Delta Upsilon Fraternity's Top Banana:

Banana George Blair

Adapted from Delta Upsilon Quarterly 7/94

He is the human equivalent of a supernova, not traversing but racing through the stratosphere much like the roman-god Mercury who he claims "is my alter ego."

"I say that Mercury is my alter ego because he was constantly on the go. He had to have wings on his helmet, wings on his ankles-so I figure we're connected because I like to think of myself as fleet afoot. "Every room in his Florida home has some rendering of mercury-one of which is a spectacular 300-year old roman tapestry.

It's an appellation that fits, especially when one considers the globe-trotting nature of an achievement that has him listed in the Guinness Book of World Records. Brother Blair is the only man to have water-skied off of all seven continents. That includes Antarctica, where he cheated the threat of hypothermia and frostbite, by successfully barefooting across Whaler's Bay-water temperature: 28 degrees, four below freezing.

He is founder of several businesses; a pioneer in the sport of barefoot water skiing (though he didn't take it up until age 46); and most recently, a professional actor, starring with Ernest Borgnine and Arte Johnson in a feature length move called Captiva Island.

You don't have to wait to see Blair's likeness on the big screen. He's already been a guest on Late Night with David Letterman; has had three appearances on Live with Regis and Kathy Lee, and starred in a television commercial for Armor All Protectant - from which people still recognize him on streets from coast to coast.

From childhood, he has always loved the color yellow which proliferates his surroundings. The interior of his garage in Florida is painted completely yellow, and houses two cars (a Cadillac and a Lincoln) which are anything but lemons. Flying around the lake adjacent to his home is the canary-colored Banana Boat, a Ski-Pro Extreme Footer, with three specially designed booms from which to cling while "barefooting".

Any public appearance finds him in a saffron blazer of varying shades, inside the pockets of which are usually stored a couple of bananas. " They [bananas] are the perfect fruit. I love them-can't get enough of 'em!" Hard to believe, coming from the man who each year receives nearly two tons of the saddle-shaped harvest from its biggest producer, Chiquita.

Carmen Miranda has nothing on our "Brother Banana", who promotes the company and its product by sending or handling out most of his banana shipment to the thousands of people he meets each year.

George Blair is an extraordinary and fitting symbol for myriad interest and discoveries that have enriched his existence and that of those around him. His is a wonderful life, punctuated by serendipitous discovery and filled with entrepreneurial adventure.

RICHES TO RAGS

'Twas not always so, however.

Blair entered high school in 1929-the same year of the legendary stock market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression. His father was a successful real estate developer and broker. Upon completion of one particularly large development, all prospective buyers disappeared. The Blairs became casualties of Depression economics that claimed so many victims.

"One day during my last year in high school, my father took me out sailing on Lake Erie," recalls Blair "He said, 'I want you to go to college, but I don't have the money any more to send you to the University of Michigan with your older brother.' I said 'That's O.K., Dad. We'll figure something out.'

"So, we scouted around to various state schools and my uncle wound up taking me down to Oxford to see Miami University, I thought it was a beautiful place, so I decided to go there."

Needless to say, when Blair arrived at Miami, his pockets were empty. With barely enough money to afford room and board, Blair became acquainted with the university president.

"I don't know if my contact with Dr. Upham caused it," says Blair, "but not long after I met him, I had a job paying me to shut off the lights in the gymnasium each night."

The work provided enough income to scrape by, but not enough to join his new DU fraternity brother and other friends during winter recess in Florida. Characteristically undaunted, Blair found a way to travel south-not all locomotives required tickets.

"I used to jump trains out of Cincinnati, but it was an awful tough way to go," he remembers. In one instance, some jealous fellow stowaways made a trip particularly unpleasant. "These hoboes wanted the can of beans I had opened. When I refused to hand it over, they threw me out of the car."

It should be pointed out that the train was moving about 30 miles an hour at the time our banana-man was evicted. He landed on his back. The injury he sustained from the incident, contributed to the need for spinal fusion surgery 20 years later. Surgery led to the discovery of water-skiing, which begat "barefooting," which begat 30 years of performances at Cypress Gardens, which begat…ah, but we get ahead of ourselves.

