BARNES BOFFEY, NO. 78, played football for his junior and senior seasons at Middlebury College, where he graduated in 1967. That spring, the 6-foot-8, 285-pounder was signed by the Pittsburgh Steelers.

My second night at Middlebury in the fall of 1963, with my little beanie on my head, I was roused from my bed after midnight and dispatched with the other freshman men to serenade the senior women from the lawn in front of Forest Hall. 

Freshman hazing required that we learn the college songs. I still know them.

That night, I stood behind the biggest person I had ever met, my classmate Barnes Boffey, all 6’8”, 250+ pounds of him. I looked right into the small of his back. 

Possessed of a booming voice and an exuberant nature, Barnes was a powerful presence in our student days. He came to Middlebury from Williston-Northampton Academy. They had no football, so he played soccer there (I would love to have seen him on the pitch).

Barnes presided in the Crest Room, the College snack bar in Proctor Hall. When he was glad to see me, sometimes he just picked me up, “How ya doin’?” he growled and gave me a hug (and I weighed 185 pounds). 

He majored in theater!

During his junior year, he decided to go out for football. We all thought it was a lark and figured he wouldn’t last a week. 

I was the Sports Editor of the school newspaper, The Campus, and met every Monday morning with the football coach and athletic director, the legendary Duke Nelson. He told me about the confusion Barnes’s presence on the football roster caused when he sent it to Wesleyan, the team’s first opponent. 

The Wesleyan coach saw there a junior with an improbable name, “Barnes Boffey,” who was listed at 6’8” and 285 pounds. He sensed a practical joke — and was not amused. He called Duke.

“He was really upset” Duke reported to me. “I said to him, ‘But, coach, the boy’s really out for the team. He’s a real person.” 

Turns out, with his size, Barnes was good at football: courageous, immoveable. He played the next year too. 

During the spring of ’67, senior year, Barnes was signed by the Pittsburgh Steelers and given a $1,000 bonus, most of which he spent buying beers for everyone at the Alibi. 

He was cut after only a few days, but still . . . the Steelers!

BARNES BOFFEY LEADS a cheer at Camp Lanakila in Fairlee, where he was director for 24 years.

Barnes had ambivalence about his identity at Middlebury. However, I had none. I remembered him in essence as a generous and delightful person. 

At our 25th reunion I got to tell him that. Barnes had chosen not to return to Middlebury since graduation, though he lived in Vermont. He did not want to reminisce about the good old days in college. They were not “good old days” for him. 

He earned a Master’s and a Ph.D. in Education and worked for a time as an adjunct professor and counselor at Dartmouth. While there, he helped make a video, “Fighting Drunk,” that we used at Middlebury for years in our training of ResLife staff. 

In it, Barnes made the point that students need to intervene when they see their classmates drinking excessively and dangerously. “What if you had a roommate,” he asked on camera in the video, “who was so fond of popcorn that every Friday and Saturday night he ate so much popcorn that he got sick, threw up? 

“How long do you think it would be before you concluded he had a ‘popcorn problem’?”

This analogy is characteristic: Barnes had a powerful command of the language in both speech and in writing — and he possessed wisdom. 

His youthful football dalliance hardly defined him. He had a genius for connecting with people, kids especially, early on. Beginning in 1953, when he was eight, Camp Lanakila in Fairlee, Vt., became his “home away from home.” He worked at Lanakila for many years and for 24 years was its director.

Professionally, Barnes was a gifted counselor, focusing on “internal control theory”; a consultant (advising on “non-coercive discipline in schools”); and a teacher. In retirement, he taught a variety of courses in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Dartmouth. 

IN THE SPRING of 1967, the cartoonist (KL) for The Campus college newspaper celebrated Barnes Boffey’s signing by the Pittsburgh Steelers. Barnes wrote the intramurals column, “Bush League,” for The Campus.

He was an active member of the recovery community, sober himself for 49 years. 

Last April, Barnes was diagnosed with malignant pancreatic cancer. Soon it became “dramatically clear that the medical/surgical option was not viable.” 

In May, he registered for Hospice care. He also chose to access MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying), made possible by the passage of Act 39 in Vermont.

Barnes thought deeply and wrote extensively about death — and living life in the face of its inevitability. For his 50th Middlebury College Reunion in 2017, he wrote an essay about death and his “partnership” with it: “The more you think about dying, the more you think about living. Death is what gives life its significance. . . Live well; It Matters.”

In May, Barnes opened a CaringBridge page and engaged in a dialogue with those who chose to contribute. His page has had 8,000 visits. His powerful commentary runs to 6,200 words. He called this final part of his life “Moving into the Light”:

“Simply making the effort to live in the light of the universe and its goodness and strength and love and courage is what is asked of us.”

Barnes died 10 days ago, Monday, August 19.

For the past few years in the fall, Barnes had come to Middlebury for Panther football games, joining his Midd classmates Gary, Rick, and me, along with his long-time camp friend Don MacIntosh of Middlebury. 

We sat together in the old-man chairs at the top of the stadium and celebrated friendship and sports, loving one another and life. 

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Karl Lindholm Ph.D., Middlebury ’67, is the Emeritus Dean of Advising and retired Assistant Professor of American Studies. Contact him at [email protected].