Marvin Ezra Clark: His Many Hundreds

He went a hundred miles to perform two hundred endowments at a hundred years of age—well almost a hundred.

Marvin Ezra Clark is ninety-eight years old, and he loves going to the temple, even though the nearest one—the Logan Temple—is about a hundred miles from his home in Georgetown, Idaho. But that hasn’t stopped Brother Clark from doing the two hundred temple endowments that were his goal this past year. Since he no longer drives, Brother Clark must depend on finding rides.

He takes them when he can get them. For example, he went with one group on a Friday evening for two sessions, returning home well after midnight. He sat dressed in a chair for four hours without going to bed so he would be ready when another group left for Logan at four in the morning to do three more sessions. “Going to the temple never makes me tired,” he beams.

There’s one more “hundred” that’s important in Marvin Clark’s life—his home teaching service. Until he became ill in late 1987, Brother Clark had never missed a month of 100-percent home teaching in eighty-five years.

Furthermore, he sang in the ward choir until his mid-eighties, when he became so deaf that he couldn’t hear the notes.

Marvin Clark’s longevity derives from his love of actively serving, as well as from his physically active life on the family farm. In summers, he still repairs fences and clears away weeds and rocks. But the activity that keeps him strong and fit at ninety-eight is chopping and sawing wood for the wood-burning stove that heats his home. Behind his house stands a monument to his energy—a neat handcut stack of logs that should give many years’ worth of fires—energy to burn.

Photo by Jed Clark