Ed Blaine

Blaine, Ed

Ed Blaine, pro football player turned cardiovascular researcher, died at 86 on March 22.

Edward Homer Blaine, an All-American and professional football player who left the game at the peak of his football career to become a successful research scientist, died in St. Louis on March 22 after a short illness. He was 86.

Blaine's story mixes science and sport, adventurous thinking, a lot of singing, and always

originality.

As a scientist, Blaine worked in industry and academia studying kidney function and its connection to cardiovascular disease. He held six patents for his work and was a key player in understanding the hormonal systems that regulate blood pressure using salt and water, work that matured for him while at Merck, Sharp, and Dohme in the 1980s. He later managed a partnership between Washington University in St. Louis and G.D. Searle Co. in the late 1980s before he found his way back to the University of Missouri in the early 1990s as the director of the Dalton Cardiovascular Research Center. He ended his career where it took off - in the laboratories and classrooms at the University of Missouri where he taught in the medical school in the years before his retirement.

The launch into academics was powered in many ways by his football success. He was a scholarship athlete from his hometown of Farmington, Missouri, when he arrived at the Mizzou campus in 1958. He played both ways as an offensive guard and a linebacker on defense and starred in the team's undefeated 1960 season under Coach Dan Devine. They beat a heavily favored Navy team and its Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback in front of John F. Kennedy in the Orange Bowl to conclude that season. He was honored as an All-American the following year.

Blaine was undersized as an offensive lineman, but he thrived in the running game that Devine had developed. He was sure-footed and mobile, and his skills caught the attention of Green Bay Packers Head Coach Vince Lombardi who ran a similar kind of offense as Missouri. Blaine was drafted in the second round and played in the 1962 championship season for the Packers. Before he left for professional football, however, Blaine had made a deal with his scientific mentor and major professor, Clint Conaway, that he would only play for five years and then return full-time to his research in zoology. He kept that promise and returned to Columbia during each off season to work on his doctorate.

Blaine was traded to the Philadelphia Eagles before the 1963 season where he played out his career as a starter at left guard. He was chosen as an all pro in 1964 and occasionally made lists of all-time great Eagles players, despite cutting his career short and leaving at his football peak. When he returned to the Philadelphia area more than a decade later to work as a researcher for Merck, he was sometimes recognized on the street. Although he appreciated the attention, his focus was on science, where he also went on to have an impact in drug development and cardiovascular function.

His scientific journey began at Missouri in the zoology department and a part of his passion always remained there, bringing him back every year for an annual gathering of herpetologists in the Ozark woods. His early research on dominance in mice translated into work on salt intake in mammals, particularly the development of salt appetite and its physiological effects. That work took him to the Howard Florey Institute in Melbourne, Australia, for several years. He lived with his family for some of that time at a sheep station in the bush in what is now Kosciusko National Park, doing research on the salt appetite of kangaroos, a population that had no known natural sources of salt in that area. It turns out that the kangaroos liked it, too, like most other mammals. The research showed a connection between how unnaturally salted human foods may contribute to unhealthy outcomes. One of the funders, Heinz baby foods, used the findings to evaluate how much salt they were adding to their baby foods and challenge the idea that maybe they were salting to the mothers' tastes and not the babies' actual salt needs.

The work in Australia led to a faculty appointment at the University of Pittsburgh in the Department of Physiology. From there, he went to industry, becoming a researcher for Merck at its West Point facility outside of Philadelphia. He also served as an adjunct faculty member at Temple University during that time.

Nearly a decade later, he moved to an industry-academia partnership between Washington University in St. Louis and G.D. Searle Company. He returned to football briefly during this time as a volunteer assistant coach for the Washington University team and he reconnected with University of Missouri development office for a number of fundraising efforts.

In the early 90s, he moved back to Columbia to lead the Dalton Cardiovascular Research Center at Mizzou, living for more than two decades in a house just steps from the Katy Trail, where he loved to ride his bike down to the Missouri River.

Growing up in Farmington, Mo., outdoor adventures were always a big part of Blaine's life. He achieved the rank of Eagle Scout from the Boy Scouts of America and was later recognized with a lifetime achievement award from the Scouts. He started paddling canoes on Missouri float streams with the Scouts and regularly paddled rivers wherever he lived, doing so up until late in life.

In the summers during college he worked in Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado where he learned mountaineering and rock climbing at high altitude. His mountaineering friends taught him to ski, and he did that with his family every year until he needed a knee replacement in his late 50s. He ran most days for 30 years, and loved to go out in the woods and "knock around."

Blaine was born in Farmington in January 1940, the youngest of four kids of Tessa Ella (McClanahan) and Warren Blaine. His brother Ted Blaine was only two years older and the two of them had many outdoor adventures. It was Ted who encouraged Ed to play football in high school. Blaine lettered in football, basketball and track where he, improbably for a future NFL offensive lineman, was also a pole vaulter.

At Missouri, he was a pre-medicine student on the football team and joined a fraternity where he became close friends with fellow Mizzou lineman and future Bell Labs physicist Bill Brinkman. The team coalesced under Devine and was regularly a power in the Big 8 Conference. It remains one of the most dominant teams in Missouri football history.

Blaine met Susan Cring at the University of Missouri and they married in 1963 shortly after both had graduated. They scrambled up Longs Peak for their honeymoon days before embarking on a cross-country road trip to begin fall training and their life together as a football family. Their daughter Jennifer was born in 1965 while they were in Philadelphia with the Eagles. Their son Mark was born in 1969 on the day Blaine defended his oral dissertation for his Ph.D. in Columbia.

Blaine was inducted into the University of Missouri Hall of Fame in 1991 and the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame in 2011.

Later, Blaine shared his life with Marilyn Starwalt of Effingham, Ill. The two lived together for more than two decades in Columbia and St. Louis. Marilyn preceded him in death in 2025. She was survived by Kelly Bingman, Steve Starwalt and grandchildren Cole, Renae, Will, and Delaney.

In his last two years, Blaine lived in Cork House at Dolan House Memory Care in St. Louis, where he was surrounded by friendly faces and got to sing along with a guitar player - another of his passions - nearly every day.

Blaine is survived by his brother, Theodore Blaine (Virginia); daughter, Jennifer Hahn (Steve); son, Mark Blaine (Jessica); former wife Susan Hayes; and three grandchildren: Sam Hahn, Ben Hahn and Miranda Blaine. He was preceded in death by his brother Robert Blaine and sister Laverne Burris.

Please check edblaine.com for more information about our father's life and career and plans for a celebration of life in June.

In lieu of flowers, please contribute to the Mizzou Athletics Fund (MAF) at the University of Missouri. Donate online at giving.missouri.edu or Send checks to: MAF, University of Missouri, 407 Reynolds Alumni Center, Columbia, MO 65211.

As a service of the SCHRADER Funeral Home and Crematory, friends may sign the family's on-line guestbook at Schrader.com.