![]() I wouldn’t think anything of this hallway until twenty years later, when the girlfriend-who-became- my-wife asked me about it after visiting Gramps. The sound of his voice would trail off as we walked through the narrow hallway filled with pop on the way to the kitchen. In the ice box we got two kinds of baloney… Polish loaf… olive loaf… pimento loaf… ham…” “Jesus Christ, Dad, it’s ten o’clock in the mornin’,” Dad would say, walking toward Grandma in the kitchen.Īs we kids run in to give him a hug, Gramps would ignore my ol’man completely and give an inventory in case we were hungry. “Can I get you a glass of pop or a sandwich?” Gramps would ask reflexively, and immediately piss off my ol’man. Isn’t that how everyone’s Grandpa talked? I had no idea there was anything to notice about that. “Ha’oh dere, son,” Gramps would say in a pretty thick standard Buffalo Polish accent. Grandma generally would see us first, and start to say hello, before Gramps– who was much closer– would take his eyes off of Lawrence Welk or Bugs Bunny to intercept us for a minute. If you creaked open that big door and looked slightly to the right- and he wasn’t working one of the three jobs he still had when I was a kid- Gramps would be sitting in that well-used comfy chair just on the other side of the beautiful leaded glass doors which lead into the parlor. She was always sitting at the head of the worn out white Formica kitchen table- complete with a cup of instant coffee in a gold butterfly mug and Kool 100 burning in the over-full ashtray. When you look straight past the pop, if Grandma wasn’t at the stove cooking, you’d see her first thing when you’d swing open that heavy front door. With 10 kids, that’s pretty much what Gramps had- and he’d buy all the pop he could when it was on sale whether he needed it or not. It was in that narrow hallway where there was always enough pop stacked up to quench the thirst of a small army. When you walked in the front door and looked straight ahead, you looked through the front hall, then a more narrow hallway, and then right into the kitchen. Grandma Cichon lived a few doors from Seneca Street in a worn out, but grand old house. ![]() That’s why Gramps loved ’em and literally filled the hall with them. Pop tasted so much better in those 16oz glass bottles.Ĭoke Pepsi RC Cola… Cardboard eight packs filled with loose glass bottles lined the bottom shelf of the pop aisle at every supermarket in Buffalo and they were always on sale.īut even when they weren’t on sale, buying those 8 packs of glass bottles was the cheapest way to buy the name brand pop. Steve's Buffalo roots run deep: all eight of his great-grandparents called Buffalo home, with his first ancestors arriving here in 1827. ![]() Why? Western New York’s embedded in his DNA. ![]() When you browse the blog here at Buffalo Stories LLC, you’re bound to not only relive a memory– but also find some context for our pop culture past– and see exciting ways how it might fit into our region’s boundless future. The 25-year veteran of Buffalo radio and television has written five books and curates The Buffalo Stories Archives- hundreds of thousands of books, images, and audio/visual media which tell the stories of who we are in Western New York.Ĭichon puts his wide range of professional experience-from college professor, to PBS documentary producer, to radio news director, to candidate for countywide elected office-to work in producing meaningful interpretations of the two centuries worth of people, places, and events that make Buffalo the unique place that we love.įrom the earliest days of the internet, Steve has been writing, digitizing, and sharing the stories and images of all the things that make Buffalo special and unique. He writes about Buffalo’s pop culture history. writing about the people, places, and ideas that make Buffalo unique and special. Steve Cichon is a proud Buffalonian helping the world experience the city he loves.
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