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Last updated on August 9th, 2017 at 06:44 am
A note arrived the other day from Santa Cruz artist Kathy Cheer:
This is a long shot.
Did you once live in East Lansing MI and was your father Lyle Blair, Director of the Mich State Univ Press?
Mr. Blair was my first formidable boss.
Since the Blair family has a tradition of being in media/communications, I just wondered if you were of the same blood line.
Answer: nope. Males in my Blair clan—aside from being in Australia— tend to die young, and therefore don’t have time to become directors of northern US academic publishing outfits. Curious about this Lyle fellow, however, I Googled the guy … and discovered he was fisking the New York Times before I was even born (he also edited a collection of works by Australia’s Henry Lawson). More from Kathy:
Lyle Blair, as I said, was my first boss and he scared the bejesus out of me, but I learned a lot about literature and writing and the perils of alcohol.
Mr. Blair had quite a number of children spread out all over the globe. Someone in his family filmed some early documentaries of the Antarctic. Mr. Blair had many contacts with the literary world in India. He tried desperately to broaden the scope of Mich State Univ’s Press publications, beyond theses on corn blight and dissecting an obscure poem by Lord Byron.
Here’s to Lyle … a Good Blair!
