On a recent cool spring day, the sound of frantic scratching at the kitchen window interrupted conversation at Peirce Webber’s home.

“Oh,” he says noticing the squirrel peering through the window, its tiny paws pressed expectantly against the glass. “He wants a peanut.”

Webber reaches into a 5-pound cellophane bag, grabs a peanut, slides opens the glass and hands over the goods.

The squirrel grabs it and darts away.

The window is closed, for now, and the conversation continues.

It’s a bit of philanthropy from his small Bangor kitchen.

Philanthropy and G. Peirce Webber are synonymous, but he doesn’t use the word much.

“I like to share,” says the 91-year-old man. “I’ve had good fortune with the land part of it and also in the stocks. In my small way I do my share.”

His “small way” has made him one of the city’s biggest – if not the biggest – philanthropists. But, his commitment to the community goes beyond writing checks.

Webber was born in 1910, one of four children born into a family that had amassed great wealth from the purchase of Maine timberlands. He was raised in the West Broadway home that now belongs to Stephen King.

After he graduated from Harvard College in 1933, Webber became the fourth generation to take over Webber Timberlands, the largest private ownership of commercial woodland in the state.

For 47 years, from a small, simple office in downtown Bangor, Webber, wearing his classic cotton work pants and suspenders, managed the 300,000 to 400,000 acres of woods and saw that the profits were divided among the 40 family owners. He retired in 1980, turning the management over to Prentiss and Carlisle Management Co. His wisdom as a businessman and an investor are legendary, but it’s Webber’s deep affection for his community and his generous commitment to it that has humbled those around him and made him a model for civic involvement and philanthropy. He has spent decades gently building and guiding the endowments and budgets of the Bangor area’s most significant institutions, such as the University of Maine Foundation, the YMCA, Husson College and Eastern Maine Medical Center’s charitable trust, Eastern Maine Charities, the Good Samaritan Agency and the Katahdin Area Council.

“He’s truly a treasure,” said Sandra Blake Leonard, a Bangor broker who serves with Webber on several investment committees. “He understands the business of investing like no one I’ve ever known.” His name alone brings a sense of respectability and integrity to fund-raising campaigns, and he has probably been the most sought after board member in the city for the past 50 years.

“He has extraordinary judgment, combined with patience and remarkable understanding of investments. He leads and guides very quietly. He’s sort of the E.F. Hutton of Bangor. Peirce listens to what committee members have to say and when it’s his turn everyone stops to listen, because he has such wisdom,” said Norm Ledwin, president of Eastern Maine HealthCare.

If there’s anyone who knows Peirce Webber, it’s his lifetime friend, Charles Bragg, former president of N.H. Bragg & Sons. Bragg, who turned 90 last December, went to kindergarten with Webber and is a virtual encyclopedia on Webber’s life.

“He was a west-sider,” Bragg said recalling the day when division between two sides of the city was deep. “Normally I wouldn’t have gotten to know a west-sider so well, but he came to school over here and his family attended All Souls Church.”

Later the two men, along with Peirce’s brother, Charles Webber, would attend Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, N.H., and share train rides back and forth.

At Phillips Exeter, Webber was captain of the tennis team, while his brother headed up the golf team.

“Peirce is a real gamer. He always plays to win. It doesn’t matter if it’s a tennis match, a game of cards or the stock market,” Bragg said.

Peirce accepts that description with a slight smile and a nod. “Yes, I guess that’s probably true.”

In 1935, the two single friends jumped into a black V-8 Ford convertible with red trim and headed to Florida to visit friends. On a Boston stop on the way home, Webber spent some time with his grandfather while Bragg took the opportunity to get reacquainted with a South Carolina girl he had met through her relations in Bangor.

Florence “Fossie” Pitts was attending Wellesley College. Bragg and Pitts spent an evening at the Copley Plaza, “the place to go in those days” to dine and dance.

A year later Webber married her. (No hard feelings, Bragg assures.)

Now when a new visitor arrives at his Webster Avenue home, Webber gently hands over a gold-framed photograph of his wife, in an elegant strapless lace gown.

“She was a Southern belle,” Webber says from the brick house they built and shared for 53 years.

Fossie Webber died in 1991.

“He still has so much love for his wife,” close friend Elanna Farnham said recently. “He speaks of her with such reverence that you can just feel the love he still has for her.”

