The People Whose Lives We Touch, Continued

by Dr. Ronald H. Stein

I contacted the people who ended up with the train station and they said it had been destroyed. I said, "How could it be destroyed? It's a bronze Buffalo." I figured somebody must have sold it off and it just disappeared. I went to the Buffalo News and said, "Will you do a story for me? UB is looking for a buffalo to represent the university, like the Nittany Lion." They did. It was brought to my attention by Milt Carlin, who used to be a Buffalo News reporter and had worked part time in our news bureau, that someone in New York City was the son of the original sculptor of the buffalo that was in the train station.

So I contacted the son, who himself was in his early 80s. He said that the original buffalo in the train station, which his father had made, was in fact not made out of bronze, like everybody thought but was made out of papier-mache. And when the roof in the train station leaked and was left to disrepair, the water dripped on the papier-mache buffalo and destroyed it. The people who said it was destroyed were right.

This fellow's company made sets for soap operas. He said, "I have up in the rafters of the building warehouse in New York City the original mold for the Buffalo at the train station. If you want, you can buy the mold and I can have it cast as a bronze buffalo for you. And UB can get its buffalo."

So I started a campaign to raise the money to buy the mold, have it cast, then shipped to Buffalo and have it mounted at the university. We raised the money with a generous gift from Burt Flickinger and a generous gift from Jerry Goldhaber. And the university put up some money. We sold some bricks for people to put their name on, around and up to the buffalo. We got a design made for mounting the buffalo and the perfect location was in front of the Center for the Arts.

Why is that special to me? It's special to me because I went to general commencement on Sunday, on the 13th of May (2001). After the ceremony, I was to meet someone out in front and have my picture taken with them. As I went out, made that turn to come out from the side of Alumni Arena, there was a line as long as you could see, of students and parents, waiting to stand up and have their picture taken in front of the buffalo. The last memory they wanted of UB was their picture by the buffalo.

It's not about raising money. It's about what the money will do to the people whose lives we touch every day.