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
BUFFALO, NY – John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas 50 years ago today.
Caption from a Courier-Express photo of the JFK memorial service, held on the steps of City Hall, in the days following the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy on November 22, 1963. Photos from the event are posted below. (Buffalo Stories/Staffannouncer.com archives )
As the nation mourned, Buffalo mourned, and maybe more so. The largely Catholic Buffalo had a special interest in the nation’s first Catholic president. Hundreds of thousands of Western New Yorkers also had a special connection with Kennedy, having seen him in person during his two visits to the area, one in the weeks leading up to his election in 1960, and another, a year and a half before he was assassinated in 1962. (I wrote a column with more on JFK’s 1960 visit to Buffalo, Niagara Falls, Wheatfield, North Tonawanda, and Lockport earlier this week. )
Here are photos from Buffalo’s two newspapers, the Evening News and the Courier-Express, as a city mourned a President. They are, as published, in mourning and in memory, in the days following the assassination in Dallas.
The somewhat rare first bulletin newspaper
A Buffalonian so distraught he smashed his radio on the floor of his Main Street store upon hearing the news…
People watching the television coverage of the assassination in horror at Buffalo State College’s student union.
Kennedy speaks to 100,000 in Niagara Square in 1962.
By Steve Cichon | steve@buffalostories.com | @stevebuffalo
BUFFALO, NY – JFK was important to the people of Buffalo, maybe even more so than the rest of the country. In 1962, 400,000 people came to see him here. Four-hundred thousand. Even if that is exaggerated by double, when is the last time 200,000 Buffalonians were measured doing anything together at the same time– aside from sitting on our collective well-padded ass watching sports on TV?
The truth is, I’m on Kennedy overload right now, but I know I have no right to complain about it. For the people who remember, 50 years later, it remains one of the saddest days of their lives, a sadness shared with an entire grieving nation. For most, it felt as if a member of the family had been shot and killed. Not anger, just sadness and grief.
As a little kid in the late 70s/early 80s, the Kennedy assassination seemed to me like the biggest thing that had ever happened in American History.
Everyone knew where they were when it happened. Msgr. Toomey came into my mom’s classroom at St. Teresa’s on Seneca Street.
But it wasn’t just the assassination, it’s who Kennedy was, and what he represented to the people in my family. My dad’s whole school– St. Stephen’s on Elk Street– got to leave class when President Kennedy’s limo came the wrong way down the 190 and got off at Smith Street… Then got right back on again. Kennedy got off the Thruway… so people could see his car and wave. There may have been some other technical reason, but technicality be damned for my 10 year old dad.
But somewhat forgotten, was his swing through Western New York as Senator Kennedy, running for President in 1960, only a week after the famous televised debate against Richard Nixon.
These are some photos from when the dynamic young Massachusetts Senator spent the day our backyard, from the archives of Buffalo Stories LLC and staffannouncer.com, as seen in the pages of the Courier-Express in 1960.
Buffalo Mayor Frank Sedita with JFK at the Aud.
JFK with Niagara Falls Mayor Keller
JFK motorcade on Pine Avenue in the FallsJFK speaks outside North Tonawanda City Hall
An impromptu JFK speech in Wheatfield
All images from the Buffalo Courier-Express and the BuffaloStories.com/Staffannouncer.com archives. This story originally appeared at TrendingBuffalo.com
The hiring of Ted Nolan and Pat LaFontaine did what it was supposed to do for me. It was a warm, comfortable feeling to know those two guys were down at the arena, and a part of my city’s hockey team again.
Not as warm and fuzzy. Google results autofill November, 14, 2013.
For me, it’s even beyond hockey. It brings me back to the most fun, care-free days of my professional life. From 1993-2003, my primary job was producing sports talk shows on the radio and sportscasts on TV.
In that position, you got to know that some guys who appeared to be good guys weren’t always when the cameras stopped rolling. Not the case with these two.
