Published: November 16, 2007 02:17 am      

LOCKPORT: American Concrete billboard stirs controversy

A business owner is standing his ground, and the women in his family are standing with him, after a YWCA of Niagara official charged his company’s advertising is gender insensitive.

Richfield Street-based American Concrete had a new billboard erected Monday on West Avenue. Over the image of a wrapped gift, the solicitous catchline, “Wife need new shoes?” is accompanied by the American Concrete logo and a greeting, “Happy Holidays.”

The humorous inference to “cement shoes” or “concrete shoes” as a method of doing away with one’s wife is at the heart of the controversy.

What company owner Kevin McCabe sees as risqué spoof, YWCA Executive Director Kathleen Granchelli condemned as ignorant.

“I’m sure it was considered to be a joke, or something cute, but with the number of fatalities we see in the domestic violence field, it’s not a joke,” Granchelli said Thursday. “It’s in very poor taste.”

No, it’s not, countered McCabe.

“I think the mainstream understands it,” he said. “It’s unfortunate that some people are reading much more into it than they should.”

The flap started Tuesday, when Granchelli and a representative of Big Brothers Big Sisters paid a visit to Mayor Michael Tucker to complain about the less-than-day-old ad near the city’s west gateway. Tucker called McCabe to alert him to the complaint, and McCabe later called Granchelli to address it.

“I told her my wife was fine with it; that my sister-in-law ... is the one who thought of it,” McCabe said. “If you know me, anyone who knows me, knows the intent was not (malicious).”

Granchelli said she knows McCabe didn’t set out to encourage violence but asked him to think about the message his billboard imparts.

“Lockport is a nice community, and this is not the first thing you want to see when you come into a nice community. ... It sends the wrong message,” she said.

That’s ridiculous, responded Anna Nemi. She’s the one who dreamed up the concept, a while back as she and her sister-in-law, both big fans of the HBO series “The Sopranos,” pored over a Sopranos cookbook.

“One thing led to another and ... it was funny,” Nemi said. “I think if anyone should be offended, it’s Italian Americans, not women. ... It’s sad that we can’t laugh about anything anymore, it’s all so serious. I’m offended that (critics) are offended.”

“Cement shoes,” according to online encyclopedia Wikipedia, is a slang term adopted by the American Mafia crime world for a method of execution that involves weighting down a victim and throwing him or her into the water to drown. “It has become adopted in the United States as a humorous term representing any exotic threat from criminals,” Wikipedia said.

McCabe said he floated a proof of the ad to several different audiences before ordering the billboard. From his wife’s woman-dominated workplace to randomly chosen female customers of the Fieldstone Restaurant, he said, the feedback was positive.

“The mainstream have seen it as a light-hearted joke; that’s all it is,” he said. “I’ve had women call (American Concrete) and say it’s one of the funniest things they’ve seen.”

After Granchelli visited Tucker about the billboard, she called county Legislator-elect Tony Nemi, whose campaign previously occupied the spot, to inquire about its ownership. Granchelli never called McCabe, though.

Instead, McCabe said, he called her.

“No one called me; they called a couple of politicians instead. What bearing do (Tucker and Tony Nemi) have on the private side? Why wouldn’t you go to the person who’s responsible for the billboard?” he said. “That kind of bothers me.”

McCabe said he thinks Granchelli’s reaction is “a little bit extreme” and he’s not having the ad removed.

Instead, he said, it will be “changed” in about three weeks — but he’s not saying how.

Contact reporter Joyce Miles at 439-9222, ext. 6245.