Chris Blake and her children asked me to be one of the speakers at Joe's memorial service. It was both a great honor and a very hard task to stand before the huge crowd that turned out to remember Joe and to try to describe him without falling apart. I still miss him.
Dayton Duncan
Here are my remarks:
I feel blessed and very lucky to stand here and tell you that Joe Blake was a part of my life almost from the moment it began more than 65 years ago. I was born 20 days before he was in Indianola hospital—yes, we had one back then—and from the time I became old enough to make memories, he was a big part of them. We went to grade school together, junior high together, and high school together, and during that time became best friends, a friendship that lasted for 65-plus years.
My mother always thought of Joe as a second son—and as the years went by, Chris became a second daughter-in-law, and their children, especially before I had any of my own, were her surrogate grandchildren.
When we weren’t yet even teenagers, I remember every spring, Joe and I would prepare for the Little League season by sitting down in my family’s kitchen with a sheet of paper to map out who we thought would end up on the All-Star team that year—he was an automatic of course, and while my status wasn’t so sure, he would insist that I would end up there as well and put my name down. We would always fantasize how this year, this year we would finally win the state championship and make it to the World Series in Williamsport.
When the All Star time came—and yes, I’m proud to say I got selected, too—all of us on the team knew that if Joe was pitching, we would win and advance: that’s the kind of confidence we had in him and his leadership, and that’s the way it always happened, in Little League and then in Babe Ruth. But the rules would not permit him to pitch every game, and so every year we would end up losing when someone else was on the mound, just shy of making it into the state tournament. Somehow, it was always the two of us who took the loss the hardest. Our dream was that real to us.
As we got older, the gulf between our athletic abilities became more apparent. He was the best athlete of our generation. Hard as it may be to believe now, at the time I was pathetically thin—very thin, but also incredibly slow. Many years later, he always liked to remind me that the highlight of every track practice in junior high was when the coach would match me against the other slowest runner, an obese shot putter, and have us run the 100-yard dash while the rest of the team watched. It was, he always said, a great chance for everyone else to get some much-needed rest. Sometimes, he claimed, he got in a long nap.
I would tell him that he was the reason my ambitions eventually shifted away from sports. He broke my thumb at age 15, when I was trying to catch his fastball in Babe Ruth. Horsing around one day in my family’s basement, he stepped on my foot and broke my big toe. He wasn’t through with me. On the last football practice of our senior year, on a bitterly cold November day, catching a pass from him, my little finger shattered, which cost me half of the basketball season. I suppose, like a good coach, he was just trying to tell me I should try something else; maybe become a writer.
Anyway, though we were something of an odd couple, we stayed the closest of friends. What he saw in me, I don’t know, but two things about Joe, even as a boy, stood out to me from the beginning. First of all, was his incredible drive to be the best at whatever he did, a fierceness, almost. Many of you probably also saw that—that furrowed brow, those blazing eyes, that clenched square jaw, that intense concentration he could bring to any situation. It’s part of why so many of us looked up to him as our natural leader.
He possessed a remarkable ability to live in the moment, to listen intently to what someone was saying and make them feel—because it was true—that he was focused on what he was hearing, and it was important. The flip side of that was this: you never wanted to go to a movie with Joe, especially if it was a thriller like one based on a Stephen King story. He’d be sitting there, intent on what was happening on the screen, and then blurt things out, like, “Oh, oh, this isn’t going to turn out well,” or maybe, “No, no, don’t open that door!” He just couldn’t help himself.
His other, equally important trait, was his sense of humor. He had a deep voice—even deeper when he would raise it to tell you a story he thought was important (and he was a great storyteller). But he had the highest laugh, almost a giggle that I can still hear in my mind. He got that sense of humor, I believe, from his mother Dixie, a strong-willed woman who also possessed a sharp, ironic sense that could find something funny in almost anything. Joe had that, as well as her sense of mischief.
One time, when I was at his house and his parents were gone, I went into the tiny bathroom off their kitchen to . . . well, to do what you’d do in a bathroom . . . standing with my back to the door. Joe rushed in and shook me all around, making me spray both of the walls. He thought it was hilarious. I was mortified and did my best to wipe down the walls before I left. The next day he called me. “Dixie asked me what happened in the bathroom last night,” he said solemnly. “What did you tell her,” I asked. He answered, “I told her you had peed on the walls,” and then he hung up.
