Saks Inc. division based in Des Moines merged into Carson’s. Continue reading →
I am pretty sure that Younkers contacted TSI about AdDept before the company was absorbed into Proffitt’s Inc. I have a rather vivid memory—not to mention a photograph—of a presentation that I did for them at the IBM office in Des Moines. Since Proffitt’s purchased the company in December of 1996, the starting date in the title is probably accurate. It might have been in late 1995.
The downtown Younkers store was connected by skyways to other downtown buildings in two directions.
Doug Pease accompanied me on the first trip to Des Moines for the demo. We stayed at a Holiday Inn that was just north of the downtown area near Mercy Hospital.
I remember that we went to a basketball game at the Knapp Center on the evening of January 27, 1996. The Drake Bulldogs came into the game with a 6-2 record in the Missouri Valley Conference. However, they were defeated by the Tulsa Golden Hurricane1 79-73. Drake seemed to be a little better overall, but they had only one guy who could dribble through a press, and in the second half when the starter had to be benched because of foul trouble. The freshman (Cory Petzenhauser) whom they inserted at point guard was just humiliated. It was painful to watch.
That defeat started a tailspin for Drake, which ended up with a 12-15 record. The coach resigned in March
The only photo that I have of the people from Younkers was taken at the IBM office. The only person whom I recognize is Roger. He is the guy in glasses in the back row near one of the enormous members of his staff.
Des Moines is legendary as a sleepy town, but I remember that Doug and I actually discovered a bit of night life in an assortment of restaurants and bars that were in a redeveloped area between the river and Younkers’ downtown store at 713 Walnut Street.
The system was not actually installed at Younkers until April of 1998.
The primary players in the AdDept installation at Younkers were the Advertising Director, whose name I think was Joe, and Roger Wolf, who was in charge of the advertising business office.
The Tea Room at Younkers.
My recollections of the details of the installation are few. The headquarters was on an upper floor of the flagship store. The Senior VP of Advertising treated us to lunch in the store’s famous tea room. It was quite elegant.
I think that Younkers bought the AS/400 directly from IBM. I don’t remember where it was kept, and I don’t think that I was required to install it. TSI wasn’t involved in connecting the various devices either.
Roger and Joe came to Enfield for training. I remember that practically everyone in the department except for Roger’s group used Macs. We had to research the availability of terminal emulation software for them. Joe had some very specific ideas about tracking the progress of production jobs. TSI was asked to do quite a bit of customizing of the trafficking programs to realize them.
Long after I posted this entry I discovered this photo of a meeting at PMG in Birmingham. Roger is the second from the left in the shirt with vertical stripes. Steve VeZain of PMG is waving on the right. Beside him is someone named Chris from Younkers. He must have been in charge of the Mac network.
I was not there for the flooding of the Raccoon River in 2003, but some of its effects were still visible years later.
Roger’s group of four or five accounting people was tucked away in a small area that was like a mezzanine up some stairs from the rest of the department. The ceiling was low. Everyone sat in a single row facing the wall. It was very cramped and felt rickety.
Roger was as almost as skinny as I was, but two enormous women also worked up there. I could not help wondering if the support beams for their floor were up to the task. For me it was a hellish place to work. Two people had radios on all day long. One played heavy metal rock; the other was tuned to the rantings of Rush Limbaugh.
My notes from 1999 indicated a peculiarity in the way that Younkers did its accounting:
They have implemented a great many things that have the result of increasing the budget for storewide ads. Some of this is at the expense of merchants, some at the expense of vendors. Roger understands this, but he is not good at articulating it.
Some of these “great many things” were quite difficult to program. Several years after the beginning of the installation Roger’s group was still not using the system to the satisfaction of the corporate people at Saks Inc.2
The rest of Saks Inc. thinks that Roger is a fuddy-duddy and an obstructionist. The PMG3 approach to solving problems is to put pressure on people to solve their own problems. I think this is why Joe quit. They have put a lot of pressure on Roger to give up his overly intricate accounting procedures and get with the program.
At first I too thought Roger was an obstructionist. The last two trips he has made a strong effort to use AdDept. However, he won’t give up his calendar until he is confident that every single number in AdDept’s calendar can be defended. They now have the worst of both worlds. Roger does the calendar in AdDept. He checks every number by hand. Then he gets frustrated and goes back to his manual calendar.
Steve’s4 idea was to send Ivy5 to show Roger how McRae’s does thing. Roger, who is at least as intelligent as Ivy, understands how McRae’s does things. Ivy has no clue how Younkers does things. Another problem is that Ivy is even less articulate than Roger.
I don’t know what the solution is, but it has to come from someone above Roger. Most people think that they are going to fire him. This won’t solve the problem.
They did not fire Roger, but they did try to make him quit. Liz Ewing6 replaced him as manager of the business office, and Roger was demoted to accounting clerk.
On most of my visits I stayed at a hotel that was within walking distance of the Younkers building. My recollection is that it was a Radisson.7 It was very nice, and Younkers had a discount rate. The thing that I liked best about it was that it had a Jacuzzi that was seldom used by the other guests. I found a good park in which to run, and afterwards twenty minutes in the Jacuzzi felt fantastic.
I had several adventures traveling to and from Des Moines. On one afternoon I was flying from Chicago to Des Moines on United. A tornado that was passing through the area forced us to land in Cedar Rapids. The entire story is recounted here.
I made it to the scheduled meetings on time and worked with the users according to the original schedule. Just another day at the office.
The other adventure involved a stop in Kansas City to play golf with my dad. The details have been posted here.
I have two startling memories from Des Moines. The first came when I was working up in the advertising business office. One of the overweight ladies was regaling the rest of us with a tale of an acquaintance of hers who had a foot fetish. He offered to pay her to allow him to suck her toes.
