PSU Magazine Fall 1992

l. I / The demo recycling bin Blake is unlocking is used in apartment complexes. shared the same problem. The youth came to understand that the young were not so different from the old. Other youth projects followed. In 1985 and 1986, Blake and hi students looked at Portland's homeless street youth. Jobs were developed for the teenagers to groom trails in Forest Park. Street youth started their own news– paper, Street Times. By mid-1989, the emphasis shifted to recycling. Still focusing on youth employment goals, Blake and his stu– dents enrolled 16 urban teenagers in a program that introduced them to careers in environmental sciences and services, as well as solid waste manage– ment. A model recycling station was set up at Columbia Villa in North Portland. Teenagers handed out leaflets and talked with residents about the advantages of recycling. The students took field trips to landfills and solid waste recycling businesses, and to newsprint, glass, and aluminum industries. By fall 1989, the Portland State recy– cling project had grown community– wide. Now called the Recycling Education Project, the emphasis has shifted from job training for teenagers to a full-scale community education project with funding from the cities of Portland and Beaverton and the Metropolitan Service District (METRO). 6PSU The project was still in the start-up phase when Blake was suddenly taken out of the picture. Early one September morning, he found he wa unable to talk during a telephone conversation in his Portland State office. Graduate stu– dent Barry Messer was in the room at the time. "I took the phone from him, and gradually he regained a few words," Messer remembers. Within days, physicians found a tumor that required immediate surgery. Messer says the surgical team that day declared the tumor inoperable and terminal. "They concluded that Jerry had six months to live, and they told him so when he came out of surgery." Blake's answer, Messer says, was typi– cal. "Like hell!" Blake responded to the terminal diagnosis. The same force of will that had kept Blake fighting for kids for so many years would now be turned toward a fight for hi own life. Blake located a clinic in San Francisco that had suc– cessfully treated cases like his, using radioactive implants and chemo– therapy. He took a sabbatical from the University for a long-term course of therapy. Eventually the tumor's progress was halted, and Blake returned to Portland State in the fall of 1990. Messer says that watching Blake's determination to overcome his illness was an incredible learning experience. "I originally wanted to work with him because of his energy level," Messer says. "His anything-can-be– done attitude. I never expected that attitude to extend to such a life-and– death situation. "I have learned a lot from Jerry professionally," Messer says. "But I am even more in pired by his personal attitude in dealing with the odds, and refusing to believe what the doctors told him." Seventy PSU students are currently working on projects supervised by Blake, ranging from an expanded multi– fami ly recycling program to the ever– present youth employment projects and studies for the City of Portland and the Metropolitan Service District on garbage management and recycling. Graham Burgh, an urban studies graduate student and this year's Recy– cling Education Project coordinator, says that he doubts he has ever worked with someone who so consistently operates from such an "extremely strong ethical, political, and moral basi "as Jerry Blake. "When it comes to acting on what he believes is right, for kids and for the community, he's almost fanatical," Burgh says. Blake is involved in speech therapy now: slowly the patterns and the words return. But his outlook on life has changed considerably since that fall day three years ago. "The doctors in San Francisco tell me it's just some weird Oregon theory when I say there was a direct relation– ship between the stress in my life-I was a crazy man, constantly over– doing-and the development of the tumor. "But I believe it is so. Sometimes your body tells you to slow down, and if you don't heed the advice, it forces the issue. So, I've learned the importance of managing four things in life: focus, pace, nutrition and stress. "And about how other people come through for you," he says. "That's the greatest lesson of all." D (Eva Hunter , a Portland freelance writer, is a regular contributor to PSU Magazine.)