1948-1970 Dad and Me

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My old man. Continue reading →

I have limited the period covered by this entry to the years before I left for the army in October of 1970. The few face-to-face contacts that I had with my parents from my arrival in Connecticut up to the last time that I saw my mom are listed in the “Mom and me” blog entry.

James E. Wavada was born on August 25, 1924, or at least that is what he has always claimed. For some reason he was never able to locate his birth certificate. I learned about this when he encountered difficulty in obtaining an official ID card in 2005 after he moved to Connecticut. He was the youngest of the three sons of Henry and Hazel Wavada. They lived in Holy Name parish in the Rosedale section of Kansas City, KS. His two brothers were named Victor and Henry Joseph (Uncle Vic and Fr. Joe to me).

The Wavadas: from the left Fr. Joe, dad, Uncle Vic, Grandmom Hazel, and Grandad Henry. My mom probably took this photo with her Brownie.

Hazel’s maiden name was Cox. My dad said that they were “Scotch Irish”, descended from the people whom the British government transplanted from Scotland to Northern Ireland. Hazel once confided to me that the Wade Hamptons1, powerful figures in South Carolina in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were among her ancestors.

Henry was fifteen years older than Hazel. I think that they were both employed in the meat packing industry in some capacity. Henry’s ancestry is foggy to me.2 My dad considered himself Irish, but the first Wavadas (or whatever the name was originally) reportedly set sail from Marseilles and lived in Alsace. They apparently settled in Fort Wayne, IN.

Jim was decidedly left-handed. Swinging a golf club was the only thing that he did right-handed.3 His writing method involved curling his hand around so that he pulled the pen instead of pushing it. My understanding is that that meant that his right hemisphere was dominant and his cerebrum was contralaterally organized. The script that this produced was illegible to nearly everyone except for mom and his secretary.

As a youth dad reportedly had a temporary episode of alopecia totalis. It must have been very embarrassing for him, but all of his hair eventually grew back. I judged that the somewhat weird fact that his scalp hair was still dark when his eyebrows had turned white4 was probably related to that illness in his youth. I might be wrong.

For a while he called himself “Pibby”. Evidently he had difficulty saying “Jimmy”.

My dad never had anything good to say about his father, who was an alcoholic. He told me that Hazel had to pull him out of bars. Other anecdotes about Henry and his family have been posted here.

My dad and his two brothers grew up during the depression. It must have been extremely tough on Hazel, but she was up to it. She lived longer than all of my other known antecedents. She died in 1989 at the age of 90.

This, believe it or not, is the dormitory in which the three Wavada boys lived while they

Jim and his brothers all matriculated at Maur Hill, a boarding school run by the Benedictine monks. It was located in Atchison, KS, approximately fifty miles from KC KS. Hazel reportedly negotiated a deal with the Benedictines that one of the boys would become a priest if all three were given scholarships. I know only a few things about my dad’s time at Maur Hill:

The photo of Jim Wavada in the Maurite for 1942
  • His yearbook lists the following activities:
    • Course: Classical
    • Tatler (the student newspaper): 3
    • Honor Roll: 2,3
    • Sacristan: 2
    • Pres. Servers’ Society: 4
    • Student Manager Athletics: 3.
  • The fact that no activities were listed with a “1” leads me to think that he probably attended Ward High as a freshman and then transferred.
  • He won the school-wide oratory contest in 1942. This was not in his yearbook, but I learned about it when the school invited him back to judge the contest decades later, perhaps in 1962. I accompanied him to Atchison.
  • He confided to me that he had been terrible at math (especially geometry) and French. The French teacher reportedly said that he had the worst French accent he had ever heard. I suspect that he got through the other subjects using his incredible memory and his writing and speaking talent.
  • He learned to play back-handed ping pong. I played him once. He could not handle spin, but his reflexes were much better than mine.
  • He learned from other students that smoking was cool. He became addicted to cigarettes for more than forty years.
  • He learned to play golf, but the only clubs available were right-handed.
  • A man named Henry Etchegaray, who lived in Mexico City but was in dad’s class at Maur Hill (and lettered in football!), visited us one time. I remember no details.

At some point while he was in high school he evidently met my mom. Maybe it was shortly after he graduated and she was on summer break . They never told me the details, and I never asked. I am pretty sure that they communicated by mail while he was in the army, but I have not seen any of the letters.

