Back then Steve Pound could fly. In 1968, he had a sweet jump shot. He could take the ball to the basket. He scored 40 points per game and became a legend in Millinocket, leading Stearns to the state championship.

“The stories make you better as you get older,” Pound said with a laugh.

The 52-year-old Pound is more grounded these days. And he is coming home. After spending much of his adult life as an educator in Canada, Pound will become Union 60’s school superintendent in July. Union 60 comprises the towns of Beaver Cove, Greenville, Kingsbury, Shirley and Willimantic.

“I’m really looking forward to going there. I feel good in the fact that I’m going somewhere I want to go. I had other offers and I chose to go to Union 60,” Pound said in a phone conversation from his home in Wolfville, Nova Scotia.

That’s the now of Steve Pound’s life. The back then was so different. It was the days of Chuck Taylor high top sneakers or “Chucks.” It was small town America where youngsters watched high school varsity athletes with a reverence.

“It is that sense of community,” Pound said. “If you can achieve at certain levels, that builds on itself. If you talk to people who grew up there, they’ll tell you [Millinocket] was like a Mecca of basketball for Maine.”

Pound watched the Jon MacDonald and Terry Carr Stearns teams of the early 1960s and dreamed of putting the uniform himself. But the main constant in Stearns basketball was George Wentworth.

“They called him ‘The Fox,'” Pound said. “But we called him coach.”

The coach won 478 games, including six Eastern Maine titles, four state Class LL (big school) championships and the 1963 New England Championship.

“It was the aura of the time. It was a small town and here we were competing with Bangor, Portland and South Portland. That was quite something. We kinda violated the category, a small school competing on that level,” Pound said.

Pound’s turn to play finally came and at the start of his senior year in 1968 the feeling was that the team could be special.

“Coach gathered us around at a practice and I’m probably embellishing the story a little but he looked at Leo Bissonette and said, ‘You’re our tallest player, you’ll be our rebounder.’ Then he looked at Rod Morrison, one of our co-captains, and said, ‘You’re our best defensive player so you’ll stop the other team’s best player.’

“He told Paul Kerwock, ‘You’re the best ball handler, so you handle the ball.’ He told John Neal, ‘You’re the youngest. You’ve got the most to learn. But you’ll start.’ And he went on to be a very good player,” Pound said.

And Pound, what did the coach tell him to do?

“He told me I was the shooter, so I was supposed to score.”

And score he did. He opened the 1968 season with 68 points in a win over Caribou. He defied logic at 5-foot-9 by taking the ball to the basket against much taller opponents and he fired away from the outside as well.

“If you shoot as much as I did some are bound to go in,” Pound said.

And he kept on scoring, finishing the season with 36 points, including a jumper with 11 seconds to go in overtime that beat South Portland in the state championship game. Stearns finished the year with a 19-3 record.

Pound left the United States for college to attend Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, where he was coached by Gib Chapman, the former coach at Ricker College in Houlton and one of his teammates was a former adversary, Terry Condon of Presque Isle.

His coach may have changed but his scoring didn’t. He was the Canadian collegiate most valuable player in 1970 and 1972 and Acadia won the Canadian national championship in 1971. In 1997, Pound was inducted into the Acadia Sports Hall of Fame.

Pound said he played basketball for two years in England in that country’s professional league and was in the English Guinness Book of Records for scoring 58 points in a game there.

“Of course, that was a long time ago. As I get older and start to expand it’s easier to convince people that I played football instead of basketball,” Pound joked.

He earned a Ph.D. in educational administration from Laval University in Quebec and then served as a teacher and principal at Quebec High School before returning to his alma mater, Acadia University, as the school’s executive director of associated alumni.

Pound recently visited Greenville and is excited about the union’s potential.

“I’ve met the staff and I’ve met the head of the hospital and the town manager and they’re very proactive. I think we can have those three areas work together to help build a vibrant community,” Pound said. “In five years time, I would love people to say this is a great place to have your kids educated and a great place to live in.”

Don Perryman can be reached at 990-8045, 1-800-310-8600 or dperryman@bangordailynews.net