A new journey for Carol Block

By Mary Daily

Carol Block always had a hunch that she and her husband would return to the West Coast even after spending three decades in Virginia. In fact, she renewed her California medical technologist certification every year, just in case.

Her hunch proved prescient last December when Gene Block was named chancellor of UCLA. "I was elated when I heard the news," she recalled. The UCLA appointment meant an exciting turn in the road the two had traveled since kindergarten.

That road began in Monticello, N.Y., where they grew up and attended the same schools, although they didn't really know each other.

The youngest of three children, Mrs. Block studied piano and the oboe, attended summer music camps and played in her high school band as well as numerous all-state bands. She loved skiing and was a "fearless" downhill racer.

She spent her senior year in high school in Denmark as an exchange student, then headed to George Washington University in Washington, D.C., to study medical technology. In the summer after her freshman year, she and Gene Block reconnected back home in Monticello; they married after they both graduated from college. Eugene, Ore. was their next destination, where she worked in a pathology lab while he attended graduate school. On weekends, they "covered the Pacific Northwest," she recalled, hiking, camping, backpacking, skiing, fishing and crabbing. Five years later, when his postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford took them to Palo Alto and Pacific Grove, she worked at Stanford Hospital and Fort Ord's Silas B. Hays Army Hospital.

But they left the West Coast behind when Block joined the faculty at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Over the next 29 years, they had a daughter and a son and built two custom homes. She found time to volunteer at the Virginia Film Festival, Virginia Festival of the Book, Tuesday Evening Concert Series (chamber music), the Charlottesville Free Clinic and Congregation Beth Israel.

Last spring, bound for UCLA, the couple prepared to say good-bye to the town where they had made so many friends and created so many memories. When they sold their three-story home in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, "it was hard to close that door for the last time," she reminisced. But their arrival in L.A. generated new excitement about new possibilities and opportunities.

Today, they are settled in the UCLA Residence, where Mrs. Block can be heard playing her grand piano. Living on campus isn't new to the couple. Since 2002, they had occupied one of ten two-story Jeffersonian townhomes, flanked by student single-room quarters, in the heart of the U.Va. campus.

Now, on quiet evenings at home, they prepare dinner together while they watch the evening news. Later, they sit outside, sipping coffee and marveling at the perfect California weather.

Mrs. Block looks forward to entertaining the Bruin family in her home and perhaps having student musicians give their senior recitals in her living room. "This is a wonderful place to be," she said. "It already feels like home."