James Torrence was 10 when he learned of Mary Pat Clarke.

His mother, just returned from prison, was struggling to find housing for the small family while his father remained behind bars. Torrence and his 5-year-old sister were sleeping temporarily at the Latrobe Homes apartment of his grandmother, who out of desperation made a call.

Clarke was on the other end of the line.

“I remember my mother crying when she got a letter,” said Torrence, now 37 and a member of the same City Council Clarke long served on. Clarke secured the family a public housing unit.

“From there on, we had housing,” Torrence said. “It was that one call.”

The memories of residents, prominent and otherwise, across Baltimore are emblazoned with similar experiences. Clarke, who died in November at 83, spent a total of 32 years on the Baltimore City Council, a trailblazing tenure that included two terms as council president.

Clarke was the first woman to occupy the powerful council president post, and an active lawmaker who championed noteworthy efforts like the city’s first fair wage act.

But she will likely be best remembered for her tireless brand of community service. Small in stature but outsized in energy, Clarke, known to most as Mary Pat, was always reachable, always ready and seemingly excited to help, recalled the cadre of officials who worked with her.

“She was an ongoing nuclear reaction,” Comptroller Bill Henry said. “She is the standard others try to meet and usually don’t.”

Henry, who served on the council before becoming comptroller, counts himself among the generation of public servants across Maryland who were students of the School of Mary Pat. The son and namesake of a prominent Democratic organizer, the future officeholder was no stranger to politics when he began working for Clarke around 1991, but hers was a uniquely meticulous operation, he recalled.

That summer, the pair crisscrossed Baltimore together, armed with a stack of index cards — the 3-by-5-inch versions fit best in Clarke’s petite jacket pockets. The official task was campaigning — Clarke was running for a second term as council president — but they inevitably encountered residents in need of assistance. Each was documented on an index card: their name, address and the details of their problem recorded. The cards were later attended to by Clarke’s office staff.

As many issues as she could — some would say too many — Clarke would handle herself. Daisy McLean, a Coldspring Homestead Montebello resident who Clarke met on the campaign trail in 1975, recalled calling the councilwoman after a child chased a ball into a hole beneath a rotting stump and got stuck, his legs sticking into the air. Within 30 minutes, crews were on the scene, she said. Clarke sat on McLean’s porch for several hours, keeping a watchful eye, and the end of the day, the stump was removed, the hole filled and the street freshly repaved.

Clarke’s desire to do it all made her an unrelenting boss. Dan Friedman, a former legislative aide, recalled her taking work home in “the bucket,” a metal accordion file schlepped to her car each evening by her longtime driver. At home, Clarke would mark up letters to constituents with a felt-tipped pen, delivering edits that tortured the young staff who drafted them.

“Her view was if she just stayed up long enough, drank enough coffee and smoked enough cigarettes, she could do the job herself,” said Friedman, now a judge on the Appellate Court of Maryland. “I was really a pair of hands that she would deploy because she wanted to do everything herself.”

It was Clarke who set Friedman on the course to law school. When lengthy spending board agendas landed on her desk each week, Clarke would dispatch him to the city’s Law Department to get explanations. Later, she would seat him, still in his 20s, on a task force charged with reshaping the city’s minority contracting rules. There he met his law school mentor.

Clarke’s commitment to constituent service was imparted onto her staff. On a recent afternoon, a reporter’s call to Friedman’s chambers was answered by the judge himself.

“If the phone rang twice in Mary Pat’s office, she would pick it up,” he explained. “Because the people of Baltimore City shouldn’t have to wait for someone to pick up the phone.”

Clarke’s devotees can be found in public service positions across Maryland. State Dels. Maggie McIntosh and Luke Clippinger are alums of Clarke’s campaigns. So is Councilwoman Odette Ramos, who now occupies Clarke’s old council seat. Others, like state Del. Regina Boyce, were her students. An educator before she was elected, Clarke returned to the classroom at the Johns Hopkins University and other local institutions when she wasn’t in office.

Boyce said Clarke helped her find a job with then-City Council President Bernard C. “Jack” Young’s office and later encouraged her to run for office. Young, too, was a former Clarke staffer. “Everything I knew about constituent service, I knew from Mary Pat,” he said.

Others, like a bright-eyed 22-year-old from Park Heights, became Clarke’s colleagues. Now mayor, Brandon Scott first encountered the veteran councilwoman as he applied for a vacancy in the council’s 6th District in 2007. He didn’t get the job, but Clarke approached him after the meeting. Scott recognized her face from the mailer listing city government phone numbers that hung on his parents’ refrigerator. The ubiquitous handouts, empowering residents to get in touch with government in a pre-internet era, hung in countless homes across the city.

Clarke encouraged Scott to stay involved, he recalled. A week later, a letter arrived at his home.

“How quickly can you join me on the council?” Clarke wrote.

When Scott was elected in 2011, Clarke worked closely with him, leading by example without patronizing, he said.

“I didn’t really know it ... she was pouring into me, telling me, ‘Hey, if you work with this person, you can help them, even if they disagree with you, you can help them,’” he said.

Clarke’s generosity with the generation behind her wasn’t as well-received by the council’s old guard. Her plans to install younger committee chairs when she was elected City Council president in 1987 led to a revolt that staffers and colleagues still call “the coup.” Hours after her inauguration, Clarke was smacked with a motion pushed by her colleagues, most of them male. They voted to revoke her power to appoint committee chairs, one of the president’s most influential powers.

The revolt, which famously unfolded in front of Clarke’s family, left her rankled for years. In 1991, several months after her reelection as president, she wrested power back, refusing to release the council from a meeting until they relented and approved a bill restoring her appointments. Some veteran councilmen were outraged.

“It had to be tonight so everyone could see who’s what and who the real leaders are,” Clarke told The Baltimore Sun at the time.

Clarke said afterward she believed sexism motivated the coup. The embarrassment of her family witnessing the moment clearly also played a role. But Friedman believes Clarke was also looking toward the next generation, as she often was.

“I think the thing that motivated her most was I’ll be damned if I’m going to give the next council president a diminished office,” he said. “It was a focus to put it back and she did.”

There were other setbacks and enemies made along the way. In 1995, Clarke ran an ill-fated campaign for mayor against two-term incumbent Kurt Schmoke, a matchup between former allies that turned bitter. News reports at the time called her “shrill” and painted her as impulsive, a contrast to the deliberative Schmoke. Clarke got out of politics and returned to teaching after the loss.

Her penchant for constituent service lured her back. When the council transitioned to single-member districts in 2004, Clarke told The Baltimore Sun she wanted the new 14th in the hands of someone responsive. She remained in office until 2020.

Years later, the many students of Clarke, despite varied backgrounds, ages and offices, somehow speak a universal language. They uniformly describe her as relentless, a perfectionist, a servant, a mentor, an adopted mother during formative years who impressed upon them the importance of being available to the people of Baltimore, above all else.

Nobody will ever be exactly like her, they agree. No one will ever work as hard. That does little to dissuade them from trying.

“We all have a piece of her,” said Boyce, who with Clarke’s encouragement, has been in office since 2019. “We all have a chapter in the book of our lives that is Mary Pat Clarke.”

“The lesson Mary Pat teaches us is to never forget home,” she said. “All politics is local. No matter how high you get or how much work you have to do, you have to touch back home.”