You could argue that Highmark Stadium — which opened in 1973 in Orchard Park as the home of the Buffalo Bills — has a trajectory parallel to the most influential years for the Baby Boom, born in the years following World War II.
By the time the Bills played their first game in the place, the oldest Boomers — in their 20s — were already helping to fill it up. Two decades later, they were pushing toward their 50s during the greatest seasons at what was still called Rich Stadium, where the Bills won three home American Football Conference championship games, unleashed a staggering playoff comeback against the Houston Oilers and went on to appear in four consecutive Super Bowls.
Sunday — when the Bills face the visiting New York Jets — will probably represent the last game the team ever plays at what is now called Highmark, before they move across the street to a gleaming new home. In a gesture of fitting symmetry, the Bills are providing two indoor club tickets Sunday to Buffalo’s Al Nachreiner — who was born a second after midnight in 1946.
This week, on New Year’s Day, that astounding timing made him the first Baby Boomer in the nation to reach 80.
As for his longtime loyalty to the Bills, he is a former season ticket holder who has been to the stadium many times, going back to the old War Memorial Stadium, called “The Rockpile,” and then to the beginning, in Orchard Park.
“I was at the first game there (in 1973),” Nachreiner told me Friday morning, “and now I’m going to be there for the last one.”
While he has attended games in all kinds of weather, never — as in ever — has he sat indoors to watch the Bills play football.
Earlier this week, I wrote a Central Current column that appeared on New Year’s Day about the extraordinary significance of Nachreiner’s birthday. As recognized in 1946 by the Associated Press — and over the years by many other major publications — he was arguably the absolute first arrival in the nation-changing wave of postwar infants called the Baby Boom, whose total number, between 1946 and 1964, was roughly 70 million.
On Thursday, that also made him the first among them to hit 80.
Nachreiner is a retired machine operator at a Buffalo box factory. His wife Alice died 17 years ago. They had nine children — three, to Al’s sorrow, have died over the years — and he is now a great-grandfather to 22 girls and boys.
On New Year’s Day — Nachreiner’s birthday — he received a call from Michelle Roberts, the Bills vice president of community impact. She had read our column describing Nachreiner, his long devotion to the Bills and his sheer guts and will in fighting against lung cancer since the diagnosis, a year ago.
“We know how much this team and this stadium mean to Western New York,” Roberts told me afterward, of why she reached out to the family. Moved by Nachreiner’s story, she said it just seemed “as if these tickets might mean a lot to Al.”
The gesture by the Bills brought an emotional reaction from Dawn Boncal, one of Nachreiner’s daughters, who will accompany her dad to the game. He has an “inner fight,” she said, that he passed on to his children — the ability to “always find the good” around him, even in the hardest situations.
She was with Nachreiner when a doctor first told him he had cancer in his lung — and there was basically nothing else that could be done.
Nachreiner was not ready to accept it.
“My dad never gives up,” Boncal said, “not on anything or anyone.”
He is a guy who loves his family, a guy who treasures every extra day. Looking for another opinion, Nachreiner went to Buffalo’s Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center. A doctor there had a more optimistic message: She told him there were treatments available that could slow down or even temporarily pause the cancer. Nachreiner embraced the chance. He is now receiving chemotherapy, and he feels well enough that you can bank on this:
He is going to the game.
Boncal said Nachreiner has lived an extraordinary life: He was a terrific fast-pitch softball pitcher, a skilled bowler, a fisherman, a gardener and — since he lost his wife — a widower who learned to both cook and bake. Most important, Boncal told me, he is “an amazing father, grandfather and great-grandfather … he never expects a ‘thank you,’ but he always gives one.”
The Bills, in appreciation of that kind of depth of character, say this gift simply makes sense.
Sunday, when the team gives the old stadium what most likely will be one last passionate goodbye, America’s first “Boomer” — his life a Buffalo snapshot of soul and diligence — will provide a symbol, at 80, of the legion of folks who have showed up, no matter what, to watch the Bills:
Beginning to end, first game and last, he found the hope that brings him back.
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