Charles I. Blood

Transcribed article: Seventy-Eight Happy Years at The Star for Charles I. Blood, Who is 92 Today. By Winifred Shields. (A Member of the Star's Staff.) Our Charles I. Blood is 92 years old today. He has worked for The Star for an incredible 78 years, and still does. He started work for The Star in 1884, when his newspaper was only four years old. He had a paper route in what was then the town of Wyandotte when Col. William Rockhill Nelson, editor and owner, could stull be seen on the loading dock handing out bundles of newspapers to carriers. Carried a Pistol. After he was graduated from Wyandotte high school in 1888, he got a job as a reporter. He was assigned to cover Argentine and Armourdale. He went about his beat carrying a .38-caliber revolver in his pocket and it wore out his only pair of pants. Why did he carry it? "I thought it was fun," he said, "and besides I had it." He was city editor for the morning edition of The Star from 1905 until 1939. And since then he has written the Forty Years Ago column. Yesterday, as usual, Mr. Blood strode into the city room at 9 o'clock in the morning on still nimble legs, looking magnificent in a navy blue suit, white-hair triumphant on a leonine head. He sat down at his desk, loaded his pipe, exchanged a few pleasantries with his neighbors, and began browing through a bound volume of The Star of the year 1922, in preparating for writing his column. He copies the items in long-hand (he has no use for type-writers) while seated with his chair tipped back on two legs in an alarming manner. Use the Stairs. When he leaves the office early in the afternoon to go home - he has been a widower since 1957 and has a housekeeper - he exits by way of the back stairs and negotiates all 27 of them with unbelievable agility. A man of extraordinary physical strength for his age, Mr. Blood confessed to an associate a few weeks back that, for a touch of arthritic pain, he had taken his first aspirin. "It seemed to work pretty well," he reported," but then, why shouldn't it? I was virgin territory." He suffered fractures of the right arm and wrist in 1956 and was hospitalized, but not for long. in 1959 he hopped a plane to New York to appear on the "I've Got a Secret" television program. He stumped the panel with his secret, which was that he had worked for The Star 75 years. Last year Mr. Blood took his first jet plane ride, out to San Francisco on vacation. He arrived back home in the middle of the night in a snowstorm. The taxi let him out in front of his house and he plodded on how own through the snow drift up to the door. In the Snow. He was embarrassed, he said, because he dropped a coin in the snow and the driver had to dive for it. In recent years going to parties he never could attend as a night-working city editor, Mr. Blood has confronted, finally, people he know for decades only on the telephone. At the Hotel Muehlebach the late Barney Allis greeted Mr. Blood enthusiastically. "I've always wanted to meet you, Charlie," he said, "let me buy you a drink!" "You're 47 years too late," Charlie Blood replied with his usual wide grin, "I gave up drinking 47 years ago." His physical strength is impressive, but it is his remarkable intellect that impresses Mr. Blood's associates more. His knowledge of past events is encyclopedic. In no more time that it takes to ask a question, his fantastic memory signals back the answer. Even more, he is admired for the upright, independent way he has proceeded through the world. Kansas City Star, November 25, 1962.