Email this page
Print this page
del.icio.us
digg
Comments
Bud Leavitt retired as executive sports editor of the Bangor Daily News in 1988, and now there’s only a handful of people who worked with him during any part of his 42-year career. Yet even among today’s BDN staff, Bud’s legend is very much alive.
John Holyoke, one of the paper’s current sports columnists, tells one story that pretty much typifies the impact Leavitt made on people throughout Maine, and beyond.
Bud Leavitt was driving into the north country with Hall of Fame baseball player Brooks Robinson and Red Sox broadcaster Curt Gowdy to do some bird hunting. He turned into a driveway, where a group of men were standing around talking, to double-check the directions. After clarifying his route, he asked the men if they recognized the other men in the car.
“No, we don’t,” was the reply, “but we sure know who you are. You’re Bud Leavitt!”
For over 40 years, Bud Leavitt fed area readers their essential dose of local color in his daily outdoors column in the Bangor Daily News. From their kitchens, over a cup of morning coffee, he took his readers trapping or skiing, taught them how to remove a fish hook, made them cry over the loss of a hunting dog. For 20 of those years, Bud Leavitt appeared on their TVs every Saturday night, taking them fly-fishing or hunting, and introducing them to his famous friends, like Ted Williams and Curt Gowdy.
“He was to outdoor journalism what Norman Rockwell was to art,” BDN sports columnist Larry Mahoney once said. Mike Dolley, who directed The Bud Leavitt Show on WABI-TV for several years, calls him, simply, “A presence. When Bud was in a room, either in person or on the screen, he simply dominated it.”
What was it about this native of Old Town who worked all but one day of his life as a sportswriter and outdoor columnist that so captured the public fancy? He was a widely read writer, though his “Outdoors” column contained few literary gems or oft-quoted turns of phrase. On TV, he was not slick or polished. Yet he was one of the most popular celebrities in Maine’s history, “as prominent,” artist Tom Hennessey said in a tribute, “as a pine standing among poplars.”
Bangor Daily News columnist Joni Averill, whom Leavitt hired to cover women’s sports in 1979, attributed his popularity and success to an unerring instinct for knowing what people were interested in. She recalls the day Leavitt swooped into the newsroom and announced to his sports staff that from now on they were going to cover stock car racing.
“I drove by Speedway 95 last evening and there were 600 people there!” he exclaimed. “We need to pay more attention to that.” Wherever the people were was where Leavitt wanted his reporters to be.
Averill tells about the circumstances that led to her being hired as the women’s sports reporter for the Bangor Daily News.
“It was after Title IX required public and taxpayer-supported schools to provide equal athletic programs for males and females,” she says. “But there was no law forcing the news media to give equal coverage.” And none did—until the day Bud Leavitt received a folded-up copy of the BDN sports page in his mail. Someone had outlined the stories about men’s sports in blue and the stories about women’s sports in pink.
“Most of the page was outlined in blue,” Averill says, “with only one tiny item in pink. Whoever sent it added a note: ‘This is equal?’”
That was it for Leavitt. He called Averill, a 38-year-old mother of two young children, and told her he wanted her to cover women’s sports six days a week “to take care of this woman problem!”
Leavitt dispatched Averill to visit every high school in the News’ coverage area because, he told her, “you have to know the people you’re writing about.” That eventually took her to 68 high schools throughout northern, eastern, and Downeast Maine!
“I learned so much from Bud about how to write for the people,” she says. “There’s no doubt in my mind that because of Bud Leavitt, the Bangor Daily News covered more women’s sports than any other newspaper in Maine, or even in the country, at that time. Women athletes owe a tremendous debt to Bud Leavitt. He was the one who got them the media coverage they deserved.”
Ralph W. Leavitt Jr., who, like many boys named after their fathers, carried the name “Bud” for his entire life, was born in Old Town in 1917. His dad was the head of the union at Penobscot Chemical Fiber Company and was, like his son, a man large in stature and voice.
