Heritage Moments

The thoroughbreds have been running at Fort Erie Race Track since 1897, but ask any railbird there which horse took the old border oval’s wildest ride, and they’ll all tell you the same thing: Puss N Boots.

A whole generation of Americans still knows it by heart: A man shouts, “Hey, kids, what time is it?” And several dozen children shout back in chaotic unison, “It’s Howdy Doody time!”

Buffalonians don't say much about the most significant architect Buffalo ever produced: Louise Blanchard Bethune, America’s first female professional architect, and a woman who designed many of the city’s signature edifices.

Charles Burchfield, 28, was already an accomplished watercolorist when he moved to Buffalo from Salem, Ohio, in November 1921 to take a job as a designer at the M.H. Birge & Sons wallpaper company. But in 1925, he really found his home.

Father Nelson Baker — the “padre of the poor,” the man who built the Our Lady of Victory complex in Lackawanna into an astonishing city of charity that featured an orphanage, a boys’ protectory, a home for unwed mothers and their infants, a hospital, a grade school and high school, a nurses’ home, a farm to help feed the hungry, a soup kitchen that served more 450,000 meals during the first three years of the Great Depression, and finally the great basilica that has become a national shrine and pilgrimage site.

The chronicle of baseball’s color line usually focuses on the triumphant story of its breaking by Jackie Robinson in the 1940s. Rarely told is the bitter story of how the color line was established, way back in the 1880s — in places like Buffalo, at the expense of black men like Frank Grant, the star second baseman of the Buffalo Bisons.

Tonto is one of the most famous and enduring characters ever to come out of American television. And the actor who made Tonto come alive during the entire TV run of The Lone Ranger (1949-57) was a handsome, dark-haired, sometimes-Buffalonian named Jay Silverheels.

Everywhere you go in North America these days, it seems, you see the Six Nations flag. You’d think it’s been flying forever. But in fact, it is less than 40 years old.

Chauncey Olcott, a son of Buffalo and Lockport, did not set foot in the Emerald Isle until he was 40 years old.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the sport of running was dominated by Indigenous men. Such famous runners as Tom Longboat (Onondaga), Jim Thorpe (Sac and Fox), Louis Tewanima (Hopi), Deerfoot-Bad Meat (Siksika), and Ellison Brown (Naragansett) were all winners of Olympic gold, the Boston Marathon, and other prestigious races of the era. But the first among them was a Seneca from the Cattaraugus Territory… the original Deerfoot.