The guy on the right is dad. The other gentleman is, I think, the man named Louis that we visited in Colorado.

Shortly after high school he enlisted. He told me that he was rejected (in World War II!) by the navy for “insufficient chest and shoulder development”. Maybe it was just as well; he could not swim. I never saw him in a swimming pool or pond, but he did take a motorboat out on Cass Lake in Minnesota a few times.

He was six feet tall and weighed 123 pounds when he first donned the olive drab. His performance on the mechanical aptitude test that the army required new enlistees to take was so bad that the guy running the test accused him of cheating on the other tests.

He served in the Pacific in WW II. He almost never talked about it except to say that he did well in ping pong. He ended as a sergeant, but something that he mentioned once seemed to indicate that he had been busted a rank or two at least once. He had little respect for most of the other grunts that he served with, but he made one life-long friend in Jake Jacobson.

I would love to know where dad and mom were when this photo was taken and who took it. Note that dad has his cigarette in his right hand, probably as a courtesy to mom.

Fighting for more than two years against the Japanese definitely had a permanent effect on his world view. Our family never had rice for supper when Jim was in town. If he ever ate any oriental food, it was not until late in his life. He firmly believed that the two nuclear attacks ended the war. I wondered what he would have thought when historians began to assert that the Japanese government and military leaders were more concerned about the Russians’ invasion of northern islands than the immolation of civilians.

Nearly all of my dad’s friends went to college on the G.I. bill. He did not. I am not sure that he even considered it.

This is my favorite photo from the wedding.

He married Dolores Cernech on September 1, 1947. His brother Joe, who had been ordained only three months earlier, officiated at the wedding in St. Peter’s cathedral in KC KS. What transpired in the year and a half between my dad’s discharge and the wedding? Decades later he disclosed two nuggets of information about that period: 1) Mom’s father was against the marriage, but Clara, her mother, somehow persuaded her husband that it was for the best; 2) He might have gotten into serious trouble if he did not get married. There were no more details, but he also mentioned something about pinball machines, which in those days were common in bars.

Life in KC KS 1948-54

The couple lived for seven and a half years in the house owned by Dolores’s parents, John and Clara Cernech. As far as I know, dad never worked anywhere except Business Men’s Assurance (BMA). I assume that he was employed there when he got married, but I could find no proof of it. As an employee he would have almost certainly received free health insurance. Otherwise, I cannot imagine how he could have afforded all of the medical bills my first few years on earth certainly generated.

Dad and J.K. Higdon, president of BMA, in 1951. I know only one other person with a head shaped like dad’s.

I can only imagine what my dad thought when he heard about my hare lip. He never talked about it later. In fact, I cannot remember him talking to me much at all in the years before I started school. The only memorable conversation was when he lightly reprimanded me for trading my Mickey Mantle baseball card to someone for a Vic Power card.

Dad was apparently pretty active at BMA. He started at the bottom, but by 1951 he was president of the KEO (“Know Each Other”) social club and one of four staff members on the company’s internal newspaper. In a short time he was transferred tp the sales department, where he eventually rose to the rank of Vice President. I think that he may have played a little baseball or softball there, too. The only equipment that he had was a first baseman’s glove. Although he sardonically referred to himself as “a natural athlete”, I never saw that side of him.

Dad and mom at 41 N. Thorpe.

My only vivid memory of my dad in the house in KC KS involves the train set that he and Joey Keuchel set up “for me”5 in the basement. I am not sure how much my dad actually participated in that effort. I cannot remember ever seeing him use a tool as complicated as a screwdriver.

How dad got to work in the five years after my birth is unclear. Perhaps he took a bus or “street car” (trolly). In 1954 he bought a blue and white Ford. My recollection is that he had quite a bit of trouble with it. The word “lemon” was frequently employed.

Hazel, Mike, and Clara at 41 N. Thorpe.

I am pretty sure that Jake Jacobson visited us at least once before we moved to the suburbs. I remember that he had a big car, perhaps a convertible. He claimed that he could steer with his belly. When I got rambunctious he would cheerfully shout, “Michael, decorum!” I am pretty sure that the three of us rode with him to Swope Park for a picnic. A fair amount of beer was consumed. I remember a contest of pitching empty beer cans into the trash receptacle. In the fifties this was considered highly responsible behavior. People in those days thought nothing of hurling litter out of car windows. Let the prisoners clean it up.

