I got the sad news this morning that poet Tom Clark has passed at age 77 after being hit by a car near his home in Berkeley. Clark was the poetry editor for the Paris Review for a decade in the 1960s and ’70s, and pertinently to my own work wrote Champagne & Baloney: The Rise and Fall of Finley’s A’s, published in 1976. Clark was hardly an insider, didn’t have access similar to sportswriters of the era, but he loved baseball and had a keen eye for observation when it came to the A’s.

I encountered him randomly one day a few months back on Solano Avenue, about two blocks from his house and a half-mile from mine, and we struck up a conversation about the Swingin’ A’s, neither of us having any idea that the other had written a book on the subject. (I knew all about his book, of course, and that he lived nearby—it was just that until he introduced himself I no idea that the guy I was talking to was Tom Clark.)

He was Berkeley to the core, at least on the day we spoke, all mismatched patterns and textures and colors, his speech a patois of beat generation-meets-merry prankster, with an overt willingness to converse with whoever might cross his path. Every story offers a window, after all, and it was easy to see that he enjoyed the process of opening as many of them as he could. Despite the fact that I was running late, we must have talked for half an hour. As I raced home I figured that we could continue the discussion the next time we ran into each other in the neighborhood, now that I knew who to look for. I never saw him again.

Clark was part of a terrific generation of writers, the likes of which is becoming scarcer and scarcer. He will be missed.