Though Webber is quick to speak of his good fortune and the many blessings of his life. It is not a life untouched by tragedy.

In 1959, Emily Webber, the Webber’s daughter, died shortly after giving birth. She was 22.

It’s still difficult for him to talk about it.

The boy she gave birth to was raised out of state by his father, but maintains a close relationship with Webber, who has his grandson’s pictures on mantels and tables throughout his home.

The Webbers’ son, John, lives just around the corner from his father and dropped in one recent afternoon with a pocketful of walnuts for the backyard squirrels.

“They just love those walnuts,” Peirce explains, getting back to the squirrels. “They’ll do just about anything for those, but, good night they’re expensive. I give them peanuts.”

John Webber had two daughters whom Peirce speaks of with pride, but the girls were not raised in the area and until recently had no idea of their grandfather’s level of philanthropy.

Last fall, at a touching ceremony at the Bangor YMCA, Webber was surprised when it was announced that the former Camp Prentiss in Hampden would be renamed Camp G. Peirce Webber, in honor of his commitment to the organization. The ceremony was a surprise and his three grandchildren traveled here and were in the room when their grandfather was led in by his close friend Lloyd Willey.

“What a surprise that was,” says Peirce. “They did an awful good job. I thought I was going to an investment committee meeting and I’d been fussing a bit that I hadn’t received an agenda. That room was full of people. It was the first time I’d ever seen my grandchildren together in one room.”

And it was the first time his grandchildren came to fully appreciate their grandfather’s dedication to his community.

Camp G. Peirce Webber is the latest place to bear the Webber name. Many Bangor doctors enjoy office space at Eastern Maine Medical Center thanks to the Florence P. and G. Peirce Webber building and students at Husson College can now gather to socialize or study at the Webber Campus Center.

There also are countless scholarships and teaching and research awards that bear his name.

In 1980, Peirce set up a charitable lead trust, which paid annuities of $35,000 each year that were split three ways among the YMCA, the University of Maine Foundation and Eastern Maine Charities. For 20 years each organization received an annual check of $11,600.

That trust matured last month.

“It was a 20-year trust,” Peirce explains. “I never thought I’d live to see it mature.”

“When Peirce sees a need in the community he steps up,” said one of Webber’s lawyers, Calvin True. “When he saw a need for home health-care services in the area, he brought two major institutions, EMMC and Community Health and Counseling to the table to get it done. Now we have New England Home Healthcare. His contribution goes far beyond giving money.”

Though there are buildings dedicated and plaques on display, the vast majority of Webber’s contributions are given with the same quiet nature that defines him.

One area businessman once called him the city’s “unsung hero.”

“There are hundreds, I’m sure thousands of people in this community who have been touched by his generosity that have no idea it was him that gave their kid the opportunity to go to camp at the Y or have their wellness shots at the hospital,” said Norm Ledwin. “This is a man who is not flamboyant or who ever seeks recognition for anything. He never once asks for anything in return.”

“I’m not one to brag,” Peirce admits. “I’ve had nice recognition for good deeds especially in recent years. But these agencies and such that I help need a lot of help. I mean, that’s a big beautiful hospital we have here. Good night, they need help all the time.”

He now spends more time at that beautiful hospital than he would like. Three days a week he spends a big part of his day hooked up to a dialysis machine.

“It’s just the way it is,” he says. It’s not great, it wears me out on the days I have dialysis, but I need it and good night we’re so lucky that we can get that right here in Bangor. … My kidneys aren’t much good, so I need to be there or that’s it. I still get a lot of enjoyment out of life. I’m not ready for the alternative, so I go.”

And he also faithfully goes to All Souls Congregational Church each Sunday, as he has all of his life. His Tuesdays and Thursdays, which are the days he doesn’t have dialysis, are often busy with committee meetings at the YMCA, Husson College or the hospital. One recent Thursday he showed up to head the investment committee at the YMCA. The consummate gentleman, he goes to great lengths to make sure that a visitor in the room is properly introduced to everyone. As latecomers show up, he stops the meeting to make proper introductions. Peirce is in his element and it’s a good day. The stock market boomed the day before and he is smiling. A table full of knowledgeable investors and business people and a pile of stock portfolios in front of him, he began the task of ensuring that the YMCA’s money was being properly invested. It’s what he’s been doing for about every major institution and agency in the city for half a century and it’s what he loves.

