John Blake: A Literal Literary Man

By Caroline Monday

John Blake, county librarian for Watauga County Library, is new to the area by Watauga standards, having lived and worked here for about three years. But he is not new to serving communities through his work with public libraries.

John Blake. Photo by Mark Mitchell

Blake was born in Angola and spent his first eight years there. His parents were missionaries with the Methodist Church.

“They went out right after [World War II],” Blake said. “They were Midwesterners. They went to Portugal for a year to study the language and then they went on to Angola. I was born out there and two of my brothers were born out there.”

Blake’s father worked as an administrator, working to help the native people of Angola during a time when they had few rights. Angola was a colony of Portugal at that time and did not allow Angolans to own property. At one point the family lived on a coffee plantation that was owned by the church but supported local Angolans.

Blake said people often have a fixed idea of what it means to be a missionary, imagining missionaries “off proselytizing.” His family’s experience was not like that.

“My mom told me that it was like the Angolans were missionaries to her,” he said. “She learned so much about Christ and what he’s about from the Angolans. And she always felt that they gave her much more than she gave them.”

Blake and his family returned to the United States when he was eight, living in New York and then New Jersey. He graduated from high school and went on to attend Earlham College, a Quaker school in Richmond Indiana.

“I was there during the [Vietnam] war years, so there was a lot of turmoil,” Blake said. “When I was in high school, we were wrapping gifts for the troops overseas and a lot of my friends went directly from high school into the military and to Vietnam. And I lost a lot of friends over there. I was writing to friends who were in the service over there.”

“When I went to college my head was quickly turned around,” Blake continued, adding that the Vietnam War profoundly affected his college experience, making it hard for him to focus. “I’ve always supported the military. I honor the military, so it was a hard place to be, a lot of questioning.”

While his college experience was not unique for college students of that era, Blake’s experiences as a child continued to influence him and his attitudes toward the war.

“For me, finally, I looked at it like this: I grew up with Angolans and there was a time there when I was a dual citizen. I could have been drafted by the Portuguese army to go to Angola and fight the Angolans.

“From having that experience growing up with Angolans, I just looked at [the Vietnam War] and said, ‘You know, with the Angolans it’s the same way.’ How could I fight them? I couldn’t do it. It would be like going out and killing Angolans; I couldn’t do it. So I didn’t want to put myself in that position.”

Blake said he turned in his draft card, which “could have been an invitation to be drafted immediately, or be put in prison. At that time, that was the struggle going on.”

In retrospect, Blake said he feels the draft was not handled well. “The thing that was wrong about the Vietnam War was that they gave all these…if you were in college you were exempt. It shouldn’t have been that way. Everyone should have had their neck on the line, that’s the way it should have been. Then you could make your decisions, if you’re going to go to Canada, if you’re going to go to jail, if you were going to go fight.”

He feels people with money for college could buy their way out of the war, which was unfair.

“I had friends who went to Canada. I had lots of friends at Earlham who went to jail,” Blake said. “It was a terrible time and I feel my first four years of college were really destroyed by it.”

Blake left Earlham one semester before graduating and with a lot of searching to do before finding his life’s work in public librarianship. He found work in Michigan at a filling station and eventually returned to school at the University of Michigan, where he graduated with a degree in elementary education.

“I never knew what I wanted to be really, but teaching is interesting,” he said. “I had three or four semesters of student teaching, so it was really intense, and I enjoyed it.”

Blake came to North Carolina with his then girlfriend when her father promised to find them jobs in Hickory, where he was involved in the arts.

“Her father was a very good opera singer. He had done most of his opera singing in Europe,” Blake said. “He was a character and he was an alcoholic.”

In reality, there were no jobs waiting for them in Hickory, so the couple moved to Chapel Hill, where they thought they might have better luck.

It was in Chapel Hill that Blake became involved in the county’s public library.

“They needed somebody in the branch and they had never had a guy working in the branch before,” he said. “But there was this wonderful woman who was the librarian, and when I went to interview we hit it off; it was just magical, it was wonderful. I wasn’t there too long and she discovered she had cancer. She survived it but she discovered there were more important things to her in her life. So they made me the temporary librarian and I basically stayed there in that job for close to 25 years.”

During that time, Blake returned to school to earn a degree in library science and worked to expand the branch library where he worked.

It was also during that time that he met his wife. “It was a library romance. My wife worked at the main library and I worked at the branch,” he said.

The two dated surreptitiously and were married in 1980 at a church near the library. Blake and his wife moved to Boone and to the Watauga County Public Library about three years ago.

“I’ve said a lot of times, ‘When I grow up, I’ll figure out what it is I want to do,’ but in a way a library job has been a good job for me because I’m pretty much interested in everything,” Blake said. “It’s also been deadly for me because I’m pretty much interested in everything. It’s hard to get a focus because there’s so much you can do.”

The library is constantly changing, working to meet the changing needs of library patrons. Blake said he wants to do more to reach out to the community and find out what its needs are and how the library can meet them. He encourages community members to contact him with thoughts and ideas at jblake@arlibrary.org.

“Books are really special,” Blake said. “To sit down with a good book, you are in communication with another person. It’s a lot of things: it’s magical, it’s rejuvenating. It’s a time when you can get away, basically, and tune into yourself, your feelings, your thoughts and someone else’s.”