Special Report
Part One: Should I stay or should I go?
Here’s what happened to some of the most promising students in Western New York's Class of 1987
The priesthood called, and Stephen Mease answered — but then he thought better of it, leaving the preseminary program and dropping out of college with one semester left. He became a car salesman, instead.
Kelvin Lee landed a faculty position at an Ivy League university by the time he turned 30.
Seattle’s vibrancy lured Anne Barrett. She stayed for a few years, before her love of family brought her back to Buffalo, where she finished college and found a job she loves.
A woman with a thirst for outdoor adventures, Elizabeth Peters lived in a hut in Kenya, on a mountainside in Alaska and in the heat of Texas before settling down to family life in Freeport, Maine.
Brian Yoshida could be practicing law anywhere — but he’s chosen Buffalo.
As different as each of their lives turned out, these people were all in the same place 20 years ago — on top of the world, among the elite of their high school graduating classes in Western New York, the future theirs for the making.
“You can follow your own path if you believe in yourself,” said Peters, the Williamsville North High School class vice president in 1987, whose maiden name was Brunton. She’s forged a career in the online arena, including launching what she says was the ski industry’s first Web site. “I’m proud I’ve had all the experiences that I’ve had, that I trusted myself to take the leaps I’ve taken.”
But their futures were different from those that beckoned their parents and even some of their older siblings. They were among the first generation of high school graduates who knew that their futures could be brighter somewhere other than Western New York; they were the beginning of what would come to be known as “the brain drain.”
Some left right after high school and never came back; others tried to make a go of it here, but ultimately decided to go somewhere else.
“I don’t miss the constant drumbeat of bad news — this church is closing down, that business is closing down,” said Mease, who moved to Scottsdale, Ariz., a few years ago and now works at Monster.com. “I feel like I’m in heaven every day I go to work. It’s an exciting atmosphere. The economy’s been so robust, they’re having trouble finding good people.”
The Buffalo News contacted Mease, Lee, Peters, Barrett and Yoshida as part of an informal study of what happened to the would-be leaders of their generation.
The News tracked down 103 of the most promising students from the Class of 1987 at 25 area high schools — valedictorians and salutatorians, class presidents and vice presidents, and those voted most likely to succeed. Forty-eight agreed to tell us what happened to them in the months and years after they left high school.
As they were growing up, Western New York was slowing down. Bethlehem Steel ended local operations and the Courier-Express folded before they even started high school. Republic Steel closed soon after. By the time the Class of ’87 danced to Bon Jovi, the Bangles and the Beastie Boys at the senior prom, Trico had announced plans to take its operations to Mexico.
People were moving away, and the region was bleeding jobs at the rate of 10,000 per year.
“You have a steady erosion of the industrial base,” said Mark Goldman, who has written several books about the history of the local economy. “The 1980s were really bad.”
But the best and the brightest from the Class of 1987 had the brains and the bravado to do anything. First, though, to borrow a line from the rock band The Clash, they had to figure out: “Should I stay or should I go now?”
Among the group surveyed by The News, the answer was clear. Most — two-thirds of them — said “Go.”
The further they went in school, the more likely they were to leave.
Half the people with a bachelor’s degree left the region. Two out of three people with a master’s degree left.
Those with a doctorate? They all went somewhere else.
And everyone who attended an Ivy League school — whether for their bachelor’s degree or graduate studies — left town.
“I basically said ‘OK, I’ve had enough of Buffalo,’ so I moved to Boston,” said Kathleen Callaghan, valedictorian at Orchard Park High School in 1987, who got her master’s in chemistry at Yale University. “The whole economics of Buffalo is terrible. I went to Boston because you have all these biotech companies, start-up companies. There were so many opportunities there.”
‘Drain’ overhyped
Sound like the Western New York “brain drain” we hear so much about?
Experts say it’s a bit overhyped. Even if Buffalo were Boston or San Francisco or Charlotte, N.C., the area still would lose many of its brightest, most promising young people to somewhere else.
“The people who leave are the highly educated people, and that’s true everywhere,” said Peter A. Morrison, a demographer with the RAND Corp. — and a native Buffalonian now living in Nantucket, Mass. “I wouldn’t expect that the most highly educated would be any greater share among those leaving Buffalo than among those leaving any other major city in the country.”
Generally, he said, people who leave their hometown — wherever it is — are the type who are willing to take a chance, seek out opportunities, and work hard to succeed, much like the immigrants who entered this country through Ellis Island a century ago.
And among the people who leave home, those who are highly educated have more-specialized skills and expertise, putting them in a national or even global marketplace of jobs, rather than a regional one.
