The unemployment office happened to be where my father was reporting some hearings, and that’s where my parents first met. It being Buffalo, he asked her out for a Friday night beer-batter fish fry.
A court reporter uses shorthand to record everything that’s said in the courtroom (quite different from a journalist assigned to report on court proceedings). After court was dismissed for the day, reporters were expected to translate their notes into typed transcripts and make them available to the parties involved. At least that’s how it worked up through the eighties, when high technology arrived.
My mother and father were married by a justice of the peace in Buffalo on February 14, 1958. Despite the romance of Valentine’s Day, none of their parents made it to the wedding, and my mom wore a blue suit. Though one could argue that in a typically white Buffalo winter this was simply a safety precaution.
Overnight, Mom went from being Ellen Watson to Mrs. John A. Pedersen. Going forward, that name would be on her charge cards, her mail and invitations, and in the phone book. There wasn’t any designation of Ms. If you were a woman, people could determine by your title of Miss or Mrs. whether you were single or not (unless you were a widow); but men had no such indicator, except maybe the tan line from where their wedding ring was supposed to be, or a slight lisp if it was temporarily hidden under the tongue.
In 1963, two years before I was born, my parents moved from Buffalo to the leafy suburb of Amherst, New York, twelve miles northeast of downtown. It was a plain, modest, yellow-brick ranch-style house with three bedrooms, a living room, dining room, kitchen, and attached single-car garage on a pie-shaped lot at 419 Frankhauser Road. Although the two thousand dollars for the down payment came out of my mother’s savings, her name wasn’t put on the title.
In those days, Amherst was truly a small town—a gentle blend of farmland and subdivision where most everyone knew their neighbors, all of their neighbors, and the police blotter was replete with barking dogs, burning leaves, and the nefarious doings of a large squirrel population. The new home was set on a recently paved winding road that had served as a cow path in the not-so-distant past and prior to that was swampland. By the sixties, Amherst had grown into a bedroom community inhabited by sixty thousand residents, a mix of working-class and professional families who fell firmly in the middle of the middle class. People didn’t ask where you “summered,” and if they did, you’d have told them “outside.”
The area wouldn’t be completely overrun with housing and strip malls until a decade later, when the University of Buffalo designated the edge of our neighborhood as the site of their new North Campus. The population quickly exploded and has more than doubled since those early days. They paved paradise and put up a parking lot, as Joni Mitchell sang in “Big Yellow Taxi.”
Living in close proximity to one of the Great Lakes meant year-round dampness, and we didn’t know a family without silverfish in their basement. When you’re a kid, they look big enough to saddle up and ride over to the sump pump. Silverfish are more wingless insects than fish, though they really are silver and practically glow in the dark. Their hobby is to slither rapidly in droves out from underneath objects and scare the bejesus out of you. Silverfish thrive in cool, dark, wet places, and their favorite foods are bookbindings, wallpaper, clothing, and small children. If you want to see The Running of the Silverfish, go into any Buffalo-area basement and lift an old can of paint off the concrete floor. To make it extra scary, wait until dark and use a flashlight.
Mr. and Mrs. John A. Pedersen went marching to suburbia with a basset hound named Herbert. Shortly after they arrived, a man campaigning for the local town council rang the bell, introduced himself as Herbert, and asked the name of their dog. My mother quickly said the dog was called Snoopy, and he remained Snoopy from that day on. At least until he bit my mother, and then his name was again changed, this time to Sleep Tight.
Unlike the suburb in which we lived, I was not a fast developer. I didn’t turn over, walk, or talk anywhere near the pediatrician’s timetable. The first few years, I was more or less a turnip in a sleeper with a room temperature IQ, despite being breast-fed and having a humidifier. Eventually I was taken for tests, and a doctor informed my mother that I was retarded. (There was no differently abled or mentally challenged back then—just slightly retarded, retarded, and very retarded.) Mom was sent for counseling and given pamphlets with such titles as “How to Deal with Your Retarded Child.” But she told them no, I was just on my own schedule.
