Buffalo’s forgotten role in the birth of modern mass media 100 years ago

       By Steve Cichon
       steve@buffalostories.com
       @stevebuffalo

Buffalo radio pioneer Charles Klinck at his radio transmitter on West Parade Avenue, weeks before “the birth of modern radio” in 1920.

One hundred years ago this week, Buffalonians were reading about the latest innovation in election returns — the wireless receiver, better known these days as radio.

Most historians agree that the broadcast of election results on the night of Nov. 2, 1920, was the birth of modern radio.

History books point to the broadcasts of experimental station 8XK in Pittsburgh — which would eventually become KDKA, but Pittsburgh was not alone on the radio dial a century ago. That same historic night, at the same exact time, election results broadcast by The Buffalo Evening News also came in loud and clear on wireless sets across Western New York.

Radio listeners in Buffalo and Pittsburgh had the same mind-blowing, history-making experience on what was a rainy evening in Western New York. People sat around their wireless sets in their living rooms, finding out in real time that Warren G. Harding had been elected president.

The newly born power of radio was equally evident in both cities, and the marvel and wonder surrounding this growing technology was exactly the same. In fact, it was all part of the same plan.

The American Radio Relay League, an amateur radio operator group still in business to this day, created a plan to “beat the regular wire service in getting the election returns to the public.”

“The plan is to have a good amateur transmitting station in each important city throughout the country send broadcast via radio the available data in his territory once every hour. This information will be picked up by thousands of radio amateurs who will arrange, through the local newspapers or in some other manner, to bulletin the returns for the general public in their respective territories.”

All this is described in a Pittsburgh Daily Post article, which goes on to say that Frank Conrad’s 8XK will take part in the effort for Pittsburgh area listeners.

Pittsburgh Daily Post, Oct. 21, 1920.

A Buffalo Evening News article announcing the broadcast of election returns for Western New York doesn’t mention the larger plan, but does offer more detail about the Buffalo plan.

Buffalo Evening News, Oct. 28, 1920.

The Buffalo Evening News had set up a special direct telephone line to the home of amateur radio operator Klinck, who was teacher of electrical science at Technical High School and was able to fund his expensive radio hobby as a member of one of Buffalo’s top meatpacking families.

After months of experimentation, he invented and pioneered the use of equipment that would allow for the clear transmission of phonograph records over his wireless transmitter.

“Well boys, how did you like that?” said Klinck, quoted in the Buffalo Courier after playing Strauss’ “The Blue Danube.” “Now listen, and I’ll give you a little jazz.”

That was the sound, on a March night in 1920, in the attic at 38 West Parade Ave., as America’s first disc jockey took to the airwaves. You pass over the historic spot where it happened when you drive the outbound Kensington as you pass the Buffalo Science Museum.

Klinck received word from as far away as Long Island that people were listening to his broadcasts. By mid-September, he reported that he was getting music requests from folks all over the northeast.

He also reported that from the beginning, the folks at the big wireless station in Pittsburgh were among his “most interested listeners.” Months before that “first broadcast,” the Westinghouse engineers at KDKA were tuned into Buffalo. On that election night 1920, Klinck was on the air from 6 p.m. to midnight, offering election results interspersed with recorded music. Not only was he Buffalo’s deejay, but also Buffalo’s first radio newsman.

That first commercially sponsored broadcast in Buffalo was described the next day in The News:

“As soon as the returns came into the Evening News office, they were telephoned over a special wire to Mr. Klinck’s residence, where they were received by a member of the Evening News staff. From 6 o’clock until midnight, Mr. Klinck sat at his wireless telephone apparatus and sent out the encouraging Republican news. Not only were city and county returns flashed out over the wireless outfit, but also state and national figures.

“During the evening, Mr. Klinck … received word from several wireless operators in the city, in Lancaster and surrounding towns that they were getting the returns by wireless with perfect satisfaction. … During lulls between dispatches, the operators who were listening for the returns were entertained by musical selections from a Victrola in the Klinck home.”

Listeners in Lancaster were amazed as the radio returns beat out the Western Union telegraph service by minutes. Pine Street druggist Harry Frost told The News that he enjoyed the “returns by wireless telephone” immensely. “We sat around very comfortably smoking cigars and commenting on the election, while every few minutes, Mr. Klinck’s voice would roar out the results as he received them.”

