Looking to Our Elders

By David Menconi

Bob Blankenship ’60 has always been a resourceful individual with an entrepreneurial streak, going back to his days growing up on the Eastern Cherokee Reservation in North Carolina’s mountains. It was the 1940s and the reservation did not yet have electricity, but that didn’t keep Blankenship from running a candy store out of his family’s living room.

“I’d be buying $60 worth of candy every two weeks,” Blankenship says. “Go house to house on my bike. I’d sell duck eggs from the river bank, too. My first business.”

Blankenship, 84, was married and a father to the first of his eight kids when he came to NC State in 1956, so his hustle continued in Raleigh. He did everything from yard work and farm labor to running a Dix Hospital ward while earning his degree in industrial management.

A six-year hitch in the U.S. Army followed, with Blankenship serving as a pilot in Vietnam. Then he came home and continued various business pursuits — running a motel, growing Christmas trees and building the largest trout farm east of the Mississippi, to name a few.

We have more free enterprise than any other reservation in the U.S.

Blankenship’s Cherokee name is OO-GAH-NAST, “Sweet Thing,” and one of his lifelong passions has been to expand knowledge of his Cherokee heritage. Blankenship was instrumental in funding and building the Museum of the Cherokee Indian, serving as its first president from 1976 to 2019. Along with helping to craft exhibits and programs to “preserve and perpetuate the history, traditions and culture of the Eastern Cherokee people,” he says, Blankenship has published five books about Cherokee history.

In his role as a tribal elder, Blankenship helps oversee the Harrah’s Cherokee Hotel and Casino on the reservation. His business skills still come in handy. “We have more free enterprise than any other reservation in the U.S.,” he says.