For most, his name is unfamiliar. But his handiwork? Chances are, you know it well.
By Alexander Manshel '09
Photographs by Mark Ostow
There’s not much written about the caretaker.
He works unnoticed; the man behind, often beneath, Bread Loaf. He’s the man who keeps the place, in its crescive yet constant state of decline, consistently static—forever the same. His work, if done well, is always done, and never in the process of doing. It’s always been this way. It’s all always been this way. Right? And while Joe Battell’s name rings true for many, who’s ever heard of John Houston, his right-hand man and Bread Loaf’s first caretaker? He was the man who helped keep up the Inn and build its acreage those first winters; the man who carried blank deeds in his pocket in case he ran across a neighbor willing to sell his land; the man who chopped wood for families in surrounding towns because, well, Battell needed the money.
No, there isn’t much written about caretakers. Not many know the name John Houston or that of the man who came next. The mountain’s history transcends the yellow buildings that dot its campus. But not for Leo.
Leo Hotte is a taut and muscular man a few weeks shy of 60 and just under six feet tall. His face appears wire-brushed with long, thin creases and his hands are weathered and tanned. By the looks of him, Leo hasn’t slowed or sagged with age, only tightened—as if the gears inside him pull him straighter by the day. When he speaks, his voice grumbles wildly, excitedly, with gravel roads up in it. There’s a pencil tucked behind his ear and a cigar in his breast pocket.
For the past 27 years, Leo has been the groundskeeper, caretaker, and manager for Bread Loaf’s 1,800-acre campus. He knows the attics, basements, pipelines, and rooftops of the 37 buildings, cabins, and outer houses better than most people know the ins-and-outs of their own garage. And it’s not just the way things look—chipping paint or a cracked windowpane—it’s the smells and sounds as well. “After a while,” he says, “you start to pick up on it. If you hear a certain thing, you can tell right away whether it’s normal or, ‘Nope, that’s not normal. We gotta go figure out what’s going on.’” He knows which houses are haunted, which ceilings leak the most, and which furnaces eat up wood like you wouldn’t believe. “You’ve got to learn and memorize the place: where all these pipes go, what they do, what’s on, what shouldn’t be on, what’s off. And then, once you get all that locked in, then you can go to the other 36 and do the same thing.”
Leo started off as Bread Loaf’s night watchman, working with Ryder Smith, the 16-year veteran caretaker at the time. Within a couple of years Smith moved towards retirement and Leo was offered the position—and the isolation that came with it. For nine months out of the year, the caretaker’s house is the only one occupied. “There were a lot of people interested in the job. But once their wives found out that they were going to be up here by themselves—especially during the winter—they said, ‘Ain’t no way I’m goin’ up there.’” When Leo tells a story, he shouts and whines theatrically, in high and low tones, doing all the voices. “Luckily, I was able to talk the wife into coming up here with me.”
The wife is Sandy Legault, a graduate of the Bread Loaf School of English and the school’s current director of admissions. It was Sandy who first heard about the watchman’s position when she happened to be sitting next to Smith’s wife at a baby shower, and it was she who got the call that first night in December 1983. “I was at home in Bridport and we had just run out of fuel oil and firewood. It was freezing in the house,” she recalled from her office in Middlebury, where the School of English is headquartered for all but the summer months. “All of a sudden Leo called and said, ‘I’ve got the job. I’m staying here for the night. I’ll come for you tomorrow.’” She paused to take a long laugh and sigh. “All I could think of was The Shining.”
But it didn’t take long for Sandy, or Leo, to settle in. She quickly came to love the peaceful rhythm of the place and he was a natural for the work. “When he went up there to that job, they were amazed that this guy would just work all day. And do it so easily,” said Sandy. “It was just so much easier than farming.”
Leo has been farming for nearly all his life. He grew up in Bridport, Vermont—about 20 miles west of Ripton—with his parents, five sisters, and three brothers. “That’s a football team right there,” says Leo. “When we sat down at the table, we raised hell with the food. You got 11 people sitting down to eat and you don’t have a chicken, you have two or three chickens.” Leo hunches his shoulders, grits his teeth, and squints his eyes a little when he laughs—a hearty, crunchy snicker. “Back in those days, the only way you could raise a big family like that was if you had a farm.” He milked the cows, fed the pigs and chickens, and worked the garden, growing sweet corn and other vegetables.
