Word: ralph
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Even some who are no strangers to commencement are frustrated by the Latin address. Ralph M. Koenker '81 and his wife Tonya J. Koenker, both former proctors, said they didn't get much out of the Latin address but thoroughly enjoyed the other student speeches...
Everyone around Jordan agrees that Ralph was the original rebel in the Clark clan. His father, William ("Todd") Clark, arrived in Montana as a homesteader in 1914. When Ralph was growing up during the '30s, he saw many struggling neighbors foreclosed. Todd Clark often bought up their land, eventually amassing thousands of acres, which passed to his four sons...
...Ralph was a daredevil who left school without learning to read or write, recalls his sister Ada Weeding, 62. He was also a drinker, and "when he was drinking, he could blame his wife or kids when things went wrong--it was never his fault," she says. Although Ralph swore off alcohol years ago, Ada thinks he's held on to his old way of thinking, except that now he blames the government and the New World Order. By the early '80s, Ralph was railing against high mortgage rates and unfair foreclosures, and in 1982 he appeared on a 20/20...
Then, in 1992, Ralph bought into the theories of a scam artist named Roy Schwasinger. Schwasinger was founder of a group called We the People, which claimed that the Federal Government had lost a huge class-action lawsuit on behalf of America's landowners, and that a trillion dollars was sitting in a settlement account. For $300, We the People sold a kit with instructions for claiming part of the settlement--and for issuing one's own "checks" against this windfall in the interim. (Schwasinger is now in prison...
Though barely literate, Ralph had managed to avail himself of many federal subsidies and loan programs, but by 1994 he had lost control of the debt load and faced foreclosure. Ralph's brother Emmett was on much sounder footing until his son Richard, enthralled by Ralph's antigovernment rhetoric, convinced Emmett he didn't have to make any more tax or mortgage payments. Ralph's and Emmett's farms were foreclosed in 1994. The renegade Clarks convened their own supreme court and began issuing subpoenas to and posting bounties on elected officials, lawyers and bankers connected to the foreclosures. They...