The other one came from Joe, the original Advertising Director who resigned and then was replaced in 2000 by Kristen Gray8. A group of us was having lunch at a restaurant. The topic of conversation was the difficulty of handling teen-aged offspring. I, of course, offered nothing. Joe mentioned that he had once received a telephone call from the police when his daughter had driven a car into a mall. Evidently no one was hurt.
In 2003 Saks Inc. made Younkers part of its Northern division. The offices in Des Moines were closed, and all administrative functions were transferred to Milwaukee. The stores continued to operate with the Younkers name. In March of 2006 the entire division was sold to the Bon Ton.
The downtown Des Moines store was closed in 2005. In 2014 a huge fire consumed the empty building that I knew as the downtown Younkers store.
Any remaining Younkers stores were closed as part of the Bon Ton’s liquidation in 2018.
1. Evidently the coach in 1922 wanted to name the team the Golden Tornadoes, but he discovered that it was already taken by Georgia Tech. So, he changed it to Hurricanes. At lest that’s what it says here. Of course, hurricanes seldom, if ever, bother Tulsa. I don’t know why or when it was made singular.
2. As is explained here, after Proffitt’s Inc. purchased Saks Fifth Avenue, it changed its name to Saks Inc.
3. PMG stands for Proffitt’s Marketing Group, the people at the corporate headquarters in Birmingham who oversaw the advertising departments.
4. Steve VeZain was the person at PMG charged with monitoring the progress of the installations in the various advertising departments.
5. Ivy Klaras worked at McRae’s in the business office. The AdDept installation at McRae’s is described here.
6. Liz Ewing’s puzzling LinkedIn page can be viewed here.
7. There are no Radissons in downtown Des Moines in 2023, The hotel that I stayed in was either sold or destroyed.
McRae’s was a chain of department stores based in Jackson, MS. In 1994 the stores were acquired as a division of Proffitt’s,but the stores retained the original logo and were administrative from the headquarters in Jackson. Either the Senior VP, whose name was Oscar, or Marianne Jonas, the Advertising Director, got in touch with Doug Pease1, TSI’s Marketing Director. They were interested in TSI’s AdDept software system. Doug made the arrangements for a two-day visit.
Doug and I flew to Jackson, rented a car, and met with Oscar, Marianne, and a few other people in McRae’s advertising department. It was located not on a high floor of one of their stores but in a very large single-story structure immediately off of Highway (NOT “Route”) 80 on the southeast side of Jackson. It had a very large elegant lobby and a curious lack of open space anywhere else. There were a large number of walled-in areas. The corridors between them all ran north-south or east-west. It reminded me of a maze created for rodents.
Oscar advised us to drive west to I-220 and to approach IBM from the north.
At the end of the day spent gathering information about how they did business I asked Oscar for advice on how we should drive to the IBM office on the following morning. We were staying at a Holiday Inn or Hampton Inn in Pearl, which is just south of the airport. He outlined a route that, by my offhand calculation, would take us at least ten miles out of our way on a journey that was scarcely more than that in total. I asked him why we could not just go up I-55. He depicted that route as being “too congested”.
I was doing the driving. I informed Doug that we were going to ignore Oscar’s advice. I used the map that Avis provided to plan a simple route that took us north on I-55 until we came to the exit. To our surprise IBM’s office building was actually right on the exit ramp. It would have been almost impossible for us to find it if we had been coming from the north as Oscar suggested. Yes, there was a modicum of “congestion”. I had to brake a couple of times, but, believe me, driving in Jackson was much easier than navigating Boston’s snake nest of roads.
On the first visit Doug and I somehow had a free day after the presentation. We drove down to Jefferson Davis’s home, which is in Biloxi (pronounced BLUX ee locally) and is called Beauvoir. The drive down to Biloxi was stunning. I could not believe all of the rundown trailers and shacks that were visible from the highway.
The mansion itself was nothing special. There was an incredibly large tree in the yard that impressed me much more than anything inside,
So, the takeaway from this little journey was that the leader of the rebellion was allowed to spend the rest of his days living in luxury while the people whom he and his fellow plantation owners had enslaved and their descendants were still living in deplorable conditions. This was our welcome to Mississippi.
Oscar and Marianne liked our proposal and signed the contract. When I returned to Jackson to install AdDept I was escorted to the Data Center (in the same building as the Advertising Department) by a guy whose name was Bill Giardina. He pronounced it Gar DEE nah, with a hard G—as if the i was not even there. I really only needed for him to show me where the box and the system console were, but he stayed nearby and distracted me with homespun chatter all day long.
One evening Doug and I attended a minor league baseball game, probably on the installation trip. The Jackson Generals2 played a seven-inning game at their nice little stadium. I don’t remember the score or the opponents or even who won, but I do remember that we had a very nice relaxing time.
I remember only a little of what TSI needed to code for McRae’s. Oscar had an advertising schedule that he had devised on his PC. We had to produce the same data in roughly the same format. I don’t recall it being exceptionally difficult. We also needed to create an interface between AdDept’s expense and co-op programs and the corporate accounting system that was called Walker.
At Marianne’s insistence I trained two people from the IT department on how to check the backup to make sure that all the important libraries made it to tape every night. I don’t remember whether I tried to talk her out of entrusting people outside of her department with the responsibility for assuring the integrity of the backup. This became an important issue at Proffitt’s, as described here.
The people:I took photos of three people at McRae’s: Marianne, Melba Willis, her right-hand person, and Ivy Klaras3, who managed the accounting area. I don’t remember too much about Melba or Ivy.
