Ted Blankenship, longtime columnist for The Active Age, died in January at age 97.
Blankenship was born in El Dorado, Kan., on Sept. 29, 1928, and grew up in the oil fields of Teeterville, now a ghost town in the Flint Hills.
As a teenager, he played trumpet and sang professionally on a radio station in Coffeyville. After serving in the U.S. Air Force as a musician during World War II, he earned a journalism degree from the University of Kansas and was hired by the Topeka Capital newspaper. He moved to the Hutchinson News and started his “It’s Not Serious” column in 1957, later continuing it for newspapers in Coffeyville and Wichita. It ran in The Active Age from 2012 to 2025.
In Coffeyville, Blankenship faced threats after writing in support of the civil rights movement. In 1966, the Wichita Eagle and Beacon hired him to run its Capitol bureau in Topeka during the administration of Gov. Robert Docking. The most dramatic event of that period was the June 8, 1966 tornado that killed 17 people and leveled a 15-mile swath of Topeka. Blankenship later wrote extensively on the energy industry and many other topics for publications around the country.
“The joke in the family is that no matter what you say, he’ll say, ‘I wrote a story about that one time,’” his son, Tedd, told The Active Age in 2024. “And the truth of the matter is, he probably did.”
Blankenship also taught journalism at Wichita State University and Friends University and worked as editor of The Kansas Times magazine. A series of columns he wrote helped launch the Wichita Jazz Festival in 1972. He served on the board of The Active Age and helped run the paper on an emergency basis when its editor at the time became ill. Many of his columns for this paper were collected in a 2017 book, “It’s Not Serious,” with illustrations by former Eagle cartoonist Richard Crowson.
Tedd Blankensip said his parents loved gardening together, and his father never lost his love of music. “He loved to sing and would fire off any jazz standard at the drop of a hat.”
Blankenship is survived by Dorothy, his wife of 73 years; daughter Leslie (Dan) Keller of Nevada, Mo.; son Tedd (Janet) Blankenship of Augusta; and granddaughter Felicia (Jack) Haffley of Dallas. He was preceded in death by a daughter, Ann.
It’s Not Serious flashback: Playing their song was the easy part
Editor’s note: This is one of the last columns Ted Blankenship wrote for The Active Age. It appeared in November 2024.
Early in 1943, my family moved from Madison, Kan., to Eureka, some 25 miles to the south. We had been there about three weeks, and I was out riding my bicycle. And there on the front lawn sunning herself was a pretty redhead.
Somehow, I managed to get a conversation going, which eventually became long sessions — purely conversational — in the front seat of her family car parked in the driveway.
I told her I had a job with the Jeff Klein Band playing a dance every Saturday night in Memorial Hall.
“Can you sing?” she asked me one evening in the ’39 Ford.
“Sure,” I replied with the confidence of a 16-year-old.
She wanted to hear, “Somebody Else Is Taking My Place.”
When I had finished, she told me it was Jim Dunham’s favorite song. Dunham was in the Army.
The relationship fizzled, and I started another one. It was uncannily like the first. This time the girl asked me to sing “Moonlight Becomes You.”
“That was Corky’s song,” she said. I didn’t know Corky. He was in the Navy.
Another encounter was even stranger. I was about 17. After the Saturday night dances, a woman stopped at the door of my car in front of the Rexall and talked music. She eventually got in the back seat, and I stayed in the front. She was eight or nine years older than I. She wore a fur coat, the first I had ever seen except in the movies.
Later, we rode around together in a restored Whippet Coupe. Her favorite song was an Ink Spots hit. She asked me to sing it every time we met.
Then one morning before work, my Dad, looking grave, called me into the living room.
“You’ve been driving my boss’s girlfriend in your car, and he wants it to stop,” he said. In those days, a petroleum engineer outranked production men, so my Dad had no choice. It was me and a music-loving woman or his job.
I decided he ought to keep his job.
Music can lead you to places you never expected to be.
My proudest moment came as a fifth-grader playing trumpet in the Madison High School Band. We performed for the veterans in the VA Hospital in Wichita. The Kansas Highway Patrol escorted the caravan all the way to Wichita, and I rode in the front seat with the superintendent of the patrol.
He gave me free rein of the siren all the way. What a gift to a fifth grader — playing with the “big kids” and free rein over the siren. It can’t get any better than that.
