William Blando, 91, New Cumberland

Because I know myself best, I'm writing my own obituary.

First, I'd like everyone who knew me to know that (like baseball’s Lou Gehrig) I consider myself the "luckiest man on the face of the Earth."

I came into the world on Nov. 2, 1934, with the love of hard-working parents. It was during the Great Depression, and I was the first of their two children. My sister, Angeline (changed from Angelina) and nicknamed "Cookie") arrived 20 months later. We were both born at Bellevue Hospital on New York City's East Side.

We attended the same elementary school, PS 122, a typical Little Red School House, except larger, having six floors and housing 1,000 or more pupils from K-6; I went on to the all-boys JHS 64 (grades 7-9); then on to Seward Park High School, graduating in 1952 and seeing my hero of an English teacher jailed as an alleged subversive for teaching his students such subjects as Ibsen's "An Enemy of the People." Rallies in support of him proved futile during the real witch-hunts of the early 1950s.

In those grammar school years, my sister and I became child actors, appearing in an original play by the impresario of the Butler Davenport Free Theatre, "Difference in Gods," but in different acts. Cookie performed in a couple more productions for Mr. Davenport, while I peaked by appearing in a drawing-room comedy, "As Husbands Go," at the off-Broadway Cherry Lane Theatre.

Cookie went into the arts as a well-respected, well-paid artist in all media, including owning and operating two galleries in Baltimore. I maintained a keen interest in theater as patron and donor, and occasional community theater performer. But I got to know and love theater strictly as an avocation; it wasn't my job (except for those occasions when I wrote reviews). Among Cookie's free-lance assignments was assembling and illustrating the Air Force Reservist magazine, which she did for more than 10 years. Among the officers who oversaw and directed her work was Gen. Chappie James, the first African-American to attain the rank of four-star general.

My real muse led me to newspapering, the only work I ever wanted to do. It began with schoolboy, stencil-printed newsletters (hawked in the streets where I lived in NYC), continued in high school, college and troop newspapers (Orleans, France) and finally earning a salary doing exactly what I wanted to do.

After an honorable Army discharge, my first newspaper job was with the Rockland Independent, covering sports and municipal government in Rockland County, NY. It was there I met and fell in love with Betty Lee Dembufsky of Indiana. Our marriage lasted just six weeks shy of 47 years -- the best part of my life. We were unable to celebrate our Golden Anniversary (or even our 47th) because Betty was stricken with Leukemia, resulting in three subdural hematoma procedures in two months. We spent our last few weeks together reminiscing about our years as man and wife, and what we might have missed by not having children.

Nevertheless, we were lucky!

We could have lost 44 years of marriage. Less than three years after we were wed, Betty, driving home from a League of Women Voters meeting, was struck head-on by a truck traveling on the wrong side of the road. She recovered after two weeks in a hospital, the first five days in a coma. Fear that she had suffered brain damage was disproved when she earned a master's degree three years later. She was able to study and write her thesis, having been awarded a fellowship from the State University of New York at Albany.

After we wed, I worked as sports editor of The Milton (PA) Standard, a six-day-a-week daily that was one of the pioneering offset newspapers in the country; Betty had what she often described as her favorite job: assistant Dean of Student Affairs at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, working for the best boss she ever had, Dean John Hayward.

Looking for bigger challenges, I sought a job as a full-time reporter. I found it at The Albany (NY) Knickerbocker News. Betty's best job there was at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs where, as assistant to the dean of admissions, she crafted slide shows and verbal presentations for incoming students and their parents, focusing on the virtues of an education at the school, among other duties. She also conducted orientations for freshmen and their families.

After a month or two of covering various municipalities, police and courts, I was assigned as the Inner-city reporter or, as it was dubbed, "the poverty beat," going head-to-head with eventual Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist William Kennedy, an Albany native. I'm proud to say, I held my own, earning a few Hearst newspaper accolades (including monetary) during my tenure.

After three years in Albany, our marriage again was tested when I went on a mini-sabbatical to visit someplace I’d longed to see for years -- Alaska. The 6,000-mile drive was shared with a fellow reporter, Chuck Malley, who chose to live in the Land of the Midnight Sun for the next 35 years. Thankfully, we've remained friends and in touch all these years.

I would have remained, too, but could not find a job to pay the exorbitant cost of living in Alaska. The big difference between Chuck and me was that I had a wife, he did not. But Betty agreed to join me when I could get us settled in with job and living accommodations. I couldn't.