Leavitt played both baseball and football at Old Town High. His cousin Alden Leavitt says that after graduation Bud went to work at Penobscot Chemical Fiber—for one day. “He didn’t like getting all covered with dirt and sweat anywhere but on the athletic field,” Alden says. The next day, Leavitt showed up at the Bangor Daily Commercial, Bangor’s other newspaper, to apply for a job as a sportswriter. He was still only 17 years old.
Leavitt wrote general sports stories for the Commercial from 1934 to 1942, when he went into civilian service with the U.S. Air Corps at Dow Air Force Base. After the war, he resumed his newspaper career, this time at the Bangor Daily News. He began as a general sportswriter, and two years later started writing his daily “Outdoors” column—a daily task he would continue for over 40 years.
While his move to the Bangor Daily proved to be pivotal in his career, it was a Commercial assignment that blossomed into one of his life’s most important friendships.
The Commercial had sent Bud Leavitt to Boston’s Fenway Park to do a story on the Red Sox in 1939, which happened to be the rookie year of a young hitting sensation named Ted Williams. According to the account related in Leigh Montville’s book Ted Williams, Leavitt was feeling a little nervous about his first major league assignment and watched the team take batting and fielding practice from a solitary spot at the end of the dugout. But in a casual bit of conversation with one of the other writers, Leavitt said that he had come down from Maine. Ted Williams overheard him and hollered across the infield, “Hey, Bush. Come over here. You said you’re from Maine. I’ll bet you have some pretty good fishing up there.”
Leavitt didn’t know that this brash young ballplayer called almost everyone “Bush,” and it made him mad. He hollered right back at Williams: “I’ll come over and talk to you, but only if you use my right name.” Williams liked that, and it was the unlikely beginning of a lifelong friendship between the sportswriter and the Splendid Splinter.
Throughout the years of their friendship, Williams and Leavitt enjoyed many fishing expeditions together, especially on the Miramichi River, where Williams delighted in capturing Atlantic salmon. Leavitt also joined Williams fishing for bonefish and tarpon in the Florida Keys. Bud and Barbara Leavitt’s home in Hampden became Williams’ stopover on his way to the Miramichi and the bond between the two of them grew stronger—but not without some rough spots!
Besides being arguably the greatest hitter in baseball history, Williams was also infamous for his use of profanity. On occasion, he could let loose with a stream of language that would make a sailor blush—to say nothing of Leavitt’s wife, Barbara, whom Leavitt adored. During one visit to the Leavitt home, Williams exploded in such an outburst that deeply offended Barbara. Bud told Williams that if he ever did that again he would no longer be welcome in his house. A chastened Ted Williams sent Barbara Leavitt a letter of apology promising never to do it again, and the friendship was back on track.
In 1953, Maine’s first television station went on the air in Bangor and one of the first local programs featured on WABI-TV was The Bud Leavitt Show.
In those years, the Bangor Daily News was the dominant news and advertising medium in northeastern Maine, and radio and television were considered archrivals in the competition for advertising dollars, so the fact that they allowed Leavitt to host a TV show was nothing short of remarkable. But the News management obviously perceived the benefit of having its featured sportswriter on this new medium of entertainment. As Mike Dowd explained in a BDN tribute after Leavitt’s death: “They had to have him. He had to have it. So [Bud Leavitt] became multimedia before the term was invented.” Indeed, for 20 years, at six o’clock every Saturday night, viewers for many miles around would tune in to hear the opening strains of “The Happy Wanderer.” It was a popular hit in Germany before hitting the charts for a brief period in this country, but its opening lyrics were faithful to Leavitt’s love of the outdoors: “I love to go a-wandering, along the mountain’s track. And as I go I love to sing, my knapsack on my back. Valderee, Valderah.”
For the first few years, WABI-TV’s studios were located at the transmitter site on Copeland Mountain in East Holden. It was accessible only by four-wheel-drive vehicles in wintertime and Leavitt would meet a station driver at the foot of the mountain, along with whatever animals, guest, or outdoor equipment he wanted to feature on the show.
George Gonyar, former general manager of WABI-TV, recalled that Leavitt was frequently late meeting the driver, and the show would have to be set up in a very brief amount of time. Of course, it was always done “live.” There was no videotape in those early days of television.
