BROOKS – Country View Golf Club co-owner Carl Brown died Thursday morning in what police are calling an accidental drowning.

Brown, 75, was in his personal water truck Thursday around 8:45 a.m. and was filling it with a friend on one of the course’s ponds, state police Trooper Eric Verhille said. When Brown tried to turn the truck around, he drove a little too far and the truck slid down the embankment and into the pond with Brown trapped inside.

“By the time we could locate his body, he had been submerged for approximately 20 to 25 minutes,” Verhille said.

Rescue workers started CPR, but he didn’t make it, Verhille said.

Brown was a well-known but modest figure in the Maine and New England golf scene.

“I’m just a country bumpkin,” Brown said in a 2002 interview with the Bangor Daily News.

The modest Mainer would retreat to Florida with his wife, Irene, for a couple of months each winter, saying that “Bangor’s plenty of city for us.”

Brown suffered from many health problems and once said he should have died many years before.

In 1973, Brown was in a construction accident, which he described to the BDN in that interview.

“I got killed on a front-end loader in 1973,” Brown said.

For six minutes, he stopped breathing, according to the article. Then a member of his crew – the only member who hadn’t been able to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation when he’d had them trained in CPR a few weeks earlier – saved his life.

Brown also had a pacemaker and was a cancer survivor, according to information provided by his brother and golf club co-owner Steve Brown.

The fatal accident occurred near the seventh hole, about a half-mile from the clubhouse. The course is built on the old family farm and is described on the sign out front as “Maine’s Most Scenic” course.

Ralph and Eva Brown, the parents of Carl and Steve, originally purchased the 200-acre parcel as a farm in 1936, according to the club’s Web site.

In 1963, Ralph Brown sold his cows and converted about 50 acres of the farm into a nine-hole golf course. Ralph and Eva operated the golf club until it was sold outside the family in 1968.

The two sons later purchased the club, bringing it back into the Brown family.

BDN photographer John Clarke Russ and BDN writer John Holyoke contributed to this report.