I recently chatted with Idaho Public Television Friends Board Director Trent Clark. He’s the Chair of the Advocacy Committee, which champions Idaho Public Television with “policymakers in Washington, D.C.; we advocate with the public in general; we advocate with mayors and city councils … we’re the cheerleaders for Idaho Public Television,” he explains.
Trent grew up on the eastern side of the Gem State. “I grew up in the teeny-tiny community of Plano, Idaho, which is about nine miles out of Rexburg.” Out of high school, he attended BYU-Idaho (“At the time, it was called Ricks College.”). Then, he took a break to do a mission for his church in the Amazon River Basin. “It was a great honor and privilege of working with people (there) … I worked as a proselytizing and what they call ‘welfare' missionary. I worked to put in water systems, sanitation systems, and get schools going. We did all kinds of work in the Amazon River Basin.” Trent remembers one tribe was so remote, getting to them involved a two-hour drive through challenging terrain. “Several times our jeep got stuck. We had to all get out of the jeep and pretty much lift it up out of the mud.” Trent’s group was among the first people of European descent this tribe had met. “It was very humid there … my typical day in the Amazon was: I would wake up in the morning, take a shower, dry off as best I could, and then put on slacks and a white shirt, and within minutes, the slacks and white shirt would be drenched with sweat.”
After completing his mission, Trent stayed on to do some botany work, one of his two majors in college. “One of my specialties was taxonomy of woody-stemmed plants in tropical forests,” he says. “The Sean Connery movie Medicine Man is based on a research project that I worked on. That movie is based on a search for cancer-reducing elements in bromeliads that grow on Amazonian Forest trees. And that was specifically a project that, working cooperatively with the Smithsonian Institute and the American University of Recife Brazil … I was involved with.”
With degrees in both political science and botany, Trent started working on analysis of environmental legislation for Congress. “I went back to Washington, D.C., and worked for the senator from Idaho, using both my botany and my poli sci degree to look at environmental legislation to determine if it would effectively protect the environment.” He and his family lived there for 10 years, then decided to move back to Idaho. “I had concerns with some of the public schools. The kids walked in through metal detectors and they had bars on all the windows. I just wasn’t sure it was the right environment. We looked to move, mostly because we wanted to find a different place to raise our kids.” It was a tough move for his wife; for when he first started dating her, she was a trained opera singer from the University of Virginia. “One of the first dates we went on was her performance at the Kennedy Center … one of the criteria for us living in Idaho was Great Performances had to be available,” he remembers. “That’s how she could stay abreast of what’s going on in the classical music field.” Trent started working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Boise and then worked for Monsanto, which later became Bayer, in Soda Springs. “That’s where I am still today, although I am retired.”
Trent is an outdoorsman and enjoys many parts of the Gem State. “As Bruce Reichert has very well documented, there’s not a corner of Idaho that isn’t fascinating. And by the way, I love Outdoor Idaho. I consider every episode to be just a delight. I love where I live. I’m three minutes from a blue-ribbon trout fishery: the upper stretches of the Blackfoot; I’m one minute from the Bear River; I have the Cache National Forest to the south of me; the Teton National Forest to the north of me; and the Caribou National Forest is the district right around me. I’m about two hours out of Yellowstone National Park. I’m in a wonderful location.” He mentions a couple of spots that really stand out for him, though. “A couple of places in Idaho I find really, really stunning. One of them is Lewis County … the uplands are all in agriculture, but then these fields of wheat have going through them these deep river valleys that are carved out by the various rivers up there. And then they have these railroad trestle bridges that go across the top and every time you come to one of these deep river valleys, there’s a trestle bridge. Most of them are wooden trestle bridges that cross up there in places like Nez Perce and Craigmont; just beautiful locations and having been up there several times, I noticed the sunsets in Lewis County are just the most gorgeous sunsets,” he says. “I thought it was just me, but then I read an article about how the Palouse wheat country goes off into Washington state and is one of the largest wheat-growing areas in the world. And the wheat pollen rises from those massive acreages of wheat and it refracts the sunlight as the sun is setting. And because of that, the sunsets on the Palouse are gradations of oranges and yellows that you don’t find almost anywhere else on Earth.” Another favorite spot is the Snake River Canyon near Twin Falls. “You look down at this box canyon, sheer up-and-down walls, and you look down into it, and then there’s this beautiful river and riverbanks and little cascades. And it’s like there’s a whole little microenvironment just a couple of hundred feet below you.”
Trent counts horseback riding, mountain climbing and bouldering at City of Rocks as some of his hobbies. “I really enjoy the challenge of climbing the boulders,” he says. He’s recently taken up fly-fishing again, saying, “I had forgotten just how much fun it is pitting your intellect against fish … I forgot how often they humble me and show that they’re a lot smarter than me.” Trent laughs. He remembers his kids watching PBS Kids when they were little. “They grew up on Sesame Street and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and all of those things.” He appreciates the wide-ranging programming that public television provides. “Even though we were in a very small town of Soda Springs, Idaho, we wanted our kids to know what was out there. And that’s where public TV was so valuable to us.”
Trent makes his own favorite snack: “Malted milk balls … I happen to live in the number one barley-producing county in Idaho. We purchase local barley and we malt it. Then I send the malted milk, dried, down to a chocolatier in San Francisco. And this chocolatier puts real, authentic Italian chocolate on the malt. And they send the malt balls back to me.”