 |
Why would anyone move to Buffalo?
Ask the Bonos
By Larry Brooks; photo by kc kratt
 |
|
Jim and Barbara Bono at home.
|
Professor Barbara Bono of UB’s English department and professor James Bono of UB’s history department sell UB and Buffalo to smart, well-educated people. Despite being born elsewhere—Barbara in Poughkeepsie, Jim in Brooklyn—they are among the most ardent Buffalo-boosters you’re likely to find.
After meeting during their undergraduate years at Fordham and marrying, they went on for their Ph.D.s—Jim at Harvard, Barbara at Brown. Following their doctorates, they both began their teaching careers at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Then Barbara did fellowships at Cornell and Harvard resulting in good options: offers from Harvard, University of Texas at Austin, Hofstra, and Buffalo. All excellent opportunities, and yet they wound up in Buffalo in 1984. Barbara says, “The overwhelming positive aspect of choosing Buffalo was the excellence of the English department.” It was among the top twenty in the nation at the time because of such luminaries as Leslie Fiedler, Robert Creeley, Ray Federman, and Carl Dennis, as well as the fact that literary theory had, by that point, been accepted in just a few places besides Buffalo. All this made UB a “very avant-garde place and made for a lively and loyal department,” she says. “I regarded it as a tremendous compliment that they wanted to hire me. We said ‘yes’ before we visited.”
What else attracted them
Barbara: How much we liked the city—how utterly amazed we were at the great houses and how affordable they are for faculty. Our incomes wouldn’t go as far in other communities. And the gifted and talented program at Olmsted.
Jim: We needed assurances we could get good options in grade school and high school. We came here during the regime of Eugene Reville, who was really a visionary.
Today, twenty-some years later, Barbara says, “Our colleagues have continued to find good pathways through the schools.” The two of them persuade colleagues with children to live in the city, which means “they have to embrace a mixed strategy to get their children educated, maybe bite the bullet and pay more money.” One of Barbara’s colleagues, Carine Mardorossian, cofounded the Elmwood Village charter school.
Since arriving, both have been strongly involved in graduate recruitment, often holding the prime responsibility in their departments and also serving on faculty search committees in their own departments and in others. About fifteen percent of their professional time is spent soliciting and reviewing applications, interviewing, and selling candidates hard on Buffalo, the total package of city and school. “That’s where we regard the city as an asset,” Jim says. And here’s a challenge, he adds: “The on-campus interviews typically take place in February, in the dead of winter. But rarely, if ever, do I get the sense that the winter weather turns people off.” Typically, a two-day candidate visit schedule is: fly them in, put them up in a downtown hotel, host them personally, drive them around, show them houses [in Allentown, Parkside, North Buffalo, and the Elmwood Village], culturals, point out the town-grown relations and activities, and dine at downtown restaurants. Barbara says, “We want to show it will be as exciting to live in the city as it is to work at UB.” There is a welcoming reception in a faculty home. “It’s a very strong practice in my department to have parties and hospitality events,” she says.
Jim was named a Buffalo Ambassador by the CVB for his work organizing two conventions. In 1996, four hundred members of the American Association of History of Medicine came here for UB Medical School’s sesquicentennial, and in 2001, 200 attended a meeting of the Society of Literature and Science. He feels this is a good town for a mid-sized convention, because “we have good hotels and meeting space downtown at a reasonable cost—professional and academic societies prefer ‘urban’ to ‘countryside’—[along with] good restaurants and entertainment, good architecture and art, and we have all those things in abundance. It’s a city that’s interesting to explore.”
Other selling points
Barbara: It’s affordable for a graduate student.
Jim: People in Buffalo do not appreciate the variety of cultural offerings we have and how accessible they are compared to NYC. You can decide to go to the theater an hour before curtain. It’s extraordinarily easy.
Barbara: The fact that you don’t have to commute as far makes for an exceptionally high standard of living.
Jim compares college classmates in other cities such as one at UCLA who has a one-and-a-half hour commute daily. They also mention the improvements in the airport making NYC a daytrip; they have faculty living in NYC and working at UB.
Are there no negatives? One candidate told Barbara, “Buffalo is a lot of things, but it’s not a large city.” Despite that, “most people who don’t know the city are delightfully surprised. Most people have stayed and put down roots.” Just like the Bonos.
Writer Larry Brooks, a native Buffalonian, is put to shame by the enthusiasm the Bonos show for their adopted home.
SUBSCRIBE NOW
Back to the Table of Contents
Back to Top
|
|
|
