The only time I was ever in Buffalo was during a January blizzard in ’84 in a van with seven heavily smoking Poles for a Solidarity conference. We stayed at the Lord and Lady Baltimore Motel. I brought goose rillettes from my Christmas geese and they loved me for that. My roommate brought extra toilet paper.

Thus begins a series of intermittent memories of my eight years spent supporting Poland’s Solidarnosc movement, mainly the underground press, which has today morphed into the leading daily Gazeta Wyborcza.