Jim Mashek

LOUISVILLE NATIVE EMBRACED SPORTS, MUSIC AND MOST OF ALL, LIFE … HE WILL BE MISSED

We couldn’t have been much different.

On the surface, at least.

George Edward Blandford was a guy who could put virtually everyone at ease. He tended to be a quiet type, in least in large group settings. But he was anything but shy.

He just knew how to roll with the punches.

George died on June 4, in his home in Middletown, surrounded by his wife, Beth, and their kids, Spencer and Devon, along with other family members. He was 70 years old, and he’d been seriously ill for several months. I got a chance to visit, briefly, with George on June 2, before leaving for Lexington and the KHSAA state baseball and softball tournaments the following morning.

For that, I am forever grateful.

We met in January, 1975, about five months after Richard Nixon resigned, before hopping in a helicopter as Gerald Ford was sworn in as the 38th president of the United States. We were both pledging Sigma Alpha Epsilon, as freshmen at Western Kentucky University, and we had plenty of the same interests.

Let’s see.

There was girls, sports, parties, sports, girls, and yeah, enough interest in our studies to avoid academic probation.

Barely, in my case, but that’s another story for another day.

George was born and raised in Louisville, the only son of Gerald and Mildred Blandford, coming into this world on September 26, 1955, exactly 11 months and one day before the pulling guard from hell, myself, was born in Dallas.

George had two elder sisters, Emily and Mary Patrice, and Mary Patrice was already married when I met her, that same year, in 1975. Mary Patrice was one of SAE’s “Little Sisters,” whose role was sorta like Mandy Pepperidge and Babs Jansen in the immortal college flick “National Lampoon’s Animal House,” which dominated American theaters in the summer of ’78.

Beautiful, charming, friendly. That was the late Mary Patrice Blandford. She lived with her husband, Larry Deaton, in an upscale apartment complex on the other side of town.

Mary Patrice already had graduated, by the time me and George showed up in 1974.

Mary Patrice and Larry always opened their home to George and his homeboys, and we used to play tennis on the courts outside their apartment.

(At least until someone ratted one of us out for using profanity on the court … Did I mention my voice carries to the county line? Anyway …)

George was pretty easygoing. He had a calm, curious demeanor. Inquisitive. Intelligent. Loved his music. The Rolling Stones, Steely Dan, the Allman Brothers, Carly Simon and Linda Ronstadt, you name it …

So, immediately, we found some things in common.

Now, I never was blessed with a sister. I had three younger brothers — David, Tom and William — more commonly known as “Wid,” because Tom struggled with the pronunciation of “Billy.”

And “Widdy” soon became “Wid.”

Wid was kind of a live wire. George picked up on that, in the summer of 1975, when we moved into Room 4 of the erstwhile SAE house located at 1351 College Street in Bowling Green.

“Y’all are a lot alike,” George said in the cramped room at the top of the stairwell, right next to the pay phone that rang incessantly.

There were FOUR of us in Room 4, a room that housed first-year active members in the fraternity. There were a couple other four-man rooms, in the three-story structure, but the majority of them were occupied by two or three frat cats finding their way through college.

We had bunk beds, naturally, not much different than you’d find in Army barracks. George and David Bass, who grew up in a military family before graduating from North Hardin High School, in Radcliff, took one bunk bed, in the back of the room. Bass was a big dude, kinda like me, and he played high school football before joining the WKU track and field team, as a javelin and discus specialist, as a freshman.

I walked on, with the WKU football team, at the same time. Mike Parker, an outfielder on the WKU baseball team, was on the bunk above me, NEAR THE WALL RIGHT NEXT TO THE PAY PHONE.

Mike, who hailed from Owensboro, was in the top bunk. I answered that constantly ringing phone A LOT.

Basketball was George’s game, not surprisingly. He was a quick shooting guard at DeSales High School, in Louisville, and one of the standouts on our SAE intramural team. He could play a little infield, too, in softball. Like a lot of us, George was finding his way through college, taking the mandated general education courses before he could really pursue his major in business administration.

If a big SEC basketball game was on the tube, on the first floor of the frat house, there was a good chance George was parked on one of the couches. The University of Louisville was his team, not surprisingly, as his childhood home on McCloskey Avenue wasn’t that far from U of L, or Churchill Downs, the fabled home of the Kentucky Derby.

While I tended to live and die — with every down — of a Washington Redskins game, George was content to just watch the games unfold. Usually, pretty quietly. But he could tell you why the Cardinals won, or lost. And we went to A LOT of WKU basketball games at E.A. Diddle Arena.

