That's the phrase that local builder Scotty McLean used to describe how he pitched himself to land his first job with Security Building Co. 40 years ago in Chapel Hill.

It's fair to say he's the same man now, giving the same pitch whether building John Edwards' 16,000 square foot manse or McLean Builders' more recently completed Tuscan marble and Idaho limestone 10,000 square foot ultimate bachelor pad hideaway featured in Chapel Hill Magazine last month.

Back then Scott was newly dropped out from UNC, deciding that the work of the head without the work of the hands was not for him. So he bought a brand-new tool belt and began a career.

Now he and his company are the most sought-after builders in town.

Back in '71, McLean also did what many did: With $5,000 he bought his seven acres of paradise in the woods of Chatham County. Fortified by the Whole Earth Catalog and few issues of Mother Earth News, Scott, with his new wife Joanie, pitched a tent, felled some trees, and built a log cabin. They trucked drinking water from town, bathed in Brooks' Branch and took care of their other sanitary needs in the most basic of ways.

If you see Scott driving his big white 1986 Chevy pickup around town hauling his six dogs to a job site or cruising in his rusty, trusty '57 Ford Fairlane or the '68 Dodge Dart, he'll likely be wearing a T-shirt, jeans and construction boots, no different from 40 years ago.

At McLean Building Co. headquarters in the repurposed old downtown Carrboro Post Office, you'll find him ensconced in his office complete with a Museum of Natural Wonders in two large bookcases.

One is filled with natural objects including a mummified cat, various skulls, shells, horseshoe crabs, snake skins and the like.

The other side, on permanent loan from master designer John Lindsay, includes a collection of eerily detailed matchstick sculptures and a set of nesting Russian dolls beginning with Yeltsin, and going back in time to Lenin.

Scott's explanation for this zany collection: "I like everything."

So how did he make that long strange trip to be the area's premier builder?

The hard way, like everyone else. He started building the simplest decks, moved up to remodeling projects and eventually to whole houses. Veteran award-winning local architect Dail Dixon recalls his first project with McLean in the mid '70s in the Blueberry Hill subdivision in Chatham County, a couple of 1,000 square foot spec houses.

But McLean also had the Scottish gift of gab, and as he himself tells it, one friend upon overhearing him said, "You give way too good phone to be just a carpenter." So now you can put another zero behind the size of what he builds.

Some successful people are all about building their careers, but anyone who's been around here for a couple of decades will tell you that Scott's parties are the stuff of legend. For seven years each Halloween he would buy a truckload of 300 pumpkins and invite, coax and cajole everyone he knew down to his house in the woods to carve.

Then the assembled would truck the jack o'lanterns down to the old one-lane wooden Chicken Bridge that spanned the Haw River off Highway 87, array the pumpkins on the flat rail wooden fence all along the bridge and illuminate them with scrap candles scavenged from years of dinners at La Residence Restaurant. Traffic would slow to a crawl for hours to admire these ephemeral seasonal sculptures.

Paralleling the pumpkin extravaganza was the June event of the same era, the "Anything That Floats But Boats Race and Louisiana Boil" held at an old Chatham farm pond. As with the pumpkin carving, the boat race and crawfish boil idea sprang full blown from the creative and energetic mind of Scott McLean. He was determined to build creative community and would urge everyone he knew to build a boat, getting them Styrofoam, wood or even cardboard to make it with.

Not to be outdone, each year he built his own boat. One year it was the hilariously seaworthy "Scotty's Screw, a squirrel cage contraption with fins on the outside. He and his son Jake climbed in and spun furiously across the pond, outdistancing all comers. This too ended after seven great years.

McLean then moved his family into town and continued to build houses, including in his spare time rebuilding his own house on Pawleys Island that Hurricane Hugo had almost pushed into the marsh. Serendipitously, a couple of live oak trees "caught" it and Scott winched it out of the trees and back on to its pilings. Luck of the Scottish perhaps, or as he's recently found out through DNA testing, the Ethiopian, Kenyan, Jewish or a host of other nations' blood.

While not a designer and in fact adamantly opposed to designbuild, his creativity is undiminished on the job site and off. Recently remarried, he and his wife, accompanied by kilted groomsmen and a bagpiper, led a parade of guests from their ceremony at the Forest Theatre, across campus to the Carolina Inn for what I'm sure was another of the legendary McLean parties.