WASHINGTON – Brigadoon rises from the mists of the Scottish Highlands once a century. Maybe you’ve seen the musical or the movie.
For Buffalo expats in and around Washington, Buffalo Nite is our Brigadoon. Capitol Hill fills with erstwhile Western New Yorkers — once a year, blessedly, rather than once a century — and we revel in food and fellowship of a Buffalo kind that we simply can’t find the other 364 days. And it’s all been going on since the Carter administration.
The idea was simple, really. Throw a Buffalo party. Invite expats from around the region. Sate them with wings and weck. And see if there might be enough interest to do it again next year.
That was 1978. Michael Castine from Jack Kemp’s congressional office and the late E. Plummer Godby from Hank Nowak’s joined staffers for John LaFalce to launch the first one. You might say they were winging it.
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“We got a room that could hold 50 people comfortably,” Castine says. “We hoped we’d get that many — and well over 150 showed up. We ran out of food in the first 20 minutes. And we knew we were on to something.”
The 41st edition is coming on Wednesday in a hearing room of the Dirksen Senate Office Building where hundreds of us will sample — OK, devour — the best of Buffalo edibles for three magnificent hours. Oh, and organizers make sure they do not run out of food or drink these days.
“We were a success from Day One,” Castine says. “We had a big advantage with Jim Molloy in our corner.”
Molloy, the late doorkeeper of the House, was a son of South Buffalo who gladly secured space in the Capitol for a celebration of his city. The first was in EF-100 — EF being Capitol Hill-ese for East Front — a space sometimes used as a holding room for presidential inaugurations.
“We had people spilling out into the hallway,” Castine says. “Tim Russert, who was working for Senator (Daniel Patrick) Moynihan then, was one of the first people who would come to the party every year. His classic line, whenever he saw me, was: ‘Hey, Michael, Go Bills!’ ”
The Buffalo Party was sponsored by congressional delegations in its early years. The Buffalo chamber of commerce renamed it Buffalo Night in Washington when it sponsored the affair from 1986-1992 and then the New York State Society took over in 1993 and changed the spelling to Nite, all according to the state society’s website.
The new organizers also instituted the Charging Buffalo Award, which goes each year to a friend of Buffalo with links to both Washington and Western New York. And who could ask for better exemplars of Buffalo in the nation’s capital than the first three awardees? They were, in order — drum roll, please — Russert, Mark Russell and Wolf Blitzer.
By the late ’90s Molloy was honored and in 2003 the award went jointly to Kemp, Nowak and LaFalce for getting the whole shebang started. It’s worth noting that Kemp, who died in 2009, was Republican and Nowak and LaFalce were Democrats.
“It was clearly bipartisan,” Castine says. “We just did it for fun. It was a case of, ‘Hey, let’s get the Buffalo crowd together.’ ”
Douglas Turner, the late Washington Bureau Chief of The Buffalo News, once wrote a column about how he was often asked who was really benefiting from the shindig, since some Washingtonians can’t grasp the difference between real parties and political parties.
“Democrats and Republicans believed we could work together then,” says LaFalce, who retired from Congress in 2003.
Castine left Kemp’s office to work for the Reagan administration in 1981. Michael O’Connell of Kemp’s office stepped into the breach. “I still remember Malloy’s guys going to the airport in his Ford Country Squire station wagon to pick up the kummelweck rolls,” O’Connell says.
These days Charlie the Butcher himself often comes to carve the roast beef. Bocce Pizza and Wardynski kielbasa and Fowler’s sponge candy are just some of the authentic delicacies that lure crowds of displaced Buffalonians back to Capitol Hill every year.
And so, come Wednesday, Room SD-G50 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building will once again become Buffalo for one enchanted evening. LaFalce can’t make it this year, but soon he’s going to do the next-best thing. He and his wife Patricia have tickets to see a beguiling musical at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont.
They’re going to see "Brigadoon."