This is the way it always went, throughout the year. Gil Hargrave and Lum Smith often talked over coffee or took long summer walks in Delaware Park, with every conversation about some mutual friend or well-loved colleague pinballing into long-ago emotional territory that led toward the same place:
Smith, like Hargrave, was a career city schools administrator. They met when they were teens, a rich friendship of 60 years that was not quite as long as the one between Smith and the other guy in their planning trinity, celebrated Buffalo artist and lawyer LeRoi Johnson, who figures he must have been about kindergarten age when he first spoke to Smith.
The three men coordinated a group they call the Inner City Sports Legends, which meets every year to distribute maybe 20 plaques and awards on the night before Thanksgiving. The gathering hardly started off as an official get-together.
Hargrave and Johnson, both in their mid-70s, said it began maybe 40 years ago. Every November, on the night before Thanksgiving, lifetime friends from the heart of Buffalo, linked by high school sports, would casually catch up at the old Humboldt Inn on this one holiday evening when everyone seemed to come back home.
It catapulted into something else in 1992, when Richard Clark – who played basketball with Bob Lanier at Bennett High and with Randy Smith at SUNY Buffalo State – suggested they turn it into more of an established, annual reunion. The late Zellie Dow, too, contributed to the birth of the Sports Legends, Johnson said.
To really broaden the scope of people showing up demanded a detailed knowledge of high school and college athletics in Buffalo going back, at that time, even into the 1930s.
For that, Hargrave and Johnson say, there was no one like Smith.
“Lum was the one who instituted giving out plaques,” said Hargrave, 75, who spent much of his career as a principal at the old Lincoln Academy, School 44 and whose wife Yvonne retired…
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