Zones of Nostalgia

I am not going to gloat, or stress, about the current state of the Bills- better but still precarious after Sunday's win and Monday night's Miami loss- but football does lead to a mountain of memories. Back when the NFL had a 16 game regular season schedule, the pundits liked to divide the season into four quarters of four games each, as sensible points to assess how things were doing for a given team. By adding bye weeks and a 17th game to the schedule to make more money, the math has gone wrong, but the idea of division into quarter(ish) segments like that still makes sense.

So it is with me. Having just hit the 64 year marker, I can look back into four roughly 16 year quarters of existence. Those time frames also overlap, not quite perfectly doing the math with the four communities I have lived out those years in: East Meadow, Ithaca, Buffalo and Rochester. Each provides a host of memories of places, people and events, that will often come back to me through anniversaries, or posted recollections by friends, or just random brain blips.

I have help with some of these. My sister is the keeper of the oldest of them, sometimes scrapbooked, other times confirmed when I ask about one.  Cornell is relentless at sending me things from the University, the Arts College, the English Department Department of Lteratures in English, my Class of 1981, the Class of 1987 for some godforsaken reason, the Memoriam List (nobody I knew this month, thank gods), the local Cornell Club, and probably four fraternities that didn't tap me trying to send me No we STILL don't want you emails. 

That help does help, for as those earlier places move the furthest away in time, the places, people and memories of them also disappear from the here and now. I remember when I first got to Ithaca in the fall of 1977, there was a bar restaurant on College Avenue named Ruloffs, which proudly (if presumptiously) posted an “Est. 1977” wooden sign next to the door. That sign would stay up for over 40 years before the place was finally killed by Covid in 2020.

It joined so many others in the graveyard of food and drink that I remember from then. The fancy graduation dinner places like The Station and l’Auberge. The dive bars like the Royal Palm and Johnny’s. My first ever taste of genuine Mexican at Dos Amigos and the Times (New York, not Ithaca) reviewed Greek food at Zorba‘s. You can’t even EAT AT JOE'S anymore. It was nominally there in the 70s and had been for much longer on the west side of town, later becoming something of a slumming spot for students by the 90s, was still going when I metangledge for the one and only time and had dinner with her there when we couldn’t get into Moosewood, and it's now just a memory on Meadow Street.

That Other Meadow for me goes back even further. The odd place still remains- the barbershop from my very first haircut, the Apollo Diner, the MAB Liquor Store that goes back to the days when the Mitchel Air Base was actually near it. Still, we've lost so many that I cut my teeth on (but not at my original dentist, who was in Hempstead). Even public places are shadows: the 11554 section of my school district is down to just one middle school and four elementary schools, down from two and six of each when I was growing up. Several churches have disappeared, while of the two closest shuls to me then, one has been bulldozed and both have merged with other aging congregations. My own sentimental Methodist home hasn't had a full time minister in years.

Other places I've mentioned here over the years with fondness- from Modell's to Mister Donut to Coret's, the music store near the Turnpike where I'd get my reeds, and from Waldbaum's to the Bambi Bakery to the Elmar Pharmacy-  are all gone without a trace. I just hear occasionally from a few parents of longtime friends who still manage to hang on there, while some younger folks who moved there later have connected with me. I certainly wouldn't want to live there ever again, and I'm not sure it's even a nice place to visit anymore.

Moving closer in time and space, there are now more than half my years to contain the memories of Western New York, but still many names have fallen. From my first years here in Buffalo, the big department stores like Hengerers, Sattlers, AM&A's and Hens & Kelly, and specialty retailers such as Jenss and L.L. Berger. The move to Rochester introduced their cousins Sibleys and McCurdys in the big boxes and B.Forman for the ladies.  Brand Names and Present Company were the catalog stores where you wished your Christmas wishes from the "big book," right before a "Santa" would take Mom or Dad's order on a scrap of paper filled out in pencil and ship it back to an employee who'd have it fished out from behind the scenes. 

