HAMBURG, N.Y. — In Ken Houseknecht’s earliest memory of his childhood friend Kathy Hochul, she’s a determined young girl craned over a kitchen table scrawling block print in a letter-writing assignment.
Hochul, the second child in a tight-knit Irish Catholic family, addressed her note: “Dear Pope Paul VI.”
“From the time that she was 5 years old, she’s been aiming high,” said Houseknecht, who’s now 64. “She wasn’t writing to her priest. She wasn’t writing to a bishop. She wasn’t writing to a cardinal. She was going right to the top.”
An ambitious sense of purpose has come to define Hochul, an amiable but tough Buffalo-born politician who, on Tuesday at the stroke of midnight, is due to become the state’s first female governor after Gov. Cuomo self-immolated in a sexual harassment scandal.
Hochul, 62, the lieutenant governor and a centrist Democrat, has only a distant relationship with the outgoing governor.
Cuomo suggested in 2018 that Hochul leave his ticket and run for a U.S. congressional seat, hardly burnishing their bond. Before he announced his resignation on Aug. 10, they had not spoken since February, according to her office.
The folksy Hochul has a far deeper relationship with her faith, her family and the upstate region that nurtured her.
She came of age in Hamburg, a right-leaning inner-rim suburb south of Buffalo. It’s an old farm town of some 59,000 people that stretches over about 40 square miles, a leafy lakeside community sprinkled with loping traffic circles and single-family Colonial-style homes.
Natives take pride in the village’s friendly feel, its slow pace of life and, perhaps most of all, its status as host to the annual Erie County Fair, one of the largest county fairs in the U.S.
Hochul, herself a regular at the fair, served more than a decade on the town board and enjoys hometown support from both sides of the political divide.
On recent afternoons, locals praised her as they relaxed in the village’s brick-sidewalk-lined main drag, fondly remembering her as a fighter for the community and for moderate, upstate sensibilities.
One resident, Christian Rosado, wielding an order of curly French fries from Nick Charlap’s ice cream stand, described Hochul as a “hidden gem” who will take a less imperious touch than the departing Empire State executive.
“Cuomo was just above everybody,” Rosado, who works at a Christian service organization, said, contrasting him with Hochul. “You feel like she’s one of us. And not just because we’re from Western New York. You feel like she represents the people, because she’s one of the people.”
When Hochul was born Kathy Courtney in the summer of 1958, her parents — Jack and Pat Courtney — had only recently moved out of a 250-square-foot mobile home rooted at a trailer park in the shadow of the Bethlehem Steel plant.
Her father, then a college student, worked nights as a clerk at the formidable factory in Lackawanna, an engine of Buffalo’s once-booming industrial economy that ultimately closed in the 1980s. The trailer park, however, withstood the collapse of Buffalo’s manufacturing industry that turned many local plants into ghostly relics.
As Jack and Pat’s fortunes improved, they made their way from Lackawanna to middle-class Hamburg.
Hochul spent her formative years there, growing up in a family focused on sports, church and achievement. She and her siblings worshiped and studied at Saints Peter and Paul, a twin-spired church with an adjoining grade school.
Money was tight for the Courtney clan. They shopped at the used clothing store, and their brick home at 202 Long Ave. was cramped, with six kids, two parents and assorted pets. The family had dogs, and Hochul also had a white cat named Puff and, later, a rescue cat with a bent tail called April.
Hochul shared the attic bedroom with her younger sister, now Sheila Heinze. The pair had to pad through their brother’s bedroom to reach their own, and their light switch was inconveniently perched at the bottom of the stairs.
The family enjoyed a simple existence, reveling in sled rides, playing touch football or basketball in the driveway, and delivering food donations at Christmastime despite their own strapped financial condition.
Hochul studied within the ivy-covered walls of Hamburg High School, where she was well-liked. She joined the girls’ service club; her favorite subject was history.
She could be gregarious with her friends, but she threw herself headlong into her classes.
Jim Owen, who taught her in a 28-student typing class when she was a junior, said he would not necessarily have guessed at her political future given her soft-spoken and studious nature. But he said her determination shined.
“She was a very hard worker,” recalled Owen, 78, who’s now retired and lives in Batavia. “She made the teacher look good.”
She worked hard outside of school, too.
When she wasn’t babysitting her neighbors’ children, Hochul was taking care of her younger brothers. Plus, she got a job at a pizza parlor in nearby North Boston.