I have a vague recollection of Fr. Joe taking me fishing at least once at Wyandotte County Lake. I don’t remember if mom or dad (very unlikely) was present. I seem to remember that there was a “gas war” going on. The going price was $.199 per gallon.

To my knowledge the only vacation that the three of us took was a long drive to Colorado to visit a man named Louis, who was one of Hazel’s relatives. I don’t remember his last name. This trip has been recounted here.

Prairie Village

In early 1955 the three of us moved to 7717 Maple, Prairie Village, KS, about twenty miles south of the house on N. Thorpe. My dad may have been in a car pool for work. Several BMA employees lived nearby.

I could hardly believe it when I found this picture. From left on the couch are Grandad John, me, Jamie, Clara, Hazel, Henry. On the far right is my dad. I don’t know who the person leaning in on the left is. I assume that the photographer was mom.

This was a big deal for me. We were in a new parish, which meant that I finished first grade at Queen of the Holy Rosary School instead of St. Peter’s. The Ursulines at QHRS seemed much nicer. Dad actually knew a few of them who had taught at his grade school in Holy Name parish in Rosedale.

When my sister Jamie arrived on the scene in January of 1956 dad must have been at least somewhat involved in picking her name. I don’t know how they came up with Jamesina. No St. Jamesina can be found in Wikipedia. They certainly did not ask my opinion. No one ever called her anything but Jamie.

Sometimes dad brought work home. On those occasions he sat at the kitchen table and filled up pads of paper with writing that reminded me of rain. Otherwise, he stretched out on our green sofa and read the newspapers (the Kansas City Star still had two editions), Time, Newsweek, or something about life insurance or marketing. He took no notes. He was not researching; he was absorbing.

If he read a book, it was non-fiction. I remember him reading only one novel ever, Mario Puzo’s The Godfather.. The salty language put him off.

He never watched movies. He said that he could not suspend disbelief. He saw people walking around furniture saying words that other people had written and feigning emotions. He attended one movie that I know of. It was a biopic, either Lust for Life, about Van Gogh, or The Agony and the Ecstasy about Michelangelo. He said that the movie was good, but, as far as I know, he never saw another one while he was in Kansas.

The only things that he watched on television were sports, especially football, and news. Occasionally he would peak at something that Jamie and I were watching. Batman comes to mind.

Henry, me, and Hazel at 7717 Maple.

Dad and I watched football games as soon as they started appearing on television. I remember that the pros used a white ball for night games, and runners who were knocked down could jump back up and continue running. His favorite team was the Chicago Bears; mine was the Cleveland Browns.

We did no projects together, mostly because the only project that I can remember him doing was working on the lawn. I did the mowing,6 but he did some weeding, planting, fertilizing, and lots of watering. The results were mixed. I helped only when coerced. To me the weeds had the same esthetic value as his Kentucky bluegrass.

Dad took me to several games of the hapless Kansas City A’s, who played their games in Municipal Stadium, which was in a fairly rough neighborhood. My recollection is that we parked on the street for those games. These events have been described here. I don’t remember us talking about anything at the games except how pitiful the A’s were. We were definitely present for the legendary 29-6 loss to the Chicago White Sox on April 23, 1955.

We also took in one home game of Maur Hill football. I don’t remember who the opponent was, but they probably lost. I also have a vague recollection of attending a game at the University of Kansas. Since I remember no details of that event, I may have fantasized it.

Dad and I drove with our neighbor, Ed Leahy, to south-central Kansas one weekend. I don’t think that the Interstates were completed yet. We drove mostly at night. I remember sleeping in the back seat.

We spent one day hunting quail or pheasants and one day at the State Fair in Hutchinson. This adventure has been described here.

The family’s big vacation to the East Coast is detailed here. Dad did almost all of the driving.

I remember two other trips with my dad. I am not sure whether my mom was along. On the first one we visited dad’s Uncle Vic Wavada (Henry’s brother) in, I believe, Nevada, MO. I remember no details at all. Great-uncle Vic died in 1962. By the way, the town is pronounced locally as nuh VAY duh, miz URR uh.

On the other journey we visited an older man named Crispy Ward somewhere near Jefferson City, MO. He might have been a salesman for BMA. We went fishing together in a small boat. I doubt that my dad participated. I had trouble with my line getting caught up in the vegetation. Crispy nicknamed me “Snag.” Fortunately, it did not catch on.

