Dave Brandt (sportscaster)

David Leroy "Dave" Brandt Jr. (February 8, 1919–June 10, 2007) was an American sports broadcaster, host, and reporter. He was notably known as the pioneer of sports on both radio and television, and one of the founders of WGAL in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which signed on the air in March 1949, and subsequently moved sports from WGAL radio to WGAL–TV.

Born in Marietta, Pennsylvania, he was the son of the late David E. and Beulah Mae (née Dyer) Brandt. For most of his life, Brandt considered sports his favorite leisure activity, participating as a spectator and observer. He graduated from Marietta High School. As a player, manager, and coach, he loved baseball (which he would take with his future career at WGAL, which became his forte). After graduation, he entered Elizabethtown College, where in his second year as a sophomore, he expanded his reach with sports by applying for a job on WGAL radio (then WLPA, now WRKY) in Lancaster to be a sports broadcaster. After auditioning successfully, the station manager hired him to be one of its full-time announcing staff and he broadcast all types of sports, particularly introducing a 15-minute news segment Brandt on Baseball and news for three years until being drafted into the U.S. Army in June 1941 and was overseas until his discharge in 1945.

Brandt returned home to his roots in Lancaster, rejoining the WGAL Radio staff and resuming his duties as a staff announcer, sports director, and, for a short time, as a farm director.

In March 1949, television came calling when Brandt took all his duties in sports from WGAL radio to the day WGAL-TV was founded becoming one of its pioneers and founders and became its very first sports director in history where he continued his 15-minute segment Brandt on Baseball after broadcasting the first live shot on WGAL Channel 4 which would later become Channel 8. He considered it his "sports desk". In addition to covering sports frequently, he served as a quizmaster host for the game show Stump Your Neighbor. Throughout his time at WGAL covering sports, Brandt interviewed so many famous sports figures. Most of which were local.^[1]

One of his other contributions to sports was when he founded and coached the Red Rose Softball League in 1964. He even managed another team that he named the Channel 8 Cardinals for eight years. Brandt retired from WGAL in 1982 after 45 years of sports broadcasting, 33 of them spent at WGAL-TV as sports director.

In 1975, Brandt was inducted into the Pennsylvania Sports Hall of Fame. A year later, in 1976, he was presented with the George W. Kirchner Memorial Award for his commitment to sports at the Lancaster County Sports Hall of Fame.^[2]In 1997, he received the J. Freeland Chryst Award.^[3]

He married Phyllis Yeagley in 1951 and they settled in Lancaster, having two daughters, Sally and Ann E., but one of their daughters, Sally Marie Brandt, died in 1972 unexpectedly. They had one grandson named Kerry Parmer and a great-grandson, Skyler Parmer.

A resident of Lancaster, Brandt died of natural causes on June 10, 2007, at age 88. Nine years later, he was posthumously inducted into the WGAL Hall of Fame in December 2016.^{[4][5][6][7][8][9]}