Nine children may have been a nightmare at the dinner table, but they were anything but on the farm. “As the family grew, the old man would expand. He’d say, ‘Okay, we’re putting on a few more cows.’ ‘Okay, we’re putting an addition on the barn.’ ‘Keep them busy.’ ‘We’ve gotta keep ’em busy.’” And this is how much of Leo’s life has gone—always busy working on something, always wishing for a few more hours of daylight, never bored, never lonely.
After all, winter on the mountain isn’t cut out for the lonely. For the caretaker, there is communion with the work and walls. In the basement of Earthworm Manor, Leo runs his fingers along a series of inscriptions etched by hand into the house’s foundation. “This house was built in 1865 by the sons of Harry Downer on their return from the Civil War.” “It was remodeled in 1927 for W. H. Upson [a local author] by George Calvin and the Salisbury Boys Gang.” And below, in black pen: “Harvey Drinkeline hired J.W.D.E. Ryan to install a new deep well pump during the Persian Gulf War.” It was winter, and there were roofs to rake and shovel off, but as Leo moved to lock up the cellar door, he stopped and glanced back at the names. “This is the kind of stuff we leave,” he said. “No plaster, no painting. Leave it. A lot of history. A lot of history here.”
Leo calls his workshop—the epicenter of Bread Loaf’s maintenance operations tucked under the Barn—the heart of the place. This is where he and George Coro, the only other year-round groundsman, do most of the wood and glass work, and where they plan their schedules for the winter. “You spend practically half your time just dealing with snow,” says Leo. The insurance company requires the roads be plowed in case of a fire and the rooftops need to be cleared so their ceilings don’t start to leak. “The other half is spent fixing up furniture. Fixing this, fixing that. Replacing windows that are cracked or broken during the summer. Refinishing furniture; tabletops that are stained or ones that somebody burned a mark in. You have to sand ’em over and finish ’em up.” Each winter they pick a project and go through every building on the campus. Last winter it was glass. Leo and George worked replacing every cracked pane and repairing old mirrors whose reflections were literally fading. “We keep going basically until we run out of time.”
Of course, there are always a few unexpected happenings. In late December, a group of local teenagers broke into the Homer Noble house, which occupies the same property as Robert Frost’s famed Bread Loaf cabin, and threw a party that resulted in over $10,000 worth of damages and more than 25 arrests. Quite a cleanup. But nothing, says Leo, compared to some of his past nighttime surprises. “It’ll be midnight, one o’clock in the morning, and I’ll have sprinkler systems trip up and flood the place. And, of course, when that happens it’s the coldest time of the year so it’s like 20 below out. Everything’s frozen. You’re trying to work with water that freezes on contact.” When something’s really funny, Leo’s laugh takes on a higher-pitched, giddy rhythm. “You’re the only dude up on the hill so you hope to God nothing bad happens.”
For half the year, Bread Loaf is indistinguishable from any other out-of-season inn. The buildings were not built to be used in the winter so they lack any insulation from the cold. The roofs leak and the ceilings crack, leaving chunks of painted plaster half the size of a dollar bill on the worn-out carpet. Mousetraps are laid out with plastic cheese and dead flies line the window panes. The Little Theatre is filled with John Deere equipment, wheelbarrows, and stacks and stacks of chairs. All the clocks, save one—the old General Electric in Leo’s shop—are an hour behind; set eternally to summer time, Bread Loaf Standard Time.
“You always try to do it all like it looks like nothing happened,” says Leo as he describes his mantra—the “Match-Existing” method—while moving through the hallways of the Inn. Except for the wallpaper patterns and the uneven wear and tear, all the rooms look identical: standard issue desk, dresser, bed, and lamp; two glasses for water, and one wrapped bar of Dial soap. “I tell them all: ‘This is the way it’s always been.’” In this way, Leo tries, has tried for years, to maintain some kind of continuity of the place. And, for the most part, his winter work has gone unnoticed. By the time the summer throngs set in on the mountain, it’s hard to believe that Ripton even suffers winter. Now, in the background, smoke detectors all over campus are chirping intermittently. The mountain temperatures run the batteries down and there’s no point in replacing them until the spring.
