Buffalo Wings
by
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Buffalo is the city of big snows. Winds sweep from the west in winter across the more westerly Great Lakes and across Lake Erie, pick up moisture, and dump it as snow at the eastern end of Lake Erie on Buffalo. Or perversely, the occasional northeastern blow from Lake Ontario has the same “lake” effect. Five miles from downtown Buffalo the sun will be shining under blue skies, while the city is reeling in a blizzard of snow. The snow swirls and drifts around the buildings and trees, catching on the rough edges of siding and bark, so that even vertical surfaces are pocketed with white. Buffalo is a city of white in winter. In the late 1960s, teaching as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Far East, when I said I was born in Buffalo, Koreans would nod knowingly and ask how I had managed to survive in the Buffalo snows.
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About the Book
As World War II comes to an end in 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt dies in office. Throughout the country, the greatest generation mourns its leader. A spring snowstorm in Western New York inaugurates the cold war.
Chuck Hobbie is just a boy, born on unlucky Friday, April 13th, but fortunate to be a child in Buffalo. As all Buffalonians know, it is not a dazzling city, unless the sparkle of winter snow and the shimmer of reflected summer lights from Erie and Niagara count. Likewise, the city’s citizens, families, and teachers are unremarkable, unless resilience, friendships, and quiet, day-to-day hard work matter. Buffalo’s children are not special at all, except that they were raised in Buffalo, amid the history of the Niagara Frontier, by people who cared for them and institutions that prepared them to fly.
Buffalo’s west side is where Chuck comes of age, but his childhood experiences range from there to New Hampshire’s White Mountains, a farm in Lewiston, N.Y., Holloway Bay in Ontario, and Alaska’s Brooks Range.
Join Chuck as he recalls in Buffalo Wings the childhood family, friends, teachers, and experiences that shaped his life in the decades before the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
About the Author
Charles A. Hobbie is from Buffalo. He graduated from Dartmouth College and earned graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin and George Washington University. After nine years as a Peace Corps Korea volunteer and staff member, he became a union lawyer in Washington, D.C. for over three decades. He lives in Falls Church, Virginia, and is now the Associate General Counsel of the Peace Corps.