1995 December: Hawaii Trip Part 3

Posted on August 20, 2021 by Mike

Maui and the Big Island. Continue reading →

The third major stop that Sue and I made on our Hawaii trip in 1995 was on the island of Maui. The flight from Lihue to the principal airport on Maui at Kahului took about forty-five minutes. En route our plane passed over the islands of Oahu and Molokai¹. Maui is not as old as Oahu, which in turn is newer than Kauai. Maui has two large volcanic structures, which makes the island look like a large irregular circle and a smaller one that slightly overlap each other. The large mountain is Mt. Haleakalā, which is over 10,000 feet high, almost twice as high as Mt. Waialeale on Kauai. The other mountain is generally just called West Maui Mountain.

Most of the people who resided permanently on Maui lived in the area between the two mountains from the outskirts of Kahului southwest to Kihei. That was also the location of almost all the island’s retail establishments and almost no tourist attractions, of which there were a very diverse multitude elsewhere.

We stayed in a nice but inexpensive hotel in the old port town of Lahaina, which is on the west coast of the West Maui part. The resorts on Maui were (and still are) mostly north of Lahaina or south of Kihei. These areas are very dry, as opposed to the eastern side of Mt. Haleakalā, which is a tropical rainforest. In the nineteenth century a series of canals and ditches dug by the East Maui Irrigation Co. brought water from the east side to the west. The purpose was to improve the sugar cane production, but the main long-term effect was to turn Maui into a mecca for all kinds of tourists.

The roads in Maui were only slightly more complicated than those of Kauai had been. A highway ran all the way around the seacoast. In the northeast corner of West Maui it was only one lane wide in some spots. In the southwest side of East Maui there were unpaved sections that were dangerous to drive. That corner of Maui was (and is) subject to flash floods of biblical proportions. There is also a road that runs along the west side of Mt Haleakala and one that zigzags up to the rim of the caldera.

We rented a car and drove from the airport to our hotel, Plantation Inn in Lahaina. Of course, we had to circumvent the mountain, which meant that we spent roughly the same amount of time on the highway as we had spent in the air en route from Lihue.

Our hotel was about three blocks from the ocean. We stayed for two or three nights. It must have been three. I clearly remember doing activities that certainly would have consumed more than two days worth of daylight. Sue and I both loved the Plantation Inn². It was convenient to everything, it offered free breakfasts, the room was nice, and it was within our price range.

Both Molokai and Lana’i are clearly visible from the northwest coast of Maui. Lana’i is only 16.4 miles from Lahaina.

On our first evening on Maui a person representing several of the tourist spots came to the hotel, made a presentation about them, answered questions about them, and sold tickets at a discount, of course. All tickets sold everywhere in Hawaii are always at a discount. I remember that all the other attendees were jealous when they heard how long our Hawaiian vacation was.

We bought two tickets for the trip in a van to watch the sun rise over the caldera of Mt. Haleakalā and to ride bicycles down. Someone from the tour company would pick us up at the hotel at 3AM. We also purchased tickets for an excursion across the Maui Channel to the island of Lana’i³ on a later day.

So, we did not get much sleep that first night. The temperature can get down to near freezing at the top of the mountain. I thought that I would be warm enough in a couple of sweatshirts and a nylon jacket, but I was wrong. Fortunately, the company that ran the tour brought along enough insulated ski jackets with hoods for everyone.

The drive up the mountain was slow but uneventful. It was, of course, dark the entire way, and so we were not able to enjoy any views. The last few miles on switchbacks seemed to take forever. Nevertheless, we arrived at least an hour before dawn. The tour guides brought thermoses of coffee and cocoa to keep us warm as we awaited the big event. While we shivered, the guides unloaded the bicycles from the vans.

By the time that the sun peeked over the eastern edge of the caldera, perhaps one hundred people joined us on the western edge. I don’t honestly remember the colors of the sunrise. The sky was already pretty well lit because the sun had already cleared the horizon of the ocean several minutes before it appeared atop the mountain. I wasn’t disappointed, and so it probably was at least somewhat spectacular.

I definitely remember the silversword plants near the edge of the caldera. They were unlike anything that I had seen before. The interior of the caldera was also very interesting. There were clouds below us, but below them we saw plenty of vegetation, and hiking trails were also evident. It had not occurred to me that people might come to Haleakalā just to explore the caldera.

Almost as soon as it was full daylight, our bicycle guide asked loudly, “Who are Sue and Mike?” When we identified ourselves, he told us his name (I forget it) and his hometown of Springfield, MA. He said that when he lived there he often came to the stores in Enfield to shop.

We posed like this, but Sue was on the seat facing forward. I had my hands on her shoulders, my left foot on the rear fender, and my right foot raised high. There is a photo of it somewhere.

Here is how the descent worked⁴. About a dozen people were in our group. We each were given a bicycle. One van preceded the cyclists, who were more or less in single file. A second van followed the group to prevent any motorists from trying to overtake us. Pedaling was hardly ever needed; gravity did all the work. The group made several stops to allow the cars to go by and to enjoy the scenery. I am pretty sure that near the bottom of the mountain we stopped at a restaurant for breakfast.

Before we departed out guide explained all of this and said that we would be starting at 10,000 feet and descending to the beach. One cyclist asked him how high we would be at the end. He answered the question with his own pertinent question: “How tall are you?”

The guide assured us that the bicycles were regularly maintained, and a mechanic rode in one of the vans. Sue’s bike was fine. Everyone’s was fine, except mine. I knew bikes. I rode bikes constantly as a kid. I rode bikes in 1973 and 1974 in Hartford and occasionally in the subsequent years in Plymouth. I felt very at home on one.

This bike was possessed by a demon. As we coasted down the road my bike started pedaling backwards on its own! I could not stop it/ It was all that I could do to maintain my place in line. I certainly paid no attention to the scenery, breathtaking as it no doubt was.

I don’t think that any mechanic could have fixed the problem. An exorcist might have had a better chance. Nevertheless, at the first stop I asked the mechanic to check out the bike. He immediately determined that something was seriously wrong with it. They had brought a spare bike, which they let me ride. I found it much easier to control.

However, there was a reason why this bike had not been assigned to someone originally. The brakes, which were activated by levers beneath the handles, were probably adequate for a normal bike ride, but after a few miles of downhill coasting I had both brakes pressed tightly to the handlebars, and the bike was still accelerating.

A few times I actually needed to employ the Fred Flintstone method of braking with the soles of my feet. I am serious.

When I told the mechanic about the braking problem, he said that he could not fix it on the spot, and he did not have any more bikes. He offered to let me ride in the van with him. Since I still had quite a bit of rubber left on the bottoms of my sneakers, I returned to my wheeled mount for the rest of the journey. It was a little harrowing, but I managed.

Every time that we stopped, everyone in our group peeled off a layer of clothes. By the time that we reached the beach and turned in our bikes, it was at least 80°. Don’t ask me to describe the scenery; I was concentrating on my braking. When we finally reached it, the beach was nice. I enjoyed the beach.

The guides drove us back to the hotel in time for lunch. I don’t remember for certain what we did in the afternoon, but I recall that on one afternoon or evening we stumbled upon a live concert in a park. We sat on the lawn for a while and listened to music. I cannot remember for sure whether it was Hawaiian music, rock & roll, or some combination. As always, Sue really enjoyed the music. I soaked up the atmosphere.

On the second day (I think) we decided to drive to Hana. This seemed a peculiar thing to do because the destination, the town of Hana, was a real nothing. However, there is was an abundance of things to see on the way. The drive itself, with its twists and turns and one-way bridges, was sometimes an adventure. There was always the chance of a flash flood, but the weather was actually dry and very pleasant.

I made sure that we left early in the morning. It was pretty important for haole tourists to avoid attempting this trip during the rush hours. The native Hawaiians knew this road very well, and they had little patience with tentative drivers. I remember that we had a plan to pick up some food that had an advertised special, but for some reason this did not work out. I don’t remember where we ended up eating any of our meals that day. We might have stopped at roadside stands.

We did stop to gawk at some waterfalls. By that point, however, we had already seen quite a few fairly spectacular ones in Kauai. So, we were looking for something different. We definitely stopped at the Ke’anae Arboretum. I have never been much of a botany enthusiast, but I was impressed by the large number of rainbow eucalyptus trees with their multi-colored barks.

I am pretty sure that we actually drove a little way past Hana. The guidebook had reported that the Sacred Pools of Ohe’o were worth a trip. So, we stopped there for a few minutes.

I don’t think that we made any stops at all on the return trip. We were rather desperate to reach civilization again while there was still enough light to see the road.

On the way back we noticed Mama’s Fish House, which is on the north coast of East Hawaii, where the big waves are. We either stopped there for supper that evening, or else we decided to eat there later. I remember that it had a very impressive view of the rugged north shore. I have never been much of a fish eater. Catholics who grew up in Kansas when I did think of fish as what people are forced to eat on Friday. When I think of fish, I think of frozen breaded rectangles.

Our other big adventure in Maui was much less stressful. We took a short cruise on a catamaran across the Au’au Channel to Lana’i. There were perhaps twenty passengers on our boat. I am pretty sure that Sue and I were the oldest couple.

The boat had large powerful engines, but it also had a sail. At least once during the trip the captain turned off the engines and raised the sail. This was, I think my first time ever sailing. Few people in Kansas buy sailboats for their ponds, and no yachtsman from the Sunflower State has ever won the America’s Cup.

We definitely saw glimpses of whales from a distance while we were at sea. I have a vague recollection that a few dolphins swam alongside the boat for a while, as well.

At the time most of Lana’i was owned by Dole⁵. Pineapples had been grown there in great numbers, but pineapple production was abandoned in 1992. At the time of our visit the company was trying to find other uses for its assets. It rented out the park at Hulopo’e Beach to tourist groups. It was a nice spot for some snorkeling and a picnic. The boat brought plenty of gear for snorkeling, and the crew gave us a quick class in how best to do it. I did not pay too much attention, and I was reprimanded when I did it wrong.

Snorkeling provided the opportunity to see some very colorful fish and other sea creatures. Unfortunately, no one had taught them any tricks yet, and so I soon lost interest.

