Insight: The most positive person I’ve ever known

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

I’ve heard people say that being with your family is the place where you can be your most complete self and for some, maybe that’s true. For me, I was blessed to have had an aunt who fit that bill and more.

Jeanette Baker, left, with her
sister-in-law Harriett Pierce and
nephew Ed Pierce on Easter
Sunday 1955 in Rochester, 
New York. COURTESY PHOTO 

Jeanette Baker was about the kindest and funniest person that I’ve ever known, and I was fortunate that she married into our family and was my favorite aunt. When she visited, she’d always slip me a piece of hard candy or when our family went to her home, she had a supply of Coca Cola or Archway Raspberry cookies as treats for myself and my brother.

Her laugh was contagious and sort of built slowly to a crescendo that filled the room. And she was seldom without a comforting smile, which invited you to confide in her what was troubling you so she could offer some practical advice.

In all the years of being around her, I never heard Aunt Jeanette speak badly about anyone or anything. She was genuinely a positive person and that attitude persisted even after she suffered a stroke later in life, her husband died, and she was forced to move into her son’s home because of her declining health and mobility issues.

It could not have been harder for her as her son and his wife ran a daycare from their residence and she was constantly surrounded by dozens of children all under the age of 5. She put up with screaming, temper tantrums and a bevy of little people running in and out of her personal space, but she never frowned, raised her voice, or complained.

When I first started driving, I would make it a point to stop by the department store she worked at for a dose of her positivity. She always gave me a big hug and made it a point to tell me how proud she was of me and that I was studying journalism in college. She would remind me that her sister, Doris Laubscher, worked for a community newspaper for 35 years.

“The world needs story tellers,” she once told me. “And this is what you are meant to do with your life.”

It was uplifting to observe her positive interactions with her department store customers, no matter if she was selling bath towels or a set of glassware. She treated each customer like they were members of her own family and went out of her way to make them feel like they were the only shoppers in the store.

Even after I served in the U.S. Air Force, graduated from college, and started working for a newspaper in New Mexico, every Christmas season I would receive a card from her, updating me about her new grandchildren or great-grandchildren, and how she was doing. I looked forward to those Christmas cards each December because she never wavered in her support for me.

Every trip home that I made included a stop to see Aunt Jeanette. We’d sit for hours at the kitchen table reminiscing about days gone by and then l would always take her to Tom Wahl’s, a nearby restaurant for a ground-round hamburger, French fries, and a frosty mug of root beer. She talked about my paternal grandfather, who had died when I was 2, and told me interesting stories about her late husband, my uncle Bernie.

Of all my family members, Aunt Jeanette was truly someone who understood the complicated relationship I had with my mother and her advice to me usually was to overlook questionable comments that my mother would make. She said I needed to remember that my mother had experienced many difficult challenges in her life but that deep down, she was a good person.

Aunt Jeanette lived for at least five years on her own after Uncle Bernie died in 1995, but it became increasingly difficult to manage alone and that’s when her son, Bernie, Jr. and his wife, Lynda, brought her to their home to live with them.

I was living in Florida and working for a newspaper in November 2012 when I received word that Aunt Jeanette’s health had taken a turn for the worse and she was in the hospital. She passed away at age 89 in January 2013.

When I posted on Facebook about how saddened I was by my aunt’s loss, I received surprising encouragement from a classmate, Peggy Muhs, whose locker in eighth grade was right next to mine. Peggy sent me a Facebook message and told me that she admired my Aunt Jeanette too. It seems Jeanette was the best friend of Peggy’s mother, something I never knew, and she had been her mother’s maid of honor at her wedding.

I’ve heard people say that you can’t choose your family, but if I could, the ideal aunt for me would always be Jeanette Baker. Last December in going through a box of old holiday decorations, I found a Christmas card from her dated 2006. She mentioned how much she adored my wife, Nancy. What a better place the world would be if everyone could be just a little like her. <

Insight: Fishing for football tickets

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

My dad was educated in mechanical engineering and that sure came in handy in the 1960s when I asked for his help in competing for a grand prize that included tickets to a professional football game.