By mid-May, the chirps are drowned out and replaced by the beeping of dump trucks backing up and shoptalk from a host of fresh faces. Five members of the grounds crew and seven custodians have been here since the first weeks of April, working as seasonal reinforcements. A crew out of Rutland is moving about the campus, pruning trees and clearing away dead limbs. Leo’s shop, near empty in the winter, is filled with guys measuring blocks of wood and eating lunch. The iconic Bread Loaf Adirondack chairs—which Leo more accurately identifies as Westport Adirondacks—are lined up in neat rows and batches throughout, not yet scattered by the summer students.
It’s been raining the last few days and the dark clouds signal more of the same. “Just enough to mess things up,” says Leo, “but not enough to really do something.” He and the grounds crew have set up sprinklers to supplement the spring rains and laid hay where the grass is struggling. All around men and women are working hard, hastening to finish final projects before the season ends—or, rather, before it starts. Bridgman Cottage, among others, has been jacked up; its foundation dug out to make room for steel beams, new concrete, and stonework from the ground up. “We’ve got another project going on right here,” Leo shouts over the commotion as he walks toward the Annex building.
“We’re having the floors redone and the ceilings repainted. All the cracks in the walls are being spackled, sanded, painted. Upstairs, all the bedrooms are being wallpapered. Paint the ceilings, paint the halls.” When he talks about the work, his voice begins to pick up. He speaks more quickly, in staccato beats, as if he’s riddling off a list—preparing to do it all again next time, step by step. “Things are happening quick,” he says. The director of the School of English has moved in, and his staff, faculty, and students are only a few weeks away. The lawns must be groomed, the rooms cleaned. Too much to do and never enough time.
Sandy compares her late spring and summer months to her husband’s like this: “For me, the School of English is the main event. But, for Leo, it’s just one more in a chain of activities; just another cast of characters that he has to deal with.” Before the graduate students even arrive, the campus and its staff will have already hosted the New England Young Writers’ Conference, reunion groups, and a convention of Vermont State Judges. “That’s one of the problems we have up here,” says Leo of the packed schedule. “The time frame. All we’re doing is fixing minor stuff while they’re here. And once they leave, then we can get our crews back in there.”
When the scholars and writers arrive, Leo and Sandy will be reunited with old friends, and the clocks read accurately once again. Sandy remarks on the sudden change: “One minute, Leo and I are just sitting alone in our house with the whole place to ourselves. And then, almost within a day, there are people everywhere. There’s this whole community. And everyone thinks that Bread Loaf is theirs. Everyone thinks it’s their place.” For Leo, this transition marks a change in activity from long-called-for repairs to small projects that require daily tending.
One or two members of the crew spend an hour each morning rolling and sweeping the campus’s clay tennis courts. In the afternoons, Leo sets up folding chairs in the theater for evening readings. “People always ask me, ‘What are you guys doing in there?’ And I say, ‘Well, for about the third time this week we’re setting this place up so that you can have somebody read to you. You know,’ I say, ‘I figure at this age, you guys all knew how to read.’”
There’s an old joke that goes like this: How many Bread
Loafers does it take to fix a flat tire? Two hundred and twenty—two hundred and nineteen to fix its place in the cosmos, and one to call a gas station. That’s the punch line. The real answer is Leo Hotte.
Windows get broken. Doorknobs get ripped off. Some years, furniture inexplicably falls from balconies. All this must be dealt with. As Leo likes to say, “I’m up here to make the show run.” An English major in college and a lover of literature, Sandy revels in this show; what she calls the deep “shared history” of the place. And though Leo is not what you would call an avid fan of poetry—“I never touch the stuff”—he appreciates that familiar relationship that grows between a writer, like any other craftsman, and his workplace.