I am pretty sure that the crew served us lunch after the snorkeling was over. We then were escorted around in large jeeps tp some of the camps on the elevated parts of the island that were formerly occupied by plantation workers and managers. It was of some slight historical interest, but no one told us the whole history of the island. For Sue and me this was just a relaxing interlude in an otherwise hectic period on Maui.

I might be imagining this, but I have a dim recollection of driving up to the ‘Iao Valley, which is close to the center of West Maui. The rugged scenery there was enough to draw tourists. However, the site actually has more historic interest than esthetic.

During the trip I had begun to become more and more curious about Hawaii’s history. I was surprised to learn that Hawaii did not have a king until 1810, about the same time that Europeans became interested in the islands. The man who united the kingdom was Kamehameha the Great. His greatest victory was the Battle of Kepaniwai, which occurred in 1790 in the ‘Iao Valley within sight of the Needle. A decisive factor was Kamehameha’s use of two cannons supplied by two British subjects who became the king’s closest advisers..

One evening we came up with the idea of having a sunset picnic on the beach. We bought some food from a grocery store in Lahaina and drove south until we found a suitable beach. We were pretty much by ourselves. I don’t think that we cooked anything. We had a good time just spotting whales and eventually watching the sun disappear into the Pacific Ocean.

The flight from Kahului to Kona Airport on the Big Island took about forty-five minutes. During the flight we were treated to a pretty good view of Mt. Haleakalā and, from a distance, the two huge mountains on the Big Island, which almost no one ever calls it by its official name, Hawaii

The Big Island is gigantic in comparison with the other islands. It is bigger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined, and it contains over 63 percent of the total area of the state of Hawaii. Moreover, because of the lava flow from Kilauea, the percentage is constantly growing.

It turned out that this last leg of our time in Hawaii was as much educational as it was entertaining. As on the other islands, we set out just to relax and have fun, but we ended up learning a lot on the Big Island in a short time.

If you go to the Big Island, and you want to explore at all, you really must rent a car. We stayed at the Kamehameha Hotel, which was close to the airport, but we intended to see as much of the island as possible. So, we immediately rented a car.

I guess that you could consider our hotel⁶ a resort—it had a Liberty House inside, and there was a luau every evening on the beach. However, it did not have that feeling of a prison in which the clients are both protected from intrusion by outsiders and actively discouraged from leaving the grounds. That has long been my impression of the big gated resorts.

On the ground floor of the hotel was a fairly large display that narrated in some detail the story of Hawaii’s kingdom, from the great triumphs of Kamehameha the Great not long after the American Revolutionary War through the tragic overthrow of Lili’uokalani in 1893 and her scandalous imprisonment. For me there was one surprise after another: Kamehameha received critically important help from a man from Wales and a man from Lancashire. So many members of the royal family died from Western diseases unknown on Hawaii. In fact, the king and queen both died in London while waiting for an audience with George IV. The Hawaiian royal family then became Christians, dressed as westerners, and had close ties to Queen Victoria and her family.

I found this all to be fascinating, and it ignited a desire for me to discover the reality underlying the Disneyfied stories that have been handed down. I had never really felt this way before about anything historical. Since then I have been inspired to conduct independent detailed analyses about many events.

Sue and I spent most of our time on the Big Island in our rental car. We headed south immediately mostly because I wanted to see just how far south we could actually get. The ultimate goal was the southernmost⁷ point of the entire United States, which we could reach after about an hour and a half of driving.

In the first half of the drive to the south we passed several coastal towns on our right. Most of the “land” to the east looked almost like asphalt. It was lava from an eruption of Mauna Loa that had not yet disintegrated into dirt. Mauna Loa, the largest active volcano in the United States, last erupted in 1984.

112 miles of this followed by a marathon? No thanks.

We were driving through the area that hosted the annual Ironman Triathlon. It consisted of a 2.4 mile ocean swim, followed by a 112 mile bicycle ride, and ending with a marathon of 26.2 miles. I had always considered the participants as a breed apart, but when I saw the course in person I was stupefied. There was no shade! None at all! And it practically never rained on this side of the Big Island. For the participants it must have seemed like exercising in a toaster oven.

On the second half of the journey to South Point we saw cattle ranches on the hills to our left, and a pretty good-sized herd of cattle was grazing there. We had enjoyed steaks from cattle raised on this island during our rain-soaked barbecue on Kauai.

South Point, the whole southern tip of the island (also known as Ka Lae), is a National Historic Landmark, probably because it is where the Polynesians first landed when they discovered Hawaii. It was (and is) extremely windy. However, on the day that we were there, the sea was relatively calm, nothing like the satellite image shown at the right.

When we arrived at the point a couple of people were wading in the water ten or twenty yards from the shore. I took off my shoes and went in. I walked out just far enough that I was two or three meters farther south than either of them. I then turned around and hurried back. So, I can safely state that for a few seconds I was farther south than anyone else on American soil.

This stunt was at least a little dangerous. The Halaea Current has a strong reputation for pulling people out to sea. If the current grabs you, you can try to ride it, I guess, but the nearest land mass to the south is several thousand miles away.

We drove back to the hotel the same way that we came. There was really no choice. I don’t remember what we did in the evening. We again avoided going to the luau, but it was not possible to avoid listening to it.

Our last night in Hawaii was scheduled to be spent at Volcano House, a lodge run by Ken Direction Corporation of Hilo for the National Park Service. It was adjacent to the west rim of the largest caldera of Kilauea, the most active volcano in the United States. We checked out of our hotel and began the long drive across the island. For most of the journey the largest of the mountains, Mauna Kea, was on our left and Mauna Loa was on the right. Their elevations are 13,803′ and 13,678′ respectively.

Once the mountains were behind us, the climate changed dramatically. Hilo and the surrounding area are a tropical rainforest.

The main reason that we even included the Big Island on our itinerary was so that Sue could visit her friend Patty Johnson, who was assistant editor the magazine Dancing USA⁹. Sue had talked with her over the phone but had never met her in person. Patty lived in a small prefabricated home on the northeast side of Kilauea, which, at the time of our visit was spewing red-hot lava on its southeast flank.

Sue and Patty mostly conversed about dancing and the magazine. I remember that Patty mentioned that her son sometimes earned money by harvesting “mac nuts”. I did not realize that macadamia nuts were a cash crop on the Big Island. In fact, I knew nothing at all about them¹⁰.

Patty recommended that we drive to the black sand beach, Punalu’u, on the south shore. Sometimes legally protected sea turtles came ashore there to bask in the sun.

From Patty’s house we drove up to Volcano House, where all forty-two rooms offered stunning views of the caldera and beyond. When we checked in, we received some unexpected news. We had vaguely heard about the folderol about the federal budget that culminated in a shutdown of the federal government, but we were still surprised when we learned that, although we could stay there that night, Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park would be closed for an indefinite period starting the next morning.

The only effect that this really had on us was that we immediately scurried over to the nearby Jaggar Museum, which would be closed on the following day. We found that the little museum was a great source of information about the geology of volcanoes.

We learned that Kilauea was a very active and complicated entity. The chain of islands that we call Hawaii were all generated by the same process, which was (and is and will be) still ongoing. A very hot spot below the bottom of the Pacific Ocean was causing this disruption. The ocean floor was very slowly moving from east to west over this spot. The volcanoes created on the other islands were dormant or nearly so, but Kilauea was definitely still affected.

We saw and smelled steam vents but no eruptions.

At the time that we were there, there had been continuous eruptions since 1983. However, they were, for the most part, not explosive eruptions. Instead lava often flowed down from a vent in the side of the mountain all the way to the ocean where it was very gradually increasing the size of the island as the relatively cool ocean waters solidified the liquid lava.

Fortunately this lava flow was generally on top of lava flows that had occurred a few years earlier. Consequently, no inhabited areas were in imminent peril.¹¹ We heard that it was possible to get quite close to where the lava was trickling into the sea, but we did not have time even to think about attempting such a feat.

At the museum we also learned about the hot spot’s other big project, the Lo’ihi seamount, which is an underwater volcano about twenty-two miles southeast of the Big Island. If it keeps going at its current pace, it could surface in less than 100,000 years. I doubt that anyone from our species will be around to notice it.

Sue and I also made a short visit to the black sand beach at Punalu’u. The sand was, indeed, black. I do not remember whether we saw any sea turtles. If we did, they did not perform any noteworthy tricks.

Our trip back home was not without incident. At some point during our adventures, the zipper broke on one of our suitcases. My recollection is that we tried to hold it shut with a strap at first, but eventually we purchased another suitcase somewhere. However, Sue refused to throw away the defective luggage. In her words, “There are people who fix zippers.”

I was unwilling to pay for an empty broken suitcase to be flown from Hawaii to Connecticut. So, after trying to give it away, Sue finally let me junk it at the Hilo Airport.

The flight from Hilo to Honolulu was fun. From the window I got good views of Maui, Molokai, and Lana’i, as well as the coastline of the Big Island that we had not had time to explore. I remember nothing about our red-eye flights back to New England. I am quite sure, however, that the first thing that we did upon entering our house was to make certain that Rocky and Woodrow, our pet cats, were OK.

1. Although the island’s name is sometimes pronounced as four syllables, it officially has only three. The last one rhymes with “dye”.

2. We liked it so much that we stayed in the same hotel when we returned to Maui in 2018, as described here. In some ways we liked it even more the second time.

3. The apostrophe indicates that Lana’i (unlike the word spelled with exactly the same letters in exactly the same order that means “balcony”) has three syllables: lah NAH ee.

4. This method is no longer allowed. Individuals can still ride bicycles down from the rim of the caldera, but groups of cyclists must start no higher than the entrance to the park, which is 3,500 feet lower. While we were on the island a young Japanese woman who was in a bicycle group lost control, slid into the upcoming traffic, and was killed.

5. In 2012 Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, purchased 98 percent of the island from the company that owned Dole. He has subsequently invested a lot of money in the island. There are now two Four Seasons Resorts! I doubt that I would recognize much about the island in 2021.

