When, at age 61, Mary Pat Clarke decided to return to public life — that is, when she launched a campaign to run again for a seat on the Baltimore City Council, where she had served several years earlier — she did so to guarantee that someone would answer the phone.

She wanted to make sure that Baltimore’s new 14th District would be represented by someone responsive to the people who lived there.

Mary Pat Clarke lived there, forever on Cloverhill Road, and she thought the best person for the job was Mary Pat Clarke.

In 2002, Baltimore had switched from six three-member council districts to 14 single-member districts. Clarke, who had served under the previous system in the 1970s and 1980s, knew that serving constituents well was a 24/7 job. She worried that, with single-member districts, Baltimoreans could get stuck with a real loser of a council member.

“That’s why I ran again and got back into elected office, because all of a sudden [we had] single-member districts,” she said. “And I said, ‘Hey, I’m either going to be on hold for four years trying to reach somebody or let me run and see if I can work for the district.’”

“I am useful at times. I try to be.”

Voters approved, and Clarke served another 17 years on the council. She knew and helped thousands of people. By the time she retired in 2020, she had given more than three decades of robust service to the people of Baltimore.

Clarke, who died Sunday at 83, was one of the most popular members of the council. Everyone called her Mary Pat. She was an energetic, positive and practical city politician, a proudly progressive Democrat who believed in Baltimore and helped it recover from the devastating riots of 1968.

We had something in common: We were both born in New England, both moved to Baltimore and adopted the city as our new hometown.

“We moved around a lot, my family and I, when I was a kid, and I wanted my children to grow up so that when someone asked, ‘Where are you from?,’ they would know right away what the answer was,” Clarke told me in 2016, when she ran for her final term on the council.

She and her husband, Joe Clarke, settled in Baltimore in the 1960s and raised their family of three daughters and a son. “We put down roots and never wanted to leave,” she said.

Mary Pat Clarke became a founding member of Greater Homewood Community Corp. in an effort to help the city recover from the riots that had devastated businesses and homes — and the city’s psyche — following the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968. She was among the deeply invested Baltimore citizens who helped establish the City Fair in 1970 as a way to bring people across the city together and to relieve anxiety among all others about coming downtown again.

“When the riot was over, the mayor [Thomas J. D’Alesandro III] was devastated and everything went still,” Clarke recalled. “And all of us out here in the neighborhoods had to reach out to each other. We didn’t know each other.”

Neighborhoods were segregated by race, by ethnicity, by fear.

“All of a sudden, “Clarke said, “we realized that the city was our neighborhood. It was the city we needed to be working for.”

Despite a rainstorm that blew down some of the neighborhood booths that had been set up in Hopkins Plaza, the first fair, in 1970, was a striking success. “The rainstorm messed it up, but everyone helped everyone get their booths back together,” Clarke recalled. “At the time, the notion of going downtown was verboten. But we went downtown. People came.”

She first ran for city council in 1975, in the old 2nd District; she ran with two Black candidates, Nathan Irby and Clarence “Du” Burns, keeping the ticket for that district racially integrated.

In 1983, Clarke ran citywide for City Council president and lost to Burns. She worked for a few years in geriatric medicine before taking another run at the council presidency.

The second time, in 1987, she was victorious, becoming the first woman to hold that post. She was council president for two terms before challenging Mayor Kurt Schmoke in the 1995 election. She lost.

“I said, ‘Enough already,’” Clarke said. “My real profession was teaching. I was an English teacher, teaching undergrads at Hopkins and UMBC. I wrote a course about cities, a sociology course, for the Maryland Institute [College of Art] to help creative students understand that they can be change artists for urban societies … a force for change.”

The course focused, in part, on how urban spaces should be designed to best serve the people who live there. People, after all, was what Clarke said motivated her to run for office and advocate for living wages for city workers and municipal employees, more affordable housing, the eradication of lead paint in old homes and the removal of blighted properties.

She dropped teaching to run for office again in 2003, to make sure someone answered constituents’ phone calls.

“I never teach and represent people at the same time,” she said. “Everything you’re thinking about is always either with your students or with your constituents. I can’t get them mixed up. I don’t do that well.”

The people of the 14th District, covering large parts of central and north Baltimore, welcomed her back.

“It’s such a great district,” said Mary Pat. “It’s the most progressive, activist district in the city. Sometimes I just take orders [from demanding constituents]. But I love that. I shouldn’t say I like people yelling at me — I don’t want to give anyone any ideas — but it shows spirit. ‘Let’s go!’ There’s still so much to do.”