Syracuse Mayor Ben Walsh was at an Albany reception alongside several other Upstate mayors not so long ago when someone mentioned the Golden Snowball, the famous trophy that’s symbolic of snowfall supremacy for large cities in New York state.
The mayors were joking about how they’d be happy if they never were asked to take that trophy again, when Walsh chimed in as a good-natured contrarian.
“I want this,” he said of the Golden Snowball and its return to Syracuse, the city where the modern trophy was created — and where it’s been absent, at least statistically, since 2018.
Saturday, once Walsh lofted the trophy in the air on a beautifully sunny day at the Buffalo Brewing Company taproom, that mayoral wish came true — while a roomful of Golden Snowball-loving enthusiasts applauded, with passion.
“It reminds me of the Stanley Cup,” said John Domres Jr., the taproom proprietor, who created a “Golden Snowbeer” as part of the trophy’s stay in Buffalo — and who hopes some craft brewer does the same in Syracuse, now that the Golden Snowball is going home.
Domres was talking about the way that trophy — in a fashion similar to the famously eccentric local journeys of hockey’s great Stanley and Calder Cups, after various championship seasons — traveled around greater Buffalo during that city’s three-year reign as snowfall champion, appearing at many iconic spots and celebrations.
The modern trophy — an important distinction in snowball lore — was created in 2004 by Roseanne Anthony of the A-1 Trophy Shop, on North Salina Street. Decades earlier, the original trophy — a tennis ball spray painted gold, atop an old Little League trophy — was the handiwork of a group of National Weather Service meteorologists, after the big Upstate cities, particularly Buffalo, endured a couple of winters in the late 1970s with massive snowfall.
The late Peter Chaston, a Rochester meteorologist who wound up spending most of his career in Missouri, came up with the idea. He simply believed that if you’re going to get that much snow, you might as well celebrate both its beauty and the sheer resilience required to put up with it.
The original trophy disappeared in the early 2000s. Not long afterward, the new version was an act of inspiration from Anthony, the Syracuse trophy-maker, who placed a glittering, gold-flecked glass snowball atop a base engraved with the name of each city that receives the snowball, every year.
In the reverent view of Steve Vermette — a SUNY Buffalo professor of climatology and meteorology and a guy “who really loves the Golden Snowball,” as noted by an admiring Domres — it’s rare nationally “to get the kind of snow in an urban environment” that cities like Syracuse, Buffalo and Rochester accept as a way of life.
The whole Golden Snowball idea in capsule form:
If you’ve got so much snow, it’s madness not to acknowledge and celebrate it — especially when one result of the toughest days of winter becomes these magnificent green springs, in a nation where so many parched regions are struggling to find water.
Walsh, in the final year of his two terms as mayor, said Vermette has really established a template for how to enjoy the trophy, on a community level. Syracuse regained the top spot by totaling more than 115 inches of snow over the last winter, but the jubilant way in which Vermette shared the Golden Snowball with all of Western New York leaves Walsh contemplating a similar celebration.
“It makes me think,” the mayor said, “that we’ve really got to step it up.”
For years, the trophy sat unnoticed on a shelf at Syracuse City Hall, in a city that averages more than 120 inches of snow a year, as measured at the nearby Hancock International Airport — with the result being that Syracuse, going back into the late 20th century, almost always won the snowball.
Things began changing in 2018, Walsh’s first year as mayor. Buffalo had the most snow of any big Upstate city for the first time in 16 years — meaning it also earned the trophy for the first time since Anthony created it. Walsh felt the new champion ought to have the Golden Snowball, and a chance to have some fun with it.
When Syracuse offered the trophy to Buffalo, then-Mayor Byron Brown stunned city officials by basically saying:
No thanks.
“That’s no competition to me, and that’s nothing really to be celebrated,” Brown told Stephen T. Watson, of The Buffalo News.
Vermette was bewildered by that mayoral response. Brown’s outlook, he felt, missed the entire point. Buffalo, Syracuse and Rochester are not simply the snowiest big cities in New York. As noted by Pat DeCoursey, a guy who keeps the numbers on the snowfall champions on his web site, they often double as the snowiest cities with 100,000 or more people in the entire United States, including Alaska.
To Vermette, that’s a matter of pride. The trophy is a symbol of affirmation for every plow driver who clears a road, for all the workers who somehow manage to reach their jobs on stormy winter mornings, for teachers and schoolchildren who casually show up on days when schools would be closed in most American communities.
