---
title: "The Most Important Employee at a Buffalo Cancer Center May Be the Valet"
description: "Jon Avery parks cars at Roswell Park with a job description he largely wrote himself"
author: "Nate Ledger"
published: 2026-10-03T00:29:09Z
modified: 2026-10-03T09:47:23Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/the-most-important-employee-at-a-buffalo-cancer-center-may-b-543899
language: en
tags: ["cancer", "health", "charity", "bills", "buffalo", "us"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# The Most Important Employee at a Buffalo Cancer Center May Be the Valet

*Jon Avery parks cars at Roswell Park with a job description he largely wrote himself*

By Nate Ledger · October 3, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/the-most-important-employee-at-a-buffalo-cancer-center-may-b-543899

## In brief

- Kate Fink, a 41-year-old breast cancer survivor, credits Roswell Park valet Jon Avery with helping her through treatment
- Avery says his goal with patients is to “have a meaningful encounter that’s not hollow”
- His repeated “You got this” encouragement changed Fink’s mindset during her illness
- Fink and coworkers at West Herr Automotive Group raised money for Bills tickets and field passes for Avery
- Avery said the gesture was unnecessary: “I know I can live in service”

Kate Fink is a 41-year-old breast cancer survivor, and she will tell you that one of the people who got her through it had no medical training whatsoever. He parked her car. Jon Avery is the valet at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo, New York, and by any org-chart measure he is among the least credentialed people on the premises. Fink credits him, in no small part, with her recovery. “Absolutely, I mean he’s made an impact,” she told CBS News. “Not just me, but so many other people.”

CBS correspondent Steve Hartman, who tells these stories in his weekly “On the Road” segment, reports that Avery does his job with such contagious optimism that if not for the wheelchairs, you might not know some of the people he greets are sick. Avery is aware that this is not, strictly speaking, what valets are hired for. “There’s always an exception to the rule, right?” he said. “So I’m one of the exceptions.”

What Avery has done – and there is a small lesson in what a job can be, hiding in here – is notice that the thirty seconds between a patient handing over the keys and disappearing into treatment is thirty seconds he controls. His stated goal for those thirty seconds is to “have a meaningful encounter that’s not hollow.” Which is a harder standard than it sounds. Anyone can be cheerful at a hospital; cheerful is cheap and patients can smell it. Not hollow is the difficult part, the part where you have to actually mean it, day after day, to people who are frightened.

For Fink, the form it took was repetition. Avery kept telling her to keep pushing. “You got this,” he’d say. Day after day. And after a while, she believed it. “Yeah, it’s just your mindset just kind of changes,” she said. That is the whole mechanism. There is no technology in it. It is a man deciding that the door of a car is also a place where care can happen, and then being right.

Fink wanted to do something for him in return. At one point Avery had mentioned, in passing, that he was saving money because he really wanted to go to a Buffalo Bills game. It was not a request; it was the kind of thing you say while handing back a set of keys. But Fink couldn’t pass it up. Last month, she and her colleagues at West Herr Automotive Group raised money, made some calls, and got Avery tickets and field passes to a Bills game.

> I serve people, that’s what I do. And if I don’t got nothing else in the world that means anything to anybody, I know I can live in service.

That’s Avery, saying the gesture was hardly necessary, which is of course exactly what you’d expect him to say, and also exactly why people said yes.