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Putt Fore the Essex Library

Find books at the library. Find videos at the library, but find a miniature golf course at the library?

Yes, on Saturday, Jan. 14 and Sunday, Jan. 15, the Essex Library will be the place to find an 18-hole miniature course. Putt Fore the Essex Library, a benefit sponsored by the Friends of the Essex Library, will turn the entire building into a playable golf layout. The fundraiser subsidizes programs and materials for the Essex Library.

On Saturday night, Jan.14, the event is designed for adults, with beer and wine included in the admission fee of $35 as well as an assortment of hors d’oeuvres.

On Sunday, planned as a family day, there will be soda and snacks for youngsters. Admission is $5 and there is no fee for children under five.

“The holiday is over and it is time for another kind of fun,” said Lisa Burkharth, president of the Friends group.

According to Essex Library Executive Director Ann Thompson, funds from the Friends pay for all magazines and periodicals, several of the databases available through the library, and museum passes to places like the Wadsworth Atheneum, the New Britain Museum of American Art, the Florence Griswold Museum, and the Connecticut River Museum.

The library held its first miniature golf fundraiser in 2019 but COVID put planning a second one on hold until this year.

Library miniature golf is the creation of Rick Bolton of Trumbull.

As a child, the was a library regular and his father was a high school golf coach. “When I was about 10, it occurred to me that the aisles of the library could be tree-lined fairways but I didn’t do anything about it for 40 years,” Bolton said.

In 2005, Bolton was a member of the newly formed Trumbull Library Foundation, and the group was looking for a fundraiser idea. Someone suggested a traditional golf tournament. And then Bolton remembered the idea he had thought about four decades earlier.

“Wait a minute. Let’s have the tournament right here in this building,” he recalled suggesting. “I went into the basement and constructed a prototype in about a week.”

The Trumbull event was a success, but with a twist. Since the Gulf Coast area was recovering from the damage done by Hurricane Katrina, the funds were donated to a library in Mississippi.

Bolton next did a second mini-golf library event in his home town of Dartmouth, Massachusetts, and this one was covered by a local television station in Providence, Rhode Island.

To his surprise, Good Morning America picked up the story. Things snowballed from there. Bolton began to receive inquiries not only from throughout the United States but also from Canada, Europe, and Australia.

Now, more than a decade later, Bolton and his brother Russ have done over 600 miniature golf courses in libraries throughout the United States and Canada. Bolton said he had just come back from creating a course at a library at Oklahoma University-Tulsa.

The libraries that are holding tournaments send Bolton their floor plan and he lays out the course.

“Few events work for people from 3 to 93, but miniature gold does,” Bolton said. And the winding course throughout the library has an unexpected benefit: people learn about sections of the library they were unfamiliar with.

“It’s a great time to explore the library. A patron who came all the time didn’t know there was a local history section until he saw it at a mini-golf event,” he said.

Bolton’s company, Library Mini Golf, provides all the equipment, clubs, balls, even scorecards. But he is aware that recording a score in miniature golf may involve some creative license. In fact, he has a one-word answer to the question of whether there is anybody who does not cheat, even a tiny little bit, at mini-golf. “Nobody,” he said.

Putt Fore the Library

Saturday, Jan.14, 5 to 9 p.m.

Sunday, Jan. 15, 12 to 4 p.m.

Essex Library, 33 West Ave., Essex

Tickets on sale at Library Circulation Desk