I never had the courage to talk to Dixie about it—and I hope the twinkle in her eye whenever she saw me meant that Joe had told her the whole story—but believe me when I tell you this, for the next 50 years whenever we talked, he’d also say, “You know Mom still can’t understand why you did that to her bathroom.” It became the standing joke of our friendship.
When I think of our friendship here as teenagers, I always think of the movie The Last Picture Show, with Joe as the character played by Jeff Bridges. Okay, we were in the 1960s, not the 1950s, and Indianola, small as it was then, was still much larger than the north Texas town of the movie. And we lived in color, not black-and-white. But we were two boys always looking for some adventure, always talking about getting out of this small town that fate had placed us in. That was our goal: to do something bigger and more important.
I guess another difference is that the two guys in the movie were better with girls than we were. We were both totally incompetent on that score. Somehow, as confident, perhaps even cocky, as we were, we almost never got up the confidence to call a girl up and ask her for a date. Some times, after a Friday night home game, we might make conversation with girls from the other town out at the Maid Rite, and I think Joe must have given one of them his address, because I remember a number of Saturday nights when we were convinced they’d be driving by his house any minute. We’d watch The Lawrence Welk Show with Dixie and Lew, but always have our eye out the window in case a car from Winterset drove slowly by. It never did. Instead, we would get in my car and drive to the square and join the ceaseless parade of other cars, all driven by teenagers, circling it again and again—I guess in the vain hope that one of those cars would have two girls in it, local or out of town, who would roll down their windows and start . . . what? . . . a conversation that would lead to a torrid affair with two obviously clueless guys?
I mention this—it became another standing joke over the years—because Joe and I would later decide that it “saved” us for the women we would eventually marry—beautiful, strong-willed, independent women like our mothers—who became the loves of our lives and mothers to our beautiful children.
After high school, I went away to college and, thanks to Joe ruining any chances I had in sports, did become a writer and pursued other dreams. He went to Simpson and kept pursuing his: to be a big-league baseball player. He was right on the verge of the major leagues, when that dream was cut short by an injury to his pitching arm. I remember talking to him after it happened, just as I remember thinking to myself how such a devastating turn of fate could easily destroy a person. But as I said earlier, passion and determination were part of his soul, part of his DNA, part of his character.
As others here will attest better than I can, since I had moved so far away, he turned that passion and determination—and his remarkable sense of humor—toward his children, and then to countless other young people as well. He did important things. He remained, as he was when we were young, a leader, and his commitment to his community, which he passed on to his kids, can be seen in the building where we’re gathered, and more importantly on the many lives he touched.
Despite the distances that separated us, he continued to touch my life. Many of you may not know how good a singer Joe was—as a teenager, he could do Eddy Arnold’s “Make the World Go Away” better than Eddy Arnold—and over the years his interest in music had an unintended influence on me. He sent me a Waylon Jennings album in the 1970s, which brought me back to a music I had abandoned, and later sent me the works of other country artists he thought I should be aware of. I don’t know if I’d be doing what I’m doing now—working on a documentary series about the history of country music—if Joe hadn’t led me back to that well and made me drink once more from it.
When my mother died, it was Joe who spent an evening making my daughter and son momentarily forget their sorrow by regaling them with hilarious stories about the misadventures of our youth. They thought I was cool, simply because he was my friend.
But it’s the phone conversations we had several times a year that I’ll treasure as much as the times we spent together here as boys. We’d talk about our children—sharing our worries and our joys as fathers, offering each other advice, his probably better than mine. We’d talk about baseball; we’d talk about music. We’d laugh. He would sometimes say, “I think those girls from Winterset finally drove by last Saturday night.” Or he’d say, “You know, Dixie still thinks you ruined her bathroom.” Any conversation we had brightened my day, and the afterglow stayed with me for weeks.
Before coming back here to Indianola yesterday, my wife, Dianne, told me that Joe was the friend of mine that she always liked the best, and that she and our kids always thought that, of all the friends I might have had, I was really lucky it was Joe Blake. I feel lucky about that too.
Well written eulogy Dayton! It described Joe and his big heart so well! Thanks for sharing with the rest of us. It was a sad day when we lost Joe! Hope to see you at the class reunion and do some catching up!!! Denny
Dayton Duncan
Chris Blake and her children asked me to be one of the speakers at Joe's memorial service. It was both a great honor and a very hard task to stand before the huge crowd that turned out to remember Joe and to try to describe him without falling apart. I still miss him.