And what a schedule it was. By age four I was finally up and running, and a glimmer of comprehension kicked in around six. My teeth were mostly in place by the time I was a teenager, and my top molars dropped down at age twenty-five.
Seven
Onward Catholic Soldiers…Everything’s Good
in the Hood…The Sinusitis Capital
My youth was whiled away primarily during the 1970s. And though the world was a complicated place, it was a simple time to grow up in small-town Middle America, a time that is no more. Or perhaps it never was.
I realize that geographically Buffalo is located in the Northeast of the United States; I do own a place mat with a map on it. However, having spent my first seventeen years in upstate New York and the rest of the time in Manhattan, I’ve taken the liberty of reclassifying Buffalo as the Midwest, at least during the time I was living there. Back then it had much more in common with Cincinnati, Des Moines, and Moline than with Boston, Manhattan, and Philadelphia. Even now, despite explosive population growth, the town of Amherst consistently ranks as one of the safest places to live in the United States.
Also, Buffalonians sound much more like midwesterners than New Yorkers. Living with all that dampness, we’re somewhat nasal voiced. And most of us suffer from a disease of the vowels, flattening them out to the point where they can be walked across, in particular the letter a. What would be pronounced as ferry in most places, to rhyme with Ireland’s County Kerry, comes out as fairy, to rhyme with dairy, in Western New York.
Perhaps the age and place can best be summed up with a maxim that was popular at the time: “Never return an empty tray.” When there
was a function or a funeral, and people brought casseroles and baked goods in glassware or finger foods arranged on china serving platters, they placed a piece of masking tape on the bottom of the dish with their name printed on it in black Magic Marker. Not only was the dish returned clean, but usually filled with a different homemade goody such as sticky buns, oatmeal cookies, or apple brown betty. Another common courtesy dictated that if you were in the supermarket and discovered a coupon you’d brought along wasn’t needed, you placed it on a shelf near the product so that some other housewife could take advantage of the savings.
Mothers instructed daughters to always count the silverware after the good utensils had been used. This wasn’t for fear of theft, since neighbors didn’t steal pieces of your silverware and no one we knew employed servants, but in case a spoon had accidentally gone into the garbage and a massive dig needed to be organized, usually performed by children in the backyard or garage. The trash could be spread out and sifted through, with an adult operating in a strictly supervisory capacity.
Back then, if a child restlessly hopped about, the grown-ups asked if you were suffering from Saint Vitus’s dance. Or they’d inquire if you had shpilkes—the Yiddish equivalent of “ants in your pants.” Bad kids were told they were going to “get it in the keister.” For people who talked a lot it was said, “His mouth goes like a duck’s ass in huckleberry season” or else “His lips move like a whip-poor-will’s ass.” Of folks more than “slightly touched” they said, “He’s crazier than a shit-house rat.” The grandparents among us still remembered how chemicals used to treat outhouses made the rats crazy, much like the mad hatters in England. If you were just slightly off in any number of ways, someone politely whispered “not quite right” or “home-knitted” as you skipped past on one leg with binoculars pointed skyward. Or else, �
��a half-
bubble off plumb.” Eccentricity was much more of a vocation in those days, before everyone started taking medication.
When leaving a place inhabited by people raised on the gospel they said, “See you soon if the good Lord’s willin’ and the creeks don’t rise.” If you arrived appearing disheveled, exhausted, or as if you’d been caught in a storm, it was bound to be noted that you looked as if you’d been “ridden hard and put away wet.” When someone was ravenous and not against working slightly blue he might announce, “I’m so hungry I could eat a rag doll’s crotch.” If you became lost in a bad section of the city late at night, you were sure to say, “We’re going to get screwed, blued, and tattooed.”
If mothers disapproved of an outfit, haircut, or overuse of makeup, but were too exhausted to fight it or didn’t have solid grounds to make you change, they said, “suit yourself,” though their mouths twitched with censure. This translated to “Do not expect me to admit that I am your mother when the police call, or to bail you out of the county jail.”