“We’d sometimes send our photographer, Ralph Libby, out to shoot eight-millimeter film for the show,” Gonyar recalls, “but it was all silent and Bud would do the narration ad lib while it was running on the air. Later we acquired 16-millimeter sound cameras and that improved the filmed segments a lot.”
Mike Dolley recalls that sometimes a guest scheduled for the show wouldn’t show up and Leavitt would simply carry the program by himself, talking about hunting and fishing and friends in the world of outdoor sports. “He was never flustered by anything,” Dolley remembers.
Among the regional guests who appeared frequently on The Bud Leavitt Show were John Christie, the ski instructor at Sugarloaf Mountain, who would demonstrate proper skiing technique on a miniature slope constructed outside the studio by the production staff; Charlie Emery, the golf pro at Penobscot Valley Country Club, who would demonstrate the proper way to grip and swing a club, and perhaps the favorite guest of all, Bill Gagnon, whose French-Canadian dialect and deliberately fractured English would send everyone, including Leavitt, into gales of laughter. Gagnon’s appearances were never scripted. Bud never knew what Gagnon would say and probably Gagnon didn’t either!
One summer in the early years of the TV show, Bud Leavitt invited a group of Boston sportswriters to join him and Ted Williams for a weekend at Stan Leen’s hunting and fishing camps on East Grand Lake Stream. Unbeknown to anyone, Leavitt and Gagnon planned a little joke on the guests. Leavitt told everyone that at dinner that evening they would be joined by the Canadian minister of fisheries and game, who would fly in by seaplane. “But,” Leavitt warned them, “he’s very self-conscious about the way he speaks English and sometimes he doesn’t use exactly the right words, so whatever you do, don’t laugh at him, no matter how funny he may sound.”
At the appointed time, the plane landed on the water and Bill Gagnon, dressed in a tuxedo, stepped into a small boat and came ashore.
For about half an hour, Leavitt’s guests, including Ted Williams, had all they could do to keep from bursting out laughing. Gagnon was literally destroying the English language with every sentence. Finally, even the host couldn’t contain himself any longer and as he broke down in uncontrolled laughter, Ted Williams jumped up from his seat and chased after him with a stick of wood, yelling something to the effect of “Damn you, Leavitt!”
Ted Williams, of course, was still game to appear on The Bud Leavitt Show whenever he was in town. He wasn’t the only luminary: Leavitt’s lineup of guests on the television show included sports personalities like Curt Gowdy, voice of the Red Sox, and Mel Allen, legendary announcer for the New York Yankees. Whether the talent was local or national, The Bud Leavitt Show was as much a Saturday night staple in the WABI-TV coverage area as baked beans. Many locals can still recite Bud Leavitt’s hallmark signoff: “Remember, the family that plays together and prays together stays together.”
Leavitt taped the last local show in 1973, but his TV days were far from over. In 1978, Maine Public Broadcasting Network launched a new show starring Leavitt called “Woods and Waters.” In just one year, it became a national PBS show, where it was rated the No. 1 outdoor program by the Outdoor Writers of America. Now on the entire country’s radar screen, Bud Leavitt appeared several times on the ABC TV show American Sportsman and as a guest on several national radio shows.
Only one thing could darken the skies of Maine’s Happy Wanderer—the ill health of his wife, Barbara, whom he often referred to in his columns as “The Pearl of Her Sex.” Leavitt decided to retire from his position as the BDN’s executive sports editor in 1988, with 13,104 daily columns to his credit. (Though officially retired, he agreed to continue writing a weekly column.) Barbara Leavitt died of cancer in the fall of the next year. Bud Leavitt shared a bit of his grief with his readers, with his signature simplicity: “The angels needed another star,” he wrote. “They got mine.” Despite his loss, and his own subsequent battle with cancer, Bud Leavitt continued to write a weekly outdoors column for the Bangor Daily News until just three weeks before his death on December 20, 1994.
