BillLindau

The Blogger's mini-biography

This is a combination of bios originally entered into my profile at Classmates.com. I want to keep this around for when after my membership in Classmates.com expires -- Bill Lindau
I've been living in Hamlet since the summer of 1990. Lately I'd been free-lancing for The Moore County Independent, and before that, The Pilot. My sister Sara lives in Aberdeen and has been a reporter for The Pilot for almost 19 years. I never got married. Just me and my PBS programs and my arts. I've been in three plays this year and had small roles in two movies and a TV show. I did some comedy at a couple of rural nightclubs last year, and in 2005-06 I took voice and piano lessons. I haven't quite gotten my singing career off the ground, but when my schedule permits, I do my stuff in the voice lab at Sandhills Community College, on Monday afternoons.
High school
I was a late bloomer when it came to girls. One of my two biggest crushes was on one of my teachers. A 27-year-old woman who taught dramatics and sophomore English in the first year of Pinecrest (1969-1970) was one of those objects of my affection. She's 10 years my senior. She lived in an apartment close to my home on Ashe Street. I used to tell her my parents took the keys to the family car from me and I needed a ride to school.She knew what I was up to, but she didn't say anything about it until years later, when I saw her again and we went out to dinner.My next biggest crush was on a Class of 1972 grad. That crush took place the same academic year. Karen K. moved to Southern Pines from Greensboro in the winter of 1970. She transferred from Grimsley. She made friends with Lois Cowan, and I'd talk to them during a free mod at the library. After awhile I walked Karen to her classes. In the summer I asked her to go on a double date with Patty Quillen and Mike Porter, but it didn't work out. She had a boyfriend when she moved here and she'd go back and see him every once in awhile. The next school year she dated Alan Stewart, a Class of 1970 graduate attending North Carolina State. I called her up a few times in my senior year and we talked a lot, but never became more than friends.Teachers who inspired me the most: Brenda Phelps, the late Sue Owen and the late Harold Sadler. Brenda Phelps got me interested in dramatics; Sue Owen in writing and Harold Sadler in history and not goofing off and using my head in school.Great memories: Oh, it'd take volumes.Doing the two plays in which I had the lead was definitely among them.So was hanging out in the drama lab with Scott Ivey, Mike Porter, Robbie Buffkin (later Mrs. Rod Harter), Susan Williamson, Andy Faircloth and Lord knows who else. Chanting "M-M-Muscatel!" with Mike Porter.So was letting one blast in Fred Hurst's all-male English class. We had wooden seats that could carry sound and I gave out with one that you could hear all the way down the hall. Mr. Hurst just went ballistic!
"Don't think because there's no girls in the class you can do that. It's uncouth as h---! You want to PBLFLLLT, you go to the bathroom."
Before the class was out, somebody else blasted one.
Other memories:
* Sneaking out of school with a certain friend of mine's kid sister (she was a frosh, I was a senior) and taking a drive up and down the highway
* The parties at Robbie's old cabin just south of Pinebluff
* Swimming in Pinebluff Lake and Highland Trails. The time we tried to get my dog to swim at Highland Trails and the poor terrified animal about clawed me to death in the water
* The beach trip with Billy Schloegl, Gary Shoe, Larry Matthews, Tim Mercer and Greg Jett. We all got stinking, barfing drunk. One time I barfed in one of Greg's boots
* The post-graduation trip for some of the folks in the Class of 1970
* Going to the rock festival at Love Valley in July 1970, with Steve Warlick, Bobby Henderson and Mike McDonald
* Another bit of GI humor: The late Gary Williamson loved to let 'em rip. But he quit doing it after Neil McInnis, the physical science teacher at East Southern Pines, suspended him from class for two days and wouldn't let him in without a note from the doctor
* "Great Expectations" in play form by Harriet Welsh's ninth-grade English class. Ginger Worsham played a wheelchair-bound Miss Havisham and Robert Buchholz played the adult Pip. One scene looked more like "Kiss of Death" in which Richard Widmark pushes a crippled woman down a flight of stairs. That's exactly what happened when Buchholz wheeled Ginger offstage. You heard a kalump-lump-lump, followed by a cry of pain (Ginger wasn't seriously injured, fortunately). The play was such a mess that poor Miss Welch was crying. Neither she nor any of the other freshman homeroom teachers came back after that year (1967-68).
Plus many more.If I could do it all over again, I'd do some of it. Definitely not all of it. There's a lot I don't miss, such as being picked on, and the arguments with my parents.
College
The summary of my college years:
1971-1973 -- Went to East Carolina.
Took a medical withdrawal in the Spring quarter of 1973. I had a nervous collapse and went into therapy, including stays at Duke and Highland hospital. Zelda (Mrs. Scott) Fitzgerald was one of Highland Hospital's (in Asheville) most famous patients.
I didn't like it there. I did all sorts of dope.
But it wasn't a total cock-up.
In my freshman year I was in "Much Ado About Nothing", in a non-speaking role and a guard on the night watch. That was kind of fun.
I went home about every weekend in my freshman year, except during rehearsals for "Much Ado About Nothing." I went home about every month in my sophomore year until I quit early in the spring semester.
Sometimes the guys would have a panty raid. One part of the campus featured a high-rise women's dorm surrounded by men's dorms. The guys would whoop it up outside the women's dorm and the women would throw panties down.
I hitchhiked home for the Christmas holidays in my freshmen winter semester and went up to Sandhills, when classes were still going on. A bunch of us rode out to the edge of the baseball field and got wasted. I kept hollering "Panty raid!" and cracking everybody up.
We went back to the dining area just wiped out. I mentioned to Jeff, Barbara, Steve and Paul what it'd be like if things happened in reverse, like snot going back into your nose. Jeff was laughing so hard he was crying. I was, too, when I wrote this down.
In the summer of 1972 I worked at the Blue Ridge Assembly, a YMCA-sponsored religious resort in Black Mountain. I enjoyed it there. My roommate was a Dane named Karl Fynbo. He, Paul Ballantyne and Carl Paulson were among my best friends. I met Becky Webb there and fell in love with her.
After spending the spring and summer of 1973 in therapy, I started to go to Sandhills Community College. I quit in the winter quarter 1973-74, but went back in the summer of 1974 and got my Associate in Arts degree in May 1975. I took creative writing for both college credit and as a continuing education course, under the late Page Shaw.
I took laboring jobs and wrote book reviews for The Pinehurst Outlook between the time I finished at Sandhills and the time I went to the University of North Carolina and got my B.A., in Comparative Literature.
At UNC I worked at Swensen's Ice Cream Parlor, the Chez Condoret and the Robert B. House Undergraduate Library, among other places.
The only school organization I joined was the Association of International Students. I served as a counselor in an orientation camp for incoming exchange students. Many of those foreign students became close friends, such as Sue Claire Yates (England); Georg Janze and Hans-Gerd Loehmannsroeben of the University of Goettingen (West Germany); and three Japanese girls: Yoko Mitsuhashi, Keiko Goda and Fusako ("Sako"), whose last name I forgot. Yoko and I wrote each other for awhile after she went back home.
After graduation I did something amazing: Went to England and worked in a pub in Nottingham. I spent a week traveling around the European continent by train. I was abroad from late August to late November.

Labels: Blogger's biography

posted by Bill Lindau @ 7:39 PM