Bart Stancampiano would have been there. If something had changed last week in that Cleveland-Kansas City showdown so that Cleveland ended up at Bills Stadium for the American Football Conference title game, Bart had planned on being in the seats.
He would have been there in his crisp button-down shirt and dress shoes, about as casual as it gets for a guy who typically prefers to wear a tie. Bart would have settled in long before kickoff and then stayed until the absolute last play, a philosophy that served him well when the Bills of 1993 trailed Houston 35-3 in the playoffs and somehow won the game in his great testament to football faith.
Yet things worked out as they worked out, and homestanding Kansas City defeated the Bills on Sunday for the conference title. What Bart feared beforehand essentially happened: He has deep respect for K.C. quarterback Patrick Mahomes, and he watched from his daughter Bridget's Tonawanda living room – wearing the headphones that allow him to best follow the game – as Mahomes moved that high-powered offense up and down the field in a 38-24 win.
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Bart Stancampiano, 95, has been a Buffalo Bills fan since the franchise was born. (Robert Kirkham/Buffalo News)
It was the rare game this season in which Buffalo could not respond in the way Bart admires so much, team qualities he sees as a kind of life ethic.
“They usually excel in the second half,” he said of the Bills, “and once they get a lead they don’t let up.”
After the loss, he exhaled and looked at his daughter and son-in-law, Matt Carozzolo.
"We'll get'm next year," said Bart, a great-grandfather who keenly understands the notion of football patience. He is 95, a season ticket holder since 1977, a regular spectator long before that.
The pandemic has limited or cut back many of his options, such as his willingness to go out and sing karaoke until 2 a.m., which – in a way felt by the entire community – only elevated the beautiful distraction of this team.
Asked for the key to his longevity, he paused, eyebrows up. He is a retired letter carrier who routinely walked for miles every day. He was never a smoker or a hard drinker, and he allows himself one tiny glass of Rose every night and the occasional beer.
Joan Hoak and her daughter, Donna, are emblematic of a fan base that has managed to keep a National Football League franchise here when teams and owners have deserted much larger American
“I love to sing, and I love to make people happy when I sing,” he said.
Bridget and her brothers, Brian and Mark, joke with him about his karaoke – he agrees that his late wife Dorothy was the one with the real voice – but they say the key to the joy strangers feel when their dad sings is the same thing they realized growing up with him.
He loves people, and he never says harsh words of anyone. Bridget sometimes runs into women or men in their 50s or 60s who remember from childhood when Bart brought the mail to their homes. When she tells her dad the name of the particular family, he will remember the address, even now.
In this video provided by the Stancampiano family, Bart Stancampiano tries his hand at singing the Britney Spears hit "Oops!...I Did It Again."
He was that kind of letter carrier, just as he is that kind of Bills fan.
“You can’t be a more loyal guy than you, dad,” Bridget said while Bart did an interview at her home, in which he downplayed any suggestion that he is special. “You were loyal to your family and your job and your customers.”
Bart Stancampiano at a Bills game, before the pandemic, with son Brian.
In 1960, he brought that loyalty to the brand-new Bills.
More than 60 years later, the team has yet to touch the absolute peak as undisputed champion of all of professional football. Asked what it would mean to see Buffalo win the Super Bowl, Bart answered in a way as perfect as it gets:
He raised his hands, then released his breath as a dream-like exclamation.
The special relationship between several different generations of fathers and sons is brought together through a common thread – the Buffalo Bills.
The Bills have threaded through his life since he was young, maybe because he associates them with family kindness. Bart was the last of eight children born to an immigrant couple from Palermo. He is named for his father, Bartolo, who died of a heart attack at 38, while Bart was in the womb. His mother somehow kept the family together, alone on the Buffalo West Side of the 1920s and the Great Depression.
Josephine Stancampiano, who stood 4-foot-11, went to work in the kitchen at Curtiss-Wright during World War II. Her youngest son remembers how she always made sure he had a clean white shirt before he left for school in the morning.
Bart only attended a year of high school before he quit to take a job, with every penny of make-it-to-the-next-day meaning to his family. Once he was old enough, he enlisted and served in the Navy during World War II, sending his pay straight back to his mother.
When he returned, she had saved it all to help her son get started, ignoring her own needs. It was not long after arriving home that he met Dorothy, at a beach place in Angola.
Bart Stancampiano watches the Bills-Chiefs conference championship game at his daughter Bridget's house.
He was a young guy, working hard, who never knew his dad. His sister Anna had married Edward Vilardo, an older man who sensed what Bart was missing. Vilardo used to take his wife’s kid brother to Bison baseball games – Bart was at Offermann one day when Luke Easter hit the scoreboard – and he introduced Bart to the original Bills of the old All-America Football Conference.
When the new version of the team appeared in 1960, Bart was all in. He often joined Bills excursions with a buddy named Johnny, a friend who provided him with the same seat so routinely that Johnny finally said to Bart, more than 40 years ago:
Why don’t you just buy that seat as a season ticket?
That was section 111, row 27, and his family now has a total of four seats in that area. For Bart, going there makes him think of Anna’s husband, who first took him to games, and all those years of showing up with his buddy Johnny, and then the last few decades with the team mainly as a family passion.
In other words, just about everything Bart cares about is somehow intertwined with the Bills, which gives him an early claim to being #BillsMafia, long before such a thing had a name.
He went to one Super Bowl, in 1993. Brian decided he would buy tickets to the Bills-Cowboys game in Pasadena, hoping it might turn into a magical father-son day on which the Bills might break out to win a Super Bowl after losing the previous two.
Bart Stancampiano, 95, refletcs on his life as Bills fan. (Robert Kirkham/Buffalo News)
It did not happen. The Bills grabbed a quick lead – shades of Sunday night – but the Cowboys took over and won 52-17. Still, if you ask Bart about it, what he remembers is how Buffalo's Don Beebe sprinted downfield late in the game, any chance to win long over, to knock the ball loose just before Leon Lett would have scored for Dallas.
If Bart had left, he would not have seen it, which to him was worth the trip.
His wife, Dorothy, not a big fan at first, gradually came to embrace the team over 54 years of marriage, reaching a point where she watched the Bills on television every Sunday. She had no desire to go to games, but Bart would tell her of the excitement in Orchard Park after any big win.
Dorothy died in 2010. Bart keeps her ashes in an urn in a safe place in his Kenmore apartment, and he thinks of her when he sings “Always on my Mind” at karaoke. Generations of Western New Yorkers have daydreamed about what they would do if the Bills someday capture a Super Bowl, but Bart is a guy who believes in first things first.
Before all else, he would go home and tell Dorothy.
