Budd Lynch celebrates 60 years with the Red Wings

Lynn Henning / The Detroit News

Wyandotte -- In his broadcaster's version of a world he relishes, Budd Lynch has been on the power play for 65 years. Not the penalty box, mind you, which is what one might figure would be the disposition of a man who left his right shoulder and arm on a tract of land in France in 1944, a few hours after a three-inch German rocket bored through him.

"My mother always had an Irish philosophy in life," Lynch was saying over lunch last week.

"It's a pleasure to grow old.

"Many are denied the privilege."

So, there we have it, one man's credo for happiness that he will again celebrate tonight at Joe Louis Arena as a big crowd, with Budd Lynch bobblehead dolls in hand, toasts a 92-year-old hockey icon whose life has been as resonant as his voice. Not coincidentally, it will be the 60th anniversary of the first Red Wings telecast that had as its play-by-play announcer one Budd Lynch.

"I just hope they don't put the arm on the wrong side," Lynch said, grinning at tonight's bobblehead memento, which will aid the Red Wings in honoring their longtime radio analyst, public-relations head, and, for the past 24 years, their enduring public-address voice.

'One-armed bandit'

If you're into living life to its happiest and fullest summit, this Budd's for you.

He played golf at his Florida getaway two weeks ago and, for the umpteenth time, beat his age, shooting 91.

He spends hours each month doing what he has done since he got home in 1944. He talks with other amputees. It's all part of his ongoing mission to show those who have lost limbs that days and years can be bright, fulfilling, and a downright blast.

Looks don't deceive. One glance at Lynch and you wonder what tonic he's been taking with that vodka he's having at lunch. He is nearly twice as old as the Mackinac Bridge and just as durable.

When he leaves a voice-mail message, he invariably refers to himself as "Budd Lynch, the one-armed bandit," a moniker he picked up while playing cards on the Queen Mary, bound for North America after World War II ended.

Lynch could have headed back to Canada (he was born in Windsor, and raised in Hamilton, Ontario) a few months after he caught the German artillery shell. But he thought there might be other, more constructive, options, which is how he ended up doing war reports for the BBC. It was natural, after all, for a man who had begun his radio career out of high school. He was such a natural, he hired on with Windsor radio giant CKLW in 1939, well before he headed off to Europe as a volunteer in the Canadian Army's Essex Scottish Regiment, an infantry unit.

It put him on the shores of Normandy at Juno Beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944. Six weeks later, Lynch and a brigadier general were near Caen, just inland from Normandy, when they decided to check out a hedgerow where German snipers were at work.

They instead came across a couple German kids, no more than 12 or 13, hiding in the underbrush and greeting them with hand grenades. They had pulled the pins. They were ready to toss them -- or to be talked out of it.

"The general just said, 'Put those pins back,' " Lynch recalled. "They were kids, a lot more scared than we were."

After the boys had given up and been rid of their weapons, Lynch felt his shoulder get slammed by a titanic jolt. It was the three-inch rocket, fired by a multi-barreled artillery piece known as a Nebelwerfer.

"Went right through me," Lynch remembers.

The general was hit, too, with a bad wound to the side of his head. But, like Lynch, he was alive. One of the German boys steadied Lynch as he slipped the shell dressing from his helmet and applied it as a bandage and tourniquet to an arm that was blown to shreds.

It was a quarter-mile hike to a farm house where the men were blessed to learn the First Forward Medical Field had just set up shop.

Lynch was, by now, on a stretcher. The unit's chaplain, Fr. Mike Dalton, with whom Lynch remained friends until Dalton's death in April at age 106, told a groggy Lynch he was about to receive the Catholic Church's last rites.

Then the surgeons went to work, sawing away Lynch's shoulder, scapula, and right arm.

From that moment he was, in many ways, reborn. A man who during his infantry days always seemed to be in the middle of things, a soldier who along the way met Winston Churchill, Dwight Eisenhower, and British general Bernard Montgomery, recovered in England, joined the BBC, and after the war got on with a whirlwind life back home.

He learned to write left-handed; to eat with an inventive utensil, crafted by Lynch, which combined a fork, knife and spoon; to carry on with marriage and raising six daughters; nothing was out of reach for a man with one arm. Even for one who had played football, baseball and hockey as a child in Hamilton, raised by his mother, who had lost her husband, a steamship captain, to the flu pandemic in 1919 when Budd was 2.