Commercial airline flights had only been available for nine years when I was born, and to get on a plane people dressed up as if they were going to a wedding. Stereos were “hi-fis,” for “high fidelity.” A new labor-saving device or invention, such as automatic transmissions in cars, was usually viewed with mistrust by the older generation and derisively referred to as “newfangled.” Any of these gadgets that stopped working were said to be “on the fritz.”
Amherst was a predominantly Catholic town and home to a high percentage of Irish, Poles, Germans, Italians, and Greeks, as was the city of Buffalo. If you need proof that Buffalo is ethnically diverse, just look at the list of mayors since my birth: Frank A. Sedita, Stanley
Makowski, Jimmy Griffin, Tony Masiello. Byron W. Brown, the first African American mayor, was installed in January of 2006. He’s a wake-going, turkey-giving Democrat, but a Baptist, of all things. Rather than state the neighborhood in which a home is for sale, real-estate ads often list the church parish in which a house is located, such as Assumption,
Our Lady of Loretto, or Infant of Prague. And workers regularly take off Dyngus Day, Saint Joseph’s Day, Saint Patrick’s Day, Saint
Stanislaus Day, and Ash Wednesday.
The Irish ran most of the political machinery in Buffalo while I was growing up. Many an Irish wake was described as open bar, closed casket. And people liked to say that at a Jewish wedding they break a glass, while at an Irish wedding they break everything.
The huge population of Poles kept us in kielbasa (spicy smoked sausage), pierogi (dumplings filled with meat, cheese, cabbage, or prune), and accordion music, especially polkas such as the “Hinky Dinky,
Parley Voo.” A Polish porch is a garage used as a substitute living room during the summer months by installing a large screen where the garage door normally goes. And when a Buffalonian sees a car wash with a Free Polish sign, we read Polish with a long o, and at first glance think they’re giving away people born in Warsaw rather than a wax job. In addition to a handful of O’Neals, O’Malleys, and Mahoneys, it wasn’t unusual to have several neighbors and teachers with Polish last names that were almost unpronounceable (forget about spelling them), so kids were told to simply call them Mr. K. or Mrs. W.
The Germans ate bratwurst, knockwurst, blutwurst, bauernwurst, weisswurst, Wiener schnitzel, and sauerbraten with red cabbage, and played schottisches and mazurkas on their glockenspiels, tubas, trombones, euphoniums, and flügelhorns in the battle of the oompah-pah bands. Almost everyone went out for a Friday-night fish fry, a result of the Catholic prohibition of eating meat on that day (considered a sin because Jesus died on a Friday, and so one should abstain from pleasure).
Buffalo butcher shops carried at least a dozen varieties of sausage: hot or mild, Italian, Polish, turkey, wienerwurst, pork roll, beer, blood, beef, barley, summer, veal, and liver. This was the same for bacon: Canadian, slab, double-smoked hunter, pancetta, pepper coated, and so on. Salami ran a close third with hard, soft, chicken, hot, dry, pork, Genoa, and other types. Most women had a borscht recipe. Most men had a heart attack.
The many different ethnic groups held annual street festivals, with the Greek and Italian ones especially well known for having delicious food and lively music. The raise-your-glass-and-sing Irish put on a lively Saint Patrick’s Day celebration, and the Poles organized the Pułaski Day parade, honoring the Polish American general who served under George Washington in the Revolutionary War. I don’t have the satellite photographs to prove it, but Buffalo boasts the largest Saint Patrick’s Day parade west of Manhattan (despite a population of three hundred
thousand to Manhattan’s 8 million) and the largest Pułaski Day parade east of Chicago, which has a total population of 3 million, ten times that of Buffalo. African Americans hold a well-attended Juneteenth festival.
Even the saffron-robed Hare Krishna had a Buffalo office for a number of years. They could be counted on to incessantly chant throughout the many street fairs, “Hare Hare, Krishna Krishna,” to the point where it was something we kids would do for fun. I once asked Dad about the Danish parade, and he said that as far as he knew it was just the two of us, so every time we went outside together it was a parade.
