The general who invented Muzak gave Dryden a free park

The next time you’re trapped in an elevator with soft music playing, you can blame a man born in Dryden in 1865. His name was George Owen Squier, and the county park on South Mill Road is his — a gift, and a strange footnote, from one of the more unlikely careers American science ever produced.

Squier went from a Lapeer County farm to West Point, then earned a doctorate and rose to major general as the Army’s Chief Signal Officer in World War I, doing much of the early work to put the United States in the air. He held dozens of patents. One of them sent music over telephone wires into homes and businesses, and he gave the service the name it still carries: Muzak, the background music you can’t escape in stores and elevators. It outlived him by most of a century.

Around 1917 he came home and bought an old mill site near Dryden, opened the grounds to anyone who wanted in, and called it a “country club for country people” — no fee, no membership, no gate. He died in 1934, and the land passed to Lapeer County and took his name: General Squier Memorial Park, which it still wears. The old mill stretch now feeds a small county water park, and the place sits on the National Register of Historic Places.

So it’s a free, century-old park where kids splash around all summer, dedicated to a soldier-scientist who helped invent military aviation and then, almost as an afterthought, the most inescapable background noise on earth.