She married physicist David Park in 1945, and they both attended the University of Michigan, where she earned a master's degree in 1949, majoring in English literature.
By the time of her mother's death, Jessica had worked for decades at the mail room at Williams College (so long in fact that the mailroom is named after her) [2] and painted, and sold, drawings of streetscapes.
[6] Fred R. Volkmar, director of the Yale Child Study Center, credited Park as being "one of the first parents who had the courage to share their story at a time when autism was poorly understood".
Her essays were published in The American Scholar, in The Hudson Review, and elsewhere on subjects ranging from memory to Samuel Pepys to the works of Anthony Trollope to those of William Empson.
Howard Nemerov noted in his preface to that collection that "[Clara Park’s] range is great, and consistently convincing from Dante and Shakespeare up through Jane Austen and Trollope and on to Richard Wilbur and James Merrill ..."