Blake's Story | Blake Wintermute for Maryland House of Delegates District 30B

Hi, my name is Blake. I was born and raised (mostly) in Maryland and reside now in the Shady Oaks Community just south of Galesville. I spent my childhood on the water, sailing and paddling around with my Dad, my Mom, and my Uncle. I’ve had an extraordinarily blessed life, filled with wonderful people who have supported and loved me so much. I am so grateful to all the family and neighbors who have made me the man I am today.

In my early years, I was a Village kid. I was raised by everyone. My neighbors were my family, from my Godparents across the street to Davis and Judy Craven, my pseudo-grandparents down the road. Our neighborhood is oriented around the river, and I was on it as much as any kid. When I was young, my neighborhood’s sense of community was strong. We regularly had events and had a strong sense of comradery. As with all things, people have aged, many have died, and the culture has diminished.

When I was 8, my mother left my father and took us to the United Kingdom. We lived there together, off and on, for many years. We lived on my grandparents’ cattle farm in Wales, where I had full run of the land and could help with farming duties. We also had a few horses, including a pony that was mine, named Shelton. Talking to my grandfather, I was shocked to learn about the financial side of running the farm. It was amazing how much farm subsidies distorted what he could grow and use the land for. It was amazing how tight the margins were. We had 30 cows, and could only just scrape by.

My Dad has always been obsessed with sailing. Growing up with him reading me a sailing-related bedtime story every night, he successfully ingrained the love in me as well. Shortly after my 9th birthday, my Dad retired, and we set sail on the family boat, after 17 years of it being in the front yard, and us trying to work on it (childhood me helping to the degree a child can). We spent the next 5 years sailing, on and off, around the Caribbean, anchoring where we could, scraping by from island to island while I was homeschooled (somewhat).

I found that exposure to the world and being forced to assume responsibilities was a far better education than anything I was receiving in the school system. Traveling so much as a child, I found it instilled in me a love of adventure and an inclination towards that ideal of liberal independence and self-sufficiency. That is an ideal I bring to my political goals. I want the government to empower everyone to live a good life, whatever that looks like to them.

As a teenager, I attended Southern High for two years before going away to boarding school. While it was a financial stretch for us, even with the very generous financial aid, I am so glad I did it. Boarding school presented to me the single best opportunity to mature. I was profoundly socially awkward before boarding school, but there’s nothing like living and working with your peers to drum that out of you. I realized the true degree to which I could perform academic work, and learned my limitations. I rowed on the crew team, and had instilled in me the virtue of relentlessness in the face of pain and unrelenting odds.

My education continued in College. I attended Johns Hopkins University and Hamilton College. I studied Computer Science, but I found that the majority of the educational value I received was actually in the out-of-class discourse. While at Hamilton, I joined a club. These people were amazingly ideologically diverse. They asked questions of me and forced me to consider perspectives I would have never thought possible in the modern age. While I think they were deeply wrong about most issues, hearing and debating with them undoubtedly made me more considerate and more thoughtful on the subjects of politics and philosophy.

Since college, I have been working at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. It is a not-for-profit research institution tasked with helping solve the nation’s most critical challenges. I function as a technical consultant. We help a wide variety of different federal government organizations to understand their problems and attempt to design and build systems that can make their processes better. Working here, I have become quite ideological about design. I believe it is critical to consider things from first principles and to look at systems holistically to understand the inevitable second-order effects any change will cause.