OT Blount was one of the Ward 8 Woods Conservancy’s longest-serving park stewards, a dedicated leader in keeping D.C.’s forests healthy and a deeply caring friend and mentor to those he worked alongside.
Born in Hampton, Virginia, on Oct. 7, 1968, Blount died on Aug. 8 due to heart complications. The 54-year-old had used a pacemaker for more than five years, but that never kept him from working hard and keeping busy, said friends and family who gathered to celebrate his life at a Sept. 8 funeral.
“He wasn’t one for just laying around, sitting around,” recalled his sister Paula Blount, with whom Blount had been living for more than a decade. She said her brother preferred to get around on his own two feet and rarely took the bus.
“And he walked fast,” she emphasized with a laugh.
Paula is one of five older sisters Blount left behind, along with many nieces, nephews, grand-nephews and a host of other relatives and friends. The youngest sibling by 15 years, Blount — called Junior by family members — always had his big sisters watching out for him. Henrietta Rogers, his next-oldest sister, remembered praying for him when he first went to the hospital and had to get a pacemaker.
It was 2015, and the family had been told to come quickly because the outlook wasn’t good.
“I leaned down and said in his ear, I told him to rise up!” Rogers said. “That was on a Friday. On Sunday, he was sitting up, eating a hamburger.”
Blount brought that resilience with him to work every day as a park steward with Ward 8 Woods, a role he took on in October 2020. Nathan Harrington, a close friend and the organization’s founder, said he was one of Ward 8 Woods’ most dedicated and longest-serving team members.
“He helped us remove more than a million pounds of trash from public parkland over the last five years; he helped us save almost 6000 trees from invasive vines,” Harrington said during a reflection he shared at the funeral.
OT rarely missed a day, unless it was raining, Harrington said. Each morning upon arriving at the site, Blount would greet Harrington as “Nate the Great.”
Blount wasn’t a fan of his own given name, Henderson, and the team called him “OT,” which stood for “Old Timer.” The moniker suited him as he came to serve as a mentor for younger park stewards and friends.
“He had the wisdom of years, and of having experience of some of the things that the younger people were going through, and he would talk to them about it,” Harrington said in an interview. “He was a very calm, very solid presence in our crew.”
Harrington described Blount as “a man of few words” who always “meant what he said and said what he meant.” He was a stickler for sanitation, always checking to see if work gloves had gotten properly cleaned and peering into the water cooler to look out for any dirt or debris.
But many, including nephew Rhondell Williams, described Blount as having a “funny, outgoing” side as well.
Chris Williams, a coworker who worked with Blount for about six months, laughed as he recalled a prank on the job: Blount asked him to come over and help with a bag that was too heavy. But when Williams walked over, it turned out Blount had actually stumbled on a beehive.
“He was always having fun, just a good person,” Chris Williams said. “He was always positive — never seen him mad, never seen him complain.”
Blount could always be found wearing his go-to bucket hat, or else — in the coldest months of the year — in a Ward 8 Woods-branded winter hat. Harrington said he gave everyone a winter hat each year around Thanksgiving, and pretty much all the team members, including himself, tended to lose it within a few weeks.
“Not OT—he always had that hat,” Harrington said. “He would always have the winter hat until spring came and then he would go back to the bucket hat.”
It wasn’t just headgear that Blount looked out and cared for — friends and family described him as someone they could count on for help.
Curtis Wheeler, a friend and fellow Ward 8 Woods park steward, said Blount watched out for him on the job, demanding that he sit down in the air-conditioned car when he wasn’t feeling well.
Earlier this year, Wheeler found himself in the hospital for weeks after being hit by a truck. He emotionally recollected how Blount was there for him during that time.
“He came [to the hospital] … I go back to sleep, I woke back up, he was still sitting right there,” Wheeler said. “He called me every day after I got out. … He was my backbone.”