FAN

Author’s note: As many of my readers know, I was born and raised in western New York, and I have been a Buffalo Bills fan since their first game in 1960. I have been a Bills season ticket holder since 2007. 

I now have written a memoir about my childhood and my attachment to Buffalo and the Bills. FAN – Stories of Buffalo and the Bills is available on Amazon in soft cover and on Kindle. The Preface to FAN is reproduced below. I hope you enjoy it. 

My Buffalo story is a collection of memories.

My parents and my grandfather told me about their lives
in Buffalo. My father lived his entire life in Buffalo, from
1914 until 1978. My grandfather lived in Buffalo for pretty much the entire
20th century. My mother lived in Buffalo beginning in the 1930s, when she
and her mother moved from Germany to join my Uncle Leo, who had
emigrated several years earlier.

I learned the history of Buffalo in elementary school, where New York
State history was part of the curriculum. Our teachers emphasized the
history that took place in western New York. We learned about battles
fought locally in the French and Indian War and the War of 1812. We
learned about the importance of the Erie Canal as Buffalo developed into
a major commercial and industrial city. We learned a bit of the history of
local native Americans, but only enough to understand the origin of local
names like Tonawanda and Scajaquada, or why Iroquois was the name of
one of the popular local beers.

The only history of Buffalo that I’ve read is The Last Fine Time, by Verlyn
Klinkenborg. The Last Fine Time is a lyric history, beautifully written and
poignant, published in 1991. Klinkenborg married a woman born in
Buffalo in 1947, the same year I was born. In his visits to Buffalo with his
wife over many years, Klinkenborg began to see that 1947 was a bittersweet
turning point for western New York. Buffalonians in 1947 celebrated
the end of World War II and looked forward to a new era of prosperity
in the country and particularly in the region. Klinkenborg’s father-in-law
opened a trendy downtown bar and night club, George and Eddie’s on
Sycamore Street. Buffalo’s young adults came to George and Eddie’s to eat,
drink, listen to live music, and to celebrate all that was good about their
lives, lives that had been interrupted by the War. I’ve often imagined my
mother and father at George and Eddie’s, enjoying a night out while Dad’s
parents took care of my brother Kent and me.

Klinkenborg describes how Buffalonians looked forward to the
emergence of Buffalo in the ‘50s as one of the great cities in the country, a
transportation hub with a thriving industrial base, all the while failing to
recognize that Buffalo’s great economic decline was underway and would
accelerate in the coming decades. Within twenty years the industrial base
had crumbled, jobs disappeared, and much of the white population fled
Buffalo for the suburbs or for other parts of the country. George and
Eddie’s closed, was soon abandoned, and eventually became a vacant lot.
For Buffalo, those happy nights out at George and Eddie’s were the last fine
times before the reality of Buffalo’s economic future emerged.

Klinkenborg also captured the indomitable spirit of Buffalo, a spirit
that survived the economic collapse that shrank Buffalo from a city of over
500,000 in 1950 to fewer than 300,000 today. People in Buffalo still believe
that the next fine time is coming, that despite the decline and the repeated
failed attempts to restore Buffalo’s economy to greatness, Buffalonians will
again celebrate good times. They pull together in the shared belief that we
can and will do it.

In Big Russ and Me, Tim Russert described the Buffalo I grew up in.
Russert was born in 1950, and his memoir captures beautifully how it
felt to be a child in Buffalo in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Russert attended Catholic
schools in the city and I attended public schools in suburban Amherst, but
he describes a life so familiar that it could have been mine.
Russert was famously a Buffalo Bills fan. Occasionally he closed his
television broadcast with a hearty “Go Bills!” His memoir includes a
chapter about the Bills. Klinkenborg, too, comments in The Last Fine Time
about his father-in-law’s ongoing attachment to the team. Neither could
write about life in Buffalo without writing about the Bills.

Sportscaster Chris Berman says, “no one circles the wagons like the
Buffalo Bills.” He means that when games get tough, the Bills pull together.
In fact, circling the wagons is a Buffalo thing. We’re all in it together in
Buffalo. Maybe it’s born of the challenge to survive the winters. In Buffalo
we understand that’s best done together; no one wants to be alone when
the skies darken, the wind blows, and the snow begins to fall. We help clear
driveways and walks. We push cars. We open our doors to shelter others.

Buffalo togetherness may have its origins in hard times, but it pulls us
together in good times, too. One Sunday morning before a Bills game, I
took my friend Raul to Wegman’s grocery store on Dick Road to pick up
sandwiches on the way to the stadium. I wanted Raul to see the real Buffalo,
and there’s no better place than Wegman’s on game day: People in Bills
shirts and Bills caps, people getting ready for the game, buying Bills cakes
and Bills cookies and Bills mylar balloons. Smiling staff. Friendly faces.
The Bills are Buffalo, and Buffalo is the Bills, and it’s all there at Wegmans
on Sunday morning. Raul struck up a conversation with a middle-aged
woman behind us in the checkout line. She explained how she was picking
up a few last-minute items for her game-day party. Within five minutes,
she invited us to her house for lunch and to watch the game. Raul was
surprised. I wasn’t; that’s Buffalo.

Bills fans who live outside western New York sometimes talk about what
they will do when the Bills make it to the Super Bowl. Some say they will go
to the game, but many more say they will go to Buffalo to watch the game
on television with Bills fans. Being together for the game will be a fine time,
indeed.

I don’t presume to write a history of Buffalo, and I don’t even presume to
write a history of the Bills. Both subjects are beyond my knowledge and my
academic energy. Instead, I write because Buffalo and the Bills live in me
as they lived in Buffalonians who knew that last fine time. I write because
Buffalo and the Bills live in each of the generations that followed.

My wife Carolyn and I built our lives and grew our family in Hartford,
Connecticut. In 2025, we will celebrate 50 years of marriage and 50 years
of life in Connecticut. Hartford is no doubt our home. And yet Buffalo, the
place of my childhood, always will be home, too.

These are stories about my life, Buffalo, and the Bills. For a Bills fan,
these stories are never far from home.