Buffalo Rising Online

Aug 3rd 2007, 4:47pm By Bill Zimmermann

Marv's super old-cool...and Martha's an enigma with a lot of time from Buffalo, --and Professor Bell has some neat connections to phone us about, so...Welcome to today's story!

Happy Birthyday to Marv Levy, born On This Day August 3, 1925. He is currently the General Manager and Vice President of Football Operations for the Buffalo Bills. He was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2001. He was voted to the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in 1998.

Levy’s family emigrated from England when he was very young. The tough talking coach graduated from Harvard with a master’s in English, but there were often times during his coaching career you could lip read phrases coming out of his South Side of Chicago upbringing. Here are some highlights of his career:

-The only NFL coach to have coached teams that subsequently won four straight league or conference championships

-Won two CFL championships while head coach of the Montreal Alouettes

-Guided the Bills to six division championships (including four consecutive from 1988–1991)

-Compiled a 17–5 record (14–5 in the regular season and 3–0 in the post-season) against the winningest coach in NFL history, Don Shula. Levy is the only head coach in NFL history to have a winning record against Shula.

-Compiled 143 NFL coaching victories (11th on the all-time list)

-One of only 14 coaches to win 100 games with one NFL team

-The only coach to compete in four Super Bowls in a row

-Retired at the age of 72; tied with George Halas as the oldest head coach in NFL history.

Happy Birthday to Martha Stewart was born Martha Helen Kostyra On This Day, August 3, 1941 to middle-class Polish-American parents Eddie and Martha. Instilled with a strong passion promoted by her parents, Stewart mastered traits that many would consider common household chores. Stewart's mother taught her how to cook and sew. Later, she learned the processes of canning and preserving when she visited her grandparents' home in Buffalo, New York.

And she learned about the stock market (and insider trading) when she became a stock broker in 1967. Stewart’s worth about 700 million and growing; and she’d like to tell you more about herself and her world at marthastewart.com.

On This Day, August 3, 1847, in Toronto, Ontario, the Montreal Telegraph Company opened lines into Toronto; just three years after Samuel Morse invented telegraph; The Toronto connection linked direct to Buffalo and eventually other US cities.

It’s funny how time lines jump—29 years later, to the day, August 3, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell held the world’s first definitive telephone tests. He made the first intelligible telephone call from building to building, at Mount Pleasant, near Brantford, Ontario, just north of us. In a one-way transmission, he heard his uncle, David Bell, recite Hamlet’s “to be or not to be…”