Summer’s denouement has arrived in Western New York with splendor — crystal blue skies, soft breeze, cool, clear air. It’s a big shift from the clouds and rain that darkened several days every week of June, July and August.

Days like these are more glorious in Western New York, where they are infrequent enough to mean something, than they could ever be in San Diego.

Now, however, our nights and evenings are tinged with a crisp bite. Fall beckons, which makes this passage from Henry W. Clune’s Main Street Beat appropriate to share:

Autumn was a time of lively stir in the city. A re-awakening after the torpor and somnolency of summer; a period of contentment and well-being — if the harvest had been good — in the country. The frost got on the pumpkin. There was a champagne-like piquancy in the air. The leaves fell and the smudge of their burning was clean and out-doorish and one of the pleasures of the season.

With little dread of the coming of winter city folk aired the mothball odors from their heavy underthings, looked to their stock of blankets, replaced screens with storm windows, saw to their coal bins. There was a good philosophy about the change of the seasons, and the transition was accepted merely as one of nature’s immutable laws. Autumn was not a period of gloom, gray, bedraggled, a time to lament the parting of summer’s brilliant glories. Eagerly city dwellers made plans for evenings whist; for dances, lodge meetings, Hallowe’en parties, football on Thanksgiving Day, and the fine gay doings of Christmas holidays.

Clune was a reporter and columnist for the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle. W.W. Norton & Co. published Main Street Beat in 1947. Billie found the book last year on an antique mall shelf in Farmington. It’s a signed first edition. I thought little of it other than it was a nice addition to our journalism book collection until I read this essay by Bill Kauffman.

I daresay that no American writer has ever known a place for as long or as well as Henry W. Clune knows Rochester, New York. He was born in 1890, to a father who once lived in the same boardinghouse as Susan B. Anthony (who was, by Mr. Clune’s report, no barrel of laughs). His mother was one of 12 employees on the first payroll that George Eastman ever met. (Mom’s boss was fictionalized in Clune’s 1952 epic By His Own Hand, an ambitious work that merits comparison with Dreiser’s Cowperwood trilogy.)

Henry grew up on Linden Street during “the finest time to have been alive”—the years preceding “our entrance into World War I.” He flunked out of Phillips Academy, learned the newspaper racket, and soon became the most popular columnist in the city’s history. Over the years he would write six novels and seven books of memoir and regional history, including The Genesee, a gem in the Rivers of America series.

Henry W. Clune (he insisted on the “W” according to Kauffman), passed at 105. Kauffman told me Clune didn’t die so much as he stopped living. He succumbed to no disease, just age.

Bill was fortunate to spend many evenings conversing with a man who was a local treasure. I need not be jealous because I arrived here too late to meet Mr. Clune; Western New York is filled with many treasures. Billie and I expect to spend many years yet digging into our new home region’s history, culture, and natural wonders, as well as meeting kind and interesting people. We also relish the changing of the seasons. As far as we can see, Western New York is just grand. The adventure is just beginning.

Clune’s Biggest Novel: By His Own Hand