Better than a Toyota

When Chris Collins came to praise Ford’s stamping plant and its workers at an event in Hamburg this week, he arrived in a Chevy.

The county executive had an explanation.

An hour before the event at Ford, his son had used the family’s Ford vehicle to take his driver’s test—which he passed —and drove it home.

“So I was left scavenging through the Rath Building to find a vehicle to drive here, and I found this old, beat-up Chevy, and that’s why I drove a Chevy,” Collins said.

Saints and sinners

Intrepid occasional Off Main Street contributor Joyce Wilson was downtown recently and said she couldn’t help but notice something that was, at once, “strange and amusing.”

On one corner of Washington Street sits a building bearing the sign, “Catholic Charities.”

Two doors down on the same side of the street, in what she described as a “lurid red and black building” with a logo of Satan amid hell’s fires, is another local institution:

Club Diablo.

One building is where God’s work is done, the other is named for the devil.

“Both tenants have been there for some time, so I guess they get along just fine,” Wilson said.

Catholic Charities spokeswoman Rose Caldwell said the unusual juxtaposition “has not gone unnoticed,” but she said inhabitants of the two buildings are not locked in an epic battle between good and evil.

“We pretty much have peak operating hours at different times,” she said.

Time to get it right

We at Off Main Street are wiping a little egg off our faces after last week’s item on the opening of a pre-adolescent time capsule in the City of Lackawanna.

We had wondered where someone got the idea to set aside a time capsule for just 12 years.

Current Mayor Norman L. Polanski Jr. had told us he believed the 1997 capsule was the brain child of restaurateur Ilio DiPaolo, with his restaurant and Abbott Glass of Western New York working together to produce the capsule.

That would have been some trick for DiPaolo, since he died in 1995.

We contacted DiPaolo’s son, Dennis, who said Abbott Glass did create the time capsule with support from the restaurant.

But Dennis DiPaolo said it was then- Mayor Kathleen M. Staniszewski who had the original idea of putting together a time capsule tied to the centennial.

We wanted to make sure Staniszewski, who has since died, gets the credit she deserves.

As for the capsule, it’s sitting in Polanski’s office as he figures out what to do with its contents.

RSVP from a VIP

Amherst Town Board candidate Toni Vazquez certainly reached for the stars when she was coming up with the guest list for her last fundraising event.

Vazquez invited President Obama and former President Bill Clinton to her fundraiser, held June 11 at a neighbor’s home in Williamsville, though she didn’t expect either man to attend.

Obama never RSVP’ed, but a Clinton staffer surprised Vazquez by contacting her Tuesday.

When someone named Chuck said he was calling from the former president’s office, Vazquez told Off Main Street, “At first I thought it was my husband playing a trick on me.”

She thought he had recruited someone else to make the call, so she played along by claiming she’d never heard of Clinton.

Vazquez said she soon realized Chuck was serious, and she accepted his apology on behalf of the former president for being unable to attend the fundraiser.

She said she told Chuck she has another event coming up and she was encouraged to send them another invitation.

“I will invite him again and again and again,” said Vazquez, who co-owns the Urban Family Practice on Buffalo’s West Side.