Charles Burchfield’s Buffalo, Part I: How Buffalo saw Burchfield

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

Let there be no doubt — Charles E. Burchfield loved his adopted home of 46 years.

“I can say without reservation that I love Buffalo in its entirety — and could not possibly exhaust its picture possibilities in several lifetimes,” he told a reporter in 1941.

Already an artist selling the occasional watercolor painting in New York City, Charles Burchfield’s time in Buffalo started in 1921 when he took a job here as a designer at a wallpaper company.

Over the next 45 years, mostly from his West Seneca home, Burchfield’s innovative use of watercolor helped that once-marginalized medium gain stature and respect as his place among America’s finest artists was cemented.

One of the most prolific of the American Realism painters with works numbering well into the thousands, Charles Burchfield came to Buffalo from Ohio in 1921 to work in the design department at MH Birge & Sons, 390 Niagara St. The Niagara Street facility was Birge’s home from 1880 to 1982. The spot where the factory once stood is now home to a Rite-Aid and McDonald’s. (Buffalo Stories archives)

In 1926, Burchfield was first introduced at length to Buffalo newspaper readers with a headline calling him an internationally known artist who carries a lunch pail.

(Buffalo Stories archives)

Charles Burchfield, in front of one of his paintings, 1961. Buffalo News archives — Charles Burchfield, in front of one of his paintings, 1961. (Buffalo News archives)

Burchfield, the article says, is the only artist in Buffalo “who, despite (that) the Metropolitan Museum of Art has bought one of his paintings, goes to his daily job as a designer for a local wallpaper firm, carrying a lunch pail.”

If living in Buffalo most of his life and capturing so much of Western New York’s natural and urban beauty didn’t make Burchfield “a Buffalo guy,” his lunch pail approach certainly sounds like Everyman 716.

Noting his almost excruciating modesty in talking about his work and the plaudits he’d received — a continuous current throughout his career – the Courier-Express continued, “To him who conceives a noted artist as a long-haired, be-smoked individual, who, pallet and smudged brushes in hand, gazes dreamily out of a cobwebbed attic window, Burchfield is a disillusionment.”

There may have been some bit of whimsical artist in evidence when Burchfield said he finds inspiration in “old houses that have the atmosphere of old worlds and old lives about them,” but whimsy was not the feeling the reporter was left with.

Interviewing Burchfield in his office at Birge, the conversation between reporter and artist ended when the 5:30 whistle blew and Burchfield had to catch his bus to West Seneca.

Early coverage of Burchfield in The Buffalo Evening News. (Buffalo Stories archives)

Still, the quiet, humble man was lauded in one 1935 headline as “the Gardenville genius” who is “said to have changed the direction of American painting.” The occasion for the mention was his winning a Carnegie Institute award for “The Shed in the Swamp.” While Burchfield was in Pittsburgh to accept the award in person, his wife and five children were gathered around the radio in their West Seneca living room to hear the live broadcast of the announcement of the award.

“The Shed in the Swamp,” as published in 1935. (Buffalo Stories archives)

The Courier-Express article goes on to quote at length a story from Harper’s Weekly, which heaps praise upon Burchfield as a uniquely American artist who refused to “grovel before Matisse (or) Picasso” and was “never taken in by the flummery of Cubism.”

“Burchfield faced life, and extracted from it an art that might justly be called his own,” wrote Thomas Craven in Harper’s, quoted in the Courier-Express. “On the strength of things accomplished, he must be called one of our best artists. … His example changed the direction of American painting.”

Burchfield celebrates his 70th birthday with his wife, Bertha, carrying himself in the manner of a milkman or an accountant rather than one of the country’s most celebrated artists. His works hung in most major galleries and in the White House.

At the same time, though, feature photos printed in both The News and the Courier-Express show Burchfield looking a lot like a Western New York garden-variety uncle making his own frames for his paintings.

A 1937 passing reference in a Buffalo newspaper story about another local artist calls Burchfield “the most important artist within several hundred, possibly several thousand miles of Buffalo.”

