IN MEMORIAM
Carol A. Blazina
Retired SUNY Oneonta Vice President, Community Leader
Editor’s Note: This is a profile of Carol Blazina, prepared when she received the Otsego County Chamber of Commerce’s Eugene A. Bettiiol Jr. Citizen of the Year Award in March of this year.
By JIM KEVLIN • allotsego.com
ONEONTA
When his youngest daughter was just 3-months-old, Enrico Blazina, a longshoreman in New York City, was struck in the head while on the job. Work rules then in place forced him back to work before was ready. “Within a day, he passed,” that daughter, Carol, said simply.
Her mother, Mary, now 96, was left with three daughters, the baby, plus Barbara, 4, and Janet, 2. “My work ethic is from my mom: She made it possible for us to stay together,” said her youngest.
That work ethic has been changing Otsego County for the better for a half century now, as the transplant from the city’s “Hell’s Kitchen” became the lightning rod for Title IX at SUNY Oneonta, learned the ways of Albany to obtained funding for Alumni Field House and its Dewar Arena and, retired from a college vice presidency, took Mayor Dick Miller’s vision for Foothills Performing Art Center and, as board president, made tough choices to achieve financial stability.
By age 4, little Carol already was working, sweeping the floors of a trucking firm next to her family’s tenement. Each week, she would receive a brown envelope containing her wages: 2 pennies. “I would bring it to my mother with great pride.”
Her mom went beyond providing just the essentials. By age 4, Carol had already found her life’s passion: Dance. Her mother would give her a quarter a week, and she was off to learn tap dancing with the Children’s Cultural Group at the neighborhood’s Yugoslav American Home. Barbara played the mandolin and Janet the violin in the orchestra.
By Carol’s teen years, her mother had moved the family to Merrick, L.I. At Calhoun High (Gwen Schuster, the retired SUNY human ecology professor, was a few years ahead of her), she was inspired to attend dance teacher Mrs. Marcus’ alma mater, Ithaca College, which brought her Upstate, (working summers and during the school year to pay her way.)
On graduating in the go-go 1960s, there were plenty of jobs available across the country in phys-ed, where dance was then slotted. But Carol was married at the time, and her husband had two years left in his studies, so a SUNY Oneonta vacancy was attractive. (Then-president Royal Netzer offered her the job – athletic director of the women’s program – on the spot.)
She’d planned to stay two years. Next year, it will be 50. “What kept me was the community,” she said in an interview over a cup of tea and half a danish. “I called it Camelot – nobody locked their doors!”
Then and now, a professor’s workload is in the three-course range. But phys-ed faculty was considered “non-academic,” and Carol found herself teaching 10 courses, and she was assigned to teach women’s fitness one night a week at the Y.
Still, with dance at the center of the women’s curriculum, Blazina was in her element, living her passion and bringing such international headliners as the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater to the auditorium at Old Main. “What makes it (dance) so great is: It is perishable. That’s why it’s so great. It’s like life. It’s the moment. And then it’s gone.”
An enduring innovation was creating a student dance troupe, Footlights, which lives on today as SUNY’s thriving Terpsichorean Dance Company, (from terpsikhore, Greek for dancer.) She published “Ballroom Dance: A Step In The Right Direction,” in 1990, and her interest continues.
Today, it’s hard understand the resistance to Title IX, the federal act requiring equal opportunities for women in academic sports, but Blazina, who led its implementation at SUNY Oneonta, still feels the bruises. “I wanted equity, and women didn’t have anything,” she said, adding, “Yes, the guys hated me.”
Today, though, she prefers to focus on the successes, as the program developed basketball, field hockey, swimming and softball to include cross-country and soccer. “It was an uphill battle on women’s lacrosse.”
Setting the stage: It’s little remembered, but women’s volleyball was the first SUNY Oneonta team to receive a national bid, playing in the 1972 tournament in Florida against Santa Barbara under the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, then the governing body. “The NCAA didn’t even know them,” Carol recalled. For four years, the Oneonta women were ranked 16th in the nation.
In the early 1980s, while she pushed for expanded opportunity, Blazina also served as the college’s first soccer coach, (learning as she went along.) And she was SUNYAC Coach of the Year twice for tennis. In tennis and volleyball, “I coached them as dancers,” Carol confides. “The offense and defense was choreographed. It’s just logical.”
The “sweetest victory” benefited all sports, men’s and women’s. In 1987-88, she worked with SUNYAC Commissioner Bill Damore to get a bill through the state Legislature that would add an athletic fee to the student bill, ensuring athletic programs didn’t have to “nickel, dime and beg” every year. A campus referendum was required; she led the drive, and “it passed by a great majority.”
There’s much more: Carol Blazina’s vitae – jobs held, civic activities, awards – runs five single-space, and it only includes activities up to 2011, when she retired at vice president for community relations. In 2013, she was approached by Betty Bettiol and Jean Scorzafava to be an original member of “Ten Fold,” an Oneonta women’s non-profit formed to help women and families, fight hunger and promote education.
She’s been president of Oneonta’s Newman Foundation since 2008, as it shifted from operating an actual center on Elm Street to raising scholarships for Hartwick and SUNY Oneonta students.
Lately, she’s been serving as an officer Destination Marketing Corp. for Otsego County, the “heads-in-bed” tourism promotion agency. As Foothills board president – she is back on the board after a hiatus – she moved step by step toward the building’s completion, particularly in upgrading the main theater’s acoustics.
It must have been her experience with the state Legislature on the athletic-fee drive that prompted Alan Donovan, who became SUNY Oneonta president in 1988, to bring her into his office in 1990 to take on the “slow and arduous task” of obtaining funding for the Alumni Field House. “People realized how important it was for the community and the college,” she said.
Learning the Albany ropes during the first Cuomo and then Pataki administration – she withholds particulars, but rolls her eyes – she then snagged Tony Bennett for the inaugural performance in the Dewar Arena in 1995. “Oh my gawd,” she remembers, “it was SRO.” Bennett “was such a sweetheart.” He silenced his band “and sang a cappella. He said the acoustics were phenomenal – and he proved it to everybody.”
A half-decade before, she’d told Donovan, “I don’t know anything about politics.”
He replied, “You’ll figure it out.”
Of course, she did, with the help of a coincidental ally. During a meeting with Rudy Runko, Gov. Mario Cuomo’s budget director, she mentioned her “Hell’s Kitchen” roots and her longshoreman father. “My father was a longshoreman,” the surprised Runko interjected.
As they talked, it turned out Runko’s father and uncle lived in “Hell’s Kitchen” too, and were active in the longshoreman’s union. After her father died, they intervened to make sure the union pension – $8 a week – went to struggling Mary Blazina and her daughters.
“Needless to say,” Carol mused, “if Cuomo had stayed in office we would have had the field house a lot sooner.”