6. The official name of the hotel is now The Courtyard King Kamehameha’s Kona Beach Hotel. It is owned and operated by Marriott.

8. Part of the answer to the trivia question: Name the southernmost, northernmost, westernmost, and easternmost states. The other three correct answers are Alaska, Alaska, and Alaska.

9. The magazine appears to be defunct in 2021. I also could not find any mention of Patty on the Internet.

10. In 2021 I generally eat exactly one freshly baked white chocolate macadamia nut cookie after both lunch and dinner every day.

11. That changed in 2018, they year in which lava flows wiped out several settlements and destroyed hundreds of houses. The national park was closed on May 17, just before eruptive activity in the caldera propelled volcanic dust 30,000 feet into the air. Explosions, earthquakes, and collapses of structures continued on the mountain for five months.

In 2020 a water lake that had formed in the caldera was suddenly replaced by a lake of lava. A fiery plume then erupted to the height of 30,000 feet. The eruptions eventually dissipated. On May 26, 2021, the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory announced that Kīlauea was no longer erupting. The lava lake had completely crusted over a few days earlier.

1995 December: Hawaii Trip Part 2

Posted on August 17, 2021 by Mike

Sue and Mike on Oahu and Kauai. Continue reading →

The part of the trip to Hawaii in 1995 that dealt with business is described here.

After we dropped Doug at the airport, Sue and I met her cousin Joe Slanec¹ and his wife Tamara for supper at Moose McGillicuddy’s², a famous watering hole in Waikiki. At the time they lived in Ewa, which is west of Honolulu. I think that Joe was in the Navy. He was later stationed on Okinawa, where he managed a commissary. I remember him mentioning at a family gathering how excited he was about selling items over the Internet.

Sue and I also spent a delightful day at the Honolulu Zoo. I bought myself a souvenir hat, and I wore it for quite some time before I left it on a plane or in a hotel room. My most vivid memories of the zoo were of the giant tortoises and some very scary black flightless birds that were about three feet tall. I don’t remember the species.

As we drove around we listened to the radio, which played mostly Hawaiian music. I really liked one of the performers. I bought a CD or a tape of his songs, but it did not include the one that I liked. I am not sure of his name because I could not find the recording.

We also picked up a few words of the Hawaiian language. The ones that we heard the most were “Mele Kalikimaka“. Every other song was a Hawaiianized Christmas carol. The most outrageous was “Winter Wonderland”: “… on the beach we will build a sand man.” One thing is certain. Absolutely nobody associates Christmas with decorated palm trees.

I remember Sue and me taking a jeep tour for a couple of hours. The guide pointed out World War II-era bunkers and the like constructed when an invasion by the Japanese was feared imminent.

We also went to a club that featured a famous comedian of Portuguese (and many other nationalities) descent named Frank De Lima. Most of those in attendance were locals. However, they had no trouble recognizing us as tourists. They tried to get us to sit in the front row of the audience, but I declined. I think that we were in the second row. The people in front became part of the act, willy nilly. Frank was fairly gentle with them, and everyone had a good time.

On Sunday December 10, the Honolulu Marathon was held. Thousands of people were in town to participate. On Saturday evening many restaurants featured all-you-can-eat spaghetti dinners for runners who wanted to carb up before the race. The runners and their entourages lined up for the feast.

I ran along the canal near the golf course in the middle.

It was very hot on the day of the race. I went out for a run in the morning, and it really felt good. In those days the heat never bothered me much. The real runners were all participating in the marathon. That made me the fastest pedestrian on the road.

The marathon’s course ran mostly on city streets from Ala Moana Center to Diamond Head and back. That meant that the first half was uphill, and the second half was downhill. 27,000 people finished the race, a new record. The temperature (88°) was also a record.

Before returning our rental car Sue and I drove up to the north shore where the famous set of waves called the Pipeline is located. The surf was not up that day, and so there was not much to see. On the way back we stopped at Dole’s Pineapple Plantation. I don’t honestly remember much about it.

I definitely remember the flight from Honolulu on the island of Oahu to Lihue, a much smaller town on the southwest corner of Kauai. When there was a few minutes to go before our plane boarded, Sue disappeared. I ran around looking for her, and I almost had to drag her out of the gift store.

Kauai: The flight from Honolulu to Lihue only took a little bit more than half an hour. We landed in the Lihue Airport in the evening. We gathered our luggage, picked up our rental car, a Chevy Geo.

We had to trust the directions that had been provided to us for reaching our lodging for the first two nights. We were staying in a highly unusual place, and it was not too easy to find. This was before cell phones, and no one had any idea what GPS stood for. However, we were in an adventurous mood, and we had quite a lot of experience in using maps. We eventually found it.

I don’t know what to call the place in which we stayed. I don’t remember what it was called, I also don’t remember where we heard about it, and I could find nothing like it on the Internet. It was run by a young couple. They had bought some property near Kapa’a, the largest town on the island. However, their property was pretty far inland. On Kauai that meant that it was largely jungle. They had built a few small cottages amidst the trees, bushes, and plants. They rented the units out by the night. We stayed two nights.

It was dark when we arrived. The lady grabbed a flashlight and escorted us down the path to our room. There was no extra charge for the geckos on the walls inside. The bathroom was not accessible from the bedroom because of a tree that the owners had built around. Remember: this was in the jungle. To go to the bathroom we had to walk out on the lanai and go around the tree. My recollection is that the land fell away rapidly from our living quarters down to a stream, but I may be mistaken.

Sue and I both loved this place. It was absolutely unique, and we got along well with both proprietors. They had banana trees from which we were allowed to sample.He was a very energetic guy who. while we were there, spent his days bushwhacking trails. He also gave me some good advice on hiking.

Kauai is roughly circular. In the middle is Mt. Waialeale, which at the time was considered the rainiest spot on earth.The beaches on the west coast, just a few miles away, receive only about 10″ per year.

There was really only one major road on the island, although it is numbered as 50 in the south and west and 56 in the north and east. The road was paved throughout, but for the most part there were only two lanes. The resort areas were Princeville in the North and Poipu on the south coast. The highway died on both ends when it reached the Nāpali Coast. Almost everyone in Kauai lived within a few miles of the coast, and most of them were on the east coast.

The dirt on most of the island was red. Everything anyone owned or used eventually was stained a reddish brown color. The stains were essentially impossible to remove. The locals just put up with it. For tourists the best strategy was probably not to change clothes as long as you were on Kauai. After you left the island, you could keep the stained items as souvenirs or throw them away. The other strategy was just to stay in one of the resorts. I am just mentioning it for completeness; I would never consider that option in such an exciting place.

One of the first things that Sue and I did was to take a short hike together to view a waterfall that was near our cabin. I don’t remember the name of the waterfall. They are a dime a dozen on Kauai. We also drove to Wailua Falls, which was featured at the beginning of every episode of the television show Fantasy Island. “Boss, the plane!”

I think that on the first day we drove to Kilauea Point to look at the incredible display of seabirds in and around the neighboring cliff. You could walk from the parking lot right out to the lighthouse constructed at the end of the point. The walk toward the lighthouse provided a spectacular view or the nesting grounds on the hills across the bay on the right.

While we were near the lighthouse, three Laysan albatrosses were out in a protected area on the point just a few feet away from the tourists. When they stretched their necks, they came up to my belt. Once or twice one took off or landed. Their wingspan was enormous, roughly two meters.

Sue and I were into birding in those days. I am pretty sure that we had a handbook that identified the birds in Hawaii. There were also displays there that identified the seabirds.

Bali Hai called me for a legendary hike, but I had to take a very reluctant pass.

We then drove west to Hanalei and on the “Wash That Man …” beach we got the promised view of Bali Hai. We might have also taken the boat ride up the Nāpali Coast at that time. The scenery as viewed from the ocean was absolutely breathtaking.

I remember that near the end of the highway we drove west across a small shallow stream. We did not stop driving until the road ended.

I had really wanted to try to hike the Kalalau Trail, which is the Holy Grail of hiking in Kauai. For eleven miles it goes up and down the coast where there has never been a road. There was only one entrance. So, the total hike was twenty-two very rugged miles.

I could conceive of no way to do it. It would have been too dangerous⁴ to attempt it by myself. Furthermore, it would take three days, and you must register in advance. Unfortunately, I was almost certain that I would probably never get this chance again. I was in good enough shape to do it, but I was forty-seven, extremely busy, and not getting any younger.

Instead, on our second full day on the island I hiked the entire Powerline Trail⁵, which was about nine miles with a gain of 1800′ in elevation. It was named after a set of power lines that were always in view but were almost never directly overhead.

I started at the northern trailhead, just south of Princeville. Sue dropped me off in the morning. The temperature was still in the eighties. I brought quite a bit of water and a picnic lunch with me. Sue agreed to pick me up at the southern trailhead at, if memory serves 3:30. This spot could be reached on a road from Wailua, the town just south of Kapa’a.

There was no mud the day that I started here.

I had a marvelous time. The trail was quite easy for the first mile or so. It was actually a road. After that the going got a little tougher, but the views provided more than adequate compensation for the effort. There was little or no shade, but the heat did not bother me in those days. More to the point, there was very little mud.

I enjoyed about as clear a view of Mt. Waialeale as is possible—it is almost always surrounded by clouds. At one point I stopped and counted waterfalls. I would swear on anything that I could see fifty-one of them at one point. It was awe-inspiring.

I don’t remember too many of the other details. I stopped for lunch when I came to a rock that was large enough to sit on. I also remember that near the end of my hike I encountered a young lady who was hiking by herself. She started at the north end and was going south. What was distinctive about her was the very large straw hat that she wore, presumably to protect herself from the sun. When we crossed, we both just said “Hi” and continued on.

She probably was going to walk a few miles and then return to the southern trailhead. Unless she had night vision it was probably too late for her to traverse the whole trail.

I arrived at the southern trailhead about fifteen minutes before our scheduled meeting time. Sue was, as usual, late. As I recall, there was a picnic table near the parking lot. So, at least I had a seat. I had considered bring a book with me, but I figured that I would have regretted the additional weight somewhere in the middle of the hike. By the time that Sue arrived, I had been out in the middle of nowhere by myself for forty-five minutes. I was very bored and thirsty, and this put me in a bad mood. I don’t remember where we ate supper.

