By Vivian Lassiter
BUFFALO — Some people come home and slip in quietly. Wolf Blitzer came home this month and took the stage at Temple Beth Zion on Delaware Avenue.
The longtime CNN anchor, a Kenmore West and University at Buffalo graduate, returned on Oct. 17 for “An Evening with Wolf Blitzer,” the program that opened the Jewish Museum of Buffalo to the public and honored the late Channel 7 anchor Irv Weinstein, sitting down for a conversation with Buffalo news veteran Mickey Osterreicher. He arrived the way the country has seen him for decades: the trademark silver beard neatly trimmed, the rimless glasses, the dark suit, and that calm, unhurried smile that says the news is serious but you are going to be fine.
That makes him the fourth subject of Buffalo’s Finest, the Chronicle’s column about the striking, magnetic people of Western New York, doing what they do and looking great doing it.
A Buffalo story that started on a train in Bavaria
Blitzer was born in Augsburg, Germany, near Munich, the son of David and Cesia Blitzer, Polish Jews and Holocaust survivors who met on a train in Bavaria, according to a profile by The Buffalo News’ Alan Pergament this month. After the Displaced Persons Act opened the door to the United States, the family landed not in New York City, as his father had expected, but in Buffalo.
“I love Buffalo so much because this community took, took my parents and helped them settle in a new community,” Blitzer told the crowd at the temple, as WGRZ reported.
His father worked at Bethlehem Steel in Lackawanna, then opened a kosher deli before becoming a successful suburban homebuilder whose company eventually became Forbes Homes, WGRZ reported.
“He began to make some money, life was good in America,” Blitzer said in The Buffalo News. “We had American flags flying outside our home, whether in Buffalo or in Kenmore. They just loved this country because it gave these immigrants, refugees who could barely speak English, an opportunity for a new life. They became very patriotic Americans, and I became a very patriotic American too.”
The news junkie who watched Irv
The family’s deli on Hertel Avenue was well known, and the young Blitzer grew up in Kenmore in the era when Weinstein ruled Channel 7. He did not set out to become a journalist, The Buffalo News noted, but he was a news junkie from the start.
“I don’t know if I became a journalist because of Irv Weinstein, but he would have been one of my heroes growing up,” Blitzer said.
The evening was built around that connection. “I think it’s all about storytelling and roots,” said Jill Abromowitz Gutmann, executive director of the Jewish Museum of Buffalo, in a WKBW report before the event. “We’re a museum dedicated to telling and preserving the stories of Jewish contributions to our region, and you can’t get any more legendary than Irv Weinstein.”
She also told WIVB what Blitzer means to the community. “He’s a Jewish Buffalonian who’s gone on to be a really important journalist and reporter all over the world,” Gutmann said. “For us to be celebrating our roots and who we are and having this major figure come is just so exciting for the community.”
In the museum’s announcement, she called it a homecoming. “We are thrilled to welcome Wolf Blitzer home to Buffalo for this very special evening,” she said.
As powerful as the president, almost
From Kenmore, Blitzer went on to a career that made his name, and his “Situation Room,” household words: the Jerusalem Post’s Washington correspondent, then CNN, where he has spent more than three decades covering wars, White Houses and world leaders.
He has a good sense of humor about the reach of all that. Recalling a 2011 trip to North Korea with former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, he told The Buffalo News that a member of the North Korean leadership insisted he was as powerful as the American president.
“I said, ‘Well, I wouldn’t go that far,’ ” he recalled. “I may be powerful, but not as powerful as the President of the United States. And she says, ‘You have Situation Room and he has Situation Room. Only two of you in the world have Situation Rooms, so you’re as powerful as the president of the United States.’ ”
The moment he calls a high point is a different kind of power. Nelson Mandela chose Blitzer as the first journalist to interview him after he was elected South Africa’s first Black president, according to The Buffalo News. Mandela had watched him on CNN during his 27 years in prison.
“It was a great moment in my career,” Blitzer said. “One of the first questions I asked, ‘What do you want to do with all those guys who tortured you at Robben Island, who treated you so badly?’ He hesitated for a second and then he said, ‘No revenge. We are creating a new South Africa.’ ”
Why it works
Television is full of anchors who look like they were assembled in a studio. Blitzer has never been one of them. The beard went silver and stayed, the glasses stayed, the suits stayed sharp and simple, and the whole look became a kind of trademark: steady, unflashy, instantly recognizable on any screen in the world. It is the style of a man who would rather you notice the story than the tie, and somehow you notice both.
Put him back on Delaware Avenue, talking about his parents and the city that took them in, and the polish turns warm. That is what makes him one of Buffalo’s Finest. The kid from Kenmore who grew up watching Irv Weinstein became the anchor other kids grew up watching, and he still comes home to say thank you.
Know someone who belongs in Buffalo’s Finest? Send nominations to editor@buffalochronicle.com.
Featured photo: Wolf Blitzer at the Peabody Awards in May 2009. Photo by Peabody Awards via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0, cropped.
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