With only 36,000 residents in Deschutes, Crook and Jefferson counties combined, Central Oregon circa 1950 was no metropolis.

Yet plenty of fine golf was being played in these parts in the 1950s and ’60s.

“A lot of great players come from Central Oregon,” says Jim Wilkinson, a 67-year-old teaching pro who grew up in Redmond.

Wilkinson should know. A two-time junior college All-America golfer at Central Oregon Community College in the 1960s and a Senior PGA Tour player in the 1990s, he is considered by many to be the best golfer this region has ever produced.

So who else was among the best?

One was Prineville’s George Beechler. A mortician by trade, Beechler won the 1955 Oregon Amateur Championship and reached the final of the United States Golf Association’s U.S. Senior Amateur Championship in 1965 and 1966 before moving to California in 1968.

“He (Beechler) was a great player — way, way better than people realize,” Wilkinson insists. “He is probably, other than myself, the best player who ever came out of Central Oregon.”

Owen Panner, a former University of Oklahoma golfer who moved to Bend in 1949, was considered among the elite players in the area while dominating Bend Golf Club with 10 consecutive club championships beginning in 1951.

Panner, 87 years old and still serving as a federal judge in Medford, played often through the ’50s, but he largely quit the game shortly thereafter. “My daughter one night at dinner said, ‘Dad, you’re not very popular out there,’ ” Panner recalls. He asked his daughter why she would say that. “She said, ‘Well, you’ve just won too long.’ ”

But Panner had plenty of scratch golfers among his competitors.

Prineville lumberman Fred Hudspeth and Madras’ Millard Porter, who won the 1962 Mirror Pond Invitational, frequently competed in the most important local tournaments, according to The Bulletin archives. The five Close brothers, all of whom were founding members of Prineville, often contended at the Hudspeth Invitational.

Redmond’s Everett Reynolds, who served as Juniper Golf Club’s superintendent for most of the 1960s, was a scratch golfer himself and multiple winner of Juniper’s club championship.

Bend’s Mike Currie, a member of a prominent golfing family (younger brother Phil won the 1977 Pac-8 Conference championship for the University of Oregon), won two of his four Mirror Pond titles in the 1960s.

Earl Boothe might have been unique among Central Oregon’s scratch players and a symbol for Juniper Golf Club’s humble beginnings.

“He was one of those kind of guys that you didn’t want to get into a money game with,” recalls Reynolds, 88, who was a friend and frequent playing partner of Boothe’s. “He’d come in wearing bib overalls and looking like he didn’t know nothing. And then he’d go out and whip ya.”