The Brigham Young University Emeriti Alumni Association presents awards to members of the association who have made a significant contribution in an area such as their family, church, community, or profession. Nominees should be members of the class of 1967 or before or be retired BYU employees. Limit information to this document (no additional pages will be accepted). Type or print legibly. Please return the nomination sheet before Monday, October 9, 2006.
Nominee’s Name: Robert Wallace Blair
Telephone: (801) 426-4775
E-mail: robertwblair@yahoo.com
Address:
City/State/Zip Code
Ward and Stake Edgemont 9th – Edgemont Stake
Age: 76
Occupation: Retired BYU professor; founder & president, Enhanced Learning Concepts
Education: BA, 1955; MA, 1957 (both BYU); PhD, 1964 (Indiana University, Bloomington)
Dates attended BYU: 1948-1954
Graduated from BYU: 1955 (BA); 1957 (MA)
Name of Spouse: Julia Groberg
Children: Margaret B. Young, Dell W. Blair, Robert G. Blair, Jenette B.
Lambert, Lisa B. Sabey, James G. Blair, Benjamin W. Blair,
Carolyn B. Madsen (31 grandchildren, 2 great grandchildren)
Please supply the following information about the nominee:
Service to the Family: A devoted father, Robert Blair has encouraged his children to learn languages and have experiences with many cultures world-wide. His children grew up with temporary residents in the Blair home from all over the world–from Guatemala to China. Robert has taken family members to Guatemala, Russia, and China, and for a time both he and his son Dell served as missionaries in Ecuador. (Robert was helping the missionaries learn Quichua.) Family vacations were sometimes used as language-learning opportunities, most notably when the family bought a run-down bus and drove it to Montreal, Canada, where all the Blairs learned Esperanto. As a result of this focus on languages and cultures, most of his children speak at least one second language, and two of his sons work with the family language-learning company that Robert helped found. All four of his sons and two of his daughters have served full-time missions, and all eight are active Latter-day Saints and world travelers.
Service to the Church: Robert served a mission to Finland from 1950-53. He later served as the first mission president of the Baltic States Mission (1993-96). He has also served as a branch president and member of several High Councils and has had special assignments from the Church’s Missionary and Translation Departments, including coordinating several MTC language training programs and starting pre-MTC training programs for senior missionaries in Spanish and French. On Church assignment, Robert trained missionaries to speak Indian dialects in Guatemala and later took a busload of returned missionaries there to write dictionaries of the dialects they had learned. Several of those missionaries have stated that their lives were changed under Robert’s influence and example. Two now serve in Church translation, and one has been a mission president in Guatemala. Robert Blair’s influence is silently present in many of the Book of Mormon translations. Even now, he continues to work in the missionary endeavor, serving as a volunteer at the MTC for missionaries preparing to serve in Mandarin, Spanish, Russian, and Finnish.
Service to the Community: Robert did volunteer work with the Utah-China project in Beijing from 2002-3 and has served as the Chairman of the Board for the Foundation for Indian Development in Guatemala. He has provided service and support to the Rose Foundation (set up by one of the missionaries he worked with in developing dialect dictionaries). The Peace Corps used him to develop language material for several languages and countries and to train volunteers from 1966-76. He has also provided publications for military language training. Over the past five years, he has served in China with his wife as a teacher and a good-will ambassador. Closer to home, he has served as a volunteer at the Utah State Hospital.
Professional Activities: In addition to PhD work at Indiana University, Robert spent a postdoctoral year as research associate in Maya at the University of Chicago. He joined the BYU faculty in 1959, where he was the founding chairman of the Linguistics Department. With his wife Julia, he was one of the first to travel to China as a teacher (Shandong University, 1980-81) as a pioneer of what eventually became the Kennedy Center China Program, which he helped to found. The two also taught in Russia (Moscow State University, 1992) and again in China (several programs in Nankai and Beijing, 1999-2005). His book Innovative Approaches to Language Teaching has found international praise and use. He has also worked independently and with linguistics students to author many language courses and dictionaries in obscure but precious dialects, including Yucatec Mayan, Cakchiquel, and Mam.
University Activities: As a member of BYU’s faculty, serving for forty years in the Linguistics Department he had helped to establish, Robert served on many committees and mentored most of those currently employed as senior faculty members of the department. He developed new classes, such as language learning acquisition, where he taught aspiring linguists effective methods of teaching a language. Each student came out of that class with some capacity to carry on little conversations in five languages. He also taught regular and experimental courses in linguistics and various languages. Again, his real effect is inestimable, since so many of his students have reported that his classes changed their career directions and opened their lives up to new possibilities.
