‘Son of Lackawanna’ hopes the story of his rise resonates with voters
By Charity Vogel
NEWS STAFF REPORTER
For Mark Poloncarz, early lessons about hard work took the shape of steel — and deli sandwiches.
Growing up in Lackawanna, Poloncarz watched his dad, Charlie, head off to the Bethlehem Steel mills each day for shifts that could stretch to 16 hours.
Then he’d go to the grocery store run by his Polish-American family in the Ridgewood Village part of the city, where he helped his diminutive grandmother, Mary, stock shelves.
“We called her Grandma Store — because Grandma ran the store,” said Poloncarz, 43. “I would help her stock the shelves, because she was this high.”
He gestures at about chest height, and laughs.
“I didn’t make any money — I was used as child labor more than anything else — but it was about family, the value of hard work.”
Poloncarz, a Democrat who has been county comptroller for six years, is challenging Republican incumbent County Executive Chris Collins this fall for the job of Erie County’s chief elected official.
There are many challenges in the marquee race for this Generation-X politician who says he is still, at bottom, a “son of Lackawanna.”
He lacks Collins’ campaign cash, name recognition and record as a chief executive.
Then there’s this: Nobody has ever used the county comptroller office as a springboard to the county executive’s suite.
But here’s what Poloncarz, and those who support him in Democratic circles and beyond, are pinning their hopes on:
The Poloncarz story.
It’s a tale of working-class roots, immigrant-taught values and a drive for moving up in the world.
Sound familiar?
For many families in Erie County, a region bound by strong ethnic and blue-collar ties, it will.
“Chris Collins is from Spaulding Lake. Mark Poloncarz is from Lackawanna,” said County Democratic Chairman Leonard R. Lenihan, who is banking on Poloncarz’s background resonating with voters in November. “That says something.”
For Poloncarz, it means that his opportunity and his dilemma lie in the same place:
Telling the public who he is — and why it matters.
Son of Lackawanna
Poloncarz grew up in a family of three boys in a development of post-World War II housing in Ridgewood Village, where his family ran “Stone’s Family Market” — named for his great-grandfather, Charles Stone — for 40 years.
The Poloncarz family was a proudly Polish-American clan, with roots stretching back to the Oswiecim — more commonly known as Auschwitz — area of Poland, and memories of a family member, a Catholic woman, who had perished in Nazi concentration camps.
Poloncarz is the oldest son of Charles and Janice Poloncarz — a steelworker and a nurse. His brothers are Robb, 41, a chef who lives in Orchard Park; and Kevin, 38, an attorney in San Francisco.
Janice Poloncarz went to school in her 30s to earn her nursing degree, then worked at Mercy Hospital. Charlie worked at Bethlehem for 40 years, starting as a laborer and moving up to be a mechanic.
“I worked a lot of 16-hour shifts. I would work three different shifts in one week,” recalled Charlie Poloncarz, sitting with his son in a Lackawanna diner on a recent rainy weekday.
“There were weeks we didn’t see him,” Mark concurred, gazing at his father. “If he was working 3-11, I’d come home from school and he’d be gone.
“But the nice thing about Lackawanna was, everyone was in pretty much the same boat. No one was rich. Everyone’s family was … trying to move their way up.”
The family attended Sunday Mass at Our Lady of Victory Basilica, saved their money, and planned for the future. By the time the boys were in school — they all attended Lackawanna public schools — the family had moved to a new house on Della Drive in the city’s 4th Ward.
Poloncarz — who became the first of his generation in the family to go to college and who now lives in North Buffalo — said the lessons he learned from watching his parents and grandparents were simple:
Work hard for what you want — and don’t take things for granted.
“We had a nice middle-class neighborhood, and they put a roof over our heads. But my parents never bought me [things like] a car. They were working to pay for their own car,” said Poloncarz, a self-proclaimed penny-pincher, whose first car was a Chevy Citation and who today drives a seven-year-old Impala.
“Stuff we wanted, we had to work for. My thought was: Nothing is handed to you.”
Law came first
Before politics appealed to Poloncarz, law did.
After graduating from the University at Buffalo in 1989, he worked for a few years, then attended law school at the University of Toledo. He liked the school because Toledo reminded him of Buffalo. It wasn’t flashy like the law school his brother Kevin attended — the University of Chicago, where he knew Barack Obama — but it got him what he wanted.
When he returned home with his law degree in 1997, however, Poloncarz found he was earning less money as a law clerk than he had been as a Sears employee selling tractors in Ohio.
He also found that he was swimming upstream by returning to Buffalo at all.
“When I came back, most of my friends were actually leaving the area,” said Poloncarz, who will turn 44 the day before Election Day. “They said, why are you coming back?”
Poloncarz worked for a small Buffalo firm, then in 2000 landed a job at Kavinoky and Cook, a well-known outfit. He worked mostly in corporate finance law and commercial real estate law.
In 2004, while watching the county’s “red/green budget” fiscal controversy play out, Poloncarz said he found himself fascinated by politics — and the role of county comptroller.
“I thought, we shouldn’t be having this fiscal crisis,” he recalled. “The comptroller’s office at the time did not do what they should have to prevent it.”