The week of his passing, tributes poured in from all over the country. The Bangor Daily published nearly a dozen pieces about Leavitt, many of them personal. Managing Editor Mike Dowd spoke of his “simple words, straightforward ideas, sustenance to kick-start the brain in the morning . . . For 46 years, day in, day out, we ate up his columns like so much pan-fried trout or grilled venison. Washed down, of course, with a canteen cup of ol’ stumpblower.” His protégé, Joni Averill, wrote several pieces. “I say, unabashedly,” she wrote in one, “I will always love Bud Leavitt.”
Even now, over a decade after his death, “Bud” remains a part of this area’s collective memory. And those who had the chance to know him still have stories to tell. Like this one, by his cousin Alden Leavitt:
Early in Bud Leavitt’s career, Alden says, Bud was assigned to cover the harness racing at Bass Park for the Commercial. He and a friend who often went with him to the track took particular notice of a horse named Foil, who was posting some pretty good times in his races. “They heard the horse was for sale and they decided to buy him,” Alden says. What they didn’t realize until after the deal was made was that none of the racing equipment, such as a sulky, harnessing, and driver’s silks, was included in the sale price. “So the two of them went into hock to buy the equipment they needed,” fully confident, of course, that the horse’s winnings would cover their debt in short order.
In Foil’s first race under Leavitt’s and his partner’s ownership, the horse was a little slow out of the starting gate, but by the halfway mark had moved into fourth place and was gaining. “At the three-quarter mile, Foil had moved to second and looked like he might win,” Alden says. But, as the horses came down the stretch, “about an eighth of a mile from the finish line, Foil dropped dead in his tracks.”
That was the end of Bud Leavitt’s venture into horse racing, but the bills still had to be paid and on a newspaper reporter’s salary that would take a long time. “Bud hadn’t told Barbara about buying the horse,” Alden says. “He was hoping she wouldn’t ever find out about it.” But one day a local lawyer came to the door of the Leavitt home to work out a payment arrangement. Barbara Leavitt asked him what he wanted to see her husband about; the lawyer said, “Bud’s horse.”
“What horse?” she asked. When her husband came home later that afternoon, he had a lot of explaining to do. Fortunately, Bud Leavitt knew how to craft a good story.
John Holyoke, one of the paper’s current sports columnists, tells one story that pretty much typifies the impact Leavitt made on people throughout Maine, and beyond.
Bud Leavitt was driving into the north country with Hall of Fame baseball player Brooks Robinson and Red Sox broadcaster Curt Gowdy to do some bird hunting. He turned into a driveway, where a group of men were standing around talking, to double-check the directions. After clarifying his route, he asked the men if they recognized the other men in the car.
“No, we don’t,” was the reply, “but we sure know who you are. You’re Bud Leavitt!”
For over 40 years, Bud Leavitt fed area readers their essential dose of local color in his daily outdoors column in the Bangor Daily News. From their kitchens, over a cup of morning coffee, he took his readers trapping or skiing, taught them how to remove a fish hook, made them cry over the loss of a hunting dog. For 20 of those years, Bud Leavitt appeared on their TVs every Saturday night, taking them fly-fishing or hunting, and introducing them to his famous friends, like Ted Williams and Curt Gowdy.
“He was to outdoor journalism what Norman Rockwell was to art,” BDN sports columnist Larry Mahoney once said. Mike Dolley, who directed The Bud Leavitt Show on WABI-TV for several years, calls him, simply, “A presence. When Bud was in a room, either in person or on the screen, he simply dominated it.”
Advertisement
What was it about this native of Old Town who worked all but one day of his life as a sportswriter and outdoor columnist that so captured the public fancy? He was a widely read writer, though his “Outdoors” column contained few literary gems or oft-quoted turns of phrase. On TV, he was not slick or polished. Yet he was one of the most popular celebrities in Maine’s history, “as prominent,” artist Tom Hennessey said in a tribute, “as a pine standing among poplars.”
Bangor Daily News columnist Joni Averill, whom Leavitt hired to cover women’s sports in 1979, attributed his popularity and success to an unerring instinct for knowing what people were interested in. She recalls the day Leavitt swooped into the newsroom and announced to his sports staff that from now on they were going to cover stock car racing.
