Buffalo Unbound, page 5
Father Baker’s Dozen
Buffalo was historically a Catholic stronghold where every day was Mother’s Day, meaning a celebration of the Blessed Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus, Queen of Heaven.
Had there been a movie about Father Nelson Henry Baker, Boys Town star Spencer Tracy would’ve played the lead. Father Baker was a Roman Catholic priest born in Buffalo on February 16, 1842, to a grocer father and a devout Irish Catholic mother. In July of 1863, Baker enlisted to fight in the Civil War as part of the 74th Regiment of the New York State militia. Within days, he found himself fighting for the Union outside Gettysburg, in one of the most violent battles of all time, and was then sent to New York City to help stop the Draft Riots. Back in Buffalo, the twenty-one-year-old Baker considered becoming a priest, but instead opened a successful feed and grain business with a friend.
On September 2, 1869, Baker entered Our Lady of Angels Seminary at Suspension Bridge in Niagara Falls (now Niagara University). Soon he headed for Europe and spent time admiring the Parisian shrine to Our Lady of Victory, a name for the biblical Mary said to have been invoked by early Christians going into battle. Following a brief meeting with Pope Pius IX at the Vatican, he returned home with a renewed sense of faith. Baker was ordained on March 19, 1876 (the feast of Saint Joseph), at the age of thirty-four, and assigned to Limestone Hill (now Lackawanna), just south of Buffalo—a parish that consisted of Saint Patrick’s Church, Saint Joseph’s Orphanage, and Saint John’s Protectory, which provided training and education for at-risk youth. Father Baker labored as an assistant until he was transferred to Saint Mary’s Parish in Corning, New York, in 1881. However, he was reassigned to Limestone Hill in 1882 with a promotion to superintendent and wouldn’t leave again.
A few days after returning, angry creditors descended on Saint Patrick’s, informing Father Baker that the institutions he ran had amassed $56,000 in debt and demanding immediate payment. The business-savvy priest assured everyone they’d receive their money. A predecessor to a modern telemarketer, Father Baker asked postmasters all over the country to obtain the names and addresses of Catholic women, and he wrote for help. Soon, not only were all the creditors paid in full, but the Limestone Hill institutions were looking to expand. On June 26, 1889, a beautiful new chapel and an enlarged protectory were dedicated.
Around the same time, Buffalo was beginning to harness the power of natural gas. Pools of this efficient and clean resource were discovered at several sites by local drillers, and the prospect of not having to pay any more lighting and heating bills caught Father Baker’s attention the way it would any home-owning Buffalonian. After persuading the bishop of Buffalo to give him two thousand dollars in seed money, the priest invited a group of Pennsylvania drillers to Limestone Hill. At the conclusion of afternoon Mass, Father Baker led a procession of parishioners down his usual “prayer path,” took out a small statue of Our Lady of Victory, reached down, and buried it in the ground. He instructed the drillers to begin work in that very spot.
After many weeks without success, the project was dubbed “Father Baker’s Folly” by local newspapers. The foreman went to the priest and pleaded with him to give up the search. Most natural gas wells were found at a depth of six hundred feet, and the Limestone Hill drillers had already passed the thousand-foot mark. Father Baker told the man to have faith.
Finally, at the unheard-of depth of 1,137 feet, gas was struck on August 22, 1891. Victoria Well, as Father Baker named it, spouted flames into the air for many hours, causing a most miraculous scene. To this day, more than a hundred years later, Victoria Well continues to provide natural gas to some of the buildings that make up the Our Lady of Victory institutions—an incredible feat considering that most natural gas wells dry up after about thirty years.
In 1897, the protectory was expanded to 190 rooms, and the brand-new Working Boys Home was opened for eighty boys, age fifteen and up, who’d left the protectory and now had jobs in the Buffalo area. Father Baker was named vicar general of the Diocese of Buffalo in 1903 and served as the bishop’s right-hand man.
Around the same time, the practice of dumping unwanted babies into the Erie Canal was becoming all too common. In response, Father Baker announced plans to construct an infant home to offer refuge, prenatal care, and adoptive services for babies and unwed mothers. The ambitious project was completed in March of 1908 and immediately filled to capacity. The Infant Home was left unlocked at night, with an empty crib standing just inside the front door. Many desperate young mothers placed their babies in that crib, and to date more than fifty thousand orphans have passed through those doors. In 1919, a maternity hospital was added.
