Frank McGrane has been coming to Waterville Valley since he was 15 years old, and buying property here since he was 24. Episode ten of Waterville Unwrapped traces that arc — from a kid from East Boston sneaking a peek at Bobby Kennedy in a bathroom doorway to a longtime Rey Lane homeowner who has watched the valley’s condo market boom, bust, and slowly reinvent itself.
A Kennedy in the Dunfey House
The episode opens with a detour: Frank recounts writing a WigWag article about a trip to Normandy with his son, one that unexpectedly connected back to Waterville through a chance museum photo and a story about Bob Dole’s World War II platoon. But the real origin story arrives once hosts Charlie and Ken steer things back to “why Frank’s here.”
At 15, Frank came up from East Boston with his older brother, tagging along on what was meant to be a date-avoidance babysitting arrangement. He needed a bathroom, got waved into a house by a Boston cop pulling security detail, and found himself face to face with Bobby Kennedy sitting in a chair — the house in question being the old Dunfey place, a name Frank knew from home because the Dunfeys were close to the Kennedy family back in East Boston. Decades later, a woman would recognize him at the post office as “the guy who met Bobby Kennedy in the Dunfey house.” It’s a story he’s told more than once, and it’s still true.
A $25,000 Condo and the Making of a Regular
Frank’s real move to Waterville started with his future wife, whom he met on Cape Cod in 1974. Weekend ski trips led to a detour down an unfamiliar road — at her suggestion — into a valley that, at the time, was mostly houses and one convenience store called Jugtown on Route 49 near where Jennings Peak Road now stands. A summer visit sealed it: chairs in the Mad River, a look at the golf course (run by a pro named Gifford Nutbrown, a name Frank still can’t get over), and a sales pitch at Windsor Hill that ended with a $25,000 one-bedroom deluxe, financed — coincidentally — through the same Bank of Boston building where Frank worked.
He and his wife married in 1978, upgraded to a three-bedroom unit, and eventually bought the Rey Lane house they still own today — built in 1988, part of a small subdivision of single-family homes on Osceola Road. Frank and his wife weren’t the first owners; they bought it from the McKelvey family and have lived there roughly 25 years since. The house next door sits on the golf course, and Frank has been sneaking onto the fairway through his neighbor’s driveway ever since.
The Golden Eagle Auction
One of the episode’s sharpest historical threads is Frank’s eyewitness account of the Golden Eagle foreclosure auction, tied to the real estate bust of the late 1980s and a change in federal tax law under Reagan that ended aggressive mortgage amortization. Frank, who spent his career in bank workout and commercial lending, walked through the mechanics: units that were supposed to generate $20,000 apiece toward a developer’s loan never sold at that price, the market cratered, and Frank stood at the auction watching prices slide from the $30,000s down before creeping back up as fewer units remained. He wasn’t a fan of the “Manhattan-style” condo concept at the time — driving two hours to end up indoors somehow felt wrong to him — but he’s since come around, noting the format serves plenty of people well, from ski-season renters to summer-only owners who hand off their keys for the winter.
What’s Changed, What Hasn’t
Much of the conversation turns to occupancy: Frank’s stretch of Rey Lane has emptied out over the years, with neighbors who show up only a handful of weekends a year, and he’d like to see more full-time families using the town rather than leaving homes dark most of the year. He cites an old resident survey where the top reason people gave for living in Waterville Valley wasn’t the mountain or the golf course — it was the outdoors, the hiking, the 4,000-footers. He also draws a comparison to the old Mount Washington Hotel and Bretton Woods playbook: build something worth traveling to, then make it easy for people to get here. (He also drops in, unprompted, the story of why The Shining was never filmed at the Mount Washington Hotel — the owners at the time turned Stephen King down, worried it would be bad for business.)
Asked about the gondola, Frank recalls being told back in the 1970s it would take five or six years to build. He still thinks it will happen and that it should — connecting the mountain and the town was Tom Corcoran’s original goal — while noting the ski industry itself is mature and narrow, limited by cost, with almost no new ski areas built from scratch in decades.
Home Ownership, Waterville Style
Frank closes with some hard-won homeowner wisdom: after 50 years of owning houses, he’s convinced nobody ever really owns a home — the home owns you. He recalls quoting a $17,000 painting estimate in the early days of his house (dark green with “turd brown” trim) and deciding to just do the repainting himself instead. Finding contractors in the valley remains difficult to this day, he says, since the good ones are stretched thin across multiple builds.
Despite the upkeep, and despite being “long in the tooth” as he puts it, Frank calls Waterville Valley heaven-kissed — a place he still counts himself lucky to have found, and one he hopes sees more young families move in for good.