Fifty years ago today, the Buffalo Bills introduced their new logo. Bob Lustig, the general manager, came up with the concept. His son, Tom, recalls why his father wanted to replace the red standing bison.
"Dad said the old logo looked like a buffalo standing in a field taking a crap," Tom says, laughing. "He said we needed something new, something moving forward and charging ahead.”
So emerged the emblem that by now is as familiar as your own shadow. Other NFL teams play with logos representing their nicknames or the initials of their cities. Only the Bills play with a logo that means — well, us.
When the Bills decided to move from a grazing bison to a charging one, they turned to NFL Properties, which engaged Stevens Wright, a commercial illustrator in the aerospace industry. His wife, Jere Wright, was a production manager for NFL Properties, and over the years her husband worked on potential new logos for the San Francisco 49ers, New England Patriots, Minnesota Vikings and Kansas City Chiefs. None of those panned out, but Wright hit the jackpot with the Bills: He came up with a blue bison at a full gallop with a trailing red streak to offer the illusion of speed.
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Lustig liked the design, but he had an idea to give the red stripe a bit more oomph, as he wrote in a letter to Dave Boss, then director of creative services for NFL Properties.
"We are attempting to portray the Buffalo in a forward accelerated motion concept," Lustig wrote, "and some of the people here thought if the red stripe started out in the eye or horn area in a smaller size and extended toward the rear in a wider design, it would give more of an impression of acceleration or propulsion."
Wright did exactly that — and ever since, the blue bison has been emblazoned on helmets and in hearts.
Tom Lustig, 67, is a retired banker. He and his wife, Barbara, split time between their homes in Pittsburgh and Bonita Springs, Fla. "We like to play tennis and pickleball and golf," Tom says, "like all retirees in Florida."
He was just 7 when the family moved from Detroit, where his father had worked for Ralph Wilson's insurance business, to the Town of Tonawanda. Robert T. Lustig became the Bills' vice president and general manager. (GM was a business-side designation then.) In the move, he promised his four kids a swimming pool, and that's how they wound up in their neighborhood. Father O'Leary, the Bills' chaplain at the time, knew that a family with a pool in his parish was moving away. As the priest told the story, he recommended the home to Lustig because he didn't want to lose pool privileges.
Young Tom made friends quickly.
"I met Mike Maryan on the day we moved into our new house," he says. They've been friends ever since. Maryan and several other close pals from their days at St. John the Baptist School and St. Joseph's Collegiate Institute are going to visit Tom in Florida this month. He'll be up in Buffalo this summer to see them, too. They've been doing this for years.
"We have some beers," Tom says, "and we have some laughs.”
The Bills wore silver helmets with no logo in their first two seasons. They wore white helmets with the red bison from 1962 to 1973. Lots of people loved that standing buffalo; many still do. The Bills won American Football League championships with it, in 1964 and 1965. O.J. Simpson ran for 2003 yards with it in 1973. By then, though, the new logo was already well on its way to full gallop. Bob Lustig's letter asking for a widened red stripe is dated a dozen days before the 1973 season began.
As his letter says, Lustig wanted "propulsion." It is just the right word. Propulsion is the force that pushes a rocket into space — and a football spiraling downfield.
Bob Lustig died in 2005 at the age of 81. Stevens Wright died in 2013, also at 81. Together they birthed a logo that lives on after 50 years. Tom thinks of his father every time he sees it.
"That logo is a part of my DNA," he says. "For me, it is always there, that connection.”