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Over The Airwaves And Overseas C h a p t e r
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T w o
I always believed if I could walk and talk, then I would live.�
- Budd Lynch
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Entering the radio game was an entirely new world to me. I began as a staff announcer at CHML in Hamilton in 1936 and a year later, moved into news and sports at CKOC, another Hamilton station, where I did my first play-by-play work, learning the ropes from Percy LeSueur. Percy LeSueur, he was up in years then, but he was a great goalkeeper in his day, a member of the Hockey Hall of Fame. He became the coach of Hamilton’s NHL team in the 1920s and later went into first the newspaper business and then radio. Percy had a son named Steve Douglas who was very famous in broadcasting, too. That first year, I had a chance to work the senior hockey games with Percy at Hamilton’s Barton Street Arena. It was kind of interesting, because the Hamilton Tigers had quite a powerful squad, lining up future Hall of Famers such as Toe Blake and Syl Apps. The following spring, the station got the contract to do PONY League baseball. So I worked with Percy LeSueur doing PONY League baseball in Hamilton. The St. Louis Cardinals were the parent club for the Hamilton team. The league’s name stood for Pennsylvania, Ontario and New York. You traveled from Hamilton to London, to Batavia, New York, to Olean, New York, to Erie, Pennsylvania. It was a great experience for a young kid in high school. When I got into radio, the bug was biting me. I guess it was learning from other people that got me so fired up about the business. Percy LeSueur worked on the Hot Stove Lounge broadcasts during Toronto Maple Leafs games at Maple Leaf Gardens, so he took me to Toronto for a Maple Leafs game one time when I was in high school and it happened to be Detroit and Toronto that were playing. That’s when I was introduced to Foster Hewitt. Percy LeSueur had all kinds of contacts with Imperial Oil. They were the ones who sponsored “Hockey Night in Canada”. It was quite a thrill going into Maple Leaf Gardens. You were awed, first of all, by the pictures on the wall. On that particular day, they had the pipe band playing, the brass band. Saturday night, it was “Hockey Night in Canada” more so because they had entertainment there. I got to know Leafs owner Connie Smythe overseas during the war years. He was a major in the Canadian forces with the artillery, and I was with the Essex Scottish. In his own way, Connie was an 10
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ornery, tough guy. He decided to bring in the military bands to play at the Toronto games. At the one end of Maple Leaf Gardens, Saturday nights only, there’d be about 40 seats filled with pipers and brass bands. It was great entertainment. After a while, they decided to play canned music so they could sell another 40 seats and get rid of the freeloaders with the instruments. Years earlier, when I was just a young lad, Hamilton had its own NHL team. I heard about them, but never got to see them play in person. The people who owned the Barton Street Arena were part of the operation that ran the team. After the NHL left in 1925, the city had a minor pro club, but as the years went on, there was no way they could have a real pro team anymore. The arena just wasn’t suitable. In 1939, I came down to Windsor, my birthplace, with Cam Ritchie, a radio guy I worked with from Hamilton, to work at CKLW. Ted Campeau, the president of CKLW, brought us down. It was a big break for me, because I also got to work with the Mutual Network, which owned CKLW at the time. When I came to Windsor in 1939 from Hamilton, little did I think my first assignment would be doing a Gold Cup race. When I was in Hamilton, on Burlington Bay, I had gotten to know a Commodore Greening, who owned a powerboat, a little racing boat. I had learned a little bit about powerboats and rooster tails. I had all the word knowledge, I just had to describe what I was seeing. The rooster tail, that’s what sprays off the back end of the boat when it’s racing. I was given the assignment to be the backup to Joe Gentile on the boat races at the Detroit Yacht Club. The races had be delayed because of bad weather and at 4:45 p.m., Joe was nowhere to be found and we were 15 minutes before the start of the Gold Cup. They said, “You’re on” and my introduction was, “Welcome to the Gold Cup on the Detroit River from the Detroit Yacht Club. The heats that were SHED-uled for earlier today have been canceled. But there is a heat that is going to take place right now.” Well, the engineer grabbed me by the arm, pulled me over and said, “We’re on a SKED-ule, you idiot.” That was my introduction to international language. I had used the Canadian version of the word. The water was choppy that day and I remember that Tempo 5, with 11