Having been in the dressing room at the Aud and Marine Midland Arena, I was lucky enough to know first hand that Pat LaFontaine was a gentleman and always willing to talk with reporters, even after a loss, and even as the old Sabres organization took a year to essentially dump him. 15 years later, we know that the best thing that he could have done after so many concussions was retire, but it was less clear then, and the team’s motives were less than clear. But Pat was a gentleman through it all.
Ted Nolan became an instant celebrity when he came to Buffalo in 1995 because he was cut from the same cloth that we were. A humble, hard-working guy, who liked to see humility and hard work from his players. I think he accepted that celebrity in the same we we hope we would, with class, a realization that he’s no better than anyone else, and just being a good guy. I produced Ted’s hour long weekly radio show on WBEN in those days, and he was the sort of guy that would always pop his head into the control room to say hello to us behind the scenes folks. It’s not that he said hi to me– its emblematic of the way he treated people.
So those are the good memories. But within minutes of hearing the news, I also saw a rehashing of stupidity from decades ago.
Today, we have internet trolls: people with information that either A.) their small brains somehow find credible or B.) information they know is false, but they share in an effort to be funny or malicious. That information is then shared as “truth” by “A.) people.”
Back in the old days, before you could just “broadcast” any piece of stupidity on the internet, people would call radio stations and TV newsrooms with these “hot tips.” I would say almost all of these callers fell into that A.) category. Many felt that they heard something important, and that they were doing their civic duty to make sure all of Buffalo and America knows this bit of information they learned from a guy whose cousin bowls with a lawyer whose brother is a cop who heard it happened.
These rumors almost always had to do with local politicians and athletes and– as someone who constantly fielded these calls– you kinda got the impression that you were involved in a massive game of “telephone.” There were a few recurring general themes for many of the “tips,” but the details were slightly different.
A few examples: I have received “proof” from callers that nearly every politician is gay and got married just to hide this fact. The call will often go on to say that those same closeted gay politicians are about to be arrested for cavorting with under age boys. I could write down at least a dozen names off the top of my head right now that I have received that anonymous call about. I’ve never heard of any such investigation from a credible law enforcement source about anyone in elective office locally, let alone dozens of them.
We’d get many calls about Jim Kelly when he was taking the Bills to Superbowls, but my favorite– and it was frequent for a few years– was something along the lines of the caller knew a guy who knew Kelly’s optometrist. Jim Kelly wasn’t connecting on passes because he couldn’t see, but was too vain to get glasses. I laughed when I got the same call about Todd Collins.
Of course, the rumor that kicked off this thought train involves Ted Nolan. I hate to put it in print, but I will only to show how stupid it is. The story is now so well versed, that when you type Ted Nolan into Google, it’s one of the options that come up.
Somehow, it’s believed by many that Ted Nolan had sex with Dominik Hasek’s wife. Can I prove that didn’t happen? No, but if you watched the rumor evolve like I did, you wouldn’t believe it either.
This particular rumor started with phone calls alleging, very specifically, that “Ted Nolan was caught having sex with Hasek’s wife in the showers at the arena, and that’s why Ted and Dom don’t get along.”
It becomes even less credible when you know that this was the last in a long line of these variety of calls. There’d been others about Nolan and other players’ wives along the lines of, “This guy was cut because Ted got caught having sex with the guy’s wife in the dressing room shower.”
There were also a few that involved Ted getting caught getting it on with players in the locker room showers. “John Muckler cut this guy was cut because he was caught having sex with the coach in the dressing room showers.”
Wait, you say! If all this Ted and shower talk is going on, there must be some truth to it, right?
Absolutely not. The “Sabres having sex in the dressing room showers” nonsense pre-dates Nolan. The first time I got a call about two Sabres caught having sex in the shower, probably in 1993, I thought I had the scoop of the century. I was quickly slapped down when I told my fellow reporters, who repeated the same rumor back to me with a long line of different Sabres through history dating back to the 1970’s.