Melba (nearest to camera) & Marianne
Melba at her desk.
Ivy.
I worked closely with Marianne both in Jackson and later at Proffitt’s in Alcoa TN. She was intelligent and a hard worker, a combination that I did not often encounter in the business that I dealt with in the South. She was also a big fan of the University of Alabama’s football team.
I got along pretty well with all of the people at McRae’s. This is what I reported in November of 1999:
I don’t like Jackson, but I like the people at McRae’s. I am even warming up to Ivy. This is the only division that is putting in a real effort to take advantage of as many aspects of the system as possible. They are printing claims4 in all media except broadcast. I made a few adjustments to the broadcast claims today. Tomorrow we will print broadcast claims.
On at least one occasion I bought boneless sirloin, green beans, sour cream, and McCormick’s Beef Stroganoff seasonings and made myself enough for two delicious meals in this kitchenette.
Life in Jackson: I have a lot of memories of Jackson. Most of them make me chuckle when they pass through my consciousness, but I never enjoyed my time there. My strategy for dealing with this very strange place was to leave the word “why” at home.
The drive to the Jackson airport was ridiculous. It was quite close to the city center, but unless you were a bird or had a jet pack, you had to drive several miles south to I-20, exit after a few miles, and then drive back north to the airport. At the end of the exit was a stop sign. From there you were forced to cross two lanes of southbound traffic (with no stop sign) to reach a roadway large enough for only one car in the median. From there one had to attempt to merge in with the traffic in the passing lane of the northbound highway.
Between the exit and the airport was a rotary. In all of the times that I visited Jackson I never saw any cars enter the rotary from the east or west.
When I was in the South I often went to Cracker Barrel for supper. I always ordered the same thing: pot roast with green beans and unsweetened iced tea. In Jackson the waitress came up to my table and greeted me with “How are y’all doin’?” Her pencil was poised over her pad.
I responded., “Fine. I’d like the pot roast with green beans and a large unsweetened iced tea.”
Her pencil was motionless. Instead she ventured this evaluation. “You’re not from around here, are you?”
I drove to Kmart one evening. This was before the advent of self-checkout machines. I was in line for a cashier; behind me was a young black woman with her son who was perhaps eight or nine. He tugged on my jacket and said, “Mister, if you were my daddy, would you let me have a Mountain Dew?”
I immediately responded, “Absolutely not. It’s full of sugar and caffeine!” It later occurred to me that that would probably be the last time ever that someone his age might think of me as a potential daddy rather than a granddaddy.
One evening I was at the Jackson airport a bit late for my flight to Atlanta. I checked in and rushed to the gate. To my joy and relief there was absolutely no line at security! I put my briefcase on the treadmill without taking out my computer. The one person on duty let me through. I barely made the plane, but it was even more surprising that I saw them load my suitcase into the cargo hold as well.
In this 2022 photo the bottle is the New-Skin.
After security got so much tighter after 9/11, I often thought how easy it would have been for me to have hidden a gun beneath my laptop.
The worst moment that I had in Jackson came when I was eating lunch with Josh Hill from Proffitt’s Marketing Group. I think that I was eating a turkey sandwich when the thing on the left side of my lower lip started to bleed. I don’t remember if I had my bottle of New-Skin with me. I do recall that I spent the rest of the lunch break in the men’s room until Old Faithful finally blew itself out.
Epilogue: In 2000 the administration of the McRae’s and Proffitt’s stores was consolidated. The accounting and data processing functions remained in the building on Highway 80. Most other functions were transferred to the Proffitt’s headquarters in Alcoa, TN. Marianne Jonas moved to Proffitt’s, where she was the Advertising Director. I don’t think that anyone else with whom I worked in Jackson made the transition to Alcoa.
The story of the AdDept installation at Proffitt’s is posted here.
1. Much more about Doug can be read here and in many of the entries for other AdDept clients.
2. The team name was voted on by the citizens of Jackson. They picked “Generals” to honor the person after whom the town was named, Andrew Jackson. Why they chose Generals over Presidents is a stumper. Jackson’s greatest military victory was the Battle of New Orleans, which actually occurred after the war was over. He had two full terms as president and strongly influenced American history in that role.
Although some sites on the Internet state that the Generals began playing in 1998, the statistics for the team in 1996 can be found here. I was astounded to discover that a factory-sealed complete set of the baseball cards for the 1996 team could in 2023 be purchased on Ebay for only $7.95. I was tempted to buy the one remaining set as a present for Doug. The site is (or at least was) here.
3. Ivy Klaras died in 2017 at the age of 52. Her obituary is posted here.
4. Claims are the documents that advertising sends to the merchandise people to show the amount of money they must collect from their vendors for cooperative advertising.
Herberger’s (known locally as Herbie’s) was a chain of department stores arrayed across the northern tier of the Midwest. It was the last Saks Inc. division to employ the AdDept system to manage its advertising. Prior to 1997 it was apparently an employee-owned company and, at least according to an article posted here, a wonderful place to work. The writer speculated that Herberger’s went downhill rapidly after it was acquired by the company then known as Proffitt’s Inc.
The Herberger’s on St. Germain St. in St. Cloud was still unoccupied in 2023.
One of the moves that occurred shortly after the acquisition was the direction by Proffitt’s Marketing Group (PMG) to install TSI’s AdDept system in the advertising department on an upper floor (there were only three floors) of the flagship store in St. Cloud, MN.
I visited St. Cloud a total of three times in 1998 and 1999. I found only a few notes and two photographs to help me remember the experience. Furthermore, I cannot recall the names of most of the people with whom I worked, and I was unable to find any references on the Internet. So, this account will mostly depend upon my increasingly unreliable memory.
