Buffalo Gal

by Laura Pedersen

  My generation was so mired in recession that the mad men of Madison Avenue skipped bothering to name us (they probably realized we wouldn’t be buying much) and went directly for our little brothers and sisters. I might dub people born between 1964 and 1966 the “Space Invaders”—though too late for the assassination of JFK, we were around to see NASA deliver on his 1962 promise to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade. And just as our parents can remember where they were when JFK was shot, we can recall where we first played the video game Space Invaders. In 1977, when my friends and I were around the impressionable age of twelve, the Atari Video Computer System hit shelves in time for the Christmas holiday season. Nine game cartridges were available with scratchy and primitive sound effects that are still unlike anything to ever come out of a TV set—the rumbling tanks of Combat, the bleep-bloop-bleep rhythm of Breakout, and the portentous silence of Adventure. Only no one in my neighborhood could afford such extravagance. We were riding high if our folks had finally replaced the black-and-white television with a color set.

  If that’s not enough to convince the world that this passed-over group should be labeled the Space Invaders, consider that Valium, the now ubiquitous tranquilizer taken to remedy the stress and anxieties that seem to have accompanied the development of the modern world, was introduced in 1964.

  Otherwise, who were we? The first generation of kids not to spend half a day searching for a skate key since skates now fitted over our sneakers and had attached screws to tighten them. We wore smooth, normal-

  looking Speedo swim caps while our mothers still sported textured

  rubber turbans complete with chinstrap and 3-D floral arrangements that made them resemble parade floats. We experienced near-fatal flip-flop accidents while playing kickball in rubber shower shoes, since it was a decade before the advent of the much safer Teva-style sandals. We were the last to grow up without mountain bikes and telephone-answering

  machines, and the first to wear designer jeans and sneakers. We were post-thalidomide and pre–Agent Orange; post-polio and pre-AIDS (at least we were too young to be born HIV positive or contract the disease in our teens). We would turn eighteen just as scientists discovered what they first dubbed “gay cancer,” and watch with horror as it turned out to be the most devastating sexually transmitted disease in history.

  We were born too early to enjoy sports bras, fleece, twist-top bottle caps, and Rollerblades while in high school. None of us wore safety helmets for batting, biking, or skiing. In junior high we had to don ugly green-and-white-striped one-piece gym outfits that resembled prison jumpsuits and made husky girls look even huskier. (Had they not received the memo from the home economics teachers about horizontal stripes being unflattering?) By the time we arrived in high school, these were gone, and we were allowed to wear our own shorts and T-shirts. Actually, the gym teachers just finally gave up after kids started regularly showing up in shorts and T-shirts, insisting that the prison garb was in the wash, on a permanent spin cycle.

  Eighteen

  Sleet Happens: The Blizzard of ’77

  According to scripture, a component of Job’s suffering, to be used for a higher purpose, was experiencing the cold. God even foretells what we refer to in modern times as the snow day: “So that all men he had made may know his work, he stops every man from his labor.” Little could God have imagined at the time how his program for suffering would have the exact opposite effect on future schoolchildren, making the snow day the focal point of numerous prayers.

  During the winter of 1976–77, it snowed for a biblical forty straight days. And then on Friday, January 28, 1977, a massive storm with ferocious winds struck, paralyzing rush-hour traffic and stranding twenty thousand people in Buffalo and surrounding towns. Southern portions of the Canadian province of Ontario and parts of western and northern New York State were besieged by what was quickly declared The Blizzard of the Century, the most severe in the history of Buffalo.

  The mercury plunged toward zero as hurricane-force winds peaking at over seventy miles per hour roared across the surface of Lake Erie. Freezing temperatures combined with icy blasts made for a windchill of sixty below zero. Visibility was nonexistent at 11:30 am on January 28 and remained so for the next twenty-four hours. For almost two days, the storm raged, with wind gusts up to seventy-three miles per hour. The city became a frozen parking lot, with motorists abandoning cars and attempting to reach the first door they could find.

  Deep snow had built up on the surface of the lake so that ten thousand square miles of powder blew inland, burying people in their cars and homes. By Friday night, January 28, thousands were stranded in office buildings, schools, police stations, fire halls, bars, factories, cars, buses, and in the houses of strangers. Highways were impassable, train lines were blocked, and airports were closed. Paralysis set in during this unique winter hurricane, with 1.5 million people caught away from their homes.

  Even some people safe inside their own houses were trapped, since the snow was higher than the door and it was necessary to tunnel out. If you visit a friend in Buffalo and wonder why there’s a shovel in the front hall closet in addition to the five or six in the garage, that’s the reason.

  One woman called emergency services because her husband passed away in their apartment after a long illness. A police officer finally made it to her door, checked the dead body in the back, and then tried to break the news to her gently: it would be at least a day, maybe two, before the body could be removed. The woman said she’d been married to him for forty years and so a few more days of being together would be just fine. The police officer opened a window in the bedroom, and the woman made him something hot to drink.