“Your thinking is not, ‘Am I going to be looking for a job in Buffalo or somewhere else in Western New York?’ It’s going to be, ‘Am I going to be looking for a job in Silicon Valley or in Austin, Texas?’ ” he said.
Consider David Smentek. He is one of a small group of people in the world who designs microprocessors.
The salutatorian at St. Joseph’s Collegiate Institute 20 years ago, he got a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at Cornell University and a master’s degree in the same field at Stanford University.
He worked for several years at Hewlett- Packard in Colorado, then for a start-up company in California. Now, he works for Sun Microsystems in the Silicon Valley.
If he were to lose his job at Sun, he’s confident he wouldn’t have much trouble finding a job with another company in that part of California, where skills like his are in high demand. People like Smentek know that even if their specific job might not be entirely secure, their careers are, with several other companies in the region eager to hire them.
But even if Smentek wanted to move back to Buffalo, he wouldn’t be able to find any jobs designing microprocessors here. There aren’t any. His is a specialized field, and so is that of his wife, Stephanie Fulmer-Smentek, who has a doctorate in human genetics.
“There are only a couple places in the country where we could both work — Raleigh, New England, Texas and the West Coast,” Smentek said.
Entrepreneurs elsewhere
The entrepreneurial spirit is thriving among the Class of ’87 grads. But it’s thriving somewhere else, mostly. Out of six businesses founded by the graduates, only one is in Buffalo.
Other cities, such as Washington, D.C., and New York, offered what Buffalo did not: opportunity on a grand scale.
Niagara Falls native Nick Bristol, once the vice president of his class in high school, started his own business plowing and sealcoating parking lots his senior year at the University at Buffalo. But he quickly moved on, eventually starting an executive recruiting firm for investment banks and hedge funds that now employs eight.
“In New York City, there are so many opportunities. New York City is just extremely competitive,” he said. “Living in a bigger city, it’s a greater risk and a greater reward.”
In other cases, it’s not a big city that lures someone away; it’s practical considerations.
Jason Helmbrecht, Springville’s most likely to succeed, settled in Cleveland, the city where he attended college. He runs HSI Consulting, installing software for major retailers.
He spends weekdays in whatever city his current client is based. Weekends in the warmer months are spent aboard his 57-foot powerboat on Lake Erie; the rest of the year, he calls Cleveland Heights home. Cleveland is fairly similar to Buffalo, with one clear advantage for him — it’s a hub for Continental Airlines.
“You want be based near a major airport, a hub for some airline,” Helmbrecht said. “You don’t want be in a situation where you’re driving two hours to an airport, then have to take a connecting flight.”
Only one graduate contacted by The News started a business in Buffalo. Mark Yellen, voted first to make a million at Nichols, operates Appraisal.com from a building on Main Street in the Theater District.
The company, which provides real estate appraisal technology, boasts a staff of about 100. Yellen also is involved in a few other business ventures out of town, including the construction of several beachfront vacation homes in the Dominican Republic.
He’s a die-hard Buffalo booster — “a bornagain Buffalonian,” he calls himself — but clearly, the city represents his base of operations, not the scope.
“I don’t consider Western New York to be my domain,” he said. “I think of my domain as including the entire world.”
Education careers
A career in education lured nine graduates in The News’ study.
The people who stayed became teachers or teaching assistants.
Those who left became school principals or college professors. Why the dichotomy?
“It’s either that you don’t have any colleges in Buffalo, which isn’t true, or it’s that there’s some kind of fundamental personality difference we just don’t measure that plays itself out that way,” said Morrison, the demographer. “It always lines up that way. Migration is a self-selection process. You get people with the willingness to take risks.”
That sort of self-selecting was evident among the graduates in other fields, too, but it was most pronounced in education.
Christine Robinson had always known she wanted to be a teacher. After graduating from Lancaster High School, where she was voted most likely to become president, she got a bachelor’s degree in elementary education at Buffalo State College.
She soon confronted the soft job market that was confounding so many of her classmates, as well. Robinson, whose maiden name was Ameno, headed back to Buffalo State for her master’s degree. Before long, Iroquois Middle School offered her a job. She’s been there ever since.
“I really am one of those people that will be here ’til I die,” she said. “My roots are very grounded. I married a high school friend. My family is here.”
Some people gravitated to the district they grew up in. One person in The News’ survey is teaching social studies in her childhood district and another is a teaching assistant in the district where he grew up.
Molly Halt teaches in the Kenmore-Town of Tonawanda School District, where she attended school as Molly Redden and was vice president of her class at Kenmore East.
