Meet Jim, the only person to reach this milestone in Hilton Head’s ‘Barmuda Triangle’

Just days after his achievement in Hilton Head Island’s Barmuda Triangle, Jim Clark was straightening up his home office when he stumbled upon a box, the contents of which would, technically, alter his tally.

In the box were old bar napkins, cardboard coasters and other slips of paper on which he’d recorded long forgotten statistics.

And those stats would, of course, have to be added to the spreadsheet.

Their addition, though, would prompt a question, one a record-keeper must reconcile: How does the discovery of new information affect a data set — not just in terms of the overall accounting of things, but when, precisely, events occurred? Clark’s response would be telling.

The spreadsheet, a Microsoft Excel document, is where the milestone lives, achieved July 13 in the Triangle, at The Lodge and recorded on line 2,364 of the database (which he sorts alphabetically).

On that date, Clark, who’s lived on the island for the past two decades, reached No. 5,000.

It was a draft — a 20-calorie-per-ounce, 8-percent-alcohol-by-volume, India-pale-ale out of Auburn, Calif., according to his database — a Stanley’s Treat from Knee Deep Brewing Company.

Clark’s 5,000th different type of beer consumed — a quest that began (technically) in the late 1960s; one he started documenting in 1990; one that became his New Year’s resolution in January, when he realized he was nearing the mark.

One that he planned — timed — to complete at The Lodge, where Nicole Cibelli says Clark has been coming in every Friday “like clockwork” for the nine years she’s worked the bar. (He typically drinks four new-to-him beers, ordered light to dark.)

And one that, arguably, could be affected by the discovery of the box.

Clark, 71, sometimes writes the names of new beers on the back of coasters or bar napkins, with the intention of adding them to his spreadsheet. But the batch in the box had somehow slipped through.

Such an omission would seemingly trouble someone like Clark, who might grin beneath a Pittsburgh Pirates cap and call himself “a born statistician,” and who — as the keeper of a spreadsheet with up to 22 data fields for each beer — is, well, thorough.

“’My God, you’re an accountant!’” Clark said last week, mimicking a friend who’d come to know him and his proclivity for documentation. “But I’m not an accountant by trade,” Clark said.

Before he retired, Clark was a corporate headhunter with a gift for remembering names and faces.

And before that, he was a pilot, flying C-130s in the Air National Guard in the 1980s after jockeying supersonic F-4 Phantom II fighter jets in the 1970s as an active-duty U.S. Air Force officer. He served two tours in Vietnam, where he bombed the Ho Chi Minh Trail and provided close air support to American troops on the ground — and where he made of list of every movie he watched during his deployments.

Clark graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1968 (the year he would later select as the beginning of his beer quest).

He has always been a baseball fan, the kind who can rattle off a 1980s-era San Francisco lineup, even though he’s not a Giants fan. A man who plans trips to new minor league stadiums — and nearby breweries — each year. A student of the game who denotes hits, runs, errors and all the other all-important statistics on scorecards.

“My dad taught me how to keep score,” Clark said recently, sitting at The Lodge’s bar, drinking No. 5,004, an Against the Grain Brewery 35 K Stout.

His dad took him to his first game, which saw the St. Louis Cardinals take on his hometown Pirates. He was 9. Pittsburgh first baseman Dale Long hit a home run in his fifth straight game, a streak that would last three more contests, through May 28, 1956. Clark’s dad missed Long’s shot because his son needed an escort to the facilities, a story Clark grins and winks his way through.

And by the way, Clark will add: Long’s eight-game home-run streak is still a record. (He’s right, of course. It’s shared with the New York Yankees’ Don Mattingly and the Seattle Mariners’ Ken Griffey Jr.).

As he neared retirement, Clark had a conversation with his father, who told him: “Jim, you’re not gonna run out of stuff to do.”

He knew his son liked quests.

These days, Clark pairs brewery tours with stadium visits, adding the former to his spreadsheet, keeping tabs of the others on separate lists.

“I’m at the marginal age,” he joked, sitting at the bar. “I go to the doctor, and he says my cholesterol is marginal, my blood pressure is marginal.”

He grinned.

“It’ll be a lot longer getting to 6,000 (beers),” he said.

But the once-lost statistics, scribbled on bar napkins and coasters, hiding in a box in his home office, will give him a head start.

And, no, their addition to the sheet won’t affect No. 5,000 — that milestone will forever be tied to a Summer 2018 Friday-the-13th at The Lodge, where Clark has, over the years, documented downing over a 1,000 brews.

After all, Clark’s spreadsheet is, on closer inspection, more of a journal than a data set.

He constructed some of it from memory, relying on friends to help him recall the long-gone regional beers they used to drink.

Many of the dates aren’t exactly precise — “pre-1990” is a common entry.

A more finicky documentarian might take issue with Clark’s data collection techniques: “At one point in time I was (entering) samples, but I stopped,” he said. “Because that’s cheating.”

A baseball fan might be tempted to put an asterisk by Clark’s tally.

But that would be silly.

Because Clark never, ever, juiced.

This story was originally published July 27, 2018 at 5:58 PM.