Clay was born in 1925 at his family's house in West Philadelphia. With three older brothers, it was a full house, in a close-knit neighborhood. As a boy, Clay would stop at his grandparents' house for a piece of candy on his way to school every day.   

In high school at the Haverford School in Haverford, PA, Clay excelled in sports and sang in the school chorus. His unbeaten 1942-43 baseball team is in the Haverford School "Hall of Fame." Clay also raced his own sailboat at the yacht club where his family had a summer home, in Seaside Park NJ. 

Clay began college at the University of Pennsylvania, but his studies were cut short in 1943 by enlistment in the Army Air Corps. As a navigator, he enjoyed the special treatment he received as the only crew member to be driven from the hangar to the airplane, due to the equipment he had to carry, but that was where his "free ride" ended. Once on board, in addition to navigating, he heated and served meals on a hectic schedule, as crew members ate at all times of the day or night. Clay flew practice missions and then trained other navigators until the end of the war. He was sorry to not have seen overseas action.

After the war, he was lucky to have a job in his father's seed business in Philadelphia. He worked in the warehouse and sold seed up and down the east coast. In 1947, he married Suzanne Pretz and received a downpayment loan from his father on a home in Rosemont, PA. Sue and Clay lived in the home for thirty years, raising two children, Gwinn and Hank. After several years in the business, Clay took a position with a local rendering company.  

By the late 1960s, Clay was General Manager of a rendering plant in Philadelphia (also providing a wonderful, if smelly, opportunity for Hank's first job). This was a job with a lot of pressure and many perks. Clay and Sue were able to travel quite a bit, both to national rendering conventions and abroad. In 1975, Clay was transferred to Portsmouth, VA, to manage an ailing rendering plant. After a year in the south, he returned to another job in Jenkintown, PA, and purchased a house in Maple Glen. Here, Clay became a deacon and an elder of Supplee Church, and sang in the church choir.

Clay retired from work at 70, but always conducted an active life outside of work.  He enjoyed home lawn and maintenance chores and kept vegetable and flower gardens. As a young man, Clay played on a softball team, and helped out as a crew member on friends' sailboat cruises. He loved to dance. He learned how to do woodworking, building two sets of library bookshelves and many decorative and functional household items. In mid-life, Clay and Sue played bridge weekly, and Clay played golf, tennis, and squash. As an older man, Clay took up regular swimming, working out, Wii bowling, and he sang in the chorus at Normandy Farms Estates. Clay and Sue had just celebrated 67 years of marriage when Sue died in May of this year.

Clay died on December 28, 2014 in Abington Hospital. After a lifetime of excellent health, he succumbed to a week of pneumonia and a bout with pulmonary fibrosis. He keenly missed Sue, who died on May 28. He was a gracious, kind, and generous man, and possibly one of the last of a breed: a real gentleman. We will miss him greatly.