Jeremy Blanchet

1922 - 2013

Jeremy Blanchet

Jeremy Blanchet died at the age of 91 at the Gateway Living Center in Springfield, Oregon on April 30, 2013 of age related causes.

He was a scholar and a devout Catholic who spent his childhood within the TB sanitarium of Saranac Lake, NY where his father was a doctor and his mother deeply involved in patients' rehabilitation. As an undergraduate he graduated summa cum laude from Dartmouth College. After completing college, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy as an aviator flying the PB4Y-2- Privateer. He returned to academia after leaving the navy in 1945 and received high honors for his Master's work at Princeton University and a Rhodes Scholarship at New College, Oxford University. He received his PhD, studying under Vice Chancellor Lord Allan Bullock.

Returning to the United States, he worked for the State Department on issues of disarmament, serving on the U.S. delegation for the Geneva Convention of 1960 and fact-finding missions to France and Libya. He later joined what was then known as HEW, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. While there, he was instrumental in drafting much of the Johnson era legislation that promoted the growth of community colleges and working for desegregation in southern US colleges during the civil rights era.

He left government service in 1969 during the student unrest of the Vietnam war to be the assistant to John Toll, the President of Stony Brook University of New York. After retiring from Stony Brook, he did independent historical consulting and looked into the effects of the US atomic bomb tests on observers.

In 1999, he moved to Eugene, Oregon to join his daughter Meg and her family. He was a member of the St. Mary's congregation and was an oblate at both the Mount Angel Abbey and St. Anselm's Abbey in Washington, D.C.

Jeremy loved art, music, and poetry, both as an observer and a creator.

He is survived by his children Garrett, Sylvia, Nick, Meg and Sarah Blanchet; and by eight grandchildren: Lucia, Jonas, Sean, Conor, Morgan, Elle Marley and Michelle.

We grieve his passing, celebrate his life and are very thankful for the time we have had with him.