Tag: Dennis T. Gorski

Buffalo in the ’90s: Hillary Clinton reads to school kids

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

This week BN Chronicles looks back into the archives for previous Western New York visits by our current presidential front-runners.

Only days before New York’s 1992 Democratic Primary, Hillary Clinton was in Buffalo campaigning on behalf of her husband, then-Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton.

Erie County Executive Dennis Gorski welcomes Arkansas First Lady Hillary Clinton to Buffalo in 1992. (Buffalo News archives.)

She told The News that the visit was her fourth to Buffalo. One 1989 stop here had the Arkansas first lady touring Buffalo’s magnet schools. This time, it was School 31 Early Childhood Center on Stanton Street, a speech before a meeting of the Women’s Bar of Western New York, and a guest spot with Brian Kahle and Jean Hill on WKBW-TV’s “AM/Buffalo.”

Reporters look on as Hillary Clinton reads to children at School 31. (Buffalo News archives.)

On Channel 7, Clinton said negative stories about her husband’s infidelity, his avoiding being drafted to go to Vietnam, and his infamous experimentation with marijuana “where he didn’t inhale” were all evidence of a “concerted effort” by fearful Republicans to derail his campaign.

“The Republicans are scared to death,” Mrs. Clinton said on “AM/Buffalo,” “and they should be.”

 

Buffalo in the ’70s: Surrounded by top Democrats, Dulski gives his final victory speech

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

Flanked by State Sen. James D. Griffin, Erie County Democratic Chairman Joseph Crangle and County Legislator Dennis T. Gorski, Rep. Thaddeus Dulski made his final of eight victory speeches upon being elected to the House of Representatives for his eighth and final term in 1972.

Buffalo News archives

A UB-trained accountant, Dulski worked for the IRS until being elected to the Buffalo Common Council first as the Walden District member, then to an at-large seat. He went to Congress following the death of Rep. Edmund Radwan in 1959, and he spent the next 15 years representing Buffalo in Washington.

Dulski was a powerful figure in Washington as chairman of the Post Office Committee, and he was influential in crafting the laws deciding what could and what couldn’t be mailed legally.

Dulski bill defines ‘obscene’ in attack on smut mailings

Rep. Thaddeus Dulski (D., Buffalo) said today that trying to control obscene mail ‘is like trying to empty Lake Erie with a pail.’ 

As the chairman of the House Post Office & Civil Service Committee, Rep. Thaddeus J. Dulski (after whom Buffalo’s Dulski Federal Building was named) had a lot of power of deciding what you could and couldn’t receive in your mailbox.

He made railing against pornography and “continued unsolicited mailings to our young people” a priority and placed “a heavy accent on putting a ban on the mailing of smut into homes where minors reside.”

 

 

After he died in 1988, Buffalo’s federal office building — which Dulski was credited with gaining financial support in constructing — was renamed in his honor.

For more about the checkered and interesting history of that building, now known as the Avant, check out BN Chronicles’ look back at June 10, 1969.