But, says Burchfield scholar Nancy Weekly at the Burchfield Penney Art Center, rarely did he leave a discussion of his artwork more satisfied than the time late in life when he packed some artwork into his car and spoke to a classroom of sixth-graders.

The reflections of 11-year-olds warmed his soul as much — if not more — than any critical success. Upon receiving a Christmas card designed by the child who sent it, Burchfield responded with a note signed, “From one artist to another.” And he meant it.

About 1,000 were on hand on Dec. 9, 1966, to lionize “the tall, dignified and soft-spoken man” at the dedication of the center that still bears his name. The artist himself was there to cut the ribbon on the center that day, but he died only a month later while having lunch at a West Seneca restaurant with his wife.

In his will, Burchfield established a foundation for the support and education of art through the Burchfield Center.

Charles Burchfield (right), looks a bit uncomfortable with all the attention at the opening of the center bearing his name in December 1966. (Buffalo News archives)

In remembering Burchfield shortly after his death, Dr. Ralph W. Loew, pastor of Holy Trinity Lutheran Church on Main Street, wrote, “Our age needs those who can see the authentic realities … (he) painted their pictures in the gray days and challenged us when we were willing to settle for complacency.”

In a citation presented in commemoration of the opening of the Burchfield center, President Lyndon B. Johnson said, “In his paintings of the American scene, his brush endowed the ordinary with universal greatness. During a period of urbanization and industrialization, he focused our vision on the eternal greatness of living things.”

That’s Burchfield the artist, but Burchfield the man was summed up in a 1927 News article about the painter, at a time when he had gained world renown but was still designing wallpaper in a West Side factory every day. Even as fame and some measure of fortune came his way, he remained mostly as described:

“(H)e’s still carrying the dinner pail, literally if not figuratively. … Charles Burchfield has always been a worker, and will always be a worker. He’s at it all day long and far into the night. And he doesn’t seem to tire of the easel. … It’s work; everlasting work, and the rewards are in his sights. Posterity can wait. In olden days, an artist would have been too proud to carry a dinner pail.”

More: Torn-down Tuesday: Charles Burchfield’s Buffalo, Part II

What It Looked Like Wednesday: Grocery wars of the ’50s spark deja vu on Hertel

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

North Buffalo and the neighborhoods around the Hertel strip are abuzz with excitement over what promises to be a revolution in grocery shopping in the very near future.

A&P and Loblaw’s fought grocery wars on Hertel Avenue in the 1950s from the same storefronts where the Lexington Co-Op and Dash’s will be vying for customers 60 years later. (Buffalo Stories archives)

The Lexington Co-Op is slated to open a new branch in what was most recently a CVS drug store on Hertel Avenue. Renovation and construction have been ongoing at the 10,000-square-foot store, which will boast a sidewalk café and meat and seafood counters.

Meanwhile, Dash’s Markets caused an uproar in 2013 when plans to close the current Hertel Avenue store and merge it with a larger facility on Kenmore Avenue were made public. Speculation has been rampant about plans for an enlarged Dash’s store in the footprint of buildings owned by the Dash family, taking up nearly the entire block from Starin to Voorhees avenues.

If the speculation comes true and consumers soon have two gleaming modern supermarkets within a block of each other — it won’t be the first time that’s happened. It won’t even be the first time for the two buildings involved.

In the 1950s, the same North Buffalo neighborhood watched two grocery behemoths battle for their shopping patronage from the same exact locations.

While the building at 1678 Hertel Ave. has been known for the last several decades as a CVS drugstore, for several decades starting in the 1940s, the location was home to an A&P Supermarket.

1950 ad for the renovated A&P Market on Hertel Avenue. It’s expected that the Lexington Co-Op will open in the building sometime in 2017. (Buffalo Stories archives)

Renovations to the existing store in 1950 promised the ladies of North Buffalo modern shopping like none they’d ever experienced. “Step down the aisles,” the ad invites. “You’ll find them lined with new departments, sparkling new refrigerated cases and modern marketing equipment of every sort.”

The A&P lasted in the spot through the late 1970s.