Honors Received:
1989: James L. Barker Lecturer in BYU’s College of Humanities
1992-94: NDEA Title VI Award
1998: Faculty speaker at the College of Humanities convocation
1998: Devotional speaker at BYU
2001-2005: Power-Glide Language Company, which Robert helped to found and for which he serves as consultant, has received numerous awards, including the Practical Home Schooling Reader's Choice Award for five consecutive years; Teacher's Choice Awards from Learning Magazine in 2004 and 2005; and selection three times as one of Utah’s 100 fastest growing companies.
Supporting or Additional Information:
Information Submitted by:
Name: Bruce Wilson Young (in association with Julia G. Blair & Margaret B. Young)
Telephone: (801) 375-9428 or (801) 422-2977
E-mail: Bruce_Young@byu.edu
Return this sheet before Monday, October 9, 2006 to:
BYU Emeriti Alumni Awards, c/o Robyn Pinegar
332 KMB, Provo, UT 84602
www.emeriti.byu.edu
To download a copy of the application, go to one of the following:
pdf or word doc
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There's a chance what I'm doing is not proper blog behavior, but I'm going to post somebody's ELSES blog (plus comments) from another site. You'll see what I'm doing momentarily.
Sitting in the Temple with Dad
by Margaret Young
I remember sitting on my dad’s lap after I burned my bottom on our ancient heating pipes at Hoosier Courts, Bloomington, Indiana. I was four years old, so it was 1959. I remember talking to him as a teenager about issues I was just approaching, which now consume much of my life. I remember watching in awe as he spoke Cakchiquel to a group of Indians in Guatemala who had never heard a Gringo speak their language. I have seen Dad in Russia, China, Guatemala, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, telling the story of the Prodigal Son or of David and Goliath—in the languages of the people he was addressing. The hardest thing has been watching him get old, identifying the first signs of shaking which is now constant; realizing one day that his hair had gone completely white; seeing him lose energy. I don’t know how much longer I’ll have my dad, but his mortality is more and more apparent. So is his greatness.
Dad received an award from BYU on Saturday, and all of our family got together for it, traveling from New York, Colorado, and New Mexico. There we were—the eight Blair kids, all grown up and with families of our own, paying tribute to our dad, along with Mom and many others he has influenced. Dad, now on dialysis, had to be on oxygen as he greeted the crowds of people who were honoring him. My daughter met me with tearful eyes and said, “He’s on oxygen. I didn’t know he was so sick.”
I found myself fighting tears all day, though they weren’t tears of sorrow but of gratitude. I tried to express what I felt at one point, but my emotions were too high and I mostly blubbered. Here’s what I wanted to say:
A few weeks ago, I went to the temple with Mom and Dad and had a rare moment of seeing Dad with new eyes—as though I were not his daughter, but his mother. He was in his robes, and I was aware that our time together on earth was drawing to a close. In an instant, I had a sense of the whole of his life—the way he had used language to tell people of diverse cultures that God loves them; the quiet lessons he taught me about the value of all kindreds, tongues and peoples; his simple devotion to my mother and to the gospel; his willingness to do whatever God asked, even if it meant leaving his personal projects to preside over a mission. I saw a great and humble man, in the image of Christ. The words in my mind were, “I am so proud of you”—words a mother might say to her son.
Dad, I am so proud of you. Here you are in the temple, while your body is starting to fail you. You have been here many times throughout your life, and these rituals are familiar to you. You have loved God by loving His children. You have used the gifts God gave you to serve and glorify the giver, not to pad your own resume. Somehow, you managed to get through a whole career in academia without succumbing to arrogance. Your whole life has been about communication and understanding, and here in the temple, you stand less steadily than you once did (yet far steadier in other ways), and you know about communication with God, and about the love which energizes all understanding. Every one of your children is in some way involved with the mission you accepted when you devoted yourself to the world’s children and their languages. We even have an idea of how important that mission is.
I can’t ever sing “Be Still My Soul/ The Lord is On Thy Side” without remembering your tearful account of some missionaries (not LDS–but you have valued all faiths and taught us to respect them) who sang that song on the eve of their execution in the jungles of Ecuador. They knew they would die in the morning, and sang themselves this hymn of comfort and courage.
I hope for many more years with you, but that song is in my heart, as I know it is in yours. Its poetry expresses the faith which you have made your life’s center:
Be still, my soul: the Lord is on thy side.
Bear patiently the cross of grief or pain.
