Shane Michael Blanchett

Shane was born in Minneola, Kansas, in 1976. He was the first grandson in a family of girls, so he became his grandpa Leo’s boy, and he adored his grandma, Sharlene. Hutchinson was always home.

He was never one for sports. He caught on to things fast, and understood them a step deeper than most. Art and computers were his favorite classes. The creativity showed most in art, where he’d take a project further than anyone expected. Electronics, though, were the real pull. Radios, gadgets, anything he could take apart to see how it worked.

He was a businessman before he was a teenager. He shoveled snow and raked leaves for money, and told anyone who’d listen he’d run his own company one day. When he was ten, he and a neighbor set up a Kool-Aid stand outside the family’s house on North Poplar. He trimmed it with a little Christmas tree and lights in the middle of summer, and rigged a Lite-Brite onto a toy truck to show the price: three cents. A Hutchinson News photographer pulled over and ran the picture, under the headline “Christmas in August.”

He met Garrett in seventh grade, and the two were inseparable from then on. Around the same time, his mom, Michele, took the tax refund down to Radio Shack, and he came home with his first computer, a Tandy. It didn’t hold him long. Within a grade or two he had an Apple IIGS, then a Macintosh LC that left the Tandy in the dust. That settled it. Apple, always Apple.

At fifteen, he and Garrett worked at McDonald’s together, and just about every paycheck Shane earned went back into computers. He bought one of the first digital cameras anyone could get, the Apple QuickTake. It was gear most grown adults didn’t have yet. Every machine taught him something, and he stayed a step ahead of it.

He looked up to Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs the way other kids looked up to ballplayers. When Jobs died in 2011, it hit him hard. Here was a man he’d hoped to be a little more like.

As teenagers, he and Garrett helped run one of the first Apple user groups in Hutchinson, the Apple Tree User Group. Shane was president, Garrett vice-president. Once a month they’d demo Macs and software, and sit with the educators and professionals who came to learn. That part was his favorite: helping other people find their footing with the machines he loved. That’s what the newspaper wrote up.

Around the same age, a pet store hired him to clean cages. He talked his way into helping customers, and he brought home his first fish tank. Fish stayed with him for good.

He and Garrett ran together into their twenties. Road trips to Kansas City as teenagers. Both of them in Wichita a few years after that.

After high school he went to work at Newer Technology in Wichita, around 1996. He taught Garrett the technical side of the Mac and helped him get hired there a year later, which launched Garrett’s whole career in computers. In 2004 he moved to Kansas City and built a Mac repair business that grew into iPhone and iPad repair.

He did that for people his whole life. He’d give someone a chance before they’d earned it, and they’d walk away surer of themselves. Surer of their work, their schooling, whatever they were chasing. He connected with everyone at school, students and teachers and even the administrators most kids avoided, usually over some inside joke only the two of them shared. The humor never left him.

He thought before he spoke, so when he did, people listened. He was generous and never made a thing of it. Later in life he leaned into his faith, and it brought him peace. And he loved his mom’s humor.

He loved animals, cats most of all. People still bring up his smile.