By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo
My grandfather, Edward V. Cichon, was born in 1926 to parents who had emigrated from Poland to the tiny south-of-city-hall neighborhood known as “The Valley.” It’s called the Valley because, at one point, you had to cross a bridge to get into neighboring South Buffalo, the First Ward, the Hydraulics or Seneca-Babcock.
In this photo from the early 1930s, Edward V. Cichon, my grandfather, is the little boy on the right. His hand is being held by his mother, Marjanna Pochec Cichon. My great-grandfather is holding Gramps’ brother Anthony.
There was a sizable Polish enclave in the neighborhood and Easter was a special time.
During the years of the Depression, dinner for the family with 10 kids (and usually a couple of boarders in their classic telescoping home) often consisted of little more than lard-fried pierogi and maybe some fresh-caught fish.
Easter added delicacies like golabki and kielbasi.
My great-grandfather would buy two whole pigs, and the family would join in the processing. Everyone would gather around the kitchen table to make the sausage, and then the older boys would build a fire in the yard, and hang the kielbasa to smoke it along with the other hams and roasts they had butchered as well.
Richard Jezuit and Dan Poczcwinski from the Chopin Society unload pussy willows at the club’s longtime Kosciuszko Street location in 1991.
After eating a feast on Easter, the next day the neighborhood boys would climb along the tracks of the Erie Railroad – where I-190 now runs – to cut down wild pussy willows to swat the heels of neighborhood girls, who would in turn throw water on the boys.
Buffalo Courier, 1916
Listen here to Edward Cichon’s 2006 description of Dyngus Day in Buffalo in the 1920s and 1930s.
Something resembling modern Dyngus Day came to Buffalo in the 1960s. It was explained by the late News icon Bob Curran, as he talked about the goings-on for Dyngus Day 1990.
The transformation to today’s grand-scale citywide Dyngus Day celebration came from those who had grown up attending parties at East Side landmarks like Chopin Singing Society and the Adam Mickiewicz Library, but also just enjoying the simpler pussy willow traditions, maybe with accordion players wandering the neighborhood mixed in.
Dyngus Day dancing at the Adam Plewacki Post 799 in 1991.
In 2005, The News did a story on a website created by Marty Biniasz to promote Dyngus Day in Buffalo. The East Side native called the site “the first phase of a marketing plan that envisions growing the city’s Easter Monday celebration into one of the nation’s premier ethnic festivals.”
Bernie Pawlak, holding the clipboard at the first Dyngus Day parade in 2007.
In the years following, there was a parade, a party inside the Central Terminal, and the Edward M. Cotter – America’s oldest fireboat – was commandeered as America’s biggest squirt gun, which is how the water end of the pussy willow tradition has been delivered for years now.
By 2010, Dyngus Day had moved beyond a quirky ethnic celebration that The News might chronicle with a small story or a photo on the Picture Page, to become a front-page story each year with hundreds of thousands celebrating.
The future of Dyngus Day as a Buffalo fixture was all but cemented when CNN anchor Anderson Cooper laughed about Buffalo’s Dyngus Day party on his show in 2012.
“It’s really so stupid,” Anderson Cooper said, as he laughed his way through a Dyngus Day story on CNN in 2012. He later apologized.
The entire city got its “Talking Proud” dander up, and with a new chip on our shoulders– wearing red, drinking beer and dancing the polka on the day after Easter became an even more Buffalo thing to do.
