Daunting intellect sets Clark apart, and some people off, in soldier's life ringed by success <...>
Clark's will to achieve surfaced early -- when he was still collecting lizards and playing toy soldiers in Little Rock, Ark. Mary Campbell, a second cousin who grew up close by, remembers teaching him to ride a bike, and growing tired as she pushed him up and down the little hill on his street.
"I knew Wesley was smart, and I thought, 'If he's so smart, he ought to get the hang of it pretty quick,' so I just let go," she recalls. "He wriggled around, and I thought he was going to fall, but typical Wesley, he came out of it unscathed. ... Wesley pretty much taught himself everything."
By his teenage years, Clark was distinguishing himself both as a student and an athlete. Because of the unrest in Little Rock over the desegregation of Central High School, Clark spent his sophomore year at Castle Heights Military Academy in Lebanon, Tenn. Classmate Rob Hosier remembers sleeping in Clark's dorm room one night and waking up Saturday at 5 a.m. to find him quietly working on a plaster of Paris model of a paramecium by the daylight filtering through the windows.
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Classmate Phillip McMath was on the Boys Club swim team with Clark when Clark decided they should have a high school team as well.
"I said, 'Wesley, we don't have a coach, we don't have a budget, we don't have a pool,"' McMath recalls. "He said, 'I'll organize it and I'll be the coach."' He turned that team into the state champions.
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http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2003/11/02/national1237EST0486.DTLDTH
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