More on Mr. Kaminski…
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By DONNE ESMONDE – Buffalo News
6/25/2006
It was the best story I could never write.
Four years ago, the elderly owner of a small deli/grocery on the East Side was beaten and robbed. Female thieves bashed Waldemar “Walt” Kaminski’s head with a can of V-8 juice from the grocery shelf and made off with cartons of cigarettes. It was not the first time he had been attacked.
I visited the deli soon after. I met a tough, stubborn piece of the past who stayed in the old neighborhood even as it changed around him. He stood bent, but not broken, dressed in a flannel shirt and wearing a blue cap. Behind thick glasses, his eyes were alive.
Broadway-Fillmore was once a working-class neighborhood of mainly German and Polish immigrants, living in small bungalows, working in mills and factories, and grabbing a piece of the American dream. Their sons and daughters mostly left for suburbia, lured by green lawns and pushed by absentee landlords and spreading blight. Good people remain, but the streets are pockmarked with crack houses and crime and little commerce.
I asked Kaminski why he stayed after others left, despite robbery after robbery. Why take a risk, when his niece in California begged him to join her?
