Seventy-five arrives as a threshold in life in which many people settle into quiet and predictable 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 where he is licensed to legally farm marijuana, a spot that offers a spectacular view from atop a hill in south Onondaga County. That vista provided a sweeping green backdrop as Brad hurried to get ready for a flat-bed to arrive.
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 — 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. Four of their five children were born in Hawaii, though the Clarry kids spent much of their childhoods in Elmwood, where they quickly embraced Salt City ways.
Such as: While a teenager attending St. Anthony’s High School, 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 older Clarrys carry some memories that were not exactly typical, 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 hair in a pony tail 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 for a decade he delivered mail 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 Muniz Clarry, who lived to be 99 before she died in 2020 in Syracuse, where she spent more than half her life…
Though she was also Kanaka Maoli, meaning: Of the native people of Hawaii. Her grandfather, 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. Four of the five Clarry children — including Stafford and Brad — were born there. While stationed far from Syracuse, Cliff somehow struck up a connection 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 from the Army as a major, the family returned to Syracuse. They lived on West Colvin Street, where Brad’s folks ran a business called Helen’s Launderette and the Clarrys were familiar stalwarts of Elmwood.
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.
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 and justice, on decency 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 said he 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 it 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 licensed 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.
Every morning, he walks out the door of the house he has owned for 40 years and looks out 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, 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 a chance to see an uncle 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 flip-flops as he flipped 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.
Read more of Central Current’s coverage
Sean Kirst: A Land Cruiser for Ukraine is Brad Clarry’s Navarino tribute to Hawaiian-born brother
The extraordinary tale of a Syracuse family with one foot in Elmwood and the other always rooted on the ‘Big Island’ of Hawaii.
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