Both the technical aspects and the reaction to Buffalo’s election night 1920 broadcast have been better chronicled than the “more historic” program the same night from Pittsburgh. The main difference remains that the KDKA broadcast was made by the Westinghouse Corporation in an effort to promote and sell the radio tubes they were manufacturing, while Klinck was an amateur operator without much interest in self-promotion.

As the world celebrates the 100th anniversary of radio on Monday with plenty of mentions of Pittsburgh and KDKA, Buffalonians should also celebrate, understanding our city’s exact same role in the birth of modern mass media a century ago.

Streetcar turnaround sold to become University Plaza, 1941

       By Steve Cichon
       steve@buffalostories.com
       @stevebuffalo

The Main/Kenmore streetcar turnaround, future site of the University Plaza.

Main Street at Kenmore Avenue was the end of the line for Buffalo’s Main Street streetcars until 1941, when the land was sold to the developers of University Plaza. The streetcar era ended in Buffalo in 1950 when the last streetcar lines were converted to bus routes.

Buffalo’s International Railway Corporation streetcars rode every inch of Main Street in the city, from where Main Street began at the DL&W Terminal along at the Buffalo Harbor out to the Amherst town line.

The Main Street trolleys would turn around in a loop on the north side of Main just before Bailey. Passengers could also catch streetcars bound for Williamsville at the loop as well as downtown bound cars, until the Buffalo-Williamsville line stopped operating in 1930.

In 1941, the IRC sold the property where the loop was located, and Buffalo’s first shopping plaza – University Plaza – was built and opened on the spot, featuring an A&P grocery store, Endicott Johnson shoes, W.T. Grant’s and Federal Meats.

Adam, Meldrum & Anderson opened the store’s first branch location in University Plaza in 1947. This photo shows the store shortly before it closed in 1985.

The Sample – the store that defined Hertel for generations

       By Steve Cichon
       steve@buffalostories.com
       @stevebuffalo

The Sample Shop in 1939.

Over the last handful of years, Hertel Avenue might have finally been redefined as the home of cosmopolitan and trendy boutiques, food and drink.

But from the time the neighborhoods surrounding Hertel were being built and the 60 years that followed, North Buffalo’s main drag was dominated and defined by The Sample Shop.

The Sample on Hertel in 1990.

Anne Bunis started The Sample Shop in the front parlor of her Hertel Avenue ground floor flat in 1929, selling sample dresses from large New York City designers. Soon after, her husband, Louis, had the idea to have “living mannequins” in the front window. What had been static displays had become fashion shows for passersby on Hertel.

That one house grew into a string of five houses within a decade, all combined into a single 61-foot block tile frontage along Hertel Avenue. What started as a business with just Anne Bunis as buyer, shopkeeper and seamstress, had grown to 61 employees.

Louis and Anne Bunis inside The Sample in the 1980s.

In 1947, most of the houses were torn down and the larger, long familiar Sample store was built – although pieces of the old homes remained a familiar sight deep in the bowels of the store.

As The Sample celebrated 60 years in 1989, 88-year-old Anne Bunis watched her company open a store in the Walden Galleria – although the end of The Sample (and local retailing in general) was clearly in sight.

The 11-store chain dwindled to three, and those remaining Sample stores were ordered closed by a bankruptcy judge in 1990.

In 1993, the flagship store on Hertel Avenue was razed to make room for a senior apartment complex.

As noted in a 1990 editorial, the loss of the Sample on Hertel was as big a blow to the neighborhood as the loss of Sattler’s was to Broadway-Fillmore. News Columnist Donn Esmonde wrote about The Sample in the store’s final days, when it had “70% off” signs plastered in all the windows in 1991.

“What happened? Tastes diversified. The Sample wasn’t big enough to offer something for everyone. Specialization meant the Sample was no longer a one-stop destination. Branches opened in the malls, but rent was high and the stores were small,” wrote Esmonde.

“The big place on Hertel sat in the middle of a residential neighborhood, both serving it and defining it. The clothes were unpretentious yet refined. For a long time, it worked.

“In the end, it was another victim of the ’80s illusion of never-ending prosperity. Maybe, as time went on, it didn’t do enough things for enough people. Which doesn’t mean that it didn’t use to, or that it stopped trying.

