Death of Fessenden S. Blanchard (1888-1963)

Blanchard, a co-founder of the game, suffered a heart attack at the Harvard-Princeton football game at Harvard stadium. A 1910 graduate of Harvard, he was a leader in textile research, a past president of the Textile Research Institute (1941-1945) and, for many years, head of his own industrial relations firm, which he founded in 1948. He served as the first President of the APTA, from 1934-1938, and was a tireless promoter of the game in the early years. He was among the first group of individuals inducted into the Platform Tennis Hall of Fame in 1965. In addition to authoring two books on the game, he also wrote widely on yachting.

One of Blanchard’s reports, prepared for the Massachusetts Development and Industrial Commission and made public in 1951 after a two-month dispute involving charges it was being suppressed, told of a “widespread belief” that the executive and legislative branches of the state government were “unjustifiably biased against manufacturers and in favor of labor but not the long-run interests of labor which are bound up with the success of Massachusetts industry.”

Source: New York Times, November 11, 1963