Halfway through his college career, Blair felt he had discovered his raison d'etre: "It became my ambition during college to improve local government systems and practices. I thought I could really serve my fellow man by getting rid of the inefficiencies in government. That interest led me to a visit with the city manager of Hamilton, Ohio."

That interest also led Blair away from college-during the summer between his junior and senior years at Miami University, he returned home to help campaign for the formation of a city manager position in Toledo. When the position was approved, Blair was offered a full-time job. He accepted, and never returned to college.

Swept up by the exuberance of discovery, Blair described his decision to leave school with the same excitement that motivated his actions 60 years ago: "How could I think of going back to college, when right here was what I really wanted to do! I knew I could always get the academic training eventually."

While an assortment of city management related positions sustained him in his early career, he spent the war years as a civilian doing cost analysis for the Army Air Force. When the war ended, restlessness set in and his entrepreneurial spirit awoke.

"I knew I didn't want to work for the government all my life," recalls Blair, "so I started a little business [manufacturing decorative pottery] that didn't do so well. It was my first foray into private business-it didn't fail, but it didn't make enough to live on.

"Then one day, I read a magazine article about the 'TIFA' machine; Todd Insecticidal Fog Apparatus. It was made by the Todd shipbuilding company out of Brooklyn, New York. They made it for the Navy to put on the stern of their ships to generate a fog so thick that they couldn't be seen.

"Some bright Navy guy dropped a little insecticide in one of these fog machines and hell, they got rid of the mosquitoes on board."

Bitten by the bug to start a new business, Blair purchased a TIFA machine and set to work. "We tried to sell fog," he says. "It was a new concept so it was a hard sell, a really hard sell." Perseverance, however, transformed the one-machine operation into a general exterminating company, called Fogging Unlimited, Inc.

It was a successful operation by any measure, but then Blair got his once-in-a-lifetime idea, and acted upon it. If you are a parent, chances are his idea is represented in your home as one of your most treasured possessions.

"I had only been in the fogging business one year, when I got this idea that I should take pictures of babies in hospitals," remembers Blair. "I took a picture of my first child…and showed it to everybody.

"I was not a great photographer, but I had fooled around with photography all my life." In the mid-1940's, cameras were nowhere near the commonplace item that they are now. Blair notices that his pictures of his own newborn children generated lots of admiration among other parents.

"I thought, gee, everybody's interested; I should go into business." Having become very familiar with strobe lights, buying them for the Army during World War II, Blair used an automatic camera and connected it to a 35-pound strobe light.

"Those lights were great big monstrosities-the size of a headlight!" Nevertheless, they provided the necessary flash for indoor photography in a hospital nursery, and the cameras were easy enough to operate so that nurses were quickly trained to be photographers.

It was a classically simple and therefore brilliant win-win arrangement. Blair had a cadre of essentially volunteer photographers in every location, limiting his overhead. Hospitals gained a new found income because they received a percentage of every picture sold to parents.

The Hospital Portrait Service, Inc. was born, and quickly multiplied to serve hundreds of locations throughout the United States, Canada, and five foreign countries. Blair owned and operated the business for 40 years before selling it in 1985.

The record of success doesn't stop there. A lifetime fascination with numbers and statistics (and a number of bankers in the family), made it a natural that Blair also try his hand at banking. To become "Banker Blair," he had to ignore the advice of many who felt that Red Bank, New Jersey was already well served by two existing banks. To be told by friends that he was crazy, "was a good challenge in itself," says Blair.

From that challenge, Shrewsbury State Bank was created just over 20 years ago, and now boasts seven branches; almost $200 million in assets; and the best asset to liability ratio of any bank in New Jersey. Blair is far and away the bank's largest stockholder and serves as vice-chairman for its board of directors and chairman of its audit committee.

Lest you think he was blessed with the Midas Touch, Blair has invested in some ventures that haven't paid off. He has provided backing to unsuccessful shrimp breeders, orchid farms, and country music hopefuls. In his view, however, all of them have been "learning experiences," not failures-and you believe him. He's not hiding behind euphemisms here, you get the feeling that Blair has taken a lesson from each one of his experiences.

If any regret can be detected, however, the pain in his voice is still palpable when re recalls the decision (made nearly a decade ago) to sell Hospital Portrait Service. His family and close associates finally convinced him to deal the business in order to spend more time on other interests, especially barefooting. It is perhaps the only decision in his life that leaves a trace of disappointment or yearning.

