Marshall Clark, Ad Man and Volunteer

Marshall Clark, formerly of Greenwich, Conn., and East Hampton, died on Feb. 20 at the Essex Meadows retirement home in Essex, Conn. He was 96 and had been in increasingly poor health.

Mr. Clark had a long career in advertising, working in Manhattan for Benton and Bowles, Scott Paper, Bowater Scott, and Needham, Harper & Steers, retiring in 1978. He also was active as a volunteer for medical and social welfare organizations.

In 1961, he took a three-year break from advertising to work for the Frank Laubach Literacy Fund, which sent him to several African and Asian countries to teach people to read and write in their own languages. He was the campaign manager for James Buckley, who ran unsuccessfully in 1980 for the Senate against Christopher J. Dodd.

Mr. Clark served on the Representative Town Meeting in Greenwich and was chairman of its cost containment committee. He also was a trustee of the Round Hill Community Church and a member of the Round Hill Club. In East Hampton, he was a member of the Maidstone Club and he belonged to the Yale Club in Manhattan. 

After he retired, he was on the board of Greenwich Hospital and assisted in its emergency room. After moving to Essex, in 2007, he volunteered in the emergency room of Middlesex Hospital’s Shoreline Clinic and was a volunteer for the Meals on Wheels program, and served on the finance committee and the residents’ council of the Essex Meadows retirement home.

He was born on July 17, 1921, in Cambridge, N.Y., one of three children of the former Elizabeth Marshall and Kenneth F. Clark. He grew up there, graduating in 1940 from the Taft School in Watertown, Conn., and from Dartmouth College in 1943.

During World War II, he was a gunnery officer in the Navy’s submarine service and saw action in the Pacific as a navigator on the U.S.S. Seadragon. After the war, he returned to Dartmouth and received a business degree at the Amos Tuck Business School.

  Mr. Clark married Vallory Willis Shepard of New York City and East Hampton in 1961 and became stepfather to her four children. His wife died in 2002. His stepchildren, who survive, are Richard S.W. Shepard of McLean, Va., Katherine S. Graham of East Hampton, Frank P. Shepard III of Harvard, Mass., and Nathanial B. Shepard of Kensington, Conn. Also surviving are seven grandchildren, a brother, Kenneth F. Clark Jr. of Memphis, and seven nieces and nephews. A sister, Margaret (Pegret) Clark MacGruer, died before him.

The family is planning a memorial service in April in Essex. Memorial donations have been suggested for the Round Hill Community Church, 395 Round Hill Road, Greenwich, Conn. 06831, or Middlesex Hospital, 28 Crescent Street, Middletown, Conn. 06457.