Let's go, Buffalo! Making of the Book Part 2,

by Chris Wendel

As I recollect the chronology of this book it dawns on me how long the process has taken and how many pilgrimages I have made to Buffalo. Recently someone asked me why I have dedicated so much time and effort into a book about the Braves.

You see I was a Sabres fan first growing up. Playing hockey from age eight to eighteen in Lockport (when it had a rink) put hockey at the forefront. Still I had good recollections of the Braves. I believe I first heard the cheer “Let’s go, Buffalo!” at a Braves game televised in 1970. Now my five year old says the same cheer in the same old cadence, when we drive past a field of bison on our regular trips to town. The years may pass but it has stayed with me.

July ’05: The Courier Express files have a limited number of Braves pictures; this is going to be a problem. What kind of coffee table book will it be without a large number of action photos? I start to search ebay for photos and memorabilia. Plenty of miscellaneous Topps cards, pennants, and Elton Brand throw back jerseys. One day I end up with a great video collection of Braves highlight films narrated by Van Miller.

Why not put the video into a CD that could be added to the book? I check with my contact with the NBA legal department who warns me to quell any video aspirations. The league is apparently quite protective of any of their video and the Braves intellectual property still belongs to the NBA, not the LA Clippers.

January ’06: Through my “real” job I run into a graphic design person here in Michigan who might be right for putting the book together. He has a strong affinity for sports and quickly shows an interest in what we are trying to do. He starts to appreciate the Braves despite the fact that he grew up in Saginaw and knows much more about hockey and the Tour de France then basketball.

March ’06: Another trip to Buffalo to file through Ranallo columns and past Courier articles. There are plenty of banner headlines highlighting a big Braves win, the amazing scoring exploits of Bob McAdoo, or a 17,000 night of attendance at the Aud.

I get some solid leads on former team photographers through two Braves fans who wonder why I’m always bidding against them for items. One asks; “What are you doing writing a book or something?”

The odyssey leading to the photographers is next.

The Making of the Book (Part 1 )

By Chris Wendel
Summer 2004: My brother Tim and I wax poetic about Phil Ranallo, the late, great columnist for the now defunct Buffalo Courier Express newspaper. Ranallo’s column “What’s New Harry” was a breakfast staple during our adolescent days growing up near Buffalo in Lockport, New York. I recall making the mad dash to the paper box on cold mornings, just to read the column while eating my morning cereal. Tim was fortunate to work with Phil at the Courier after college in the early 80’s. We wonder where the old columns are if they still exist at all.

November ’04: Tim informs me that old issues of the Courier exist in the archive section of a Buffalo library. I decide to take my first of what turns out to be many trips back to Buffalo to view old articles and microfilm of the Courier Express. I live in Michigan and use the trips to visit my parents in Lockport and look at the columns. Revisiting the Ranallo columns 25 years later is somewhat surreal. To my relief his writing stands up well over time and I still can’t stop reading them.

January ’05: I’m back in Buffalo collecting columns with the help of the library’s helpful staff. Looking at microfilm for a few hours causes serious eye strain but fortunately there are also plenty of old columns that someone literally cut out of the old paper and mounted on typing paper. After reading 50 or so columns and several conversations with Tim it is apparent that Phil has a soft spot in his heart for the Braves. We decide that the Braves have been placed on a shelf long enough and their story that needs to be retold.

April ’05: Another trip to Buffalo and more research. Tim is an accomplished writer and I enjoy the grunt work of finding pictures and assembling the Ranallo columns. The format is unclear until I talk with Mike Romstadt of Village Press here in Michigan. The debate between us will continue for months. Mike thinks that this has the makings of a high quality coffee table style book that should be printed in a limited quantity and sold for a premium price. I run this scenario past several people I know and trust. Two camps quickly develop; the first includes those who think that there likely is a market out there (that already pays hundreds for decent game tickets) for a high quality book about the Braves. The second consists of folks who know little or Buffalo or sports and think that I’m nuts.

What we’re lacking is pictures. Finding the photos is a story we will save for the next installment.

Were the Buffalo Braves the canary in the Western New York mine shaft?

by Tim Wendel, author of Buffalo, Home of the Braves

Few thought so 30 years when the team switched franchises with the Boston Celtics before heading westward ho to become the Los Angeles Clippers. (The architect of that bizarre deal was a young lawyer named David Stern. But we’ll leave that twisted tale for another day.)

When the Braves left town, some civic leaders predicted that the NBA would be back in a decade or so. Seriously. They said that at the time. But one of the few guys who realized what this bait-and-switch really meant for the fans and the city was Phil Ranallo, the longtime columnist at The Buffalo Courier-Express.

I had the good fortune to sit next to Phil in the old C-E Sports Department in that paper’s last years of existence. He taught me about writing on deadline, how to get to real story and, most of all, how to have a sense of humor.

Phil nailed it when the Braves left town for good. He predicted that it would be a generation or more before the Niagara Frontier had another shot at a team of such stature. Back then we often debated the state of the sports world in late-night bull sessions at the paper. Several times Ranallo wondered aloud if the heyday of Buffalo had already come and gone. How with the economy suffering (this was the early 1980s) that it would difficult to hang on to remaining major-league franchises (The Bills, The Sabres).

Now some like to deride WNY as being behind the times. Unfortunately, when it comes to the impact of globalization, one could argue that Buffalo was cutting edge. It was one of first Rust Belt cities to be sold out by the politicians and see its jobs base flee overseas.

In Buffalo, Home of the Braves, we’re including several of Phil’s insightful takes on the team and the city. The man was ahead of his time and in some small measure our book is a tribute to him and an effort to bring his columns to a new generation of sports fans.