Published: September 22, 2007 12:04 am         

Fifty years after high school, Block earns prestigious Plummer award

Special to The Leader



His 68th birthday was just a week away when Gerald Block took home the prize as the smartest boy in his class.

Almost 50 years after he first enrolled at Lamar University, Block graduated with a bachelor of applied arts and sciences and the prestigious Plummer Award, recognizing him as the male with the highest grade-point average – a 3.95.

That honor is one of many claims to fame for the lifelong Vidor resident – bluegrass musician, webmaster, ground-floor computer expert, military scientific specialist, turner-of-phrases and family man, devoted to his wife, Linda, five children and seven grandchildren.

On. Oct. 27, he’ll attend the 50th class reunion of Vidor High School’s Class of ’57. “Many of us started school together at Vidor Elementary in 1945,” Block says, “and not a few of us are cousins.”

Block was 64 when he returned to Lamar in the fall of 2003. He was no stranger to academia, having studied electrical engineering at Purdue University while he was in the Navy four decades earlier. But, he said, “I was a little apprehensive. I wasn’t sure I would be up to speed. I’m here to tell you it’s been a wonderful experience. I have nothing but admiration for the professors and instructors. They are all very supportive, very helpful and very involved. Their classes have been delights.”

When Block learned he was a candidate for the Plummer Award, presented at summer commencement Aug. 18, he wasn’t sure what it was. “To tell you the truth, I had to look it up. I didn’t expect to win anything because one thing that has impressed me at Lamar is the quality of the students,” he said of his classmates, most young enough to be his grandchildren or even great-grandchildren. “They’re hard-working, extremely bright kids.”

Block considers himself a native Vidorian, though he was born Aug. 26, 1939, at Hotel Dieu in Beaumont. His parents had moved to Vidor in 1938, he said, “so I guess you would call them pioneers. We were a working-class family. My daddy was a house painter and paper hanger, a good, hard-working man, and my mother was a homemaker. I have one older sister, Melba Courmier of Pine Forest, but I had cousins everywhere, and I still do.”

Music – particularly bluegrass – has been part of Block’s life as far back as he can remember. “When we were children, we had to make our own entertainment,” he said, “and playing music was one way to do it. It was a cultural thing – part of the fabric of our life.”

His grandmother, mother and sister played piano. He and his cousin, Rodney, who are about the same age, learned to play instruments together, and they still do. His uncle Jesse Block was a well-known fiddler throughout this area. The family listened to the Grand Ol’ Opry and tuned in to Slim Watts on local radio. Occasionally, a touring bluegrass band would come through town – he remembers Jim & Jesse McReynolds & The Virginia Boys playing at Gateway Shopping Center on a flatbed trailer.

“We attended the Pentecostal Church, where there was a lot of good, bluegrass-style gospel music. That’s how I got started. I played bass fiddle with a gospel quartet at church,” Block said. “From there, it’s been bluegrass – though I did play electrical instruments as a teenager, guitar mainly, and we had our typical Elvis Presley-type garage band.”

oday, Block plays with The Sabine Bluegrass Band, also known as Crabgrass, and, he says, “I thoroughly enjoy it.” His instrument is an 83-year-old C.F. Martin mandolin he bought at a pawn shop in Lafayette, Ind., during the ’60s. He can tell by the serial number it was crafted in 1924.

A newer endeavor is the sabinebluegrass.com website, which Block began hosting more than a year ago. “It’s a hobby that got plumb out of hand,” he says.

When he returned to Lamar after half a century, Block had yet to complete a class or earn a credit from what was to be his alma mater. After high school graduation, he said, “I floundered around being a boy. I sacked groceries and checked and stuff like that.”

He enrolled at Lamar in the fall of 1958, but the Soviet Union and its Sputnik satellite interrupted his plans. “I don’t want to equate the two, but Sputnik, at that time, had an impact on our nation close to that of 9/11.

“I remember my mother pulling down the window shades so Sputnik couldn’t look into our house in Vidor,” Block said. “There was a great deal of patriotic fervor, and I joined the Navy.”

     

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