I do remember where we ate breakfast most days. We both liked the Ono Family Restaurant⁶. Sue liked the omelettes with papaya. I don’t remember what I ate, but I can visualize the place, and every mental reference is pleasant.

I remember that this restaurant is where I first encountered the The Garden Island⁷, the small daily newspaper. I bought a copy every day. In terms of content it was the smallest daily newspaper that I had ever seen. I did note that some big chains advertised in it. Only 56,000 people lived in Kauai in 1995. Enfield alone had 43,611, lots of retail, and no newspaper⁸.

The southernmost hotel on this map, The Kauai Shores Hotel, was called Kauai Sands in 1995.

We stayed the next two nights at a convenient and reasonably priced hotel called the Kauai Sands⁹. It was convenient to a small beach south of Kapa’a in Wailua. On the drive there we saw the Coco Palms Hotel that was in Elvis Presley’s movie Blue Hawaii.

Our unit was inexpensive and very comfortable. It even featured an unexpected kitchenette. There was also an outdoor barbecue grill available for guests to use.

Sue and I had been eating restaurant food for a week. The food at restaurants in Hawaii was OK, but the best food there was fruit and fish, both of which are plentiful in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Everything else was quite expensive. This was not the fare that my fellow Kansans were accustomed to consuming on a regular basis.

I don’t think that the Kauai Sands had even one swimming pool in 1995. The beach was within easy walking distance.

We decided to treat ourselves to a home-cooked meal of steak, rice, and green beans. We drove to a grocery store that we had accidentally discovered when looking for something else. There we bought some steaks from a ranch on the Big Island and everything else that we needed for supper.

It was my job to cook the steaks. I started the fire easily enough. I was just about to put the steaks on the grill when the rain started—the only rain that we encountered on the entire trip. It did not rain very long, but while I was tending the steaks it was pouring. When they were done, I sprinted with them to our hotel room, but I still got a soaking. I laughed it off.

The steaks were a little stringy, but everything else was good, and we got a good vacation story out of it. Rain does not play a major role in most people’s adventures in Hawaii.

There was no rain during the hours that we spent on the Wailua River, the only navigable stream in all of the islands. We started by taking the large boat out to Smith’s Fern Grotto, which was (and still is) a popular spot for couples to get married. We did not do that. We just looked at the foliage that had been pretty well wiped out by Hurricane Iniki in 1992. Most had grown back.

On the boat ride a small group played Hawaiian music. Two hostesses made everyone try to hula. Needless to say, Sue was much better at it than I was.

These ladies had an easier choice about who sat where than we did

Our other outing on the river was a nightmare. We decided to rent a two-person kayak and go up the river on our own. I don’t remember whose idea it was, and I can hardly imagine that either of us expected to have a good time. Our first clue to the fact that this would never work was when the guy giving us our thirty-seconds safety briefing told us that the biggest and strongest person should sit in the back. He was stumped when I informed him that those were two different people. The person in the back provides the propulsion. The one in front does the steering. To to right, paddle on the left side.

I sat in the back on the way upstream. That seemed like the best choice at the time, but Sue was not strong enough to keep us from drifting to the center of the river. At one point the large boat taking people to the Fern Grotto blew a loud horn at us. The return trip downstream was only a little better. We traded places, but Sue was too tired to paddle much.

We spent the last nights in Kauai at Koke’e Lodge, which was (and still is) located in a remote corner of the western side of the island. Before we left, however, Sue and I put on our Sunday-go-to-meeting outfits one evening and went to Gaylords Restaurant for supper. The restaurant is in a large plantation house called Kilohana, located southwest of Lihue, a little way off of the main road.

This place was definitely upscale. We toured the plantation house for a few minutes. Then we were seated at our table, which was outside. It was a beautiful evening, and the setting was truly stunning. The food was just OK, but we knew that we were really paying for the atmosphere. It was the only time that we really splurged on the whole trip.

The drive to Koke’e Lodge was somewhat challenging. We left right after breakfast, and it was almost noon by the time that we reached the lodge. The Geo was not happy about the part of the journey represented by wiggly blue lines on the map at left. That is the area in which we drove on switchbacks up to 3,800 feet . On our right was Waimea Canyon. On our left the land fell more and more steeply towards the ocean.

We never needed the Geo’s four-wheel drive at any time, but we could have used a little more horsepower on this journey. The poor little guy was really struggling.

The birds are moas,which are very common on the islands

The accommodations at the lodge were a little spartan. The cabin had bunk beds and a furnace as I recall. It was cheap and very convenient for exploring the most spectacular scenery in Hawaii, if not the world. Koke’e State Park offers spectacular views down towards the canyon on one side and down towards the Nāpali Coast on the other.

My recollection is that we only stayed at Koke’e Lodge one night, but in retrospect it is hard for me to figure out how we could have done as much as we did and still made it back to Lihue for our flight to Kahului. Maybe we stayed two nights.

I undertook my second epic hike while we were staying at Koke’e Lodge. I am not sure what the names of the trails were, but I suspect that I could find them if I went back to the area—without a map—even though almost twenty-six years has passed between the time that I was there and the time that I finally got around to writing about it.

There were four trails. Three of them were roughly parallel and ran from the highway west toward the ocean. Each was about a mile or two in length, and each sloped rather gently through the forest. The fourth trail ran north-south and connected the endpoints of the other three trails. The north-south trail ran along the side of the hill/mountain and afforded stunning views of the ocean and the steeply sloping land between the trail and the ocean. Each of the trail’s two legs was also a mile or two.

My plan was to stroll down the northernmost of the three east-west trails, hike the entire cliffside trail from the north end to the south end, and then walk up the southernmost east-west trail back to the highway, where Sue would pick me up. There was one awkward difficulty. The part of the cliffside trail that linked the northern trail with the middle trail was closed. I directed Sue to leave me off at the entrance to the northern trail anyway.

For me the ideal walking stick is five or six feet long and very sturdy. It also needs a comfortable spot to grip.

The walk on the northern trail was delightful. The trail was well maintained, and the atmosphere was quite invigorating. Best of all, I found a very good walking stick early in the journey. When I reached the end of the trail, the view of the ocean and the sloping land down to the ocean was exceptional.

There was indeed a sign that said that the trail going south was closed, but there was nothing that prevented or even actively discouraged walking on it. So, I decided to give it a go. The path was narrow, and the slope of the falloff was severe in spots. On the other hand, there was quite a bit of bushes and shrubbery on the hillside. Even if I slipped, I was fairly confident that I could stop myself and scramble back up onto the path. It was steep, but it wasn’t that steep.

I encountered no difficulty until I was within a quarter of a mile of the intersection with the middle trail. The trail had washed out. I could see the trail on the other side of a patch of about fifteen or twenty feet. Getting to the rest of the trail would definitely be tricky. If I had been sensible, I would have turned around at this point and returned back the way that I came.

Instead, I put one foot forward. The ground held. I planted the stick ahead of me on the downhill side and took a step. So far, so good. I only had to repeat this process three or four times to make it past the dangerous area. Whoever decided to close the trail definitely made the right decision, but I never came close to slipping.

Shortly before I reached the southernmost trail, a truly amazing thing occurred. I once again crossed paths with the lady with the big hat. We exchanged greetings again. I think that we both were amazed. There were literally hundreds of hiking trails in Kauai. I had encountered only a few fellow hikers on either occasion and only one singleton, and I saw her twice on separate days on the opposite side of the island!

The whole experience was truly exhilarating. There is something about accepting danger and then overcoming it that is very satisfying. Maybe it has something to do with testosterone. I was in an exceptionally good mood when Sue picked me up on the highway near the southern trail.

Sue and I both spent quite a bit of time in Koke’e State Park. There are dozens of interesting trails here. We walked out together to one of the overlooks of the Nāpali Coast. The view was amazing. People lived in that rugged land at one time, but no one has attempted to civilize it in centuries.

I had hoped to find time to hike the trail that led to and then through the Alaka’i Swamp, which is literally like nowhere else on earth. It is the world’s loftiest rain forest. Unfortunately, I could not figure out how to work it into the schedule.

On our last day Sue ran out of energy. She wanted to hang around near the lodge. I recall that some guys were getting together a pig hunt. Sue just wanted to spend some time taking photos of flowers and birds. I took advantage of this to take a quick journey on the Pihea Trail, the one that leads to the swamp trail. I walked it at a very fast pace. I stopped to look at only a few sights, notably the view of the canyon. I got as far as the start of the boardwalk, but I needed to turn around before I actually reached the swamp trail. I had already been gone longer that I said that I would.

So, maybe next time for the swamp trail. Whom am I kidding?

I also had a goal of hiking the canyon trail, but there was no time for it. The helicopter tour would have been exciting, but it was also expensive and somewhat time-consuming.

So, we terminated our stay on Kauai by driving the Geo back to Lihue. The Geo liked driving downhill a lot better tShan the trip up to Kope’e. We stopped to fill up the car with gasoline before returning it. Then we got our tickets and flew to the Kahului Airport on Maui.

I fell deeply in love with Kauai. I gave serious consideration to moving our residence and the business there. We did most of our business using phone lines. It was a pipe dream. Sue would not be able to stand it, and, even if Denise agreed, we would need to hire new employees. Sigh.

The description of the remainder of the Hawaii Trip is posted here.

1. Sue’s family’s name is Slanetz. In the Slovak language the last letter looks like a c but is pronounced like tz. However, Joe pronounces his last name SLANN eck.

3. Hawaiian pronunciation is rather easy. There are only twelve letters, and they are pronounced consistently. The vowels have the same sound that they have in Italian or Spanish. “Kauai” is somewhat difficult because of the four consecutive vowels. Until I heard someone pronounce the name of the racehorse, Kauai King, I thought that it was pronounced COW eye. In actuality, it has three syllables, with the accent on the second one: kah WAH ee.

2. Moose McGillicuddy’s closed for good in February of 2021.

5 The trail is still open, but its website (available here) lists such potential dangers as falling rocks, flash flood, strong current, hazardous cliff, and dangerous shorebreak.

