Courtesy the Tigers' Print

(November 22, 2010) At 5-foot, 4-inches tall, playing center for the 1948 Tiger football team, he wasn’t the largest player in the program’s history. But the effect Richard “Dick” Bullock had on the Middlebury (VT) High School football program, and on the girls’ softball program, was enormous.
Bullock died at his home in Salisbury on October 1 at the age of 79 after being diagnosed with cancer.

The week before the school’s homecoming football game, he made his last appearance in the high school press booth, where for decades he broadcast football games with his lifelong friend Richard “Ziggy” Livingston. More recently, he shared broadcast duties with David Sears, who now provides radio play-by-play with high school social studies teacher Bjarki Sears. Bullock estimated that he broadcast more than 350 Middlebury High School football games, including several state championships.

Dick had hoped to be in the press booth for the homecoming game against Brattleboro and also planned to give a pre-game pep talk to the football team, but hours before the game he said he was too ill to attend. Within a week Bullock had passed away. Players honored him this season by wearing stickers on their football helmets bearing his initials, DB.

Bullock was a strong supporter of the high school football and softball programs. To help softball players attend the team’s pre-season games in Florida, Bullock gave them jobs catering meals at American Legion Post 27 in Middlebury, where he was post commander for many years. The Legion placed into a special fund all the money the girls made waiting tables there.The money defrayed the costs of the Florida trip. For decades, Bullock also umpired slow- and fast-pitch softball games. Former Middlebury Union High School player and current softball Assistant Coach Michelle Telgen Davis said she is pushing to honor Bullock by having the school softball field named after him.

A Middlebury native, Bullock came from a family of twelve. He graduated with the class of 1949.

In a recent interview at Bullock’s home on Lake Dunmore, his brother, Tom, a Wisconsin resident, said their mother, Margaret, died two days before Christmas in 1942. Their father Frank, a mail carrier, was unable to care for all his children, so the Bullock siblings split up and went to live with others in the area.

Dick and Tom were shipped off to live on a farm. After four years of farm work, Dick was self-sufficient enough to live with his father, and he returned to Middlebury to finish his last two years of high school. Dick was 19 months older than Tom and of the 12 Bullock children, Tom is now the only surviving sibling.

Dick never really left Middlebury. Although he served in the U.S. Air Force after high school, he came back to Vermont after being honorably discharged and started a career as an automobile parts specialist. He married and had a daughter, Kristen, who lives in South Burlington. He and his wife, Pat, divorced but remained close friends.

Bullock loved sports and, at the high school, played varsity football, basketball, and baseball. “That was one of the main reasons he wanted to come back to school, was to play sports,” Tom said.

As the center of the 1948 varsity football team, Dick was appointed captain after the original team leader was injured. The team he captained was hardly the most successful in the school’s history, finishing with one win, four losses, and two ties. Being as short as he was, 5-feet, 4-inches, he was not the tallest player on the high school basketball team, but he was effective, his brother said. He remembers in one game during his senior year Dick scored 26 points. “Everything he threw up seemed to go in,” Tom said.

Those who knew him remember Dick’s senseof humor and his tendency as a boy to get into mischief, often with his friend Ziggy Livingston. Once when they were altar boys St. Mary’s Catholic Church, Dick and Ziggy were alone inside the cathedral and decided to pretend they were giving and receiving confession, Tom said. While they were inside the confessional, someone entered the church. Dick ran out of the booth but Ziggy stayed behind on the priest’s side and heard the confession.

In the high school’s 1949 yearbook, Dick was voted by his classmates Most Cheerful, Class Joker, and Best Sense of Humor. He was inducted into the high school’s Hall of Fame in 2002.

Bullock is buried at Farmingdale Veterans Cemetery in Middlebury, where he was interred with military honors.

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