Perhaps feeling the heat from the sparkling new A&P, in 1955, Loblaws closed its dated location at Hertel and Parkside (now the site of Walgreens) and opened a new store just up from Hertel and Starin.

1955 ad for the grand opening of the Loblaws supermarket on Hertel Avenue. The same building is now the home of Dash’s Markets. (Buffalo Stories archives)

In 1971, the store – which had also been known as Star Discount Market for a brief time – was sold to become a B-Kwik Market. It was operated as B-Kwik by the Dash family for decades, until a corporate sale mothballed the name B-Kwik and the store became Dash’s in 2003.

Torn-Down Tuesday: Buffalo police headquarters in 1937

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

The City of Buffalo has purchased the old federal courthouse on Niagara Square for $1, with plans of making it Buffalo’s combined police and fire headquarters.

This is the police headquarters building that was abandoned in 1937 when a new Buffalo Police Headquarters building was opened at Church and Franklin. Buffalo Police are expected to leave that building to move to the old federal court building on Niagara Square in 2017. (Buffalo Stories archives)

The “new” building was dedicated as Buffalo’s federal office building by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on a visit to Buffalo weeks before the 1936 presidential election, which makes it a year older than the building Buffalo Police brass will be vacating at Church and Franklin. That building was ready for occupancy in 1937.

As Police Commissioner Ralph V. Degenhart looking on, the Rev. Jacob Ledwon blesses new police cars in 1985 outside the building that has served as Buffalo Police Headquarters since 1937. (Buffalo Stories archives)

The Church and Franklin building replaced a much earlier structure that stood a couple blocks away at Seneca Street between Erie and Franklin. The Skyway onramp runs through the property now, which is across Franklin from the back patio of The Pearl Street Brewery.

A 1933 report from the state Corrections Department called the old building “unfit, inadequate and unsafe.”

The report went on to lament the Depression and how plans for a new headquarters were scuttled by the economy crisis. “The building has been condemned for many years and destructive fires have occurred which required large expenditures for its restoration. The close proximity to the railroad, with the consequent noise and grime, makes the location objectionable.”

Buffalo Police headquarters, Seneca and Franklin, 1920s. (Buffalo Stories archives)

The report was the last straw — and city lawmakers insisted on a new headquarters. After wrangling between city, state and federal funding sources, preliminary plans for a new building on city owned property at Franklin and Church were unveiled in 1935.

“When completed, the new police headquarters will be a most up to date building,” said Mayor George Zimmermann. “The plans were drawn only after the best features of other modern police headquarters were studied, and they also include suggestions from Commissioner Higgins. The City of Buffalo can well be proud of the new building that will replace the present antiquated structure.”

Jan. 31, 1937, was the day Buffalo Police moved into the new $800,000 headquarters. Commissioner James Higgins personally directed the crew of 30 telephone lineman, upon whose order, “Cut now!” communications were disconnected at the old building. Exactly 15 minutes later, the same lines ran to the new office.

“Everything worked out so smoothly and quickly the police department did not miss a single call,” Commissioner Higgins said.

Twenty members of the mounted squad spent about 10 hours moving hundreds of pieces of furniture up Franklin Street, to the “thoroughly modern” building complete with a crime laboratory, a lie detector and a ballistics microscope.

Old Tools from Old Guys

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

Having old tools around helps connect you to the people who taught you to use them.

Grandpa Cichon would get you all the hammers, work gloves, flashlights, and blanket-lined denim work coats you could ever want from National Aniline. I wish I had saved more of that stuff. I remember donating the work coat he gave me to the Salvation Army when I was in high school. I hope someone is still using it!

There were always flashlights and work gloves– and we had a bunch of Grandpa Cichon’s hammers at our house– but the only tool I every remember seeing at Grandpa Cichon’s house was an old pair of pliers that grandma kept in the drawer and used for just about everything.

Grandpa Coyle was a union glazier and glassworker who didn’t believe in measuring tapes.

He had at least a dozen rules. I snagged one off the final pile heading to the Salvation Army.

I love the little poch marks made by molten something... I like to imagine it was from plumbing with lead. When I told Gramps that I replaced an old lead drain in the basement with PVC, there was real sadness in his eyes.

