I loved to hear Buddy Gist tell his stories.

He'd talk in a scratchy voice full of syncopated rhythm, letting his fingers dance as he regaled me with colorful, irreverent tales about him and Miles Davis, his good friend.

Buddy would tell me these stories everywhere. At UNCG. In the downtown library. On a street corner, where I'd stop, roll down the window and ask, “Buddy, where you need to go?”

He'd always get in. And before he got out, he'd launch into some story about Miles, John Coltrane or some other famous person he knew.

Often, he started his story the same way: “Hey, listen, did I tell you about ….”

Buddy walked everywhere in Greensboro in a sharp suit, with ramrod posture and a shock of hair swept back away from his slender face. He looked like a modern-day Frederick Douglass wherever he went.

And over the years, I often wondered how Buddy knew so intimately these household names who had helped shape our idea of music, popular culture and black America over the past half century.

I admit, I was skeptical. But all I had to do was stand outside UNCG's Music Recital Hall and realize Buddy was speaking the truth.

There it was, under Plexi-glass, protected by alarms. The Horn. It's the very trumpet Miles used to record “Kind of Blue,” the 1959 recording that became one of the most influential jazz albums ever made.

Miles gave The Horn to Buddy. And Buddy gave The Horn to UNCG.

I wrote about that gift more than a decade ago for Greensboro's local newspaper, the News & Record, and afterward, I saw firsthand how that one donation brought in students, attracted big-name performers and spurred UNCG to rename its jazz studies program after Miles.

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DISPLAY OF PRIDE After Buddy Gist, left, donated Miles Davis’ trumpet to UNCG, Steve Haines, right, set to work finding an appropriate display for it. Luckily, he found Maxim Construction, whose owner was a huge Miles Davis fan and thought it an honor to build and donate the $3,000 custom case. In April 2002, the School of Music celebrated Gist’s gift by hosting a big New Orleans style dance and then pulled the velvet off the case. It was a proud moment.

Over the years, I'd watch students cluster around The Horn and pose in front of it, like it was a famous landmark. And really, it was.

Musicians from near and far would tell me how they would always make a pilgrimage to UNCG's music building just to see what they called the Holy Grail of Jazz.

And every time, I thought of Buddy.

He's a complicated man, Arthur Taswell “Buddy” Gist.

He came from one of the most prominent black families in Greensboro.

His mother was known as Mama Gist. She ran the Magnolia House, a hotel used by many prominent black entertainers during the Jim Crow era, and introduced her family to the likes of Louis Armstrong.

Armstrong loved Mama Gist's ham biscuits with maple syrup.

Buddy's brother Herman became a state senator. Buddy's sister, Annie Lou, helped integrate Greensboro's swimming pools. And Buddy left Greensboro for New York and found a fairy tale life.

He got married twice and went from waiter to entrepreneur. He sold cars and coffee and befriended some of the biggest names in jazz. He saw them play, partied with them and co-signed loans for them so they could buy cars.

A Jaguar for Count Basie. A Buick station wagon for Coltrane. A Mercedes Benz for Miles.

James Houghton, a 2008 UNCG grad with a jazz performance degree, loved those stories. And like me, he always wondered how true they were.

He found out a few years ago in Richmond, Va., when he went to go see comedian Bill Cosby speak at Virginia Commonwealth University. Houghton ran into Cosby in a VCU hallway after the show.

“Hey Bill, thanks for coming out,” Houghton told him. “By the way, your friend Buddy Gist wanted me to say ‘Hi’ to you.”

That stopped Cosby in his tracks.

“Buddy Gist is still alive?”

That's how it always happened. Buddy was telling the gospel truth.

I saw it in February 2006 when Miles' three grown children came to UNCG to hear students perform their own arrangements of their father's music. They had feuded for years over their father's estate after his death in 1991.

So, that first night was tense. You could see it. Cheryl Ann Davis, Miles' daughter, came with a bodyguard as big as a defensive tackle, and all three children stood on opposite ends of the room so they wouldn't see each other.

But Buddy cut that tension quick. He had babysat Miles' children when they were young. And that night at UNCG, Buddy circled them up, clasped their hands and, like an old babysitter, he told them to mind their manners.

“Hey listen!” he told them. “Y'all got to get along. This is for your father!”

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LIFE IN NEW YORK Buddy Gist, left, and his friend Miles Davis, right, are out on the town. Davis and Gist were such good friends that Davis invested in Gist’s Kilimanjaro African Coffee company. In 1968, Davis recorded “Filles de Kilimanjaro,” which is partly named for the company.

That was Buddy. His charisma could light up a room. His friends say he could've been a black billionaire because of his ideas and entrepreneurial drive. Yet, for some reason, his plans never got off the ground.

People don't know why. His finances tumbled. And he became homeless.

After that special night in 2006 at UNCG, I'd run into Buddy everywhere in Greensboro. And always, he'd be immaculately dressed, like he just stepped out of Esquire magazine.

But like many, I had heard the whispers. Buddy was living out of his Cadillac. He was crashing at Center City Park in downtown Greensboro. He had nowhere to go.

I asked him about it. So did everybody else. We all got the same answer.

“I'm doing fine,”’ he would say politely. “I'm doing fine.”

In the summer of 2008, UNCG music professor Steve Haines returned from a year-long sabbatical in New York and found the once well-dressed Buddy disheveled and unshaven with his white hair wild and unruly.

“Look, you need to level with me, Buddy,” said Haines, the director of UNCG's Miles Davis Jazz Studies program. “Tell me where you're living.”

“I'm living with friends, and they love me,” Buddy told him. “I get to tell stories about Miles.”

“Where's that?” Haines asked.

“Center City Park,” Buddy responded.

“Well, we have to change that,” Haines said.

In August 2008, Haines and a constellation of friends and colleagues — jazz faculty, students and fans — helped move Buddy into Partnership Village.

It's a transitional housing program run by Greensboro Urban Ministry. In its 10 years of operation, Partnership Village has helped nearly 300 homeless people get back on their feet.