I didn’t have a car until my junior year at WKU. High school sports — football, wrestling and baseball, through my junior year — kept me pretty busy during the school year. George, meanwhile, was driving a beat-up, 1963 Chevrolet Impala, if memory serves. It got him to Louisville and back.

Two or three times, I joined him, where Mr. and Mrs. Blandford couldn’t have been more welcoming.

In the spring of 1976, the Bicentennial year, me, George and David Bass moved to Room 8, in the back of the house. Comparatively speaking, there was a little privacy, as it was in the back, near the second floor stairwell, and the dormitory like bathroom at the rear of the dwelling.

We even had our own phone. That was kinda cool!

Anyway, after our sophomore year, George went back to Louisville, and I returned home to Potomac, Maryland. We were going to be moving off campus, for our junior year, and we decided we’d room together, with our buddy Mark Tarter, a country boy from Casey County, Kentucky. Mark’s Dad was the postmaster of the county, and his Momma delivered the mail.

Mark was a little older than us, but he was a kind soul. A good dude. And the three of us piled into a second-floor unit at Greenhaven Apartments, which catered to WKU students, and, shall we say, the wide-open lifestyle a lot of us associate with the surrealistic ’70s.

Greenhaven still boasts that “all utilities paid” pitch on the signs in front of the manager’s office. It’s not far from where I live in Bowling Green, today, in the Springhill subdivision.

In hindsight, that move might have been a mistake.

As George liked to tell his wife and kids, he more or less majored in having a good time at Western. A lot of us were finding ourselves, in one way or another, and after a turbulent semester — academically speaking — for all three of us, me, Mark and George went our separate ways.

George got in his Chevy Impala and returned to Louisville, where he finished up his studies at U of L.

It wasn’t too long, before graduation time, that George and I reconnected. But he stayed in Louisville, and dabbled in all sorts of industrial sales pursuits, along with real estate, and all the while traveling throughout the Mid-South in his 20s and into his 30s. Before long, I’d already relocated to Texas, and then Louisiana, and gotten married — and divorced — before 1985. George, not surprisingly, was taking his time.

Until he met Beth.

The love of his life.

Beth and George liked to quibble about how they actually met, whether George sprayed a tee shot into the fairway Beth happened to be playing at a Louisville golf course. George and Beth shared a passion for sports, for live music, and travel, and in time, they were wed.

Before long, their family grew from two to four. Devon, their daughter, came first, and she had a passion for horses and equestrian. So, naturally, George did, too. And then along came Spencer — who’d grow to be 6-foot-5 Spencer — a high school tennis standout who went on to compete at the University of Southern Indiana in Evansville.

George and Beth found themselves on the road for Evansville all the time, then, too.

(I told Spence about the time I got George in a little trouble for the dust-up on the tennis courts at Larry and Mary Patrice’s apartment tennis courts, back in the day …)

When I was working on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, from 1994 until 2012, George would find some of my stories and columns on the Lexington Herald-Leader web site, which was in the same chain(s) as my employer at the time. We started emailing each other, on a regular basis.

Then, in 2016, I moved from Texas to Kentucky. First, Owensboro, and then Bowling Green, three years later.

George and I had more chances to actually hang out together, oftentimes at a Louisville sports bar. He joined me at the University of Louisville’s Jim Patterson Stadium, home of the Cardinals’ baseball team, for a non-conference game against Western Kentucky about 14 months ago. George and Beth insisted that I stay at their place, rather than a hotel room, and I couldn’t help but to take ’em up on that offer.

And, in 2024, George drove down from Louisville, picking me up on our way to an SAE/FNOC reunion in Clarksdale, Mississippi, home of the Shack Up Inn, killer barbecue and Cajun cuisine, the Mississippi Blues Museum and so many other music-related attractions. About 30 of us stayed at the Shack Up Inn, on the outskirts of town, and if you ever get the chance to do the same, GO FOR IT.

That weekend, George got to catch up again, with our roommate at the SAE house, David Bass, as well as with pals Bernie Steen, Jerry Pea — the organizer of the reunion — along with Rich Poling, Bob Moore, Rick Hunter and so many more. Some of the guys’ wives came along for the party, too.

(Mark Tarter, our roommate at Greenhaven Apartments in 1976, passed away in 2016.)

George got to make some new friends, too, and several of our fraternity brothers sent emails or text messages about how happy they were to hang out with George again.

Unfortunately, I had to share George’s story with these same guys, through group chats and telephone calls, over the last couple months. And several of them reached out after I made the trip to Louisville earlier this month, to see my dear friend one last time.

I’m still coming to grips with it all, and Beth and I have texted one another a few times since George passed over the last couple weeks.

George Blandford was a good man.

I’m missing him more, every day.

Godspeed, mi compadre.