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Guy Lombardo at the wheel, washed out right in front of me, so I wasn’t the only one having a rough time of it. We had ourselves a lot of great times in those days. We’d go over at three in the morning to play hockey at Windsor Arena. There’d be guys from the newspaper and guys from the wire services who were ex-Canadians. I think they charged us $30 for an hour. The ice had been cut up by three other teams before you’d get on. There was no resurfacing in those days. But it was fun. Then I’d have to go to work on three hours sleep. The crazy things you do when you’re young. It was September of 1939 when I first came to Windsor and war had been declared by the British Empire, so that fall, Cam and I decided to join the Essex Scottish Second Battalion reserves. You sort of felt that you wanted to volunteer. I was single and I figured, “I don’t want to be called as part of a conscription.” The government had talked about doing that, but they wanted volunteers. We joined the second battalion. We used to parade every Friday night up and down Ouellette Avenue, right in the heart of downtown Windsor. One thing about joining the Essex Scottish: the bagpipes, they made you walk at a different pace. Then the brass band, they woke you up. We went to training camp, the officers school, in London, Ontario and under canvas, three of us got pneumonia. I got out of there and survived. By the time we came back, the war had really started to develop then. There was the tragedy of Dieppe, when the Essex Scottish No. 1 Battalion had gone overseas and they were wiped out, about 70 percent of the soldiers either ending up prisoners of war or killed. They couldn’t get the troops out. They never thought to have rescue parties to bring them off the shore. One wonderful thing I did before heading overseas. Francis Gee, the women I’d met in Hamilton and fallen in love with, accepted my proposal. We got married just before I went overseas. We decided to go on active duty, and they sent Cam and I to officers school in Brockville, Ontario. From there, when we graduated, we were reserve officers, so we hadn’t been called to active duty overseas yet. We got sent -- of all places -- to Niagara-on-the-Lake, which is right by Niagara Falls. They were assembling a troop train to go to Prince George, British Columbia, and they made me the adjutant. There were 348 personnel, some 12
Nice legs. That’s me in the kilt alongside fellow Essex Scottish solider Art Carley.
A man and his motorcycle. Getting ready to go for a ride in England, 1943.
I find this photo very ironic. For some reason, I posed at the Aldershot, England barracks with my right arm behind my back in April 1944, a few months before losing the arm in combat.
Major Budd Lynch of the Essex Scottish Unit, serving working for BBC radio in 1944.
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senior officers, a captain and a couple of colonels and we had to stop in just about every city all across Canada to parade up and down and let the people know that we were the volunteers. Then we went to Prince George, British Columbia, because the government thought the Japanese were setting fire to British Columbia with incendiary bombs. They’ve had those Mother Nature fires in British Columbia for years. They’re called forest fires. You might have heard of them. Anyway, we get out there and it was another experience because none of us knew anything about that kind of camping life - tear down some trees, put up a tent. There were guys from London, Ontario, guys from Chatham, Ontario. We experienced that for about the better part of four weeks, then we got the urgent call to report back to Windsor to be sent over to reinforce the Essex Scottish in England. So we went back to Hamilton, then to Debert, Nova Scotia. We were on a converted banana schooner going across the ocean. There were doctors, a few Red Cross volunteers, some nurses and 120 of us young punks and two Beaufort guns that were the armored part of this banana schooner, but one of them didn’t work. We’d never fired a Beaufort gun before, so we all had to practice. We were on the ocean 21 days all told, from Debert, Nova Scotia, along the coastline almost to Boston, and then back up through the gulf to Labrador, to Iceland, to Greenland, to Ireland, then to Cardiff, Wales, where we landed. We found out later that we were the armored might of a 110-ship convoy. We saw German U-boats out in the ocean, but they were far enough away that they weren’t going to take care of us. It was quite an experience, though, going all that way across the ocean. Once we got to England, they took us, the Essex Scottish and the RHLI, the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry, which was part of our brigade, all of us officers had to go to where our bases were, which was Middletonon-Sea, a beautiful town along the coast line. You were in the war zone because that’s where the enemy was coming over at night. You could hear those German Fokkers in the air. Spitfires were everywhere. Those guys who flew those fighter planes, they were gutsy guys. From Middleton-on-Sea they sent us to another officers school in Sandhurst, which was the big weapons training center in England. I became 14
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a weapons training officer. From the Essex Scottish unit, they moved four of us to brigade headquarters, No. 4 Brigade. Brigade No. 4 headquarters was in Southern England. It was located there so that the Germans didn’t know what the Allies were doing. Going there was like a step up towards being given a colonel’s command. I was slotted to be invited. I’d been a commanding training officer, I’d been a weapons training officer with the Essex Scottish. At brigade, we had more meetings because we had communications links with the Polish tank brigade and the British infantry brigade and the free French. And the free French, some of them had actually dropped into France and then escaped back to England. Some of the things that happened after Dieppe, it’s amazing how some of those intelligence people, British particularly, gained the information about the shoreline, where the German guns and munitions were located. They would actually be landing in there at night and getting out a couple of weeks later. They’re the real unsung heroes because information is what they had to have to make an invasion work.
Getting prepared shortly before the June 6, 1944 D-Day invasion. 15
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