Back at the beginning of the pandemic, when it was hard to find toilet paper or disinfectant and there were lines waiting to get into the grocery stores, Bob Clark found enough Clorox to disinfect virtually the entire Rio Grande Valley.
Clark was able to locate a donation of 25-30 18-wheeler trailers of Clorox at a warehouse in Georgia, Tom Hushen, Cameron County emergency management coordinator, said. The Clorox has been distributed to cities, counties, towns, school districts and churches across the Valley ever since.
Clark founded the Bob Clark Social Services Center at the corner of Browne Avenue and California Road in Southmost. The center serves as a hub for 21 surrounding colonias, providing a wide variety of social services and educational programs in the community.
Clark recently passed away but his widow Esther Clark is carrying on his legacy. Wednesday morning she was overseeing the distribution of pallets of Clorox to local churches from the county warehouse in the old Brownsville Herald building at East 12th and East Van Buren streets.
“Bob Clark’s calling was to help the people of Brownsville,” she said. People from Brownsville’s various religious communities who were having pallets loaded onto pickup trucks and trailers for further distribution at their parishes and churches agreed.
Eric Sanchez, coordinator of the Catholic community Apostolic Missionary Association, or AMA, said the help is much appreciated. A forklift loaded a pallet containing dozens of jugs of Clorox onto his white pickup, which Sanchez said would be distributed later to parish churches around the Diocese of Brownsville and then redistributed to individuals receiving help at food banks.
Jose Angel Correa, president of the pastoral association for Restauracion y Poder churches in Brownsville, loaded a smaller number of Clorox bottles onto his pickup. He said the bottles of Clorox would be added to Friday food bank packets at Restauracion y Poder churches.
“This was something that Bob Clark, bless his heart, thought would help, especially for the school districts that would have children coming in, and the EMS having to decontaminate every time they made a trip,” Hushen said.
“We’ve been doing this for weeks on end. It really has helped out some of our cities and school districts. When the 18-wheelers started coming, we bypassed some of them directly to Hidalgo County,” Hushen said. “When we got it we shared it with every county to help disinfect jails, buildings. We got it for cities, counties, schools, whoever needed it. … He helped the entire Rio Grande Valley and that’s pretty awesome.”
