After more than a quarter century of impeccable work, Alumni Editor Dotty McCarty is putting down the red pen.
To tell you the truth, I didn't know much about Middlebury College when I took a job helping out with class notes. Actually, I was exhausted from running after my two little boys and needed a chance to sit down. On top of that, I was making nada for collecting apples and turning out hand-decorated jars of homemade apple butter. And it seemed like working for the College might make better use of my Berkeley degree in English literature than stirring vats of hot apple butter.
It was the fall of 1979 when I took off my apron and entered the amazing world of class notes. Technology was a little simpler back then. Electric typewriters were the latest thing in technology, but we still used lots of those little bottles of white paint until the self-correcting machines arrived. I think when a column ran too long for the magazine in those days, someone just took a pair of scissors and trimmed it a bit.
I particularly remember the day when President Olin Robison announced that everyone at the College—student, staff, and faculty—would soon be working on a computer. My initiation came right after student Jane Benz '83 finished typing David Stameshkin's The Town's College on the enormous computer we called Big Ugly. The magazine editor pointed menacingly at Big Ugly and said, "Okay, Dotty, put the next edition of class notes on the computer." No instructions! All trial and error!
Computer programs changed, magazine editors arrived and departed, budgets ebbed and flowed, the office packed and moved many times. Out in the old schoolhouse where I lived in Cornwall, earth-shaking changes were also taking place.
But no matter what was happening, the class notes flowed on, a never-ending stream chronicling the lives of thousands of Middlebury College graduates. Taking on a life of its own, the great tabulation of jobs, marriages, babies, joys, sorrows, and triumphs surged relentlessly on. Surging along with the flow, I have been undefeated only because I have gone on trying, barely daring to take my hands from the keyboard in fear of being swept away.
But just as I gave up my house in Cornwall for a condo in town a few years ago, so must I admit that I need to cut back a bit on my obsession with reporting all the news that's fit to print. Fortunately, I think I'll get to hang around the College on a part-time basis, working on projects for the communications department. The best of all possible worlds!
Glancing back through any Middlebury Magazine—can it actually be more than 100 issues I have worked on!?—the class notes instantly spring to life as wide-angle snapshots of an ever-growing, ever-evolving community of Middlebury people. When I arrived in Vermont in 1974, I remember thinking that I might like to learn to make quilts. But instead, I pieced together the stories of people's lives, and that has been a very gratifying kind of art. And although it's time for me to start exploring other art forms, I look forward to reading the class notes and staying in touch with Middlebury as the future unfolds.
—Dotty McCarty