“I drove by Speedway 95 last evening and there were 600 people there!” he exclaimed. “We need to pay more attention to that.” Wherever the people were was where Leavitt wanted his reporters to be.
Averill tells about the circumstances that led to her being hired as the women’s sports reporter for the Bangor Daily News.
“It was after Title IX required public and taxpayer-supported schools to provide equal athletic programs for males and females,” she says. “But there was no law forcing the news media to give equal coverage.” And none did—until the day Bud Leavitt received a folded-up copy of the BDN sports page in his mail. Someone had outlined the stories about men’s sports in blue and the stories about women’s sports in pink.
“Most of the page was outlined in blue,” Averill says, “with only one tiny item in pink. Whoever sent it added a note: ‘This is equal?’”
That was it for Leavitt. He called Averill, a 38-year-old mother of two young children, and told her he wanted her to cover women’s sports six days a week “to take care of this woman problem!”
Leavitt dispatched Averill to visit every high school in the News’ coverage area because, he told her, “you have to know the people you’re writing about.” That eventually took her to 68 high schools throughout northern, eastern, and Downeast Maine!
“I learned so much from Bud about how to write for the people,” she says. “There’s no doubt in my mind that because of Bud Leavitt, the Bangor Daily News covered more women’s sports than any other newspaper in Maine, or even in the country, at that time. Women athletes owe a tremendous debt to Bud Leavitt. He was the one who got them the media coverage they deserved.”
Ralph W. Leavitt Jr., who, like many boys named after their fathers, carried the name “Bud” for his entire life, was born in Old Town in 1917. His dad was the head of the union at Penobscot Chemical Fiber Company and was, like his son, a man large in stature and voice.
Leavitt played both baseball and football at Old Town High. His cousin Alden Leavitt says that after graduation Bud went to work at Penobscot Chemical Fiber—for one day. “He didn’t like getting all covered with dirt and sweat anywhere but on the athletic field,” Alden says. The next day, Leavitt showed up at the Bangor Daily Commercial, Bangor’s other newspaper, to apply for a job as a sportswriter. He was still only 17 years old.
Leavitt wrote general sports stories for the Commercial from 1934 to 1942, when he went into civilian service with the U.S. Air Corps at Dow Air Force Base. After the war, he resumed his newspaper career, this time at the Bangor Daily News. He began as a general sportswriter, and two years later started writing his daily “Outdoors” column—a daily task he would continue for over 40 years.
While his move to the Bangor Daily proved to be pivotal in his career, it was a Commercial assignment that blossomed into one of his life’s most important friendships.
The Commercial had sent Bud Leavitt to Boston’s Fenway Park to do a story on the Red Sox in 1939, which happened to be the rookie year of a young hitting sensation named Ted Williams. According to the account related in Leigh Montville’s book Ted Williams, Leavitt was feeling a little nervous about his first major league assignment and watched the team take batting and fielding practice from a solitary spot at the end of the dugout. But in a casual bit of conversation with one of the other writers, Leavitt said that he had come down from Maine. Ted Williams overheard him and hollered across the infield, “Hey, Bush. Come over here. You said you’re from Maine. I’ll bet you have some pretty good fishing up there.”
Leavitt didn’t know that this brash young ballplayer called almost everyone “Bush,” and it made him mad. He hollered right back at Williams: “I’ll come over and talk to you, but only if you use my right name.” Williams liked that, and it was the unlikely beginning of a lifelong friendship between the sportswriter and the Splendid Splinter.
Throughout the years of their friendship, Williams and Leavitt enjoyed many fishing expeditions together, especially on the Miramichi River, where Williams delighted in capturing Atlantic salmon. Leavitt also joined Williams fishing for bonefish and tarpon in the Florida Keys. Bud and Barbara Leavitt’s home in Hampden became Williams’ stopover on his way to the Miramichi and the bond between the two of them grew stronger—but not without some rough spots!
