ABSTRACT
At the end of my freshman year in June I remained in Middlebury and worked in the college library, packing several thousands of books in large wooden crates, to ship by truck to the Bread Loaf library for the reserve shelves for the summer school courses. Four other Middlebury students were also going to Bread Loaf: Edward Hayward, a native Vermonter, who had graduated and now ran the bookstore at Bread Loaf; Norman Hatfield, a senior English major, editor of the Middlebury College literary magazine; and Charley Sanford and Bob Maxwell, my classmates. Hayward had attended Bread Loaf every summer since 1935, and Hatfield had spent several summers at Bread Loaf. On June 21, a week before classes began, we all went up the Mountain to prepare the campus for the summer session. Ed Hayward and I spent a day unpacking books and placing them on the library shelves. Then I joined the other scholarship students, including some from Vanderbilt, Virginia, and Harvard, as a ground crew working under the direction of E. H. “Al” Henry. We worked with several Riptonites, Harold Whittemore, Milton Kirby, and a crew of boys led by Bishop McGill, to whip the Bread Loaf campus into shape. We cut the lawns, planted more bright flowers in the formal eighteenth-century garden in front of the Inn, rolled the three clay tennis courts and stapled down the tapes, opened all the cottage dormitories, did minor carpentry repairs on the porches, repaired and painted lawn chairs and cottage porch railings, piled firewood at each fireplace or stove in each cottage, and did miscellaneous other tasks. Dean Harry Owen was a fanatic for neatness, and when the Bread Loaf School opened on June 28, with words of greeting from President Moody, the whole campus gleamed in the sunlight.