Gramps loved rusty tools– his basement was a tool and mismatched piles of junk wonderland. He’d be happy to know that I am happy with one of his rusty, obsolete tools.

Buffalo in the ’20s: At JN Adam Memorial, a groundbreaking ‘sun cure’ for tuberculosis

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

Tuberculosis. TB. Consumption. The bacterial infection usually manifest in the lung is now exceedingly rare in the United States, but a century ago, it was a scourge.

People afflicted with the “Great White Death” were sent to sanitariums far away from the rest of the population, where it was expected they would eventually succumb to the disease that was one of the nation’s leading causes of death during the first half of the 20th century.

James Noble Adam was the owner of the JN Adam Department store and Buffalo’s mayor when tuberculosis became an acute problem in Erie County. He offered to buy nearly 300 acres of land in far-out Perrysburg if the state and city would build a TB hospital on the Cattaraugus County lot.

The JN Adam Memorial Hospital opened in 1912 with “comfort and contentment” of the patients at the hospital as the key concern.

In 1915, Buffalo was somewhat mystified and somewhat scandalized when “1,000 feet of motion picture film,” probably about 20 minutes’ worth, was shown as a fundraiser for the sanitarium. The packed house at the Elmwood Music Hall saw movies of “unclad children frolicking in the snow” at Perrysburg.

The images captured the first American implementation of Swiss physician Auguste Rollier’s “sun cure” for tuberculosis. Heliotherapy and fresh air was thought to be the only way to cure the ravaging disease.

The JN Adam Memorial Hospital was renowned in medical circles for its use of the rays of the sun to bring new life and vigor to TB patients. For decades, the place was the host of a constant stream of doctors wanting to see “the cure” in action for themselves.

Many of the images in this story appear in Char Szabo-Perricelli’s new book, “J.N. Adam Memorial Hospital: Her Inside Voice,” published in part by the Museum of disABILITY History in Amherst.

The book tells the story of the rise and fall of both the Perrysburg hospital and the sun cure — both of which saw a rapid decline after the discovery and more widespread use of antibiotics, especially after World War II.

The campus closed as a tuberculosis hospital in 1960 and was used as a facility for the developmentally disabled until 1993. It’s been mostly abandoned ever since.

Szabo-Perricelli has been photographing and collecting the stories of the J.N. Adam Hospital since 2001, chronicling the decline of the structures while finding meaning in what remains.

While there have been many who have worked to find new uses for the sprawling Cattaraugus County campus, the historic structures are suffering from the same fate as the people who called them home for decades: They’re out of sight, out of mind, wasting away.

Buffalo in the ’40s: The Beerador and Bevador, beer fridges invented in WNY

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

With people pouring into town from all over the country and all over the world to spend the holiday with their families, the days around Thanksgiving are generally among the busiest at taverns and gin mills around Buffalo and Western New York as those same people catch up with old friends at old haunts.

Everyone’s home, and everything feels like it should. It feels simple, but it’s a complex mosaic that makes home and our home watering hole feel that way — in many Buffalo places, right down to the beer fridge.

If your favorite Buffalo taproom has been around for a while, chances are pretty good that there’s a Buffalo-made Bevador or Beerador keeping your favorite brews cold. The main difference between the two was size. The Beerador held 22 cases of beer; the more popular Bevador held 264 beers or 11 cases.

An ad also bragged that the Beerador’s merry-go-round shelves allowed the coolest beer to be moved to the front and easier access to any brand of beer on any shelf.

The Jewett Refrigeration Co. made the beer-bottle-shaped appliances on Letchworth Street in a spot that is now a parking lot for students at SUNY Buffalo State. Jewett started making ice boxes and coal scuttles in 1849, but moved ahead with the times and was an early pioneer in electric refrigeration in the 1910s and 1920s.

1933 ad — 1933. (Buffalo Stories archives)

By the time the 1930s rolled around, the Jewett name was found in the kitchens of some of the country’s wealthiest and most famous citizens.

