When Vermont Democrats lacked a gubernatorial candidate the afternoon of the primary deadline in August 1972, Rockingham lawyer Tom Salmon, in the most last-minute of Hail Mary passes, threw his hat in the ring.

“There could be a whale of a big surprise,” Salmon was quoted as saying by skeptical reporters who knew the former local legislator had been soundly beached in his first try for state office two years earlier.

Then a Moby Dick of a shock came on Election Day, spurring the Burlington Free Press to deem Salmon’s Nov. 7, 1972, victory over the now late Republican businessman Luther “Fred” Hackett “the biggest political upset in Vermont history.”

Salmon, who served two terms as governor, continued to defy the odds in subsequent decades, be it by overcoming a losing 1976 U.S. Senate bid to become president of the University of Vermont, or by entering a Brattleboro convalescent home in 2022, only to confound doctors by living nearly three more years until his death Tuesday.

Salmon, surrounded by family, died just before sundown at the Pine Heights Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation at age 92, his children announced shortly after.

“Your man Winston Churchill always said, ‘Never, never, never, never give up,” Salmon’s son, former state Auditor Thomas M. Salmon, recalled telling his father in his last days, “and Dad, you’ve demonstrated that.” 

Born in the Midwest and raised in Massachusetts, Thomas P. Salmon graduated from Boston College Law School before moving to Rockingham in 1958 to work as an attorney, a municipal judge from 1963 to 1965, and a state representative from 1965 to 1971.

Salmon capped his legislative tenure as House minority leader. But his political career hit a wall in 1970 when he lost a race for attorney general by 17 points to incumbent Jim Jeffords, the now late maverick Republican who’d go on to serve in the U.S. House and Senate before his seismic 2001 party switch.

Tom Salmon and fellow former Democratic governor Philip Hoff meet in 1984 with Madeleine Kunin, who that year became the first woman to win Vermont’s top post. Archive photo

Vermont had made national news in 1962 when the now late Philip Hoff became the first Democrat to win popular election as governor since the founding of the Republican Party in 1854. But the GOP had a vise-grip on the rest of the ballot, held two-thirds of all seats in the Legislature and took back the executive chamber when the now deceased insurance executive Deane Davis won after Hoff stepped down in 1968.

As Republican President Richard Nixon campaigned for reelection in 1972, Democrats were split over whether to support former Vice President Hubert Humphrey or U.S. senators George McGovern or Edmund Muskie. The Vermont party was so divided, it couldn’t field a full slate of aspirants to run for state office.

“The reason that we can’t get candidates this year is that people don’t want to get caught in the struggle,” Hoff told reporters at the time. “The right kind of Democrat could have a good chance for the governorship this year, but we have yet to see him.”

Enter Salmon. Two years after his trouncing, he had every reason not to run again. Then he attended the Miami presidential convention that nominated McGovern.

“I listened to the leadership of the Democratic Party committed to tilting at windmills against what seemed to be the almost certain reelection of President Nixon,” Salmon recalled in a 1989 PBS interview with journalist Chris Graff. “That very night I made up my mind I was going to make the effort despite the odds.”

Tom Salmon takes a break from campaigning to try on shoes. Archive photo

Before Vermont moved its primaries to August in 2010, party voting took place in September. That’s why Salmon could wait until hours before the Aug. 2, 1972, filing deadline to place his name on the ballot.

“Most Democratic leaders conceded that Salmon’s chances of nailing down the state’s top job are quite dim,” wrote the Rutland Herald and Times Argus, reporting that Salmon was favored by no more than 18% of those surveyed.

(Gov. Davis’ preferred successor, Hackett, was the front-runner. A then-unknown Liberty Union Party candidate — Bernie Sanders — rounded out the race.)

“We agreed that there was no chance of our winning the election unless the campaign stood for something,” Salmon said in his 1989 PBS interview. “Namely, addressed real issues that people in Vermont cared about.”

Salmon proposed to support average residents by reforming the property tax and restricting unplanned development, offering the motto “Vermont is not for sale.” In contrast, his Republican opponent called for repealing the state’s then-new litter-decreasing bottle-deposit law, while a Rutland County representative to the GOP’s National Committee, Roland Seward, told reporters, “What are we saving the environment for, the animals?”

As Republicans crowded into a Montpelier ballroom on election night, Salmon stayed home in the Rockingham village of Bellows Falls — the better to watch his then 9-year-old namesake son join a dozen friends in breaking a garage window during an impromptu football game, the press would report.

At 10:20 p.m., CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite interrupted news of a Nixon landslide to announce, “It looks like there’s an upset in the making in Vermont.”

The Rutland Herald and Times Argus summed up Salmon’s “winning combination” (he scored 56% of the vote) as “the image of an underdog fighting ‘the machine’” and “an appeal to the pocketbook on taxes and electric power.”

Outgoing Gov. Davis would later write in his autobiography that the Democrat was “an extremely intelligent, articulate, handsome individual with loads of charm.”

“Salmon accepted a challenge which several other Democrats had turned down,” the Free Press added in an unusual front-page editorial of congratulations. “He then accomplished what almost all observers saw as a virtual impossibility.”

Tom Salmon takes the oath of office as Vermont governor in 1973. Archive photo

As governor, Salmon pushed for the prohibition of phosphates in state waters and the formation of the Agency of Transportation. Stepping down after four years to run for U.S. Senate in 1976, he was defeated by incumbent Republican Robert Stafford, the now late namesake of the Stafford federal guaranteed student loan program.

Salmon went on to serve as president of the University of Vermont and chair of the board of Green Mountain Power. In his 1977 gubernatorial farewell address, he summed up his challenges — and said he had no regrets.

“A friend asked me the other day if it was all worth it,” Salmon said. “Wasn’t I owed more than I received with the energy crisis, Watergate, inflation, recession, natural disasters, no money, no snow, a tax revolt, and the anxiety of our people over government’s capacity to respond to their needs? My answer was this: I came to this state in 1958 with barely enough money in my pocket to pay for an overnight room. In 14 short years I became governor. The people of Vermont owe me nothing. I owe them everything for the privilege of serving two terms in the highest office Vermont can confer on one of its citizens.”