Dayton Duncan
Here are my remarks:
I feel blessed and very lucky to stand here and tell you that Joe Blake was a part of my life almost from the moment it began more than 65 years ago. I was born 20 days before he was in Indianola hospital—yes, we had one back then—and from the time I became old enough to make memories, he was a big part of them. We went to grade school together, junior high together, and high school together, and during that time became best friends, a friendship that lasted for 65-plus years.
My mother always thought of Joe as a second son—and as the years went by, Chris became a second daughter-in-law, and their children, especially before I had any of my own, were her surrogate grandchildren.
When we weren’t yet even teenagers, I remember every spring, Joe and I would prepare for the Little League season by sitting down in my family’s kitchen with a sheet of paper to map out who we thought would end up on the All-Star team that year—he was an automatic of course, and while my status wasn’t so sure, he would insist that I would end up there as well and put my name down. We would always fantasize how this year, this year we would finally win the state championship and make it to the World Series in Williamsport.
When the All Star time came—and yes, I’m proud to say I got selected, too—all of us on the team knew that if Joe was pitching, we would win and advance: that’s the kind of confidence we had in him and his leadership, and that’s the way it always happened, in Little League and then in Babe Ruth. But the rules would not permit him to pitch every game, and so every year we would end up losing when someone else was on the mound, just shy of making it into the state tournament. Somehow, it was always the two of us who took the loss the hardest. Our dream was that real to us.
As we got older, the gulf between our athletic abilities became more apparent. He was the best athlete of our generation. Hard as it may be to believe now, at the time I was pathetically thin—very thin, but also incredibly slow. Many years later, he always liked to remind me that the highlight of every track practice in junior high was when the coach would match me against the other slowest runner, an obese shot putter, and have us run the 100-yard dash while the rest of the team watched. It was, he always said, a great chance for everyone else to get some much-needed rest. Sometimes, he claimed, he got in a long nap.
I would tell him that he was the reason my ambitions eventually shifted away from sports. He broke my thumb at age 15, when I was trying to catch his fastball in Babe Ruth. Horsing around one day in my family’s basement, he stepped on my foot and broke my big toe. He wasn’t through with me. On the last football practice of our senior year, on a bitterly cold November day, catching a pass from him, my little finger shattered, which cost me half of the basketball season. I suppose, like a good coach, he was just trying to tell me I should try something else; maybe become a writer.
Anyway, though we were something of an odd couple, we stayed the closest of friends. What he saw in me, I don’t know, but two things about Joe, even as a boy, stood out to me from the beginning. First of all, was his incredible drive to be the best at whatever he did, a fierceness, almost. Many of you probably also saw that—that furrowed brow, those blazing eyes, that clenched square jaw, that intense concentration he could bring to any situation. It’s part of why so many of us looked up to him as our natural leader.
He possessed a remarkable ability to live in the moment, to listen intently to what someone was saying and make them feel—because it was true—that he was focused on what he was hearing, and it was important. The flip side of that was this: you never wanted to go to a movie with Joe, especially if it was a thriller like one based on a Stephen King story. He’d be sitting there, intent on what was happening on the screen, and then blurt things out, like, “Oh, oh, this isn’t going to turn out well,” or maybe, “No, no, don’t open that door!” He just couldn’t help himself.
His other, equally important trait, was his sense of humor. He had a deep voice—even deeper when he would raise it to tell you a story he thought was important (and he was a great storyteller). But he had the highest laugh, almost a giggle that I can still hear in my mind. He got that sense of humor, I believe, from his mother Dixie, a strong-willed woman who also possessed a sharp, ironic sense that could find something funny in almost anything. Joe had that, as well as her sense of mischief.
One time, when I was at his house and his parents were gone, I went into the tiny bathroom off their kitchen to . . . well, to do what you’d do in a bathroom . . . standing with my back to the door. Joe rushed in and shook me all around, making me spray both of the walls. He thought it was hilarious. I was mortified and did my best to wipe down the walls before I left. The next day he called me. “Dixie asked me what happened in the bathroom last night,” he said solemnly. “What did you tell her,” I asked. He answered, “I told her you had peed on the walls,” and then he hung up.
I never had the courage to talk to Dixie about it—and I hope the twinkle in her eye whenever she saw me meant that Joe had told her the whole story—but believe me when I tell you this, for the next 50 years whenever we talked, he’d also say, “You know Mom still can’t understand why you did that to her bathroom.” It became the standing joke of our friendship.
