BUFFALO’S PALACE BURLESQUE THEATER entertained the men of that town for 60 years, and tempted the teenagers for just as long. A young Tim Russert and some of his pals from Canisius High School summoned the courage to try and bluff their way in one day in the mid-’60s, only to be asked their age and whether Father Sturm, the Prefect of Discipline at Canisius, knew they were there.

“None of us could think of an answer to that one,” Russert admits in his new book, Big Russ & Me, “and we skulked away in defeat.”