Andrea Bruzgul saw the billboard for the first time Wednesday at Hamburg’s “seven corners.” She held her 2-year-old, Gordy, while her three older kids scrambled forward, calling out:
Daddy.
“One city, one heart, one team, one JBB,” the billboard reads. Andrea and her mother-in-law, Carol Jenkins, stared up at a monumental image of a Bills loyalist with arms spread wide, a Buffalo guy in Buffalo attire: Zubaz coveralls.
That was Jaron “J.B.” Bruzgul, in tailgating glory. He was a regular at Bills Stadium since childhood, an admirer of special teams maestro Steve Tasker and the kind of season ticket holder who showed up for December games in the bleakest conditions in the hardest years. Thinking of it all, eight high school friends – tight with him for more than a quarter-century – pooled their money this week and raised the billboard. It will be visible to thousands Saturday as the Bills host the Colts in the first playoff game since 1996 in Orchard Park.
“It’s perfect for this weekend because it's what he would have lived for,” said Brad Feine, a fellow Nichols School graduate, now in Chicago.
Chelsea Root, J.B.'s sister, said her family sees it as a statement of community, describing J.B. “as the representation of every Bills fan.”
Their father, Dr. Joseph Bruzgul, is a season ticket holding veterinarian. Raised in Orchard Park, J.B. graduated from Nichols and went on to Hartwick College. Restless, he moved west to live with his brother Jud before taking a job in finance in New York City, a position lined up by a former girlfriend of his brother Josh.
J.B., knowing nothing of the work, conquered it. While he lived there, he was reacquainted with Andrea, a childhood friend of Chelsea's. As little kids, under parental order, J.B. – eight years older – was sometimes their babysitter.
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Years later, they were reunited by family trauma. Chelsea was attending Virginia Tech in 2007 when a mass shooter killed 32 people, and then himself. J.B., worried sick, bought a ticket to fly his sister to Buffalo, and he was home when Andrea arrived to offer comfort.
“Something happened that weekend,” said Andrea, recalling their hours of intense conversation. Not long afterward, still unsure if J.B. felt a similar connection, she and Chelsea traveled to his place in New Jersey, planning to visit Manhattan while he flew back to Buffalo.
He left for the airport. Andrea decided she had been kidding herself. Within an hour, J.B. came back.
“He said his flight was canceled,” Andrea said. She always figured a day would come when he confessed as to whether he simply turned around.
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However it occurred, they married three years later. Their twins, son George and daughter Reagan, were born in New Jersey, a great day that only reinforced J.B.'s weariness at life as a trader. He felt it was “too showy,” Andrea said, a world built too much on empty aspirations.
“He told me he wanted to come back to where our roots were,” she said. “He wanted his kids to grow up in the place that had everything he believed in. He wanted them to be Buffalonians."
They returned in 2014 to Orchard Park, where their daughter Sadie and son Gordy would be born. J.B. became office manager for his father, providing what the son always wanted: time at home. He lived 100 yards from his brother Josh, also a veterinarian, while J.B. routinely embraced challenges he never tried before.
“There was nothing he couldn’t do,” said Josh, recalling how J.B. – ambidextrous – used to switch hands to better nail difficult splits as he bowled. In Orchard Park, J.B. brought that confidence to learning carpentry and drywall, doing much of the work when he and Andrea built their house.
He took particular pride in his home office, dominated by a life-size poster of Bills great Bruce Smith. Many parents mark the wall as a way of chronicling their children’s growth, year by year.
J.B. measured his children's height against the legs of a pass-rushing Hall of Famer.
Close to family, he embraced familiar rituals. He was a regular at East Aurora’s Bar-Bill Tavern, a longtime family haunt, where his mug made its way to the honored top shelf and where he always met Chelsea on pre-pandemic Thursdays for a brother-sister "standing date."
Andrea often thinks of Bobby, the Labrador-mix rescue Josh gave to J.B., years ago. In 2002, on the way to Colorado to see Jud, J.B. rolled his pickup and feared the dog was dead, before realizing Bobby had fled in terror.
J.B. refused to leave. His dad flew out to help. After two days of searching, they found Bobby hiding in a barn. “He was J.B.’s world,” Andrea said, recalling how J.B. cherished Bobby's tags after the dog died at 12.
Her 6-foot-4-inch husband was a runner, a regular in the Turkey Trot. He took his grandmother to lunch every Wednesday. For his 40th birthday, he and Andrea thought about a weekend getaway, then settled on something else: gumbo at Wiechec’s in Kaisertown, before going home to put the kids to bed.
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As for his high school buddies, scattered throughout the nation, he stayed close. In a routine many of us understand, they engaged in a furiously dinging chain text during Bills games, ignited by every big play or missed chance.
The group included Eric Termini and Joshua Lippes, who became friends with J.B. when all were 4-year-olds at Buffalo’s Elmwood Franklin School, then stayed with him through the years at Nichols, where they listened to Pearl Jam on group campouts. As adults, the nine core friends typically assembled for one Bills game on the road, which last year was the playoff game in Houston, against the Texans.
Buffalo led 16-0, then unraveled. The group left in silence. J.B.'s buddies say the emptiness after that loss amplifies everything about what the team is doing now.
They wish the guy in the Tasker jersey could see it, leaving the billboard as the next best thing.
“This season,” Lippes said, “would have meant everything to him.”
In late April, they all spoke by video call on a Sunday before J.B. signed off to help Andrea with the kids. A few days later, she kissed her husband good night on an evening like any other. She decided to sleep downstairs to care for a restless Gordy, while J.B. fell asleep in their room.
The next morning, the twins made a beeline to jump onto their father and wake him up. They hurried back and told their mother: “Daddy’s pretending to be asleep.” Assuming it was a joke, she and Gordy went upstairs.
It took a few moments to understand. Andrea's husband, at 41, had died while he slept.
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A guy who worked out every day had suffered a massive heart attack, the doctors said. Andrea chose a casket of simple barnwood “because there was nothing fancy or perfect about it,” and she put the tags from Bobby's collar in the casket. While the family held a small pandemic funeral, hundreds, safely distanced, lined the road to watch the procession to Orchard Park's Friends Cemetery.
J.B. was buried in the shade of an old tree. Josh Bruzgul – who once climbed Kilimanjaro with his brother – intends to put up a bench, still counting on one thing.
“How blessed was I,” he asked, “to know someone you love even more every time you see them?”
Andrea speaks of how fast the world is moving while her own life stands still, and said her biggest fear becomes her mission: Her children need to remember and understand how much their dad loved them. “As tough as this was,” she said, “everything about him was about hope, and I want them to carry something good out of who he was.”
She will tell the kids how J.B. flooded the backyard so they could skate, how he was always next to them as they blew out birthday candles and how – instead of choosing to get rich far away – he asked if she wanted to move their family home, where she hopes making such choices, in all ways, provides a sign.
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