But the Beerador, manufactured to always keep bottled beverages at a uniform, perfect temperature, was Jewett’s next-to-last hurrah. After years of outfitting hotels and restaurants like the Statler chain and unique venues like the Broadway Market with custom, large refrigeration systems, Jewett was bought and sold several times, until the remaining company in Buffalo became focused on medical applications of refrigeration.

It just so happened that most of the considerations that made the Beerador a great beer fridge also made it a great blood lab fridge.

The largest order ever received by Jewett was also one of its final orders. In 1959, the Greek government bought 43 slightly modified versions of the Beerador, which were rebranded “Blood Bank Refrigerators.”

By the end of the 1960s, the Jewett Refrigerator Co. was another manufacturing memory in Buffalo. But 60 and 70 years later, many of us are served bottles of Blue or Rusty Chain from the same Beeradors that kept our fathers’ and grandfathers’ Simon Pure and Iroquois cold.

What I mean by Thankful…

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

Thankful to me means accepting without settling, filled with mercy but strong in resolve, happy but realistic.

Thankful to me means lacking in anger but not lacking in passion, lacking in spite but not lacking in a hope for justice, lacking in hate but not lacking in a drive to help good triumph every time.

Thankful is about finding the light up close and far away. It’s allowing the tiniest beautiful things to lighten your heart even when your first inclination might be to leave it all in darkness, but also looking to the horizon– maybe even squinting if you have to– to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Thankful can happen even in the most adverse climates and situations, but it takes a lot of work and fighting through pain and darkness. It’s not always cool or popular to be thankful, and sometimes it doesn’t even feel right to be the only one filled with thanks– but thanks is never wrong.

I pray the light of thankfulness touches us all today and everyday.

What It Looked Like Wednesday: How Buffalo bought a turkey in 1928

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

Usually, a smart shopper can find a relatively inexpensive turkey that won’t bust the family’s bank while still allowing everyone to share in late autumn’s all-American communal meal. But before the days of shoppers’ cards and even freezers, a Thanksgiving turkey was a much more expensive proposition.

These three boys each bought their family’s bird at the Elk Street Market from Barneth Satuloff, poultry merchant on Elk Street on the Sunday before the holiday, but sales usually hit their peak on the Tuesday or Wednesday before the Thursday celebration. (Buffalo Stories archives)

Leading up to the holiday, Buffalo’s public markets “pushed Thanksgiving fowl into the limelight” with the sale of live turkeys — all to be butchered and dressed while you wait. You couldn’t buy a turkey until the few days right before, but for those days, a cacophony of gobbles filled the air around the Broadway, Chippewa and Elk markets.

While having a turkey for Thanksgiving has been the holiday’s hallmark for almost 400 years, the price hasn’t always been in everyone’s reach. In 1928, the price for a turkey at one of Buffalo’s public markets was between 50 and 55 cents a pound, which adjusted for inflation, is about $7 or $8 per pound.

thanksgiving-1928-weedco — Buffalo Stories archives

The “buxom twenty-pounder” one poultry man described to a reporter would cost as much as $140 in 2016 dollars, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics price calculator.

It wasn’t just turkeys — meat, as a commodity, was much more expensive in general. Ducks were 30 cents a pound, chickens around 33 cents. A goose could be had for 25 cents, and the most affordable meat for your Thanksgiving table would have been rabbit at a reasonable 20 cents a pound.

The essentials for cooking the bird were on sale leading up to the big day in 1928 — Weed & Company, Buffalo’s biggest hardware and bric-a-brac store, had plenty of Thanksgiving utensils available for sale.

Torn-Down Tuesday: Main & Amherst in the 1940s

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

It might be difficult to recognize today’s corner of Main and Amherst in your mind by looking at this photo.

Looking north on Main Street at the Amherst Street intersection, 1940s. (Buffalo Stories archives)

The intersection today is quite different.

Two International Railway Company street cars ambling alongside vehicular traffic is one of those pieces of Buffalo’s past that is difficult to imagine if you don’t remember them running.

And then there’s the Mischler’s Tavern building, which dates to the 1880s and was built before East Amherst Street was constructed.

