About once a month or so, I get together with Karl Lindholm ’67—usually over a couple of glasses of whiskey—to chat about some of our favorite topics: Middlebury hoops, the goings-on of our kids (his, mostly grown; mine, in middle school), what we’ve read recently. Quickly, though—and sometimes instantaneously—we digress, skipping down the pathways of Lindholm’s memories: of growing up in Lewiston, Maine; of caddying as a teenager; of high school sports in a Maine mill town; and, more often than not, of Lindholm’s 50-plus-year relationship with Middlebury College.
Lindholm is a master storyteller, and while his tales (he often refers to them as his “anecdotes”) are best heard in person, we now have the next-best option, at least relating to his Middlebury anecdotes: a collection in print.
In Also Plays: Stories from a Middlebury Life, Lindholm recounts his days as an undergraduate; as a dean (of students, of several Commons, of advising); as an assistant professor of American studies; as a parent of two Middlebury students; and as a faculty advisor to two athletic teams (no doubt he’ll remind me of what I have not included).
There are more than 100 unvarnished stories in the anthology, each offering a fly-on-the-wall vantage point of moments covering half a century at Middlebury, moments both monumental and trivial, though in this collection nothing is truly trivial. By gathering all of his anecdotes in one place, Lindholm has created a mosaic of College life that can serve as an unofficial history of a place the author knows about as well as anyone could.
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