Books came from Ulbrich's and Village Green, records from Cavages and Record Theater (long gone but still with its bags hanging on in a former location). Music venues with legendary acts for under ten bucks included Scorgies in Rochester and the much-moved but finally-just lost Tralf; controversy abounds this very week over an LA vulture capitalist reopening that one with not a little risk to some other locally owned stages we love. 

Too many other places for food and drink in both places to keep track of; just our wedding vendors from 1987 who have fallen include the reception hall, the rehearsal dinner restaurant, the cake maker and the florist. It's pretty much just us, and a few of you, left from that day.

I am also fortunate to have two chroniclers of some of these Western New York memories in what little remains of the cities' daily newspapers. The Buffalo News still engages the vast back catalog of a longtime media member (and now Facebook friend) named Steve Cichon to report when a particular store, restaurant or media institution breathes its last. Rochester's Demagogue & Comical long employed an author of a similar ongoing series called "Whatever Happened To...." written by a media specialist (and also now Facefriend) named Alan Morrell. His pieces referenced here over the years have chronicled the history of the aforementioned Scorgies in downtown Rochester as a space for 80s alternative music and comedy, and also his (slightly different than my) recollection of a suburban watering and listening hole I once represented called Red Creek, where the owner pissed off the members of U2 on their first US tour and resulted in them booking from the bar before ever playing a public note.

Cheap bastards that Gannett now has in charge of the place, the D&C hasn't posted a new "old" piece of Alan's in ages. They're all just recycled columns he did anywhere from five to 15 years ago. One of them recently run was of a "whatever happened to" that crossed over through two, arguably three, of my current and former haunts:

Whatever Happened to Bowling for Dollars?

The show ran on Channel 13 (then WOKR-TV, now WHAM-TV) during two periods in the 1970s and early 1980s. The longtime host was Ron DeFrance, and shows were usually broadcast live (sometimes taped) from the Channel 13 studio, where two bowling lanes were built for the program.

 

Local residents appeared on the show and it was an immediate hit. The premise seems simple: bowl two consecutive strikes and win a jackpot shared with a "Pin Pal" drawn from a barrel of mailed-in cards from viewers.

Alan's piece was from 2014, almost a third of the way back to when it was on the air there. But I remember another franchised version from even longer back:  I grew up watching the WOR-TV version of this franchise on channel 9 in New York, with Mets broadcaster Bob Murphy selecting the "pin pals" and calling the balls and strikes that went to the "Brooklyn side" or "Jersey side."  I don't remember Buffalo's version of it, though the article lists us among the 25 cities that picked up the concept. I do, however, remember another local spin on the pins. The Nickel City has always been associated with a game featuring balls, beer and stinky rented shoes; growing up, my father had a mimeographed page of mildly offensive ethnic jokes, one of which was

How do you estimate the Polish population of the world?
Count the number of bowling alleys in Buffalo and multiply by fourteen.

(I have no idea why that's funny, or even IF it is. I have less of an idea why I still remember it, but we'll return to that conundrum later....)

The bowling show that struck (heh) the local populace was called "Beat the Champ," and like the channel 9 BFD show was hosted by a sports announcing legend. Van Miller, the Voice of the Bills for most of their first 40-odd years, was also the local Channel 4 nighttime sports anchor, but he spent his Saturdays hosting these rolloffs.  A small over-air channel even now shows a revived  "Beat the Champ" on Saturday afternoons with a younger set of hosts from some of Buffalo's finest Polish population estimators-



Back to the Rochester show, though: I never saw the WOKR version of Bowling for Dollars- it was gone by my arrival in 1984- but I did participate in an "ask the lawyer" call-in segment from their West Henrietta Road studio back in 2008, with a financial planner and consumer credit counselor I knew back then.  They gave us a quick tour of the building, and I distinctly remember the bowling lanes still being there.  I wonder if they still are.

That was also the only time I ever met the legendary Don Alhart, channel 13's lead anchor before, during and all the years since our time living there. He is now in the Guiness Book of Records for longest tenure on a single station. . Even then he was movin' kinda slow, and that was 15 years ago.

Not that I can boast about all of my faculties, mind you. We'll return to some stories about that in our next episode, assuming this site doesn't shut down after years and years before I get the chance.