“Mitch, you’re not a Democrat. And I can prove it”.

Dr. Blake looked across his desk at me. I was afraid he might be right.

---

Jim Blake was the son of a New York cop, and still had the Queens accent to show for it. I didn’t know much more about his background, other than he had gotten a Masters at Rutgers and his PhD at Marquette – a school he’d chosen because he wanted to be in a city with an NBA team.

I didn’t know the whole story:

Born in Brooklyn, NY on April 26, 1947 he was the son of the late James and Louise Blake. By all accounts he was a very shy, sweet little boy who seemed beyond his years and would at times be sad and “ morbid” as his grandmother put it. At the age of three, he was presented with a baby sister, Pamela Louise. At the age of six, his beloved mother passed away with cancer. He was unfortunatelyl eft in the hands of a very uncaring parent and thus began a very rough and tumble childhood.

When he was eleven, a stepmother and a stepsister joined the household. He spent the next several years protecting his sisters and endured continued physical and emotional abuse. He spent many nights in the car outside of a bar watching his sisters until the bars closed and his “parents” returned. His sister still remembers the pain of watching her brother being abused even during times of illness and always having to “man” up.

But fatherhood and academia were where Dr. Blake found a footing in life.

Although Jim was the first in his family to attend college, and was successful wherever he went in one way or another, his family loved him for other reasons. He broke the cycle of abuse he experiences. He was a loyal husband and friend. A wildly amusing and unique father. Bedtime for his son was having a father that became a robot and would obey his commands by pushing”buttons.” His daughters were not read bed time stories but would be visited by a “creature from the cellar.” There were eight at one time; each with a different voice and personality. One was Sidney a particularly obnoxious, bratty character which gave him full rein to be just that. Some of the characters wore a wig or an old suit picked up at a second hand store.

He taught in Memphis before getting a job running the small, ailing English department at the small, ailing college where my mother worked, giving me the 80% tuition break that got me into college.

He arrived to find the English Department with only two majors and this at a liberal arts college. One year after arriving, he was made department chair and at the end of the first year there were more than 50 students enrolled as English Majors.

I didn’t know I was going to be one of them until the end of my Freshman year – because, after taking my first class with Dr. Blake, I found I had a facility, and before long a fascination, for analyzing narratives and finding the point behind the story. By the end of my freshman year I’d changed my major to English. I’ve never regretted it.

Along with analysis and ferocious logic, Dr. Blake had two traits that would make him a pariah in education today.

First – he was utterly up-front about the prospects for English majors after graduation. He never promised that we would find a “job in our field”; indeed, he was drearily realistic about the jobs that were “in the field” for English majors (who didn’t want to be high school teachers) back then; years of graduate school leading to years on the tenure treadmill (the situation was bad then, and worse today), years of work in literary or refernce editing (working for $15K in 1985 dollars a year in New York or Los Angeles), or the endless grind of trying to actuallyl be a published author that earned a living. Instead, he emphasized the strengths the degree did give us; thinking outside the box, digging for the narrative needle in haystack, and turning it into a living, The degree didn’t teach us the “how”, but it taught us how to find the “why”. Without Dr. Blake, I’m not sure I’d have had the mental agility to blunder into the career I’m in, one which didn’t exist when I was in college.

Also – he was a conservative. He referred to himself as a “Monarchist”. And while he didn’t push anyone, he represented for the value of the traditions that made Western Civilization the hotbed of intellectual liberalism and economic humanity that it is.

I’d been getting little precursor echoes of my worldview changing for years; my anger at Jjmmy Carter’s “Malaise” speech, watching the crackdown on Solidarity, talking with boys my age from Polish and Vietnamese refugee families…

…but it was Dr. Blake who helped me tie it all together. I doubt I’d have pulled the lever for Reagan in 1984 without Dr. Blake.

Dr. Blake took a job as a dean in Marshalltown, Iowa the year after I graduated, and in 1992 moved to take a job at a school in Oil City, Pennsylvania. Marriage and kids and divorce led me out of contact with him until 2016, when I started looking him up and found his obituary from the year before.

I’ve never regretted procrastinating more.