Q: I need to retrieve old Claris works docs but don't have Pages Open Office doesn't  work?

You can try LibreOffice. It is able to open some of those old formats.

Yes LibreOffice https://www.libreoffice.org/ will open them.

Choose Open and then and then your ClarisWorks files or just drag them into its Open dialog. The conversion is unlikely to be perfect, but it should be good enough to allow you to copy out the raw text or export the file to a more robust format such as plain text so that it’s a bit more future-proofed.

Or if you are feeling adventurous you can use software like SheepShaver to get os9 running on osX and install Claris that way.

I was a little bit cautious about going that far because a couple of the posts here were attempting to work with files that were so old that even LibreOffice was unable to open them.

No.

In Sys Prefs > Security > General > Allow apps downloaded from... you probably don't have this set to "anywhere". This is good for security so you can bypass this settings for apps you know are safe by instead of double-clicking on the app in question to open it,  Ctrl+click or right click on the app and select Open from the contextual menu.

That setting is for first launch of the app, once you have got it open you can revert back to the original setting and it will launch fine from then on.