Dad and I did not do very much together. He played catch with me occasionally. The only thing that I recall that he ever taught me was how to wash myself. My reaction was a silent “Well, duh.”

Did my dad have any friends in the area? He talked to a few of the neighbors. He and mom went to social occasions at the homes of some of the other BMA employees a few times. The only other friends that I can recall were Boots and Fay Hedrick. I seem to recall that dad, mom, or both knew them from KC KS. They had a son named John who was about my age.

You could probably do it with one hand in a pocket.

I started wearing glasses in 1958 or thereabouts. My dad also wore glasses when he drove the car. Otherwise, he shunned their use. He nagged me about the fact that I put mine on as soon as I woke up and wore them continually until I went to bed. I took them off when playing football and whenever large amounts of water were involved. He could not understand why I always wore them. I wanted to see, and my prescription was much stronger than his was. The year before I got them I batted .000 in 3&2 baseball. It was humiliating. Give a kid a break.

The other thing that he nagged me about was putting my hands in my pockets. Whenever I heard him say, “You can’t climb the ladder with your hands in your pockets” I would spin my head around to see which ladder he was referring to. I never saw it.

Leawood

At the end of the 1961-62 school year the Wavadas moved south and east a few miles to 8800 Fairway in Leawood, KS. This house was much nicer than either of our previous two residences. It had three bedrooms, a large living room, a dining room, a rec room, a two-car garage, a basement, and an attic. It also had central air conditioning and a large fan in the ceiling of the hallway by the bedrooms. Every summer evening my dad would order the air conditioning turned off and the fan turned on. All the windows were opened except for the ones in my bedroom. I left mine closed and shut my door when I went to bed in order to muffle the sound of the fan.

My dad joined a car pool to BMA. Its members included Malcolm Holzer, the company’s treasurer, and Mac Dolliver, an actuary whose family lived only a block away from us. There was at least one other person in the car pool. In inclement weather they would drive me to Rockhurst High School. On most other days I walked.

For one of my birthdays my parents got me a wooden basketball backboard and orange rim of iron. My dad and, I think, my grandfather, John Cernech, mounted it on the roof above the driveway. The backboard was not quite vertical, and the rim broke in one place, but I still played there extensively.

A later Christmas present was a six-foot pool table that dad and mom clandestinely set up in the basement. Its surface was wood covered by felt that quickly warped, but I did not care. I practiced on it many evenings, especially in cold weather. While I did so I listened to my records on a portable turntable that I acquired somewhere. Nobody could beat me on my table because I knew how to play the “break” in the southeast corner.

At the new house dad had a much larger front lawn to maintain. He cared not a lick about the bushes, the side lawns, or the much larger back yard. I think that he was secretly competitive about this hobby. Our neighbors to the north, the Westergrens, had a thick lawn, but the grass was fescue, not bluegrass. Dad considered fescue to be weeds. It completely took over the lawn on the north side of the driveway. My dad concentrated on the 90 percent of the lawn that was south of the driveway. He waged a war against any fescue that somehow crossed the driveway.

By this time we had a self-propelled lawnmower. I was an energetic teenager; mowing the lawn was actually somewhat pleasurable for me. However, once a year dad rented a heavy machine that sucked up loose vegetation from the lawn. It was not self-propelled, and it was a huge pain to push.

As before, dad spent nearly every summer evening listening to news, sports, or talk on his small transistor radio. Never music; he no appreciation of music. Once in a while a song would strike his fancy, but I could not name even one song that he liked that was released between “Oh, My Papa” and “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” Seriously.

Dad had two season tickets to the Chiefs’ home games, which took place at Municipal Stadium until Arrowhead Stadium opened in 1972. Sometimes he took mom. Once or twice a year he took me. In 1965 he let me bring two friends from Rockhurst, Ed Oakes7 and Dan Waters. Win or lose, I had a great time at these games. From 1966 to 1969 I could not attend because I was in Ann Arbor. After that I never lived in KC in the fall.

I cannot remember anything about our communication during the games. We talked mostly about the players and strategy.

Why so much responsibility for the pinkies, and only one fat key for one thumb?

Dad had little involvement with my schooling. I sometimes rode to Rockhurst with him and the other members of his car pool. The only other involvement with my high school years that I recall involved speech competitions. He let me have his old Time and Newsweek magazines. I used them in my competition in extemporaneous speaking. They were very helpful.

