News Detail
A Special Tribute: David Clapp ’81 on His Father, Harvey Clapp ’51
Harvey Rowland Clapp III '51, known as Ronnie to many of his childhood friends, passed away earlier this year at the age of 79. My father lived an adventurous life that began only blocks away from Calvert. He followed a well-worn academic path; attending Calvert through Twelfth Age, moving on to Gilman and then to Princeton. After college, he enrolled in Harvard Law School where he excelled before clerking for Judge Kaufman in Baltimore. He then took a job with Venable, Baetjer, and Howard as a securities lawyer and bought a house on Greenway, never straying far from his first school to which he gave so much credit for his later academic successes. I was born shortly after my parents moved in and, as tradition had it, the first call my father made after leaving the hospital was to Calvert School to get an appointment for me to get tested for admission.
The more adventurous part of his life began after he left Venable to pursue what he called his “serial entrepreneurial” desires. He owned and ran a restaurant in Baltimore (the Café Des Artistes), bought a beachfront hotel in St. Croix, started an online course for law school graduates, invested in an electric car company, managed a video store downtown, and traveled the world with my mother, all along the way making new friends and recanting humorous stories with his larger than life smile. His greatest professional achievement was a natural gas exploration company he founded in Turkey, of all places. For many years, the project was known as “Harvey’s Turkish Bath” because of the poor returns, but eventually things turned around, and the company thrived. He loved proving people wrong.
Some of my fondest memories of my father are the morning walks with him to Calvert in the crisp, fall weather. Between reviews of spelling words and drills on math facts, my father often found time to share his pearls of wisdom as we wound our way through Guilford to Tuscany Road. “To whom much is given, much is required” was a favorite of his. After his success in Turkey, my father and mother gave a gift to Calvert to establish the Clapp Teaching Fellow with the goal of providing an inexperienced educator an opportunity to learn side by side with the impressive faculty at Calvert. He had seen me struggle as a beginning teacher and understood the importance of mentoring, so he wanted to support this apprentice position at the school he cared about so much.
When considering where to have his service, my mother and I settled on the perfect location: Calvert School. It was the institution that gave him the academic foundation, provided the confidence to tackle the challenges he faced in his life, and instilled the character traits that made him such a special person. I believe the May 5th service was just what he would have wanted, a gathering of good friends (several of whom he had known since Calvert), a telling of stories, some hard laughs and some big tears, all ending with Calvert’s Middle School string ensemble playing a song my father never would forget, “We’re Going Far from Calvert.” His legacy lives on at the School in the form of the Calvert Fellow and in his two grandchildren, Ella ’22 and Jackson Clapp ’24, whom he was able to drop off at the front door on Tuscany Road only a few weeks before his passing, continuing a tradition that meant so much to him.
Calvert School is a coed independent lower and middle school.