Sometimes, she wouldn’t get home until 11 or 12 at night. The walls of the Courtney sisters’ bedroom, coated with Creamsicle orange latex paint, would illuminate when she returned.
“I remember being in bed, and looking over, and she’d get home from the pizzeria,” Heinze, 57, said. “And she’d have her light on, and she’d be studying.”
She graduated in 1976, and headed east to Syracuse University. There, her political interest, which had initially stirred during a high school trip to Buffalo City Hall, began to strengthen.
She studied political science, engaged in activism and joined the student government, becoming its vice president.
Along with Jordan Dale, the student body president, she led a push to change the name of the Carrier Dome, the school’s imposing — but then not yet opened — football and basketball facility.
The students wanted the stadium’s moniker instead to honor Ernie Davis, a star running back at Syracuse who was the first Black player to win the Heisman Trophy and who died of leukemia in 1963 at age 23. They brought their case directly to Mel Holm, the head of Carrier, which pitched in $2.75 million to help build the facility.
Holm said no.
Hochul had greater success fighting for lower prices at the school bookstore and for the university to shed investments tied to apartheid-era South Africa. And she left an indelible impression on her friends.
Dale, who went on to run a summer camp for three decades, said Hochul “had very high values” and “a great sense of humor.”
“Everybody liked her,” added Dale, 63.
In 1979, the school newspaper, The Daily Orange, published an article assessing members of the student government. Hochul scored an A.
After graduating, she spent the Reagan years in Washington: She studied law at Catholic University, earning her degree in 1983, and was then hired as an aide to Rep. John LaFalce, a Democrat from the Buffalo area who would become her political mentor.
In the mid-80s, she married Bill Hochul, another product of Buffalo, and bounced to a legislative job with Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a towering Democratic lawmaker from New York who died in 2003.
LaFalce said that when Moynihan poached Hochul, the senator phoned him and declared: “You’ve got great staff. I promise I won’t raid you anymore.” LaFalce said he retorted: “OK Patrick, thank you for the compliment, and thank you for saying you won’t compliment me anymore.”
By the early ’90s, fate and family carried Hochul back to Hamburg. She and her husband raised two children, and she briefly stepped back from politics, even as her family migrated to the D.C. area.
But Hochul did make some trips to Hamburg Town Hall, a squat, unassuming building with an old-time lobby and wings containing the council, court clerk and traffic safety department.
She came to advocate on local matters, and it didn’t take long before she caught the eye of one board member impressed by her articulate, persuasive arguments.
“Most of the people come and yell at you on a town board, so it was a little change,” said Jim Connolly, 77, the board member.
One day, when she came to speak, Connolly pulled her aside in the hall and suggested she join the board. Not long after, a vacancy opened, and Hochul was voted on.
She proved dogged and diligent, according to her colleagues. She often worked on the weekend, carrying a buoyant optimism as she pursued community-building projects like an annual festival on the beach or new celebrations for Christmas.
Along the way, she helped bring a domestic violence shelter to Hamburg, fought for safer streets and supported environmentally friendly developments.
“She really gets into her work,” said Joan Kesner, 69, another former board member, recalling Hochul trudging through fields in boots to see how a project would impact an area. Hochul was the lone woman on the five-person board before Kesner joined and reshaped the gender balance to 3-to-2.
Hochul urged greater accessibility in government, too. At one point, she started office hours, called “Councilman’s Night In,” that allowed citizens to drop into town board members’ homes during monthly two-hour windows.
Tom Quatroche, 51, a town board member in Hamburg from 1994 to 2010, said the initiative marked one of Hochul’s efforts to get closer to the townspeople. He described her as “unbelievably pleasant” and said, “Probably the happiest she ever is, is when she’s talking to constituents one-on-one.”
She could also turn fierce at times. When Walmart tried to build a new store in the village, she demanded sterling architectural features for the chain’s outpost as a condition for approval.
Walmart wasn’t sure what she had in mind, so she directed the retailer to a nearby country club as a model. Locals still credit her for their striking Walmart.
As Hochul toiled away at town hall, her children grew and her husband worked as an assistant attorney in the local U.S. attorney’s office. In 2003, an opportunity arrived for Hochul to advance beyond Hamburg politics.
David Swarts, the Erie County clerk and an old friend of Hochul, asked her to join his staff as his deputy. She took the job, and continued to work on the Hamburg Town Board.
After Swarts landed a job in Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s administration in 2007, Hochul moved into the county clerk post. That fall, she faced an election challenge from a Republican, Bill O’Loughlin.