By 1921, Father Baker was seventy-nine, his City of Charity was caring for hundreds of infants, youths, and adults each day, and he’d improved the lives of thousands of people throughout the region. However, he had one more dream that he wanted to make a reality—Our Lady of Victory Basilica. Once again, donations flooded in from around the country. European artists and architects were hired and instructed to use the finest materials available from around the world. The basilica was dedicated in May of 1926, the year of Father Baker’s golden jubilee, and has since been recognized as one of the most beautiful cathedrals in the world. Our Lady of Victory is guarded by four eighteen-foot angels, and the bronze doors are an exact replica of the Grotto of Lourdes. Inside are two hundred French stained-glass windows, African mahogany pews, life-size marble statues of each of the apostles, and a 1,600-pound statue of Our Lady of Victory.
As the nation sank into the Great Depression, Father Baker’s institutions served more than one million meals a year, clothed 500,000, and gave medical care to 250,000 others. On July 29, 1936, the Priest of the Poor succumbed to old age at ninety-four, in the hospital he had built. It was estimated that anywhere from 300,000 to 500,000 people viewed Father Baker’s body, and the service was officiated by 700 priests. He was buried in Holy Cross Cemetery, next to the cathedral. The complex of services that Father Baker built still serves the community and is the largest employer in Lackawanna today.
Since 1986, the Our Lady of Victory parish and the Diocese of Buffalo have been working to secure canonization. Father Baker is currently Venerable, which is the first step on the path to sainthood in the Roman Catholic Church, Pope John Paul II having named him a Servant of God in 1987. Now the Vatican must review Baker’s report card, accept one of his alleged miracles as the real deal, and declare him Blessed, a step called beatification. The final hurdle is a second miracle, one worked through intercession after beatification has been declared.
In the Sainthood Olympics, Father Baker is competing against Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, Father Michael J. McGivney, and Father Isaac Hecker to become the first American-born male saint. And I hear that the German judge is a particularly tough grader.
To make it easier for the faithful to pray to Father Baker, he was moved inside the basilica and put under the front altar in 1999. However, the cemetery workers who dug up his coffin were surprised to find two coffins in his plot. Inside the smaller one were three mysterious vials of liquid. (It turns out that if you think you have a shot at sainthood, you should keep some bodily fluids on the side.) Laboratory analysis determined they contained Father Baker’s blood—blood in liquid form after six decades of Buffalo winters. Saints alive! This must surely give Father Baker an edge in the quest for canonization.
Baker has been honored as Buffalo’s most influential citizen of the twentieth century, and his name was given to a major bridge on New York State’s Route 5. It was the late 1950s, and, in retrospect, the circumstances surrounding its construction can be seen as portentous regarding the future of the area. The memorial bridge wasn’t contracted to an American firm, even though it was being built right in the backyard of Bethlehem Steel, one of the nation’s largest steel producers. Instead, the girders were made in Japan and then transported across the Pacific, through the Panama Canal, up the East Coast to the Saint Lawrence Seaway, on to Lake Ontario, through the Welland Canal, and into Lake Erie. Even with all the transportation, a Japanese company was still able to provide the steel less expensively than nearby Bethlehem Steel. (Not necessarily the fault of Bethlehem Steel, since they were required by law and unions to provide workers with certain wages and benefits. And whereas Bethlehem Steel was by then considered old, Japan’s plants were new, having just been built with post–World War II foreign aid, provided mostly by the United States.)
As for the bridge, it was potholed, poorly maintained, and treacherous during lake-effect storms. It eventually closed in 1991, barely thirty years old.
Another prominent Buffalo Catholic, Washington news commentator Tim Russert, mentioned Father Baker in his best-selling autobiography, Big Russ and Me. He fondly recalled the standard threat for South Buffalo Catholic boys caught misbehaving: “You’d better watch it or you’re going to Father Baker’s.” When Russert unexpectedly died of a heart attack at age fifty-eight on June 13, 2008, Buffalo mayor Byron Brown ordered flags flown at half-mast, even though Russert had never held political office. And on June 18, 2008, New York senators Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer, along with congressman Brian Higgins, introduced a resolution to rename a section of Buffalo’s US Route 20A that runs past the Buffalo Bills’ home, Ralph Wilson Stadium, the “Timothy J. Russert Highway.” President Bush signed the bill into law just five weeks later. Russert is buried at Rock Creek Cemetery, in Washington, DC.
