Klancy
Clark de Nevers is a printer’s daughter who grew up
proofreading, doing bindery work and numbering ballots in her
father’s business, Quick Print Co. in Aberdeen, Washington. The rush
to get the Grays Harbor Post out every Friday night gave
structure to her family’s week. During World War II four of her
uncles were in the armed forces and by observing how closely her
family followed the progress of the war, she gained an enduring
interest in the history of that era. She graduated from Weatherwax
High School (where she had been editor of The Ocean Breeze)
in 1951.
Though she left home to attend Stanford University and then to
accompany her husband Noel de Nevers to Michigan, California and
finally Salt Lake City, Utah, where they have lived for 40 years,
she has kept in touch with Aberdeen as hometown and core of her
writing life.
In
1970 she earned a Master’s Degree in Mathematics from the University
of Utah. After a varied career in technical and managerial positions
that allowed her to use her mathematical and computing skills, she
retired to focus on writing. With Lucy Hart of Seattle, she edited
Cohassett Beach Chronicles: World War II in the Pacific Northwest
by Kathy Hogan, a book of Hogan’s columns from the wartime pages of
the Grays Harbor Post.
Her
poem “Curator” won first place in the City Weekly literary
competition in September 2000. She serves as treasurer for City Art,
a grass roots literary organization that presents readings each week
in the Salt Lake City Public Library, and recently retired from the
working board of Writers@Work, which presents a nationally known
writing conference in Salt Lake City.
Her
latest book is The Colonel and the Pacifist: Karl Bendetsen,
Perry Saito and the Incarceration of Japanese Americans during World
War II (University of Utah Press, April 2004). This book
provides the first in-depth account of Aberdeen’s Karl Bendetsen who
single-mindedly, it seemed to the Japanese Americans, pushed for
their exclusion and then headed the Army’s evacuation of all
Americans of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast in 1942. Because
Bendetsen’s hometown is also hers, she starts the story in Aberdeen,
and contrasts it with the very different experience of Perry Saito,
his neighbor and one of his innocent captives. The book probes a
past that Bendetsen apparently wanted to revise and consistently
denied.
John
Hughes, publisher of the Daily World in Aberdeen,
WA, describes de Nevers as “a painstaking researcher and
talented story teller.” His review concludes: “de Nevers
pulls no punches, but anyone who accuses her of exercising
politically correct hindsight will have ignored the facts she
has documented so well. The Colonel and The Pacifist is a
breakthrough in World War II scholarship — a tale of two
star-crossed lives rooted on the Harbor, told with the added
advantage of someone who grew up in Aberdeen during World War II.”
(Daily World, June 3, 2004).
Curator - A
poem by
Klancy
Clark de Nevers
