Roger M. Clinton, Sr. (July 25, 1908 – November 8, 1967) was the first stepfather of former President of the United States Bill Clinton.[1]
Clinton was born in Yell County, Arkansas, to Allen W. (August 26, 1880 – June 14, 1965) and Eula Clinton (née Cornwell) (May 29, 1882 – October 10, 1975).[2] He was of part Cherokee ancestry. Clinton was an owner of the local Buick dealership,[3] "a handsome, hell-raising, twice-divorced man from Hot Springs, Arkansas".[3] In 1950 he married Virginia Blythe, mother of the future president, whose first husband had died in a car accident four years earlier. Clinton and his family lived at the south end of Hope.[4] Then, Clinton sold the Buick dealership, to move, with his family, to a four hundred-acre farm a few miles west of Hot Springs.[5] After a year or so on the farm, around 1955,[6] they moved into Hot Springs. In 1956, he and Virginia had their only child, Roger Clinton, Jr., in Hot Springs.[7] Roger and Virginia divorced in 1962, but remarried a few months later, after which his stepson took the surname Clinton.[8] Roger Clinton was referred to as "Daddy" in Bill Clinton's presidential memoir My Life.
He had gotten sick, eventually reconciled with his stepson when Bill Clinton drove down from Georgetown on weekends to visit him at the Duke Medical Center in Durham.[9]
He had gotten sick again later in the fall 1967.[10] He was in the hospital for a while, but he wanted to come home to die.[10] Roger Clinton died of cancer[10] aged 59 in 1967; he is interred at Greenwood Cemetery, Hot Springs, Arkansas.
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