As a teacher, I love the inspirational movies Lean on Me (Morgan Freeman as Principal Joe Clark) and Stand And Deliver (Edward James Olmos as teacher Jaime Escalante). Of course I know that the movies didn't perfectly match the reality, but they were supposed to be close enough that we could draw inspiration from them--and I did.
And now we learn that Joe Clark himself has moved to the big campus in the sky. He won't need the bat and bullhorn there:
Joe Clark, the baseball bat-wielding former New Jersey principal who was the inspiration for the 1989 movie “Lean on Me,” has died after a long battle with an unspecified illness, his family said.
Clark was 82.
The longtime South Orange resident, who was played by Morgan Freeman in the hit movie he inspired, died Tuesday surrounded by his family in his retirement home in Gainesville, Florida, the family said.
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