Doug Pease. TSI’s Marketing Director, took the call from Tandy Corporation. I am not sure whom he talked with, but he learned that Tandy had three retail divisions—RadioShack, Computer City, and Incredible Universe. All three were based in Fort Worth, TX, but they placed their advertising independently. They were interested in purchasing three copies of the AdDept system. Doug was salivating at the prospect landing three new prospects at once, especially since Tandy already had AS/400’s with enough capacity to handle all three installations. So, there would be no problems in the IT area, and there would be little or no hardware expense. It was almost too good to be true.

Doug and I flew to Fort Worth to talk with the people about their needs. RadioShack was clearly driving the project. They ran weekly ads in two thousand different newspapers. The responsibility for ordering and paying for the ads was split among four employees: north, south, east, and west. Another lady managed their ads in magazines.

The newspaper schedulers already had two systems, one for scheduling and one for paying. The two systems did not communicate at all. So, each employee had two separate workstations on his/her desk. One of the schedulers, Dolores DeSantiago, showed us how they worked. They had to enter all the ads in each one, and both systems were intolerably slow.

I am pretty sure that I did the demo at the local IBM office. The people who attended were very impressed at how quickly AdDept could build a schedule, and I don’t think that they could believe it when I told them that it could fax insertion orders without any extra data entry.

The primary custom work that they wanted was to devise a way that they could split up the newspapers as they were accustomed to doing. I could think of no good reason why scheduling would require four people using AdDept—they only ran one ROP ad and one insert every week. Most papers got one or the other. I don’t think that we actually talked with anyone from Computer City or Incredible Universe, but we were assured that if it worked for RadioShack, it would work for them.

I wrote up the proposal and the design document. They liked it. I sent them the contract for all three divisions, and they signed it and sent the deposit.

Four people from RadioShack came to Enfield for training—Dolores, Veronica Anguiano, and a man and woman whose names I don’t remember. He was quite familiar with the Hartford area and asked about some of the girlie bars that were just east of I-91 at exit 33. She had worked at Color Tile (described here) and was an enthusiastic supporter of the AdDept system.

We probably went out to eat together, but I don’t remember where. It was December, and so they drove up to Springfield to see the Bright Nights display in Forest Park.

After the training session I and the programmers were working on the custom work specified in the contract. That was when Doug received a disconcerting phone call from Tandy. They no longer wanted to purchase a system for Incredible Universe. Evidently sales were sluggish, and they were closing some stores. In fact, they closed down the entire division in 1997.

So, we had to decide whether to hold Tandy to the signed contract, or to revise it to include only RadioShack and Computer City. If we had done the former, we probably would have had a somewhat bitter client. Maybe we were wimps, but we gave in and rewrote the contract.

The installation was unusual. I went to Tandy’s gigantic data center, where not a single TRS-80 was to be seen. A female employee escorted me to my workstation, where I had access to the AS/400 that would be used for the two systems. She spent the entire day sitting next to me watching what I was doing! Maybe she worked in security. She would not let me take any photos.

When I was finished I went to RadioShack’s offices. They insisted that I spend time with each of the four newspaper schedulers.

RadioShack was famous for being a go-to retailer for new technology. During the early course of its relationship with TSI, its leading cellar was the cellphone. At that time their were many different carriers, and RadioShack had deals to supply phones and technical assistance for many of them. The carriers varied from store to store. So, Veronica asked us to add a field to the pub table to designate the carrier. It was important that the paper got the correct version of each ad.

I don’t have any notes from my work with Tandy, but I do have some vivid memories.

• Fort Worth reminded me of a cow town. It was nothing like Dallas, which seemed like a very wealthy oil city. Doug and I found a restaurant downtown. I ordered chicken-fried steak. I asked the waitress if it was low in calories. She admitted that it wasn’t. I said, “Good; I’ll have it.” It was delicious.
• On one of my first trips to Fort Worth I was a little late and slipped on some unexpected ice. Because I had my sample case full of program listings in one hand and my laptop bag in the other, I fell flat on my ass. I was not hurt.
• Most of the time I parked in a gigantic lot that was near the Tandy Center, a shopping mall that also included the offices. The only privately operated subway in the U.S. transported parkers to station below the mall. It only went underground for a short distance.
• The mall had an ice rink, but it did not get a lot of use.
• I was in Fort Worth when the temperature exceeded 100 for the fifteenth consecutive day. It was so hot that the asphalt felt spongy. The roads in that area are almost all made of concrete.
• On November 27, 1997, I was in Fort Worth and, as I usually did when a college football game was on television, I watched Texas Christian University, which is in Fort Worth and almost universally known now as TCU) play against Southern Methodist University, which is in Dallas and is almost universally known now as SMU. SMU, which entered the game with a 6-4 record, was heavily favored. In fact they had won their previous five games. TCU was 0-10 and considered the worst team in the countries. The game took place in Fort Worth. If I had known about it, I might have gone. The lowly Horned Frogs prevailed over the Mustangs 21-18 and won the Iron Skillet.
• One day I saw a list of new stores that were planned. The name “Enfield CT” jumped out at me. Knowing that there already was a RadioShack store in the Enfield Square Mall, I asked for the address. It was a low number on Elm Street. This seemed strange to me because the only strip mall of any size on Elm St. was directly across the street from Enfield Square. Nevertheless, that was where they put the new store, but it was only open for a couple of years.
• Veronica had a crush on a singer or actor named Antonio. I assumed that it was Antonio Banderas, but when I said so she looked at me as if I were from another planet. Evidently there was another heartthrob named Antonio.
• The attempt of Bruce Dickens to extort money from the Tandy Corporation because the AdDept system used a simple calculation to determine the century was explained here.

Most of my time in Fort Worth was spent in the RadioShack division. Computer City actually went out of business in 1998. Before it did, however, I had several unusual experiences in the CC advertising department.

• The first thing that I noticed was that everyone in the department seemed to keep a large supply of food in one of the desk drawers. Maybe this was a widespread habit elsewhere, but I first noticed it at CC.
• One of the ladies with whom I worked casually mentioned that she had fifty-three cats. Sue and I had two at the time, and I had always considered that two was the perfect number. I asked the lady if they were indoor cats, and she said that if any of them went outside, a neighbor of hers would shoot them with a rifle if they approached his property. I remarked that this would have been adjudged as bad form in New England.
• One day I noticed the VP of advertising spending time at the copying machine. He spent the entire afternoon engaged in copying something. I could not imagine what he could have been doing. I don’t ever recall seeing a VP at any other company photocopy even one sheet of paper. They all had personal assistants or secretaries.

In 2000 Tandy changed its name to RadioShack Coroporation.

I remember the name of only one other employee at RadioShack. Bob Quaglia² was the media director, which made him the boss of both Veronica and the lady who managed the magazine advertising.

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In 2007 Veronica called us to say that RadioShack had outsourced the buying of their newspaper ads to to an ad agency or media buying service. Since that was the primary use of AdDept, they stopped using AdDept. A few months later she called me for some reason. She mentioned that they thought that they might have made a mistake.

In February 2015, RadioShack Corporation filed for bankruptcy protection after eleven consecutive quarterly losses. It was purchased by General Wireless, Inc., in May. A very high percentage of the stores have been closed. All the remaining stores are franchises.

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1. Much more information can be found about Doug here and in many of the entries for other AdDept clients.

2. In 2023 Bob was still in the advertising business with his own firm called Gonzo Media. Its website is here. He left RadioShack in 1998. Incidentally, the reason that I remembered his name is that quaglia is the Italian word for quail.