Besides being arguably the greatest hitter in baseball history, Williams was also infamous for his use of profanity. On occasion, he could let loose with a stream of language that would make a sailor blush—to say nothing of Leavitt’s wife, Barbara, whom Leavitt adored. During one visit to the Leavitt home, Williams exploded in such an outburst that deeply offended Barbara. Bud told Williams that if he ever did that again he would no longer be welcome in his house. A chastened Ted Williams sent Barbara Leavitt a letter of apology promising never to do it again, and the friendship was back on track.
In 1953, Maine’s first television station went on the air in Bangor and one of the first local programs featured on WABI-TV was The Bud Leavitt Show.
In those years, the Bangor Daily News was the dominant news and advertising medium in northeastern Maine, and radio and television were considered archrivals in the competition for advertising dollars, so the fact that they allowed Leavitt to host a TV show was nothing short of remarkable. But the News management obviously perceived the benefit of having its featured sportswriter on this new medium of entertainment. As Mike Dowd explained in a BDN tribute after Leavitt’s death: “They had to have him. He had to have it. So [Bud Leavitt] became multimedia before the term was invented.” Indeed, for 20 years, at six o’clock every Saturday night, viewers for many miles around would tune in to hear the opening strains of “The Happy Wanderer.” It was a popular hit in Germany before hitting the charts for a brief period in this country, but its opening lyrics were faithful to Leavitt’s love of the outdoors: “I love to go a-wandering, along the mountain’s track. And as I go I love to sing, my knapsack on my back. Valderee, Valderah.”
For the first few years, WABI-TV’s studios were located at the transmitter site on Copeland Mountain in East Holden. It was accessible only by four-wheel-drive vehicles in wintertime and Leavitt would meet a station driver at the foot of the mountain, along with whatever animals, guest, or outdoor equipment he wanted to feature on the show.
George Gonyar, former general manager of WABI-TV, recalled that Leavitt was frequently late meeting the driver, and the show would have to be set up in a very brief amount of time. Of course, it was always done “live.” There was no videotape in those early days of television.
“We’d sometimes send our photographer, Ralph Libby, out to shoot eight-millimeter film for the show,” Gonyar recalls, “but it was all silent and Bud would do the narration ad lib while it was running on the air. Later we acquired 16-millimeter sound cameras and that improved the filmed segments a lot.”
Mike Dolley recalls that sometimes a guest scheduled for the show wouldn’t show up and Leavitt would simply carry the program by himself, talking about hunting and fishing and friends in the world of outdoor sports. “He was never flustered by anything,” Dolley remembers.
Among the regional guests who appeared frequently on The Bud Leavitt Show were John Christie, the ski instructor at Sugarloaf Mountain, who would demonstrate proper skiing technique on a miniature slope constructed outside the studio by the production staff; Charlie Emery, the golf pro at Penobscot Valley Country Club, who would demonstrate the proper way to grip and swing a club, and perhaps the favorite guest of all, Bill Gagnon, whose French-Canadian dialect and deliberately fractured English would send everyone, including Leavitt, into gales of laughter. Gagnon’s appearances were never scripted. Bud never knew what Gagnon would say and probably Gagnon didn’t either!
One summer in the early years of the TV show, Bud Leavitt invited a group of Boston sportswriters to join him and Ted Williams for a weekend at Stan Leen’s hunting and fishing camps on East Grand Lake Stream. Unbeknown to anyone, Leavitt and Gagnon planned a little joke on the guests. Leavitt told everyone that at dinner that evening they would be joined by the Canadian minister of fisheries and game, who would fly in by seaplane. “But,” Leavitt warned them, “he’s very self-conscious about the way he speaks English and sometimes he doesn’t use exactly the right words, so whatever you do, don’t laugh at him, no matter how funny he may sound.”
At the appointed time, the plane landed on the water and Bill Gagnon, dressed in a tuxedo, stepped into a small boat and came ashore.
For about half an hour, Leavitt’s guests, including Ted Williams, had all they could do to keep from bursting out laughing. Gagnon was literally destroying the English language with every sentence. Finally, even the host couldn’t contain himself any longer and as he broke down in uncontrolled laughter, Ted Williams jumped up from his seat and chased after him with a stick of wood, yelling something to the effect of “Damn you, Leavitt!”
