Dudley Clark, a volunteer with the Patrick County Community Food Bank, recently celebrated his 95th birthday.
Clark started volunteering with the organization 18 years ago in January.
“My son, Jeff Clark, helped organize that. The first day they were going to give out food, they called, and he couldn’t go. He had some obligation,” Clark said.
Clark’s son called his father and told him to go to the EMI building, which housed the food bank before it moved to its current location.
“I had just moved here, and I didn’t know where the EMI building was even though I lived on the street that goes straight to it,” Dudley Clark said.
But he found it, and Clark said he and other volunteers moved 20 pallet skids to unload the truck. Because the building still contained office supplies from the previous business, Clark estimated it took the five or six person crew nearly all day to haul and organize 40 boxes of food to distribute to those in need.
When the food bank moved to its current location on Commerce Street, Clark was responsible for creating the conveyor belt system of packaging food boxes.
He told the then-director “that we need to organize. We need to build us some tables and put a conveyor down and get some volunteers to make it a lot easier,” he recalled.
Clark said he was told, ‘that’s a good job for you.’”
Everywhere he went, Clark said he asked about conveyors. The morning the organization was going to put the tables together in the building, he decided to visit Jamie’s Recycling Center.
“I went down there and introduced myself and told him what we needed,” Clark said. “He took me out back and he had two. I said, ‘I don’t know how much money we’ve got,’ and he said ‘well, that’s a good project so I’ll just donate them.’”
With the conveyors, Clark said volunteers can box 280 food boxes in less than an hour.
When he thinks about his time with the food bank, Clark said he thinks about the community which works to make it work.
“This neighborhood is the best that I’ve ever seen at supporting us. Last year, Primland gave us a check for $20,000 and that’s unbelievable,” he said, adding county residents donated more than $15,000 when the building was at risk of being closed.
“It’s unbelievable how they’ve supported us, and I’m thankful for that. I’m thankful for living in a place with all the meanness that’s going on, that there’s still a lot of good people,” he said.
His attitude matches that of the community he now serves. Even with the number of candles on his birthday cake, Clark has no plans to stop doing what he loves.
“It’s all I’ve done all my life,” he said, and added that his philanthropy began during his youth, while he lived in Indiana.
“I volunteered back in the late 1950s to 1960s, and we were having all the riots all over the county. I volunteered for a nightly patrol. We had the horses trained and we trained them for riot control,” he said.
When he moved to Tennessee, Clark volunteered with Habitat for Humanity for 11 years before moving to Patrick County.
Clark said he volunteers because he enjoys helping people, and because he “hates to see or think about somebody, especially somebody old or some young kid, going hungry or not getting warm.
“I’ll do anything for anybody if I can help them,” Clark said. “I’ve been that way my whole life, and that’s the way I’ll go out.”
