Jim Ramey got a taste of office life back in the late 1960s.

Fresh from earning a bachelor’s degree in economics from Cal State Los Angeles, Ramey took a first job not unlike the kind held by so many other young college graduates.

It did not take him long to decide that being stuffed in a cubicle was not for him.

“I started looking at these offices that these people were working in, and they (the office occupants) were pale and I thought, ‘I don’t want to end up doing that,’” recalls Ramey.

More than 40 years after that decision, nearly all of that time spent in various course maintenance roles at Sunriver Resort, Ramey, 66, has retired as perhaps the most respected superintendent — not to mention course architect — Central Oregon has ever known.

“I ended up on a golf course so I could be outside every day,” says Ramey, whose retirement began with the new year. “And it’s been great.”

Ramey first became an assistant golf pro at Wilshire Country Club in Los Angeles in the early 1970s. After four years, he had enough of the smog and the traffic of the big city.

A skier, too, he headed north to the Pacific Northwest looking for a place to settle.

Roots

Ramey’s Southern California roots are evident in his tendency to slip a ‘man’ in on any sentence, and by his laid-back demeanor.

“I think he could get along with just about anybody,” says Bill St. Jeor, superintendent at Sunriver’s Crosswater Club, where St. Jeor began working for Ramey in 1994.

Otherwise — whether Ramey has skis on his feet or a golf club in his hands or hanging out in the log home he built himself near the Fall River, where he often fly-fishes — he is all Central Oregonian.

Which is why he never left after his first trip here in 1974.

“From the day I got here, man, I never thought of leaving,” says Ramey, who met his wife of 35 years, June, at Sunriver and raised two sons here. “This is just the most beautiful place — the sky, the air, the water. I love the mountains. Love the golf courses. The fishing is unbelievable.”

Before he came to Central Oregon, he had lived like a vagabond, visiting places that included Banff in Canada and Seattle. At the recommendation of some friends, he happened upon a fledgling resort with one quirky golf course near the small town of Bend.

He saw the little downtown homes, and figured the rent had to be cheap.

“Then I hiked to the top of Mount Bachelor that day and skied down and said, ‘Man, I’m going to live here,’ ” Ramey recalls. “I went up (to Seattle) and got my stuff and moved down here.”

Ramey’s first job in Central Oregon was as the storeroom manager at Sunriver Lodge. But his desire to work outdoors became too great, and that first summer he joined the maintenance crew on the South Course (now known as the Meadows course).

The balance between fertilizer and water, the effects of top-dressing — all of it fascinated Ramey right from the start.

“Mowing greens every day and trying to figure how you make the greens the best you possibly can all the time, and what are those ingredients, that’s what got me going in golf-course maintenance,” says Ramey.

With no formal education in golf-course maintenance, Ramey turned the South Course into his classroom. He raked traps and mowed greens, tees, fairways and roughs and rebuilt bunkers.

He became the irrigation technician, then moved up to assistant superintendent and later the superintendent of that South Course.

“It was all on-the-job training,” says Ramey, who retired as the resort’s director of agronomy. “I did everything on that South golf course.”

Among the best

Ramey quickly became a turf expert.

“He just has an eye for it,” says longtime friend Larry Gilhuly, who oversees turf quality for the Western Region of the United States Golf Association and first met Ramey in the late 1970s.

Ramey’s resume is impressive: He grew in two transformational golf courses, the Woodlands in 1981 and Crosswater in 1995, that each upped the ante on Central Oregon golf. He has kept Sunriver Resort’s three regulation courses manicured for dozens of championships, including The Tradition, a Champions Tour major championship played at Crosswater from 2007 through 2010.

With a passion and talent for architecture, Ramey designed Quail Run Golf Course in La Pine, the final nine holes at Crooked River Ranch, shaped Missing Links Golf Center in Redmond, and co-designed Caldera Links at Sunriver Resort.

Crosswater might have been his baby, but “every little project has been so cool,” Ramey says.

Along the way he has developed a reputation for being an expert’s expert in golf maintenance.

“He’s been an enormous help to me,” says St. Jeor, who has known Ramey for nearly 30 years. “He has been a real influence with a lot of superintendents around here.”

What impresses the USGA’s Gilhuly most is Ramey’s environmental stewardship, including preserving wildlife habitats such as the famous bald eagle nest off Crosswater’s 13th green.

Gilhuly says Ramey’s passion for animals is clear when the two of them tour the course together and Ramey becomes part Jack Hanna, the renowned animal expert.

“When he points out those eagles, he can tell you all about them and how old they are,” Gilhuly says.

Ramey was a pioneer of sorts in his sparing use of chemicals, such as pesticides and fertilizers, Gilhuly adds. And in 1999 Crosswater became the first course in Central Oregon to be named an Audubon Sanctuary by the Audubon Society of New York State.

“Jim doesn’t talk about it, he does it,” Gilhuly says of using sustainable practices in golf course maintenance. “He is really in tune with nature. He would be the perfect model as far as a sense of what is going on a golf course for a superintendent in the environmental-sustainability area.”

Hanging around

Ramey still lives with his wife in the log home they built. And like any grandfather, he looks forward to visits from his adult sons and his grandchild.

He plans to consult for Sunriver. But he wants to get back to playing golf.

“I still think about golf and my golf swing all the time,” says Ramey, a solid 10 handicap. “I am gripping a golf club all winter and making golf swings all winter.

“I’ll keep doing that until I just can’t do it anymore.”

Last fall he and June visited the golf courses of Ireland. A few years earlier they played the famed links of Scotland.

“Now I don’t need to go anyplace,” Ramey says with a laugh. “It’s too hard to travel.”

Most of all, Ramey will continue to be a Central Oregonian, with even more time to do all the things — golfing, fly-fishing, photography and particularly skiing — that brought him here in the first place.

“That’s how I wanted to live my life,” Ramey says. “That’s why I ended up living here, because I wanted to be able to do that every day that I possibly could.”