That Farm on New Road and Dodge

by John Fopeano

An activity that kind of ties some things together for me is gardening. My dad was in the army, and I lived in Kansas during the war, in a little town named Herrington. It was all of 3200 people. I had a victory garden there. We had a horse that came in and plowed the back yard up for the garden.

When I went to study biochemistry as a graduate student at the University of Michigan, the faculty had a community garden. Adam Christman, my professor, would go out of town in the summertime on vacation, and I taught in the summer, so he asked me to take care of his garden the first year. The next year, they let me have my own plot.

Wilson D. Langley was the head of biochemistry at UB. He and his wife, Lucy, had maintained a friendship with Christman. Christman recommended me to him, and I came to UB as an instructor in biochemistry in 1954.

The Langleys lived out on a farm on New Road and Dodge, and they had two hundred plus acres. Langley let me have a garden, so I did a lot of gardening. When there was a faculty member in engineering who went to Scotland, they wanted somebody to take care of their garden, so I gardened out on North Forest one year as well.

Langley was a very independent character. He had been here since right after the Depression, the thirties. I think it was '36 that there was a tremendous snowstorm in Buffalo. At that time, the medical school was down on High St., and his family was out on that farm on New Road and Dodge. The city was snowbound. Nobody could get anyplace. Langley went downtown and bought a pair of skis, and he skied home from High Street out to New Road.