The purposes of my first trip to St. Cloud were to install the AdDept system on the AS/400 that had been purchased from and installed by IBM and to train the people who would be responsible for setting up the tables and entering the ads. St. Cloud is north of the Twin Cities, just far enough away to be considered an independent city. On that first occasion I flew Northwest Airlines from Bradley to the very nice Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport. I then took a long hike to my connecting flight, At the time1 a regional company flying with a Northwest flight number made the trip back and forth several times a day. I described it in one of my emails to Denise Bessette:
We boarded for St. Cloud at 8:20. We rode on a seatless bus to the plane. Then we sat on the plane for a while. Then we taxied for a while. We left at 9:05. We arrived at St. Cloud at 9:22. 45 minutes on the ground; 17 in the air.
On the subsequent trips I just rented a car at the airport in Minneapolis and drove to St. Cloud.
On all of my visits I stayed at a hotel2 that was only a couple of blocks from Herbie’s. I walked there and used the employees’ entrance from the parking lot behind the store.
Anne Hof.
I think that Josh Hill from PMG was present for all of my visits. PMG owned the system and insisted that there would be no custom programming. This made it extremely difficult for the president of a company with “Tailored” in its name. It came at a time when our programming staff was up to its armpits in alligators; that was good. However, for the first time in my life I knew that I sometimes could not provide what the client wanted or, sometimes, even what they needed.
Al DeCamillis and Christie Vierzba in the training room.
The people: I have pictures of three Herbie’s employees: Al DeCamillis3, the Business Office Manager, Christie Vierzba3, the Direct Mail Manager, and Anne Hof. I remember little or nothing about Christie, Ann, and the other workers in the department.
I think that Al was hired between my first and second trip. He was eager to use AdDept for all of the accounting, but he could not use it for his closing. The method he used was “closing to plan,” which meant that the expenses and income that he reported to corporate accounting always matched the planned amount to the penny. The offsetting entry was to a slush account. Evidently this was what he had always done. It meant that the monthly figures in every advertising account were, for purposes of analysis, worthless. No one could ever determine from the general ledger where too much or too little was spent.
My life in St. Cloud: My first visit to Herbie’s was an eye-opener. By that time I had visited the headquarters of twenty or more retailers. Each was either a free-standing structure or the upper floors of a huge store. Herbie’s was indeed in an upper story of a store, but although the building occupied the entire 600 block on St. Germain Street, it was only two or three stories high. It would never have been considered as a setting for a movie about a department store. It was just a store with departments. It even had a good-sized parking lot. The town itself had a much more Midwestern feel than any that I had been in.
I have remarkably few memories of my time in St. Cloud. I cannot remember any restaurants. My only recollection of the hotel was that there was definitely an iron and an ironing board in my room.
Not much of great note or interest actually happened either in the store or in the town while I was there. By far the most memorable event for me was the stress that I underwent while worrying about what was happening back in Enfield. That tale has been related here.
The location for one very unusual event involving Herbie’s occurred during one of my visits to Birmingham. It has been described here.
The logo that was used after the move to Milwaukee.
Epilogue: The installation at Herberger’s was not a happy one for anyone. In 2000 Saks Inc. decided to transfer the administration of the stores to Carson’s in Milwaukee. The jobs for 260 administrative employees in St. Cloud were eliminated. The stores retained the Herberger’s name but they also replaced the flower with a circle of red hexagons that Carson’s displayed on all of its stores. Eventually Carson’s was renamed the Northern Division. It was then sold to the Bon Ton in 2005. By 2017 all of the Herberger’s stores were closed. In 2023 there were still rumors that the brand might be resuscitated, but I found no evidence that any Herberger’s stores had been reopened.
1. In 2023 the only flights to and from the St. Cloud Regional Airport connected the town with Mesa AZ, Punta Garda FL, and Laughlin NV.
2. It was not part of a chain then. I think that it might be a Marriott Courtyard in 2023.
Up and down the Danube seeing sights and playing bridge. Continue reading →
This ad appeared in the September 2019 issue of the Bridge Bulletin.
I was definitely enticed by the announcement from Alice Travel in my Inbox in the fall of 2019. Larry Cohen1 was planning to host a cruise on the Danube on a ship called Mozart from the luxury line Crystal Cruises. It seemed awfully expensive—over $6,000 per person for only a total of ten days. However, the details were definitely appealing to Sue and me.
It started and ended in Vienna, a marvelous city that we had always wanted to see.
An optional excursion to Mozart’s home of Salzburg, a city that I had long wanted to visit, was offered when the ship spent a day in Passau.
Social activities were planned in Budapest.
The ship also made a short stop in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. Sue was interested in going to the Pizza Slanec restaurant there if possible. Her family name is Slanetz, and the owners might be her relatives. I just wanted to check out the wardrobes of the current generation of Wild and Crazy Guys2 there.
A regionally rated bridge tournament was scheduled for the other days. Regional tournaments awarded gold points, and Sue needed twenty-some gold points for her Life Master rank.
Larry would be teaching bridge lessons on the ship.
The entire ship was reserved for the tournament. All 130 passengers would be bridge players or, perhaps, spouses who would be bored to tears by the conversations at the dinner table.
Everything except air fare was included in the price, even the excursions sponsored by the touring company.
Vienna was the starting point. The Mozart then was to sail west to Passau, turn around, sail east to Budapest, turn around again, and sail back to Vienna.
I called Alice Travel, the New Jersey-based company that was organizing the cruise, to make reservations for us. They gave us the last available cabin that featured the lowest price. As usual, Sue and I had little interest in wasting money on a more luxurious cabin. I, for one, intended to spend very few of my waking hours there.