So, it was back to Albany and temp work for several months, including construction that took me to northern New Hampshire where a new highway was planned; my job was taking test borings in the shadow of the Old Man of the Mountain tourist attraction.

But newspapering was my game, although I knew I'd probably never make the big time, a revelation that materialized when a reporter from the New York Times, Homer Bigart, used a typewriter at the Rockland Independent and made it sound like a battery of machine guns going off back to back, to back. I couldn't think as fast as that man could type.

In the spring of 1970, I was hired by the prestigious Trumbull Times (of Connecticut) as its lone reporter-photographer-page designer. In less than three months the editor resigned for a better-paying position, and I inherited his job soon after winning the New England Press Association's best newspaper honors that year. Publisher Rick Diamond, a true visionary, invested heavily in the new offset technology -- one reason why our Times looked so much sharper than our competition. The key to that honor was a front page that featured the No. 1 national story (an eyewitness account of the Kent State shootings) and the top Connecticut story (a protest rally at Yale University in defense of several blacks, including two sisters from Trumbull).

As a newspaperman, I had the honor and pleasure to interview many celebrities, but it was my first important story with The Times I've treasured most. An elderly eccentric lady with a cause, Paula Elterich, prevailed on the state -- through exceptional persistence and an abiding and relentless faith in her ability to persuade -- for state recognition of the first Earth Day (1970). Then she managed to convince the First Selectman that Trumbull should lead the way with a daylong schedule of events, fairs, lectures and educational seminars. That initial tribute to our planet set the standard for Earth Day, at least in Connecticut, for what eventually became a pseudo national holiday.

Awards followed and our staff expanded. A full-time photographer, two more reporters, an editorial cartoonist, a managing editor and a sports editor were added, plus area correspondents. But the major factor for the Times' success was the development of Social Editor, Ellen Beveridge, whose feature stories for decades earned press awards for the single mom of two daughters.

Betty and I loved Connecticut enough to stay for seven years. But Mr. Diamond had second thoughts about converting our weekly into a daily, and we looked elsewhere for our next job/adventure.

That's when Betty and I came to Harrisburg.

I was hired as a copy editor at the Patriot-News, while Betty took on several jobs, including TRW (as manager's assistant -- OK, glorified secretary); Black & Decker; the state Securities & Exchange Commission; a couple of banks; and Post Office as a Christmas holiday temp). She left each of those jobs for basically the same reason:: she was bored after mastering their challenges.

My duties during 27 years at The Patriot-News ranged from being one of several copy deskmen (first the night shift, then day) to assistant to Social Editor Nance Woodward to Page One and Wire Editor, which included page designing. Through the years, I contributed written stories including a handful of news items, but mostly features, critical reviews of books, movies and theater, sports, and political opinion columns.

Despite Betty's hailing from a conservative northern Indiana town and I, growing up in New York City and its liberal politics, our views were compatible. Betty's parents encouraged her to attend a small college, preferably one that leaned a bit left. She chose tiny Antioch College in Ohio, a school that blended classroom theory with the practical that included spending time acquiring a job and working at it for a part of the school year -- and earning credit for it.

I was fortunate, along with my contemporaries, to be working on a seven-day-a-week respected daily newspaper when journalism was considered an important, even a noble profession.

I was fortunate, blessed and lucky. The major reason was my wife, who tolerated me and my faults and even subverted her own ambitions for mine.

My father, Nunzio J. Blando, known to friends and family as "The Chief,” taught me to take pride in my work and to go at it full force. A staunch union man, he instilled in me that in unity there is strength, a belief I held then and still do.

Dad's work and his connections led me to various sports venues -- both inside and outside as a vendor, hustling various food or drink items and novelties or souvenirs; they included the old Yankee Stadium, the Polo Grounds and Ebbetts Field; Madison Square Garden, the St. Nicholas Arena; Ridgewood Grove in Brooklyn, the Hambletonian trotting championship in Goshen, NY; New York's Central Park; Randall's Island Stadium; and smaller sports arenas in and around the Big Apple.

My Mom, who walked picket lines during the early days of the Great Depression and participated in protests of corporate greed and racism, taught me that the little guys needed to help one another and those who had less than we did. Another lesson: If enough little guys stood up to the power brokers, they had more than a reasonable chance of making good things happen.