O’Loughlin, who described Hochul as a “very nice person,” said he had been told that the race would not be challenging and that he would easily dispatch his little-known opponent.
Instead, she steamrolled him by a 2-to-1 vote margin.
“She is one of the most formidable political opponents in the history of Western New York,” O’Loughlin, 83, said. “I pity somebody that ever spends any significant amount of money to defeat her because the money would be better off poured right down the sewer.”
Voters, he added, embraced her energy and overwhelming friendliness.
Hochul staked out one position in the race that seems certain to haunt her in an upcoming Democratic gubernatorial primary: She opposed a plan from Spitzer to issue driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants.
She has since reversed her position, and has generally drifted left. Swarts, 74, defended Hochul’s shift as a willingness to evolve, and said it also reflects the political divergence between upstate and downstate.
“She recognizes the importance of learning and listening,” he said. “The views of policy issues may be different from one end of the state to the other.”
In Hamburg, where Democrats slightly outnumber Republicans, few carry far-left positions. The village went for President Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020, and Hochul was hardly a Blue Dog by the standards of the town’s board, which is historically controlled by Democrats.
“She was considered one of the more liberal members of the town board — probably the most liberal member,” said Steven Walters, 46, a Republican who served as town supervisor when she was on the board. “But when you look at her from a statewide perspective, because of the differences in opinions, she clearly lands more as a centrist.”
Walters said Hochul’s upstate outlook could allow her to win over converts who don’t typically vote for Democrats. Though he didn’t always agree with her on the town board, he added, he found that she stuck to her word and “let you know where you stood.”
She has already displayed an uncommon ability to win in red areas. In 2011, she ran for Congress and shocked political analysts, capturing a conservative district in a special election.
Rep. Chris Lee, a Republican, had surrendered the seat after the emergence of embarrassing personal emails he sent and a shirtless selfie he snapped.
Hochul made health care the central issue of the closely watched campaign to replace Lee, hammering a Republican budget plan in the House that would have made Medicare a voucher program. Her case resonated with seniors, and she beat her opponent, Jane Corwin, by about five percentage points.
After delivering a victory speech in the United Auto Workers Union Hall in Amherst, she left the stage to the tune of “Taking Care of Business” by Bachman–Turner Overdrive.
Commentators focused on the implications of the Medicare debate, but Hochul — who was badly outspent in the district — had shown a gift for retail politics beyond the shrewd messaging.
“She radiates sincerity and enthusiasm,” said LaFalce, 81. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re a liberal or a conservative or a Democrat or a Republican, she can win you over with her warmth and her smile.”
But she couldn’t win over every Republican, and she lost the seat a year later when the district was redrawn and made even more conservative.
Still, she came within two percentage points of beating the Republican candidate, Chris Collins, and Cuomo picked her as his running mate in 2014.
Today, Hochul has more than six years in the Cuomo administration under her belt.
She has embraced her largely ceremonial role, criss-crossing the state and generating reservoirs of goodwill with her frequent appearances as Cuomo’s upstate emissary. She’s made a tradition of reaching each county in the state annually.
Hochul’s children, Caitlin and William, are grown. Her mom, Pat, died in 2014. Jack, 85, lives in Florida.
She and her husband, who spent six years as the U.S. attorney for the Western District of New York, live in a complex of brick condos overlooking a marina near downtown Buffalo, a peaceful place where gently lapping waves mingle with the jangling of boats.
But for all her recent travels, her life is now poised to tilt decisively away from the Buffalo region; she has said she intends to run for reelection next year.
Friends question whether she’d have accepted such a charge when her children were young. But wherever she goes, they said, she’ll carry Hamburg with her.
“She never forgets where she came from, that’s for sure,” said Randy Hoak, 43, who used to babysit for her children and is now running to be town supervisor. “She’s going to be a strong advocate for upstate.”
Hochul figures to bring a blast of change to Albany. She will become New York’s first upstate governor in more than 90 years, and the first woman in the post since George Clinton inaugurated it in 1777.
But perhaps the most striking shift she could provide, as a homegrown veteran of small-town politics, is a dose of civil cooperation.
Her by-the-book style, according to her allies, will invite collaboration, not scandal, and stand as a stark contrast to the domineering Cuomo’s top-down approach.
“She’s just a solid human being,” said Houseknecht, the childhood friend, who still lives in Hamburg. “She’s a good person. She’s the sort of a person you would want to move in and live next door to you.”
