Spilling Grain

JACK DRISCOL Boss of a Buffalo grain scooping gang, railroad man and elevator worker "The scoopers were at the whim of everybody." A railroad man at age 17 who would soon become the "boss" of a grain scooping "gang" in 1962, Jack Driscol toiled on Buffalo's waterfront his whole working life. Jack shared memories of scooping grain deep down in the hold of a ship, of working with equipment that stay...

STEVE BACZKOWSKI Musician, music curator at Buffalo's contemporary arts center Hallwalls and Buffalo grain elevator sound enthusiast  "Banging, creaking, popping, sliding, scraping: every sound you could imagine. Sometimes it sounded like a person screaming, the way the wind moved through there." As a kid,  Steve Baczkowski sneaked into Buffalo's abandoned grain elevators to hear what his sax migh...

BERT HYDE First Ward historian and lifelong Resident, curator and co-founder of The Waterfront Memories and More Museum, daughter and sister of Buffalo grain workers   "Girls didn't go by the waterfront."   Most women and girls who lived in Buffalo's First Ward -- the waterfront community at the heart of Buffalo's once-pulsating grain industry -- never went close to the waterfront or worked among...

DON DODD Longtime General Mills worker "It's like walking next to a jet, that's how loud they are.... That thing was just whistling and screaming." Don Dodd got his start at General Mills in 1969 and worked there for decades, taking on all sorts of roles. For a time, he was a gunner - literally shooting Cheerios out of a pressurized chamber that created a deafening sound. In the early days churnin...

LYNDA SCHNEEKLOTH University at Buffalo architecture professor emeritus and grain elevator preservationist "They are so out of scale to anything that you see in your life that they are like a distant landscape right in front of you all the time." More than a grain elevator enthusiast, Lynda Schneekloth is a scholar of these giant concrete and steel structures. On a frigid and windy Buffalo day in...

PAT NEEDHAM Buffalo grain scooper and grain ship engineer from Alabama Street "When we were kids we'd go to Concrete Central – just fields over there, old railroad tracks. And we'd hang out." Some of Buffalo's grain elevators had already shuttered by the time Pat Needham was a kid, but he worked hauling and scooping grain for decades in Buffalo and around the Great Lakes. A tragic accident down in...

BRUCE AND JOEL CARTER Former Buffalo flour mill workers "My father said, 'Here's a bottle of whiskey. Go tell that guy I need about a three-second spill.'" With a dad nicknamed Fearless Freddie who worked in and around the grain elevators throughout his life, Joel and Bruce Carter were indoctrinated into Buffalo's grain culture as kids. They both went on to work in the mill themselves, but an indu...

Audio storytelling from the people of Buffalo's grain elevators Ever walk across a river frozen thick to get to a whiskey-soaked work lunch? Stood atop grain piled so high it was like trudging in deep snow? Ever spend a month camped inside a leaky grain elevator — or fought to keep one from being demolished? The people featured in Spilling Grain have. They've worked in and around Buffalo's magnifi...