Despite a high concentration of Irish, Poles, Germans, and Italians,
it’s safe to say that Buffalo can produce at least a few of just about every nationality. In the eighties, a popular Gypsy leader was receiving treatment at a local hospital when a contingent of followers attempted a ceremony that involved roasting a goat on the hospital steps; officials eventually put a stop to the outdoor shish kebab, though whether it was based on a health ordinance or for blocking the fire lanes, I don’t know.
The area is currently three-quarters Catholic, according to the American Religion Data Archive, and was even more so back in the sixties and seventies. It could be considered just plain efficient to have such a prayer-centric religion in the majority, as Buffalonians spend a good deal of their time hoping the car starts and the pipes don’t freeze.
Even though there were plenty of Jews and Protestants, you felt the Catholicism wherever you went. For instance, at a birthday party there was a 90 percent chance that following “Happy Birthday” there would be a rousing round of “May the Good Lord Bless You.” Roadways and parking lots were full of the vans and station wagons necessary to cart around large families. The matriarch of one Polish household containing fifteen children required all the boys to eat at least one hot dog before sitting down at the dinner table.
The Second Vatican Council ended on December 8, 1965, and alleviated a considerable amount of heavy lifting for Catholics. However, these decisions were regarded much the same way Buffalonians view volcanoes—as disasters that happen to other people in faraway places. Nuns didn’t suddenly start to dress down, rump roast didn’t appear on the table on Friday night, and the Virgin Mary was as blessed and ever present as before. Few of the faithful truly looked or listened hard enough to determine whether or not the priests had turned around and shifted from Latin to English. And just try to get an old Polish Catholic woman to stop wearing a doily on her head.
Regarding Roman Catholics, James Joyce once said, “Here comes everybody,” because Catholics tend to live out loud. Whether it’s because there aren’t enough bedrooms in their houses or because ritual and music are so embedded in their traditions is up for debate. But it makes for an energetic community, with street parades and enormous picnics and going all-out for the many Catholic holidays.
Even if you went to public school, as I did, you couldn’t escape the overarching influence of the Catholic Church. Friends were constantly off to first communion, Catholic Youth Organization (CYO), confirmation classes, and confession. On Fridays, all the public schools served a breaded fish patty as a nod to the large number of Catholic students. And whenever the kids uncovered a student with a secret life as an altar boy, he was mercilessly teased about it right up until graduation.
Why didn’t all the Catholic kids go to parochial schools? Because the public school system was free, had better sports facilities and more advanced-placement classes, and included transportation. Also, many parents were Cafeteria Catholics—they took the pieces of the religion that suited them, and left other parts aside, most often the ban on premarital sex and birth control, and sending their children to parochial schools.
Even with these public school defections, thousands of local children did indeed attend Catholic schools, and the area overflowed with churches, priests, nuns, Catholic hospitals, nursing homes, and cemeteries. Basically, there was a cloaked figure around every corner, ready to remind you that sex is for procreation, not recreation. And you couldn’t go three blocks without hearing a chorus of “Kumbaya” drifting out of a school bus or classroom window. The career elementary teachers could simultaneously perform the song in sign language as they sang. If you yelled questions from the Baltimore Catechism across a crowded playground, you’d surely get an 80 percent response rate.
(Q: Who made us? A: God made us. Q: Who is God? A: God is our Father in heaven.) A housewife busy preparing three meals a day for a dozen or so people could often be heard calling upon Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, who declared, “God is in the pots and pans.”
Because of its high concentration of God-fearing Catholics, this godforsaken landscape is a natural flash point for battles between the pro-choicers and right-to-lifers. Representatives of both factions regularly descend upon the city from all over the country to protest. The 1998 murder of Amherst resident Dr. Barnett Slepian made national headlines. One of a few local doctors who provided abortion services, he was shot in his home by God Squad activist James Kopp.
Buffalo Gal Page 6
