Book Review, September 24, 2009,
San Clemente, California, Sun Post News

Column: Hall Around Town by John Hall

‘The Fonz’ and Tom Blake: Who could ask for more?

“Thousands attend Mission Viejo Book Festival,” said the banner. “Visitors see star authors such as Dean Koontz and stars such as Henry Winkler.”

Actually, there were a total of 48 authors and exhibitors who brought in the mob to the record-setting event staged by Friends of the Mission Viejo Library. Besides Koontz, the fireball detective novelist, and Winkler, one of the lesser-publicized but extremely popular “other” authors on hand was our own Tom Blake, a San Clemente resident, who runs Tutor and Spunky’s Deli in Dana Point and has been writing the “Middle Aged Relationships” column for the Register’s community newspapers for more than 15 years.

Tom’s latest book, “How 50 Couples Found Love After 50,” is obviously an offshoot of his column that has proved so vital to those of a certain age.

Beyond the column, he regularly emails a newsletter on the subject to hundreds across America as well as to Canada and Europe.

He got started with the romance of it all, he said, because he’d heard “all too often from older singles that they couldn’t meet anybody that was right for them, that they’d given up on the dating and given up on finding love on the Internet, that there was just nobody out there that was right.”

“I knew better, and John, you know better, too,” he said in a personal e-mail. “Both of us found love later in life. Plus, men and women send me their success stories all the time. They meet on the Internet, at a local bank, at a writers club, at Barnes & Noble, at my Dana Point deli, at a San Clemente dentist’s office, at the Ritz-Carlton—the list goes on and on.”

He’s been so overwhelmed by so many success stories that he couldn’t cut off his book at just 50 stories. He has eight extra accounts, for a total of 58 couples telling all. Three are from San Clemente, including Tom himself, saying, “Eleven years ago, I was between relationships. A woman came into my deli and ordered a fresh carrot juice. When she sat down to wait for her juice to be squeezed, I looked at her. And without thinking twice, I simply walked around the counter and asked her for a date. She was surprised, but she said yes, and Greta and I have been together ever since.”

Just like that. The book reads a little like peeking into somebody’s private diary, but that, of course, is a large part of the charm.

“The purpose of the book is to give hope to older singles that they can meet a partner,” Tom said, in summing up.

The book is available at www.50Couples.com or at his deli (www.tutorandspunkys.com).