Seventy-five arrives as a threshold in life, a moment at which many people have settled into quiet, predictable and reassuring daily routines.
Many people, yes. Just do not include Brad Clarry, who hit that 75th birthday a couple of weeks ago.
For example: He woke up last Sunday at the Navarino homestead that is a short distance from Ayrloom, a Beak & Skiff subsidiary, where Clarry works as a marijuana cultivator and technician. His house offers a spectacular view from atop a hill in south Onondaga County, a vista that provided a sweeping green backdrop as Brad hurried to get ready for the arrival of a flatbed.
In honor of his late brother Stafford, who spent a lifetime doing humanitarian work around the globe, Brad was about to donate his used Land Cruiser to an agency called “Cars for Ukraine,” which accepts suitable vehicles to repurpose for the Ukrainian war effort against invading Russia.
Everything went well. Brad said a couple of guys arrived to get everything loaded up, and they all posed for an image with a Ukrainian flag before Brad watched the Land Cruiser — strapped onto the truck — head down the road to vanish beneath the treetops of Sentinel Heights.
Brad made that donation in tribute to what he described as “the foresight, the world travels, the experience, the point of view” of his oldest brother, known to his family as “Staff” — the same guy who always took whatever time was needed 60 years ago and more to help Brad with his childhood math homework when their family lived in Elmwood.
Their mom was native Hawaiian. She met their dad, a career Army guy from Syracuse, when he was stationed near her hometown during World War II. The four Clarry brothers – Stafford, Doug, Brad and Bryan – were born in Hawaii, while sister Christine was born in Syracuse, where she became valedictorian at St. Anthony’s High School and all five kids embraced Salt City ways.
Such as: While a teenager attending St. Anthony’s, Brad and his buddies would scale the walls of the War Memorial and sneak through a second-level restroom window to watch concerts by such heavyweight rock bands as the Moody Blues, Brad’s favorite at the time.
Yet as siblings who had lived for years as young children in Hawaii — through their mom’s lineage, they are distant cousins of the actor Keanu Reeves — the Clarrys carry some memories that were not exactly typical to their Syracuse peers, such as fleeing a tsunami or watching a volcano erupt on the “Big Island.”
No, there is nothing routine about the journey of Brad Clarry, a born storyteller who laughs out loud as he speaks of the twists and turns that brought him to 75.
“I’ve had great luck in life,” said Brad, a retired letter carrier who keeps his long white hair in a ponytail and wears flipflops whenever possible. After high school, he recalled, he traveled around the country for a while before enlisting to serve in the Army and later in the Air Force.
He spent most of his post office years in Syracuse, though he also lived for nine years in Colorado. The father of two grown kids, Brad embraces a daily philosophy that is all about being, as he puts it, “stress-free and don’t worry.” He said that absolutely comes straight from his mother, Ethel Frances Moniz Clarry, who lived to be 99 before her death in 2020 in Syracuse, where she spent more than half her life…
Even while she made sure to teach her kids the importance of being Kanaka Maoli, meaning: Of the native people of Hawaii. Her father, Brad said, was born in Hawaii when it was still a kingdom. As a young woman, as documented in old clippings, she reigned for a year as the hula queen of the Big Island, just before she met this soldier from Syracuse named Cliff Clarry.
They eloped and were married. Ethel waited and prayed as Cliff survived a sequence of fierce battles in the Pacific during World War II. He returned to Hawaii, though he later served during the Korean War and remained in uniform until 1960, when the family moved to Syracuse for good.
Before that, the Clarry base of operations was often Hilo, a city in Hawaii and Ethel’s hometown. Four of the five Clarry children — including Stafford and Brad — were born there. While stationed far from Syracuse, Cliff somehow struck up a correspondence with Herald-American columnist Joe Beamish, who frequently published Cliff’s first-person accounts from Hawaii or beyond.
In 1959, for instance, the Clarry children had an unforgettable view when Kilauea Iki erupted on their island, sending off fountains of lava that reached as high as 1,900 feet.
A year later — to be exact, 66 years ago this week — Brad was 9 when his mother woke him in the middle of the night to say they all had to get out of their home: and fast. A tsunami was coming.
