By BOB HERTZEL

For The Times Leader

MORGANTOWN — Meet Bonnie Clark.

I know, the sports pages are a strange place to meet her. She’s never hit a home run, scored a touchdown, canned a 3-point shot.

But she owns a World Series championship ring and worked to earn it with the 2008 Philadelphia Phillies and has been chasing a second one ever since, hoping that maybe this will be the year.

It will be worth meeting her. After all, James Earl Jones did. Oprah Winfrey did. Heidi Klum did. So did Bryce Harper.

It all has come to her because of the degree she earned at West Virginia University, but before we get ahead the story she’s going to tell you on this Fourth of July weekend, let me take an aside to connect the strange series of dots that connected me to her.

This time of year in a college town you are looking for things to write and noticing that her job, as Vice President, Communications Community Initiatives with the Phillies certainly qualified for being the subject of a story back here where her alma mater is located.

But as I began researching, I noticed something from when she joined the Phillies. The opening she filled was one left vacant by the retirement of longtime Phillies publicity director Larry Shenk, a legend in the PR game.

Bells and whistles went off.

Shenk had left his job as a sportswriter with the Wilmington (Del.) Morning News and Evening Journal in 1964 to take that job.

His replacement?

You are reading him. Forty-four years after I replaced Shenk as a first-year journalist out of the University of Missouri, Bonnie Clark replaced him to head up the Phillies communication department.

Small world.

Bonnie Clark never envisioned the road her career would take out of WVU. She wasn’t particularly into sports. She was a public relations person working for QVC, the 24-hour-a-day cable shopping station.

But we must go back before that to her true dream that started in high school in a small town on the Pennsylvania-New York border named Milford, Pa.

“I tell this story when I’m talking to college kids,” she said from her office in Citizens Bank Park in Philly. “How many of you are familiar with the television show ‘Love Boat’? No one other than maybe the professor or a parent in the audience might raise their hands, but no one else. So I told them that on the show there was a girl named ‘Julie’ and she was the cruise director.

“In the ninth grade I went to my counselor and said ‘I want to be like Julie in the ‘Love Boat’, what would I major in?’ She said you could major in public relations.”

That sent her off searching for a college that offered a major in public relations. She couldn’t find many back in the day.

“There was Tulane, Pepperdine, the University of Pittsburgh, but you had to go to their Bradford campus. And there was West Virginia. It was close enough to home, it was affordable,” she said.

She didn’t know anyone in West Virginia, but off she went. It was a decision she never regretted.

“I tell people today that if I were given a chance and could go to any school I wanted with them paying the way with a full scholarship, I’d still go back to West Virginia,” she said. “The training I got there, the knowledge that I learned while there and my advisor was Dr. (Hunter P.) McCartney”

It was a wonderful time to go to school at WVU, the early to mid-1980s. Sunnyside was the old Sunnyside and helped it get named the nation’s top party school in three of her four years. Don Nehlen had the football team going forward with an upset road victory over Oklahoma and in 1984 WVU “FINALLY” defeated Penn State, 17-14, after having gone 28 consecutive years without beating their rival.

She was at that game, as she was at all the game, and she was on the field for the wild post-game celebration.

“How could you be a Mountaineer and not go to football games?” she asks.

Those were days of couch burnings and that became a day etched in her mind.

“I hang on to my memories of Morgantown. When I went to open a bank account, I opened it on High Street. I remember the teller saying to me, ‘Would you like an ATM card?’ and I said, ‘What’s that?’ She said it was a card that you put in a machine and get your money out and I was like ‘What?’ It was the first time I heard of an ATM, and it was a MAC card then,” she said.

“I went to a department store on High Street and bought some shorts when I got there. I’d packed all these winter clothes and it was August and I didn’t have any shorts or anything like that.”

She got her degree in four years. Her parents, she said, paid her way but had told her that would be for only four years. Any longer and she was on her own

And so went off to chase her dream, the dream of being “Julie” from “The Love Boat.”

She admits she hasn’t been remiss as an alum, coming to campus only twice.