On this day, men and women, dressed in fine suits and generations younger than their chairman, speak directly to him as they pitch different purchasing ideas, or ponder a sale.

“He knows more about the market than I’ll ever know,” Sandra Blake Leonard said. He has a wonderful instinct. You can’t name a company that he hasn’t heard of and knows something about. He’s extremely aware of what’s going on in the big picture.” Peirce is not big on spending money on himself. He’s never owned a Mercedes (the thought of it makes him chuckle) or a big boat. Until recently he played a golf game dubbed “Bingo, Bango, Bongo” at a bet of 10 cents a ball. When asked whether his friend lives a wealthy lifestyle, Bragg raises one eyebrow and asks, “Have you ever seen him?”

“I never once saw him look real sharp,” says Bragg, who’s prone to bow ties and dapper cardigans. “His clothes don’t always match and they look like he just dug them out of a box at the Salvation Army. Fancy clothes and such have never been important to Peirce.”

“I have my interests,” Peirce says with a sly grin and a wink. “And I think you know what they are.”

No one spends even a short time with Webber without becoming acutely aware of his love of the stock market. His wealth, he guesses, has come pretty much half and half from profits from the family’s timberlands and the stock market.

Where does he get what some call his “genius” for the market?

“It comes from a lifetime of study,” he says simply, recalling his days as a young man, reading financial journals in his downtown apartment near City Hall.

“Actually my life as a financier may have begun on my long walks from West Broadway to All Souls Church. My father would give my brother and I 5 cents apiece to put in the collection plate. On the way to church we passed by Warren’s Drugstore and would stop and buy ourselves 4 cents worth of chocolate. We’d stuff our mouths with chocolate all the way up State Street hill and then put a penny in the collection plate. I guess I felt the chocolate was a better return for my money,” he laughs.

He bought his first four stocks in 1932, much to the dismay of his grandfather.

“Oh good night, he was madder than hell. He said, ‘You mean to tell me you’re buying stocks?'” he remembers. ” In those days for most people it was only bonds they wanted. Well of course it’s been my salvation the stocks have.”

Investing in stocks three years after the 1929 crash was a risk, and today Peirce still likes a challenge.

Sitting in his living room, he gazes at a visitor through his signature round spectacles and holds out his hand. He leans forward, smiles, winks and sets his hand to trembling.

“You want that,” he says quietly, as if sharing a secret. “When my hand trembles just a bit. That’s when I buy.”

His keen knowledge is not lost on those who sit on investment committees with him and many have admitted to jotting down a tip or two that Webber tosses out. They’re referred to as “Peirceisms.”

“He’s willing to take risks. That’s kind of surprising for someone his age,” Blake Leonard said. “Many at his age have a tendency to want to pull in, but he doesn’t pull in. He’s a broad investor and has keen knowledge about where the future growth is going to be not only in our economy, but in foreign markets as well.”

So what’s he think about today’s volatile market?

“It’ll take courage and fortitude to stick with it,” he says looking out his window. “Just don’t panic. You can’t panic just because it’s all going to the devil. You’ve got to be sensible. Study. Use your head and have some patience. You’ve got to have patience right now. … I’m pretty disgusted with the high-tech stocks though. But I think they’ll come back.”

And then there’s the whole acorn thing.

Anyone who speaks of Webber talks about acorns.

“That’s my philosophy,” he says. “You plant some oak trees and you get acorns and with those acorns you get more oak trees. It’s hard to beat.”

The sign at G. Camp Peirce Webber is decorated with acorns, as are some of the awards of recognition that gather dust on his mantel.

Webber, city leaders say, has planted oak trees throughout Bangor. That’s a lot of acorns.

Trying to get Webber to explain his philanthropy is like asking a fish why it swims.

Though wealthy, Webber says his parents were never civic minded and never gave their money away.

“I don’t know. I don’t have yachts or anything like that. I’ve traveled throughout my life. I’ve been on the QE2 a few times. I’ve been to Venice, Switzerland, Rome. I don’t need anything more than I’ve got. In my case, I give my money to charity. I serve on these committees and I appreciate what these organizations do and I like to help them. I get great enjoyment from that. I really do.”

And while Webber may think globally when he’s investing, he thinks locally when he gives.

“I like to keep it here. I think this national stuff is for the birds. I made my money in Maine and I like to keep it here.”