129 Leonard Street

South Buffalo is the place of my birth, Mercy Hospital, 25 September 1951. Before my dad moved the family to Eden in November 1958, we lived at 129 Leonard St, Lackawanna NY.

I attended the McKinley Elementary School for kindergarten, first and pat of second grade, from September 1956 until we left in November 1958. I have few specific memories of that time other than an episode with kissing a girl in the gym (and getting reprimanded for that), receiving a free crossing guard badge (that my dad was unwilling to fund) and a kind administrator just gave it to me), calling out an older neighbor to 'play' ('Harold,' a fireman at the steel plant), and playing with other kids along the street.

We walked to school, about a third of a mile (see recent Google map, below). The current Lackawanna City School District in 1956 was McKinley Elementary, named after the president shot in Buffalo at the turn of the twentieth century. There is a front page picture from a September 1958 edition of the Buffalo Evening News, when there were five of us walking to school -- Al, Tom, me, Doug and Fran -- and three 'left behind,' either in my mother's arms or clinging to her skirt: Ted, Joe and Mary Ann. Two more kids would arrive after we moved to Eden, Jim (1960) and Mark (1963).

When we had moved I had just turned seven two months earlier. I had few if any serious attachments to our house or our neighborhood. Six boys sleep upstairs in a single, large room in three sets of bunk beds. Father Ed had both a large aquarium set up and a Lionel O-gauge model train exhibit in the basement. He painted the wall of the basement staircase a bright white, then had the kids dip their hands in black paint and leave their hand prints on the wall.

After-school religious education at Our Lady of victory meant another walk. The Google map shows a mile, but in those days there was no charter school on Ridge Road, no senior apartments on Orchard Place (in fact, I doubt that Orchard Place even existed), and there was an open field behind the McKinley school, allowing for a short cut through the field to the northeast corner of the cemetery and a short walk along Ridge, a left at South Park, and arrival at the OLV elementary school. Probably fifteen minutes for a seven-year old.

My brothers were probably my primary play group in Lackawanna. By the time we moved to 3158 East Church Street in 1958 there were six boys, all of them within five years of my age. The yard is pretty small, front and back, and we never played any sports like baseball or football in those confined spaces. That alone made the idea of moving to twenty acres in Eden an amazing adventure, and adventure that lasted another eleven years, until I left for SUNY Binghamton in September 1969, and never really looked or moved back fully to Eden, although I always had my old room there for breaks and summers, until mom and dad took the three youngest to Texas in early 1978. By that fall I had finished nine years of university, defended my dissertation, and was off to be a fresh, very young assistant professor at the University of Kansas.

At my age -- sixty-nine (and a half) -- one must look back to memories. There is less to look forward to in the future and there are plenty of filters that seem to preserve primarily if not only the best, most positive memories of the past sixty years. There is joy in those memories, something to deeply relish. And there are lessons and traditions to pass on to Jane and Gaby. Children inherit much more than financial wealth from their parents. There are cultural traditions, values, stories and other artifacts of personal history. These are, in most likelihood, more important and useful than the financial inheritance.

Joy, hope and opportunity. Two weeks ago I wrote about these essential elements of a life of purpose and happiness. I find joy in memories, yet there is also opportunity and hope possible within these memories. Part of it is the ability to remember that we have been through tough and even tougher times before, but with youth, poorly taught history, and the superficiality of modern media, many people have either forgotten the past, or never learned about it, or from it. Me? I remain hopeful. And I see opportunity. And I have hope.