Last week I paid my final respects to an old friend, Buck Lester.

When I say “old friend,” it needs qualifying. I knew Buck for 50 years, but were on friendly terms only for the last 35 or so. It’s a long story and in order to understand it, you need to know about Paul Smith’s College during the Buxton years.

Dr. Buxton, PSC’s third president, took over the reins when the joint was tottering on bankruptcy. He built it up and into the black, and ran it single-handedly and successfully for the next 35 years. That said, he was also a exotic mixture of personalities — one part 19th-century gentleman, one part Byzantine potentate and one part egalitarian.

He subscribed to the theory of “He who rules least, rules best,” so almost nothing was in writing (including our contracts). That would unsettle people who love to have everything spelled out in detail, but it worked fine for us. Essentially, everybody did their jobs and when they ran into a hassle, they either figured out how to resolve it, or bagged it.

A perfect example: Jack Skelley started teaching “Forest Recreation” in his mid-20s. The Reccies were always building various structures — bridges, lean-tos, gazebos, you name it. Early on, he needed material for a project and went to the comptroller for the money. The comptroller, for reasons known only to God Almighty Hisself, refused to fund him. So Jack did the logical thing — he appealed to his boss, Bill Rutherford, the dean of forestry. And when he did, he found out exactly how things worked at Old Siwash.

After he made his case, Dean Rut ended the issue in one sentence.

“Look, Skelley,” he said, “I hired you to solve problems, not to tell me them.”

Jack, always a quick study, got the message loud and clear … and figured out how to solve his problem. First he scrounged up a bunch of the guys in his class and a couple of pickup trucks. Then they went to the dump, where they salvaged what he needed.

I said Dr. B. was an egalitarian, and he was (though he would never have stomached the label “democrat.”) Essentially, there was no status hierarchy. Regardless of their job, everyone got treated the same. In effect, it was a level playing field, where, for example, the teachers got no more props than the cafeteria workers. To use the old cliche, it was every man for himself. So if someone gave you crap, it was up to you to figure out how to deal with it. Mike Rechlin summed it up best when he said, “Back then, PSC had lots of strong egos.”

The reading room

In the summer of 1967, li’l Dopey Boy wandered into this scene.

I was working for Bill Gokey in the maintenance department and spent almost the whole summer pushing and dumping wheelbarrows of gravel for a new septic system in the Gabriels campus. It was hard work, but I liked it because I was outdoors getting good exercise. It finished when I had one week left there. Then Bill moved me back to the main campus and assigned me to work with Buck and Mr. Riley, getting the dorms ready for fall semester. If Bill thought by doing this he was starting one small happy family, he was sadly mistaken.

Here’s the thing: Buck and Mr. Riley had worked together for years. They liked each other and they knew what they were doing. I, on the other hand, had no idea what was involved in that work, and to put it mildly, I was not liked by Buck.

It wasn’t due to anything I said or did, because I never had a chance to do either. Instead, when I showed up at the dorm on Monday morning and reported to Buck as told, he said, in his usual gruff manner, “You got a book on you?”

A weird question, I thought, but since I always carried book, I answered in the affirmative.

“Good,” he said. “Now go in there.”

He pointed at a dorm room.

I did as told.

“Now close the door and read,” he said, “We’ll get you for lunch.”

So that’s what I did, and that’s what he did. And after lunch, it was the same thing.

Every morning I’d go to the dorm, go in a room and read till lunch. Then after lunch, I’d go back and read till my shift was over. It was a perfect solution to what could’ve been a sticky situation: I read a bunch of books, and Buck never saw my face.

At the end of the week, I left for college, never having told anyone what’d gone on that last week. Hey, I was a kid and didn’t know much about much, but I did know enough to keep my mouth shut and not rock the boat — any boat.

The thaw warms … somewhat

In January 1973, I came back to PSC as a faculty member. While the faculty and almost all the staff were friendly and kind to me, the maintenance guys, including my old nemesis Buck — were far less so. I understood it — I was, after all, a newbie, a kid.

But they were friendly to the young guys in the forestry faculty, and I understood that, too.

Back then, forestry drove the school, since three-fourths of the students were stumpies. The forestry faculty were all hardcores who did serious manual labor and were out in the woods at least half their time. They were uber-machos. To the maintenance guys, they were The Real Deal.

The English teachers, on the other hand, couldn’t have been considered bigger sissies if their last job had been dancing in the Jewel Box Revue.

Then in the mid ’80s, this all changed. Suddenly Buck was friendly to me. OK, maybe not friendly in the warm-fuzzy, ole buddy old pal, kind of way. But friendly in the Buck way. This meant when I said hi to him, he actually said hi back. And even more amazing, he started calling me by name.

So what caused this earth-shaking change?

Buck had started working at PSC in 1951, at the school’s infancy, so he was one of Old Guys. But he was the youngest one. So in the mid ’80s when the most of them retired, Buck was the only Old Guy left. In fact, there were only a handful of employees who’d been there during the Buxton years (read that The Glory Days), and believe it or not, I was one of them.

A telling anecdote: During The Glory Days if we wanted something from the maintenance department — a bookshelf, a broom, a window fixed, whatevs — we just dropped in and told whoever was there what the problem was and they fixed it when they could. Later, with the new regime, we had to submit work orders for such things. Everything took longer to get done, if it got done at all, but at least there was a paper record.

One day I lost my office key and I did what made sense — I went to the maintenance shed and asked Buck to make me another key.

“You’re supposed to have work order,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “But I don’t. And I don’t wanna have to make the secretaries lock and unlock my door all damned day till I actually get a new key.”

He shook his head.

It wasn’t a “No” kinda head-shake, so much as a gesture of mild disgust.

Then, without saying anything, he made me another key.

When he handed it to me he said, “See, there’s no office number on it.”

This meant, officially, the key didn’t exist. There’d been no work order, so no record of nuthin nowhere. He did it as a personal favor to me without having to actually admit it.

Even though my office door had the lock changed at least two more times, I kept the key and still have it on my chain. It says more about Buck than Buck ever said to me.

Last week I told a friend I was going to Buck’s calling hours.

“I never knew Buck,” he said. “Was he a nice guy?”

I was taken aback. I thought about the Bucks I knew — the master craftsman, the man of undying loyalties, the good-hearted grump.

Finally I came up with what I thought was an adequate answer.

“Buck wasn’t a nice guy in the usual sense,” I said. “But he sure was a good one.”