Dad worked on projects with a Benedictine named Roger Rumery. Fr. Roger somehow obtained a book that explained in detail the process of learning to type. I spent a lot of time with it and an old Royal machine that was, I think, my mom’s.8 I became quite proficient at the keyboard. I used my new skill to type evidentiary quotes on index cards, arguments, and entire speeches. Later this skill became even more useful. Only God knows how many millions of words I have typed over the last sixty years or so.

Health

My dad was almost never ill, but he had problems with his back. At some point I am pretty sure that he had an operation that only helped a little, if at all. I have a vague recollection that he occasionally suspended himself in a closet in order to stretch something in his back. I never saw this, and I may have just concocted it from stories. At some point it must have gotten better. I don’t remember him wincing or complaining about it after the early sixties.

The only exercise that dad got was on the golf course. BMA purchased a family membership for the Wavadas at Blue Hills Country Club. Dad played there on weekends. He seldom used an electric cart. He walked with his bag in a two-wheeled cart that he towed behind him.

I must mention that although dad loved the game of golf, he was not very good at it.9 He had a good excuse. He was left-handed, and he was using right-handed clubs. He never mentioned this, and he never tried to swing left-handed, at least not to my knowledge. He did experiment with left-handed putting.

Dad and I played together several times per year. Did I enjoy it? Not really. He made me very nervous. He was always watching the group in front of us and the group behind us to make sure that we were not holding anyone up. I was (and am) not a good loser. When I hit a bad shot, I beat myself up over it. I had made a pretty detailed study of the golf swing (described here). I knew how to correct a slice (often) or hook (almost never). It frustrated me enormously that the balls sometimes did not go where I planned.

Nevertheless, playing with him raised my game up to respectability. I did enjoy the competition when I was playing as part of a pair or a team. I played on my company’s team in the army (related in some detail here) and in the golf league at the Hartford. My partner John Sigler and I were in first place in the entire league when I broke my kneecap. Those adventures have been chronicled here.

Occasionally he asked me for evaluations of his swing. I never volunteered an opinion. If I had, it would have sounded something like, “Well, your grip is wrong, and your stance is wrong. It is hard for me to say anything until you change them.”

His reply to my silence would be something like, “I think that I am pushing the ball”, “Am I swaying?”, or “I need to swing through it more.” I had no idea what any of these meant in terms of body parts involved in a golf swing.

My dad played golf until he became lame and blind in his eighties. For decades after I left the Hartford I could afford neither the time nor the expense of the game. In my seventies I had absolutely no regrets about giving it up.

Friends

My parents seemed to have a lot more friends in Leawood than they did in Prairie Village, but not in the neighborhood. Most of them were parishioners at our new parish, Curé of Ars. The two that I remember the most were Mike Goral, a golfing buddy, and Phil Closius. They were both transplants from the New York area.

What I inherited from my dad:

  • Physical build
  • Hair color
  • Head shape
  • Speaking and writing abilities
  • Political tendencies
  • Love of travel, although I did not witness this much as a youngster.

1. The three Hamptons named Wade were very influential in South Carolina in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. If Hazel was a direct descendant (she might have said “related to”), I suspect that Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. would be able to tell me exactly how many slaves they had, but rest assured that there would be a comma in the answer.

2. A fairly large number of Wavadas lived in the Spokane, WA, area. One of them has done genealogical research. My dad had a copy of her findings, but, unfortunately, when he died Sue got her hands on it, and it entered the black hole of her existence. If I had to guess, I would place it in her garage, which has long been impenetrable.

3. Not quite true. I found one photo of him with a cigarette in his right hand.

4.Mine was just the opposite. My scalp was almost completely grey when the first white hairs appeared in my eyebrows.

5. I had no say in the design, and I only was allowed to handle the controls a few times under strict supervision.

6. I would have been too small to handle a lawnmower in the first few years in PV. Someone else must have done it. My money is on my mom.

7. My recollection is that Ed did not bring a jacket and was shivering by the second half.

8. It must have been. My dad certainly did not know how to type. He hunted and pecked.

9. For some reason he was pretty good at using a 3-wood from the fairway. Most people consider this one of the most difficult in the game. He was also a much better putter than I was.