'I thought I'd be a lawyer'

Budd's post-war radio career and his increasingly plentiful emcee duties were so robust, he was persuaded to try a prosthetic arm. But he soon realized he and the mechanical limb might not mesh.

During an appearance in Battle Creek, Lynch's new arm fell onto the stage.

"What do you do for an encore?" the show host asked as the audience -- and Lynch -- howled.

But there was another, more serious reason the bouncing prosthetic wasn't going to work.

It weighed 40 pounds.

"Your heart muscles are going to deteriorate," doctors told him, indicating the strain it would put on the opposite side of his chest.

The contraption went away as Lynch's broadcasting career boomed in tandem with his crisp, baritone voice.

From CKLW to WWJ; to his broadcast years with Joe Gentile, Van Patrick and Bruce Martyn; to the "booth" that night 60 years ago at Olympia, when WWJ-TV decided it would place a couple stationary cameras inside the old red barn and bring a Red Wings hockey game to a then-tiny Detroit TV audience. Broadcasting and Budd Lynch had hooked up on a long-term romance.

The Red Wings televised seven games that first season. Within two years, they were regular programming as Metro Detroit's TV numbers soared.

Lynch stayed on as Martyn's color man during radio broadcasts until he moved into the club's publicity office in 1975. He presumably retired in 1982 and headed with his wife for a two-week vacation in Hawaii, courtesy of the team's new owners, Mike and Marian Ilitch. Retirement lasted about as long as his vacation.

"You've been with us from the first day," Marian said to him not many moons afterward. "Why don't you do the P.A.?"

He since has called thousands of goals, penalties, and nearly as many times has informed the Joe Louis Arena crowd there is "one minute to play in the period."

Mickey Redmond, the longtime Red Wings forward and even longer a color man on Wings telecasts, shakes his head at Lynch's mind, which is a kind of Google search for NHL students.

"At his age, in our sport, his institutional memory is second to none," Redmond said. "I have 40 years of institutional memory in the game of hockey, but Budd absolutely blows me away."

"I never thought I'd be in this business," he said of a vocation that took him from radio, to TV, back to full-time radio, and then to the public-address microphone. "I thought I'd be a lawyer, because I love to talk.

"But my mother said to me," and Lynch breaks into a giggle as he remembers her baseless charge: "No, no, they're mixed up with the Mafia."

'He does so many things'

Lynch wouldn't have cut it. His style was decidedly less ruthless.

"I still consider him a bit of a father figure," said Bill Jamieson, a longtime Red Wings media relations director who came aboard when Lynch "retired" in 1982. "He took me under his wing right away and really got me ingrained in the National Hockey League.

"I never felt like a stranger or outsider. Out to lunch or dinner together all the time, he would introduce me to everybody."

Jamieson serves on the executive committee of a Lynch charity, one of his many, the Budd Lynch Golf Classic, that helps fund The Guidance Center, which provides a host of services for needy Wayne County children and families.

"He does so many other things," said Jamieson, who lives in Grosse Pointe Farms, "that don't get much publicity."

Lynch's explanation for the amputee counseling and charitable work is that he feels a need to give back for all the blessings one man has received in these 92-plus years. It's a neat insight into someone who tends not to look at ceilings or finish lines. An infantryman who literally gave his right arm in World War II might have been excused for believing he had already donated in the extreme.

But that's not Lynch, who is more than delighted that the centerpiece for tonight's celebration is a bobblehead doll. No one will laugh harder than the man of the hour, the Red Wings' immortal one-armed bandit.

The Budd Lynch file

Born: Aug. 7, 1917, Windsor, Ontario

Given name: Frank Joseph James Lynch

How he acquired the nickname Budd: His boss at his first radio job at CKLW said there were "too many Franks" on the staff. Lynch was fond of buying his mother boxes of Laura Secord Chocolate Buds. He spontaneously decided on "Budd" with a double-d.

Family: His first two wives are deceased. He has six daughters, eight grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren.

Awards: Inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1985 as a media honoree and winner of the Foster Hewitt Memorial Award; inducted into the Michigan Sports Hall of Fame in 2005; received the Ty Tyson Award for Excellence in Sports Broadcasting, issued by the Detroit Sports Broadcasters Association.

Book: "My Life -- From Normandy to Hockeytown," co-written by Windsor Star columnist Bob Duff, and published in 2007 by Olympia Entertainment Inc.

Residence: Wyandotte

lynn.henning@detnews.com (313) 222-2472