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Kenneth ClarkKenneth Clark
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furious at Bernie Bard for turning the issue around so that he got two or three headlines on “Ken Clark's moonlighting”-- I just said to myself, “God damn it, I don't need this.”

I wrote him and his editors a blistering letter, telling them that I know that it ‘s their perception that a black person is an economic supplicant, but the hell with them, my income from other sources was equal if not greater than my income from the University, and to hell with it. I didn ‘t tell them I was going to retire early, but I knew inside that if being on the payroll of the University was going to interfere with my saying what the hell I thought, then, the University could have its payroll.

I retired two years after that incident. And oddly enough, they didn't want me to retire from the University, but I persisted and I didn't tell them exactly why. In fact, I think you and my wife are the only two people I've ever told, the real or the core reason for my decision on early retirement.

Gad, there's an arrogance in me -- and the arrogance was that I just resented the implication that what I was doing at MARC could in any reasonable way be interpreted as an attempt to get some kind of personal monetary gain, you know. I resented the term “moonlighting” applied to my working as hard as well as I was working.

I said, “Oh, Christ--” Well, fortunately I could afford the child like impetuous response to that damn thing. But I did, I'm not at all sorty that I did -- and a number of other things reinforced it, such as my getting ill --





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