Clay Hollister: A life of intrigue; it could fill volumes

To say Hollister, 74, has lived an extraordinary life is an understatement; his rich past could fill volumes on the wooden bookshelves of his stately home, where he has a sweeping view of Mount Monadnock.

“We fell in love with it the second we saw it,” Hollister said of the place he and his wife, Caroline Hollister, have called home since 2001. “It needed new plumbing, new electric, and a new roof at the time. ... It sits on just 3.6 acres, but who cares.”

It’s the only house built in the town at an elevation of 2,200 feet, with the majestic mountain, which crests at 3,165 feet, in its backdrop.

The Hollisters retired in Caroline’s hometown of Jaffrey roughly 15 years ago, but remain active in the Monadnock Region. The two were college sweethearts who once traveled the world together — and then some.

Clay Hollister, the son of a U.S. Navy man, was born in New York City and grew up in Greenwich, Conn. He went on to study English at Duke University in North Carolina, where he met Caroline, a beautiful young actress with whom he was in the university’s drama society.

“Meeting her was a game changer,” he said with a smile.

The two married in 1967, just six months before Hollister deployed to Vietnam. He landed there in February 1968 on the heels of one of the largest military campaigns of the war, the Tet Offensive, and served a total of 14 months as a cameraman, forever preserving an infantry’s operations.

Hollister received his draft notice while studying film at New York University Tisch School of the Arts. He enrolled at the university after returning from Nigeria as a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer. In Nigeria, he developed an interest in educational films, which he used as a teaching tool in his English classes in the early 1960s.

“It was very challenging for a kid from Greenwich to be pushed into the bush of Nigeria, but it was also a phenomenal experience,” Hollister said of his volunteer work abroad.

When he returned home to America, he realized he wanted to make films like the ones his students valued, and believed film school was a gateway to realizing that dream.

Hollister, though, completed only the first year of the two-year program before he was drafted into military service.

But the stories from his film school days live on, including the one about his now-famous classmate Martin Scorsese.

Hollister recalled that Scorsese — whose work as a director, producer, actor and screenwriter spans more than four decades — excelled at a young age. Students were required to produce a three-minute short film for class, and Hollister said Scorsese’s was “terrific.”

“I don’t remember the topic, but I’m sure he was given an ‘A.’ He received all kinds of applause.”

Hollister isn’t an Oscar or Golden Globe winner, but he did leave his mark on the film industry before a lengthy career in U.S. government.

One of his early gigs was for The November Group, which served as Richard Nixon’s private advertising agency during the 1972 presidential campaign. That group of skilled advertisers and producers was a wing of the Committee for the Re-election of the President.

The job worked out well at first, but then Nixon’s second term quickly unraveled in the Watergate scandal, Hollister said. The dominoes fell with the June 1972 break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate office complex.

And so did the credibility of those employed with The November Group.

“I knew a lot of people in the industry, but they were reluctant, if not somewhat hostile, to work with us,” he said.

Hollister struggled to find work, but he had a family to support, including newborn daughter, Gambrill, and so he couldn’t give up.

On a bit of a whim, he decided to accept a job offer in 1974 at the International College, a secondary school founded in Beirut, Lebanon. The college’s president wanted to partner with one of the television stations in Beirut to provide educational programming like that offered in America.

At that time the Middle East was “booming with oil money” and “buying up television stations all over,” Hollister said.

The family’s first year in Beirut was good, but during year two a civil war broke out. Consequently, no one cared anymore about producing educational programming for kids — and rightfully so, Hollister said.

“It was dangerous, a very unnerving time. We evacuated to Greece twice. We thought it was over, and then in 1976 we were captured by the Palestine Liberation Army,” he recalled.

He was living with his wife and two daughters, Gambrill and Sarah, in the village of Damour, 12 kilometers from Beirut.

The army had fired directly at homes in the village and so the expatriates there retreated to the college, Hollister said. The Palestinian fighters, though, didn’t realize the people were educators and not village natives, he noted.

When the army surrounded the college, Hollister chose to open the door and let them in. The alternative was death.

His family was arrested at gunpoint and held for two weeks. Their captors fed them food ransacked from the village.

“We did finally get out, with the clothes on our back and our children,” Hollister said.

Immediately after his release, he traveled to Beirut to tell his boss he’d had enough and was going home.

The Hollister family flew back to Jaffrey and took refuge in a cottage Caroline’s family owned on Harkness Road. As she and the two girls took needed time to heal, Hollister traveled back and forth to Washington, D.C., where he had professional connections, in hopes of finding more permanent work.

And after a few months, he did. Hollister landed a job in media education with the National Fire Protection Administration, later called the U.S. Fire Administration. His proudest achievement was working with The Children’s Television Workshop, which created Sesame Street, to teach preschool children fire safety. The project encouraged children to “stop, drop and roll” and “crawl low in smoke.”

“I can say I brought Sesame Street into the fire world,” Hollister said with delight. “The biggest issue at that time, and still is, is children and fire safety. That program made a huge difference.”

Hollister’s story could easily end there, or years earlier, but it doesn’t. In fact, some of what he calls his most meaningful work was with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), where he was employed for 27 years.

He held various positions within the agency and worked his way up to the very top, retiring as associate director and acting chief of staff after Sept. 11, 2001.

Today, FEMA is not an independent agency; rather it is one of more than 20 different federal departments that operate under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, FEMA’s focus shifted from responding to natural disasters to preparing for man-made ones, Hollister said. And it was at that time, he chose to bow out.

“9/11 was not my kind of disaster. I didn’t want to work in that world. I’m glad, though, and thankful, that there are people who do.”

Until that September morning, the Oklahoma City bombing was the worst terrorist attack to take place on U.S. soil. More than 20 years later, Hollister remembers the home-grown attack all too well; he responded in its aftermath.

Hollister led the search and rescue teams, including the dogs who he said were psychologically traumatized after not finding many people alive in the rubble. Hollister had responded to places throughout the country after hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes, but Oklahoma City was unlike anything he had ever experienced before.

“It was intentional; it wasn’t an act of God. It was just malicious and evil,” he said. “That gave us a taste of 9/11 in the emergency world.”

Although retired, Hollister hasn’t left his work entirely behind; he is Jaffrey’s emergency management director. In the administrative role, he works closely with the town’s first-responders to develop and update emergency plans that can be implemented in a moment’s notice.

Hollister, who previously served two terms as selectman, said he was recruited by Mike Hartman, then Jaffrey’s town manager. His work at the national level didn’t go unnoticed by those in the small town, who believed he was most qualified for the position.

But those same people, including his wife, tell him he should set aside time to reflect and write an autobiography. After all, his stories could fill volumes.

“Maybe one day I’ll stop being an emergency manager and become an author,” he said with a wink. “One day.”