HAMPDEN, Maine — Bruce Lindberg, a teacher, administrator and basketball coach whose pioneering efforts in high school international student recruitment helped save Lee Academy, has died.
The 63-year-old Hampden resident succumbed Thursday night at Eastern Maine Medical Center of Bangor after a five-month fight with cancer, said his daughter, Ellsworth High School counselor Hope High.
An energetic, confident, compassionate man, Lindberg stayed true to form in his last days, offering reassurance to those who had gathered around his hospital bed and were “struggling to accept what was happening.”
“In one of my last conversations with him, he said, ‘You know what, Hopie? I had a great life and I have no regrets.’ And those words will ring with me for the rest of my life,” High said Sunday.
An avid San Antonio Spurs fan, Lee Academy’s former headmaster died at about the same time as former academy student Youssoo Ndoye played center in his first game for the Spurs, High said. Ndoye played for 11½ minutes in the Spurs’ 95-92 preseason loss to the Sacramento Kings.
Ollie Faulkner, Lee Academy’s dean of postgraduate operations and a friend of Lindberg’s for 30 years, said Ndoye is “among many people in the middle of pursuing things all around the world right now because he [Lindberg] gave them a chance, a start, and he supported them and guided them.”
Lindberg was born Oct. 30, 1951 and raised in Mexico, Maine, and earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Maine-Farmington in 1974. Jobs as an English teacher and basketball coach at Dirigo, Skowhegan and Ellsworth high schools followed. He earned a master’s degree in leadership and administration from UMaine-Farmington in 1992 and began work as a school administrator two years later. He served seven high schools, including Ellsworth, Bucksport and Piscataquis, until 2004.
That year he became headmaster at Lee Academy, a private high school that accepts Lee-area public school students from SAD 30. He recalled during an interview years later that members of the school’s board of directors told their new headmaster that if he didn’t develop new sources of revenue, he might be the school’s last headmaster.
Lindberg seized upon raiding the international student market in an unlikely place — Asia. International student recruitment was nothing new in Maine, but Lindberg added a twist. Essentially selling Lee Academy’s curricula overseas, Lindberg formed three schools that taught Lee subject matter to high schoolers in South Korea, the Philippines and China. He also vastly increased the number of students from those countries studying at Lee, with that number peaking at 130, about 46 percent of the school’s population, in 2013.
His efforts generated a lifeline of funding for Lee Academy and earned Lindberg a ton of frequent-flier miles. Today the school has partnerships with a school in Daegu, South Korea, the Shanghai Film Art Academy and Bangor Chinese School. It also has 72 international students, said Richard Wyman, chairman of Lee’s board of directors.
“He was the one that came in and had the first concept of really going over and doing a comprehensive recruitment effort,” Wyman said. “He was just a good businessman in that regard. We owe a lot to him. Prior to Bruce, it was scary days.”
Other public and private Maine schools, including those in Farmington, Millinocket and Orono, generate hundreds of thousands in revenue from international students and curricula sales or are launching recruiting efforts. Local education officials have said that they expect high school recruitment of international students to vastly increase when a law allowing international visitors no more than a year of study is lifted.
Lindberg retired from Lee in 2013 but returned as Ellsworth High’s interim principal, and Bucksport High School’s boy’s basketball coach, the next year. His Facebook page was filled with hundreds of accolades from admirers on Sunday.
Lindberg took on cancer “the same way he did everything else,” High said. “He was going to fight it. ‘I am going to fight this with everything I have,’ he said. He was positive and tried to protect us. ‘You kids don’t worry about this. I will be OK. I will fight this.’ Up until the end, he was positive.”
Educators and coaches all over Maine have worked or played for Lindberg, said his son, 38-year-old David Lindberg.
“He has opened so many doors for so many people,” said Lindberg, director of international admissions and men’s basketball coach at Fisher College in Boston. “He was always looking for opportunities to help kids get out and see some things. That goes back to the way he was raised.”
Lindberg was a man of big ideas and nimble gestures, friends said. He was known for standing outside his schools and warmly greeting students as they got of the buses every morning. He would find a particular book, inscribe it, and give it to a student if he thought it fit the student’s needs.
“Maybe they were halfway around the world from their parents and he became their parent. Maybe he was their guidance person,” Faulkner said. “He didn’t try to fix their problem. He just gave them inspiration to fix it.”
He had a near-photographic memory for faces and names. Lindberg would give students rides home, pay them exorbitant rates for menial labor on weekends, use his personal connections to advance their goals — anything to help them — and he was fair.
“Students with lesser academic aptitude he saw as just as valuable as anyone else, and he provided them opportunities that fit what they needed,” Faulkner said. “School was always for and about the kids with him.”
Family was perhaps most important to him. Lindberg called his children every day no matter where in the world he was, High said.
Lindberg’s touch was universal. High was gratified by the several months she worked with her father at Ellsworth High School. She saw him employing the same skills to knit personal connections with parents and students there that she saw him use when he ran Lee’s international school in the Philippines.
Occasionally, he advised her not to work so hard — perhaps ironic advice from a man known for his hard work.
“There were times he would say, ‘Hopie, it’s OK.’ I would say, ‘No, I have to do this.’ I knew about the relationship he had with kids,” High said, “but last year I got to witness that. To see that with my own eyes was so special.”
“It makes you smile to know the difference that he has made in so many people’s lives,” David Lindberg said. “You just hope that they would take a minute and pay that forward to somebody else, because that was what he would want.”