East Aurora Advertiser

Letters from the Editors: Barry Holtzclaw: Life After Leaving



“We gotta get out of this place, if it’s the last thing we ever do. We gotta get out of this place, where there’s a better life for you and me.”
The Animals’ single hit the radio stations just before my graduation in 1965, preceded by a few weeks of “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones. These two songs, whose choruses reverberated in AM car radios and beer-lubricated singalongs, just about summed things up for many of us leaving EAHS in that late spring of 1965.

The songs captured a growing sense of “we” — a new sense of rebellious identity that would unfurl itself to the world at Woodstock a little over four years later – and the “I” of psychedelics that fueled introspection at beaches and in foxholes in the years ahead. Change the world, change ourselves – which came first?– were conflicting mantras that absorbed our generation and confounded our parents.
Looking back on it, how presumptuous of me and my friends to equate feelings of entrapment – in East Aurora of all places – with the real fervor of working-class England or Black communities in U.S. cities. The young women in our class likely felt it more profoundly, as they burst out of ‘50s stereotypes into a new feminism.
Once in the following summer, when my car broke down in the parking lot of the Bethlehem Steel plant in Lackawanna, a co-worker offered to give me a ride all the way home to EA, and he told me he just wanted to see where I lived, to see the groomed lawns’ contrast with the soot-covered front porches of his Polish-American neighborhood. I was stunned by his appreciation; I was the one who should have been thankful.

Barry Holtzclaw during the 1960s.

The steel-mill summer, when one of my high school buddies was almost killed by carbon monoxide at the blast furnaces, and I sometimes passed for Polish because my name ended in “aw,’ was clearly one of those coming-of-age moments for a small-town kid who couldn’t figure out who he was.
This gets me back to EA. I had the good fortune (or the misfortune) to roll along a very big political and cultural wave. Things would never be the name. Our generation wouldn’t actually save the world, as our parents did in the 1940s, but at some point, I believed something was happening that I wanted to be part of, even though I might not have been exactly clear what it was.
I had become convinced that the only way to be part of a new world, the only way to grow up, was to start from scratch, to reject nearly everything I thought my hometown stood for, to reject my father’s dreams and set out to make my own. Perhaps this disillusionment had begun with the assassination of John F. Kennedy in the fall of my junior year, or perhaps it was the looming elephant in the room: Vietnam.
So I would never return. Except for a couple of visits. I made few efforts to reach out to important high school friends. In many ways, I regret this deeply. How reckless to think I had to reject so much to grow up.  It is only in the last decade, to some extent fueled and aided by social media that I recognize that growing up in EA, in what my first wife called a “Father Knows Best” town, was an important part of me, a part of my DNA, to be cherished and appreciated.
Those “home-town values” of family and community, of loyalty and honesty, of hard work and humility, endured. I spent decades in other small towns, building families, sorting through multiple careers and making many life mistakes along the way. I began to realize and appreciate that my continued confidence and optimism grew out of my hometown experience.
To be sure, the village of my youth had many problems – alcoholism, sexual abuse, teen pregnancy, racial discrimination, to name a few – that were not spoken of or dealt with. But the young people that EA sent into the world – many of whom would return home – would make great contributions to families and communities and institutions, would become leaders with confidence and heart. That cocoon from which I had struggled to escape produced many

Barry Hotlzclaw is featured in the top right of this 1965 picture with the East Aurora high school basketball team, which was sectional champions that year.

butterflies after all.

I would spend most of my working life – which continues to this day – as a journalist, an observer. My first byline was with the Advertiser. My daily reading experiences included the Courier Express and the Evening News. The local newspapers framed the outside world for me.
When I reflect on the people that were extraordinary in my youth, I think of the teachers and coaches in school, and of the mentors at the Boys Club. Their lessons stick with me, looking over my shoulder. My faith journey began in a crowded sanctuary of a former Roycroft Chapel across Main Street from the high school.

EA, you are a part of me. Thank you, and Godspeed.

*****

Letters from the Editors: Recollections from Former Advertiser Staffers

As part of the Advertiser’s 150th anniversary, we asked former editors, reporters and columnists to share some memories of their time at the world’s best hometown newspaper. We welcome them back to our pages. Longtime East Auroran Alice Askew edited the paper from 1976-1979 and wrote a weekly column as well. Colleen Stack Lynch, Iroquois class of 1986, came directly from college to the Advertiser in 1990. She has parlayed her newspaper experience into a successful career as a communications expert at ESPN. During his senior year at East Aurora High School (1994-95), Chris Sullivan wrote a weekly column in the Advertiser called “Teen View.” His column about Wal-Mart’s unsuccessful attempt to locate in East Aurora won a New York Press Association prize. He went on from weekly newspapers to become president of MacMillan Communications in New York City. Sara Foster Herrmann came on as a reporter in 1996 and quickly rose to the editor’s desk. After years of writing corporate copy at Environment & Ecology, she founded North by Northeast Communications, a consulting firm specializing in helping companies share their environmental and corporate social responsibility commitments with stakeholders. After first publishing in the Advertiser, Barry Holtzclaw, East Aurora High School class of 1965, went on to a long career in journalism in Kansas, North Carolina, California and now, Washington State where he is managing editor of a news website. Chris Burke, EAHS graduate and former faculty member, is a writer, teacher and lifetime subscriber to the Advertiser

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