Not even the sign is maintained in 2021.

5. I was considering replicating this feat on our second trip to Hawaii in 2018, but when I looked the Powerline Trail up on the Internet, I discovered that it was no longer maintained. That was a virtual guarantee that parts of the trail were overgrown, and parts were probably swamp. It did not sound like a good idea for a septuagenarian.

6. The Ono Family Restaurant survived for two decades after we ate breakfast there, but it could not survive the pandemic. It closed for good in 2020.

7. The Garden Island actually became a client of TSI when Macy’s West, which used A^xN, TSI’s Internet service for insertion orders (described in detail here), acquired Liberty House. They continued to subscribe to the service until TSI’s last days in 2014 even though control of Macy’s advertising had earlier been transferred to New York in 2009. That office did not use A^xN, for reasons that are described here.

8. Since I had twice been an editor of a newspaper—News and Views in eighth grade and Rumsey Roomers in college—I have occasionally considered starting a newspaper for the town in which we lived. Only one name was appropriate: The Enfield Flyrule.

9. When we stayed there it was run by the Kimi family. The people who bought it from the Kimis changed the name to Kauai Shores. I don’t understand the use of the plural. Nearby, there are certainly lots of sands, or at least grains of sand, but only one shore.

1997-2005 AdDept Client: Proffitt’s Inc./Saks Inc.

Posted on August 13, 2021 by Mike

Holding company in Birmingham, AL. Continue reading →

Proffitt’s (under the name of the Elliott-Proffitt Co.) began in 1919 as a department store in downtown Maryville (locally pronounced MARE vuhl) TN. Decades after it became a chain of department stores TSI’s AdDept system was installed in its advertising department. The account of that process is detailed here.

In 1984 the company and all of its stores were purchased by the RBM Acquisitions Co. It was led by R. Brad Martin, who had previously been a very young member of the Tennessee Legislature and a real estate mogul. Proffitt’s Inc. soon began an ambitious series of acquisitions and openings of new stores. In 1994 it purchased McRae’s, a chain of department stores based in Jackson, MS, that was actually larger than Proffitt’s by any measure except ambition.

Previous new stores that had been purchased by RBM were run under the Proffitt’s logo and administered from the company’s headquarters in Alcoa, TN. McRae’s was allowed to run as a separate division, as were subsequent acquisitions of the Parisian, Younkers, Herberger’s, and Carson Pirie Scott.

The lobby in Birmingham was rather impressive.

After the Parisian division was acquired, the corporate headquarters was moved to a beautiful office located at 750 Lakeshore Parkway² on the north side of Birmingham, AL. However, all advertising was still administered by each local division in its home location. The data center and the IT department were at McRae’s headquarters in Jackson, MS.

TSI had repeatedly sent promotional materials to advertising directors at each of the divisions. Doug Pease, TSI’s marketing director, followed up on the mailings and eventually encountered Fran Jose², who was a top executive of Proffitt’s Marketing Group (PMG), the organization that supervised the advertising departments in the divisions. He was impressed enough with the AdDept system that PMG made the decision to implement it in each of the advertising departments. By the time that I got involved in this endeavor Fran had moved on. This was fine. Doug referred to him as “a little Napoleon”.

In 1998 Proffitt’s Inc. bought Saks Fifth Avenue and immediately changed the name of the company to Saks Inc. AdDept had been installed in all of the divisions, including Saks, although Carson’s was no longer using the system (as explained here). In 2000 Martin divided the company into two divisions. One was Saks, the other was everyone else. Martin then moved to New York and ran Saks with little success for a few years before he had to sell it and all of the other pieces of his crumbling empire.

The people: I dealt mostly with Steve VeZain³, who hailed from Louisiana and LSU. He joined PMG in September of 1997. Steve had rather grandiose plans about managing the advertising departments of the various divisions. He made a couple of trips to visit TSI to discuss some of them. Only a few of those were ever put into play. I have rather extensive notes dating from 1999 about our interactions.

Steve’s wife worked in the same building in Birmingham as he did, but I think that she was a buyer or maybe the boss of buyers for the Parisian.

Steve took me to supper several times when I was in Birmingham. His favorite restaurant was Joe’s Crab Shack. I think that his wife accompanied us on one occasion.

I fond the above photo after I had posted this entry. I think that it must have been taken in 1996 or 1997 after the installation at Younkers but before the installation at Proffitt’s. I have no memory of this meeting, but attached post-its identified the participants. From left to right they were Tom Henry from Proffitt’s, Roger Wolf from Younkers, Tom Waltz and Cindy Karnoupakis from Proffitt’s, a guy named Chris from Younkers, and Steve VeZain.

One of Steve’s first moves was to hire Josh Hill, a native of Minnesota who was a recent graduate of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. In fact, Despite his accent, Josh was designated as Mr. UAB in 1997.

I spent a fair amount of time with Josh at various divisions. Steve sent him to oversee some of the AdDept installations, and he accompanied Steve on at least one of his visits to TSI.

Josh liked to lift weights and to ride his motorcycle at high speeds. I don’t know why he (or anyone else who grew up north of the Mason-Dixon line) decided to come to Birmingham for his education.

In late 1999 my sister, Jamie Lisella, quit working at TSI and moved to Birmingham to work for Steve VeZain at PMG. The circumstances have been detailed here.

In January of 2000 Jamie told me that Josh’s car had been involved in a serious accident, but he was OK. She also informed me that the employees at Saks Inc. were allowed to sign on to the Internet, and many of them wasted a lot of time there.

I have only sketchy memories of others who worked at PMG (or whatever it was later called). Kathy D’Andrea kept the corporate books for marketing. I don’t remember her, but I found a photo of her. One of the documents that I found mentions that she would be at Herberger’s at the same time that I was scheduled, but I do not remember seeing her there.

Dave Weeast was in charge of the AS/400’s for all of the divisions. We dealt with him fairly often, but I don’t think that I ever met him. I think that he worked in Jackson, MS, for Windell Manuel⁵.

I have no recollection of Corky Wicks⁶, who worked as a business analyst for the company from 1997-2006, but his name is in my notes.

By March of 2001 Jamie had left Saks Inc. I found an email from her to Dave Weeast and Windell Manuel, about the five AS/400’s that had been running AdDept.

What was the purpose of PMG? I had the impression that it did not have a specific agenda. Perhaps the idea was to impose standards upon the advertising departments of the divisions that had, in most cases, been operating independently for decades. What standards? I think that was a big part of the problem. TSI probably did not help. One of our selling points was that the system was easily adaptable to different philosophies of the administration of marketing. Some of the procedures used by the divisions were real outliers.

I think that Steve, Josh, and Jamie had all left Saks by early 2001. Perhaps the marketing group itself had been disbanded. The other organizations that we had worked with had nothing that was similar to PMG.

SPM: All five divisions (and even Saks Fifth Avenue) had been using an ad agency named SPM to place their newspaper ads. Saks dropped them some time in 1997 or 1998. All of the divisions hated working with SPM. Steve decided to drop them in the Spring of 1999. This was a break for TSI. All the divisions suddenly needed to produce insertion orders. We were rapidly able to implement insertion orders and faxing without too much difficulty.

Three interesting visits: This event was not mentioned in my notes, and so it probably happened before July of 1999. When I arrived in Birmingham on the first day of that visit Steve told me that he wanted me to attend a demonstration of a system that was being used for some aspect of either creation or production of ads at Carson’s.

The demo was conducted by two people from a software company that I had never heard of. These two guys were accompanied by Ed Carroll, who was still the Senior VP there. I knew him fairly well. He was the SVP at P.A. Bergner when the company declared bankruptcy in the middle of the AdDept installation. When Ed Carroll saw me he greeted me with a sarcastic “What are YOU doing here?”

I wasn’t quite sure myself. Steve had said that they were interested in implementing an interface with AdDept. After the demo—which I did not think was very good—I went to wherever I was supposed to be on this trip, probably upstairs in the Parisian advertising department. I later asked Steve if he wanted me to pursue this and quote an interface. He quickly dismissed that idea.

On another trip the SVP of advertising for Herberger’s—I don’t remember his name—was there for a meeting. At the time Herberger’s was about open two new stores in the Minneapolis area. They had scheduled an open house to hire people to work in the stores, but they had forgotten to run ads in the local newspapers. He spent several hours on the phone with local radio stations dictating copy to them and begging them to run ads for his company. I found it amazing that he did not trust anyone back in St. Cloud to handle this for him.

I also encountered the advertising director from Saks Fifth Avenue, the company that had just been acquired. I don’t remember her name, but at the time I knew her fairly well. I always wondered why she was in Birmingham that day. Maybe they were just telling her not to worry about any interference in the way that SFA did business.

The big project: At the end of July in 1999 Steve and Josh came to TSI’s office and described how they wanted a system for the corporate marketing group that was fed by the other five systems. Apparently they were able to sign on to the systems and get some of the information that they wanted. However, they wanted all of this to happen automatically when the departments closed their books at the end of the month.

I could see many problems. The divisions did not all play by the same rules. The May Company and Macy’s had methods of standardizing the reporting of their many and diverse divisions. I knew that some of the Saks Inc. divisions were keeping their records in ways that were anything but standard. I am not sure that some of them were even legal. This sounded to Denise Bessette and me like a huge amount of work with no evident benefit.

Problems at the divisions: My notes from 2000 foreshadow some big problems that were beginning to appear:

The infrastructure at the divisions needs attention. Each division has only one printer, and it fails often. They should get the most recent version of Client Access and set up sessions for the printers (at least some of which were put on the Mac networks for some reason). Some divisions use a version of 5PM Mac software that has bugs. Dave Weeast is in charge of all of the AS/400’s in Saks Inc., and he is hard to get in touch with.
The divisions cannot approve requests unless they take it out of their own budgets, which they will do under practically no circumstances. The current process for approving requests is difficult. The divisions request something. Denise and I write a description of it and send it to Jamie. She runs it by Steve when she gets a chance. There are dozens of issues from the divisions from the pre-Jamie period that have never been addressed. If Steve thinks there is some merit in the request (which usually means that one of the Senior VP’s has been yelling at him), he tells me to quote it. I quote it and send the quote to Jamie. She tries to get Steve to look at it and approve it.

