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December 1, 1932 – October 1, 2022
Dick Hirsch had a finely tuned sense of curiosity. Whenever something caught the attention of the longtime Buffalo newspaper anchor, he wanted to know more.
In the case of “Merry We’re Moving, Thanks to Marvin,” one of the weekly BfloTales columns he writes for Buffalo Business First, it all starts at an airport as he watches passengers move their suitcases.
“You don’t see many people carrying suitcases anymore. You see people pulling them,” he told Buffalo News reporter Mark Sommer in 2017. “I looked at it and found it to be an inspirational sales story. Marvin Sandow, whose company made and sold suitcases, was dead at the time, so I spoke to someone in his family.”
He collected this observation and more than 100 others in the anthology “A New White House Bathtub and Other Intriguing Stories.”
Mr. Hirsch, who wrote about 1,768 columns for Business First, died Oct. 1 at suburban Millard Fillmore Hospital, Amherst, after a brief period of failing health. He was 89.
“I proposed the idea of a weekly column to add some personality to Business First,” he wrote in his farewell column in December 2019. “The editor approved a trial period. That was in October 1985. BfloTales was born.”
He was inspired by a talk he attended at the Jewish Community Center by journalist and filmmaker Nora Ephron.
“She said everything was a copy,” he told Mark Sommer. “She learned that from her parents, who were screenwriters. They taught her to be aware of the world around her, including people’s behavior. After hearing her advice, I changed my approach and became more comfortable writing in the first person. I started seeing story opportunities that other people weren’t seeing.”
His informative and gently humorous columns glorified Brussels sprouts (“This is no ordinary vegetable”), examined common idioms (“Distinguishing the other things from Shinola”) and pondered the origins of General Tso’s chicken on Chinese restaurant menus.
“I decided that General Tso must be the most famous Chinese general of all,” he explained to Sommer.
Born Richard L. Hirsch in Buffalo, the older of two children, he attended School 22 next door to his home on Huntington Avenue and graduated from Bennett High School in 1950. At Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, he was president of class, editor of the campus newspaper and president of Medusa, the senior honor society.
“My inquisitive nature developed in college, where I became editor of the newspaper and, among other things, convinced the dean to schedule regular interviews with me,” he wrote in his farewell column in Business First. “I found the experience very rewarding, and after graduation I was hired by my hometown morning paper, where I earned my first salary, to ask questions and compile interview reports.”
A summer job as a reporter at the Buffalo Courier-Express during college led him to a full-time job there after receiving his bachelor’s degree in 1954. His first story landed on the front page. He continued to cover City Hall and report on events such as the mutiny aboard the Crystal Beach boat Canadiana in 1956. He began writing a casual Sunday column called “Offhand” in 1957 and won several Newspaper Guild Front Page Awards. Buffalo.”
Needing to better support his growing family after 10 years at the newspaper, he joined Hoffman Printing Inc. as a salesman and progressed to president of the company.
During that time, Mr. Hirsch had a 19-year association with WNED-TV that began in 1968, when he was invited to host “The Man in the News,” a weekly program in which a panel of journalists interviewed elected officials and other prominent people . After it ended its broadcast, he moderated two other public relations programs, “Call 17” and “Personal”.
When Hoffman Printing started a regional sports magazine, Buffalo Fan, in 1975, he was editor. He led its evolution into BFLO, a general interest publication. After a brief stint as an executive at Thorner-Sidney Press, he founded Hirsch and Company in 1991, a consulting firm specializing in what he calls “strategic communications.”
Along with his newsletter and annual report commissions, he wrote and published seven non-fiction books, beginning in 1995 with The Bubble Didn’t Burst, a biography of local developer Nathan Benderson.
This led to a commission from a family contracting firm in Boston, Massachusetts, for which he wrote a book entitled A Pipe Dream Came True.
This was followed by “The Osmose Story,” a story of the Buffalo Wood Preservation Company; “Firm Beliefs,” commemorating the 175th anniversary of the law firm Phillips Lytle LLP; “Concrete Foundation,” the story of the Ciminelli family of contractors and entrepreneurs; “A Lasting Impression,” which focuses on the Smith family and Rigidized Metals Corp.; and “Achieving Stardom,” which follows the Starr family from Dunkirk as their small winery grows into one of the country’s largest juice bottlers.
“He loved the research and personal interviews with the founders and executives and the second and third generations,” wrote his son Jeffrey. “I remember these book projects often taking a year or more from start to finish.”
While working at Hoffman Printing, Mr. Hirsch became a runner, and for more than 40 years he ran with others at lunchtime on routes through downtown Buffalo, regardless of the weather. It eventually became a walking group.
He dated his wife, the former Lynn Lederman, for four years before they married in 1956. She became the first director of the early childhood program at the Benderson Family Building at the Jewish Community Center.
In addition to his wife and son, survivors include two daughters, Betsy Hirsch and Nancy Hirsch-Ackerman; sister, Barbara Kaplan; two grandsons and a great-granddaughter.
A memorial service was held Oct. 4 at Temple Beth Zion Sisterhood Chapel, 805 Delaware Ave.
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