The Tonawanda News
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Yes, that’s me: the tall and overweight man with earbuds in his ears and the wire descending to the machine on his hip, huffing through the dusk on Delaware Road in Kenmore. The onset of Daylight Savings Time is as good a time as any to begin, or actually re-start, a health regimen, a daily two-and-a-half-mile hike from the Village Green to Sheridan Drive and back. It is a resolution with a built-in end date, as well; if I can keep it up, there may be progress to note when the clocks get wound back in the fall.
Yes, that’s me, observing as I walk. In the leafy summer, this winding street is as attractive and interesting as any in Niagara on the Lake, Lewiston or any local tourist mecca. The buds and leaves are beginning to emerge on Delaware Road’s foliage, and by my standards, will turn the street green a little too quickly. Trees never ask where the time went.
It’s a pleasant evening’s walk, even if weight loss is not one’s mission. There is the architecture to stare at: starting at the small but earnest war memorials at the corner, I pass Kenmore’s Municipal Building, a Depression-era project built in the “classical monumental” and across the street, a jewel-like little Art Deco treasure that somehow fits in and stands out from its neighbors, built in 1933 as a home and office for Dr. Daniel E. Stedam, a founder of Kenmore Mercy Hospital. A few doors away is a Civil War-era farmhouse.
The walk takes me past six churches, the public library, the middle school that was once Kenmore High School, and residential streets where stand old houses built elsewhere in the village and then moved, with horse power and rollers, to their new sites. At a curve in the street (Delaware Road was once an Indian trail, at the highest elevation in the region), a particular front lawn is prominent. By summer, the home’s gardeners will oversee a splendid collection of flowers and other decorative plants, the highlight of Ken-Ton’s annual “Garden Walk.”
At ponderous Kenmore West High School, I think of property owner Edward Knab, who refused to give up his land to the construction project in 1940. The entire school plan was turned 90 degrees to avoid his homestead, and thus faces Highland Boulevard instead of Delaware Road. When I get to tiny Failing Cemetery (named after the Failing Brothers, early settlers, and full of the early 19th-century deceased), I know I’m nearing the halfway point of the walk, the Tim Hortons on Sheridan Drive. I then either turn around, or buy a coffee and turn around.
Of course, I’m not alone out there. Joggers abound, often teams of them wearing the equipe of a local school. Sometimes all-female teams of them, the beneficiaries of Title IX of the “Education Amendments of 1972.” That legislation, among other results, encouraged the participation of women in sport, and is why girls in high school and college are these days offered jockdom as an avocation.
There are dog walkers as well, and bicyclists, and Delaware Road somehow sees more than its share of specialty cars, Corvettes and ’48 Mercurys and ’57 Chevys. Specialty cars for a specialty road. Transportation of a more prosaic category arrives every evening as well, and rolls into the high school parking lot, for basketball games and what’s called “community education” — Kenmore does not lack for development of 21st-century skills and get-up-to-speed refresher courses, nor does it lack a population respectful of the myriad of education and its advantages.
Neither am I alone in that I brought appropriate music, music to inspire awareness and weight loss. The second movement of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony takes about 18 minutes to play, followed by a short pause and then the fiery four-minute “Donna Diana Overture” by Emil Von Reznicek; that’s the soundtrack of my walk. Play it twice, once going out and once coming back, and the day’s ramble, a ramble with a purpose, is complete (old-timers like me might remember the Beethoven piece as the roll-the-credits theme music of NBC’s long-ago “Huntley-Brinkley Report,” and whose signature opening is presented as an homage, these days, on MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olberman. “Donna Diana” includes the theme from radio and television’s “Sergeant Preston of the Yukon”).
In six months, when we reset the clocks, I’ll resemble a Chippendale’s dancer, one with a caffeine habit and a heightened sense of observation. I’ll owe it all to late-afternoon walks on Delaware Road.
Ed Adamczyk is a Kenmore resident whose column appears weekly in the Tonawanda News. Contact him at EdinKenmore@gmail.com.