"I enjoyed everything about running that business," he says. "It was like raising a baby. I saw it come from nothing to become the most successful business of its kind in the world. That has been my biggest personal accomplishment.

"After 30 years at it, I could be away for months at a time, and the business would run itself, so why should I sell? But they [family and friends] kept hitting on me to let it go."

Adding to the wistful nature of his thoughts on the sale of his business, is the lingering notion that his creation was bartered for a price not commensurate with its worth.

"I know it was worth more than what we sold it for, I just know it." Blair says. "I had just put in a lot of new creative ideas allowing us to sell more [pictures] at less cost.

"I just wish that one time, the people I sold the business to would call and tell me, 'Yeah, you were right, this business was worth more than what we bought it for.'"

All signs of melancholy evaporate, however, when talk turns to the second of his life's passions; water-skiing. He is one of only 32 members in the sport's Hall of Fame, currently located in Winter Haven, Florida. 1995 will mark his 40^th year of involvement with water-skiing, a relationship that started while he was recuperating from back surgery, wearing a steel brace that traversed his entire torso.

"I thought that the sport looked like a lot of fun," remembers Blair, "But I thought my back would never allow me to try it. Then one day, I ran into a water-ski instructor who said to me, 'If you can walk, you can ski.' So I tried it, and it was the biggest thrill of my life. I was instantly hooked."

Learning to water-ski and becoming an expert at it; developing his business, and now trying his hand at acting - in all of his life's endeavors, Blair has been served by what he claims is his key to success. "It's focus, he asserts. "I mean everybody has to decide what they want to do. I don't care if it's a long range plan or a short range plan, or whether the plans change. You gotta have a focus."

"When you get out of bed in the morning you don't want to say 'What am I going to do today?' You want to say, 'Hell, I'm going to do this, and that's why I'm getting out of bed.'

"It's so much more fun to be engaged in something. Just make up your mind that damn it, this is interesting!"

Through his commitment to focus, Blair developed a talent to see opportunities for improvement that are invisible to others. In business, for example, he recalls. "Every day, every hour practically, some little facet of our operation was honed and improved, made more efficient. In a way, I begrudged every minute I was away from the office, because I knew…I could be doing something; making something happen that would make the business better."

He has taken the same focus to the movie set "After my first scene in the film," says Blair, the director came over and said to me, "That's fine, 'I said to him. 'I don't want it to be fine, I want the best I can possibly do; I want perfection'…I've always been that way, I guess."

Against the backdrop of the hardcharging, pragmatic, perfectionist, is a wonderfully human and deeply emotional person whose heart is never far from his sleeve. The mere mention of some particularly poignant events in his life, brings forth spontaneous tears.

It is an endearing trait, and one that he acknowledges: "People see me out there barefooting, and they say 'Jeez there's a tough old guy,' but I mean, I'm really the softest touch you ever saw. It's embarrassing, but what am I going to do?"

He also has a soft spot for his associations with Delta Upsilon. As a young man, he traveled to New York City looking for work. Brother Blair recalls, "I had only been in New York City a couple of days, and I went to the Columbia DU Chapter house on 114^th Street and I lived there throughout my first summer. And here again, I had a support group, rather than an empty hotel room.

"I also used to attend the Delta Upsilon Alumni Club lunches in New York City. I really enjoyed those gatherings. I treated them with almost a church-like reverence, because here were all these great men, and I was just a kid. But they took me in…and there was one guy there by the name of Harvey Bunce who was just terrific to me.

"DU has meant a lot to me, really it has. I still keep in touch with a few of my old brothers."

At 83 years young, Blair is gregarious and lovable, doling out belly-laughs as often as he does bananas. He stands as a modern-day wonder for the boundless energy and joie de vivre that dictate his spirit. He is a living example of the phrase carpe diem, and there is an elegant and authentic harmony when he says, "I've loved everything I've done in life."

A strong component of this harmony, is the charming and spirited Mrs. Blair, JoAnne, George's wife of the past 25 years. They met because JoAnne's first waterskiing experience was miserable, and she decided lessons were in order. There were several ski schools from which to choose, but JoAnne settled on Blair's.

Naturally, she found him listed in the yellow pages.