J. Milton Zeckhauser (1910-2006), was a businessman and investment banker. Born in 1910 in Ohio, he was a graduate of Culver Military Academy and Ohio State University, where he was a varsity football player and heavyweight boxing champion. He volunteered for the U.S. Army after Pearl Harbor, rising through the ranks from Private to Major in the Eleventh Air Force Command. As part of the extended Kobacker family of Toledo, Ohio, J. Milton (”Zeke”) Zeckhauser came to Buffalo in the 1930s, to work in one of their Buffalo stores. After rising to vice president of the Western New York division of Kobacker Stores, he had a second career in investment banking. He was involved in many different organizations in lay leadership capacities, as a board member, chairman or president. He chaired the United Jewish Fund campaigns of 1967, 1971 and 1975 and was chairman of the local United Negro College Fund. He served as President of the United Jewish Federation from 1972 to 1973. He was board member of Temple Beth Zion, the Anti-Defamation League, Better Business Bureau and the Board of Safety for the City of Buffalo. He was president of the Temple Beth Zion Brotherhood, Jewish Family Service, the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, the Broadway-Fillmore Association, the Main Street Association and the Westwood Country Club. He was a member of the executive board of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, and Canisius College special gifts committee. Among other awards, in 1964, he received the Good Neighbor Award from the City of Buffalo, and in 1971, was an awardee of the Buffalo Area Chapter of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, “Brotherhood Award.” While serving in the US Army in Alaska in the 1940s, he grew a flower garden at Elmendorf Field. Later, in retirement in 1992, he returned to gardening, with the founding of Grassroots Gardens of Buffalo, a program that helps people create and sustain community gardens on vacant lots in Buffalo. Out of this initiative, Mayor Anthony Masiello appointed him as Coordinator of Community Gardens to counteract dumping on thousands of deserted lots across the inner city. Amy Zeckhauser is a lay leader and philanthropist who has been active in Buffalo in multiple spheres since 1946. She was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1920 to parents Lilla Lebowich Markovitz and Harry Markovitz who worked in wholesale hosiery. As a teenager Amy Markovitz volunteered at a local Jewish orphanage. She attended the University of Pennsylvania to study art and art history and graduated in 1941. While in college, she was involved with the Louis Marshall Society, known today as Hillel. Amy Zeckhauser continued her volunteering activities during the Second World War, as she worked as a nurse’s aide for the Red Cross in civilian hospitals and at Camp Lee, Virginia. She relocated to Buffalo in the 1940s, after she met and married J. Milton Zeckhauser. In Buffalo, Amy Zeckhauser was active in the Temple Beth Zion Sisterhood, the Jewish Community Center and the Women’s Committee of the United Jewish Fund Campaign at both national and local levels. She was a member of the Buffalo chapter of the National Council of Jewish Women, and active within Hadassah, the Girl Scouts of America, Brandeis University National Women’s Committee, the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, and Israel Expo 1976. She was involved with Meal on Wheels for the Food and Nutrition Services of Erie County as both a board member and a driver, and was active in the PTA at Public School 56. She has received awards for her community work including the Hannah G. Solomon award from the Buffalo Section, National Council of Jewish Women and the American Jewish Committee. She continues a long-term commitment to child literacy through the Jewish Federation and the Buffalo School system as a classroom reader.