Donald Van Blake, the 86-year-old ambassador of tennis in Plainfield, N.J., is known for the slogan “Tennis, Tennis, Tennis everyone” which is inscribed on the monument in front of the Donald Van Blake Tennis Courts.
Van Blake is one of the most decorated tennis coaches ever, yet he didn’t start playing until he was 55. Asked why, he mentioned the expression ‘Cherchez la femme’ and explained that he was courting a lady who played tennis and wanted to impress her. The relationship faded but he fell in love with the racquet. He has since coached the Plainfield High School Boys’ Varsity Tennis team for 30 years (he retired in 2006). In 1983 he helped found the Plainfield Tennis Council and then organized community programs in every nook and cranny available. He has been honored with all sorts of awards in New Jersey – for distinguished service, as sportsman of the year, for his efforts on behalf of grassroots tennis, along with a special commendation as an “Educator, Role Model and Positive Influence to Youth.” He was also named the 1991 Star Ledger and Courier News Coach of the Year and has been honored with Eastern’s Southern Volunteer of the Year and Special Services awards. In 2001, the 16 Hub Stine courts in Plainfield were renamed for him.
He likes to say that “you can play tennis with someone for months and not know what their job is. You know their backhand but that’s it.” In Donald’s world, no personal judgment calls exist inside the white lines – no prejudice, no comparisons regarding material possessions or status – only the one-on-one chase to the tennis ball. And his only agenda has been to inspire every kid in the community to share his love of the game and his philosophy of equality.
“I was not raised in the kind of community where I could play tennis,” said Van Blake, who was born in Plainfield in 1921 and attended de facto segregated public schools there. “One of the challenges of the sport was that it was so closed to blacks. Plainfield did not have a recreational tennis program even into the 1980s. Laura Canfield got me started; she was my guiding light.”
When Donald first called Canfield, then the director of Eastern junior programs, he told her he had just retired from teaching metal shop at the Hubbard Middle School in Plainfield and wanted to become a full-time tennis volunteer. “Donald basically retired on a Tuesday, drove to the USTA Princeton office on Wednesday and called me at the Eastern office on Thursday to schedule a meeting,” Laura said. She helped him organize a middle school program and develop a schedule of play. She also agreed to ship him tennis balls, racquets and anything else he wanted.
“I once met Donald and the pro Willie Washington at about 5 p.m. on a weekday afternoon and they discussed scheduling some future school assemblies,” Laura said. “Willie called me at noon the very next day and said the two assemblies he and Donald had done that morning went very well.
“I was dumbfounded and actually asked if he meant to say the two assemblies ‘they were planning,’ she continued. “Wrong! Somehow, after I left them, Donald contacted a couple of principals that same night and arranged two assemblies for the very next morning! I envisioned him knocking on the doors of the principals’ homes at 10 p.m. and was amazed by his passion and his connections.”
Donald said that when Jenny Schnitzer succeeded Laura at Eastern “she was always there for me, too, when I starting getting into the USTA [organization] myself.” His big projects have always been in the schools, including gym classes and after school programs, and on playgrounds and in parks.
“Donald’s whole focus has been to get kids off the streets and onto the courts and let’s see where it goes from there,” said his friend of 25 years, Curtiss Young.
“I was not looking for champions,” Donald pointed out. “I love it when kids come through the program and make the varsity squad but you never want to lose track of those who don’t make the team. I would love every kid to be able to play tennis for recreation now and in later years. So we sponsored Town Tennis summer leagues to keep them playing at every level against teams in surrounding towns and recreational clubs. It’s free and parents volunteered to drive them to matches. And the Board of Education got me a bus so I could drive them, too. …Learning to play tennis is frustrating but that’s part of the wonder of it. And you meet all kinds of people…”
In his life before tennis, Van Blake was scarred personally by the reality of segregation. “A whole lot can happen to you in 86 years,” he said. He served in the U.S. Army in two segregated outfits – one a harassing mounted artillery unit, and the other, engineering – and saw action at the front during World War ll, in North Africa and Italy. In the early 1950s he earned his degree on the G.I. Bill at Virginia’s Hampton Institute (now University), where he trained for a career in painting and decorating. “I wanted to go into my own business to make money,” he said. “I had a strong feeling about black men making money…that when you had money you had power.
“I ran the business for 25 years but I never made a million,” he admitted with a chuckle.
The civil rights movement exploded in the 1960s and he took on the role of Plainfield’s chairman of the NAACP political action committee. “I organized marches for six months,” he said. “We marched five days a week. We would have 200 or 300 people carrying signs and singing. It was the time of Martin Luther King’s 1963 march on Washington and his 1965 register-to-vote march to the county courthouse in Selma, Alabama, and the sit-ins…There were spontaneous protests in each community. These were the ancestors of black people who over the centuries were trod upon, stepped upon, spit upon. The whole feeling was ‘we have had enough!’”
Perhaps inspired by the advancement of civil rights, he tapped into his humanitarian values to focus on helping kids. While teaching metal shop courses in the Hubbard Middle School he also taught his students about black history. “We didn’t teach our young people about who they are [like other cultures and religions have done],” he said. “This has been an awful loss to our young people, and to me. Some of my most glorious years were the years I spent in black schools…because they do teach you our history.” In Plainfield, he said, black history ran about a page or two in the book and the teachers said Egypt was in Europe. At college he learned that Egypt was in Africa, that the black people had societies on the west coast.
Friends and relatives at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania helped him borrow African American artifacts from the museum there. “We put them on show and related them to the work we were doing in shop class,” he said. “The kids loved it. I started an African American history club, told them blacks had contributed to this country, with inventions like stop lights, and with the medical initiatives of people like Dr. Charles Drew, who discovered blood plasma and developed the nation’s first blood bank and the storage of blood plasma for transfusions. The kids rushed to join.”
In his leisure time, Donald sang second tenor for 13 years in the Ric Charles traveling choral ensemble. Laura Canfield attended one of his concerts and said he was “Awesome!” And about ten years ago, he modeled gentlemen’s clothing in newspapers and magazines for a Philadelphia agency. “That’s hard work,” he said. “You have to go on a lot of ‘Go Sees’ (auditions) so that potential clients can take a look at you and determine if you’re the right type for a job.”
Asked if he thinks black people today are as angry as he was, he said “No, especially now since Obama is running. Maybe we will reach some kind of agreement or goal. I’d like my four grandchildren to live in an equal society…”
And how does the sport of tennis rate in the whole scheme of Donald’s world? “Everybody has equal footing on the tennis court,” he said.