Ted Williams, of course, was still game to appear on The Bud Leavitt Show whenever he was in town. He wasn’t the only luminary: Leavitt’s lineup of guests on the television show included sports personalities like Curt Gowdy, voice of the Red Sox, and Mel Allen, legendary announcer for the New York Yankees. Whether the talent was local or national, The Bud Leavitt Show was as much a Saturday night staple in the WABI-TV coverage area as baked beans. Many locals can still recite Bud Leavitt’s hallmark signoff: “Remember, the family that plays together and prays together stays together.”
Leavitt taped the last local show in 1973, but his TV days were far from over. In 1978, Maine Public Broadcasting Network launched a new show starring Leavitt called “Woods and Waters.” In just one year, it became a national PBS show, where it was rated the No. 1 outdoor program by the Outdoor Writers of America. Now on the entire country’s radar screen, Bud Leavitt appeared several times on the ABC TV show American Sportsman and as a guest on several national radio shows.
Only one thing could darken the skies of Maine’s Happy Wanderer—the ill health of his wife, Barbara, whom he often referred to in his columns as “The Pearl of Her Sex.” Leavitt decided to retire from his position as the BDN’s executive sports editor in 1988, with 13,104 daily columns to his credit. (Though officially retired, he agreed to continue writing a weekly column.) Barbara Leavitt died of cancer in the fall of the next year. Bud Leavitt shared a bit of his grief with his readers, with his signature simplicity: “The angels needed another star,” he wrote. “They got mine.” Despite his loss, and his own subsequent battle with cancer, Bud Leavitt continued to write a weekly outdoors column for the Bangor Daily News until just three weeks before his death on December 20, 1994.
The week of his passing, tributes poured in from all over the country. The Bangor Daily published nearly a dozen pieces about Leavitt, many of them personal. Managing Editor Mike Dowd spoke of his “simple words, straightforward ideas, sustenance to kick-start the brain in the morning . . . For 46 years, day in, day out, we ate up his columns like so much pan-fried trout or grilled venison. Washed down, of course, with a canteen cup of ol’ stumpblower.” His protégé, Joni Averill, wrote several pieces. “I say, unabashedly,” she wrote in one, “I will always love Bud Leavitt.”
Even now, over a decade after his death, “Bud” remains a part of this area’s collective memory. And those who had the chance to know him still have stories to tell. Like this one, by his cousin Alden Leavitt:
Early in Bud Leavitt’s career, Alden says, Bud was assigned to cover the harness racing at Bass Park for the Commercial. He and a friend who often went with him to the track took particular notice of a horse named Foil, who was posting some pretty good times in his races. “They heard the horse was for sale and they decided to buy him,” Alden says. What they didn’t realize until after the deal was made was that none of the racing equipment, such as a sulky, harnessing, and driver’s silks, was included in the sale price. “So the two of them went into hock to buy the equipment they needed,” fully confident, of course, that the horse’s winnings would cover their debt in short order.
In Foil’s first race under Leavitt’s and his partner’s ownership, the horse was a little slow out of the starting gate, but by the halfway mark had moved into fourth place and was gaining. “At the three-quarter mile, Foil had moved to second and looked like he might win,” Alden says. But, as the horses came down the stretch, “about an eighth of a mile from the finish line, Foil dropped dead in his tracks.”
That was the end of Bud Leavitt’s venture into horse racing, but the bills still had to be paid and on a newspaper reporter’s salary that would take a long time. “Bud hadn’t told Barbara about buying the horse,” Alden says. “He was hoping she wouldn’t ever find out about it.” But one day a local lawyer came to the door of the Leavitt home to work out a payment arrangement. Barbara Leavitt asked him what he wanted to see her husband about; the lawyer said, “Bud’s horse.”
“What horse?” she asked. When her husband came home later that afternoon, he had a lot of explaining to do. Fortunately, Bud Leavitt knew how to craft a good story.