“The world changed and, like so many other local retail outlets, the Sample lost its way. And this week, the people to whom it meant the most will leave it for the last time.”

A Buffalo ‘skins-titution’: The Palace Burlesk, 1925-1967

       By Steve Cichon
       steve@buffalostories.com
       @stevebuffalo

“Clever comics and pretty girls at the Moulin Rouge of Buffalo,” read a 1940s matchbook for “The Home of Burlesk as you like it,” the Palace Burlesk. This photo was taken during the final show at the original Palace on Shelton Square in 1967.

Dewey Michaels opened the Palace Burlesk on Buffalo’s Main Street Shelton Square in 1925.

His Courier-Express obituary called Michaels “an irrepressible showman” who operated the original Palace for 45 years. He was 12 years old – not even to Lafayette High School, yet – when his career in showbiz began running the hand-cranked projector at his father’s Allendale Theater. He graduated to ad writer and usher, and was soon managing his own movie parlor.

The Palace Burlesk in Shelton Square, circa 1949. The Ellicott Square Building, to the right, is the only structure in this photo still standing today.

Buffalo didn’t have a vaudeville burlesque theater when he opened the Palace, but it filled a niche that’s foreign to modern audiences. There was more titillation than there was skin, in the brief parts of the show where there was any at all.

“Basically, I’m a prude,” owner Michaels said. “The kids at the downtown Palace saw more in their minds than they did on the stage,” wrote Doug Smith in a Courier-Express remembrance of Michaels.

“Compared with modern television, (the shows) were touchingly innocent,” wrote George Kunz in The News in 1993.

“Although the Palace had been known as a burlesque house, its programs were largely vaudeville … The Palace held a unique place in the heart of downtown Buffalo. Audiences were large and spirited … (and) exuded life. Pedestrians passing during showtime heard raucous, robust sounds of extravagant fun. The orchestra blared, drums rumbled and laughter, a rollicking outrageous laughter, tumbled out the doors onto Main Street.”

Digital Newspaper Archives of US & Canada

Newspaper ads for the Palace, 1948, 1956 and 1942. Rose La Rose was one of the queens of the burlesque circuit, and well-remembered by fans in Buffalo. Appearing as a part of her act in 1948 at the Palace was Joe DeRita, who later gained fame as replacement-stooge “Curly Joe” as a member of the Three Stooges through the 1960s.

Kunz continued: “To describe a Palace midnight show is to resurrect a bygone era. Waiting for a performance, hucksters circulated among the audience, peddling popcorn, ice cream suckers, candy, programs. The atmosphere resembled that surrounding a hockey game.”

In 1967, the original Palace Burlesk closed and was torn down in the name of progress and urban renewal. The spot where it once stood is now part of the open space between the M&T Tower and the Ellicott Square Building on Main Street.

A new Palace Theater was built at Main and Tupper. Courier-Express columnist Anne McIlhenney Matthews wrote with glee about new life for old burlesque only months after the original spot closed.

“With the calendar circled and the deadline established, Michaels is now on the telephone daily contacting booking agents and tracking down stars for the rebirth of burlesque in Buffalo’s downtown.”

While Michaels built one of the theaters that would be an anchor of Buffalo’s Theatre District, it wouldn’t be as the Palace. In 1978, the renovated building opened as Studio Arena Theatre and played a monumental role in keeping Buffalo’s cultural head above water during the darkest days of the region’s history.

The contribution to “what it meant to be a Buffalonian” was celebrated as Studio Arena opened with a tribute to Dewey Michaels and the Palace.

The Palace Burlesque becomes the Studio Arena, 1978.

“An old Buffalo joke had it that to receive a high school diploma, young men, at least once, had to skip the day’s classes and attend the Palace Burlesque. Only then could an education be considered complete,” wrote George Kunz.

At the opening of Studio Arena, Buffalo bon vivant and Courier-Express critic Doug Smith wrote of the relative innocence of the Palace.

“In the world of strip and tease, Dewey always fancied himself as something of a prude. That’s one reason his new Palace at 710 Main never was a financial success.”

Michaels himself directly blamed the proliferation of X-rated movie houses across the city.

The second Palace building continues to host live theater today as Shea’s 710 Theatre, but that’s not the only piece of the Palace that lives on.