Form Follows Freedom
A documentary on Western New York eccentrics would no doubt reserve a starring role for Elbert Hubbard, founder of the Roycroft movement in bucolic and picturesque East Aurora, New York, twenty miles southeast of Buffalo. Nor would it be very entertaining without this figure, who, in his day, stood at the top of the inspirational ladder the way that Dale Carnegie, Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, Anthony Robbins, and Oprah Winfrey would in years to come.
Born in 1856 in Bloomington, Illinois, Hubbard was brought to Buffalo in 1880 to sell soap products for J. D. Larkin and Company. He eventually became dissatisfied and, in 1892, at age thirty-six, left for a brief stint at Harvard. He also left his first wife and three small children for long periods of time to be with the suffragist Alice Moore, who was a freethinker like Hubbard. Additionally, Hubbard believed in free love, and in 1884, he had a daughter with Alice, and then two years later, another daughter with his wife, Bertha.
During a two-month trip to England, he was exposed to the British Arts and Crafts movement, which emphasized attractive and user-friendly products designed and made by hand, not by soulless machines on dreary factory floors. However, where the Brits were also concerned with reform and social justice, Hubbard was more taken by craftsmanship and capitalism. He arrived back in the States with a desire to start a (profitable) magazine that reflected his thoughts on morals, politics, and religion. So Hubbard returned to East Aurora in 1895 and founded the Roycroft Press, which soon expanded to furniture making, metalsmithing, leatherwork, and bookbinding. Roycroft was the surname of two seventeenth-century English printers, and though Hubbard offered different stories at different times, that’s most likely where the name originated.
Based on the medieval guild system, the general idea was that making quality goods by hand would counter the dehumanizing and ill effects of the Industrial Revolution. The work and philosophy of the group had a strong influence on the development of American architecture and design in the early twentieth century. Hubbard’s 1899 inspirational essay “A Message to Garcia” (Calixto García e Iñiguez was a Cuban insurgent fighting against Spanish control) ranked only behind the Bible and the dictionary in overall sales at the time. Great thinkers and artists of the day made pilgrimages to the Roycroft Campus, including Frank Lloyd Wright, Clarence Darrow, Thomas Edison, John Muir, Rudyard Kipling, Henry Steinway, Booker T. Washington, and Mark Twain.
Hubbard, often dubbed “the original hippie,” became fond of eccentric dress, including a wide-brimmed Stetson hat, leather vest with gold nugget buttons, buckskin trousers, high-top boots, jangling spurs, an ascot in the plain bright red preferred by anarchists, adorned by a diamond stickpin, and a cape overcoat. He grew his hair long and sported a beard down to his waist. All this from a man who preached discipline and self-control. In 1903, Hubbard’s wife divorced him, and the following year he married Alice.
At its peak in 1910, the Roycroft community had five hundred workers and served as a meeting place for radicals and reformers. Hubbard was a supporter of the Universalists, who would later merge with the Unitarians, and he worked with their local East Aurora minister, the Reverend John Sayles, on village political reform and various intellectual endeavors. “Religions are many and diverse, but reason and goodness are one,” wrote Hubbard. As an example of the dichotomy of the Hubbard mind, he also said, “Formal religion was organized for slaves: it offered them consolation which earth did not provide.”
When the Titanic sank in 1912, Hubbard wrote about the disaster and featured the story of Ida Straus, a passenger who refused to get into a lifeboat, saying, “Not I—I will not leave my husband. All these years we’ve traveled together, and shall we part now? No, our fate is one.” Hubbard then editorialized: “Mr. and Mrs. Straus, I envy you that legacy of love and loyalty left to your children and grandchildren. The calm courage that was yours all your long and useful career was your possession in death. You knew how to do three great things—you knew how to live, how to love and how to die.”
