On the ultimate lap of the 1979 Daytona 500, the 2 main vehicles crashed into one another. Whereas one other automotive zoomed into first place, the drivers received out and commenced combating one another.
“We’ve been delighted to deliver you flag-to-flag protection of maybe essentially the most wonderful, astonishing Daytona 500 in historical past,” stated the sportscaster as he signed off.
But it surely was that sportscaster, not the drivers, that made this race a historic televised success.
His title was Ken Squier.
Squier was an icon of broadcasting who helped make NASCAR a nationwide phenomenon. In his residence state of Vermont, he constructed Thunder Street and shepherded one of many final bastions of true group radio into the twenty first century. He died on Wednesday, Nov. 15, 2023 at 88 years outdated.
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Squier was born on April 10, 1935, into the infancy of automotive racing and the golden age of radio.
He grew up in Waterbury, the place his father owned the native radio station, WDEV. When most different youngsters have been studying to learn, Squier was studying how you can discuss right into a microphone.
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He began asserting automotive races at a younger age, too.
“The story no less than is that he put himself on the again of a flatbed truck in Morrisville when he was 14, and introduced a race there,” stated his daughter, Ashley.
A younger child within the early Nineteen Forties, Squier noticed automotive racing at county festivals and shortly grew to become enchanted.
“When dad was a boy,” Ashley stated, “racing was extremely harmful and vehicles have been new. So it was the know-how of the time, and these guys pushing that know-how to its very edge.”
Ken Squier at all times stated the attraction of racing was that it was frequent individuals doing unusual deeds.
However Squier himself was something however frequent.
“He was a jokester, he was a miscreant of the primary order,” stated Brian Harwood, who has recognized Squier since highschool. “He was not above doing issues that would not be thought of to be typically acceptable, and I am unable to listing any of these. However he was, , he was so many issues, Ken was.”
Squier was a silver-tongued raconteur, charismatic and irreverent, persistent and artistic, with an enormous ego and hearty humorousness.
He beloved classical music, jazz, and canine. He was at all times one for a superb fart joke, and was well-read with a superb reminiscence.
As soon as, Squier and Brian Harwood have been strolling down the road in Boston, “and he started reciting one thing from Shakespeare. Simply , stanza after stanza. It was that form of a thoughts,” Harwood recalled.
However above anything, it was at all times vehicles and radios for Ken Squier. One among Ashley’s strongest recollections of her dad is being a little bit child, sitting subsequent to him within the entrance seat of his blue Pontiac, singing the music “American Pie.”
After finding out communications at Boston College, Squier returned to Vermont and located buyers to construct the racetrack that grew to become Thunder Street in Barre. It opened in 1960, when he was simply 25 years outdated.
He received married, had two youngsters, and labored at WDEV.
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Then, within the Seventies, his nationwide profession as a sportscaster started to take off. He anchored CBS and TBS broadcasts, labored his means into NASCAR, and was a founding father of the Motor Racing Community.
In 1979, he helped persuade CBS to air the whole thing of the Daytona 500. Up till that time, races weren’t broadcast flag to flag — they have been edited down into spotlight reels.
Squier introduced the televised race along with his rollicking vocabulary, and it was a smashing success. Which is precisely what he thought would occur, as he defined inan interview with Vermont PBS in 2006.
“There was an entire sense that this was the American pastime, and it had been neglected,” he stated. “What occurred was that Center America lastly had an opportunity to vote. The in a single day scores have been at all times managed commercially, and tv by New York, Chicago, LA, Philadelphia, Baltimore. And when Center America voted, locations like Iowa and Indiana and Illinois and Vermont, they voted for racing.”
NASCAR went on to develop into the second-most watched televised sport in America.
Squier spent many years as a lap-by-lap commentator, and helped deliver in-car cameras to televised races.
Ashley says when she was a child, her dad was gone 40 weekends a yr, calling races. However he at all times got here residence to Vermont.
In 1979, when Squier’s father died, he took over WDEV, and later shaped the Radio Vermont Group. He believed in what he known as “related radio” — that what went on air must be of a spot and in service to a group.
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When Waterbury flooded throughout Tropical Storm Irene in 2011, WDEV stayed on air all evening.
Invoice Shepeluk was the city supervisor on the time, and each hour or so, he known as into the station to inform individuals what was happening — the place there have been energy outages, what neighborhoods have been being evacuated.
“It was only a place that I might name and supply info and know that they’d broadcast that. And realizing how the group turned to WDEV once they wanted info, I knew that folks can be listening to what I used to be telling them,” Shepeluk stated.
It wasn’t a nationwide station, or perhaps a statewide one. Ken Squier made positive it continued to be of and for the place it was in.
They broadcast highschool sports activities, native music, and agricultural programming. And, after all, there’s the notorious present,Music To Go To The Dump By.
“It began as a 15-minute broadcast on Saturday mornings, the time when individuals can be going to the dump,” Brian Harwood stated. “However then he would play all these ridiculous items of music. After which, , recount all these tales, individuals would ship in mail, and so forth.”
The present is now an hour lengthy, and nonetheless runs on Saturday mornings.
“He was a jokester, he was a miscreant of the primary order. He was not above doing issues that would not be thought of to be typically acceptable, and I am unable to listing any of these. However he was, , he was so many issues, Ken was.”
Brian Harwood, who has recognized Ken Squier since highschool
Squier left different legacies. He was a mentor to many in racing, radio, information, and politics, together with Secretary of Agriculture Anson Tebbetts and Gov. Phil Scott. He was a longtime supporter of Vermont Symphony Orchestra. He obtained a number of Emmy nominations for his broadcasting, and has been inducted into quite a few halls of fame.
Races proceed at Thunder Street underneath new possession.
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In 2016, Ken Squier went to his final Daytona 500. His daughter Ashley was there within the pits with him, watching him discuss to individuals, totally in his factor. At one level he turned to her and stated: “There’s not one higher place on this planet.”
“And I stated, ‘Than the pits at a racetrack?’” Ashley stated. “And he stated, ‘Than with these individuals. It would not matter — nothing else issues, , who the president is, not all of the wrongs on this planet. As a result of what everyone’s right here to do thisthis factor with one another.’”
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