In 1980, 83-year-old Michaels donated about 60 antique painted canvas backdrops to local schools and theaters – and one beautiful art nouveau piece to the Smithsonian.

Looking at the art that set the scene for comedians and performers like Phil Silvers, Abbott & Costello, W.C. Fields, Jerry Lewis and Sammy Davis Jr., among scores of others, Michaels thought of all the great comedians who “worked scenes,” unlike the “strictly loser” modern crop of funnymen.

“Stand- up comedians are a bunch of kids who need microphones and tell jokes about their mothers. In my day, the stage wasn’t equipped with a microphone. You had to speak up,” said the octogenarian showman in a Courier-Express interview in 1980.

Outside of the Palace, Michaels brought boxing title fights to Buffalo and auto racing to the Rockpile. He also was active in raising money for the Variety Club.

Dewey Michaels died in 1982 at the age of 85, but memories linger in the minds of those boys who ditched school, tried hard to make sure their voices didn’t crack when telling the man in the ticket booth they were 18, and got equal amounts of eyes-full and imaginations-full in a bygone era.

Conrad Loewer, c1855-1893, my third-great grandfather

       By Steve Cichon
       steve@buffalostories.com
       @stevebuffalo

Conrad Loewer is my third-great grandfather, born in the Holy Roman Empire state of Hesse Cassel/Kurhessen (in today’s Germany) sometime around 1855. He died in Buffalo in 1893.

Conrad and Katherine Weigand Loewer

With his father (my fourth-great grandfather) John (born 1821), sister Katherine, and brother Henry, he came to the United States aboard the Bark Therese. The 52-day voyage from Bremen, Germany landed at the Castle Garden immigration station in New York—the forerunner to Ellis Island– on August 13, 1868.

A bark (barque) is a ship with three or more masts. The image of the Bark Therese was created by Norwegian artist Frederik Sørvig in 1853.

John was a tailor in Germany and continued that trade in Buffalo—passing it onto his son Conrad as he came of age in Buffalo. In 1885, Conrad sold his property on Hickory Street near Batavia (Broadway) and eventually made his way to Carbondale, PA, where he opened a men’s tailor shop on Seventh Street there.

In 1887, newspapers in Carbondale and Scranton reported on Conrad’s childhood association with one of the anarchists who lobbed bombs at police officers in Chicago’s Haymarket square. In Hesse, Loewer attended school with August Spies, who was eventually executed for his role in “The Haymarket Affair.”

“It’s a pleasure to know that this early association with the bomb thrower did not contaminate him, for Mr. Loewer is ‘mild-mannered’ and an industrious citizen,” reported the Scranton Republican.

In 1888, Loewer returned to Buffalo with his wife and children, moving around Jefferson Avenue and William Street. Living at 899 Smith Street, he died in 1893 from pneumonia.

My great-great grandmother, Jeanette “Nettie” Loewer-Greiner, and her twin brother John were seven years old when their father died. Sisters Agnes and Dora were even younger.

Conrad Loewer’s daughters: Katherine, Elizabeth, Jeanette, Agnes, Dora

Especially after the death of my third-great grandmother Katherine Weigand-Loewer in 1900, Conrad’s brother Henry became a father figure in the lives of the Conrad’s destitute and orphaned six children, doing what he could to support them. Henry also supported his elderly father John until his death in 1897.

Henry A. Loewer was a cloth cutter at the Erie County Penitentiary before he was elected Buffalo’s Morning Justice in 1901. For four years, he was the judge who’d travel from precinct to precinct deciding on the cases of men arrested overnight for drinking, fighting, etc. During his time on the bench, he also solemnized 169 marriages.

Henry Loewer 1864-1907

When Henry died in 1907, the Buffalo Enquirer called him “one of the East Side’s best-known Republicans,” and said, “he was a man of bulky size and a familiar figure to the people of the East Side.”

Tracing the history of the Loewer family in Buffalo is challenging since there is another Loewer family with children named Conrad, Henry, and John. They were also from Hesse Cassel and also tailors. It’s very likely that they were related “in the old country,” but there’s no evidence of them working together, sharing business, etc in Buffalo—despite living only blocks away from one another in the Fruit Belt and the streets just south of the Fruit Belt with tree names in the Ellicott Neighborhood.

