By Daniel Hartill,Staff Writer

AUBURN – After 18 months leading the Good Shepherd Food-Bank, Charles “Budd” Large has resigned.

The longtime businessman left to rejoin the private sector, said Michelle Gosselin, the food bank’s development director.

“We’re sorry to see him go,” Gosselin said. His last day was Oct. 28.

A national search is already under way. Until a new director is found, Ted Brown, chairman of the food bank’s board of directors, will serve as the interim leader.

In the statewide charity’s 24-year history, Large was only the second executive director.

He took over in May 2004, shortly after the death of co-founder JoAnn Pike. The Sun Journal was unable to reach Large for comment on his departure.

However, it was clearly a job that weighed on the soft-spoken leader.

Only one month after his arrival, the anxiety of raising money and running the Auburn-based facility was keeping him awake at nights, he told the Sun Journal.

Yet, his fears seemed tempered by the charity’s work to feed hungry Mainers.

“You wake up and know you’re doing a good thing,” he said.

The food bank is a kind of coordination site, where millions of pounds of donated food is sorted, stored and distributed to about 530 Maine food pantries, soup kitchens and other agencies.

Leaders estimate that more than 70,000 people are fed each month.

Before coming to the food bank, Large had worked for technology companies. In the 1980s, when Wang Laboratories was in its prime, he was the company’s Florida financial director. He worked for several start-ups and lived in Jacksonville, Fla., until the early 1990s, when he was hired to come to Lewiston-Auburn to work at Pioneer Plastics.

He settled here with his family: his wife, Kelly, and their four children, Daniel, Raynor, Carolyn and Janey.

He was working on start-ups in South Portland when someone from the food bank called.

A born-again Christian, he accepted a 30 percent pay cut to take the job.

On Oct. 5, Large unveiled a new “food mobile” outside the facility, a retooled and repainted beer truck that is used to haul food to agencies.

As he made speeches though, he was in pain, wearing a neck brace from a late-August accident. Avoiding a little dog, he had crashed his bicycle into a ditch, breaking his back in the fall.

“It was a perfect one-point landing,” Large recalled last month. Doctors said he may need major surgery to repair the fractures.

After the accident, he missed only about a day and a half of work.