Three years later, Hubbard and his wife boarded the ocean liner Lusitania in New York City, bound for Liverpool. World War I was raging in Europe and the Third Reich had warned US citizens to stay out of German waters, but Hubbard insisted that he needed to interview Kaiser Wilhelm II and try to end the war. On May 7, 1915, the Lusitania was torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine off the coast of Ireland. The ship sank quickly, and 1,198 people died, including 128 Americans, among them Elbert and Alice Hubbard. The Germans asserted that the ship was carrying arms for the Allies (which later proved to be true). As a result, anti-German sentiment increased in the United States and rallied support to end American isolationism by sending troops abroad.
In a letter to Hubbard’s son, Ernest C. Cowper, a survivor of the Lusitania tragedy, wrote:
I can not say specifically where your father and Mrs. Hubbard were when the torpedoes hit, but I can tell you just what happened after that. They emerged from their room, which was on the port side of the vessel, and came on to the boat-deck. Neither appeared perturbed in the least. Your father and Mrs. Hubbard linked arms—the fashion in which they always walked the deck—and stood apparently wondering what to do. I passed him with a baby which I was taking to a lifeboat when he said, “Well, Jack, they have got us. They are a damn sight worse than I ever thought they were.” They did not move very far away from where they originally stood. As I moved to the other side of the ship, in preparation for a jump when the right moment came, I called to him, “What are you going to do?” and he just shook his head, while Mrs. Hubbard smiled and said, “There does not seem to be anything to do.” The expression seemed to produce action on the part of your father, for then he did one of the most dramatic things I ever saw done. He simply turned with Mrs. Hubbard and entered a room on the top deck, the door of which was open, and closed it behind him. It was apparent that his idea was that they should die together, and not risk being parted on going into the water.
The Roycroft Shops, run by Hubbard’s son, Elbert Hubbard II, operated until 1938, when they were officially declared bankrupt. However, the Roycroft Campus was granted national landmark status in 1986, taken over by a group of business leaders in 1988, and reorganized as a not-for-profit organization. Though in need of further restoration, it’s open to the public and remains devoted to fostering, encouraging, and supporting artisans. There are classes, tours, and plenty of handicrafts for sale. Some of the shops play the kind of New Age music that sounds very soothing when you first hear it, and then after about ten minutes you understand why people end up with body parts in their freezer.
The Roycroft Inn, built in 1905 to accommodate all the visitors, was also under the management of Hubbard’s son until 1938. After passing through several owners, it was completely restored with original and reproduction furniture and reopened in June of 1995. Carved into the doors of the rooms are the names of such notable guests as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Clara Barton, George Washington Carver, Charlotte Brontë, Henry David Thoreau, Stephen Crane, and Susan B. Anthony. And if you don’t need a place to stay, the splendid restaurant is well worth a visit.
The nearby Elbert Hubbard Museum is a two-story Arts and Crafts–style bungalow built in 1910 according to a design by William Roth, the head Roycroft carpenter. It features furniture and decorative items produced by the community, along with an extensive collection of Roycroft books.
The spirit of Elbert Hubbard’s iconoclasm and individualism survives in East Aurora, not just amidst its eclectic Main Street, carefully preserved homes, and old-fashioned theater, but in the hearts and minds of its residents. The village was one of the first communities to successfully block a Walmart store, in 1995 and again in 1999.
Cleveland Hill Fire
There’s a reason the architecture of my school, like that of so many in the Buffalo area, is reminiscent of a maximum-security prison, and it’s not because bricks, barbed wire, and asbestos happened to be on sale the year it was built. On March 31, 1954, there was a fire that would modify school design across the country, not unlike the Angola Horror had forever changed railway safety and engineering.
My friend Pete was in Mrs. Marie Morgan’s third-grade class at Cleveland Hill Elementary School in Cheektowaga, New York, a suburb six miles east of the city of Buffalo. It also happened to be the school district where Pete’s father, Last Chance Heffley, was superintendant. (In high school, this provided Pete with the opportunity to warn his teachers that their contracts were in his father’s bureau drawer and hopefully he wouldn’t accidentally throw one away.) Walter’s older sister, Mary Lies, taught second grade at Cleveland Hill Elementary, and two of her children, Pete’s cousins Elizabeth and Brian, were also students there. Pete recalls walking to school on an ordinary drizzly and cold late winter day and seeing his aunt Mary, who was always meticulously turned out, dressed in a light gray banker’s suit.