I can’t look at hobbles, and I can’t stand fences. Don’t fence me in.

The email: By 2000 AdDept systems had been installed on separate AS/400 systems in Des Moines IA (Younkers), Alcoa TN (Proffitt’s), Jackson MI (McRae’s), St. Cloud MN (Herberger’s), and Birmingham (Parisian). When the responsibility for advertising for McRae’s was transferred to the Proffitt’s division, and the ad scheduling for Herberger’s was moved to the Carson’s division, Jamie arranged for the McRae’s and the Herberger’s AS/400 systems to be shipped to the computer room in Birmingham. I know this because I was a cc on an email that she sent to Dave Weeast and Windell Manuel on March 29 of 2001.

Dave, Windell,
I understand there is some confusion regarding the location and status of the five AS/400’s that I administered. I will be happy to work with the two of you to facilitate any restructuring of these systems. I would prefer to communicate only with you, as I have not had much, if any, cooperation from the personnel in Birmingham and I am tired of doing charity work. I reviewed this information repeatedly with management and IT staff at Saks Inc. prior to my departure. I would like to reiterate that sending one of these AS/400’s to Jackson for their big ticket system was being done as a favor.
There are three systems on hand in Birmingham; PARADV, HERBADV and MCRAEADV. All three boxes are located in the computer room on the second floor. The PARADV system is active and used by the advertising department of Parisian. Operating system level is V4R2, but the upgrade package V4R4 is on hand in Birmingham.
HERBADV and MCRAEADV are the surplus AS/400 systems due to fusion. I had these boxes transported to Birmingham last fall and upgraded the operating systems on both to V4R4. The IP addresses for network connection for these systems has been issued through Jackson and changed on both of the AS/400’s. However, the connection failed. I had been working with Jerry Aultman in Birmingham’s IT Department to get this resolved. My hunch is that the problem lies with the DNS entry, or lack thereof. Additionally, the advertising personnel also utilize the IBM FAX/400 product which requires installation of an inbound and outbound fax line via 7852 modem.
I ordered these lines through Jeff Bass. Although I provided him with account numbers to pay for installation and usage on these lines, as of my departure on 3/14, I had not been advised that they were installed and functional.
The fourth system, YNKADV, is physically located in Des Moines. This machine is an older model 40e. This is the system I had planned to ship to Jackson for the Big Ticket application. Before it can be shipped, the network connection on the HERBADV AS/400 must be resolved and the MAC connectivity issues addressed. Two phone lines must be active. The base AdDept software application is intact on this box. The data libraries for TSI’s AdDept application need to be copied and installed. TSI will need to consult on this process, as well as the installation of any subsequent custom software programming and the fax configuration. I have cleared out the user profiles on the HERBADV box and added the current Younkers’ users.
I had also planned to move the existing PROFADV system (located in Alcoa, TN – V4R2- also an older model) to the MCRAEADV box. The MCRAEADV system holds the base software previously used by McRae’s advertising personnel. This will be an advantage on the software side. Once again, the network, phone, fax and software issues described above apply to PROFADV, also.
All of these AS/400’s are covered by a software subscription valid through December, 2001. PARADV, HERBADV, MCRAEADV and PROFADV are all covered by a one-year, 24 x 7, focal point contract for IBM hardware and software. The YNKADV system is set up on monthly maintenance, so that the monthly payment could be assumed by Jackson after it is transported there. However, I did purchase a software subscription for YNKADV, so the Jackson personnel could order the OS upgrade at no cost. Mike Wavada at TSI should be able to assist with any questions regarding the IBM maintenance, as they were purchased through his company as a business partner with first right of refusal.
If there are any additional issues, please let me know.

I found this email remarkable. I don’t remember what model of AS/400 Younkers had, but there was never a model e40. However, the most remarkable thing was that Jamie had, at least according to this email, arranged for the two boxes to be shipped from St. Cloud and Jackson. I doubt that anyone cared much about the box in Herberger’s advertising department, but the one in Jackson was in the corporate data center. I cannot imagine how she had managed to get it out of there. It took a lot of chutzpah and, I imagine, some maneuvering.

After Steve, Jamie, and (presumably) Josh left Saks Inc. in 2001, we still had rather good relationships with the advertising people at Younkers, Proffitt’s, Parisian, and, especially, Saks Fifth Avenue. We were never able to convince Carson’s to use the AdDept system even after the division was purchased by the Bon Ton, which had been using it for years.

1. Incredibly, Brad Martin has no Wikipedia page. A biography is posted here.

2. Beautiful photos of this building were posted here. It is apparently occupied in 2022 by Evonik Industries.

3. I don’t think that I ever got to meet Fran Jose. He does not appear to have a LinkedIn page.

4. Steve VeZain left Saks Inc. in 2001. His LinkedIn page is here.

5. 6. Windell Manuel’s LinkedIn page is here.

6. Corky Wicks LinkedIn page is here.

7. SPM was affiliated with an agency that handled newspaper advertising for Sears and a few other retailers. The two agencies were across the street from each other. I met with them when I visited Sears. That adventure is recounted here. In 2023 SPM was still in business. Its website could be found here.

1997-2007 TSI: AdDept Clients: Tandy Corporation Divisions

Posted on August 13, 2021 by Mike

RadioShack and Computer City. Continue reading →

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.

Tandy Center in 20002. The Mall was between the two towers. Computer City was in the tower on the left. I think that this photo was taken after the subway was shut down.

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 subway stop for workers and shoppers.

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.

The two people whose names I cannot remember.

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.

The new RadioShack store in Enfield was less than a quarter of a mile north of the existing store in Enfield Square.

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.

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.

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.

1991-2012 TSI: AdDept: The Whiffs

Posted on August 8, 2021 by Mike

A few notable failures. Continue reading →

We had a very good record of closing AdDept sales. Most of the whiffs fell into one of two categories:

Divisions of Federated Department Stores. Our relationships with various Federated divisions are described in detail here. They are not included in this entry.
Companies that did not advertise enough to justify a high-quality multi-user centralized database. We actually sold the AdDept system to a couple of these anyway.

TSI’s first efforts to market AdDept were concentrated around New York and New England. I figured that there were not very many retailers who could afford the system to keep track of advertising, but, then again, I did not really expect to justify the cost of the system at Macy’s in the very first module that we activated—ad measurement.

The strip mall in which the Enfield store was located was named after Caldor.

Our first attempt was a quintessential whiff. Kate Behart (much more about her here) had been in contact with someone in the advertising department at Caldor, a discount department store based in Norwalk, CT. Kate arranged for me to give a presentation to them at the IBM office in Norwalk. Of course, we had to make sure that the office had the BASIC program, and I had to install both the AdDept programs and some data that I had dummied up from Macy’s real data.

My presentation was flawless. The only problem that I encountered that day was the lack of an audience. No one from Caldor showed up. We never did find out why not. Kate called them repeatedly, but no one returned her calls. It may have had something to do with the fact that in 1989, the year that we installed the first AdDept system at Macy’s, the May Company sold Caldor to a group of investment houses.

Caldor went out of business in 1999.

I also paid a visit to another local retailer, Davidson and Leventhal, commonly known as D&L. Theirs were not exactly department stores, but they had fairly large stores that sold both men’s and women’s clothing. So, they had quite a few departments. The stores had a good reputation locally. The headquarters was in New Britain, CT.

This D&L ad was on the back cover of the issue of Northeast that featured my story (described here).

The advertising department only employed three or four employees. They wanted to know if they could use the computer for both D&L ads and ads for Weathervane, another store that they owned, as well. That seemed vaguely feasible to me, and so I said they could. In fact, we later did this for Stage Stores and for the Tandy Corporation, but both of those companies were much larger, and I had a much better understanding by then of what it entailed.

I didn’t even write up a proposal for D&L. The person with whom I spoke made it clear that what we were offering was way out of their price range.

D&L went out of business in 1994, only a few years after our meeting. Weathervane lasted until 2005.

I have only a vague recollection of doing a demonstration at IBM’s big facility in Waltham, MA, for a chain of auto parts retailers from Phoenix. The name of the chain at the time was Northern Automotive. My recollection is that I spoke with a man and a woman. If they told me how they heard about AdDept, I don’t remember it. After a very short time it was clear that AdDept was much more than the company needed. Although Northern Automotive had a lot of stores with four different logos, it only ran one ad per week. So there was really not much to keep track of. I had the distinct impression that the demo was just an excuse for the couple to take a vacation in New England on the company’s dime.

I don’t remember either of their names, but the experience list on LinkedIn for a guy named Paul Thompson (posted here) makes him a strong candidate. Northern Automotive changed its name to CSK Auto, Inc. not long after our meeting. In 2008 CSK was purchased by O’Reilly Auto Parts.

Won’t Paul be surprised to be busted thirty years later in an obscure blog?

Tom Moran (more details here) set up an appointment with employees of Genovese Drugs at its headquarters in Melville, NY. The two of us drove to Long Island to meet with them.

I probably should have talked to someone there over the phone before we left. The only impression that I remember getting from the meeting was that they were not at all serious about getting a system. We had a great deal of trouble getting them to describe what the advertising department did at the time and what they wanted to do. I was frustrated because I had considered this a relatively cheap opportunity to learn how chains of pharmacies handled their advertising. It was actually a waste of time and energy.

Tom tried to follow up, but he got nowhere. We did not submit a proposal.

J.C. Penney bought the company in 1998 and rebranded all the stores as Eckerd pharmacies.

Woodies’ flagship store in downtown Washington.

While I was working on the software installation at Hecht’s in 1991, Tom Moran coordinated our attempt to land the other big department store in the Washington, DC, area, Woodward & Lothrop, locally known as Woodies. I found a folder that contains references to correspondence with them. Tom worked with an IBM rep named Allison Volpert¹. Our contacts at Woodies were Joel Nichols, the Divisional VP, and Ella Kaszubski, the Production Manager.

