Spilling Grain

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 ...

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 the hold of a grain ship put an en...

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 
ste...

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 c...

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 the grain elevators. But the industr...

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."

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 stayed the same since his dad's time as...