By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo
The essence of Buffalo Stories is defining and celebrating the people, places, and things that make Buffalo… Buffalo.
That’s Buffalo’s pop culture heritage-– and that’s what you’ll find as you scroll through these stories or search the collected works of one of WNY’s most prolific pop culture historians of the last decade for something specific…
By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo
This Buffalo News editorial, published 45 years ago, looks at the issues surrounding the criminalization of marijuana. At the time, President Richard Nixon and New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller had called for reducing penalties for simple marijuana possession to “a level that does not ruin the accused for life.”
By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo
Dennis Shaw, the Bills’ No. 2 draft choice, was holding out from training camp over “a few thousand dollars,” as Larry Felser writes in August, 1970.
Shaw was the heir-apparent to Jack Kemp, and would eventually start in all but five games for the Bills over the next three seasons.
By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo
TV’s Southern California hippie undercover cops were on the cover of TV Topics – and therefore likely on many Western New York coffee tables – this week 45 years ago.
The show, starring Michael Cole, Clarence Williams III and Peggy Lipton, ran from 1968-73, but had its highest ratings in the 1970-71 season.
By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo
Not an exhaustive list by any means, this is merely a collection of fast food/drive-in style restaurants which had ads in The News this week 45 years ago.
Red Barn was a longtime favorite place when the hungries hit.
The Millersport Highway location of Sandy’s is now a car parts store. The Transit Road location is a used car lot across the street from Hillview Elementary.
Gleason’s had two Amherst locations in 1970.
A visit to Col. Sanders would net chicken lovers a 6-pack of Dad’s Root Beer.
Beefy’s was a beef on weck place inside the Seneca Mall.
By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo
Buffalo’s only black police captain — one of only 25 black officers in the city — said having more men of color policing the neighborhoods predominantly inhabited by people of color would help solve many issues.
In 1970, Buffalo had 1,400 police officers and 25 (1.7 percent) were black. Department of Justice figures say in 2013, Buffalo had 714 officers, and 29 percent (about 207) were minorities.
By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo
The Linde Air Products Company of Tonawanda boasted in a News ad 65 years ago this week that its production of pure nitrogen helped create a more healthy way to package foods to last longer.
Today, Tonawandans who think of Linde are more likely to think of the lasting effects the Manhattan Project work done there. The federal government spent decades and millions of dollars to remediate the radiological waste left behind from uranium processing done there in the 1940s.
By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo
From The News 65 years ago this week, a Pittsburgh grocer who grew up in Russia recalls the story of Stalin — in the years before Stalin became a ruthless, murdering despot — as a fugitive who hid under the grocer’s sleeping bench inside an Odessa saloon.
By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo
The Ontario summer home of the Duane Lyman family was the scene of a dance party for the entire summer colony at Thunder Bay.
Lyman was “the dean of Western New York architecture.” He designed the Saturn and Buffalo clubs on Delaware Avenue, the old Federal Courthouse on Niagara Square, Christ the King Chapel at Canisius College and Williamsville South High School, among others.
He died in 1966.
By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo
Residents of the Perry Projects organized a rally and protest at St. Brigid’s School to “alert people to the methods used by the Communists to infiltrate our way of life” after a pro-Communist petition was passed through the area.
By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo
Repaved and widened, Connecticut Street was poised to become a center of Buffalo’s Italian neighborhood. It later hosted Buffalo’s Italian Festival in the ’70s and ’80s before that event moved to Hertel Avenue in 1988.