Conrad Loewer’s daughter Jeanette married Frederick W. Greiner, the son of Joseph Prentiss Greiner and Mary Atkinson-Greiner. Their daughter, Jeannette Greiner-Wargo married Stephen Wargo. They were my grandmother’s parents.

My great-great grandparents Fred and Jeanette Greiner lived on the corner of Hickory and Sycamore in a house with a corner porch. My 5’2″ grandma used to tell stories about her 4’8″ grandma chasing kids off that porch with a broom. Hahaha. Here’s a picture of Fred– a WWI cavalry sergeant and bottler at the Iroquois plant– enjoying a smoke in his living room on the corner of Hickory and Sycamore in the Ellicott Neighborhood.

Joe Bruno was friendly– but ready to fight

       By Steve Cichon
       steve@buffalostories.com
       @stevebuffalo

Longtime New York State Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno died today.

Some of my most interesting times as a reporter happened when I was the only journalist on the scene.

As a radio guy without a camera, I think it puts a lot of newsmakers at ease— or maybe it makes them feel like they’re at an advantage.

Anyway, I was at an event to ask Joe Bruno about state budget negotiations as headed by Albany’s long-infamous “three men in a room,” where the governor, the Assembly Speaker, and the Senate Majority Leader would swap and balance their special interests to make sure the budget would have the votes to pass for the governor’s signature.

Bruno was warm and overly friendly— and entirely evasive. We both played the game. I likely had at least two more stops that night and it was clear I wasn’t going to win a Pulitzer for the story that would result from the interview. It would probably just end up as a couple of quick sound bites for the morning show.

My last question was something like, so what is it like being one of the three men in the room?

With the same overly friendly approach, he said that three men in a room was a myth, not how it actually worked, etc, etc… it was a sound bite he’d been well-practiced at giving for more than a decade.

I thanked him and stopped my recorder.

“There’s no such thing as ‘three men in a room,’” he said, with calculated seriousness and determination in his eyes that hadn’t been there during the interview.

Then a gleam grew from that cold look and a faint smile appeared at the corners of his lips, but the way he straightened his spine at the same time gave more of a sinister vibe than a warm one.

He made sure our eyes were locked when he said, “but it’s great being one of those three men,” keeping that gaze long enough to intimidate but short enough to claim otherwise.

He was not only a tough old-time politician, but he was also a boxer— a good one.

I met a little of both that day.

Football during a global pandemic, 1918

       By Steve Cichon
       steve@buffalostories.com
       @stevebuffalo

Nichols was one of a handful of Buffalo High Schools playing for the Harvard Cup in 1918.

Weeks into Buffalo’s struggle with the flu epidemic in 1918, even though the number of new cases were dropping in the city and surrounding areas, Buffalo Health Commissioner Dr. Franklin C. Gram banned travel for football. Outside teams weren’t being allowed to come into Buffalo and Buffalo teams weren’t being allowed to leave to play.

Front page headline in The Buffalo Evening News, 1918.

“Football got an awful wallop from Spanish influenza today when the health authorities declined to permit the playing of games between the local high school elevens and out of ton school teams,” reported the Buffalo Enquirer. “The Buffalo Boys…. Are deeply disappointed, but appreciate the necessity of complying with the health laws in order to stamp out the epidemic.”

“He does not place a ban on games between Buffalo teams, but frowns upon them,” reported the Buffalo Commercial.

“Dr. Gram believes keeping people standing about or sitting in bleachers, without exercise, would have a bad effect on the epidemic,” reported The Buffalo Evening News.

Canisius College immediately canceled a game against the soldiers at Fort Porter. The men training on the army base that is now the site of the Peace Bridge Customs plaza were preparing to join the fighting in the World War in Europe.

The way the University of Buffalo found around leaving people disappointed with the decision to play football was to play exhibition games as fundraisers for the ongoing Victory Bond drives that were paying for American efforts in World War I.

During the same week UB canceled instruction for all students because of the flu pandemic, the school also announced plans to fill the hole in its football lineup caused by Dr. Gram’s order.

Thiel College was set to visit UB until teams from outside the area were banned, so instead, the school turned to the Curtiss Aeroplane football team. The Curtiss factory team was made up mostly of recent college football stars – but the Buffalo Times noted they were not well practiced and out of playing shape, leading UB to a 6-0 win.

