Brendan Buckley, a retired MD from Hardwick, Vermont, will speak about his newly released book “The Morse Code: Legacy of a Vermont Sportswriter” at Steele Community Room in Waterbury on Thursday, July 27 at 6 p.m., and at the Isley Public Library in Middlebury on Tuesday, August 1 at 7 p.m.
Buckley fell in love with Vermont while attending Middlebury College from 1969 to 1973. After medical school and a residency at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, he moved to Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom where he practiced primary care medicine at the Hardwick Area Health Center for thirty-four years. He retired in 2019 and continues to live in East Hardwick with his wife, Helen, a retired school psychologist. He is the author of “The Morse Code: Legacy of a Vermont Sportswriter,” published by Rootstock Publishing on July 18.
Dave Morse (1937-2015) was a beloved Vermont Sports Hall of Fame journalist who spent 20 years at the Hardwick Gazette writing “The Morse Code,” an all-sports, all-ages column. This new biography, with color photos and a foreword by Ross Connelly, former editor and co-publisher of the Gazette, chronicles the life of this veteran sports editor whose contributions to the youth of a small community echo across the Green Mountains today.
Peter Graves of ABC Sports said: “Dave loved Vermont and its athletes. From high school sports to the Olympics, his beat was large… His works will forever be linked to excellence and compassion in the history of Vermont sports.”
“I knew Dave. We both lived and worked in Hardwick. I saw him at our children’s sporting events,” said Buckley. “I had been impressed by his devotion to telling a story, to the distances he would go to cover an event, and, always, to his enthusiasm for and his delight in the athletes’ triumphs. To my surprise, there was much more to his life story than I had ever imagined.”