Buffalo Cement Works, east side of Main Street, 1884. (Buffalo Stories archives)

When this photograph was taken in 1884, the east side of Main Street near Amherst was dominated by Lewis Bennett’s Buffalo Cement Works.

Today, this intersection is dominated by the Amherst Street MetroRail station, the site of which would have been behind the left shoulder of the photographer of the Mischler’s Tavern/street car photo. Had that he turned around, he would have seen the Central Park Market building where the MetroRail station now stands.

Central Park Market building. (Buffalo Stories archives)

Buffalo’s 1520 WKBW Radio: WNY’s great contribution to 20th century pop culture

BUFFALO, NY – It’s funny the way memories begin to haze. Strictly from a Buffalo point of view, in the late 50’s and early 60’s, KB was one of many stations cranking out the music and antics that made for great rock n’ roll radio.

Stations like WBNY, WWOL, WXRA, and later WYSL and a host of others were capturing the imaginations of young people in Buffalo. Tommy Shannon first made girls swoon at WXRA Radio, from a location way out in the boonies. The studio was on rural Niagara Falls Boulevard, in a location which soon would be the home of Swiss Chalet for the next 50 years. WXRA later became WINE, where Hernando played host.

hernadowine — Hernando, on a WINE promo– with a microphone flag edited from WXRA to read WINE. Buffalo Stories archives

Tom Clay, one of many disc jockeys to use the name Guy King on WWOL, was arrested after his playing ‘Rock Around the Clock’ over and over again, while perched atop a billboard in Shelton Square. Traffic was snarled for hours in what was considered “Buffalo’s Times Square,” and is now just considered the MetroRail tracks in front of the Main Place Mall.

wwol-shelton-sq — Shelton Square, featuring The Palace Burlesk and WWOL Radio. The block where these buildings stood on Main Street is now a grass-covered park. The Ellicott Square Building, to the right, still stands and gives reference to the location. Buffalo Stories Archives

If you tuned to WBNY in the late 50s, you were likely to hear the voice of Daffy Dan Neaverth, Joey Reynolds (right), Fred Klestine and Henry Brach. At WBNY, Neaverth would pull a rooftop like event similar to Guy King’s, throwing candy out to passersby. Neaverth, perhaps with his boyish good looks and demeanor, evaded arrest for his stunt.

As many of the smaller stations in Buffalo were churning out rhythm and blues music all day, at night, for Buffalo and the entire eastern seaboard, ‘the Hound Sound was around.’

George “Hound Dog” Lorenz, the Godfather of rock n’ roll radio (not just in Buffalo, but PERIOD) first plied his trade in Western New York at Niagara Falls’ WJJL, as early as 1951. By the mid 50’s, Lorenz’s hip daddy style, and the fact that he was spinning records from black artists, made him an institution.

The King and The Hound, Memorial Auditorium

Ironically, the man who brought Elvis to Memorial Auditorium was out at KB when the station went Rock n’ Roll full-time. Lorenz wanted nothing to do with a Top 40 style format. While inspiring many of the changes that came to KB and many other stations around the country, the Hound stayed true to his style, and founded WBLK Radio; where he continued to uncover and spotlight new artists, both in Buffalo, and to a syndicated audience around the country.

KB broadcast to the white area on the map.

Despite a pioneering spirit and great imaginative programming, each of those true rock n’roll pioneer stations had unique problems. Either they weren’t well financed, or had daytime-only signals so weak that they couldn’t be heard throughout the city and all the nearby suburbs.

Enter WKBW Radio, soon with the corporate backing of owner Capital Cities (now THE DISNEY CORPORATION, by the way), and its monstrous 50,000 watt signal. With an eventual 50% of the marketshare, KB quickly blew all of the much smaller competitors out of the water. Half of the audience was listening to KB. Never before, and never since, has a radio station been so dominant in Buffalo.

Before Top 40 came to KB, Stan Barron hosted the Morning Clockwatcher show, live each morning outside the Main Street studios.