As I browsed through the file, I detected a few warning signs. The advertising department was reportedly in the process of asking for capital for digital photography, which was in its (very expensive) infancy in 1991. Tom was told that they hoped to “slip in” AdDept as part of the photography project. Furthermore, the fact that we were not dealing with anyone in the financial area did not bode well.

Finally, we had no choice other than to let IBM propose the hardware. Their method of doing this always led to vastly higher hardware and system software costs than we considered necessary. I found a copy of IBM’s configuration. The bottom line was over $147,000 and another $48,600 for IBM software. This dwarfed what Hecht’s had spent. If the cost of AdDept was added in, they probably were facing a purchase price of over a quarter of a million dollars! That is an awful lot to “slip in”.

I don’t recall the details, but I remember having an elegant lunch during this period with someone from Woodies in the restaurant of the main store. It may have been Joel Nichols. It seemed like a very positive experience to me. He seemed eager to automate the department.

We lost contact with Woodies after early 1992. I seriously doubt that the advertising department even purchased the photography equipment that they had coveted. The early nineties were very bad for retailers. By 1994 the owner of Woodies and the John Wanamaker chain based in Philadelphia declared bankruptcy and then sold the stores to JC Penney and the May Company. Many of the stores were rebranded as Hecht’s or Lord and Taylor.

In some ways Fred Meyer, a chain of department stores based in Portland, OR, seemed like a perfect match for TSI. At the time they were almost unique, and we usually excelled at programming unusual ideas. Their approach to retail included what are now called “hypermarket” (department store plus groceries) stores, although they definitely had some much smaller stores as well. The one in downtown Portland was very small. I really thought that we had a good shot at getting this account, largely due to the fact that the IT department already had one or two AS/400’s. So, the hardware cost would probably be minimal.

She would be lucky to make it in nine hours; there were no direct flights.

I was asked to work with a consultant who, believe it or not, commuted from Buffalo, NY, to Portland, OR. I can’t remember her name. She knew computer systems but virtually nothing about what the advertising department did. She wanted me to tell her what AdDept could do, and she would determine whether the system would work for them. I have always hated it when a “gatekeeper” was placed between me and the users. I understand that they do not trust the users to make a good decision, but advertising is very complicated, and almost no IT consultants know much about it. I would not have minded if the consultant sat in on interviews that I conducted with people in advertising.

If I was allowed to meet with anyone from the scheduling or financial areas of the department, I do not remember it at all. I do remember spending an afternoon with the head of the company’s photography studio. AdDept had a module (that no one used) for managing shoots and another (used by Macy’s East) for managing the merchandise that is loaned to the studio for a shoot.

I remember the photo studio guy mentioning that they also did billable work for outside clients. He mentioned Eddie Bauer by name. He could not believe that I had never heard of it/him.

I probably botched this opportunity. Before agreeing to come out the second time, I should have insisted on meeting with whoever placed their newspaper ads and the person in charge of advertising finance. I did not want to step on the toes of the lady from Buffalo, but I probably should have been more aggressive.

Kate accompanied me on one of these trips. We probably flew on Saturday to save on air fare. On Sunday we drove out to Mt. Hood, where we saw the lodge and the glacier, and visited Multnomah Falls on the way back.

Freddie’s was acquired by Kroger in 1998, but the logos on the stores were maintained. There still is a headquarters in Portland, but I don’t know if ads are still created and/or placed there.

Aside from our dealings with Federated divisions² TSI had very few whiffs during the period that Doug Pease (described here) worked for us. After one of our mailings Doug received a call from Debra Edwards³, the advertising director at May Ohio, a May Company division that had its headquarters in Cleveland. Doug and I flew Continental non-stop to Cleveland and took the train into downtown. My recollection was that we were able to enter the store from the underground train terminal.

The presentation and the demo went very well. I am quite certain that we would have gotten this account were it not for the fact that in early 1993 the May Company merged the Ohio division with Kaufmann’s in Pittsburgh. Management of the stores was transferred to Pittsburgh. Debra was hired as advertising director at Elder-Beerman Stores.

We stayed overnight in Cleveland and had time to visit the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which was right down the street from the huge May Co. building. I cannot say that I was greatly impressed with the exhibits.

A few years later Doug and I undertook a second trip to Cleveland to visit the headquarters of Sherwin Williams. Doug had talked extensively with the lady who was the advertising director there. He was very enthusiastic about the prospect of making this sale. By that time Doug had already closed a few big deals for us, and so I trusted his judgment. However, I could not understand how a company that really only sold one product could possibly need AdDept. Yes, they have thousands of stores, but how many ads do they run?

I don’t honestly remember anything about our discussion with them. Needless to say, Doug did not close this one, although he never stopped trying to revive it.

I don’t really count it as a whiff, but Doug was unable to close the deal with Liberty House in Honolulu after our epic trip to Hawaii in December of 1995. The details are recounted here.

I drove past two of the stores in Texas, but I never went inside.

Just as Marvin Elbaum had backed out of his contract with TSI for a GrandAd system in 1986 (as described here), so also one company signed an agreement for TSI’s AdDept system and, before we had installed the system, changed its mind. There was one big difference in the two situations. The second company was the Tandy Corporation, which had actually ordered installations of AdDept for all three of its retail divisions. At the last minute the company decided to close down Incredible Universe, one of the three divisions. The other two companies became TSI clients in 1997, as is described here.

It was not a big loss for TSI. IU was one of a kind. Its stores were gigantic multi-story combinations of electronics and theater. There were only seventeen stores, and only six were ever profitable. Those six were sold to Fry’s Electronics. The other eleven were sold to real estate developers at pennies on the dollar.

I did a demo for Mervyn’s California, a department store based in Hayward, CA. I think that I must have done the demo after finishing a training/consulting trip at Macy’s West in San Francisco. I cannot imagine that I would have flown out to the west coast to do a demo without spending a day or two gathering specs.

The IBM office nearest to Hayward was in Oakland. I took BART in the late afternoon from San Francisco to Oakland. There was quite a bit of excitement at the Holiday Inn at which I was staying. Someone had been murdered on the street in front of the hotel the previous night. There was one other very peculiar thing about this stay. I checked into a Holiday Inn with no difficulty, but I checked out of a different hotel (maybe a Ramada?). The hotel had been sold, and its ownership had changed while I was asleep.

The demo went fine. The guy who had contacted me—his name was Thiery or something like that—liked what he saw. However, the sale never advanced any further. This was almost always what happened whenever I got talked into doing a demo without taking at least a day to interview the potential users. At the time that I did the demo Mervyn’s was, unbeknownst to me, owned by Target. This might have explained the lack of progress. Target may have been restricting or rejecting any capital purchases at the time.

Mervyn’s was sold to some vulture capitalists in 2004. A much smaller version of the chain went out of business in 2009.

For some reason Doug and I once had a very short meeting with the president of Gottschalks, a chain of department stores based in Fresno, CA. He told Doug and me that he would get all of the other members of the Frederick Atkins Group to install AdDept. This organization (absolutely never abbreviated by its initials) somehow enabled its members to shop for foreign and domestic merchandise as a group. Nearly every department store that was not owned by the May Company or Federated belonged to it.

A few years after he made this promise he (or someone else at Gottschalks) arranged for me to speak before the members at one of their conventions in Naples, FL. I flew to Fort Meyers and rented a car from there. Naples was beautiful and reeked of new money. I gave my little spiel, but I did not have an opportunity to interact with any of the members of the audience. So, I did not get any direct feedback.

We eventually did sign up a few members of the group—notably the Bon-Ton (described here) and Elder-Beerman (described here). I don’t know whether my speech had any effect.

I think that the Frederick Atkins Group is defunct in 2021. The references to it that I could find on the Internet were all from decades past.

In (I think) 1999 Doug Pease and I made an unproductive trip to Columbus, OH, to talk with the IT director of of Value City about the possibility of installing the AdDept system for use by the advertising department. That adventure is described here.

TSI got a phone call from a chain of furniture stores in coastal Virginia, Norfolk⁴, as I recall. As part of my crazy automotive support trip, I stopped by to talk with the advertising director at this company on my journey from Home Quarters Warehouse in Virginia Beach to Hecht’s in Arlington. I spent a couple of hours with him. When I discovered that the company had only three stores, I knew that this was a mistake. I told him that our software could address his problems, but the cost and effort would not be worth it for either of us. I advised him to hire someone who was a wiz with spreadsheets.

I think that I got a free cup of coffee out of it.

I can’t tell you what happened to the company thereafter because I don’t even remember its name.

We had two reasonably hot leads in 2000. I had to handle both of them myself. The first was at Bealls department store, which has its headquarters in Bradenton, FL. This was another situation is which I had to deal with the IT department rather than the advertising department. I am pretty sure that the company already had at least one AS/400. I have a few notes from this trip, but it is not clear whether I intended to do the demo on their system or on one at a nearby IBM office.

In any case I think that there was a technical problem that prevented a successful installation of the software needed for the demo. So, I had to improvise, and I did not get to spend much time with the people who would have benefited from the system. The whole thing made me very depressed.

I had some free time, and so I went to the beach. I stopped at a Jacobson’s store to buy a tee shirt to wear at the beach. The cheapest tee shirts in the store cost $100!

The beach was lovely, and it was unbelievably empty. The weather was pretty nice. A beach in Connecticut would have been packed in this type of weather.

We did not get the account, but the tale has an interesting coda. Bealls is still in business today. For years Bealls could not expand outside of the state of Florida because a different store with exactly the same name was already using it in other states. These Bealls stores were run by Stage Stores, a long-time AdDept client that was based in Houston. Stage Stores was still using AdDept when TSI went out of business in 2014.

In 2019 Stage announced that it was changing all of its stores into Gordmans, its off-price logo (which did not exist while I was working with them). When the company declared bankruptcy Bealls purchased, among other things, the right to use the Bealls name nationwide.

I remember going to Barneys New York in late 2000 to talk with someone in advertising. I also have discovered three emails that I sent to Christine Carter, who was, I think, either in charge of the advertising department or in charge of the financial side. Barneys only had twenty-two stores, and that included some off-price outlets. I don’t know how much they actually advertised.

