Former CTA Chairman Walter Clark, Harvard grad courted by local leaders

Walter Clark got an inkling of what he was in for as the CTA chairman when he asked some basic questions of one the agency’s top financial guys.

“The guy said to him, ‘I’m going to be honest with you: I don’t know anything about accounting,’” Mr. Clark’s son, Hilton P. Clark, recalled recently.

The elder Clark, a Harvard-educated financial whizz, remembered being both grateful for the man’s honesty, but deeply troubled at the thought of what else he might find in the patronage-plagued CTA of the mid-80s, his son said.

Mr. Clark, who’d also headed Harold Washington’s mayoral campaign finance committee, died last month at St. Joseph Hospital on the North Side. He was 90.

Mr. Clark was born in Athens, Georgia, in 1928, and like so many African-American families, his moved north — to downstate Carbondale — in search of better opportunities, his son said. In high school, Mr. Clark was a talented basketball player — good enough to win a national junior college title and a tryout for UCLA.

He returned to the Midwest to earn his accounting degree at Southern Illinois University in 1951. A year later, he started as a teller at a black-owned savings and loan bank in Chicago. Though his career there was cut short by his service in the Korean War, he would go on to work at First Federal Savings & Loan Association, rising — during his 30-year career there — from accounting clerk to executive vice president and a member of the board of directors. With the support of his employer, Mr. Clark would go on to earn an advanced degree at the Harvard School of Business.

Mr. Clark had no interest in public office, but he was often courted by politicians, including President Jimmy Carter, the future-Mayor Harold Washington and Mayor Richard M. Daley. He was Washington’s campaign finance chair and, in 1986, Mr. Clark, then a CTA board member, was elected to replace the retiring Michael A. Cardilli.

“You can’t kick me anymore,” Cardilli said, expressing his “sympathies” for his successor.

Mr. Clark perhaps better understood Cardilli’s sentiment as he settled into the job. What irritated him most, his son said, were machine politicians who’d call and complain when someone they’d sponsored at the CTA hadn’t received a promotion in a timely manner.

“He literally just kind of closed the door [to patronage],” his son said. “He wanted people who were qualified.”

When Mr. Clark asked the high-ranking financial employee what he actually did at the CTA — if he wasn’t an accountant — he told his boss that when someone called in sick, he’d drive to their house to see if they were playing hooky.

Tragedy cut short Mr. Clark’s three-year term in charge of the CTA. His only daughter, Jaunine, was diagnosed with leukemia, and Mr. Clark resigned in 1988 to help take care of her. Jaunine died shortly after Mr. Clark stepped down. She was 28.

In addition to his son, survivors include his wife of 61 years, Juanita E. Clark, and numerous nieces and nephews.