By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo
“Talking Proud” was Buffalo’s anthem at a time when many of us didn’t feel so great about Buffalo.
When the song and campaign were released 1980, Bethlehem Steel, where more than 20-thousand men once worked, was winding down and the furnaces would soon go cold.
There was a billboard behind City Hall asking the last person leaving Buffalo to turn out the light.
Our region had spent a lot of time in National headlines as the epicenter of environmental disaster at Love Canal and the home of snowy death with Blizzard of ’77.
We needed something to hang our hats on.
It was easy to feel down about Buffalo, and over the last 40 years, most of us have said, “We’re Talking Proud!” ironically… but having something, anything to rally around made a difference and gave us Buffalonians a sense of identity—
Even if we giggled a little as Terry Licata did he leaned back arm-swinging march through the streets of Buffalo.
This is a later follow up to the original Talking Proud television spot. These continued to air through the 1980s. The video is courtesy of retrontario.com, whose webmaster Ed Conroy has posted hundreds of great Buffalo (and, as you might guess, Southern Ontario) television clips from the 70s, 80s, and 90s.
More from the Retrontario YouTube Channel: youtube.com/user/Retrontario