“You have to embrace the snow,” said Buffalo Common Councilor Mitch Nowakowski, at the taproom Saturday to formally present Walsh with the trophy. Nowakowski said that while snow maintenance is one of the biggest challenges in helping to govern Buffalo, heavy snow is also an intrinsic part of the civic personality.
In 2022, when Buffalo again received the most big-city snow in New York, Vermette didn’t give Brown another chance to turn it down. Vermette got in the car and drove to Binghamton — at that time, the defending Golden Snowball champion — to pick up the trophy. Vermette became Buffalo’s self-appointed “custodian of the Golden Snowball,” and for the last three years, he lived out that commitment as Buffalo repeated three straight times as snowfall champion:
Vermette elevated the trophy into part of the Western New York tapestry.
For a time, for instance, the snowball was displayed at the Buffalo Brewing Co. taproom, after Domres made a couple of batches of his “Golden Snowbeer” — a brew that includes a small amount of melted Buffalo snow. Vermette also shared the trophy with the Buffalo Museum of Science, which did a whole display on the city and Lake Erie’s fierce “lake effect” storms, and he brought it to the city’s National Wing Festival, to local libraries and to such celebrated Buffalo eateries as Chef’s and Duff’s.
Basically, he did exactly what Walsh hoped would happen — and far more — when the mayor first decided in 2018 to share the trophy with other communities, rather than keeping it locked up in City Hall.
Now, as Walsh said Saturday with a palpable sense of mission, the question is whether Syracuse can do the same thing, or even better.
DeCoursey — a guy known as the “Oracle of the Golden Snowball” — and I have talked for years about the Central New York possibilities. If you’re asking us, we’d love to see a regularly updated public display in Syracuse that keeps track of the statewide leaders, every winter, for the trophy.
Beyond that, what about a Golden Snowball Festival in Syracuse in the peak months of January and February? Why not celebrate by having the Yuletide tree in Clinton Square — and maybe the magnificent National Grid Building — burn with golden lights in those months, along with a civic parade and maybe some great performers at the Landmark Theater, offering a touch of what Charleston does with its summertime Spoleto Festival — but celebrating instead at the heart of the nation’s snowiest big city?
The other goal that makes powerful sense in Syracuse: In a city with painful rates of childhood poverty … meaning there are all too many girls and boys stuck at home, without recreational options, in hard winters … the city schools ought to team up with whomever they need to work with to make sure that every child learns to skate, starting with weekly lessons for, say, every second grader in the city, giving these kids a lifetime skill they can use for fitness and fun within walking distance of their homes, on long winter days.
The city operates three skating rinks in Syracuse. With a little will and imagination, this could be done — and could serve as national template.
That’s a big dream, sure, but anything seemed possible Saturday at the Buffalo Brewing Company, where Domres began the trophy ceremony with a moment of silence for the 47 women and men in Erie County who died in Buffalo’s Christmas weekend blizzard of 2022 — a reminder of the human stakes of these fierce winters, and the eternal need for a selfless, look-out-for-each-other sense of community.
Once Nowakowski handed the Golden Snowball to Walsh — for whom the timing was perfect, since he was in Buffalo anyway to watch his daughter in an Irish dancing competition — the principals posed for photos with the trophy alongside a wide-open tap room window. It allowed a warm breeze and sunlight to pour inside on an absolutely gorgeous late spring afternoon — the kind of moment we especially appreciate in these Upstate cities, as we finally move beyond cold, gray days that lingered all too long.
Vermette joked about how “there are no rules” within the guidelines of sharing the Golden Snowball between cities, how the people who love the trophy just make up how to do these exchanges as they go. What is clear, however, is that in the way he’s embraced the snowball and what it means, Vermette has joined the short list of joyful, imaginative caretakers who’ve shaped that trophy’s history.
As he watched Walsh swap honorary batches of locally made craft beer with Domres — just before the mayor walked outside to pack the iconic trophy into his car — a bemused Vermette said he was happy for Syracuse, but he also made the same point, with emphasis, he’d made a whole lot of times throughout the day:
This handoff to Syracuse, Vermette insisted, is just a loan. Give it a winter or two, and he promised — in Buffalo — the Golden Snowball will be back.
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