“I felt that I got a lot out of school and benefited from the teachers. I feel very honored to go back,” she said. “There were some teachers who really had an impact on me.”
Among the graduates who left the area, two became principals. Four became college professors.
Kelvin Lee, a professor in Cornell University’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, is working with a team from Cornell’s medical school to develop a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease that would actually reverse some of the cognitive decline patients suffer.
He’s never had any interest in returning to Western New York. Even if a local college offered him a job, it would be tough to compete with all that his Ivy League employer has to offer.
“Cornell is a great place to be a professor,” said Lee, who was the salutatorian at Williamsville North. “And I’m within spitting distance of Buffalo.”
Reasons for leaving
Some Western New Yorkers who moved elsewhere, including Lee, chose their new location based purely on job opportunities. They packed up and went to a new place because that’s where they had found work.
But that was more the exception than the rule among people The News surveyed.
Generally, there were three main reasons why people ended up where they did: weather, school and family.
The winters in Buffalo were just too harsh, some people said.
Visions of palm trees, beaches and sunny skies helped draw Christina Derme to Southern California nine years ago. The winters in Buffalo seemed to be getting longer, and she found them depressing.
That’s not an issue for her any more, living in Long Beach, Calif., with her husband and 3-year-old son.
“It’s a nice thing to be able to give your child, to allow them to not worry about running outside and playing because it doesn’t rain that much and it doesn’t snow,” said Derme, who was class president at Kenmore East High School. “It’s huge, not having to worry about putting on a coat, and just walking out the door.”
One out of three people who moved away are living in the same place they attended college or grad school. In some cases, the connections they made in college led to job offers.
Robert Kramer planned on living in Western New York after he graduated with a degree in math and secondary education from Xavier University in Cincinnati. After college, he spent a year coaching college baseball there, then returned home to Springville, where he had been vice president of his senior class.
He was going to get his New York State teaching certificate and find a job in the area.
That never happened. Soon after he got back into town, he got a call from Mariemont Junior High in Ohio. They offered him a job. He took it.
“I thought I was going to stay in the Western New York area — go to college, then come home,” he said. “It’s playing out like I anticipated, just not where I anticipated it would.”
Others who left Western New York relocated to be near their spouse’s family or near their own family members who had moved away.
After Stephen Mease graduated as president of his class at Lackawanna High School, he attended Canisius College and enrolled in a preseminary program. After a few years, he decided he didn’t want to be a priest.
He left school, one semester shy of graduating, with plans to take six months off and then finish his degree. That never happened.
He took a job in Buffalo selling cars — and did that for eight years. Then, after a stint doing sales for Verizon, Mease took a buyout. He jumped at the chance to move to Arizona. His brother had moved there several years earlier, then another brother moved out there, too. Mease would be next.
“I fell in love with the area over a course of visits,” said Mease, an Internet recruitment consultant for Monster.com. “Now, I’m just not feeling hamstrung to any one job. There’s just so much opportunity. Whereas at Verizon, to make the money I made, I felt like an indentured servant.”
He also makes more than twice as much as he did in Buffalo, he said.
Family a reason to stay
For the variety of reasons why people leave, and why they choose the places they do, it seems to be much simpler for the people who stay in Buffalo.
Nine times out of 10, the reason they stay is this: family.
Many say their decision to remain local likely has come at the cost of a higher salary, more job opportunities, or better weather. But family trumps all those things.
Brian Yoshida, Cleveland Hill’s salutatorian, is associate general counsel for M&T Bank. He realizes he probably could have ended up with a firm in a bigger city. For two years, he worked for a law firm in Pittsburgh before coming home to be closer to his ailing father and the woman who would become his wife. But Yoshida says he has no regrets.
“I have no complaints about being in Buffalo,” he said. “There’s an unquantifiable value to that familial relationship that has overcome any disappointment that I might have had from not working in a big city or making the big bucks.”
Anne Barrett moved to Washington State for a while after she graduated as South Park High School’s valedictorian. She loved Seattle — the city pulsed with life, and job opportunities abounded.
After three years, though, the traffic jams wore on her nerves. The weather, although free of snow, wasn’t the greatest. And she missed her family.
Barrett, whose maiden name is Nicholas, moved back to Buffalo and earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Buffalo State College. Now, she’s an administrative assistant for athletic compliance and eligibility at Erie Community College. She lives in Cheektowaga with her husband, Martin, and 18-year-old son, with plenty of family members all around.
“You feel at home here. My family’s here, so it’s nice,” Barrett said. “The money’s not that great, but hopefully someday it’ll turn around.”
e:mail: mpasciak@buffnews.com and dswilliams@buffnews.com
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