UB would play teams from Canisius and Niagara that shortened season, but also against the Rochester Jeffersons – a semipro team that two years later would join the pro league that eventually became the NFL. Talk of a game against Masten High was scuttled when Masten’s captain and best player went into the service.

Buffalo factories were key battlegrounds in early ‘Ford vs Chevy’ tilt

       By Steve Cichon
       steve@buffalostories.com
       @stevebuffalo

A 1956 Ford, built in Buffalo.

There have been volumes written about the famous Buffalo-built cars like the Pierce-Arrow, the Thomas Flyer, and even the postwar two-seater the Playboy. And those names are only the tip of the iceberg. Dozens of different makes and models were built in Buffalo, especially in the early decades of automotive history.

While the names Ford and Chevrolet don’t instantly bring Buffalo to mind, it is in the early stories of both of those lions of American industry that Western New York and Western New Yorkers have made the greatest impact in the history of motoring.

Millions and millions of Fords and Chevys were built in Buffalo by thousands of our blue-collar fathers and grandfathers – but it wouldn’t have happened without the Danish immigrant who quit his job with the railroad to come to Buffalo as a bicycle mechanic.

William S. Knudsen would eventually become president of General Motors and was President Roosevelt’s point man for war supply production during World War II.

William Knudsen, 1922 photo.

But in 1906, Knudsen was living on Buffalo’s Victoria Avenue, a few blocks from the John R. Keim factories on Kensington Avenue at Clyde Avenue. He worked at the factory that produced machined metal parts – first for bicycles, then more and more for automobiles. As Keim became one of Ford’s leading suppliers for axle housings and drip pans, Henry Ford visited Buffalo in 1910 to buy out the factory.

Knudsen became one of Ford’s trusted lieutenants, and was the superintendent of the factory that became Buffalo’s first large-scale auto assembly plant. Before moving to Detroit to serve in a corporate capacity with Ford, Knudsen oversaw the building of the new Ford plant on Main Street in 1915. More than 600,000 Model-T Fords were churned out of the factory which, after years as a Bell Aircraft and Trico factory, still stands today as the Tri-Main Building.

Ford’s new Model A was unveiled in Buffalo at the factory where tens of thousands of them were built on Main Street near Fillmore.

Henry Ford called Knudsen “the greatest production genius in modern time.”

In 1930, Ford purchased a submerged plot of land on Fuhrmann Boulevard, and after backfilling more than 30 acres of land, a new Ford assembly plant was built. Between 1931 and the plant’s closure in 1958, about 2 million Buffalo-built Fords rolled off the line. The building still stands along Buffalo’s Outer Harbor as “Port Terminal A.”

The first postwar Ford rolls over the assembly line in Buffalo, 1946.

Meanwhile, after running Ford’s entire 27-plant production system after the end of World War I, Knudsen left Ford in a disagreement, eventually moving to GM with a chip on his shoulder. As a vice president at Chevrolet, his Danish-accented, one-line speech to workers became famous.

“I vant vun for vun” was printed that way in employee newsletters, and it was a bold challenge. He wanted one Chevy built for every Ford built. It was a huge dream – at the time, Ford was clearly at the top, while Chevy was America’s seventh-most popular car.

Among Knudsen’s first bold strokes in chasing Ford was to return to his adopted hometown of Buffalo to build a 600,000 square-foot, $2.5 milllion Chevy assembly and body plant on East Delevan Avenue.

Buffalo’s East Delevan Ave. Chevrolet Plant, with 1923 Chevys lined up in front

The first Chevys built in Buffalo hit the roads in summer 1923, and soon the factory was making 8,000 cars per month. The same “genius” level production mind that gave Henry Ford his first million car year helped transform, almost overnight, Chevrolet from an also-ran to the company that would be Ford’s greatest domestic competitor for almost a century and counting.

Buffalo’s first Chevrolet, 1923.

The Buffalo plant was a major player in Chevy’s surge to become America’s second-most popular automobile. After 18 years and well over a million vehicles, in 1941 the plant was converted to defense production.

After the war, the facility was refitted into an axle, brake and clutch factory. GM eventually spun off American Axle, which continued operating the plant until 2007. Efforts to remediate parts of the property for redevelopment have been ongoing since the plant’s closure.