The cruise was scheduled for March 18-27, 2020. Sue and I decided to add on three days in Vienna at the end.
I ordered a guidebook for the city on Rick Steves’ website so that we could make optimal use of our time there. We had, of course, previously taken several European tours using his tour company. I also picked up another guidebook at Barnes and Noble. It had a lot of beautiful photos.
When I paged through the guidebooks, I was astounded at how much there was to do in and around Vienna. There were dozens of things that I wanted to do and places that I wanted to see. At the top of the list were these three:
Melk Abbey.
The world-famous opera house in Vienna, Wiener Staatsoper;
The Hofburg Palace, a museum that housed, among hundreds of other things, one of the relics that had been identified as the Lance of Longinus3 (or really the head of the lance0;
The Benedictine abbey at Melk, which had been the inspiration for the bestselling book by Umberto Eco, Il Nome della Rosa. which I had read in both English and Italian.
At first I made reservations at one of the hotels that the guidebook had recommended, the Hotel Austria. The attractions were its very convenient location and good price. The hotel had also confirmed via email that it had an elevator—one of Sue’s requirements. However, when we received the details concerning the room, we decided that it was not for us. Here is the text of the email that I sent to the hotel on January 29:
I need to cancel my booking. My wife vetoed the notion of the toilet and shower in the corridor.
Name: Michael Wavada Period: Three nights starting March 27
.Please confirm that you received this.
Danke.
Mike Wavada
I received the email confirming the cancellation the same day. I then booked a room at the Hotel Zur Wiener Staatsoper. It was a little more expensive, but it was very close to the opera house, several other attractions, and a Metro station. The most important feature was the fact that its bathrooms were inside the individual rooms.
On December 27, 2019. I purchased our airline tickets on United Airlines. Most of my worst experiences in flying had taken place on United, but I had never taken an international trip on the airline. Perhaps the service on those flights was better. I also purchased the flight protection plan offered by Expedia. I figured that a large number of things could go wrong for a pair of septuagenarians planning overseas travel. Seldom in my life have I exhibited such prescience.
Two opera performances were on the schedule for the nights that we would be in Vienna. The first was Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, one of my favorites. Sue and I had even seen a production of it in Prague, as described here. The other offering was Tri Sestry, an opera written in 1998 by the Hungarian composer Péter Eötvös. Its Russian libretto was based on Chekhov’s play of the same name. I had never heard of this opera, and I was likewise unfamiliar with the composer.
I tried to order tickets for Le Nozze di Figaro, but it was sold out. My request was recognized by the company that sold the tickets, however. I was notified by email that my name had been placed on the standby list.
By the end of January all of our reservations seemed to be in order. I spent most of the time in which I was not playing bridge or performing various functions for District 254 trying to put together a workable schedule of activities for our time in Vienna. I carried one of my guidebooks with me most of the time, even when I drove to the Hartford Bridge Club. I needed to become familiar with the times in which the various attractions were open and the transportation needed to arrive at them. The excursion to Melk was more difficult than I anticipated because the period in which we would be there would be just before the tourist season.
Vienna Metro map.
In February of 2020 information about the outbreak of a new disease in China began to be covered in some depth by the major media. By the end of the month Covid-19 had spread to several Asian countries. The western country that was most severely impacted in February was Italy. Cases first appeared there in the middle of the month. By the end of February Italy had more cases than any other nation on the planet.
In contrast, Austria had only a few cases. I started watching the Johns Hopkins website every day to see the developments in the three countries that our ship would visit. I was still optimistic about the trip in early March.
The shocking spread of the disease in New Rochelle, NY, opened my eyes to the possibility that our entire vacation might be in jeopardy. On March 2 an attorney named Lawrence Garbuz, who lived in New Rochelle, tested positive for Covid-19. Within a week more than fifty cases in the town could be linked to him! Most of them could be traced to a synagogue that he had attended. This disease was obviously much more contagious than the previous pandemics, SARS and Ebola.
Fred Gagnon.
A similar outbreak occurred in Colorado Springs. CO. In this case the “superspreader event” was a game at the Colorado Springs Bridge Center. By chance a good friend of ours, Fred Gagnon of Springfield, MA, was playing there the day that “patient 0” infected a number of bridge players. Fortunately, he never played at the same table that she did, and they had no other interaction. On his return to New England Fred told us the story.5
On March 11, less than a week before our departure date, the World Health Organization declared that Covid-19 was a pandemic, a word that is never used without a great deal of justification. President Trump for some reason downplayed the effects of the virus, but the governors of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut issued stay-at-home orders. The hospitals in the area were flooded with cases, and they did not yet know the best treatment methods.
Stuart Rothenberg, the president of Alice Travel, sent an email on February 25 that reported that the cruise was still set to sail. He acknowledged the seriousness of the disease, however. “I cannot speculate on what Crystal would do if this trip became interrupted and for the most part, Alice Travel will be guided by Crystal Cruises’ decisions. I will advocate and fight for our group if need be.”
His second email came late on the night of March 3:
Like you we are quite concerned with the Coronavirus situation.
We are in touch with Crystal Cruises to see what alternatives or options we may have, if any. We are waiting for them to evaluate the situation and provide us with any new decision as to a cancellation or a postponement of this sailing. At this point, they are planning to continue with this sailing as I wrote to you on February 25.
Further, we did check with airlines flying to Vienna, and all of them to our knowledge are continuing to fly and they have not offered any type of special waiver or refund should you cancel your flights. Of course for flights into Asia and into Milan, the airlines have been providing refund and exchanges without added fees, though for Vienna that is not the case.
Once we receive any updated information from Crystal Cruises, we will let you know an update to the situation.