1948-1970 Mom and Me

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Dolores Wavada Continue reading →

This was the most difficult to write of the hundreds of entries in this project. I decided to set an ending date of 1970 because after I left for the army face-to-face contacts with my mom were quite limited. My dad came to see me when I was working at the Hartford, but it was only for a day at the end of a business trip. Mom stayed home. I don’t remember them visiting us at all for the three years we lived in Plymouth. They both came to Detroit once, and they did not like it at all. After my wife Sue and I moved back to Connecticut they visited a handful of times, but, except for the first trip, they spent most of their time with my sister Jamie and her family.

Sue and I visited them in 1973. After that we were too poor and too busy to travel much until I started flying much more in the nineties. I arranged a stop in the Kansas City area whenever it was feasible, which was pretty often. However, the ones when she was still alive were mostly for parties or other celebrations. I remember very little of the conversation. Also, through much of this period she was reluctant to contribute much.

In fact, I reluctantly admit that the sum total of my knowledge about my mother is pitiful. Dolores Ann Cernech was born on October 2, 1925, in Kansas City. Her parents were John and Clara Cernech. My understanding is that Clara was half German and half Polish. Cernech is a Croatian name. John’s mother was at least partly Irish.

Mom grew up in Kansas City, KS. In 1943 she graduated from Bishop Ward High School, which was less than a mile from the Cernech residence at 40 N. Thorpe. Students in her graduating class were asked to specify who their favorite band leader was (!) and what they hoped to become in life. Dolores Ann Cernech answered “Tommy Dorsey” and “Private Secretary”. The latter seemed like a peculiar response in the age of Rosie the Riveter.

I am not sure how she met my dad, who was a year older and went to high school in Atchison, KS, about fifty miles away. My understanding is that they were already acquainted before my dad enlisted in the army in 1942.

I wish that I had learned more about what my mom did in the period between her graduation and Jim Wavada’s discharge from the army in February of 1946. I have a vague recollection that she had worked in a clerical position somewhere, but she must have been communicating with my dad while he was in the army. They were married on September 1, 1947, which was eighteen and a half months after he was discharged from the army. It definitely was not a shotgun wedding. It was officiated in St. Peter’s by my dad’s brother, whom I knew as Fr. Joe. I did not show up until eleven and a half months later.

What transpired in the year and a half between my dad’s discharge and the wedding? Decades later he disclosed two nuggets of information about that period: 1) Mom’s father was against the marriage, but Clara persuaded him that it was for the best; 2) He might have gotten into serious trouble if he did not get married.1 He also mentioned something about pinball machines, which in those days were common in bars.

Dolores and Jim took up residence in the Cernech’s house in KC KS. I am not sure if John and Clara lived there at the time. It was not a large house, and I know that at some point John, an employee of the Boss Glove Company, was transferred to Grand Island, NE. I have dozens of questions that I should have asked while they were still alive. Did they have a honeymoon? If so, where? Presumably my dad worked at BMA. Did mom work, too, at first? How did they get around? They did not have a car until 1954.

I have no doubt that my mom ran the household’s finances from day one. My dad was nearly incapable of balancing a checkbook. For the most part she was very frugal at least during the time that I lived at home. My dad bought suits and other dress clothes for work. My mom sewed most of her own clothes.

I am equally certain that my mom took on any task that involve any kind of a machine or any tools. My dad had the least mechanical aptitude of anyone whom I have ever encountered. What about yardwork? The house on N. Thorpe had a very small yard. I doubt that the family owned a power mower. So, somebody must have mowed the grass with an old-fashioned push mower. Uncle Rich might have helped, but my money is on mom. I can’t imagine my dad doing it even once.

Life in KC KS 1948-54

The first big event after the marriage was my birth on August 17, 1948. It must have been a horrific shock for her to see my mangled face. I have been told that the physicians performed the first surgery shortly after birth. There were follow-up procedures before I started going to school and another one after I completed the eighth grade.

My parents almost never brought this up. They had obviously discussed the matter and decided that they wanted me not to fret about my appearance. That certainly succeeded. Very few people whom I have met paid as little attention to appearances as I did.

I remember one trip to the shoe store when I was quite young. The salesman talked mom into purchasing arch supports for my very flat feet. I think that that only happened once. After that off-the-rack was good enough. I did not start using arch supports regularly again until I was in my seventies. Those came from Walmart, cost $10, and could be worn with any shoe or none.

I cannot remember my grandparents ever living in the Cernech house with us. Richard Keuchel2, Clara’s youngest brother, lived with us. He kept to himself most of the time, but I remember that he occasionally brought me a small present or gave me some coins for baseball cards.