The Nolan one stuck, because I think he just might be the biggest, most widely-loved Sabres celebrity of all-time. Not just by hockey fans, but by everyone. He was a good coach, a good guy, a rough-and-tumble guy, and good looking to boot– Everyone loved him. Except Dominik Hasek. Everybody knows both of those names, so its easy to repeat, and we all love to kill our heroes for some reason. So here it is, 15 years later, and still going, because you’d have to have a pretty big reason to hate Ted Nolan, right?
The one good thing, I guess, is that Nolan/Hasek’s wife stupidity became so rampant that it seems to have ended the Sabres dressing room shower sex rumors forever.
Mostly in jest, I think, it was repeated, or at least eluded to, a whole bunch on the internet yesterday. and probably will forever. But it’s stupid, and it’s made up, so let’s let it die, OK?
This page originally appeared at TrendingBuffalo.com
We just got a notification that they were moving around our cable channels, and I kinda laughed, since I have literally (and figuratively) no idea where any of my 900 cable channels are located anyway.
Every time I pull up the courage watch some TV, I spend 7 minutes trying to turn it on before I can start flipping. After 5 minutes of not finding anything good– but finding a lot of offensive– I go find something else to do.
Do you remember the days when you not only knew every cable channel you had, you also knew the number off the top of your head?
I remember first getting cable, and being amazed at the world that was opened up to me. Dozens of extra cartoons. You Can’t Do That On Television. Sabres Games. Guys speaking Spanish. Getting to watch Congressman Henry Nowak “Live from Washington, DC” on C-SPAN. OK, maybe that last one was just me, but for all of us, it was in 36 or fewer channels. It was fewer in my house, because we never got Disney or HBO. We, for some reason, always had Cinemax and Showtime. (I think they were cheaper than HBO and The Movie Channel at one point.)
Depending on where you lived, Western New York had a handful of different cable companies like Courier Cable, Cablevision, Jones Intercable, Adelphia, and TCI among others, until Verizon wound up gobbling them all up. I can remember looking in the TV Guide with pre-teen anger at the all great stations people in other towns were getting that we weren’t. Jones Intercable always seemed unfair and a few years behind the times.
TCI served the City of Buffalo for most of the 1980’s and 1990’s. Here is the TCI cable lineup from 1989.
(For all the kids out there, you had to keep this next to the television, because the names of the stations didn’t appear on the screen when you flipped through the channels when your mommy and daddy were little.)
That’s it! No page 2! No digital tier!
This page originally appeared at TrendingBuffalo.com
It wasn’t that long ago, right? 1999-2000? So the phone book shouldn’t be that different, should it?
As I put two recently delivered telephone directories out for recycling today, I thought I’d go grab a classic phone book off the shelf and give it a look through.
(Thanks for skipping over the why the hell do you have a 1999-2000 phone book question.)
Anyway, flip through, and of course there are some “oooOOH YEAaah!” type moments from things you’ve forgotten over the last 14 (almost 15) years.
One thing that’s changed: the name of the phone company. It was Bell Atlantic for about 7 minutes between NYNEX and Verizon.
Yay! Coupon for Blizzard Soccer!
I miss this long neck guy from Forest City Auto Parts. He was on the building that is now a smut shop at Seneca and Bailey for a long time. I think they probably could have kept him on the sign, with just a few artistic changes?
Remember Jim Pachiole screaming at us about Factory Sleep Shop?
How about remember when the most annoying car ads just asked you to say hello to your mother? Note Lockport’s Gambino Ford’s website is hi-mom.com.
Were you a Frontier Cellular guy or a Cell One guy? Or did you still have a pager?
My mom probably still looks for phone book coupons when she has computer trouble.
Some how, buffalo.com’s 1999 ad looks like it’s from 1989. RIP Adelphia and Bell Atlantic.
This page originally appeared at TrendingBuffalo.com
As a guy who people think of as a “historian,” it means that I get to do a lot of “research.”