It may have been a step down from his duties at work designing plans to transmit satellite imagery to government monitoring stations, but you sure couldn’t tell by his enthusiasm for helping me win the contest.

I first heard about the competition in September 1964 when I accompanied my parents to the Star Market grocery store on a Friday night. There was a huge display in the soda pop aisle promoting the contest and I took home an entry form to participate.

The Coca Cola Bottling Company of Western New York was sponsoring a contest to win two tickets on the 50-yard line at the old War Memorial Stadium in Buffalo for a mid-November game featuring the Boston Patriots against the Buffalo Bills. The contest entry form contained 24 small circular photos of Buffalo Bills football players and to compete, all you had to do was find and remove rubber bottlecaps of the 24 players depicted on them and attach them to the entry sheet.

The contest opened Oct. 1 and ran through Oct. 31 and seemed like a lot of fun. It turned out to be a genuine quest for me and was an activity I could share with my younger brother and my father.

The first few bottlecaps were easy to collect. Inside the six 16-ounce bottles we brought home from the store were bottlecap images of Bills quarterback Jack Kemp, fullback Cookie Gilchrist, defensive end Ron McDole, defensive tackle Tom Sestak, wide receiver Glenn Bass and punter Paul Maguire.

I attached them to the entry sheet and was excited because I only needed 18 more to have a chance to win. That proved to be a little more challenging than I expected.

The next trip to the supermarket and the purchase of six more bottles only yielded one new bottlecap, that of backup quarterback Daryle Lamonica. So far, I had just seven of the 24 required to win with about two weeks left in the contest.

As I began to think I might not have much of a chance to win after all, my father brought home three new bottlecaps from the Coke vending machine at his office including safety Ray Abruzzese, linebacker Harry Jacobs and guard Al Bemiller. That brought my total collected to 10 and boosted my spirits considerably.

But it also gave my father an idea and he shared it with our family at the dinner table that evening. He told me that he thought about creating a makeshift “fishing pole” with a magnet on a string that he could lower into Coke vending machines around town to try and “fish” out as many bottlecaps as we could.

The first stop was at an Esso gas station, and it must have been quite a sight to watch as I lowered the string with the magnet down into the slot where people popped the metal bottle caps off their Coke bottles. I slowly pulled four bottlecaps out of the machine and extracted about 35 bottlecaps out of there in total and loaded them into a brown paper bag my father was holding.

We then found another Coke machine in the shopping plaza near our home. That also resulted in a haul of about 30 more bottlecaps. The last stop was at the bus station and that machine produced more than 40 bottlecaps using our impromptu “fishing pole.”

Back home, I discovered bottlecaps for running back Wray Carlton, cornerback Butch Byrd, linebackers Mike Stratton and John Tracey, halfbacks Willie Ross, Bobby Smith and Joe Auer, defensive end Tom Day, defensive tackle Jim Dunaway and wide receiver Elbert Dubenion.

My total stood at 20 bottlecaps with a little more than a week left until the end of the contest. I obtained bottlecaps for guard George Flint and center Walt Cudzik by trading extras I had collected of Lamonica, Kemp, Sestak and Gilchrist to a classmate.

That left wide receiver Ed Rutkowski and kicker Pete Gogolak to finish the set and enter the drawing for the grand prize. On the day before the entry forms were due, my father drove me back to the Coke machine at the Esso station and we were able to gather about 15 bottlecaps out of the machine there.

Returning home, out of the 15 bottlecaps, I could only find Rutkowski and fell one short, missing the unorthodox soccer-style kicker Gogolak.

Later that week, I read in the newspaper that a 14-year-old from Lockport, New York had won the drawing and received tickets to the game against the Patriots.

My family watched on television several weeks later as the Bills raced out to a 28-21 lead, but Patriots’ quarterback Babe Parilli engineered a fourth-quarter rally, including throwing a touchdown pass to Gino Cappelletti as the Patriots throttled the Bills, 36-28.

Not sure what happened to many of those rubber Bills player images, I still have four of them but who knows what they're worth today?