The Final Brick For Lisa Dedrick

A few years after her daughter died, Mary Ann Clark went to a support group for parents who lost their children. A father got up, and said he had “gotten over” the death of his child, and had “forgotten it,” she said.

“I never want to forget it, I will never get over it,” Clark said. “I think other parents who lost a child would understand, you don't ever get over it. It is not about forgetting about Lisa, I don’t want to forget about her or get over it… She was my best friend, and I want to remember her.”

Clark has spent every day for the last 22 years remembering her daughter, Lisa Dedrick, who died at the age of 23 in 1990. The family, along with her friends, have raised thousands of dollars to rebuild , a field just across the street from Cohanzie School, where Dedrick went to elementary school.

But now that is ending. Once they finish bathrooms at the field, the fundraising will end and the Lisa Dedrick Memorial Field will be complete.

“I think she would be so proud,” Clark said. “Everyone loved Lisa, everyone loved Lisa. She just gave so much to everybody, I just wanted to do something in her memory. Her and I are best friends… It just keeps her alive in my mind I guess.”

The Story

Dedrick was a standout softball player at Waterford High School, excelling at first base. She graduated and received a scholarship to play at Mitchell College, and then moved on to play softball at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield.

In 1990, Dedrick was killed in an automobile accident at the age of 23. But her memory would not soon pass.

The next year, her friends at Sacred Heart started an annual softball tournament in her name, which raised some money. After a few years, they replaced the softball tournament with an annual golf tournament, which made far more money.

The golf tournaments raised about $8,000 each, half of which would go to the Lisa Dedrick Foundation and the other half would go to Paul Newman’s Hole in the Wall Gang Camp. It was unbelievable how these friends, who knew Dedrick just a few years, kept doing these fundraisers 20 years after her death, stepfather Steward Clark said.

“You just can’t imagine how much (her friends) loved her,” Clark said. “When she went down there, all of a sudden she created this network of friends. And they just kept (fundraising) year after year after year, on the other end of the state. Getting no credit, no feedback, no nothing.”

With the money, the Clarks originally gave scholarships to Waterford High School girls who played softball. But it got to the point where none of the students or even the administrators knew who Dedrick was, Stewart Clark said.

So instead they focused on Dedrick’s love, softball. They bought new fences for Cohanzie Field, turning it into a girls softball field, and then replaced the dugouts, got a new scoreboard, put electricity at the field, installed batting cages and on and on, Clark said.

Along the way, Cohanzie Park was renamed . The Clarks are now working on the final project, installing a free-standing building with a men’s and women’s bathroom, that should be finished soon.

“It was always working on Lisa’s field, working on Lisa’s field,” Mary Ann Clark said. “So that is going to end now. But I think it is the right time.”

The Community

The Clarks have hardly been alone in reconstructing Lisa Dedrick field. Many people have donated supplies and labor working on the softball field, Stewart Clark said.

Patch met Stewart Clark Friday at noon at the field. Clark said he was with friend John Quinn earlier in the day, helping pour cement for the bathroom. Quinn, a pool contractor, had an employee there he was paying to help him, and still wouldn’t take any money, Clark said.

“That’s just the kind of people who have done this,” he said. “They would do anything for us, give us the shirt off their back. It has been unbelievable.”

A Mother And Her Daughter

And yet still 22 years later, the pain is still very real for Mary Ann Clark. She took Patch into Dedrick’s old bedroom, where she had the wall lined with pictures of her daughter.

“I just like to come in here sometimes, and look at her,” she said. “She was my best friend. She always knew exactly what I needed.”

Clark’s favorite story is the day she threw a 75th birthday party for her mother. This was just a year after Dedrick died, “and at that point I could care less about anything, but they talked me into it.”

At 3 p.m., in the middle of a sunny, clear day, Clark took the cake out for her mother. And there, in the sky, was a rainbow.

“I know that was Lisa,” she said. “And now every time I see a rainbow, I say, ‘There’s Lisa’.”