I vaguely remember mom taking me with her on a few shopping trips. Most of the time she probably walked to Central Ave., a lively retail area just a couple of blocks from the house. We might have taken an occasional bus or “street car” (trolley) as well.

The one type of excursion that impressed me the most was trips to the library. I was allowed to pick out my own books in the children’s section. My tastes primarily ran to westerns. I don’t remember her reading these books to me, but she must have, at least at first. I remember also that I had a rather large book that had fables in it. The only one that I recall was about an ant and a fiddle-playing grasshopper.

My recollection, which is probably at least a little off, is that I had the run of the neighborhood by the time that I was four or five. I am pretty certain that I walked to both kindergarten and first grade, and I remember spending a lot of time with my friends in the neighborhood. I don’t think that I was allowed to cross the alley in back of the house by myself, but I remember playing with friends up and down N. Thorpe Street. I also remember our telephone number, FAirfax 9890.

I remember attending several weddings and funerals of mom’s relatives. However, we had no automobile. Maybe those took place after we moved.

Did my mom have any friends? I don’t recall any. She knew everyone on N. Thorpe. She grew up there. Someone told me that she selected one of her classmates from Ward High to be her maid of honor. I have a photo of the wedding, but the people are not identified. I think that the same lady might have been my godmother, but she did not have any role thereafter in my mother’s life.

Maybe looking after me was all that mom could handle. Four instances came to mind that might have made her wonder what she had gotten herself into:

  • In addition to all of the trips to the hospital, she also arranged sessions for me with a speech therapist. This was apparently in anticipation of difficulties in speaking due to the amount of plastic in my upper lift. I don’t remember ever having trouble articulating, and I did well in the formal presentation required by the therapist.
  • I related the story here about the rock-thrower whom I beat up in kindergarten. I received no punishment that I remember. Mom and the teacher explained that what I did was wrong, but I don’t remember their reasoning. My reasoning was that “he had it coming.” In westerns this happened to people all the time.
  • One morning I made a scene at Mass because The Lone Ranger was on television3, and I did not want to miss it. I think that mom had to escort me out of the church on that occasion, but I am only guessing.
  • The problem that I had with the box of letters in first grade is also documented here. I would really love to know what mom thought when the nun informed her that I seemed incapable of reading and writing.

The only other vivid memory that I have of life on N. Thorpe was of mom painting a fruit tree freehand on one of the walls in the kitchen. Everyone praised it. In retrospect it made me wonder what else she could have accomplished if she were not so devoted to our small family. Unfortunately I inherited my artistic ability from Jim.

There might have been some trips. I think that the two of us took a train trip somewhere in the south. Clara (and maybe John) may have also been along. It seems to me that we spent some time in Hot Springs, AR. I am pretty sure that we also visited mom’s relatives in the Dallas area either on that trip or a separate junket. The mother’s name was Jule Palmer or something like that. Either or both of these might have been after the move, but I don’t think so.

Mom loved animals. I remember a dog named Trixie, which was, I am pretty sure, Mom’s pet before she got married. Trixie must have died before we moved. I have no recollection of her at our new house. I am pretty sure that we also had a pet parakeet named Mickey before we moved. Someone taught him to talk, probably mom.

Prairie Village

I found a set of four photos developed at Katz drugs, which was near our house in PV. They were dated Easter 1955. The other three are also at a train station, and they all include a couple whom I don’t recognize.

In early 1955 the three of us moved to 7717 Maple, Prairie Village, KS, about twenty miles south of the house on N. Thorpe. In addition to setting up a household in a suburban location, mom almost immediately had to deal with my childhood illnesses—chicken pox, measles, and whooping cough—that I contracted one after another. Fortunately, that was pretty much the last time that I was sick until I contracted the Russian Flu during exam week in college.

Evidently mom’s father did not think much of the blue house on Maple St. He called it “a cracker box.” My dad told me much later that my mom uncharacteristically retorted, “Yes, but it’s our cracker box.” Well, theirs and the bank’s.

I remember that mom took me to the doctor to receive the smallpox vaccine. I have always hated the idea of injections, and I dreaded this. I had to return for a second (and maybe a third) vaccine because the first one “didn’t take.” The second one did not either. I never got that little volcano-shaped scar on my arm. For the only time that I can remember mom took me aside and told me in a deadly serious tone that I must NEVER forget what she was about to tell me. If ever there was another outbreak of smallpox, it was critical for me to receive the vaccine again.

