The People whose Lives we Touch

by Dr. Ronald H. Stein

Before I got to be the vice president for advancement and development, I was the vice president for university relations. And in the process of learning the university relations job, which is something I did for all the jobs I had, I would travel to other universities to see how the very best did it. So in the course of learning about university relations I traveled to UCLA and Penn State.

When I was on the Penn State campus I saw that there was this thing called the Nittany Lion that everybody would pet. It was just a real centerpiece in the campus, in the quality of campus life. Then when I went out to UCLA, there's this thing called the Bruin Bear, which had the same kind of magical nature to it. So I came back and decided that we needed a buffalo.

At that time Judith Van Nostrand was associate director of alumni relations, and she agreed to work with me on finding the buffalo for UB. We started to try and get a real buffalo, a herd of buffaloes. We were going to put them out by the Ellicott Complex. But they smell, really bad, and they're kind of mangy. And a buffalo is much more romantic as a statue than it is in person. So we gave up on that.

Then we started to try to find a statue of a buffalo. I contacted American Airlines because American had this buffalo statue at its terminal gate. I asked them if they would donate it. They said that they promised the donor that they would never give it away; it was tied to the first American Airlines chairman, or whatever have you. So I couldn't get that buffalo.

Everybody kept telling me about the buffalo in the old train station, and that I should contact them, because Central Terminal was a wreck, was not being used. The picture of the buffalo, in everyone's mind, was that when people came back from World War II, and took the train back to Buffalo from New York City or wherever they would embark, they would get off that train and the first thing they would see was this marble platform and this regal buffalo on top of the platform. So the statue of the buffalo represented not only the city of Buffalo but some very special memories to a lot of people. So I should try to get the buffalo from Central Terminal.