(7 of 9)
Persistence & Ambition. At Princeton, Blake went out for football, Christianity and philosophy—more or less in that order. Of the three, football was the most frustrating. In his sophomore year, five men who played his position—guard—were given letters; Blake ranked sixth. In his junior year, two guards got letters; Blake was third. "The experience of just barely missing my letter for those two years was almost a trauma," Blake admits. But senior year made up for it—he got a large P for his sweater and was picked for several all-Eastern teams. "I suppose I can say that persistence is one of my qualities—it was certainly true with football," says Blake. "And I probably have more ambition than most people."
Organization Man. Blake's religious life at Princeton also had its traumatic side. Before Blake arrived in 1924, Frank Buchman—patriarch, prophet and founder (in 1938) of Moral Re-Armament—had swooped down on Princeton with what was later to be known as the Oxford Group, M.R.A.'s predecessor. Blake found the college seething with eager young men taking their friends to weekend "house-parties" to change their lives by "God-guidance" salted with public confession of teen-age sins.
His brother Howard, studying for the ministry in Princeton Seminary, was an ardent Buchmanite, and until recently worked fulltime for Moral Re-Armament. Gene mingled with the Buchmanites until one day a wire came from Buchman announcing that he had had "guidance" that Blake should bring John D. Rockefeller III to New York to have a chat with Queen Marie of Rumania. Blake wired back that this might be Frank Buchman's guidance but it was not his. "From then on," he says, "I decided to be an organization man—that is, to work through the regular machinery of the church."
Lahore to Pasadena. At first he thought he might want to be a missionary, but a year of teaching at missionary-run Forman College in Lahore. India (now Pakistan), killed his enthusiasm for a missionary career. Returning home in 1929, Blake married Valina Gillespie and spent the first year of his seminary training studying theology at New College, Edinburgh, then went back to Princeton Seminary until his ordination in 1932.
Minister Blake's first post was as assistant pastor of Manhattan's now demolished Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas, where, even the sexton told him he "ought to shout more." He decided that he was "a better popularizer than a scholar," and should give up a hankering he had for seminary teaching. He got a call to Albany's First Presbyterian Church, went on five years later to the Presbyterian Church in Pasadena, Calif., where he stayed for eleven years before the General Assembly elected him Stated Clerk in 1951.
He now lives in New Canaan, Conn., where he delights in playing golf, which he hopes keeps down his weight—a hefty 220 well carried on a 6-ft. frame. Says one of his golfing partners, the Rev. Donald Campbell of the First Presbyterian Church in Stamford, Conn.: "Gene's game is dynamic and daring. He shoots anywhere from 84 to 94. I think my game's just as good as his, but he's such a fierce competitor that he beats me three games out of every four.