Russell Clark

Russell B. Clark was a retired physician and surgeon, real estate developer, and philanthropist. He served on the Brigham Young University President’s Leadership Council for many years.

Clark was born in Montpelier, Idaho, on November 19, 1900, and raised on a dairy farm near Georgetown. He remembered driving the horse and buggy for his mother when she traveled to care for the sick babies in Bear Lake County. He began his medical training at the University of Utah and earned his M.D. degree at Northwestern University in Chicago in 1929.

He donated generously to the Brigham Young University College of Nursing, the Gordon B. Hinckley Alumni and Visitors Center, the Joseph F. Smith Building, BYU’s gerontology program, and scholarships and athletics. He lent his name for the Russell B. Clark Gerontology Conference at BYU, for education and assistance of the elderly. He and his wife, Donna, moved to Hawaii to temporarily run Brigham Young University-Hawaii’s first health center.

Clark practiced medicine for 19 years in Chicago. He was on call on February 14, 1929, when Al Capone’s gang killed seven members of Bugs Moran’s gang. He helped confirm the deaths, and the killings are known as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

Clark and his family moved to Southern California in 1947, where he acquired additional surgical training and purchased a private hospital in Artesia. He later acquired a second hospital in Glendora.

Clark was the father of five children. He had three with his first wife, Ruby, and two with his second wife, Donna. Clark was a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Before his medical training he served in the Southern States Mission from 1919 to 1921. He later served as a missionary with his wife Donna in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and Jamaica from 1980 to 1981. He was named America’s Oldest Worker for 2003 and was honored in Washington, D.C. He lived to be 109 years old, dying on September 10, 2009. His wife Donna passed away five weeks before him.