On July 4, 1958, Futursonic Radio was alive on WKBW. The rock n’roll era had arrived on a respectable, long established Buffalo radio station. When station manager Al Anscombe first convinced the Reverend Clinton Churchill to make the switch to Top 40, initially, the station was stocked with out-of-towners at the direction of the man who’d established WBNY as the city’s Top 40 leader, program director Dick Lawrence.

But eventually, a base of homegrown talent sprinkled with some of the most talented people from around the country, KB built an unprecedented following in Buffalo and around the country. Most of the names already mentioned here made their way to KB, and many reading this might not know or remember they worked elsewhere.

As often happens, over the last 50 years, for better or for worse, people who remember Guy King or the earliest Tom Shannon or Daffy Dan Neaverth shows, will think they heard those things on KB, forgetting those early pioneering rock n’roll days. If you watched Elvis shake his hips on Ed Sullivan for the first time, and you then listened to Elvis on the radio– It wasn’t likely KB, even though your memory might tell you otherwise.

The Disc Jockeys of WKBW. Left: Fred Klestine, Dan Neaverth, Jay Nelson, Jack Kelly, Doug James, Bob Diamond, Tom Shannon

Many who played a part in making those smaller stations great feel slighted by the fact that KB has swallowed up the collective memory of the early rock n’roll era; but it’s no slight on those great stations and the folks who worked there: It’s more a testament to the incredible juggernaut that KB was. Henry Ford didn’t invent the automobile, he was just the first to make the same car available to everyone.

With its clear-channel 50,000 watt signal, KB was heard all over the eastern half of North America. Anyone who worked at KB in its heyday has stories. The Joey Reynolds Show was a resounding Number 1 in Buffalo. But 370 miles away in Baltimore, the show showed up in the ratings as number 4. The late newsman Ed Little would remember being in the room as packages containing female lingerie were opened; sent from Maryland by an obviously big fan. Don Yearke, known as Don Keller the Farm Feller back in the early 60s on KB, was recognized along with his KB Litter Box by a fan in Southern Pennsylvania.

Program from the night Joey Reynolds and Fred Klestine wrestled the Gallagher Brothers at Memorial Auditorium.,

Starting in the mid 50s, and running through the mid 70s, its fair to say cumulatively, that nighttime KB disc jockeys like George “Hound Dog” Lorenz, Dick Biondi, Tommy Shannon, Jay Nelson, Joey Reynolds, Sandy Beach, and Jack Armstrong enjoyed more listeners on a single radio station during that clear-channel time in the evening, than any other station in the country.

For that reason, KB owns a special place not only in Buffalo’s pop cultural lexicon, but also for thousands and thousands of fans, who just like the ones in Buffalo, fell asleep with their transistor under their pillow, wondering where the hell Lackawanna was.

The proof is in a quick search of WKBW on your favorite search engine. People from all over the country, and not just Buffalo transplants, have built websites dedicated to keeping the memory of WKBW alive. It’s a part of Buffalo’s past of which we should all be proud.

Listen to WKBW!

WKBW 1958

Narrated by then-KB Radio newsman Irv Weinstein, this piece reflects the KB staff from it’s first year as a Top 40 station. It starts with The Perry Allen show, with an Irv Weinstein KB Pulsebeat Newscast… with some of the great writing and style Irv would become known for in Buffalo over the next 40 years. You’ll also hear from Russ Syracuse, Johnny Barrett, Art Roberts, and Dick Biondi.

WKBW 1963

Narrated by Irv Weinstein, Instant KB was actually released on a single-sided album sized record for distribution sponsors on the local and national level. You’ll hear snippets of disc jockeys Stan Roberts, Fred Klestine, Jay Nelson, Dan Neaverth, and Joey Reynolds at work, followed by a Henry Brach newscast, and a quick excerpt from Irv Weinstein’s documentary “Buffalo and La Cosa Nostra.” Many KB commercials and contests follow.

WKBW 1972

The famous Jeff Kaye produced and narrated look at KB in 1971, with jocks Danny Neaverth, Jack Sheridan, Don Berns, Sandy Beach, Jack Armstrong, Bob McCrea, and Casey Piotrowski, with Kaye’s thoughts and insights on each in between. First appeared on album form from the industry periodical “Programmer’s Digest.”