Thomas LaClear's Buffalo Newsboys

Genre painting is an exaltation of the ordinary. Thomas LeClear's 1853 Buffalo Newsboy is an epitome of 19th century American genre art. The subject is direct and immediate as the gaze of the boy. He sits relaxed amid the debris of his everyday life, surrounded by paper epherma and advertising type. The apple he holds captures forever the transient moment. What could better represent everyday life and passing time than the daily newspaper?

To read more of this issue's Historian's Notebook by John H. Conlin, see page 40 of the Summer 2007 Heritage Magazine.

A Distant Roar

...The busiest site for auto racing in Western New York became Buffalo Civic Stadium, which ran every good weather week from 1940 to 1959 except for a wartime federally mandated suspension. A total of over 140 midget auto features were run at BCS but not many after 1949.The stadium had a unique sound among all stadiums, probably because of its open bowl design and concrete wall. Castor oil laced fuels and other mixtures were inhaled innocently and the gleaming car designs improved year by year. The midget phenomena would eventually fade but only after becoming, by 1947, America's #1 spectator sport. The reasons for a decline in popularity were comprehensive but the arrival of network television by 1949 was not the least of them. The cost of operations were high and economics invariably determine the racing we get...

To view the rest of this story by Keith S. Herbst, see page 44 in the Summer 2007 Heritage Magazine. Subscribe now!

 

A Father's Legacy

My Dad, whose name was Ed Ryan, was born in Buffalo where the family lived in 1905 and he was the grandson of Thomas, one of the original Ryan Boys. He was 6 ft. tall with blue-green eyes and the heavy arms of a workingman. His complexion was ruddy from working outdoors and he had dark hair because he favored his mother's side of the family. He had worked since he was 12 when the nuns threw him out of school for being a bad boy; they had locked him under the stairs and forgotten to let him out at the end of the day so his father wanted himout of there anyway. They were a very strict order of German nuns...

To read more of this story by Ellen Ryan Grucza, see page 54 of the Summer 2007 Heritage Magazine.

 

 

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