The next email, sent three days later, was at once encouraging and distressing.
As you certainly know, the coronavirus COVID-19 is causing wide concern and among many of you planning to travel to Vienna for the Crystal Mozart Regional on the River cruise.
Wednesday, I had a conversation with Crystal Cruise’s management, including the Managing Director of Crystal River ships, and its Director of Sales, Business Intelligence and Analytics. I followed up this conversation with an e-mail yesterday as discussed below. Crystal has not yet responded to the e-mail, so I will summarize the position Crystal took during our conference call on Wednesday afternoon.
Unfortunately, while the Crystal team said they are being guided by the health, safety and concern of its guest travelers, they are not willing to cancel this specific sailing, in spite of my requests. Crystal’s position is that the areas where the Mozart sailing is traveling to are not under major traveler advisories and that all of their river ships are sailing as normal.
At that point ten people had already canceled. The email concluded with a description of a partial refund being offered by Alice Travel;
This past week, I have been in Sarasota with Larry and the current Bridge Camp. Together Larry and I have discussed as many options as possible while we were waiting to hear back from Crystal. Given Crystal’s present position, and because we are less than two weeks away from sailing, we have decided to come up with our own two options for you.
Here they are:
First Option:
If you feel that it is in your best interests to cancel this sailing, we will provide a choice of a 25% refund of the Cruise Fare only or a 40% Future Cruise Credit.
This offer is being provided by Alice Travel and Larry Cohen, not Crystal Cruises.
Second Option:
Join Larry Cohen and the ACBL Bridge Directors on this planned Regional on the River. We expect to run this Regional with fewer people than originally planned.
As you may know, this cruise sold out quickly with 125 players, making for a wonderful Regional schedule. However, with a smaller turnout, we don’t feel that all of our scheduled 2-session events make sense. Regionals with small numbers of tables are impractical. Accordingly, if needed, we would tweak the schedule to allow for more sessions of Larry teaching. We know that many of you might prefer more teaching, and we wanted to provide a “heads up” that the events may be “subject to change” based on the overall attendance.
Neither of these was even slightly appealing to us. We decided to wait for better news. It did not come in the next two emails, but an additional option was presented in the one sent on March 11.
1) On April 30 (give or take a week), we will know if the Mozart ship is available to use for our bridge exclusive charter in March, 2021. If it is available, you will have a choice to keep your booking that you originally had with your stateroom suite remaining the same. Should you choose this option, you will be under a full penalty process at this time though your trip protection plan will be carried over, unless you had made an earlier insurance claim.
2) If instead you would like the 25% refund offer, this option is still available to you and you do not need to decide on this option until we know if the Mozart ship will be available to us for next year (March, 2021).
For either of these options, you will have until May 30, to make your decision.
3) Alternatively, you can choose the 40% future cruise credit as another option. If the sailing for next March, 2021 is not available as described above, then Crystal will supplement the cruise credit. At this time, we cannot provide you with an exact amount, though our best projections are that you would receive a total amount equaling 60 – 65% of your original cruise fare. Again, this is a future cruise credit. Once again, you can choose at that time to receive the 25% refund or the future cruise credit.
Meanwhile, the opera had been canceled, the hotel had sent me an email that it would be closed, and I had canceled our flights through Expedia. Our cruise no longer appeared on Crystal’s schedule, but the management was still insistent that its new refund policy would not apply to the bridge cruise.
On April 3 Stuart sent an email that said that Crystal would indeed provide refunds, but the details were still being worked out.
The final offer was included in the email of May 7, nearly two months after the scheduled sailing date. It included a few paragraphs that detailed the problems faced by Alice Travel. Stuart said that his staff and Larry Cohen had put in an estimated 1,400 hours working on this cruise. Here were the two options that Stuart provided to us:
Option A: A Refund in the amount of 75% of your original bridge cruise. We anticipate sending this check to you the week of May 25, unless you prefer Option B.
Option B: A Future Cruise Credit at 100% of your original bridge cruise. This future cruise credit with Alice Travel can be used through June 30, 2022. Further, if you do not utilize all or part of this credit, beginning October 1, 2021, you can request a refund instead and we will refund 75% of any unused credit. In all, you have two years to use your full credit, or you can request a refund if you prefer.
Sue and I talked this over. Eventually we decided to select Option A. Who could say when the pandemic would end to the extent that normal traveling conditions were restored? As my dad used to say, “At my age I don’t even buy green bananas.”
So, we lost quite a bit of money on this trip, but Alice Travel did provide us with sweatshirts to commemorate the cruise that wasn’t. We ordered a large for me and an extra large for Sue. An employee of Alice Travel asked me if I meant to get the extra large and Sue the large, I assured her that that was not the case. She even laughed when I told her that we were like Mr. and Mrs. Jack Sprat.
Nevertheless they sent us a large lady’s and an extra-large man’s size. I have worn the former a few times. It was a little tight, but it did not really bother me much. I don’t think that Sue ever has worn the other one.
The inscription on the left breast is on the lines of a treble clef: Larry Cohen and Alice Travel Regional on the Danube Crystal Mozart March 2020
Getting the refund from AIG for the United flight took a few months, but they finally provided a 100 percent refund.
On November 2, 2020, I was surprised to receive an email from Expedia that I had a credit with them. I logged onto the website to see it. Sure enough, there were two credits there—one for me and one for Sue—for $903.29 each. So, we have until the end of 2022 to use them on a flight. Of course, we need to find some place to which United flies that we want to visit.
1. Larry Cohen was (and is) a famous bridge player and teacher. Sue and I had previously been on two ocean cruises on which he had been featured. Those experiences have been described here and here.
