Ralph W. 'Bud' Leavitt Jr. - Early Life and Career Beginnings

Early Life and Career Beginnings

Ralph W. Leavitt Jr. was born in Old Town, Maine, in 1917 to Ralph W. Leavitt Sr., union manager at Penobscot Chemical Fiber Company, and his wife Elise. Following graduation from Old Town High School, 'Bud' Leavitt went to work in the plant where his father was manager of the union – and quit the next day. "He didn't like getting all covered with dirt and sweat anywhere but on the athletic field," said Bud's cousin Alden Leavitt.

Following his one-day career in the industrial world, Leavitt went looking for other employment. He landed his first newspaper job at age 17 when he began writing for The Bangor Daily Commercial in 1934. At the outbreak of World War II, Leavitt joined the Army Air Corps as a civilian employee. Following the War, in 1946 Leavitt took a job as general sportswriter at The Bangor Daily News, with which he associated as sportswriter, sports editor and outdoor columnist for the next 48 years.

During his tenure as sports editor and outdoor columnist, Leavitt also occasionally filed stories to national publications, including TIME Magazine. High school graduate Leavitt's prose on sporting topics even turned up occasionally in the highbrow The New Yorker magazine. He also frequently hunted and fished with his friend Nelson Bryant, outdoor columnist for The New York Times, who wrote about their jaunts in his newspaper. During this time, Leavitt began to make himself indispensable to the Bangor newspaper, where the owners noted that his presence on the sports pages came to embody for many readers the newspaper itself.

In 1948 Leavitt began writing a daily outdoor column for the newspaper in addition to his sportswriter duties. The column, in which Leavitt discussed hunting and fishing and life in Maine, ran in The Bangor Daily News until November 30, 1994 – six years after Leavitt had retired as the paper's sports editor, and only weeks before the columnist's death from cancer.