Clark Parker votes against tuition increases at Coastal Carolina University nearly every time the issue comes up before the board of trustees – and it comes up nearly every year. He admits that it’s a somewhat quixotic position to take. As a certified public accountant and as chairman of the board, Parker understands better than anyone the hard equation of lean state allocations and rising costs which leaves most public universities with no alternative to raising tuition. Still, since his first term on the board in 1993, he has usually cast the sole dissenting “nay” when the vote is taken, and he says he will probably keep on doing it.

“I’m here for the students – they’re the whole reason I decided to get involved with the board of trustees,” he says flatly in his famously quiet, undemonstrative voice.

Although he graduated with a degree in accounting 25 years ago, Parker has vivid memories of what it was like to be a college student at Coastal. During most of his collegiate years, Parker was a full-time student working a full-time work-study job (40 hours a week) plus another part-time off-campus job managing a miniature golf course. When Parker talks about his college days, it is not the arduous challenge of such a schedule as much as the opportunity it represented that he remembers and tries to convey.

“Like a lot of kids from Horry County then, I probably wouldn’t have gone to college if Coastal hadn’t been here,” says Parker. Born and raised in Aynor, he wasn’t planning to pursue higher education after he graduated from Aynor High in 1972. But Christine Hucks, a guidance counselor and teacher, encouraged him to try for a scholarship, and he eventually won a four-year award from the Georgia-Pacific Corporation. Luckily, he enrolled just as Coastal was mounting its successful campaign to add a junior and senior year, making it possible for him to earn a full bachelor’s degree without having to transfer.

On his journey from the classroom to the boardroom, Parker spent a good bit of time in the stockroom of Coastal's athletic department. Parker's original career goal was to become a coach.

Parker’s original plan was to study physical education and become a coach. At Aynor he had been a trainer, manager and a player on the baseball and track teams. By the time he was a junior at Coastal his work-study job in the athletic department had made him a seemingly permanent fixture in and around the Williams-Brice Building. He supervised 23 student-athletes and was in charge of equipment and transportation, which included everything from keeping the oil changed in department vehicles to cleaning the gym to busing the players to away games.

“Most of the people in my graduating class thought my degree was in P.E.,” says Parker, who had become so indispensable around campus that when he graduated in 1977 Coastal offered him a full-time job to live on campus as a security-facilities manager. But by then he had begun a different career track which took him in another direction.

Part of Parker’s other college job, at Jungle Golf of America, was to work with the accountant, Jim Bryan of (then) Smith, Sapp & Company. “Jim had a big impact on me,” Parker says. “I enjoyed working with him and I felt comfortable with numbers, so with his encouragement I switched my major to accounting.”

It comes as no surprise, given his orientation to sports and numbers, that Parker’s best Coastal memories are connected to game scores. Parker is naturally reserved and unemotional, his voice rarely rising above a stage whisper, but there is a distinct gleam in his eye when he recalls a basketball game against Newberry in which two of Coastal’s guards, Howard White and Lonnie Chestnut, tallied 93 out of the 98 points Coastal scored in the entire game. White led the nation in scoring that year (1976).

The single most significant event which occurred during Parker’s college days, however, was not sports-related. In 1976 he married Marcia Wells, a Coastal business student who was an Horry County Higher Education Commission scholarship recipient, editor of the yearbook, and active in Homecoming events – and she served as the official scorer for the basketball team. She graduated in 1978. The Parkers have three children: Bradley, 18; Curtis, 14; and Stephen, 13.

Within four years of graduation, after a couple of financial officer/sales rep jobs with Coast magazine and Harris Weible Advertising, Parker was well established in his own accounting business. He earned his CPA license in 1987.

Almost as soon as he was out in the real world, however, he found himself back at Coastal on a volunteer basis. He was president of the Alumni Association from 1979 to 1981 and he headed up the CINO Club, Coastal’s athletic booster organization, in the early 1980s. In 1989 he was appointed to serve on the Horry County Higher Education Commission, the governmental organization that manages Coastal’s tax millage. Once again the timing was just right. The first year he joined the commission he was elected chairman – which positioned him to take the lead in the fight for Coastal’s independence.

The Parkers today at their 21st Avenue office in Myrtle Beach.

The movement to leave the University of South Carolina system had been gathering strength for some time, though its advocates had a tough time convincing all the parties involved, not to mention the public, that it was the right thing to do. Parker immersed himself in this crusade, which he describes as “the best education in the political process that anyone could hope to have.” He worked hard gathering information, getting advice from other institutions, and building a consensus. “Finally it was clear to everyone that remaining in the USC system was holding Coastal back,” he said. Parker was chairman of the commission until 1993, when Coastal officially achieved independence.

“It was one of the best experiences in my life,” says Parker. The symbolic high point of the whole process, he feels, occurred at the July 1991 commission meeting when former chairman John Dawsey seconded the motion to leave USC. “John had been 12 years ahead of his time. Back in 1979 he had made a motion authorizing the commission to look into the possibility of breaking away from the USC system. He didn’t even get a second to his motion. So this time around we wanted to make sure that John got the chance to do the honors.”

Parker left the commission in 1993 to join Coastal’s first board of trustees. He’s pleased with the strides Coastal has made since independence, but he’s not surprised. Having been intimately involved with the institution for nearly 30 years, he has a longer view and a surer sense of Coastal’s potential than many observers – and he foresees an even bigger future.

“In 25 years Coastal will be bigger than Clemson,” he says as matter-of-factly as if he were checking a list of itemized deductions. He believes football will provide the impetus for the next stage in Coastal’s progress. “People from this area love football and they will attach themselves to our team. We’ll have fans here on Saturday afternoons who have never set foot on this campus before. That will generate a lot more prospective students for Coastal – as will the football recruiting process itself. For every athlete who makes the team there will be two or three who don’t but who will like the campus and stay.”

Parker is living proof that Coastal is a superb training ground for student success. “The key is getting involved,” he says. “Not many colleges are as well located as Coastal. In addition to all the traditional campus activities and work-study programs, students have almost unlimited part-time employment opportunities. If they need or want to work they can, like I did.” Parker’s Myrtle Beach accounting firm employs two Coastal business administration students, Rebecca Passwaters and Richard Carroll, in part-time jobs. Coastal accounting graduates Samantha Skipper ’89 and Angie Martin ’98 are part of Parker’s firm, and his wife Marcia handles the investment/retirement services arm of the business.

In passing the chairman’s gavel to Parker at the May 2001 trustees meeting, immediate past board chairman Fred DuBard Jr. jokingly told him he was going to need a bullhorn to be heard around the conference table. Parker enjoyed the quip in the spirit it was intended. He knows – and so does everyone who knows him – that being loud isn’t what’s important: working hard for what you believe in is.

Clark's Accounting Team: Several employees of Parker's accounting firm are Coastal graduates and students: (left to right) Rebecca Passwaters, a sophomore accounting major; Marcia Parker '78; Clark Parker '77; Samantha Skipper '87; and Richard Carroll, who earned a finance degree from Coastal in 2001 and is now pursuing a second degree in accounting.