“I was working for an advertising agency called Tierney, I think it was either 1997 or 1998, and was working on the Bell Atlantic — now Verizon — account and my responsibility was to do all of James Earl Jones’ appearances for Bell Atlantic,” she said.

“I’d travel with him when he did appearances and they had a ‘Star Wars’ halftime show for one of the games. That was my first-time back to Morgantown after I graduated.

“I got to go to the President’s House. I think it was President Gee. We went to his house after the game and I was on the field for the halftime show and I was thinking, ‘You know what, if there was any way to come back for the first time, this is the way to do it.'”

Then, on New Year’s Eve 2022, she and four friends got together to welcome in 2023 in Morgantown.

She wound up doing PR work QVC and was completed satisfied with what she was doing, but fate intervened and a friend introduced her to a Phillies vice-president at a time when Shenk was talking about retiring. He said he thought she would be perfect for the job and should send in a resume.,

“I had no ties to baseball at that time, other than going to an occasional Phillies game. Both my boys played football, but we went maybe three times a season,” she said. “I loved my job at QVC, but I sent my resume. That was in November of ’05. I never followed up, never heard anything, the complete opposite of anyone who ever applied for that job. I figured they must have found somebody else.”

Two years and two months passed and out of the blue she got a call and the Phillies told her if she’s still interested, they’d like her.

Turned out it took Shenk that long to finally put in his retirement papers, so she began the interview process.

“I kept coming in for interview after interview. I did five interviews. One of my references called me and said I just got off the phone with Mike at the Phillies. We spent an hour on the phone and he says it’s down to you and another guy who had worked in sports in New York.

“I’m thinking they are going to hire that guy. They’re not going to hire a woman who has no sports experience.”

Then came another phone call.

“I thought they were going to say ‘We’re going to hire someone else’ but instead they say ‘We’d like to offer you the job as the VP of communications with the Phillies.’ I was like, ‘Hold on, what did you just say?’ I was honored it got down to me and somebody else, but I never thought they’d hire me.”

Why did she get the job?

“I believe when I interviewed for the job, just before that I worked with Oprah Winfrey, who had partnered with QVC and we did this show we called ‘Oprah’s Next Thing.’ We would bring out six products and the audience would vote on the best product and that would go on QVC. It wound up being like a lasagna pan where you could just pop out the lasagna. That was a great invention,” she said.

“I was also working with Heidi Klum, helping her do the launch for Heidi Klum jewelry,” Clark went on. “I have never been starstruck and I think that was one of the reasons they hired me. I’d look at it like ‘I’m working with Heidi Klum. She is not different from any of your daughters. She’s just a woman starting a business.'”

And so she entered the world of baseball, a world where not many women had jobs of authority.

“When I took this job there were only two other women who had this job,” she said.

But timing is everything and the sport was finally fully accepting itself as a business.

“I get the question all the time, what’s it like to be a woman in a man’s world and I truly do believe this, they hired me not because I was a woman but because of the PR experience I had gained. They hired me because of my resume, not just because I was a woman,'” she said.

“But it’s still very much a man’s world, but we have grown significantly with the Phillies. I think we have five female senior vice-presidents now. We have made a significant leap. It’s like that around the league now. I think half the clubs have women who have more of a senior role as directors or vice-presidents.”

Now she’s looking for a World Series return.

She had gone to the World Series her first two years in baseball, winning it all the first year, but that was kind of wasted.

“I wish I could have a do over. I was still very green then. That’s why I felt very fortunate we went back again in 2022 because I had the knowledge that I didn’t have in the first two World Series so I could soak it all in. In those first two World Series it was just one blur, making sure we did everything right with credentialing,” she said.

“After the years of not doing well and understanding what it takes to get there, you can appreciate it. It’s like Pat Gillick said, ‘It’s all about luck. It’s all about when you get good. It’s all about when your hitters are hitting and your pitchers are performing. All the stars have to align.

It can be great. Like last year, we won the division but then we sat because we weren’t in the wild card race. My point is the unpredictability of it makes you appreciate when you get to the World Series you appreciate it more, which it didn’t the first two times.”

Now, she’d like to get another shot at it, then maybe go off and find her real dream job as Julie on “The Love Boat.”