Leave to thy God to order and provide;
In every change, He faithful will remain.
Be still, my soul: thy best, thy heavenly Friend
Through thorny ways leads to a joyful end.
Be still, my soul: thy God doth undertake
To guide the future, as He has the past.
Thy hope, thy confidence let nothing shake;
All now mysterious shall be bright at last.
Be still, my soul: the waves and winds still know
His voice Who ruled them while He dwelt below.
Be still, my soul: when dearest friends depart,
And all is darkened in the vale of tears,
Then shalt thou better know His love, His heart,
Who comes to soothe thy sorrow and thy fears.
Be still, my soul: thy Jesus can repay
From His own fullness all He takes away.
Be still, my soul: the hour is hastening on
When we shall be forever with the Lord.
When disappointment, grief and fear are gone,
Sorrow forgot, love’s purest joys restored.
Be still, my soul: when change and tears are past
All safe and blessèd we shall meet at last.
Be still, my soul: begin the song of praise
On earth, believing, to Thy Lord on high;
Acknowledge Him in all thy words and ways,
So shall He view thee with a well pleased eye.
Be still, my soul: the Sun of life divine
Through passing clouds shall but more brightly shine.
Permanent Link : Comments (14)
14 Comments »
Thank you for such a beautifully expressed thoughts regarding your Dad. I’ve often wondered if our relatives
who have passed watch us as we age. I like to think they mark our progress through life and toward joining
them again.
Comment by Remembrancer — 2/27/2007 @ 9:04 pm
A lovely tribute from a daughter to her father. We’re lucky daughters to feel about our fathers as you and I do. Thanks for this gift.
Comment by Ardis Parshall — 2/27/2007 @ 10:32 pm
Margaret - thanks for your beautiful thoughts. It appears you and I are about the same age and, I assume our fathers are the same age as well. My father is 87. I have similar fond memories of the times with my own father but for different reasons than yours. My father is a simple man who pays his bills on time and gives feely of his time and wisdom to all who seek it. Thank heaven for good fathers.
Comment by Lamonte — 2/28/2007 @ 8:56 am
Lamonte–we are likely the same age, but I am the oldest child in my family, so my father is a decade younger than yours. His father died at age 51. His sister died at age 41. His mother died in her mid-seventies. So he has lived longer than any other member of his family. Amen to your words about fathers.
Comment by Margaret Young — 2/28/2007 @ 12:41 pm
“…here in the temple, you stand less steadily than you once did (yet far steadier in other ways)…”
What a profound line. Thank you for writing it, Margaret–and thanks also for this tribute to a loving, good, and great man.
Comment by Russell Arben Fox — 2/28/2007 @ 12:52 pm
Wonderfully inspiring.
Comment by Kim Siever — 2/28/2007 @ 1:36 pm
Margaret - I am the youngest in my family. My father was 34 when I was born - which seemed ancient back then. My father father and all his father’s siblings lived into their 90’s so he has a few years left.
Comment by Lamonte — 2/28/2007 @ 1:56 pm
I seldom write, but look forward to your wonderful posts. Anyone who has had even close to what you have experienced with your father is indeed fortunate and blessed. My father, a wonderful dad in so many ways. has been gone for 20 years. He was 85 and his examples are still as vivid to me as when we were together. In so many ways, I can’t wait until our reunion.
Comment by Lawrence — 2/28/2007 @ 2:47 pm
Margaret this post is beautiful. It brought tears to my eyes and makes me look forward to the eternities to se my Dad again. Thank you.
Comment by Lizzilu — 3/1/2007 @ 12:31 am
Thank you so much for this moving and heartfelt tribute; and for reminding me of the beautiful words of this hymn.
Comment by RoAnn — 3/1/2007 @ 9:17 am
Thanks, Margaret. This is especially dear to me because my mother passed last summer. She also used her abilities to serve others rather than to seek her own.
Comment by manaen — 3/1/2007 @ 5:00 pm
This was beautiful, (and on a tangent, it really made me miss Bloomington.)
Comment by Matt W. — 3/1/2007 @ 5:28 pm
Your father is one of the greatest men I have known. I took his language pedagogy course back in the 70\’s, and have had contact with him on and off over the years. It is rare to find such a combination of brilliance and humility. Thank you for reminding me of one who exemplifies what human beings are capable of when led by the spirit of God.
Comment by Alan L. — 3/2/2007 @ 1:49 am
Thank you, Alan L. I have heard similar sentiments from many, many people. Dad changed lives quietly.
Comment by Margaret Young — 3/2/2007 @ 3:52 pm
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