When Mike Ricigliano was a coxie for the Buffalo State crew team, in the early 1970s, he almost steered a racing shell into the Niagara River breakwall. His erstwhile rowing mates still call him Wrong Way Ricig.
Ah, but his Buff State crew jacket steered him the right way in the race of life. He was wearing it some years later when, by chance, he met Terri Glaeser twice on St. Patrick’s Day weekend, in 1979. It was the beginning of a beautiful relationship: Sunday marked their 40th wedding anniversary.
They celebrated with dinner at a restaurant attached to the Baltimore Art Museum. They have lived in Baltimore for most of the time since the Courier-Express closed, less than a year after their wedding. Ricig was a sports cartoonist at the Courier. Terri was a teacher in Buffalo. And Friday will be her last day after almost 50 years of teaching, most of it in and around Baltimore.
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Here is the homemade card that Ricig gave Terri for their 40th anniversary. (Note the pair of bison in Noah’s ark.)
The happy couple actually celebrate two anniversaries: one for the day they wed, and the other for the day they met. They call that one their St. Pat-iversary. It is a Buffalo love story painted in leprechaun green:
Ricig was wearing his Buff State jacket on a Saturday night when he met Terri for the first time. They were in a crush of revelers at Curran’s, a bar on Delaware. She said hello. He was smitten. And then she was gone. He immediately regretted not getting her name and number.
Sunday, of course, was the St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Courier-Express photographer Bob Bukaty was planning a collage of Irish faces for the next day’s paper. He asked Ricig to help him find some. And who should Ricig run into but the woman from the night before. She remembered him by the Buff State jacket. (She went there, too, though somehow they had never crossed paths on campus.) They chatted for a bit in the hubbub of the parade, and then she was gone again – off with her boyfriend, a Buffalo police officer.
As it happens, Bukaty had snapped a photo of them as they spoke – Ricig in his trademark bucket hat, Terri in her Irish sweater.
Bukaty tossed a print on Ricig’s desk the day after the parade. Ricig showed it to Jack Connors, who worked on the Courier copy desk and moonlighted as a bartender at Curran’s. Yes, he knew Terri, and he got her address for Ricig, who delivered the photo to her house in a manila envelope. Ricig, in his cartoonist’s way, added a word balloon: Photo-Ricig asked Photo-Terri to go out with him. The real Terri said yes. And days later they went on their first date, at J.P. Bullfeathers, on Elmwood.
Two years later they were married at Blessed Sacrament Church on Delaware Avenue. He wore a bucket hat/top hat hybrid as they strode down the church steps following the ceremony.
The wedding of Terri Glaeser and Mike Ricigliano.
I only wish I could have been there. I blame Rick Monday.
I was the Courier’s sports columnist at the time, and in the week before the wedding I was in New York covering the Yankees’ three-game sweep of the Oakland Athletics in the American League Championship Series. The Los Angeles Dodgers were playing the Montreal Expos in the National League Championship Series. If the Expos won, I could get to the wedding. But if the Dodgers won, I would have to go directly from New York to Los Angeles for the World Series.
The Expos led early in the decisive Game Five, but then Rick Monday socked a ninth-inning home run 380 feet to center, catapulting the Dodgers into the Series. In Montreal, the moment is memorialized as Blue Monday. I still feel a bit blue about it myself.
“In the grand sweep of Montreal sports history,” Michael Farber wrote in the Montreal Gazette last week, “that ball is still airborne 40 years later, floating on a jet stream of regret.” (His column compares the misery of Blue Monday to Wide Right and No Goal: “That’s some bad Western New York juju right there.”)
The wedding reception was held at the Aud Club. Some 150 guests got party hats as party favors – bucket hats, baseball caps, cowboy hats, propeller beanies, sombreros – all emblazoned with this logo. The dance floor looked like New Year’s Eve in October as they boogied the night away, everyone hatted and happy and waltzing on air.
But the Courier-Express folded on the way to happily ever after. Then Ricig formed a greeting card company in Buffalo with Bill Cooke, the Courier’s former sports editor. They sold T-shirts, too, all with sports themes. And then they had a million-dollar idea: Greeting cards with a slot for lottery tickets. One card said: “For your birthday, I wanted to give you a million bucks.” Open it up and it said: “Maybe I did.” All the purchaser had to do was buy a lottery ticket and place it in the slot.
Genius, right? Well, no: It turned out people feared gifting a winner. No matter how generous they were otherwise, they could not bear to give away their own luck.
Ricig and Terri moved to Baltimore for him to take a cartooning job with Sports First, a publication of the Baltimore News American. Sports First folded after a year. Then he worked for the 200-year-old News American itself – and it folded, too. He got a contract to draw cartoons for the Baltimore Evening Sun. Then it folded. He built up freelance work for the Baltimore Sun, The Buffalo News, the Los Angeles Times and USA Today Sports Weekly. But as newspapers fell on hard times, almost all of that work dried up.
These days Ricig teaches cartooning at Johns Hopkins and Towson universities. He is still a freelance cartoonist, but gigs are harder than ever to find. He makes jokes about being a starving artist. Of course he makes jokes. They are his living.
Only family is more important to him. Ricig and Terri’s older son, Steve, 39, was born in Buffalo. Their younger son, Ryan, 38, was born in Baltimore. Ryan and his wife, Shiho, had identical twin boys in April. They will grow up in a world where sports cartoonists are all but extinct.
Generations ago, many major metropolitan newspapers employed their own sports cartoonists. Now none do. The New York Times wrote about that in 2012 under the headline: “Lost Occupation, Lost Art.” The story presented Ricig as Exhibit A. The print edition of the Times featured some of Ricig’s cartoons on the same page with some of Bill Gallo’s. The late New York Daily News sports cartoonist had been Ricig’s cartooning hero when he was growing up on Long Island.
“My cartoons, in the New York Times, with Bill Gallo’s,” Ricig says. “It would have been the best day of my life – if they weren’t writing about the worst days of my life.”
He’s joking again. The best days of his life, of course, are the day he met Terri and their wedding day, 40 years ago. Ricig and Terri celebrated that on Sunday. They will celebrate her retirement on Friday. And then, come March 17, they will celebrate their St. Pat-iversary.
“That was the day,” Ricigliano says, “I had the luck of the Italian.”
