BLAIRSVILLE, Bklyn – As a journalist I am appalled and disgusted by the accusations being hurled at New York Times reporter Jayson Blair. I am here to report that I have personal proof that Blair is neither a liar nor a plagiarist. For one thing, no reporter would ever stoop so low as to lie and steal the words of others.
For another, I was – yes! – Blair’s first wife. We met in high school in San Francisco in 1934 when Jayson was an up-and-coming baseball player and opera singer. I fell hard, but he held me at bay saying, “Give me liberty or give me death.”
“Blair!” I exclaimed, “Are you saying, ‘Learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all?’ In other words, you don’t want to fool around?”
After graduation, Jayson went to Harvard and I stayed home and enrolled in air conditioning and refrigeration repair school where I graduated summa cum laude. I tried to forget him, but I couldn’t. Sixteen years later, I snuck into his college graduation where he implored fellow grads, “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.”
Jayson spotted me in the audience and the rest, as they say, is histoire.
Our romance was as hot and as swift as his meteoric rise in journalism. When he asked me to be his first wife, he knelt and said, “But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Linda is the sun.”
We wrote our own wedding vows. “I will be as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny,” we promised one another. And that’s the whole truth.