2. Bratislava was the original home of the Festrunk brothers, Georg and Yortuk, who chased foxes and enlivened late night entertainment on Saturdays in the seventies.
3. The Lance of Longinus is mentioned in John 19:31-37, but was overlooked in the other three gospels. Longinus was the name traditionally given to the Roman soldier who supposedly pierced Jesus’s side with his lance to make sure that he was dead. There are many historical references to the lance. My favorite is its miraculous discovery during the First Crusade in the floor of St. Peter’s church in Antioch by Peter Bartholomew. The story is recounted here.
4. In 2020 I was the webmaster and database manager for the New England Bridge Conference, the organization that manages District 25 of the American Contract Bridge League. I also wrote both the online and printed bulletins for the district’s tournaments. During January and February I was busy preparing for the six-day Presidential Regional, which was always held around the time of Presidents Day. In 2020 the hotel with which we had contracted, the Red Lion Inn in Cromwell, CT, went out of business shortly before the scheduled starting date. My notes for this hectic event have been posted here.
5. On May 1 the New York Times also ran a long article about this event and the popularity of bridge in general. It is posted here.
Background: I broke the patella (kneecap to you and me) of my right leg in 1974, the final year of my employment in Hartford. This event and its aftermath are described here. For twenty-four years the knee bothered me very little. When I got up from a chair I sometimes walked like Walter Brennan on The New McCoys1 for a few paces, but otherwise I managed quite well. I took up jogging in the following years. At one time I was able to run eighteen miles in a little more than three hours.
Chris Bessette.
In 1998 or 1999 something happened to my knee. I don’t remember injuring it, but it became quite swollen, and running produced a good bit of pain. I knew that Denise Bessette’s son Christopher had once had difficulty with his shoulder. She told me that Christopher2 was very happy with the outcome of the treatment by an orthopedic specialist who had an office in Enfield. I asked her for the physician’s name3 and made an appointment.
I told the doctor my symptoms, and I admitted that I was worried that he would advise me to give up running. He took x-rays and told me that he thought that the doctor who did the surgery on my knee had missed one of the fragments of the patella, and it had fused to a bone or something. He surprised me by asking me if my hip sometimes hurt. I said that it did, but I never suspected that it could be related.
He thought that my problem was tendinitis in the iliotibial (IT) band that connects the knee and hip on the outside of the knee. I later learned that IT band syndrome is rather common in distance runners. He gave me two prescriptions—one for pills to bring down the swelling and one for a few appointments with a physical therapist. It took a few weeks, but the pills worked.
I remember that the young lady who supervised my PT was very cute, but I don’t recall her name. The office that I went to was on the part of Route 5 that I often have driven past on the way to southbound I-91. It no longer is a clinic for physical therapists. At some point a podiatry clinic took over the building.
She taught me some exercises for strengthening the muscles around my knee and especially to stretch the IT band. What worked the best for me was one in which I held onto something with my right hand, stepped over my right foot with my left, thrust the hips to the left, and leaned a little to the right.
I performed the stretches before every time that I went for a run or, after I gave up running in 2008, a walk. I also used the step-over stretch when I felt a pain on the side of my knee or anywhere near my hip. This sometimes occurred when I rose and walked around after being in a sitting position for an extended period. As soon as I exited from an airplane I almost always did the step-over stretch before leaving the waiting area at the gate. It also came in handy for the European bus tours that Sue and I took in the twenty-first century. I probably looked silly, but that simple movement always decreased the pain and in most cases eliminated it.
Easter Sunday 2017: By 2017 my life had changed dramatically in many ways. TSI had been shut down for good for a few years. Sue and I had been on quite a few European vacations and one fantastic African safari trip to Tanzania (described here). I had established for myself an office in one of our spare bedrooms.
On Sunday morning, April 16, 2017, I was in my office working on the computer, probably on something related to bridge; by then I was both webmaster and database manager for the New England Bridge Conference. I arose from my chair to go to the bathroom. I got as far as the door to the office—about six feet—when my right leg gave out. I did not fall; I was able to grab the door frame to steady myself. I experienced a sharp pain in my knee, but it soon subsided.
The weather that Easter Sunday was quite nice. I was enthusiastic about the prospect of getting in a long walk around the neighborhood. In those days I made a circuit of about two miles walking on School St., Hazard Ave., Park St., and North St. I hoped to do two or three circuits that afternoon.
I was less than a quarter of a mile from the house when my leg gave out again. I fell flat on my face on the sidewalk. I got to my feet without difficulty and limped slowly and carefully back home. This seemed more serious than IT band syndrome.
I searched the Internet for information about dealing with knee pain. I learned about RICE: rest, icing, compression, and elevation. For the next month or two I stayed off of my leg as much as possible. I wore my knee brace and iced my knee after exercise. I brought a small chair into the office so that I could elevate it, and I put an ice pack on it until the swelling went down.
Even after the swelling subsided I did not feel comfortable about trying to walk several miles on it. It still felt very shaky. Eventually I decided to make an appointment at the Orthopedic Associates clinic in Glastonbury. I was amazed at the place. It was much larger than I anticipated. There were dozens of people—maybe a hundred—waiting to be seen. Most were older and much less ambulatory than I was. There was no way to tell how many patients were on the other side of the many reception desks.
They took x-rays of both knees, and then I met with Dr. Mark Shekhman, who specialized in hips and knees. He compared the x-rays of my two legs and showed me that there was much less cartilage in my right knee than in my left. He said that he thought my difficulties were due to arthritis, rather than either my fractured patella or the IT band syndrome.4 He prescribed more physical therapy, and told me that if I still had pain to call him. Injections could be used to address the problem.
