♂Kenneth Blanchard

Kenneth Blanchard (25 July 1897 – 20 March 1975) was a physician, a pediatrician who practiced for decades in New Jersey. He was the father of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006).

Early life

Kenneth Blanchard was born in Haverhill, Massachusetts, the son of Dr. George Wesley Blanchard (1868–1939) and Anna Walker Merryman (1869–1942); his father, also a physician, and his mother were living in New York at the time of his birth, according to the birth register. The family was in Manhattan by 1900 and at Highland Falls, in Orange County, New York, by 1910. He entered Massachusetts Agricultural College at Amherst in 1916, with the class of 1920, though a later college yearbook lists him with the class of 1921 as sophomore class captain - a slip in the record that may reflect time given to war service. He enlisted in the United States Army on 22 August 1918 and was released that December, serving in the closing months of the First World War. He went on to earn his medical degree at Harvard Medical School in 1924, and in 1925 he was an intern at Babies Hospital in New York City.

Marriage and career

On 1 November 1926 he married Mary Esther Schneck (1900–1968) at the Methodist Episcopal Church in Mount Carmel, Illinois. They settled in New Jersey, where he practiced medicine over the following decades in South Orange, Newark and East Orange. He was a Presbyterian. In June 1928 The New York Times quoted him, as a “child specialist of Newark,” on the case of two toddlers in that city who smoked cigars; he called the habit at that age very injurious. A 1938 issue of the Journal of the Medical Society of New Jersey names him chairman of the society’s Section on Pediatrics.

Shortly after midnight on 23 March 1950, in heavy rain, he was pinned between two cars on Route S-3 in Clifton, New Jersey, while changing a flat tire; both his legs were broken, and he was treated at Mountainside Hospital in Montclair. He was elected to the Sons of the American Revolution, New Jersey Society, as a descendant of the Revolutionary soldier Joseph Knapp Jr., with supplemental lineages allowed through Joseph Knapp Sr., John Clough Sr. and Uriah Howard. He and Mary Esther had three children, including Nancy Jane and a son, Robert (1934–2006); in June 1956, when Robert married at Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, the wedding notice gave his parents’ home as Cheyenne, Wyoming. Mary Esther died on 25 January 1968.

Later years and death

By the late 1950s Kenneth Blanchard had left New Jersey for the West. After joining the Great Falls Clinic in Montana in 1953, he spent some five years as chief of physical medicine and rehabilitation at the Veterans Administration hospital in Cheyenne, Wyoming. In March 1959 he and Mary Esther bought a lot in the Grand Estates subdivision at Estes Park, Colorado, and built a house there that year; the 1960 telephone directory lists him simply on Grand Estates Drive, and the family remembered that the house had no street number and that the mail went to a post office box. As a retirement project he owned a self-service laundromat in the town, in the Lake Estes Shopping Center, and a granddaughter later recalled going with him to empty the coin boxes on the machines, then helping to count the coins at home and hunting through them for buffalo nickels. The Grand Estates house was at first a summer home; he sold it in August 1968, after Mary Esther’s death, and later settled in Florida.

In February 1969, just over a year after Mary Esther’s death, he married Jean Young (1898–1977), formerly Mrs. William Jordon Exum, in Broward County, Florida; their marriage license was published in the Fort Lauderdale newspaper on 26 January 1969, a year and a day after she died, and his brother, Admiral Theodore Blanchard (1902–1979), is credited in a contemporary newspaper account with introducing the couple. He died on 20 March 1975 at Boca Raton Community Hospital, Florida. He was cremated, and his ashes were interred at Rose Hill Cemetery in Mount Carmel, Illinois, the town where he had married Mary Esther more than four decades before.

Notes

His obituary in his family’s Illinois hometown newspaper, printed within days of his death, named no surviving wife. Florida records - a marriage license, a wedding announcement, a 1974 garden-club notice, two Florida obituaries, and Jean’s own death and obituary records - establish that Jean Young Blanchard did survive him; the hometown paper’s omission appears to reflect what the family told a distant editor rather than an error in any official record.

The family remembers the laundromat as the Village Laundry; the Estes Park Trail called it the Estes Park Laundracenter in 1960 and the Self-Service Laundry in 1961 and 1962, when he was also a partner in a neighboring dry-cleaning plant.