Category: Buffalo Neighborhoods

       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.”

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.

       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.

       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.

       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.

       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.

       By Steve Cichon
       steve@buffalostories.com
       @stevebuffalo

The Rich Stadium dot-matrix scoreboard in 1989, five years before Buffalo’s first Sony JumboTron was installed.

Agiant video screen with video replays, shots of fans and all sorts of entertainment between the plays has become a given part of the experience of a big-time sports event.

The first JumboTron scoreboard was installed at Rich Stadium in 1994. At the time, it was the largest video scoreboard in the country – and second in the world, only SkyDome’s was larger.

“Bills fans are in for a real treat,” said Rick Fairbend, the Bills’ new scoreboard systems manager just before the new screen debuted. He told News Reporter Gene Warner that “the technology is so good that it will be like watching TV at home, plus you’ll have the atmosphere and excitement of being at the game.”

It might be hard for some to imagine that today’s drugstores have better displays to announce laundry detergent sales than the Bills did for their stadium scoreboard before that 1994 upgrade.

These images show the in-game experience at Rich Stadium at a 1989 game against the Saints.

Mighty Taco, Super Duper, Genesee Beer and Marlboro were all major sponsors on signage as well as in ads that played on the dot-matrix board opposite the stadium’s tunnel.

The now-rudimentary looking displays also encouraged fan interaction, describing the plays described by Bills public address announcer Stan Roberts, and even included the sing-along lyrics to the then-new “Shout” song.

This 10-minute video offers a glimpse at the in-game experience of a Bills fan in the late 1980s, with a focus on what was on the scoreboard as the game continued, plus the on-field introductions of the Jills cheerleaders and the 1989 Bills defensive starters.

       By Steve Cichon
       steve@buffalostories.com
       @stevebuffalo

Genesee Street up the middle of the photo.

Think of walking out the front door of the gold-domed Buffalo Savings Bank Building on Main Street to look straight up Genesee Street toward City Hall and seeing the open skies over Lake Erie. It wasn’t that long ago that view was still intact.

Genesee Street was one of those streets radiating off Niagara Square as designed by Joseph Ellicott in 1804. The square was designed as a public square and gathering place, and was used in the public execution of the Thayer Brothers in 1825, as well as addresses by Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson.

For more than a century, Niagara Square was once Buffalo’s most elite address. Millard Fillmore lived where the Statler now stands upon returning to Buffalo from the presidency.

Judge Samuel Wilkeson, “The Father of Buffalo,” lived where City Hall is now.

There were many other homes there as well.

An 1805 map of Buffalo.

Behind City Hall looking toward the water, including “the foot of Genesee Street,” where Genesee Street meets the Erie Canal.

Before the wave of urban renewal of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s blocked off Genesee and Niagara Streets, one could stand on Main Street and look up either of those streets to see the McKinley Monument.

An aerial view of Downtown Buffalo.

Niagara and Main no longer intersect — the first block of Niagara was built over in the construction of the Main Place Mall and Main Place Towers. Genesee has been built over with the Convention Center and the Hyatt.

       By Steve Cichon
       steve@buffalostories.com
       @stevebuffalo

The Buffalo area’s first Wegmans store opened on Dick Road in Depew in 1977. The store was torn-down in 2005 and a new larger store was built in its place.

While just about every Buffalonian knows that Wegmans is headquartered an hour down the Thruway in Rochester, it’s been a part of our Buffalo experience for so long and has become so entrenched as the benchmark by which our grocery shopping experiences are judged, that we can fairly claim Wegmans as a Buffalo institution.

The floor at the Wegmans Losson Rd store in 2015.

When Wegmans first arrived in Buffalo, “warm food colors” yellow, brown and orange were the store’s color scheme

The Wegmans experience has evolved since the first store opened in our end of Western New York on Dick Road in January 1977 – only days before the Blizzard struck.

By the end of the year, locations opened on Alberta Drive and Orchard Park Road “across from the Seneca Mall,” making three Buffalo-area locations.

Today’s Wegmans fan might look for variety and quality in areas like the bakery, prepared meals and the Mediterranean Bar, but those first stores had embraced the Wegmans concept that was promoted through the 1970s as “the mall in a store.”

Buffalo newspaper readers of the late ’70s would have been just as likely to come across ads for Wegmans “Fashion Fabrics” department as they would for groceries.

And in sharp contrast to the distinctive high-end touches that make a trip to Wegmans an adventure for modern shopper, 40 years ago, as a new kid on the scene trying to butt heads with the likes of Tops, Super Duper, and Bells – Wegmans’ biggest draw was basic in a town that has traditionally been among the nation’s top coupon redeemers. The chain opened its doors offering deep discounts with double coupons.

Wegmans dropped double coupons after a couple of years, but rejoined the fray in the mid-’90s when Quality Markets and Jubilee Foods began promoting double coupons as they entered the local-market market replacing Bells and Super Duper.

Two Buffalo stores were added in the 1980s, Sheridan Drive in 1985 and McKinley Parkway in 1988. Another four stores opened in the 1990s, including the only location in the City of Buffalo – on Amherst Street, in 1997.

Wegman’s Fairport store, 1958

       By Steve Cichon
       steve@buffalostories.com
       @stevebuffalo

When the UB Dance Theater Workshop presented an adaptation of “The Inner City Mother Goose” in 1970, director Billie Kirpich told the Courier-Express that the collection of poems is “a bitter comment on the paradox of what a child’s life Is supposed to be like — the innocence — and what it’s really like in urban areas.”

The UB ballet adaptation dealt with the book’s themes of poverty, like old Mother Hubbard’s bare cupboard.

“The ballet tells about the hunger for food and the hunger for the chance to live,” reported Tom Putnam in the Courier.

Poet Eve Merriam adapted nursery rhymes to reflect and dramatize the realities of urban living, but the book was never meant for small children. When the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library bought a copy in 1970, it was filed under “Literature and Fine Arts.”

When the volume was purchased by Buffalo Schools through a grant meant to enrich life in the inner city, it was placed in high schools, to be used with a teacher’s discretion.

In 1972, a controversy gaining nationwide attention erupted when Councilman William Duria railed against the book in a meeting discussing what he saw as the misuse of “Model City” grant funds.

Immediately, Mayor Frank A. Sedita ordered the book off the shelves at Buffalo Schools.

A week later, Erie County Judge William Heffron empaneled a grand jury to investigate the book.

“This book of so-called nursery rhymes advocates the commission of certain crimes,” Heffron told grand jury members.

He read several of the poems out loud to the jurors, including, “Jack be nimble, Jack be quick—snap the blade and give it a flick. Grab the purse—it’s easily done. Then just for kicks, just for fun, plunge the knife and cut and run.”

Heffron said that at least eight of the poems attack policemen and one attacks a judge. He read that one aloud as well.

“A wise old judge sat in court,

“The case was long, his judgement short.

“Why change the way it’s always been?

“Convict the man of darker skin.”

“We have to realize that 70% of the crime committed in Erie County is committed in a 40-block area in the core of our city,” railed the judge. “To teach these little children to commit crimes is something that I think should be stopped.”

Newspapers in Chicago, Phoenix, and other cities around the nation offered editorials in support of the judge and the removal of the book from schools—although the Buffalo Public School system said the swirling controversy surrounding giving this book to little children was completely misplaced.

Buffalo Schools Associate Superintendent Eugene Reville told reporters that the book “has never been available for elementary school children to read” and “that it is not the policy of the school system to make the book available to such children in the future.”

The grand jury investigation ended with Erie County District Attorney Michael Dillon assuring the panel and the judge that the book wasn’t available to students through the school district.