They’ll fill St. Mark’s Church this morning for the funeral of Richard F. Griffin Sr. We lost him last week, at the age of 88. He was Buffalo at its best, a lion of the law who won some of the biggest civil rights cases in the city’s history.
As it happens, he was a favorite student of my father, Charles A. Brady, at Canisius College in the early 1950s. Sometimes my father, an English professor, hired Griffin to do odd jobs, and he was at our house changing storm windows on the day I was born. My father wasn’t home at the time, so Griffin, a senior in college, drove my mother to Sisters Hospital.
It’s no exaggeration, then, to say this is a man I have known all my life.
Richard F. Griffin Jr., his elder son, is my dear friend for more than 50 years. We met at Canisius High School and hit it off before discovering that our budding friendship replicated our fathers’. Their friendship survived the years: Dick Griffin Sr. was my father’s attorney for decades. Our friendship lasted, too: Dick Griffin Jr. is godfather for my daughter, Claire, as I am for his son, Charles.
“Stage of Fools,” my father’s bestselling novel on the life of St. Thomas More, was published in 1953, when Griffin Sr. was taking those English courses. He named his younger son Thomas, with More as the middle name. (We called him T-More back in the day.)
More is the patron saint of lawyers and statesmen, and it is notable that three of Griffin Sr.’s children are attorneys: Tom, Dick and Mary. Annie is a film producer and director in Scotland. (Last year she directed an episode of the HBO space comedy “Avenue 5” in which the White House of the future is Buffalo’s City Hall.)
In the 1970s, Griffin Sr. represented the plaintiffs who argued that Buffalo’s public schools were illegally segregated by race. He won that case, among the most important in local legal annals.
In the 1960s, he represented Black Muslim prisoners who were not allowed to practice their faith at Attica State Correctional Facility. He won that case, too, with Malcolm X as his star witness. The Black Muslim leader testified for three days, and one day came for dinner at the Griffin home in North Buffalo. Malcolm X was fasting at the time, so the menu was toast and orange juice. His bodyguards stood sentry outside.
Buffalo News reporter Dan Herbeck told Griffin Sr.’s life story beautifully in his obituary. Griffin Sr. was one of Herbeck’s favorite legal sources for decades; he could always be counted on for smart analysis, even on hot-potato cases when other attorneys dared not comment.
Griffin Sr. was a sixth-grader pitching for St. Rose of Lima when he noticed a cute girl from St. Mark’s in the bleachers. They began dating soon after. It is a Buffalo love story for the ages: Dick and Jane Griffin celebrated their 66th wedding anniversary in December.
Griffin Sr. played quarterback for Canisius High School in 1948, when the Crusaders met rival St. Joseph’s Collegiate Institute for the first time in 17 years. (A brawl following the 1931 game had led to the rift.) Tens of thousands came to War Memorial Stadium to see the long-awaited renewal. Griffin Sr. backpedaled into the end zone to take a strategic safety in the waning seconds as Canisius won, 14-9.
Today, the athletic director’s office at Canisius High is named for Dick and Jane Griffin — and for Griffin Jr., a champion tennis player and rower who also played on the first hockey team in the school’s history. Dickie, as some of us still know him, was also sports editor of the student newspaper, The Citadel — and I was one of his sports reporters.
Our intertwining family histories do not end there. My wife is Carol Stevens. We met at the Courier-Express. She came to Buffalo by way of Oregon and Virginia and knew only one person in town: Ed Stevens, her uncle, who taught chemistry at the University at Buffalo. He was a colleague of Jane Griffin, a chemist for the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute. At 88, she still does some work for it.
Bart and Kristin Roberts on Thursday evening with Brady, center, and Griffin, left, in front of their home in the Parkside neighborhood.
Allow me one last tale of connection betwixt the Griffin and Brady clans. When my nephew Bart Roberts and his wife, Kristin, bought a house in the Parkside neighborhood some years ago, it turned out to be where the Griffins had once lived — and where Malcolm X came to dinner.
Bart and Kristin met in middle school at City Honors, which owes its existence to the desegregation case won by Griffin Sr.
Bart and Kristin Roberts have two sons, ages 8 and 3. The older one is named Brady. And the younger?
His name is Griffin.
