Decades of Baking the College's Bread in Silence

Author: Lindsey Whitton

The large kitchen in the basement of Proctor Hall is a fairly quiet place. Workers dressed in white are all busy marinating chicken strips, chopping vegetables or cleaning off the counters. They talk to each other as they work but nobody yells and there is no loud music blaring.

For three of the workers, however, the room is completely silent. Two of the bakers, Pat Broughton and Keith Payne and one of the pot washers, Jimmy Greene, are all deaf. All three of the men fill important roles in Dining Services and have been working at Middlebury College for most of their lives. Broughton, the head baker, has worked in the bakery for 42 years. Payne has been baking for the College for 38 years, and Greene is a 36-year veteran of Dining Services.

Broughton, a tall man with a friendly, enthusiastic smile, started working part time for the College bakery when he was a student at Middlebury Union High School (MUHS). He had matriculated to MUHS after going to the Austine School for the Deaf in Brattleboro, Vt.

When he was a student at the high school he was given no special assistance or interpreter, and there were no special education classes or concessions made because of his disability.

Broughton credits his friends with helping him get through high school when he never heard a single word that his teachers said.

Charlie Sargent, Dining Services' buyer and the meat shop receiving supervisor, who is the most capable sign language translator currently working there, said that Broughton was "a basketball star" in high school. Broughton graduated from MUHS in 1959, and immediately began working full time at Middlebury. He now has a wife and four children..

Broughton grew up on Weybridge Street, two doors down from his friend Payne, who is five years his junior. Payne also went to the Austine School for the Deaf, but continued his education for two years at Gallaudet College for the Deaf in Washington, D.C., before returning to Middlebury to work with Broughton in the bakery. Payne has a wife and three children. And he still lives on Weybridge Street.

Both Broughton and Payne expressed that they have had no real problems communicating, either within the College community or the greater Middlebury area. They write notes if there is ever a problem, but both men are very capable lip-readers. Sargent noted that both men are "very well known in the community."

Practically everyone in the kitchen knows a little bit of sign language and there is a "big interest in learning," Sargent added. "A lot of us couldn't learn French," he said (and signed) "but we learned sign language." Broughton and Payne laughed knowingly.

The bakers work from 4:45 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Broughton said that he tries to go to bed by 10 p.m. at the latest "depending on who is playing basketball," he signed.

Both men love their jobs. They do all the baking for the four dinning halls on campus and Middlebury Catering. When Broughton first started working for Middlebury, he had no idea how to bake. He learned all of his initial skills from longtime Middlebury employee Rodney Degray, even though Degray only knew the most basic sign language.

The baking for the College is extensive — Middlebury does over one million dollars worth of catering each year and some of the baked goods that are requested are very eleborate. The bakers make over 6,000 cookies for graduation weekend alone.

They have an enormous, industrial sized oven that holds 16 sheet pans on rotating racks and is equipped with a huge flashing light that accompanies the loud buzz of the timer.

The phone is also equipped with a flashing light, and there are three TIY telephones (special phones for the hearing impaired that involve a keyboard and a screen that translates voice into words) on campus, one of which is in Proctor.

Broughton said that his favorite part of the job was when the College invested in expanded training for both the bakers and the chefs. Two years ago, bakers and chefs from the New England Culinary Institute were hired for a month to work in the kitchen at Proctor. The bakers have also traveled to Buffalo, Montreal and Boston to learn how to make special types of bread and bake in a European style. Broughton signed that he "liked to make fancy things."

Nestled in the back of the big kitchen, in a warm corner heated by the huge oven, the bakers have worked for decades.

They may not have ever heard the sounds of the kitchen, but in their line of work, hearing is secondary to smelling and tasting. The hundreds of chocolate chip cookies, dozens of pecan pies and stacks of fresh bread loaves fill the air with a soft, sweet aroma.

And if Broughton or Payne were ever to wander through the dining halls, they would see students filling their pockets with cookies, gobbling down entire loaves of bread and smiling over generous pieces of delicious, homemade pie.