Mark KennedyI spotted Basil B. Clark at the HoHo Expo one Sunday last month at the Chattanooga Convention Center. He was there in his infantryman’s baseball cap manning a booth at the holiday fair, and I was handing out bottles of water from a drag-along cooler.
We began to chat as I flipped through a copy of his book, “War Wounded: Let the Healing Begin.” (Waldenhouse Publishers, available at Amazon.com.)
Clark, a 65-year-old Vietnam War veteran living in Ooltewah, said he was at the expo to market his book and his character monologues, in which he plays historical characters. He impersonates everybody from Adam (yes, the Adam in the Bible) to Abraham Lincoln.
Intrigued, I asked him to drop by the newsroom one day.
Clark said the stories in his book are about people he met in everyday life while he was a college speech and theater teacher at the University of Pikeville in eastern Kentucky. Many of the chapters are about veterans, like him, coming to terms with battle scars. Others are about people with different, but heavy, crosses to bear: family suicides, gang life, addictions.