BUDD LYNCH

If you were going to rank Michigan’s treasures, Budd Lynch would be pretty close to the top.  Former play-by-play radio broadcaster for the Red Wings and currently, the club’s P.A. announcer, Lynch has tried twice to retire, only to be coaxed back by fans and the organization’s top management.

At 92, Lynch remains as sharp as the day he took over the Red Wings’ mike in 1949. Beloved as a humanitarian as well as an announcer, Lynch’s work with fellow war amputees is but another feather in his very full cap.

His personal World War II story began long before the United States became involved; as part of the British Empire, his native Canada had been at war since 1939.   As a young Major with The Essex Scottish Regiment, he landed at Juno Beach the morning of D-Day, and in subsequent fighting, was struck by a non-exploding ‘eighty-eight’ shell which took away his right shoulder and arm.  Following a long recovery, Lynch returned to his pre-war career in broadcasting, going to work for the BBC.

Back home following the war, he took a job with the Red Wings—the team won the Stanley Cup during his first season, and four times during his first five years with the club.  The luck and pluck that had allowed him to survive his horrendous war wounds seemed to have rubbed off on the team, and he proudly wears the diamond-studded championship ring as a mere representation of his fascinating career.

Lynch was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1985 as a media honoree and winner of the Foster Hewitt Memorial Award.  His amazing stories of the war and his subsequent sixty years with the Red Wings are contained in his book,  My Life: From Normandy to Hockeytown.

 

   
   
   

 


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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