♂Robert Wesley Blanchard

Robert Wesley Blanchard (23 August 1926 – 10 November 1980) was an American educator who was superintendent of schools at Montclair, New Jersey, and then for eleven years of the Portland Public Schools in Oregon; he was dismissed by a 4-3 vote of the Portland School Board in June 1980, sued the board, and died of a heart attack five months later, with the suit still unsettled. He was the first cousin of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), the only child of her father’s eldest brother, William Wesley Blanchard (1895–1973).

Early life

Robert Wesley Blanchard was born on 23 August 1926 at Newburgh, Orange County, New York, the son of William Wesley Blanchard, an insurance salesman, and Rilda Jane Reissman. In 1930, aged 3, he was living with his parents on River Road at Highland Falls, in the same county, in a household that also held his mother’s parents, Frederick and Marie Reissmann. By 1940 the family had moved to 823 Woodland in Oradell, Bergen County, New Jersey, where the census records him aged 13 and in the eighth grade, the only child in the house.

The Army and education

He was drafted into the United States Army at Newark, New Jersey, on 3 January 1945, aged 18, giving his residence as Bergen County and his schooling as four years of high school; he enlisted for the duration of the war plus six months, and was discharged on 5 September 1946. His obituary in The Montclair Times records that he graduated from Bowdoin College in Maine, took a master’s degree at the University of Maine and a doctorate at Harvard, and that before he settled into education he had worked as a radio and television announcer, a program director and adviser to a Korean broadcasting chain, the manager of a classical radio station, a taxicab driver, a lumber grader, and a night clerk and auditor at a hotel. The newspaper gives no dates for these jobs.

Marriage and career

On 30 June 1962, at White Plains, Westchester County, New York, he married Kathryn Mary Alar (1931–2009), who taught business in the White Plains schools; her obituary records that the two met there. The couple had three children.

From 1965 to 1969 he was superintendent of schools at Montclair, Essex County, New Jersey. He left in 1969 to become superintendent of the Portland Public Schools, giving his first address there on 20 August 1969, and the family settled in Portland. An article in the Oregon Historical Quarterly credits him with the district’s desegregation plan, “Portland Schools for the Seventies”; that rests on the article’s summary and has not been checked against the district’s own papers.

On 16 June 1980, after months of controversy over the district’s desegregation policies, the school board fired him by a vote of four to three. He had served one year of a four-year contract. He sued the board for $283,728, alleging breach of contract, denial of due process and violation of the Oregon open-meetings law, and in October 1980 a Multnomah County Circuit Court judge ruled that the board had broken that law by meeting in closed session before the firing; the remaining claims were expected to come to trial in February 1981. At his death The Oregonian described him as the longest-serving big-city superintendent in the country.

Death

On Monday, 10 November 1980, he collapsed from a heart attack at the Multnomah Athletic Club in Portland after jogging and lifting weights, and he was pronounced dead at Good Samaritan Hospital at 9:40 a.m., aged 54. The chairman of the school board that had dismissed him said that, in spite of their differences, he had held “a high regard for his integrity and his standards”. The family’s notice called him Dr. Robert Wesley Blanchard, of SW 33rd Street, Portland. A memorial service was held on 15 November 1980 at Jackson High School in Portland, and friends were asked to give to a Blanchard Memorial scholarship fund at the Portland Public Schools in place of flowers. He was cremated and his ashes placed privately at Finley-Sunset Hills Memorial Park; his memorial there bears the words “Vision Courage Principle”. His wife died in 2009.

Notes

He is not to be confused with his younger cousin Robert Watson Blanchard (1934–2006), Nancy Jane Blanchard’s brother.