A year ago this weekend, Tom Fitzgerald received an unexpected lesson in the point of St. Luke’s Mission of Mercy.
Fitzgerald, 52, has worked for 34 years as a custodian with the Kenmore-Tonawanda School District. Last December, as a lethal blizzard engulfed greater Buffalo, he pulled his Silverado pickup into the parking lot of a convenience store on Military Road, intending to buy enough food to wait out the storm.
“The cashier lady was crying,” Fitzgerald said. It was two days before Christmas. He asked her what was wrong. She replied that her husband and a friend were stranded with two kids at a police district station on Hertel Avenue, with no way to make it home.
“Don’t worry,” Fitzgerald said. He promised he would give them a ride.
The first step was easy enough. He made it to the station and welcomed the little group into his truck, which he figured could handle the wind and snow. But all of it was beyond anything he had ever seen.
“It’s a blizzard that almost blew my truck door off when I opened it,” Fitzgerald said.
“No one had to do that specifically for me,” Marcos Vazquez said, “and it makes me want to do the same thing for someone else in the same position.”
His passengers lived in the Fillmore district of Buffalo, where…
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