When I think of our friendship here as teenagers, I always think of the movie The Last Picture Show, with Joe as the character played by Jeff Bridges. Okay, we were in the 1960s, not the 1950s, and Indianola, small as it was then, was still much larger than the north Texas town of the movie. And we lived in color, not black-and-white. But we were two boys always looking for some adventure, always talking about getting out of this small town that fate had placed us in. That was our goal: to do something bigger and more important.
I guess another difference is that the two guys in the movie were better with girls than we were. We were both totally incompetent on that score. Somehow, as confident, perhaps even cocky, as we were, we almost never got up the confidence to call a girl up and ask her for a date. Some times, after a Friday night home game, we might make conversation with girls from the other town out at the Maid Rite, and I think Joe must have given one of them his address, because I remember a number of Saturday nights when we were convinced they’d be driving by his house any minute. We’d watch The Lawrence Welk Show with Dixie and Lew, but always have our eye out the window in case a car from Winterset drove slowly by. It never did. Instead, we would get in my car and drive to the square and join the ceaseless parade of other cars, all driven by teenagers, circling it again and again—I guess in the vain hope that one of those cars would have two girls in it, local or out of town, who would roll down their windows and start . . . what? . . . a conversation that would lead to a torrid affair with two obviously clueless guys?
I mention this—it became another standing joke over the years—because Joe and I would later decide that it “saved” us for the women we would eventually marry—beautiful, strong-willed, independent women like our mothers—who became the loves of our lives and mothers to our beautiful children.
After high school, I went away to college and, thanks to Joe ruining any chances I had in sports, did become a writer and pursued other dreams. He went to Simpson and kept pursuing his: to be a big-league baseball player. He was right on the verge of the major leagues, when that dream was cut short by an injury to his pitching arm. I remember talking to him after it happened, just as I remember thinking to myself how such a devastating turn of fate could easily destroy a person. But as I said earlier, passion and determination were part of his soul, part of his DNA, part of his character.
As others here will attest better than I can, since I had moved so far away, he turned that passion and determination—and his remarkable sense of humor—toward his children, and then to countless other young people as well. He did important things. He remained, as he was when we were young, a leader, and his commitment to his community, which he passed on to his kids, can be seen in the building where we’re gathered, and more importantly on the many lives he touched.
Despite the distances that separated us, he continued to touch my life. Many of you may not know how good a singer Joe was—as a teenager, he could do Eddy Arnold’s “Make the World Go Away” better than Eddy Arnold—and over the years his interest in music had an unintended influence on me. He sent me a Waylon Jennings album in the 1970s, which brought me back to a music I had abandoned, and later sent me the works of other country artists he thought I should be aware of. I don’t know if I’d be doing what I’m doing now—working on a documentary series about the history of country music—if Joe hadn’t led me back to that well and made me drink once more from it.
When my mother died, it was Joe who spent an evening making my daughter and son momentarily forget their sorrow by regaling them with hilarious stories about the misadventures of our youth. They thought I was cool, simply because he was my friend.
But it’s the phone conversations we had several times a year that I’ll treasure as much as the times we spent together here as boys. We’d talk about our children—sharing our worries and our joys as fathers, offering each other advice, his probably better than mine. We’d talk about baseball; we’d talk about music. We’d laugh. He would sometimes say, “I think those girls from Winterset finally drove by last Saturday night.” Or he’d say, “You know, Dixie still thinks you ruined her bathroom.” Any conversation we had brightened my day, and the afterglow stayed with me for weeks.
Before coming back here to Indianola yesterday, my wife, Dianne, told me that Joe was the friend of mine that she always liked the best, and that she and our kids always thought that, of all the friends I might have had, I was really lucky it was Joe Blake. I feel lucky about that too.
Jo Croat ((Beck))
Mary & Dayton,
Thanks for posting this notice as I didn't know that Joe had passed away.
I didn't know Joe and Chris very well since I was only in Indianola a couple of years,
but recall how genuinely nice they were to an outsider like myself. What a
great life our classmate had!
Joanne (Croat) Beck, St. Louis, MO
Dennis Woodruff
Well written eulogy Dayton! It described Joe and his big heart so well! Thanks for sharing with the rest of us. It was a sad day when we lost Joe! Hope to see you at the class reunion and do some catching up!!! Denny