One of the strongest memories my sister and I carried throughout our lives was when the County Sheriff and his deputies repossessed our furniture from our fifth-floor apartment in a tenement on the Lower East Side of New York because my Dad didn't have seven dollars of the 16 he needed to make the overdue payment. The embarrassment of seeing our stuff taken down the stairs and into the street with all the neighbors watching remained a harsh memory that none of the four of us ever forgot.

Thus, my parents and I held fast to a liberal point of view, which I always considered a blessing, long and strong support for pro-labor, anti-racism organizations, and above all, a deep hatred for conservative viewpoints, especially when espoused by the super-rich.

I had the good fortune to interview many of the celebrities I regarded as heroes: Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Pete Seger (three times), civil rights attorney William Kuntzler, the Berrigan brothers; Studs Terkel, and some who were less known, such as Leon VanDyke, who organized a group of young black men In Albany, called The Brothers who fought the politically corrupt O'Connell machine, and Peter Pryor, a black civil rights lawyer who was instrumental in getting racial reforms through the courts; and a reporter, Ed Swietnicki, who crusaded for a black man beaten for no reason by the police and who underwent a long, painful recovery. Swietnicki's ordeal was equally painful -- not physically, but emotionally and psychologically, resulting in a nervous breakdown. A true survivor, he recovered and resumed his career as a prize-winning reporter.

Included on my list of outstanding people is Mary Paley of Albany, who dedicated her life to establishing a permanent tribute to her Dad, an artist with a camera, Robert Paley, whose main focus was on civil rights and fighting poverty, discrimination and hunger. Her e-museum and documentaries also had the effect of immortalizing some of my yarns in cyberspace.

Among the stories contained in the Paley e-museum are my reporting on the Poor People's Campaign, its 50th anniversary noted on NPR. I traveled there twice with members of the black communities in Albany -- early in its run as participants arrived via all sorts of transport, including covered wagon, and late in the campaign as the noble protest deteriorated in a slum by the weather, vandals and criminals.

But I managed to interview the black leaders after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination just weeks before the rally was to be held, among them Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young, and King's successor as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Ralph Abernathy.

The stories during that period dwelled on the civil rights struggle and the anti-Vietnam War movement, then seemed to merge into a common cause.

That slice of Albany's history has been captured in Ms. Paley's most recent documentary, again featuring the coverage in photos by her Dad, and eye-witness testimony by several activists.

Also interviewed were entertainers and artists and writers and a few non-heroes (Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, among them). The best were the members of the New York Giants of the early 1960s; the New York Jets and their coach, Hall-of-Famer Weeb Ewbank, who took the time to talk about his team with a young reporter from a somewhat obscure newspaper; the members of the first New York Mets team, led by Gil Hodges, who should be enshrined in Cooperstown, being the gentlest big man (and great interviewee) I ever met; musician Maynard Ferguson; actress Sandy Dennis; Life Magazine photographer (later movie director and composer) Gordon Parks; other photographers W. Eugene Smith and Cornell Capa, who founded the Union of Concerned Photographers.

I served Louis Armstrong and his entourage ice cream popsicles; a beer and a hot dog to Jack Dempsey; provided Jose Greco, the Flemenco dancer with a glass of water when there was no soda because the large crowd he drew at Lewisohn Stadium drank it all that hot summer night; heard William Warfied sing "Old Man River"; saw and heard Chet Baker and Stan Getz play at a small jazz club outside Paris; heard Gwen Ifill at a WITF Premier Circle dinner.

Newspapering allowed me to follow in the footsteps of another reporter, who asked: “How else would a mug like me be able to ask important people like presidents and CEOs questions they'd rather not answer?"

Overriding my great and good fortune was a wife who, while letting me do my thing, was unafraid to criticize. I heard about my mistakes -- boy, did I ever! She made me a better husband and person than I might otherwise have been.

My survivors include nephews Steve Culfogienis, his wife, Teri, and their children, Erin and Ryan, of Bowie, Md.; and Jim Culfogienis, his wife, Ket, and son Dylan, of Hamilton, Va.; an aunt, Carole Blando of Buffalo, NY; and a couple dozen cousins. In lieu of flowers, please donate to one or more of your favorite charities.

A final word: If there's anything beyond the world we see here, then I'd like this message to be transmitted: I thank my parents and my beloved partner and wife. All I ever really wanted was to make you proud that I was your son and, Betty, that I was your husband.

Viewing will be from 10am until funeral services at 11am Wednesday, October 28th at Parthemore Funeral Home, New Cumberland. Burial will follow in Tri-County Memorial Gardens, Newberry Twp.

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