  Once hotel rooms were completely booked, marooned workers overflowed into the lobbies and restaurants. Hengerer’s department store opened the housewares section so people could get blankets,

  pillows, and linens. On the roads, thirteen thousand cars were stranded, with passengers eventually abandoning them to avoid freezing to death. By the morning of the second day, there were shortages of food and lifesaving drugs. Power failures left seven thousand households without heat in subzero temperatures. Not even the National Guard could get in to the area to help.

  In the city of Buffalo, one house caught fire and it quickly spread to others. Many of the homes are old, made of wood, and built close together. The fire trucks couldn’t get through, and there was fear of an inferno—that the entire city would burn. One truck finally made it, and only five homes were completely lost. However, the residents were all successfully evacuated.

  Mayor Stanley Makowski went on the radio and television to plead with people not to leave their homes or wherever they had found shelter. A driving ban went into effect. A person could attempt to travel if a baby was on the way or if they were going to a funeral (but not a wake). Others went on television and sang “Where are the Plows?” to the head of the transportation department, using the tune of the then-hit song “Send in the Clowns.” But the plows could no longer get through the streets, which were overloaded with abandoned and buried cars. Though one plow driver claimed that the small cars weren’t much of a problem because they go through the rotary blades.

  Additionally, several plows had broken down and been quickly buried themselves, thus contributing to the clogged roads. One snowplow driver became stranded out near Lake Erie and radioed for help. It was fifteen hours before he was found. Out of the city’s six tow trucks, five were soon stuck or nonoperational because of the heavy ice. Eventually, earth-moving equipment had to be brought in to handle the huge accumulation of snow and cementlike drifts.

  Volunteers from snowmobile clubs, citizens owning four-wheel- drive vehicles (not nearly as prevalent back then), the Red Cross, and the Salvation Army flocked to assist police, firefighters, and hospitals to deliver insulin and search for survivors. In the suburb of Depew, volunteer firemen used a trenching machine to help rescue a family that had been snowdrifted inside their own home. Alth
ough there was some looting and vandalism, overall the storm succeeded in pulling the community together. Stores, restaurants, and hotels all pitched in, some offering their services for free.

  On Saturday, January 29, President Jimmy Carter issued a declaration of emergency that covered four western New York State counties, including Buffalo, which enabled the Federal Disaster Assistance Administration to help with rescue efforts.

  My father was stuck downtown in the lobby of the Statler Hotel along with many other court reporters, lawyers, and judges. Mom and I were at home, where she was assuring me that the school janitor would feed my gerbils, which were stranded at school. There was no Weather Channel back then, but if one had existed in Buffalo, it would have no doubt been called the Bad Weather Channel.

  The blizzard hit during the Roots miniseries, and though the TV drama had captured the attention of the nation, it received much higher ratings in Western New York with so many viewers housebound.

  Once the wind finally died down, residents watched Doctor Zhivago, only it was playing outside the window. A mountain range stood where there used to be trees, sheds, and jungle gyms. The neighborhood had become an arctic landscape, everything covered with a pure white blanket of snow, including single-story houses. Meantime, we kids had a blast. The sledding was incredible and ubiquitous—climb on top of a roof and away we went. The reindeer at the zoo had a good time too. The snow made it possible for them to step over their fence and wander about the city to do some window shopping.

  At first the moms and kids safe in their houses felt terrible for all the fathers stuck downtown. The television news said that no rooms were left anywhere in the city and soon they’d run out of food. But after several hours of being stranded in close quarters and bedding down in hallways and lobbies, a party atmosphere took hold, and what they were in danger of running out of first weren’t foodstuffs or pillows, but booze. The news went from showing a guy being told no room at the inn to raucous scenes of music blaring and people dancing in conga lines atop tabletops in hotel ballrooms. The delivery boy at the liquor store across the street from the Rand building worked all night and declared he’d never collected so much in tips in his life—and probably never would again.

  On Sunday, January 30, New York governor Hugh Carey arrived in a cargo plane that carried snow-removal equipment. The residents thought they were coming out of a two-day storm when the blizzard struck again, closing roads that had just been reopened. On Wednesday, a driving ban was back in effect, while crews worked round the clock to dig the city out for a second time. Forklifts accompanied the plows and tossed street-blocking cars up onto the nearest lawn. The National Guard arrived to help, only there was no place left to put the snow. Some of it was heaped into railroad cars and sent south to melt.

  Eventually the storm abated, roads were cleared, schools reopened, and people who owned white cars had learned their lesson. The blizzard was a boon to CB-radio manufacturers. People realized these two-way, short-distance radios could save a life when they were without power. The storm had claimed a total of twenty-nine lives across the region.

  On February 5, President Carter declared nine Western New York counties a major disaster area, the first and last such declaration ever made for a snow emergency. Soldiers were dispatched from Fort Bragg in North Carolina to assist in the cleanup, which would last several weeks. The total damage of the blizzard exceeded 300 million dollars. And the Buffalo Winter Carnival had to be postponed three times as a result of too much wintry weather.

