CRAFTSBURY – Library trustees joke that a recent $25,000 donation “came out of left field.” But really the surprise gift from the Yawkey Foundation was more like a slow, high-arching pitch, a Lee-phus, specifically, 50 years in the making.
photo by Craftsbury Public Library Director Susan O’Connell
The foundation, started by former Boston Red Sox owners Tom and Jean Yawkey, made the gift in honor of longtime Craftsbury resident and famed lefthanded pitcher Bill Lee.
The celebrated 1975 Boston Red Sox team’s southpaw pitcher Bill Lee chose his adopted hometown public library as the beneficiary for the donation.
“It was quite a surprise, probably the happiest surprise the library has had in years,” said Alan Turnbull, president of the Craftsbury Public Library’s governing board.
Usually the foundation targets its tens of millions of dollars in annual donations to nonprofits benefitting eastern Massachusetts and coastal South Carolina. But 2025 was not a normal year.
photo by Craftsbury Public Library Director Susan O’Connell
From April to October, the Red Sox, along with the city of Boston and seemingly all of baseball-loving New England celebrated the golden anniversary of its 1975 American League pennant-winning team. There were museum exhibits, panel discussions and cameos by former players at games.
Lee, whose 14-year professional career began with the Red Sox, attended many of those events. The World Series that year played against the formidable Cincinnati Reds was a frequent topic of his and others’ recollections.
Lee started on the mound for Boston for both Game-two and -seven. In each one, he pitched deep and left the field with his team in the lead.
“If I win Game-two, there is no Game-seven,” Lee said in a mid-January interview. “Game-six, when Carlton (Fisk) hit that home run of the 13th inning, the bells rang in New England for over 45 minutes, you know, that (next) morning, and we would have been world champs.”
But the Reds won both games, leading to the latest in a string of seventh-game heartbreaks for that era’s Boston fans.
Lee still speaks passionately about the talent of his 1975 teammates, and about the decisions by club management that got in their way.
“The ‘75 team, simple, we were good,” he said, making special note of the team’s two standout rookies that year, Fred Lynn and Jim Rice. “We were a stacked team for a while and we could have dominated the ’70s,” he said.
His fellow Red Sox players were the first to start calling Lee “Spaceman” because of the nonconformist “out there” views he didn’t hesitate to share. But the nickname stuck with sportswriters in the 1970s and early ’80s who rarely missed an opportunity to pepper their stories with his quirky quotes.
Lee’s pitching talent, unorthodox approach and lively wit continues to inspire media coverage. He has been the subject of several documentaries, as well as a 2016 full-length feature film starring Josh Duhame that dramatized his final months with the Montreal Expos. The movie focuses on how his love of the game got him through personal straits and led him into the senior league.
For the 2025 season, at age 78, he was still playing with the Burlington Cardinals, alongside the city’s former mayor Miro Weinberger.
Lee took his own star turn in the 2024 film “Eephus” inspired by the deceptively lolling pitch he made his own. In it, Lee arrives mysteriously on a small town ball field, just like Shoeless Joe Jackson in another baseball classic, Kevin Costner’s “Field of Dreams.”
Still Lee said the Yawkey Foundation choosing to make a donation in his honor was “kind of unexpected, let’s put it that way.”
That’s because the idea came from former Red Sox president and current foundation board chair John Harrington. “He and I kind of had altercations near the end of my career with the Red Sox,” he explained.
Lee was traded to the Expos in 1978, the same year as a transition in the ownership of the Red Sox franchise. The estate of Tom Yawkey, who bought the team as a brash 30-year old in 1933 and died still an active owner in 1976, sold to a three-way partnership that included Jean Yawkey.
“Tom Yawkey loved me. I loved Tom Yawkey,” Lee said. “We were close.”
Harrington, then Red Sox treasurer, became Jean Yawkey’s representative in team matters and was part of pushing through personnel changes. He went on to consolidate control of the team under a trust set up in her name and served as Red Sox president until the club was sold to its current owners in 2001.
With that history, Lee called Harrington’s decision to back a gift in his name “pretty remarkable.”
The library trustees feel the same. The nonprofit’s board plans to use Lee’s donation to increase its endowment, which now supplements the library’s budget by around $20,000 annually.
“We certainly don’t expect to spend it all in one place or in one year,” Turnbull said.
The library, which reported more than 14,586 visits and 14,740 physical items checked out in 2025, provides collections and programming much greater than are typical in such a small town, he said. In recent years, a town contribution has covered just around one-third of the organization’s annual $150,000 budget.
Increasing the size of the endowment will allow the library to continue to be an “outsized presence” in the town for years to come. ““We want to be able to maintain that without burdening the taxpayers,” Turnbull said.
For Lee, the Craftsbury Public Library immediately came to mind when the Yawkey Foundation asked where to send the gift.
The library, then in a much smaller, one-room space, was one of the first places in town he visited after purchasing property in Craftsbury in 1989. These days, he and his wife Diana can be found at the white clapboard building off Craftsbury Common at least several times a week. They use the internet to read and respond to e-mail, look up weather predictions, read the news and, of course, the Red Sox report.
He appreciates libraries in general as a bulwark in a fractious age.
“Libraries are sanctuaries for knowledge and peace,” Lee said. “We should embrace them more, all of us.”
