Locally known for his Great Short Stories class, George Clack is planning a new class about books whose main characters are over 50. Photo by Ed Warner

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For some, a second career in retirement isn’t just a way to keep busy and maybe make a bit of cash — it’s a chance to do what you’ve always wanted.

Take George Clack, a former editor who, post-retirement, achieved his dream of becoming a college professor.

“I’m finally doing what I wanted all my life,” Clack said.

That’s not to say Clack, 79, had a humdrum career. After graduating with a master’s in English in the 1970s, he found jobs scarce in academia, so he became an editor with the federal government. Eventually, he was promoted to edit what may have been the government’s grandest print undertaking.

Called Amerika, it was a Russian-language, photo-filled magazine focused on American life. A quarter of million copies of Amerika were provided free each month to residents of what was then the Soviet Union. Sometimes, U.S. diplomats left copies on buses for riders to read and pass along.

Joseph Brodsky, who fled Soviet persecution and later became the U.S. poet laureate, told Clack that the magazine gave him hope during his Soviet years.

“I spoke with him face-to-face and learned how much he’d cherished our magazine as a young dissident poet in St. Petersburg,” Clack said.

Amerika helped the country win the Cold War, according to former U.S. diplomat Yale Richmond. He told Politico in 2022 that “Amerika was a minor expense, but a major success, in the cold war of ideas.”

Although Clack didn’t speak Russian, he was Amerika’s editor for the magazine’s final two years. He said the magazine aimed to show the Soviet people U.S. life, “warts and all.”

The stories, written in English and then translated, were first cleared with the U.S. embassy in Moscow, which only rejected one piece during his tenure, he said.

When the Cold War ended, though, Congress cut the budget of Amerika’s sponsor, the U.S. Information Agency, and “the magazine went down the drain” in 1992, Clack said.

Clack finished his federal career with a 10-year stint at the Department of State, where he got a start in what would be the future of publishing. He headed the Publications Office, which produced pamphlets, books and what were called “electronic journals.” And in 2008, he helped set up the department’s Facebook page.

Free to teach

When Clack retired in 2009, he decided he’d give his graduate-school dream a shot, even if he had to do it without pay. He volunteered to teach at Howard Community College (HCC), which told him he could “make up whatever course I wanted,” Clack recalled.

He settled on what has become his signature class, Great Short Stories. Clack enjoys teaching short stories because his students can focus on one per class.

“You can analyze them really deeply; you can talk about them for an hour and a half,” he said.

Favorite authors include Alice Munro and Wendell Berry, and a favorite short story is J.D. Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” known for its baffling ending.

“I like it when the story makes me think,” Clack said.

Clack teaches courses in HCC’s Continuing Education program, which is largely for retirees, a demographic he said is particularly attractive because they’re “lifelong readers and they want to talk about what they read.” They also bring a lifetime of experience that enriches class discussions, he added.

Literature’s value, Clack believes, is that it presents readers with “an alternative kind of life,” new experiences that can broaden perspectives.

After reading a powerful story, he said, “the characters will live in my head,” resonating for months or years.

Many classrooms

Clack has also taught literature courses at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in Columbia and recently began offering a literature class at Residences at Vantage Point, a senior community in Columbia.

Although he teaches three courses per semester, the workload isn’t bad because his classes are discussion-only. Because he doesn’t assign essays, he doesn’t have to grade students’ papers. And after more than a decade of teaching, Clack has a trusty repertoire of lesson plans.

“The art of being a teacher is to recycle your material,” he joked.

Clack also appreciates poetry and is astounded by the number of poets in the U.S. He’s on the board of the local literary magazine, Little Patuxent Review, which receives about 800 submissions for the 20 to 25 poems they’re able to publish each year.

Looking forward, Clack said he’d like to start teaching a course on literature and aging. To be called October Light: The Fiction of Autumn, it would cover such novels as The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout and Evensong by Stewart O’Nan — all with older protagonists.

Through his literature classes, Clack said he’s promoting a love of the written word in a world shifting to digital, a place of “very few words, not complexity.”

He admits he’s “fighting a losing battle” against the digital age, acknowledging that there’s “an element of ‘old-fogey-ism’” in not adapting to the times.

For Clack, teaching is truly his life’s ambition, he said. “I’m doing what I was born to do. I just want to keep doing it.”