While it’s been generations since Buffalo has rolled completed cars off of assembly lines, there are still about 1,400 GM workers creating components at the former Harrison Radiator in Lockport. GM’s Tonawanda Engine plant was opened in 1938 and employs about 1,600 workers. Opened in 1950, the Ford Stamping Plant in Hamburg continues to employ around 1,200.

And Buffalo’s link to the earliest days of the “Ford vs. Chevy” battle lives on.

Beer vat escape and other Houdini tricks in Buffalo, 1900-1925

       By Steve Cichon
       steve@buffalostories.com
       @stevebuffalo

Highlights from Harry Houdini’s seven trips to Buffalo.

From his first visit to Buffalo in 1900 until his death in 1926, master illusionist Harry Houdini visited Buffalo at least seven times. That first visit came “at the personal invitation of Michael Shea” and came well before Houdini was a household name.

That first visit was also the first time that Houdini completed amazing feats off the stage to promote his appearances. At a patrol barn on Henry Street near the Terrace (on a spot today covered by the Skyway on-ramp), the illusionist amazed gathered patrolmen and police drivers by escaping from nine pairs of locked handcuffs shackling his hands and feet.

Then billed as “The King of Handcuffs,” he was originally engaged for a one-week stay at Shea’s Garden Theater, but he proved so popular the stay was extended a week at the Pearl Street venue that was Buffalo’s first vaudeville theater.

That visit left an impression. Weeks later, when a prisoner tried to escape a straightjacket, the Courier reported that the man “gave an impromptu entertainment that threatened to eclipse the recent performances of Houdini.”

By the time Houdini made it back to Buffalo in 1905, he was an international sensation and escaping from handcuffs in a police horse stable wouldn’t be up to his reputation.

First, he defeated the lock that held William McKinley assassin Leon Czolgosz, and then escaped a giant wooden trunk created by the shipping and packing men of Buffalo’s JN Adam department store.

Ads promoting Houdini’s 1906 and 1908 visits to Buffalo.

He returned to Michael Shea’s stages again in 1906 and 1908. When he added an element to his act – unlocking the handcuffs while inside a giant tank of water – he surprised swimmers at the Central YMCA one Wednesday morning before a show. Manacled in 20 pounds of handcuffs, he threw himself into the deep end of the pool at the Y.

When he emerged from the water – free of shackles – one minute and four seconds later, he said, “Gentlemen, that’s about as near as I care to come to death when I’m entertaining my fellow athletes.”

“When I dove, I didn’t know the water was so shallow,” said Houdini, as quoted in the Buffalo Commercial. “I struck my head on the bottom and I was stunned for six or eight seconds. It’s a wonder I didn’t knock my brains out.”

Four sailors from Buffalo’s Seaman’s Union sealed the magician in a sea bag, “used on the insane at sea” during a 1911 appearance here. Coming back to Buffalo in 1916, Houdini engaged employees of Buffalo’s Phoenix Brewery to seal the cask after he jumped into 100 gallons of beer during his show at Shea’s Vaudeville Theater.

“Houdini feels positive that he will be able to free himself and appear before the audience within a very few minutes of the time that he is imprisoned,” wrote the Buffalo Enquirer, the morning before the beer stunt. “He assured the management when he accepted the challenge there was no fear but that he would be out and able to appear for the remainder of the week.”

Houdini’s final appearance in Buffalo, in 1925, was at the Teck Theater.

On his final trip to Buffalo, a year before his death, “Houdini the unconquerable” was as much a celebrity as he was an illusionist. All the papers covered his visit to the Meyer Motor Company showroom at 1275 Main St., where he checked out “the clever performance” of the “Talking Studebaker,” which sang, played songs, and told the age of passersby. Later that night, he escaped from a crate built and nailed shut by the employees of the Pierce-Arrow Motor Company.

At an appearance at Canisius College, Houdini gave a lecture denouncing mediums and spiritualism, and did a show using many of the tricks used by mediums to make it appear that they are engaging in otherworldly communication.

A year to the day after his last performance in Buffalo, Houdini became seriously ill during a performance in Detroit. He died a week later, on Halloween, 1926.

