“I’m the type of person, I can’t sit still”, said George Buck.

George is always on the move. At the time of our interview, he and his wife Gail had just come back from Florida where they spent their winter. His golf team had made it to the state championship. Now he was back in Rangeley with the real estate closing for Evergreen Golf Club in just a few days.

I asked him how he came to be in Rangeley.

“Oh boy,” he laughed, “this is a long story.”

Originally from Westport, Connecticut, George recalled his first visit to Rangeley. He had been dating a girl named Kim, whose father, Lou Dorsey, a teacher in Westport, was a camp counselor at Camp Wayawi on Gull Pond back in the 60’s. Dorsey had a place here and the family would summer here.

“I would come up and visit her in the summer. So, we, after a couple of years, ended up coming up and renting a place for the summer. Loved Rangeley in the summer. There’s no better place in the world to be in the summer than Rangeley, Maine.”

“We were up skiing a few years later, and we were married at the time. And so, we came off the mountain, and we saw, it was called The Last Resort at the time, it was for sale. And I was in the music business back then. I had a touring audio company. We did sound for rock bands; we traveled all over the world. I was going to Europe in a few days after that. So, we saw a for sale sign on it. We went to see Shelton Noyes; a lot of people remember him. We ended up buying the place with some partners. Two brothers ran it for a couple of years. And then I got out of the music business. And so, I came up here after those guys, they were gone. So, I basically started running the place.”

Upon the purchase of the property the named changed to The Mountain Inn, but later, the property grew to include golf.

“And then when my father died, who was a golf pro, he was a golf pro in Connecticut. Anyway, when he died, I ended up with a whole bunch of golf equipment; a golf cart with a golf ball picker and all that. So, I built the driving range. We had the driving range for a few years and then Doug Cooke and I… a couple other people, we started to build a few golf holes. So, we had four golf holes that we used for classes and so forth.”

About ten years later he made two more significant changes in his life. For one, in 1999 his wife Gail moved up here and has helped him run the business ever since.

Seondly, it was around the year 2000 when the golf course was completed.

“And then at that point, I decided to finish the golf course, bought some more land, and finish the golf course. That was like 20 years ago now, when the course was finished. Hard to believe that was 20 years ago, but that’s how long it is… more than that, 22 years ago. And that’s about it. Did I confuse you enough?” He laughed heartily.

George talks fast. He reiterated. “We bought the property in 1982. And then the driving range. My father died in 1992. I went to Connecticut. “He had a whole fleet of golf carts and all that down there. He had been at the club there for 40 some odd years. So, I went down, ran the business for the summer, liquidated everything.”

His father’s golf club where he summered was on the East Coast. However, in the wintertime he was a golf pro at the world-renowned Doral in Miami. It was there where a bunch of photos were taken and George can show you his dad  spending time with some of the most well-known celebrities of the time. Think baseball legend Mickey Mantle, Academy Award winner Sidney Poitier, or The Great One, Jackie Gleason.

So, when big band singer and television personality Beryl Miller, who was at the time co-hosting an NBC variety show with Eddie Albert (think Green Acres and Eva Gabor), it was suggested she go to George Buck’s well-known club in Westport, CT.

Well, his mother did look him up, and he wound up teaching her golf. It became her lifelong passion, and George Buck Jr. was her lifelong fan.  “She was good at anything she did, but golf was… she loved golf more than anything. So, she stopped singing and all that, and married him and took care of her two boys.”

Child rearing did not prevent her from being a phenomenal golf player who among other honors won the Southern New England Women’s Golf Association tournament ten years in a row from 1959-1968. “To win anything ten years in a row is incredible”, he said. “She would like never miss a shot. She was like a machine. She’d hit a tee shot, hit the second shot on the green and have a birdie putt all the way around. She was something else. She was one of the best golfers I’ve ever known.”

So of course, with two professional golfers as parents, George had grown up enjoying golf. However, that wasn’t his only passion. Like his mother, he has more than one passion. He also loves to ski. I asked him to tell me a little about that.

“What kind of brought us up here to Rangeley permanently was the ski area. We were skiers. I was in the  pro ski racing circuit out there, when I was in Vail, in the wintertime and then I’d come back to Connecticut in the summer.

He started ski-racing out in Vermont on a college ski team, then raced at Mt. Snow, then in his early twenties, he and his friends enjoyed some shenanigans skiing out west. When he ended up in Vail he would work in restaurants at night and raced every day.

“Every day. Yeah. Won some ski races. Never did that well on the pro circuit because there were like 100 guys trying to qualify every week for 16 spots and everybody was really good. It was very difficult to qualify. But I had a great time doing it.”