We never heard from them after my last email, which emphasized how easily AdDept could be adapted to differing needs even for companies the size of Barneys. By this time the very affordable AS/400 model 150 had been introduced. It would have been perfect for them.

I think that Barneys is dead or nearly so in 2021. All of the stores in the U.S have been closed, and even the “Barneys New York” brand was sold to Saks Fifth Avenue. However, the company also had a Japan division, which is evidently still operational.

I received a very unexpected phone some time in 2001 or 2002. It came from a man who had formerly worked at Saks Fifth Avenue and had taken a job as a Vice President at Sears. He knew that the advertising department at Saks had been doing things with its AdDept system that Sears’ advertising department seemed utterly incapable of. He invited me to the Sears headquarters in Hoffman Estates, IL, to investigate the possibility of installing AdDept at Sears.

At about the same time I had been in contact with the agency in a nearby town that Sears used for buying newspaper space and negotiating newspaper contracts. They wanted to talk with me about the possibility of working together. The agency’s name was three initials. I think that one was an N, but I am not sure.⁵

I arranged to spend consecutive days at the two places. It was cold on the day that I visited the agency. I learned that it recruited new clients by claiming that they could negotiate better rates for them because they also represented Sears. I suspected that this was baloney. Sears was a bid dog nationwide, but the amount of newspaper ads that they bought in any individual market was not that impressive. They were just in a lot of markets.

After the people explained the services that they offered to clients, I remarked that about 10 percent of what they did overlapped with about 10 percent of what we did. Privately I could not imagine that any of our clients who would benefit from their services.

I told them about A^xN, our Internet product. They informed me that the papers did not want to sign on to their website for insertion orders. Of course, they wouldn’t, and they had nothing to hold over the papers.

We ended the meeting with the usual agreement to stay in touch and look for synergies, but privately I considered them the enemy.

I did not see a parking structure. Maybe I entered on the wrong side of the pond.

The next day was bitterly cold, and there was a strong wind. I located the sprawling Sears complex and parked my rented car in a lot that was already nearly full. I had to walk a long way to the main building, and I have never felt as cold as I did on that walk.

I could hardly believe it when I walked into the building. The ground floor was billed with retail establishments—a drug store, a coffee shop, a barber shop, and many more. I had to take the escalator up to get to Sears. I was met there by the woman with whom I had been in contact. She was from the IT department.

OK, now I get it. Our problem was that we did not have enough architects.

She took me up to meet the “advertising team”. Six or eight people were assembled in the room, and they all had assigned roles. I remember that one was the “system architect”, and one was the “database manager”. I almost could not suppress my amusement. What did all these people do? There was no system, and there certainly was no database. At TSI I handled essentially all the roles that everyone at the table described.

They asked me some questions about the AdDept system. When I told them that it ran on the AS/400, the system architect asked me if that system was not considered obsolete. I scoffed at this notion and explained that IBM had introduced in the AS/400 64-bit RISC processors that were state-of-the-art. I also said that, as far as I knew, the AS/400 was the only system that was build on top of a relational database. That made it perfect for what AdDept did.

I wonder how many “OS/2 shops” there were in the world.

They informed me that Sears was an OS/2⁶ shop. I did not know that there was such a thing. In the real world Windows had already left OS/2 in its dust by that time. In all my time dealing with retailers I never heard anyone else even mention OS/2. It might have been a great idea, but IBM never did a good job of positioning it against Windows.

Besides, just because the corporation endorsed OS/2 should not eliminate consideration of multi-user relational databases where appropriate. The devices with OS/2 could serve as clients.

They explained to me that Sears’ advertising department had hundreds of employees, most of whom served as liaisons with the merchandise managers. Most of the ads were placed by agencies. I presume that the newspaper ads were produced in-house. No one whom I talked with seemed to know. The people on the committee did not seem to know anything about how the department did budgeting or planning.

Someone talked about Sears’ competitors. The example cited was Home Depot. I don’t know why this surprised me. I must have been taken in by the “softer side of Sears” campaign a few years earlier.

After the meeting my escort took me to a remarkable room that was dedicated to the advertising project. It was a small theater that had ten or so posters on the wall with big Roman numerals at the top: I, II, III, IV, etc. There were no statues, but otherwise I was immediately struck by the resemblance to the Stations of the Cross that can be found in almost any Catholic church in the world. I asked what the posters represented. The answer was that they were the “phases of the project”. I was stunned by the assumption that the project required “a team” and that it was or indefinite duration. No one ever allowed us more than a month or two to have at least portions of the system up and running.

At some point I was allowed to give my presentation. The man who had worked at Saks attended along with a fairly large number of people. Maybe some were from advertising. I was never allowed to speak with them individually.

I never got to read the advertising department’s Wish Book.

My talk explained that AdDept was a relational database that was specifically designed for retail advertising departments. I described a few of the things for which it had been used by other retailers. I could not do much more than that. I had not been able to talk with any of the people in the department, and the IT people were clearly clueless.

When I returned to Connecticut I wrote to both my escort and the man from Saks. I told both of them that I did not know what the next step might be. I had not been given enough access to the advertising department to make a proposal. The whole experience was surreal. If someone had asked me to return, I would only have done it if I were granted unfettered access to potential users.

No one ever contacted us. I told Doug not to bother following up.

One puzzling whiff occurred during the very short period in which Jim Lowe worked for us. The strange case of Wherehouse Music is explored here.

Perhaps the strangest telephone call from a genuine prospect that I ever received was from Albertsons, a very large retailer with is its headquarters in Boise Idaho. The person who called was (or at least claimed to be) the advertising director there.

I had heard of Albertsons, but I did not know very much about the company. All I knew was that they were a chain of grocery stores in the west. Since advertising for grocery stores is basically limited to one insert/polybag⁷ per week, they had never seemed to be great prospects for AdDept. However, I never hung up on someone who expressed interest in the system.

The problem was that this lady insisted that I fly out to Boise to meet with her and her crew the next day. I tried to get her to explain what the situation was, but she said that she had no time to talk. She needed to know if I would make the trip. It was a little tempting for a peculiar reason. Idaho was one of the few states⁸ that I had never visited. Still, this sounded awfully fishy. I passed.

The incredibly bumpy road that Albertsons has traveled is documented on its Wikipedia page, which is available here. I don’t remember when the call from the advertising director came. I therefore have no way of knowing whether she was in charge of advertising for a region, a division, all of the grocery stores, or none of those. I might well have passed up an opportunity that might have extended the life of the company. Who knows? It looked like a goose, and it honked like a goose, but maybe going to Boise would not have been a wild goose chase.

Jeff Netzer, with whom I had worked in the nineties at Neiman Marcus (recounted here), called me one day in 2010. He asked me if I remembered him. I said that I did; he was the Aggie who worked at Neiman’s.

He informed me that he was now working at Sewell Automotive, the largest Cadillac dealership in the Dallas area. He said that they were looking for help in automating their marketing. I was not sure how well AdDept would work in that environment, but I agreed to visit them. His boss promised to buy me a steak dinner.

I flew Southwest to Dallas, and for the first time my plane landed at Love Field. It was much closer to Sewell than DFW would have been.

I found a great deal out about their operation. I doubted that we could do much for the agency for a reasonable amount of money. On my computer I recently found a three-page document dated September 23, 2010, in which I had listed all of the issues that I learned about at Sewell. A woman named Tucker Pressly entered all of their expense invoices into a SQL Server database. It was inefficient, and there were no programs to help them compare with budgets.

The main objective of the marketing department was to make sure that they were taking advantage of all available co-op dollars from Cadillac and other vendors. We could not help with this unless we wrote a new module. I described my reactions to their issues in a letter to Jeff.

I never heard back from Jeff, who left Sewell in 2012. Nobody ever bought me a steak dinner.

Sewell Automotive is still thriving in 2021.

In 2011 or 2012 I received a phone call from a lady from the advertising department at Shopko, a chain of department stores based in Green Bay, WI. I don’t recall her name. She said that she worked for Jack Mullen, whom I knew very well from both Elder-Beerman and Kaufmann’s. Before Doug Pease came to TSI, he had worked for Jack at G. Fox in Hartford.

I flew out to Packer Land to meet with her. They had a very small advertising department. They basically ran circulars in local newspapers on a weekly basis. As I remember, she and one other person ran the business office.

I worked up a proposal for the most minimal AdDept system that I could come up with and sent it to her. When I had not heard from her after a few weeks I called her. She said that the company was downsizing and, in fact, her position was being eliminated.

Jack also left the company in July of 2012. His LinkedIn page is here. Shopko went out of business in 2019.

1. Allison Volpert apparently still works for IBM in 2021. Her LinkedIn page is here.

2. As I write this I can easily visualize Doug stabbing a box with a pencil after a frustrating telephone conversation with someone from a Federated division.

3. I worked fairly closely with Debra Edwards when I installed the AdDept system at Elder-Beerman stores in Dayton, OH. That installation is described here. She was the Advertising Director there. Her LinkedIn page is here.

4. The “l” in Norfolk is silent, and the “ol” sounds much more like a short u.

5. I later learned that there were actually two affiliated agencies across the street from one another. I encountered the other one, SPM, in my dealings with Proffitt’s Inc./Saks Inc., which are detailed here. The agency was still around in 2023. Its webpage is here.

6. In fact IBM stopped updating OS/2 in 2001 and stopped supporting the operating system in 2006. I cannot imagine how Sears dealt with this. I pity their employees with nothing OS/2 experience at Sears on their résumés.

7. Polybags are the plastic bags that hold a group of flyers from diverse retailers. they are ordinarily distributed to people willy-nilly.

8. The others are Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, and Alaska. I am not certain of Arkansas. I might have gone there with my grandparents when I was a youngster. The only place that I have been in Utah is the Salt Lake City airport.

Wavablog

Memoirs, bridge, popes, travel, and other stuff

Author Archives: Mike

1995 December: Hawaii Trip Part 3

1995 December: Hawaii Trip Part 2

1997-2005 AdDept Client: Proffitt’s Inc./Saks Inc.

1997-2007 TSI: AdDept Clients: Tandy Corporation Divisions

1991-2012 TSI: AdDept: The Whiffs