  A week later, I finally returned to my sixth-grade classroom to find that my gerbils, Ping and Pong, had turned into the Donner party. Only the bones of one were ever recovered, over by the wheel. However, I was unable to identify the body.

  Winters in Buffalo don’t always feature blizzardlike conditions. And occasionally there’s even a storm-free year. But one rarely hears about it because Buffalonians are afraid that their relatives in Florida and Arizona might return.

  When it comes down to it, the citizens of Buffalo are a Calvinistic lot, and most have decided that suffering during the winter is good not only for the constitution, but also for the spirit. During the dark days of February, you can almost hear the chorus of elementary schoolteachers chanting: “That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

  Fifteen years later the city would become home to a major-league soccer team, and it was appropriately named the Buffalo Blizzards.

  Nineteen

  Taking a Turn for the Nurse

  It was really no surprise that my mother decided to go back to school. Around the time I was born, she installed a 2,000-watt overhead light above a wall-length mirror in our bathroom and essentially converted it into her own first-aid theater. Whenever I bashed a shoulder or cracked open my skull, she’d haul me in there for triage. Once, after examining my fractured head under the glare of these klieg lights, the woman not prone to understatement announced, “I can see right inside to your brain.”

  My father, anxiously waiting in the doorway, promptly passed out. But then, he’d once fainted in a barber’s chair while reading about a paraplegic. “You need about twelve sutures,” she’d cheerfully forecast, as if it was going to be an adventure to have a needle and thread poked through my scalp. Even before she officially became a nurse, my mother never said stitches; it was always sutures. Likewise, bumps were hematomas and bruises were contusions. (If she ever has her colors done I’m sure they’ll be blue-purple.) Mom didn’t just threaten you with pneumonia; she told you what kind you’d contract: viral, bacterial, streptococcal, and so forth. One might say she had an innate sense for medicine, the way successful politicians have a knack for lying.

  Nursing was her destiny. If she were the mother of all things, I am quite certain that all things would wear sweaters. Everyone in the household was issued white socks and underwear so as not to be poisoned by dye. A person only had to twirl a paper clip to be reminded that her grandfather died of tetanus. When one is thinking fun party, she’s thinking fire hazard. If I had a few friends over and someone started hacking, from the next room we’d immediately hear, “Who coughed?” And there was something about her tone that made us afraid to admit it, as if we had state secrets in our possession. When a person sneezed, she no less casually inquired about the color of the mucus. Mom reads snot the way others read tea leaves or check the sky for a weather forecast. Move over Florence Nightingale.

  In her bathroom-cum-operating-theater, my mother could sterilize needles for splinter extractions, pluck asphalt from an eyeball, and thoroughly examine cuts and assorted road rash (wounds and abrasions) for signs of infection (sepsis). Her nickname was Eagle-Eye Ellen, and there wasn’t much chance of anything getting past her, whether that was the intention or not.

  She removed Band-Aids stuck to scabs that others were terrified to peel off. She extracted loose teeth in danger of being swallowed. And she applied ice to sprains and gauze to scrapes, so that a child could get back on base as fast as possible.

  Mom was an early advocate of abolishing table salt (the silent killer!), even though her brother and sister used the saltshaker to punctuate their sentences and continued salting throughout lengthy expositions. She forbade me from drinking cola (it takes paint off a car!) and railed at anyone who would listen against homemade douches (too much vinegar destroys the ability to fight bacteria). Mom was raising warning flags about skin cancer in the days when people were still slathering baby oil over their bodies and wrapping record album covers with aluminum foil to reflect maximum ultraviolet rays onto their faces. She was hostile to grease, fat, and cooking oil (hardens the arteries) and went around slipping ice cubes into ashtrays back when people smoked in confined public places. (Why should the rest of us die from secondhand smoke?) When it came to carbohydrates, “The whiter the bread, the quicker you’re dead” was her mantra. These things are all a matter of course now, but back then Mom was considered a radical, and probably a quack as well. On the back of the toilet tank
she always kept a box of pitted prunes.

  Dad, on the other hand, would use medical research to suit his needs and ignore whatever wasn’t helpful, such as studies linking smoking to cancer. He doesn’t wear a seat belt since “the steering wheel will protect me in an accident.” He read that nicotine and coffee help to prevent Alzheimer’s, and he swears by that one. Same with a report that says wine wards off heart disease. (I admit that, in similar fashion, I clip everything published on the health benefits of consuming large quantities of chocolate.) Dad won’t let a dermatologist look at his skin cancer because “it will all burn off when I’m cremated.” Once when he was gardening, I looked over and asked, “Are you wearing foundation garments?” He said, “Those are my trusses.” Apparently Dad lets hernias stack up the way other people do unpaid bills.

  Over the years, my mother developed a reputation in the neighborhood as a provider of low-cost (free), low-pain healthcare, and thereby had a devoted following among my friends. When a neighborhood child (hint: red hair) was temporarily relieved of her eyesight after chewing an entire pack of bubble gum and blowing a helium

  balloon–sized bubble that popped and sealed her eyelashes shut, her choice was Nurse Pedersen.