His time working at restaurants at night probably helped him with his future endeavors. He recollected the early years when the property was first purchased. “We had a nightclub downstairs where we had live entertainment two or three nights a week. And then upstairs, we ran the restaurant. And we had a little stage over in the corner and dance floor and we had bands play there. Boy, those were some late nights, Jesus.”

Besides indoor entertainment, he also wound-up hosting larger concert events.

“Where my house is, that was actually a stage. Right when I got into the sound business, I had a whole bunch of sound equipment that I brought up here. So, I said, you know, I said we should build an amphitheater out there and do some concerts, some summer concerts. And we did three or four of them. And the last one we did was The Outlaws. You remember them, right? You remember the band called The Outlaws? They were a southern rock band. They were big time. Anyway, we had a lot of bands here. We had a reggae festival and then we had some local bands and then we had some…. Who the hell was the other band? We had the Pure Prairie League. They played here.” Also, “New Riders of the Purple Sage”

They did that for about a year and after a couple of them got rained out they decided not to do it anymore. When they stopped doing the concerts, he wound up enclosing the stage all in and turned it into a recording studio which he ran for around five years. Bands from around the whole state would come to record there.

Did I mention another one of his passions is heavy metal drumming?

“And in the meantime, I was running the inn. And I was playing in the original Tom Ball band back then. I played drums in the Tom Ball Band. The original Tom Ball Band when we had a big crew. We had a crew and a bus and everything. We traveled all over the whole state. We had a big giant sound system, and we had a big lighting system and follow spots and sound men and lighting guys. It was a big deal. It was me, Tom Ball, Ross Thompson. Mike Blythe and Terry Tessio. It was a big loud powerful band too… Remember “Jerky”? We would always play at People’s Choice a lot then. You remember People’s Choice, right? (Now Moose Alley) And we used to play there, and I remember that Jerky used to say, he was a bartender there, one of the owners and a bartender, and he said, ‘You’re the only band that comes in here and all the glasses above me shake. That’s how loud you guys were.’ We were really loud. The sound system I put together was a monster sound system and it was just, it was awesome. But we packed that place, you know. You should have seen Tom Ball. He was a great front man. Aw, he’d be out there. We should have videotaped that original band. It was some band.”

When Sarge’s Sports Pub and Grub threw Tom Ball a 30^th anniversary party last year, they asked George to come out. “I hadn’t played in front of people in a long time. So I just went down there and I was laying back talking to some people and all of a sudden someone goes ‘George Buck is here. Get him up here!” I was like, aw Jesus. I hadn’t played with anybody in so long. So, I got up, and I played two or three songs. So that was fun. That was great.”

If I was here all winter long, I’d still be playing with somebody. But I’m gone all winter. Playing golf all winter.

For the past thirteen years, during the winter, George and his wife Gail live in Naples, Florida.

“Florida is great too. I play on a golf team down there. I play a lot of golf tournaments down there. Real serious stuff too. It isn’t just fun stuff. It’s high-pressure golf I play down there. So at least in these big, important tournaments, like the kind I play in Florida, you’re nervous the night before because you want to do well. You got people following you around and watching you and everything, you know, so you don’t want to miss a two-foot putt in front of 30 people.” He laughed.

“It’s a tough sport. I always tell people (he laughs) I say, ‘This is a horrible game!’ You know what I mean?”

Evergreen golf club is the first place I ever played golf at, and I know there are hundreds of others who have very fond memories from when it was any number of businesses.

Thinking back, among others, George sublet to familiar folks such as Craig Sargent, Chuck Priestley and Marge McGlidden, and then Sam with the Thai Blossom, and Johnny Field and the Powder Dreams Ski Shop. A lot of fun times at this location.

Truthfully, not only does George talk fast but George has a lot, and I mean, a lot of stories. It was difficult to pare it down and I admit it’s already a pretty long article. Perhaps he should write an autobiography like his mother did- “Lucky Star: Beryl Buck Miller, Big Band Singer, Television Star, Golf Professional”.

So, with his love of golf, love of skiing, and love of Rangeley, you might ask, why is he selling? Is he leaving?

“Oh, I’m not leaving. I’m not going anywhere. I can’t run it forever. But it’s a perfect fit. Because we can stay here as long as we want. Our house is subdivided out, like I said before, I can stay here and work as long as I want.” He warned the new owners. “I said, ‘I’m not EVER going away.’ Even after someone takes over. I said ‘I want to be a pain in the ass’. I want to be, ‘Oh we’ve got to fix that over there.’ I’m gonna be impossible. But they want us to stay involved as long as we want. I kept my house, so I’m not going anywhere.”

Lucky for us.

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