Right now, I’m in various stages of writing and research at least 6 or 7 books, most of them having to do with some element of life and pop culture in Western New York. The most fun part of writing a book for me, far and away, is the research.
It’s sort of like CBS Newsman Charles Kuralt talking about his old series “On The Road,” where he’d drive around the country in a Winnebago doing stories about oddities in every day life in America.
“We generally have a story in mind when we hit the road,” he said to WBEN reporter Mike McKay when Kuralt visited Buffalo in the early 90’s, “but we kinda hope we don’t get there.”
I love getting lost in research. It can be painstaking and hit or miss. Even if I know the date of some event that happened in 1963, you have to look through both the Courier-Express and the Buffalo Evening News a few days before hoping for a preview, and a few days after hoping for a recap. It’s often a low-odds gamble to look for something specific like that, and if you did nothing but look for what you were looking for, you could walk away with nothing after 8 hours.
So I end up reading the paper. From like 50 or 100 years ago. So even if I don’t find what I’m looking for, I find out things like Buffalo Police used to carry their suspects to the police station. Like over-the-shoulder WWF style.
I know, right? Read on.
This page originally appeared at TrendingBuffalo.com
We’re going back 63 years here, but these photos show that on many levels, life was simpler not all that long ago.
Two generations ago, you could walk to the car dealership in your neighborhood to purchase your next ride. If you wanted to haggle over the 9 or 10 cars they had, you went in and talked with the guy whose name is on the sign. The buildings are just regular city buildings, many of which still stand today, and you’d never guess were once car dealerships.
It’s just so much different than what we think of in 2013.
Although most of these photos are likely from the mid ’40s or earlier, each of these photos was taken from a collection of ads dated 1950.
The best thing about every single one of these places? None of them are HUUUUGE.
DiBello Pontiac 1275 Main Street. Its facade is bricked over, but it’s still standing.
Don Allen Chevy, 2585 Main at Fillmore. Now the site of an Eckerd. I mean Rite Aid.
Gillen Pontiac, the only dealer shown outside of the city, at 3445 Delaware Avenue in Tonawanda. Until recently the home of Premier Liquor, it’s now Len-Co Lumber.
LB Smith Ford, 1212 Abbott Rd at City Line. Recently abandoned after years as a Ford dealership, the buildings still stand next to LB Smith Plaza, home of Hens & Kelly.
Maxson Cadillac-Pontiac, 2421 Main St at Jewett. Built as a Pierce-Arrow dealership, Caddys were sold here for about 65 years. Has been a bank for the last decade.
Rooney Nash, 2705 Bailey St. Neither the car make nor the building have made it. This was where the gas station near the police station is.
Taggart Schutz Pontiac 1294 Seneca St. building is boarded up and painted white, but still stands.
Taylor-O’Brien Ford, 2837 Bailey Ave, Buffalo. Building still stands with large cement awning next to the 33
Not a car dealer, but interesting old car photos, and AAA– which still does all these things (except the crisp white jumpsuit wearing.)
This page originally appeared at TrendingBuffalo.com
I’m not the biggest fan of winter, and I hope it’s a mild one. I’ll take warm over cold any day of the week.
While sometimes I might say I do, I don’t hate winter. Winter is part of our deal here in Buffalo, so I accept it and try to make the most of it.
What really bothers me– what inspires something closer to hate– is the speed with which it all seems to go by.
A very artistic, instagrammy look at Steve Cichon’s snow blower
In the last week, I made a pot of scratch chicken noodle soup, gassed up and started the snow blower, and got the furnace ready and turned on the heat. Mundane chores that bother some people, but for me it’s not that chore, so much as it’s just that it literally could have been last week that I was grilling on the 4th of July, sharpening the lawn mower blade for the season, and getting the fans out of the attic.
Really. All of that could have been yesterday. But right now, I’m wearing 4 layers as I type in the back bedroom of our drafty old house, thinking that I won’t be warm until May. Again, it’s not the layers as much as it seems perfectly reasonable that I should be wearing shorts to take the dog for a walk today, not pulling out the peacoat for its 21st Buffalo winter.
