Famous Faces of WNY
National Celebrities with Local Roots

By Carol Fisher-Linn

    Wolf Blitzer was not born in Buffalo yet is considered a Buffalonian. Blitzer was born in Bavaria, Germany in 1948 during the post WWII occupation. Polish Jewish refugees from German occupied Poland, his family survived the Nazi concentration camps – most of his relatives including grandparents were murdered in Auschwitz or died of typhoid in Poland. What was left of his family immigrated to Buffalo. Blitzer graduated from Kenmore West Senior High and received a BA in history from the State University of NY at Buffalo in 1970, and an MA in International Relations from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. His name truly is Wolf (people long thought it was made for TV) passed on from his grandfather. Fluent in Hebrew, he began his career in Journalism Affairs in the 1970’s in the Tel Aviv bureau for Reuter’s. In 1992, Blitzer became CNN’s White House correspondent, a position he would hold until 1999. During this period, he earned an Emmy Award for his coverage of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. In 1998, he began hosting the CNN Sunday morning interview program Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, which was seen in over 180 countries. CNN selected Blitzer to anchor their coverage of all U.S. presidential elections since 2004. Since 2005, Blitzer has hosted The Situation Room on CNN. Blitzer has won awards too many to mention.

   Buffalo born Sylvia Lark (1947-1990) of Native American and Italian-American heritage, was an abstract expressionist painter, printmaker and educator. A graduate of Buffalo’s Nardin Academy, she attended school at the State University of New York where she received her B.A. degree in 1969; Lark received her M.F.A from University of Wisconsin in 1972 before moving to California where she began teaching printmaking at California State University. The Smithsonian Archives of American Art gave us the following information about Lark: In 1977 she received a Fulbright grant to travel and study in Korea and Japan. She began teaching at the University of California, Berkeley that same year where she remained a professor for the rest of her life. She was awarded the Distinguished Teaching Award for teaching art by the College Art Association posthumously in 1991. In addition to her professorial career, Lark was a widely exhibited artist who collaborated on several Native American works. Her work can be found in numerous collections including that of the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Oakland Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. In 1992, she was the second inductee into Nardin Academy’s Alumnae Hall of Fame. Lark died on cancer at the age of 43.

         Actor George “Gabby” Hayes (1885 – 1969) was born a small hotel in Stannards, NY (near Wellsville). As a young man, he worked in a circus, played semi-pro baseball, and ran away from home at 17 to join a traveling stock company. He married, and he and his wife Olive found success on the vaudeville circuit to the point that they could retire young. He returned however, now to film, after losing much of his savings in the 1929 market crash. In no time, Hayes became the most famous Western sidekick in Hollywood. First as “Windy Halliday” in the Hopalong Cassidy films, and later as “Gabby,” the name that stuck for the rest of his career. Hardly a heartthrob star, his whiskered face, colorful drawl, and good-natured humor helped him become the beloved sidekick to stars like John Wayne, Roy Rogers, and Randolph Scott, even ranking among the Top Ten Western Box Office Stars of his era — a rare feat for a sidekick. Hayes moved to television where he hosted the Gabby Hayes show from 1950 to 1956. Hayes lived a quiet life in retirement. Surprisingly, off screen Gabby was quite the opposite of his scruffy coarse characters. In fact, he was refined, elegant and well-read.

Honorable mention:

     Katharine Cornell (February 16, 1893 – June 9, 1974) was an American stage actress, writer, theater owner and producer. She was born in Berlin to American parents, raised in Buffalo, at 174 Mariner Street and attended The State University at Buffalo. She was considered “The First Lady of the Theater.”

    Robert Franklin Young (1915 – 1986) was an American science fiction writer born in Silver Creek, New York. Except for the three and a half years he served in the Pacific Theatre during World War II, he spent most of his life in New York State. He owned a property on Lake Erie.