A call by The Buffalo News to former county comptroller Nancy A. Naples, who preceded Poloncarz in office, was not returned.
In 2005 Poloncarz turned his energy into work on the John Kerry campaign for president. He held the position of coordinator of the campaign’s Western New York activities.
In 2005, Poloncarz also got married, to Elizabeth Smith, a Buffalo public relations professional. They were married for five years, then divorced; there were no children.
“It just didn’t work out,” Poloncarz said.
Lenihan, the party chairman, got to know Poloncarz well at that time. He said he soon saw that he had potential for public office.
“A couple of things about Mark stood out,” said Lenihan. “He was organized, very focused. He was sort of calm, cool and collected. That’s what really impressed me most about him.”
Poloncarz ran for comptroller in 2005 and won in a surprise upset over incumbent Naples. It was his first go at running for elected office. He still smiles at the memory.
“I’m the first Democrat to hold this position in 30 years,” he said. “I like being the underdog.”
‘A steel spoon’
When Poloncarz announced that he was running for Erie County executive, in a speech delivered outside the Lackawanna Public Library in May, he drew on his roots to present to voters a reason why they should vote for him.
Comparing himself to those who grow up in affluence, Poloncarz said this: “I didn’t grow up with a silver spoon in my mouth … it was a steel spoon.”
The “steel spoon” image was a blunt announcement of his pedigree — and a preview of one of his fledgling campaign’s recurring themes.
Poloncarz is seen as a Democratic party favorite. He’s been strongly supported by labor; in September, he served as grand marshal of a Labor Day parade in Buffalo that included a rally on his behalf at which he was praised by labor leaders, including those from the local AFL-CIO.
But the “steel spoon” reference was also a thinly veiled swipe at Collins — a millionaire who owns several companies and lives in a well-to-do neighborhood in Clarence.
Democratic Party leaders said Poloncarz just needs to get his background and point of view out in front of the public.
Once people know him, Lenihan said, they will pull the lever for him.
“Erie County is basically conservative, blue-collar, and it’s ethnic,” the party chairman said. “They like somebody who’s tight-fisted. That’s who Mark Poloncarz is.”
Though Poloncarz’s supporters estimate that the greater majority of Erie County residents recognize him on sight and know his name — “I would say 75 percent,” said Lenihan — casual conversation with county residents, even in Poloncarz’s hometown, show the campaign might have a ways to go to build familiarity.
“I don’t know anything about him,” said Terra Short, 27, a Lackawanna resident who works as a waitress at the Village Square Restaurant on Ridge Road. “I don’t hear anything about the campaign — I haven’t gotten any fliers at my house, either.”
But some of those who have met Poloncarz while he’s been out campaigning have come away with good impressions of the young, energetic candidate.
“I was really impressed,” said Marguerite Battaglia, a resident of Chatham Avenue in Buffalo, who met Poloncarz when he was campaigning in her neighborhood earlier in the year.
“He seems to have the savvy,” Battaglia said.
“Just the fact that he walked in my neighborhood himself — he’s among us, he’s not above us.”
Lack of name recognition may be one of the challenges facing Poloncarz in November. Another could lie, observers said, in the nature of the job he currently holds.
County comptroller is a position that does not necessarily lend itself to serving as a platform for advancement to an executive type of elected office, said Michael V. Haselswerdt, professor of political science at Canisius College. In other words, it can be kind of boring.
“First, people don’t understand what the job is,” Haselswerdt said. “And oftentimes, even when the guy issues a report on something, it’s hard for people to really grasp what he’s talking about. It’s not simple.”
Unusual springboard
Haselswerdt said that comptroller is also not a job that lets a potential candidate display much personality.
“Even if you’ve got charisma,” he said, “it’s hard to display it. Alfreda [Slominiski] was the one exception — she had her own thing going on.”
Slominski, 82, reached at her Depew home, had a slightly different view. She said she thinks the comptroller’s office can be a good training ground for a county executive, because it offers a window on all aspects of the county’s business.
“You certainly do learn county government when you are county comptroller,” she said.
Poloncarz — who calls Slominiski the “gold standard” for the job — asked her to sit down for a conversation soon after he was elected six years ago.
He came away, he said, inspired by her practical advice.
But while Slominiski said she was glad to meet with him, she cautions that she does not give her blessing to everything he has done in the job since taking office. A lot of the interaction between the county comptroller and county executive’s office now is too politicized, she said.
Poloncarz, after lunch at a Lackawanna diner, refocused his gaze on the weeks between now and November.
“Hi, Mark,” a patron called out, walking past the comptroller’s table.
“Hi,” Poloncarz responded, waving.
Poloncarz pushed his plate away and grinned.
“I feel as comfortable in a diner in Lackawanna as I do at the Buffalo Club,” he said. “I don’t think Mr. Collins can say that.”
But will that mean anything at the polls?
Poloncarz said he thinks so.
“Your county executive,” he said, “should be representative of the people in this community.”
Are you out of your freakin mind, we need to take care of the people in our country before we can even think of taking care of imagrints , definitely will not be voting for you . You should be ashamed of yourself fu