For 50 years, home of the Bills has been heart of the community

I had no idea who he was, but my father immediately recognized him as a recent transplant who had moved to the area for a new job.

I walked up to him and said, “Excuse me, sir, are you Marv Levy?”

“Why yes I am,” he said. “And what’s your name?”

I introduced myself and days later sent him a letter to wish him luck on the new job. Marv wrote back with an autographed team photo. Back then, I thought it was simply a kind gesture by a nice man. Now, I see it as something more: He realized, early and quickly, that Buffalo Bills fans are a community, and he was a central part of it. Even with the tiniest of interactions, he was embracing that role.

Nowhere is that sense of community with the Bills quite like it is in Hamburg and Orchard Park, home to tens of thousands of people – some of them players, coaches and front-office personnel – and the Home of the Buffalo Bills.

That place, formerly known as Rich Stadium, turns 50 years old this week. It opened to the public on Aug. 17, 1973 with a preseason game against Washington. The word “inauspicious” fits nicely for its inaugural event: The first time the clock on one end of the building started counting down from 15:00 during a game, a player on the opposing team was returning a kickoff for a touchdown.

There would be many more lows and plenty of highs over the next half-century.

All of them happened in my neighborhood.

I lived in four homes during my childhood and young adulthood, each of them in neighborhoods off Southwestern Boulevard, the main thoroughfare cutting through Hamburg and Orchard Park. Highmark Stadium, as we call it today, is at the intersection of Southwestern and Abbott Road.

Every Monday morning at Frontier High School, I would gaze into the distance, my vision cutting through the October fog…