That’s not to say that there are never disagreements. Sandy points out that “Leo sometimes has a hard time when someone will come up and give him a little ‘free advice’ about how something should be done. He feels very proprietary. But, then again, they do too.” In this way, the summer months are a careful negotiation between those with their heads in the clouds and the creaking buildings nearly buckling to hold them up. More than anyone, Sandy knows that, without Leo, Bread Loaf would be hard off. “He gets into the guts of the building. And me—well, I wouldn’t go into one of those basements for anything in the world.” This is the kind of job that calls for a strong will, and an even stronger sense of humor.
“Welcome to Hell!” shouts Leo boyishly as he hunches over and walks through the low-ceilinged cellar of the Inn. “This is the fun place to work.” In just this way, he flushes the tubes of the building’s two boilers daily to clear the water of any sediment or rust. “You just open up the pipe two or three times until the water pretty much comes out clear. Once you get it to that point,” he bangs the boiler hard with the palm of his hand, “you slap it. Just for [fun]!” For a man who works year-round in places that most Bread Loafers never see, Leo sure as hell loves what he does; what he has been doing for more than a quarter of a century.
“When I first started working up here, it was 10 times worse than this,” he says as he moves to the door of basement shop, lighting the cigar that’s been waiting quite some time. “It was brutal.” Leo used to shovel a dump truck load of coal a week just to keep the Inn warm at night. Then he’d hunch himself over and carry out the 15 barrels of ash that the building produced. In the summer, he would mow the more than 100 acres in the fields across from the main campus. During his tenure, Leo has installed new bathrooms, plumbing, wells, wiring, and septic systems.
Though all of this says little of the physical plant’s funding which has, in that same time, grown and improved as well. “It was really tight for a number of years. The structures were old and they had been deferring repair for much too long,” said Leo, blowing out smoke. “They’d say, ‘Just paint it, make it look good, and let it go.’ Eventually, it gets to a point when you can’t really paint it any more,” he says, kicking the rotted-out post that holds up the shop’s garage door. “This is an awful big building to have a base rotting out on you. The College has realized that they’ve got to spend some money up here.”
With limited time and resources, however, it is all a system of priority. Some things have got to be fixed before winter is out, others can wait a season or a year. And over the years, Leo has fixed, waited, and fixed again just about everything you can think of on the Bread Loaf campus. “When you’ve got 37 buildings that all need roofs,” he chuckled, “by the time you get the last one fixed, it’s time to go back and fix the first one all over again.” It is this circularity, this repetition, that helps him keep track of the time spent. The years here are measured in roofs.
“One of the ways that I can tell I’ve been here too long is that all the new stuff that I put in when I first started, we’ve had to take out and throw away because it’s too old. In some of these buildings, I put a brand-new furnace in it and they went and wore it out. And now I put another new furnace in and I’m saying, ‘I’m not going to stick around long enough for this one to wear off. Twice is enough!” He laughs heartily and puts out his cigar. “I’ve got to sit,” he says. His legs are tired.
In a few years, Leo will retire. “Next month, I’m 60,” he says from his desk chair in the shop. “And in two more years, I’m 62. That’s how I’m looking at it.” The time away from Bread Loaf will give him the opportunity to work his 40 acres of Bridport farmland where he grows Sunset Timothy, a top-quality hay used to feed horses and alpacas. He might even get a moment to ride his beloved “beast,” the 1967 BSA 650 motorcycle that he rebuilt after finding it on the floor of a friend’s shed.
Negotiating Leo’s retirement, and replacement, will certainly be a difficult task for the campus that owes much to the man. “They told me, ‘If you’re going to be retiring, we need to know about the place.’ They’re all asking, ‘Where’s the water lines? Where’s this? Where’s that?’ Now that’s what I call job security!” Leo rubs and kneads his tightened hands as he speaks. After sitting for a moment, he is restless and tired of just talking. He starts jingling the chain of keys in his pocket. He hears a noise in the pipes and gets up to check it out.
Alexander Manshel ’ 09 is an English and American literatures major. This story evolved from a winter term creative writing independent project under the tutelage of David Bain. Manshel attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference this summer.