I asked Dr. Shekhman if I could increase my mileage after I completed the therapy. I explained that I was getting fat. He assured me that I could.
The physical therapy that I received this time was overseen by two people at the Hartford Hospital office at 100 Hazard Ave. in Enfield. I don’t remember their names. I went once a week for five weeks in October and November. The prescription required me to attend twice per week, but the guy who worked with me the first week said that my problems were not that serious.
The staff there seemed to be better organized than the therapist with whom I had previously dealt. I usually started with an eight-minute warmup on a stationary bicycle. On the first visit the fellow who worked with me noticed that when I bent my leg I slanted my right knee in. He advised me to slant it out, as I already did with my left knee. He said that I had been favoring my left leg, and the muscles in my right leg needed strengthening. Both he and the female therapist also worked on getting the “knots” out of the muscles and ligaments surrounding the knee.
They also gave me exercises to perform every day. The list grew to include nine exercises, all of which were performed from a prone position. Three of them were stretches—four sets of holding the position for thirty seconds. These were basically prone versions of stretches that I had been doing since my first session in the nineties. The other seven were designed to build strength. They consisted of twenty repetitions of the designated movement.
After the second or third session I was provided with a paper that showed the exercises that I was to be doing. At the last session I was given a new paper that supposedly illustrated all of them. I saved both of these sheets of paper, although they were both badly wrinkled. I discovered recently that the second set only contained eight exercises, and one of those was shown twice. So, for the image shown above I created a composite that included all nine exercises.
I usually did these exercises before I went for a walk—either outside if the weather permitted or on my treadmill. I added one more exercise to stretch my calf muscles to reduce the likelihood of cramps. I found an old brown exercise or yoga mat in my garage. I laid it in the hallway, one of the few places in the house in which I could stretch my six-foot frame. It was a little tight, but I managed.
When I performed these exercises at the clinic I used two pieces of equipment. The first was similar to a dog’s leash. One end was looped around my foot. I grabbed the other end to pull my stiff leg toward my face. Then I pulled a straightened leg across the other leg to the side. The “leash” was also used it to pull a bent leg back to the rear, but I could just reach back and grab my foot for that one. I have good flexibility in that respect. At home I repurposed an old Donald Duck tie as a substitute for the “leash”.
The second instrument was a length of stretchy fabric that had been knotted into a loop. This one was used for the “clamshell” exercise depicted on the sheet, and they let me keep it. After a month or so it snapped in two; I did not replace it.
The left one: I exercised my right leg using this routine nearly every day for almost two years. I felt pretty good about the progress that I had been making until the day on which my left leg almost collapsed while I was walking on School St. I limped back to the house. By the next day the left knee was swollen. I used what I had learned with my right leg to try to address it. Eventually the swelling went away, but the pain still occurred occasionally.
I expanded my exercises to include both legs. I revised the order so that I did not need to change positions so often. I started on my back with the straight leg raise—right and then left—and the bridging. I then did the three exercises lying on my right side followed by the two that required me to be face down—left and then right.
Next I did the three exercises while lying on my left side. I then rolled over to my back again and attached the tie to my right foot for the stretch that pulls the leg back and the ITB stretch. I then transferred the tie to my left foot and did the same two stretches. I finished with the calf stretch that is not shown on the sheet. The whole set took about half an hour.
My left leg was still bothering me when I attended the fall North American Bridge Championships in San Francisco (described here). Quite a bit of walking was required there. It felt very strange to be limping on a different leg. I did my exercises on most mornings, but I was still uncomfortable most of the time that I was there. My right leg did not bother me at all.
Recovery: By the time of the worldwide shutdown due to the pandemic my left leg had fully recovered. Over the spring and summer of 2020 I walked at least five mile nearly every day. On several days I did 7½ miles and at least twice I walked ten miles. I almost never had any pain in my legs. The most likely location of discomfort was in my right lower back. However, I was usually able to stretch this away.
I often rested on the cast-iron bench in front of Dr. Cummiskey’s office.
Over the fall and winter I walked on the treadmill5 more often than outside. A new development was a pain on the top of my right foot that spread to the ankle. At first it only occurred when I walked outside. Later a much milder version plagued me on the treadmill as well. I could usually walk for about 1¼ miles before it became difficult to tolerate. After I rested for a couple of minutes and stretched the leg, it went away. However, it usually came back after about the same distance.
We were scheduled to take a European river cruse in October of 2021. My goal was to be able to participate in all of the excursions without leg pain. Since we decided to postpone this cruise until May of 2022, whether I can achieve that still remains to be determined.
1. If you are unfamiliar with Grandpappy Amos’s gait, you can view a short demonstration here.
3. I can picture the doctor in my imagination, but I have forgotten his name.
4. In retrospect, I am sure that Dr. Shekhman was correct in his diagnosis of arthritis. However, I think that he was a little too dismissive of my two previous experiences. It was likely that the arthritis was precipitated by the original fracture. Also, the IT band syndrome never really went away. I had rather mild symptoms both before and after the arthritis treatments. Aside from that first day when I fell I never really had much pain in my knee itself.
5. The biggest problem with the treadmill was boredom. I subscribed to the Metropolitan Opera On Demand service for about a year. I streamed operas on my Lenovo convertible PC (which is called Yoga) and watched them while I was walking. I also watched some operas and the entire series Inspector Morse shows on YouTube. Later I subscribed to MHz Choice and watched a large number of European mysteries with subtitles. February 10, 2021, was a very dark day for me. The treadmill broke. Since then I have used the rowing machine when I could not walk. On May 26 I dropped my Big Bubba mug on Yoga and cracked the screen badly. I bought a new Microsoft laptop from Best Buy a few days later.
