BUFFALO, N.Y. — 2 On Your Side's Dave McKinley takes a look back in TV news history.
10 years ago this week:
Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced the largest portion of the Buffalo Billion to date, $250 million, would be spent on building a high-tech industrial park on the Riverbend site, a brownfield that formerly housed Republic Steel.
The state would spend those taxpayer dollars to build facilities for two companies that had yet to even show a profit. They were Silevo, which made solar components and Sorra, which produced high efficiency lighting products.
Neither company came here.
After the state spent hundreds of millions of additional dollars, Tesla would move into the site, but it has never gotten close to producing the number of jobs that were being projected this week in 2013.
20 years ago this week:
Ford produced its 300 millionth vehicle, a crimson Mustang, which rolled off an assembly line in Detroit. The number of vehicles produced by the company has since exceeded 400 million.
Johnny Depp was named People magazine's “Sexiest Man Alive”, newspapers were still chock full of pages classified ads and then as now, there was all sorts of talk about revitalizing the Buffalo’s Central Terminal, which has still yet to fully materialize.
A new law went into effect which provided for “wireless number portability”, allowing cell phone customers to keep their numbers when switching carriers.
30 years ago this week:
When deer season opened the Food Bank of Western New York sent a large truck around to NYS CDEC check-in stations to collect donated carcasses. In 1993, they expected to receive 300 of them.
These days, the Food Bank no longer sends trucks out, but still accepts donated venison from hunters.
40 years ago this week:
A controversial movie aired on television during the height of the cold war which not only sparked discussion in classrooms and community forums about nuclear disarmament.
It depicted a fictional nuclear holocaust after the US and USSR fired missiles at one another and was so disturbing that ABC television had psychologists on standby to take calls from distraught viewers.
It also ended up becoming the most watched made for tv movie of all time and its name is the subject of this week’s News 2 You Pop Quiz (The answer to which you can find at the conclusion of the video attached to this story).
This was back when the Harvard Cup game, emblematic of the city’s high school football championship, used to draw a packed house to Buffalo’s All High Stadium every Thanksgiving. The contest is no longer held.
We shopped at Radio Shack, flew on the discount airline People Express, and tolls to cross the Peace Bridge were rising from 35, to 50 cents this week in 1983.
60 years ago this week:
President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas and vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson was sworn in to lead a grieving nation.
We have also now reached a point in time where anyone who remembers this would now be a senior citizen.
However, if you were to ask them today, they'll likely be able to tell you exactly where they were, and exactly how they felt, when the received news of one of the most tragic and saddest chapters in American history this week in 1963.
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