By Virginia M. Wright
From our January 2020 issue
Bradford Camps, T8 R10 WELS
A few weeks before his final broadcast, Bill Green and a News Center Maine crew set out to record an episode of his eponymous news magazine program in the few remaining townships the legendary roving reporter has never visited. They didn’t get far. A rainstorm had rendered the logging roads through the unorganized territories impassable. “There were so many trees down, we had to turn back,” Green says.
But the 66-year-old, who retired in November after 47 years with News Center, vows to get to those townships someday. When he does, perhaps he’ll find a definitive favorite place. Right now, he confesses, “I don’t have one. I like visiting and moving on.”
Not surprising for a guy who has made his living telling stories about the Maine outdoors. A lifelong Mainer, Green started as a cameraman and sports reporter at Bangor’s WLBZ when he was a UMaine freshman. A few years later, he moved to WLBZ’s sister station, Portland’s WCSH, where he produced sports features that evolved into “Green Outdoors” segments on the evening news and the wide-ranging, extremely popular Bill Green’s Maine, a weekly half-hour show featuring interviews with notable Mainers, behind-the-scenes peeks at sporting and other events, and various ride-along adventures with Green himself: making snow with a Sugarloaf crew in high winds and frigid temps, fishing for stripers from a paddleboard in the Saco River, climbing Katahdin (three times).
Often, Green says, his favorite place is simply the location of some recent adventure. And so he namechecks Bradford Camps, on moose-rich Munsungan Lake, where he and his wife, Pam, spent a week last summer. “I’d been there twice for work, but that was my first time as a guest,” Green says. Ten miles north of Baxter State Park’s northern entrance and 50 miles west of the nearest town, Ashland, Bradford Camps is a deep-woods hunting and fishing lodge. “The best way to get in there is by plane, and there’s no electricity,” Green says. “Except for one other cabin, they have the entire lake to themselves. It’s gorgeous.”
But, Green quickly adds, he and Pam also hiked the Bold Coast in Cutler last summer, so now that’s right up there among his favorites. So are Hancock County, Monhegan Island, Acadia National Park, Sugarloaf, Sunday River, and his own Cumberland backyard. Green’s favorite place, in other words, is Maine — pretty much all of it. “Maine’s beauty is different from the usual beauty,” he says. “It’s not soft pastels. It’s rugged. It’s rocks and waves and jagged peaks.”