It’s not that I don’t stop to smell the roses. I do, literally. I love nature, and enjoy taking it in. But the seasonal differentiation device in my brain is like an old VCR constantly flashing 12:00. I have no good sense of time, which means time is always flying by.
Flying by, in fact, like a tractor trailer on a dark road in the middle of the night.
When you see those little pinholes of light in the rear view mirror coming over that hill way behind you, it seems like that little spec of yellow might never catch up to you.
Daydream (or night dream, as it were) for a moment, and all of the sudden, that truck is right next to you, loudly rattling past, whooshing and reeking of diesel for about 6 seconds. Then it’s tail lights, until they get small and disappear– Just as two more little white pin pricks of light appear in your rear view mirror again.
Not just seasons, but all the things of life. All that time looking forward to something, only to have it whoosh by and turn into tail lights before you even realize it was there.
I’m not sure if it comes with age or if it’s because we change the way we live as we age, but it wasn’t always this way. I find myself being one of those annoying people who have tell people who are younger than me to take the time to enjoy… time. I don’t put it quite that way, but that’s what I mean. And make sure you enjoy time while standing somewhere other than my lawn.
I wouldn’t want to return to youth. The wisdom and knowledge of age roundly outweigh the creaks, groans, and grays for me.
The one thing I’d love to get back is time that goes by like a Countrytime Lemonade commercial– with twangy music, hazy sunshine hanging just above the horizon, a breeze gently swaying the willow tree,and the feeling that none of it will ever end.
This page originally appeared at TrendingBuffalo.com
These are the kinds of thing that litter my hard drive and my attic.
This is what it means to be a “Buffalo pop culture historian,” having this sort of junk at my fingertips. And if I don’t regularly share images like these, people stop calling me a “historian” and start calling me a “hoarder.”
So these are from the Buffalo Stories/staffannouncer.com Archives.
If you survived the decade of the 1980’s in Buffalo, New York, you very well may remember:
In most locations, Gold Circle took over Buffalo area Twin Fair stores in 1982. Gold Circle stores closed in 1988, with many becoming Hills, unless there was already a Hills location nearby (such as on Lake Avenue in Blasdell.) Remember when the Trico ad in the boards lit up when the Sabres scored a goal at the Aud? Windshield wipers were invented in Buffalo, and produced in 3 various plants around the city, until Trico closed up shop and moved to Mexico. Also, remember when the Sabres scored goals?
A field full of plants growing cans of delicious Genny Cream Ale? Don’t tell me you haven’t dreamed this dream. People will come, Ray… People will most definitely come.
This is the Buffalo Chamber of Commerce in 1982. The best part is, the “Talking Proud” hook rug hanging on the wall might not even be in the top 5 most 80’s things about this photo.
Get your discount Crystal Beach tickets at Super Duper. That’s exciting, but the real excitement, in retrospect, was the fact that you could very likely cross the Peace Bridge by answering one question with “US,” and then getting a “go ahead,” from a customs guy.
This 1981 Irv Weinstein photo has a strong 1970’s look about it, but the early 80’s had a strong 70’s look about them. For some people in WNY, the 70’s ended and the 80’s began some time in 1992.
This page originally appeared at TrendingBuffalo.com
This past weekend, we had visits to several box stores on our to-do list.
Since it was Sunday morning, and all of these box stores are each right next to a “box restaurant” where you can get bread-y things for breakfast, we decided to get our Niagara Falls Boulevard visit out of the way before most Williamsville soccer moms are awake to clog the roads and Canadians are still stuck in bridge traffic.
Steve’s look inside the Niagara Falls Blvd. Trader Joe’s the weekend it opened.
There was no line, but I’m not sure the fire marshal would like home many people were packed inside Trader Joe’s this weekend.