Buffalo in the ’40s: Crystal Beach’s Comet replaces deadly Cyclone coaster

       By Steve Cichon
       steve@buffalostories.com
       @stevebuffalo

Among the last riders of the Comet line up as Crystal Beach closes permanently in 1989.

When Crystal Beach opened for its 58th season on May 20, 1948, it was the general public’s first chance to try “the world’s newest, largest, and smoothest $200,000 roller coaster,” the Comet.

“Fast, but smooth as silk,” said the workmen on the coaster’s first trial run a week earlier.

News Reporter Mildred Spencer was there as the Comet took its first run. It was clear the craftsmen who built the ride were having as much fun testing as generations of Buffalonians and Southern Ontarians would have over the next 41 years.

“A gang of laughing, cheering workmen piled into the new Crystal Beach Comet Tuesday morning to give it a trial run. Two hours after the initial trip they were still riding, and it was with reluctance that they left for lunch when the noon whistle blew,” wrote Spencer.

The Comet was 700 feet longer than the old Cyclone coaster it replaced, and had 800 feet of track along the beach seawall for a total of 4,000 feet of steel track.

“There are no banked turns to jostle the riders and it has been hailed as thrilling, yet comfortable, for young and old,” reported The News.

“The Comet is perfectly safe for young and old alike,” said Crystal Beach General Manager F.L. Hall. “We’ve eliminated the sharp-angled banks – some as sharp as 75 degrees – that were characteristic of the Cyclone. All curves in the new ride are on the level track. The Comet is like a smooth toboggan ride, only faster, with cars going up to 65 miles an hour.”

Talking about the safety and smoothness of the Comet was not only the standard marketing talk of an amusement park operator – it was meant to reassure patrons who’d been wary to ride a Crystal Beach roller coaster since a Black Rock man plunged to his death on the Cyclone a decade earlier.

The fanfare announcing the opening of the Cyclone in 1927 sounded a lot like the opening of the Comet 21 years later.

“Thrills galore are promised by the giant cyclone coaster now being erected at Crystal Beach. It will have a sheer drop of more than 100 feet and no end of hair-raising, nerve-tingling turns, but will be absolutely safe. This new coaster is to cost more than $100,000 and is to be the outstanding feature among several noteworthy new features being offered this year,” explained the Courier-Express.

Crystal Beach’s Cyclone roller coaster, from a postcard.

“The new coaster is to rest on 600 separate concrete foundations. More than 200 tons of steel will be fabricated for its construction.”

Hundreds watched in horror on the park’s opening day in 1938, when Amos Weidrich, 22, of Buffalo, was killed when he fell from the coaster’s car at the top of a loop. He was decapitated when the car rolled over his body on the tracks below.

The News and Courier-Express accounts both provide graphic descriptions of the incident from eyewitnesses.

Park officials were quoted in newspapers around North America the next day speculating that Weidrich “must have jumped,” because the ride is safely operated.

“There was no possible way he could have been thrown out,” said park manager Hall.

Weidrich’s companion – who’d ridden the coaster with him three times that day and was sitting in the car next to him moments before his death, said that Weidrich didn’t jump.

An inquest called the death an accident and didn’t access any blame.

Within a decade, the Cyclone was replaced with the Comet.

Aside from the thrills of that brand-new Comet, a 1948 trip to Crystal Beach was reflective of a different time, according to one late summer ad promoting the beach and the park:

“Three hours of moonlight cruising on Lake Erie will be offered on the Str. Canadiana, the Crystal Beach boat, tonight at 8:15. Harold Austin’s 12-piece orchestra will play for listening and dancing. The steamer departs from the terminal at the foot of Commercial St.

Str. Canadiana, from a postcard.


“Many Buffalonians have been riding the Canadiana to Crystal Beach and back just for the relaxing trip. By taking the 8:15 boat, passengers can be back in Buffalo by 10:15.

“Amusement devices to tickle the fancy of young and old will be found at Crystal Beach. They range from thrilling rides on the Comet Coaster, the Flying Scooters and the Octopus to the carrousel, the Old Mill and the miniature railway. All are tested regularly for safety features.

“As summer rears a close, bathing is more and more popular. The patrolled beach insures against rowdyism and ample lifeguard service prevents accidents in the water.”

Riders on the Comet in the 1980s.