— — Back in my day a television comedian named Harry Anderson had a magic act of sorts, more snappy patter and advantage taken of his audience’s good nature than any amazing display of the art form. A punchline to a trick would go like this: conspiratorially he’d eye the crowd and intone “Watch, watch ... ” then point to his wristwatch and say “Watch!”

That’s evidently why there’s no business like show business. He’d then astound himself with some ruse and mutter “How does he do it? Why does he do it?”

I feel that way sometimes, especially when escorting groups on tours of my hometown of Kenmore.

Fred Strock presides over a non-profit organization, Preservation Buffalo Niagara, whose mission is to introduce the local citizenry to the area’s remarkable buildings, neighborhoods and history, and when the group elected to expand its horizons past the city line and include tours of selected suburbs, they chose Kenmore and Fred chose me.

So now I’m a tour guide, something I’d done in the past but not for a mob of architecture-savvy enthusiasts obliged to pay $10 a head for the privilege of being shown around the village (and be assured the money goes to the organization, not to the tour guide).

I cannot imagine doing that job without enthusiasm for the locale. If the tourists sense a script is being followed, one

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without any energy or passion behind it, the experience could be disheartening for all involved. And since I cannot do something of this magnitude without channeling my inner Groucho Marx, the scholarly stream of facts was leavened with plenty of wisecracks (and they laughed in all the right places, which is my yardstick for success or failure).

To wit: on the steps of the Municipal Building I pointed out that the Village of Kenmore was founded in 1619 by pirates and prostitutes. No wait, that’s Florida.

Then the truth: 1899. Buffalo’s first suburb. A genuinely planned community with all the things au courant in fashionable suburbs these days, including walkable streets, retail facilities that don’t require an automobile to patronize, resting spots and small public parks, houses that don’t resemble afterthoughts to garages, and access to neighbors instead of isolation.

It was Delaware Road that dazzled the tour group. Joggers and dog walkers ambled by on this humid Sunday afternoon, almost on cue, to indicate it was a friendly street for exercise. The “Art Deco” house at 33 Delaware Road, a few doors down from a pre-Civil War structure, amazed them. Cameras were going off as if they’d never been aimed at anything so special. Perhaps they hadn’t.

We entered the Church of the Advent, an Episcopal church built in the 1920s with a large addition constructed in the 1950s, all in the Tudor style. Arthur Werner, a woodworker, Kenmore resident and member of the congregation, is responsible for the church’s interior details, intricate wooden vines and filigrees that surround doors and arches, and the tourists were astounded. Father Terry Bull, pastor and part-time jazz trombonist (Kenmore also has the world’s hippest Episcopalians), was on hand to genially answer questions I could not, and we left the church impressed.

And so it went. The Kenmore United Methodist Church, built about 90 years ago and replicating a Gothic church in England from the 1400s (where did Kenmore find masons and builders who could pull this stuff off?); the fire house, scene of an Alka-Seltzer Plus television commercial in the 1970s; the castle-like assisted living facility, former location of a Studebaker dealership and an early (and smaller) Premier Liquor. The group was divided on the artistic merits of the castle.

On the other side of Delaware Avenue, we met a resident who was spending his Sunday breaking up concrete at the apron of his driveway. Just another superhero who calls Kenmore home, I told the visitors. Of particular interest were the several homes we passed that were once elsewhere in the village, a common practice here in the early 20th century. On an unusually eventful day long ago, a farmhouse, typically located on what would become a street corner, was lifted off its moorings and dragged several hundred feet down the street to where it stands today. Horses, rope and muscular citizens were involved. Two houses on Mang Avenue were formerly one farmhouse on Delaware.

That sort of thing really amazes the out-of-towners.

The more deeply I study this village and its history, the more amazed I become, as well. Kenmore is a relatively new community, compared to Lewiston or Williamsville. Yet if you dig into a few facts, like the ones about the tavern that stood on the city line at Kenmore Avenue, the halfway point between the City of Tonawanda and downtown Buffalo when that trip was an all-day journey on horseback, you better understand that, while kings or presidents may not have walked though here, a lot of interesting people did.

Ed Adamczyk is a Kenmore resident whose column appears weekly in the Record-Advertiser. Contact him at EdinKenmore@gmail.com.