There was no line, but I’m not sure the fire marshal would like how many people were packed inside Trader Joe’s this weekend.
We were able to quickly grab what we needed at three stores, and, well, we just happened to be in the plaza that plays host to the most exciting thing to happen to Western New York since Krispy Kreme opened here.
There were parking spots right in front of the store, and there weren’t any Real Housewives of Snyder clawing at each other in a line in front of the store– in fact, there was no line– so we tried Trader Joe’s, especially since we needed to buy something for dinner anyway.
It’s a grocery store. It has a trendy feel, too trendy for my liking, but so does Wegmans where I shop twice a week. They had what I needed to make chicken soup, and they had generic Cheerios on sale. Fine.
There’s my opinion, but people have been all over the map on Trader Joe’s.
They have some interesting inexpensive items. They have some interesting super expensive items. The clerks are either “nice and helpful” or “annoying and too perky” depending on your point of view.
The meat and vegetables were pretty reasonably priced, but you couldn’t possibly do all your shopping there, because the trendy TP looks like its made out of pine cones.
Why do I have to form an opinion on a stupid niche grocery store? We have become a society where you have to love or hate something, and then argue the crap out of why you feel that way.
It’s a store. Some stuff I’d buy, some I wouldn’t. In the 25 minutes my wife and I were in there, three different employees told me they liked my bow tie with buffaloes on it, and three also asked if I needed any help. Based on that, I think it’s fair to say the staff in general is nice, annoying, too perky and helpful.
I just can’t get worked up either way… over a freaking grocery store.
Somehow though, in my ambivalence for TJ’s, as the insiders call it, I feel like less of a man. Like I’ve showed up to a Superbowl party to “just root for a good game.”
“Just pick a team, Sally,” I feel some alpha-male douche snarling at me, and he wants to know about cookie butter and what my feelings are over a lack of “Two-Buck-Chuck” because of our state laws governing wine sales in grocery stores. He hates it, because he has Two-Buck-Chuck in his fantasy league.
I’ve actually been caught in the cross-hairs of a Love TJ’s vs Hate TJ’s battle, with each side trying to sway me with incredible arguments about a grocery store that’s been open for less than 100 hours here in WNY. If only we could corral this passion into something good.
I don’t hate Trader Joe’s. I don’t love Trader Joe’s. It’s meh. But with all this passion about the joint, maybe they should build one in the hole where the Aud used to be.
This page originally appeared at TrendingBuffalo.com
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The truth is, I’m on Kennedy overload right now, but I know I have no right to complain about it. For the people who remember, 50 years later, it remains one of the saddest days of their lives, a sadness shared with an entire grieving nation. For most, it felt as if a member of the family had been shot and killed. Not anger, just sadness and grief.
In most locations, Gold Circle took over Buffalo area Twin Fair stores in 1982. Gold Circle stores closed in 1988, with many becoming Hills, unless there was already a Hills location nearby (such as on Lake Avenue in Blasdell.)
Remember when the Trico ad in the boards lit up when the Sabres scored a goal at the Aud? Windshield wipers were invented in Buffalo, and produced in 3 various plants around the city, until Trico closed up shop and moved to Mexico. Also, remember when the Sabres scored goals?
A field full of plants growing cans of delicious Genny Cream Ale? Don’t tell me you haven’t dreamed this dream. People will come, Ray… People will most definitely come.
This is the Buffalo Chamber of Commerce in 1982. The best part is, the “Talking Proud” hook rug hanging on the wall might not even be in the top 5 most 80’s things about this photo.
Get your discount Crystal Beach tickets at Super Duper. That’s exciting, but the real excitement, in retrospect, was the fact that you could very likely cross the Peace Bridge by answering one question with “US,” and then getting a “go ahead,” from a customs guy.
This 1981 Irv Weinstein photo has a strong 1970’s look about it, but the early 80’s had a strong 70’s look about them. For some people in WNY, the 70’s ended and the 80’s began some time in 1992.