After parking the car, Walter and I walked to the plaza in front of Rockwell Hall at The State University College on Elmwood Avenue in Buffalo, New York. There, we joined hundreds of others gathered to participate in the 1971 annual Buffalo March on Hunger. It was a warm, sunny Saturday in mid-April.
Our sponsors had each pledged to contribute a specific amount for each mile of the march that we completed. Though we were sleep-deprived and hungover from our previous night’s revelry, we were bound to complete the twenty-mile course. We were young in those days and not thwarted by minor inconveniences like hangovers and lack of sleep. Besides, we knew that hard exercise is the best cure for a hangover.
I would like to say that my friends and I participated out of a dedication to fight and end world hunger, but that would be a lie. To us, it was primarily a social event. Not to say that we didn’t raise plenty of donations for the cause, because we did. But we were there to enjoy ourselves and socialize with the other participants.
And there were hundreds of participants.
After a welcoming speech from the march’s organizers, the marchers were dispatched. We filed out of the plaza and strung out along the Elmwood Avenue sidewalk. The organizers had provided us with maps depicting the route of the march and indicating checkpoints at which staffers would stamp our pledge cards to indicate the number of miles we had marched.
Walter and I were strong, experienced hikers. We began passing the slower walkers and ended up closer to the front of the line.
After about the first quarter mile Walter said to me, “I’m going to try jogging for a while. If we get separated, I’ll meet you at the car after the march.”
Well, I decided that I would not let Walter get the better of me. We began to jog together. When we stopped, after about another quarter mile, we were near the front of the march. The mass of marchers had thinned to a trickle.
After walking a short way, Walter said, “I’m getting blisters on my feet, but they weren’t bothering me while I was jogging. I’m going to try jogging the whole twenty miles.”
We began jogging together. Soon we had passed almost all the other marchers. When we reached the first checkpoint, the staffers told us we were nearly the first to arrive. They said that the only ones in front of us were members of a high school track team.
We continued, stopping at each checkpoint only long enough to get our cards stamped. At each point, the track runners were further ahead. We never caught up with them. We never even saw them.
We reached the final checkpoint, which brought us back to the march’s starting point at Buffalo State University College. We returned to the parked car to retrieve our bagged lunches and, more importantly, our drinks which we had stored in an ice cooler in the car’s trunk.
After a brief discussion, we decided to drive to the campus of SUNY Buffalo. The campus was located at the corner of Main Street and Bailey Avenue. It was the checkpoint for the halfway point of the march.
The SUNY Buffalo campus fronts on Main Street, on the edge of the city limits. There is a large parking lot along the Main Street front, beyond which is a grassy slope leading to the buildings beyond. Today, in 2022, it is used as an auxiliary campus. The main campus which did not exist in 1971, is now located to the north, in suburban Amherst.
The checkpoint was at the top of the slope, in front of Hayes Hall. The checkpoint staff members informed us that no marchers had arrived since we had checked in about one hour previously. Walter and I decided that the grassy slope below the checkpoint would be a suitable place to eat our bag lunches and drink some more cold pop. It was about 12:20 PM.
As we settled in and began to eat, the first group of marchers began to trudge up the slope towards the checkpoint. One person commented, “You guys’ll never finish if you just sit there.”
I responded, “We already finished.”
“Sure you did!” he answered sarcastically in disbelief.
Those first marchers were not the last to comment. As more marchers began arriving, making their way up the slope, similar comments were offered, and we responded similarly. And no one believed us.
As more marchers arrived, and commented, I started to embellish the story somewhat. Why not? Nobody believed the true story. They might just as well doubt an exaggeration. To the next few commenters, I changed my response to, “We’re already on our second trip around.” (Notice the slight exaggeration.)
As the afternoon wore on, my fish story grew larger. It wasn’t long before we had already completed two trips around. That was the largest the story grew. I couldn’t find it in me to increase the size of my whopper any further.
The crowd of marchers was beginning to thin. The bulk of the march had passed. The stragglers were starting to drag their feet up the slope. A group of about half a dozen trudged past us. One member of the group made the usual comment as he walked by; I offered the usual retort. He stopped and looked at us and was astounded.
“You went around twice already!” he exclaimed.
It was my turn to be astounded. Here was someone who actually believed my lie. I responded, “Yes, we did.”
At that, he began walking briskly up the hill toward the rest of his party. “Those guys have gone around twice already, and we’re not even halfway yet,” he berated his companions. He was clearly exasperated with them.
He joined his companions and began to scold them. “You’ve been dragging your feet. You’re slowing us down. You’d better start moving a lot faster!”
As they continued up the hill toward the checkpoint at the top, the halfway point, we could hear him continuing his tirade until his voice faded in the distance.
Finally, someone believed my story. Walter and I got a good chuckle out of it.
The afternoon was growing late. The crowds of marchers were growing thin. Walter and I decided it was time to go home, and so we did.
Twenty years later, one Saturday morning, my wife, Linda, and I were sitting in our kitchen sipping our morning coffee. We had been reminiscing about our earlier lives in Buffalo. We were comparing notes from the time before we met.
The conversation shifted to our respective experiences during the hunger marches. We had both participated in more than one of them, all before our first meeting, or so we thought.
I was relaying the story of our experience in the 1971 march. I was in the middle of describing our encounter with that one man who believed my story when suddenly she turned and looked at me with fire in her eyes.
“That was you?!” she shouted. “Do you have any idea what you put me through?!”
She remembered that day when her boyfriend stopped briefly to converse with those two guys seated on the grassy hill during the 1971 Buffalo March on Hunger.
Afterward, he began to angrily excoriate her for slowing everyone down with her dawdling. He claimed that the two men he had spoken to had already gone around twice, although she didn’t believe that they actually had. Nevertheless, he continued to berate her for the remainder of the march.
His behavior that day precipitated a slow deterioration of their relationship and led to their eventual break-up. Because of that day’s events, Linda was single and available when we met for what we thought was the first time in February 1972.
{A more detailed description of that meeting can be found in this story}
After twenty years I discovered that it was my own words that precipitated Linda’s separation from her then-boyfriend. That was how she happened to be single when we met the following February 1972, in a Buffalo tavern, for what we thought was the first time.
It took twenty years to find out.
Yes. That was me.
