Not having Joe Blair around will take getting used to

Even though I knew better, I thought Joe Blair was going to live forever.

Last Thursday, he proved me wrong.

It's going to take some getting used to.

Like many of you who knew and loved this icon of Portales, I'm flooded with memories and hard put to know where to begin.

Let's start here: Nobody ever revered our flag more and handled it with greater love and respect than Joe Blair.

As part of the American Legion honor guard (a group he helped found), Blair was a regular for decades at funerals for locals who had served in the United States armed forces.

Decked out in crisp white shirts with gold shoulder braids, hands in immaculate white gloves, Blair and his team reverently performed the touching ritual of transforming an American flag into a precisely folded triangle to be presented to a surviving loved one followed by the haunting strains of "Taps" on a bugle.

Blair's daughter, Judy Hall, said her dad helped with that poignant ceremony more than 280 times.

Other members of that honor guard will do the same for Blair at his funeral at 10:30 a.m. today at Wheeler Mortuary in Portales.

"All Daddy asked for was a Masonic funeral and his own flag," Hall said.

I've known Joe Blair my whole life, since he was the proprietor of B & B TV in the old Sands shopping center, back when relatives of mine owned and ran the Sands Restaurant in the same strip.

He was a regular at the Sands, and a favorite. He loved to come indulge his sweet tooth on pies baked each day by my cousin Adele Lovorn.

An avid hunter and lifelong prankster, he got a kick out of shocking my Aunt Blanche by carving round steaks into circles with "nostrils" and pretending it was slices of elephant trunk.

Blair was passionate about history, especially the history of our community, and had an encyclopedic memory of the people, dates, events, and details.

He was a gifted storyteller with a keen wit. After I started writing this column, when I'd see him, he usually would preface anything he told me with, "Now don't go writing about this in your newspaper."

Then he'd chuckle delightedly to himself - which was half the fun - before he launched into wonderful salty tales.

Blair lost a good portion of his hearing when he dropped out of high school the day after his 17th birthday to enlist and become a machine gunner in World War II.

He was matter of fact in telling stories of his service, as if surviving 26 battle engagements was just what any good American would do.

If he had a regret, it might have been this: He would have loved to have been a pilot in the war.

"Flying was my number one passion," Blair told me in November, the last time I interviewed him.

"I've flown 15 types of aircraft and enjoyed every one of them," he said. "I didn't get to fly in the war because I didn't have a high school education. You had to have a high school and college education to be a pilot."

As I left that last interview, I walked past Blair's little red truck - a 1995 Dodge Dakota that was almost as recognizable in Portales as he was.

There were two bumper stickers in the back window. The lower one said, "All men are created equal. Then a few become destroyer sailors."

But it was the top one that I'll remember.

It was Joe Blair in four words: "I'd rather be flying."

Happy trails, old friend. You have earned your wings.

Betty Williamson hopes Joe Blair will forgive her for writing about him in "her newspaper." Reach her at:

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