In March 1946, Clayton Carelock left Fort Meade, Md., and returned to the home he grew up in, at 320 Ridge St. in Steelton. Carelock had been drafted in July 1943, a month after graduating Steelton High. His mother, a housekeeper and cook, had died while he was in the service, a few days before Christmas, 1944. She was buried next to his father, a steel worker and veteran of World War I, in Midland Cemetery.
A block away from the house on Ridge Street was Watson’s, a house that sold candy, soda and hot dogs from an enclosed porch. It was there, on a Sunday after he’d come home, that Carelock met Clementine Epps, a recent graduate of William Penn High School who had come down with her friends from Harrisburg. “One thing led on to another,” as Carelock now recalls, and, in February 1947, they were married.
This month, the Carelocks mark their 68th wedding anniversary. Since 1956, they’ve lived in the same Muench Street home, where they raised a son, on a block that now carries a high proportion of handicap-reserved spaces. Not so in the old days—as Clayton tells it, the plow came rarely back then, and the men would shovel out the block together whenever it snowed. Most of those neighbors have since passed, and, though they’re friendly with some of the new ones, “We don’t have that kind of cooperation now that we had then,” he says.
On a recent afternoon, Clayton sat on a recliner in a tracksuit and sneakers, a cane close at hand. Over his shoulder, on a raised bed, lay Clementine, asleep under a white blanket. In 1955, they learned she had a brain tumor. “When she’d go to sit down, she’d miss the chair,” he recalled. Her mother, who “had a good bit of influence over her,” talked her into having an operation in South Carolina, where she was born. An eighth of an inch more of tumor growth, the doctors told him, and she wouldn’t have been able to speak again.
Still, until recent years, she was getting around well. Their house on Muench had a pool table on the third floor, and, after the operation, Clementine would bake sticky buns for the neighborhood guys who came over to shoot pool. Twice, they went on a Caribbean cruise. But, Clayton said, “she’s had so many things happen to her since then.” In 2007, she fell and broke her leg, and, after that, she “didn’t come around like she usually did.” She can no longer hold a conversation, but she’ll talk to him. “Sometimes, I understand what she says, and sometimes I don’t,” he said.
Both he and Clementine worked at Olmsted Air Force Base, she as a clerk typist, he packing supplies for military personnel. When the base closed in 1969, he was moved to Mechanicsburg, where he worked his way up to an inspection supervisor. After he retired, he started driving a van for students in Susquehanna Township. “I had most of the kindergarteners,” he said. “I loved that job better than any job I had. Those kids, they made your day. You could have problems, but when you got with them, I guess you got just like they did, you know.”
In the 1970s, during the tenure of Mayor Harold Swenson and later Mayor Paul Doutrich, he was a member of the Citizens to Save Harrisburg, an anti-blight task force. “It was representatives from all over Harrisburg,” he said. “Different churches, the Jewish synagogue.” The group tried to tackle that era’s housing problem, although, as far as his own block was concerned, “the housing always wasn’t too bad.” He later joined the First Baptist Church in Steelton and was named a deacon emeritus there.
In the 1990s, he worked with Barbara Barksdale and the Friends of Midland in their efforts to restore the historic black cemetery, where many of the graves were toppled and overgrown. He served as both treasurer and researcher. “He became like the big-brother-slash-father figure for me,” said Barksdale, who still calls him for guidance now and then. “It’s hard to find men like that anymore.” She later helped him apply to the federal government for a new headstone for his father, who is one of Midland’s many interred soldiers. With his siblings, Carelock paid for a matching marker for their mother and their youngest brother, George, who died when he was only a few months old.
Through all the years, what has kept his and Clementine’s marriage strong? “A lot of people ask me,” Carelock said. “I really don’t know. I guess respect for each other.” On the coffee table were a dozen or more framed photographs—Clayton’s father in a suit, against a photo-studio backdrop; Clem as a young woman; Clayton in middle age, in a tailored suit and afro. “It looked like time just flew by.”
An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of a Middletown Air Force base. It is Olmsted Air Force Base, not Olmstead Air Force Base.