The Clarrys took shelter nearby, in the biggest building in the area. “I’m a Catholic kid inside a Buddhist temple, waiting for a tidal wave to hit us,” Brad said. In a letter later published by Beamish, Cliff wrote of how the water stopped maybe 75 yards from their home. Sixty-one people died in their Hawaiian community.
In 1960, after Cliff Clarry decided to retire as a sergeant major from the Army, the family returned to Syracuse. They lived on West Colvin Street, where Brad’s folks ran a business called Helen’s Launderette on the once-bustling Elmwood commercial strip, where the Clarrys were familiar stalwarts.
Stafford, the oldest brother, joined the Peace Corps after graduating from the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. He spent the rest of his life working for humanitarian programs — typically overseen by the United Nations — in South Asia, East Africa and the Middle East, before spending many years offering counsel and support to the Kurdistan Regional Government.
To Brad, his brother embodied the value of decency, of empathy, of human rights. A graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School, Stafford sometimes lectured at Syracuse University while visiting his hometown. He was deeply connected to his Hawaiian heritage, a guy who still maintained a home in Hilo, but Brad said he also remained a supportive older sibling, in a big way:
He and Brad were part of a lively family text in which Stafford offered almost daily reflections both about sweeping issues and everyday concerns, conversation that mattered deeply to Brad — who had tremendous respect for Stafford’s take on life, justice and courage.
“A brother you looked up to,” said Brad, who always remembered how Staff’s long experience with difficult terrain left him enamored with Toyota Land Cruisers, built to withstand harsh conditions. Six years ago, after their mother died, Brad used a small inheritance to finally buy a used Land Cruiser of his own, which made it easier to navigate the south county hills in the snow.
Brad still had the vehicle when Stafford died a year ago this week in Syracuse, at 80, from complications linked to heart disease. Brad contemplated what gesture or tribute might have meant the most to “Staff,” and he read an article that gave him a clear choice: The Land Cruiser.
The brothers shared a deep faith in the Ukrainian cause, and a profound respect for the way the Ukrainians are resisting the Russian invasion. Brad, who closely follows accounts of the war, read a piece that described “Cars for Ukraine” — an effort co-founded by Ivan Oleksii, who offered this thought about the program in an email exchange:
“Basically, (these vehicles) are vital for logistics,” Oleksii wrote. “Getting goods to the places they need to be, evacuating wounded and even sometimes toying them into rocket launchers as well as reinforcing with armor.”
Brad’s vehicle, Oleksii wrote, is one of about 500 donated so far.
“If my brother was alive? He would be thrilled,” Brad said. “He was a huge believer.”
Now summer is coming, which Brad sees as a magnificent time of year. He loves music, and he provides volunteer help “at all the shows at Beak & Skiff.” He also serves as a marijuana cultivator for Ayrloom, a Beak & Skiff subsidiary that produces cannabis products, though Brad’s use of marijuana involves only an occasional gummy to help him sleep.
Overall, he figures things have worked out pretty well. Every morning, he walks out the front door of the house he has owned for 40 years and looks from his porch at an impossibly beautiful vista of green hills rolling up to Navarino. He also spends a lot of time with his longtime girlfriend, Maggie Young Disque, on Tipperary Hill in Syracuse, where you’re liable to see them walking together on gentle days in Burnet Park.
Within the next year or two, Brad expects to make another visit with relatives in Hilo, his Hawaiian hometown, including a chance to see a cousin in his 80s who still loves to surf. Statistically, Hilo is the rainiest city in the nation, Brad said. When his parents moved from there, they settled in Syracuse, ranked as the snowiest large city within the 50 states.
Considering the weather in those locales, you can take his word for it:
He loves blue sky summers.
When I stopped by Brad’s place this week on a warm spring Monday morning, this Elmwood-raised grandfather with deep Hawaiian roots savored the chance to wear a T-shirt, shorts and flipflops as he paged through scrapbooks and old family photos. He deeply misses his parents and his brother, but he prefers to embrace all they did with gratitude, using one word to summarize the life they helped him build:
“Fantastic,” said Brad Clarry, with more warm, green days ahead.
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