Buffalo Rising Online

Oct 23rd 2007, 12:53am By Bill Zimmermann

Toronto… and Buffalo… their great future ahead together are the best dreams we can ever foster hopes upon.

The Bills are playing a game one date in Toronto this season, and likely many more to come, at least once per year, it’s said. It’s time to get our psyche together, regionally. Toronto is a bit over an hour away, and is on the very short list of top world cities that have it together.

It was On This Day, October 22, in 1992 that the Atlanta Braves beat the Toronto (Labatt) Blue Jays, 7-2, in Game 5 of the World Series, as Lonnie Smith hit a grand slam; this was the first American team to win a World Series game outside the US.

And then came 1993--On This Day, Tomorrow-- when the BLUE JAYS REPEAT WORLD SERIES WIN! Blue Jays slugger Joe Carter hits a three-run homer in the bottom of the 9th inning to give Toronto an 8-6 win over the Philadelphia Phillies in Game 6 of the World Series; defending champions take the Series 4-2; first team to win the World Series on Canadian soil! And Buffalo was there rooting and cheering blazes!

Figure how far away New York City is…Boston…or Chicago. Now try to enlist the idea that although we’re of two different countries, we’re actually closer to Toronto than any of the other big cities.

Buffalo is the critical city of the entire United Sates that played a role in Indian, then French, then British, and then American rule. We’ve had inhabitants here via the Natives for over 10,000 years flanking our riverbeds, and now know a good thing—it’s called Toronto’s hand reaching out to us.

Now think commerce, real estate, and the glacier-like move of Toronto reaching southward, growing, building, expanding, often glowing in its economic revolution of experience gathering up wealth and reach.

Ought not Buffalo be the Welcome Mat to Canadian Wealth reaching across to the US? Shouldn’t we greet and engage commerce and culture—kinda quickly? Is our City welcome to that hope, able to it, and open to it?

When I was growing up in Southern Ontario—Fort Erie, to be precise, it was an interesting awareness to me to be Buffalo-born, having a dual-citizenship, and crossing the Peace Bridge every day to go to Buffalo’s Nardin Academy for grammar schooling. I was born in Buffalo, but knew the two sides from my primary residence there.

For a six year-old, it just seemed normal—two countries, the Peace bridge, etc. But it was odd when Buffalo grammar school classmates questioned my accent—“Mum for Mom,” “awought for out,” so on and so forth and then “eh on the eh-ccasion.”

Toronto—and Southern Ontario, they are our super rich, world-wielding resource neighbors that built Western New York equally to Western New York building them. We were a unified region together far longer than we were separated as distinct cultures and state-vs-province distinctions of separate countries

When I was a kid there was a joke—Buffalo is the “armpit” of the USA and Fort Erie is the armpit of Canada—so then why not just start your own country? Maybe that wasn’t so bad an idea.

Speaking of which—armpits—as a kid I spent summers with my brothers and cousins at the Point Abino Day Camp. This was the American side of Canada’s beachfront Lake Erie paradise hold—still is, but can you believe more and more Canadians are buying in to their locale? Every morning we’d carry our lunch pails over the Point Abino sand dunes’ woodland hike to the place where our camp held court all day by the waterfront. There was a kid there who was a wealthy Canadian—named Harold Armand Pitts III.

“Harry Arm Pitts”-- the Third –he had a big nose and “zits” galore and was always being disqualified for blatant clumsiness from the various sand bag races and the like we endeavored. Poor kid—he was extremely wealthy however, and wonder where he hails from now? He likely owns a town or two near Kitchener—bless him.

I just could never figure why it seemed that Buffalo folk often thought too difficult about arranging their minds to include Canada as part of our region. The City of Buffalo is designed like a wagon wheel—just like D.C., except that half of it is in the water reaching towards our neighbor.

I grew up mutual to both and to this day feel that way. If there’s anything I could bottle up and sell, it would be an elixir to help people see that the world’s largest unprotected border really is friendly—to all of commerce, culture and community.

Praise WNED TV for nurturing this amalgamation of societal opportunity—they helm themselves as a station beckoning to both cities and regions—Buffalo and Toronto.

The more Buffalo associates with Toronto, the more it sees a grand future.

There’s a great link of Buffalo to Boston, New York, and Chicago…yes…but none of them seem to want to even be a true neighbor in our current reach. But Think Hard on Toronto…and think of the economic and cultural Megalopolis Cross Border.

That’s the news-- today…from On This Day, from Buffalo’s Wondrous and Reaching World.