Vocal Point: Building tribute to a big-handed darling

If you drive up or down Hamilton Street, you may notice that David’s Pizza has been torn down and a new shopping-restaurant plaza (aka retail center) is being built in its place.  If you look high up on the side of new building, etched in medium-sized black lettering is the name CLEMENTINE. To the locals, that name is a tip-off to the owner of the new construction. He put his mother’s name on the wall along with the year of the opening of the new mall, which will be early in 2012.

Clementine’s last name is Stockton. It is her son John’s plaza project. Clementine passed away some five years ago. John retired from the NBA in 2003 and was inducted into the Basketball Hall Of Fame in 2009.

Clementine was a small, slender woman. But she had hands. Big ones. I did a comparison with her 10 years ago. I slapped my hand down on the table, and Mrs. Stockton fit her outstretched hand on top of mine. Her fingertips extended well beyond my own. I am some inches taller than 6 feet. Clementine was some few inches taller than 5 feet. Big hands are a basketball player’s weapons. John could palm a basketball in junior high. Stockton used those rare genes to become a Hall-of-Famer. If Clementine had my mother’s hands, John would probably have been a bartender at his dad’s bar, Jack and Dan’s, which is across the street from the new shopping plaza construction.

During John’s NBA years, Clementine, John’s sister Stacy and close friends watched the Utah Jazz games in a TV room at the back of the bar. Some of us were allowed to enter that room and watch the game with the family if we kept a sense of decorum. The language out in the main bar tended to be salty, more than Clementine Stockton would abide. We were better men for the restraint required to be seated in that VIP room. Even Jack Stockton was banished from his own bar during the games due to the things he shouted at the television set while his son was playing.

While Jack was absent from the bar, several 70-ish old gentlemen friends of the Stocktons would flirt with Clementine. She never responded with anything but cordiality. She did not scold them; the old gents were allowed to keep their dignity.

Clementine Stockton treated everyone as though they were a gentlewoman or -man. She got the same back from the barroom fans who barely knew better. She was a lady who deserves to be etched in stone.