BUFFALO BOOKS By Cynthia Van Ness Buffalo Gal By Laura Pedersen Fulcrum, 2008 It is about time that my generation started chronicling itself. How many sixties figures were so convinced of their exceptionality that they had self-congratulatory memoirs out by age thirty? In terms of autobiographical output, those of us who came of age in the 1970s have been modest bordering on mute by comparison, hardly earning the boomer stereotype of excess self-importance. Like Laura Pedersen, I was born as the baby boom petered out, late enough that the first “boomers,” those born nine months after the conclusion of World War II, those who can take all of the credit or blame for “the Sixties,” could technically have been our parents. Demographers insist that we are boomers, too, but in the 1960s, we weren’t being recruited to anti-ROTC demonstrations, we were being recruited to scout troops. Many of us in grade school during the battles of the 1960s longed to take our places on the front lines of the social change movement, only to come of voting age as Reagan swept into office and grimly foreclosed on the progressive future mapped out by our hipper older siblings.  In Buffalo, seventies kids were the first generation to grow up amid the sharp contraction of nearly everything: jobs, wages, factories, businesses, discretionary income, student financial aid and scholarships, social programs, occasional foodstuffs, population, fossil fuels, and any previous sense of economic security. In our world view and aspirations, we have more in common with the Depression generation than the Sixties generation. Buffalo Gal recounts a lost era of American childhood, in which parents were not expected to monitor or program kids’ every waking moment. After school, children were allowed out of the house unchaperoned and enjoyed ample unstructured time, in which they wandered in and out of each others’ kitchens, biked as far as their interest or stamina took them, invented their own pastimes, and were expected to stay out of their parents’ hair. Somehow they turned out OK. Pedersen, an only child, enjoyed an especially free-range childhood with little (by contemporary standards) parental involvement and plays it for affectionate, comedic effect. Maybe the Pedersens were blessed with a precociously reliable and self-reliant daughter, though one cringes at the occasional parental obliviousness. Buffalo Catholics get some good-natured ribbing, but in the spirit of saving your best satire for your own people, Pedersen treats Unitarian-Universalists, her own denomination, to a few pages that read like the winning stand-up routine at a UU General Assembly—where such a competition could actually occur. Consistent with the UU ecological ethic, this is the first book I have ever seen with an Environmental Benefit Statement at the back, where the publisher reports on resources conserved by the use of 100 percent post-consumer-waste recycled paper. It is a testament to the author’s temperament and generosity that she looks back on a tough time in Buffalo with warmth and gratifying observations about the habits, expectations, pop culture, and coping mechanisms of a city experiencing wrenching new realities. What will surprise you, unless you grew up in the seventies, too, is how funny it all was. Buffalo-Niagara Connections: A New Regional History of the Niagara Link By John W. Percy Western New York Heritage Press, 2007 Location, location, location. The familiar real estate mantra also reveals why cities and regions evolved as they did. Percy, the historian of the Town of Tonawanda and a longtime teacher and author, uses the distinctive geography of the Niagara region to illuminate the rise and fall of Buffalo over the last two centuries. The retreat of glaciers thousands of years ago bequeathed to us the Great Lakes—the world’s largest bodies of fresh water. Underlying bedrock formed an escarpment (meaning a ledge or cliff-like land form) that resulted in Niagara Falls, a deadly barrier that blocked navigable water access to the interior of the continent from the Atlantic Ocean. Until the advent of the Welland Canal and the St. Lawrence Seaway, of course. We all know how that story ended. Buffalo’s rapid rise in the 19th century owed everything to its strategic position on the Great Lakes. Foresighted leaders saw the need for a commercially navigable waterway connecting the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes, and the Erie Canal was the result. Situated at the conjunction of Lake Erie, the Niagara River, the Erie Canal, and Buffalo Creek, Buffalo exploited the barrier posed by Niagara Falls to become the major transhipment point for the young nation. Buffalo was where goods arriving from the west by lake freighter were transferred to canal boat and later rail to reach markets in the east.  Goods arriving from the east likewise had to pass through Buffalo to reach markets in the west. We prospered and, as our monumental grain elevators silently attest, became the world’s largest grain port and the second largest rail center in the country. Throughout this history, the Niagara River has functioned as both a wall and a bridge. Percy returns to this geographic theme throughout his book, calling it “the Niagara Link.”  “The Niagara Link is the key part of an historic series of trade and travel routes that connect the Great Lakes area of mid-continent North America with the Atlantic coast. The Niagara region, encompassing land on both sides of the U.S./Canadian border, has played host to several versions of the Niagara Link over a period of more than three centuries. Whether it was the primitive link pioneered by Native Americans or improved routes developed by French, English, American, and Canadian interests, all sought a way to overcome nature’s break in the all-water route from the continent’s interior to the sea. That break, Niagara’s falls and rapids, has continually challenged human ingenuity.  Much of the history of the Niagara region revolves around the challenge of building and maintaining a viable Niagara Link.” (p. vii) Buffalo’s role, while central to the region, does not overwhelm Buffalo-Niagara Connections. Percy uses geography and geology as tools for understanding the origins of all of the communities in the Niagara region. As such, this well-illustrated regional history fills a gap on any history buff’s bookshelf. Cynthia Van Ness is the director of the library and archives at the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society. SUBSCRIBE NOW Back to the Table of Contents Back to Top