Friends, neighbors, North County Fire wish John Blatchley a happy 100th birthday

News has been quite bleak lately. Stores have been cleaned out of toilet paper, and people are stuck inside their homes trying to avoid coming into contact with an invisible, deadly enemy.

So, Sunday morning was, for friends and family of John Blatchley, perhaps a welcome reprieve from the doom and gloom.

That's because Mr. Blatchley, a longtime Fallbrook resident, was celebrating his 100th birthday.

He, his wife and other family members waited on their front lawn for friends and neighbors to show up and give their good wishes. It wasn't just friends and neighbors, though; firefighters and paramedics from North County Fire Protection District rolled by the Blatchley residence to toot their horns and sirens in celebration of Mr. Blatchley's centennial.

John Blatchley was born in Killingsworth, Connecticut, on April 5, 1920 – coincidentally, at the tail end of the last great pandemic, the Spanish flu, which did not lift until December 1920.

He went to work for Alcoa – the Aluminum Company of America – in his early 20s, where he worked through World War II, his wife, Beverly Blatchley, said.

John Blatchley worked for the aluminum company for 40 years, most of that time spent in Connecticut, but at the tail end of his career, he transferred to the company's plant in Corona.

During the brief time he was working at the Corona plant, he commuted from West Covina, Beverly Blatchley said. In fact, the future husband and wife lived just blocks apart, she said, but they would not actually meet until both moved to Fallbrook separately.

John Blatchley discovered Fallbrook simply by driving around Southern California. He decided Fallbrook was where he wanted to live out his retirement.

"He built a house here and then moved to the house," Beverly Blatchley said.

The pair had both lived through tragedy by the time they started seeing each other.

"We met at the Fallbrook Presbyterian Church," Beverly Blatchley said. "I signed up for (a) class and I had just lost my husband, and he lost his wife later that year."

Beverly and John Blatchley have been married since 1994, she said, and between the two of them have a blended family of four children, and a total of 35 grandchildren, great-grandchildren and a great-great-grandchild.

John Blatchley was very active in the Fallbrook Presbyterian Church for much of his retirement in Fallbrook, his wife said.

Much of John Blatchley's family still lives on the East Coast, in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, Beverly Blatchley said.

They had planned a larger celebration for John Blatchley's 100th birthday, but then the coronavirus pandemic happened.

"We had a big party planned," Beverly Blatchley said. But with the pandemic, they decided that "staying home and then people coming" would work much better.

So, neighbors and friends, some of them wearing masks, waved to the Blatchleys from the sidewalk, before turning their attention to the passing fire and paramedic vehicles giving their support. A girl from one of the neighboring homes stopped by to leave a sign for John Blatchley that she had made for his birthday – she left it on the sidewalk from a safe distance, of course.

All in all, in the current sea of unhappy news, it was a welcome island of celebration.