I spent no time in the hospital while we were living in Prairie Village, but I spent a lot of time at the doctor’s office. I ran into a shopping cart at the grocery store one day. It did not require stitches, but the mark is still visible just a quarter of an inch from my right eye. I ran into a parked car on the lot of Queen of the Holy Rosary during recess. I dodged the tag, and the nineteen stitches in my mouth were a badge of honor. I got four more stitches when I ran into the barbecue grill in our backyard while catching a popup that my dad threw to me. While returning a punt on the football field my nose got smashed and bent a little. On all of these occasions mom drove me to see Dr. Battey, our family physician. On one of the later occasions he told her that my head was held together by catgut.

I almost forgot one incident. Mom insisted that I take the free swimming lessons offered at the PV public pool. I rode my bike to the pool for the morning lessons. One day a German Shepherd came running out of a house on my left, growled, and chomped me on my leg. Someone called mom, and she came and got me. I don’t know how many stitches were required. The dog did not have rabies or anything else. He just got loose that day.

I hated the swimming lessons because I got so cold that my teeth chattered. Also, that was where I realized my footprints looked like they were made by a duck with toes. However, I later was glad that I learned how to swim.

When my myopia became evident in the third or fourth grade, mom took me to the optometrist. Since then I have seldom been seen without my specs unless I was in water or playing football.

My mom drove me to many activities. While writing this I began to wonder when and how she learned to drive, and how she got her license. Maybe she learned before she got married.

Aside from my tendency to run full-speed into inanimate objects, I did not cause many problems for her. She never helped me with homework, but I didn’t need it until I got to the chain rule in calculus class. She didn’t need to nag me to do it. I got tired every evening and voluntarily went to bed at about the same time. She never had to wake me for school. I was usually awake before she was. I took the bus to school, and I was always ready and waiting for the Bluebird.

What she did help me with were projects. I remember that we had to make a map of a state or country out of papier mache. I picked France. I was making a big mess of it until she stepped in. She also helped out with my years in scouting. She was an excellent den mother for a while; all the guys said so. When I had trouble growing bean plants for the Nature merit badge, she gave me a tip (I don’t remember its nature) that allowed me to succeed. She also made a costume of St. Peter for me for wear for an all-saints version of Halloween.

In retrospect I find it incredible that she was willing to get up to drive me to Queen for the 6am Masses for which I was a server and then pick me up when it was over. She also carted me around to sporting events. I often stayed after school (and therefore missed the bus) for band practice or great books or safety patrol or scouts or the school newspaper or football or basketball. Sometimes I walked home, but at least half of the time I engaged mom’s taxi service.

I do not remember Mom giving me much advice beyond basic Catholic principles. However, I very clearly remember her reaction when I got into a fight with Michael Bortnick. He was my age but considerably bigger. I came into the house crying and told mom that he beat me up, and he was bigger than I was. She merely replied, “Then you should have avoided fighting him.” I remembered that and applied it with great success throughout my remaining life..

As soon as I was old enough I got to play on a team in the local 3&2 baseball program that served as a Little League for Johnson County, KS. The team was sponsored by Sunflower Drugs. I undoubtedly made the team through the intercession of Don Wood’s father. This was the last summer before I got glasses. I was a good fielder and base runner, but I batted .000. I only hit the ball once—on my very last at-bat.

The next summer I did not make the team. I was ready to quit baseball, even though I really wanted to play. I was even more depressed than I was when I missed a catechism question in second grade (described here). I was totally unprepared mentally for failure.

My mom told me that I should not quit; there were plenty of other teams. It was good advice. I somehow learned about the team sponsored by Bauman’s Red Goose Shoes. I had a good time on that team, and I even got quite a few hits.

Mom did not like the idea of me playing football in the seventh and eighth grade, but she allowed me to go out for the team. Even after she had to take me to the doctor after I got clobbered on a punt return, she let me continue. It meant a great deal to me.

I remember that for a short period we (I am not sure if Jamie was involved) spent a few minutes every evening reading the Bible from start to … well, I think that we finished Genesis before the project was abandoned. I would love to have heard that decision being made.

Like millions of other Americans our family owned a nicely bound Bible with those incredibly thin pages. Ours, of course, was the Douay-Rheims version, which is the only English version recognized by the Catholic Church. It had a dozen or so brightly colored illustrations. I don’t know what happened to it.

My mom was friendly with all of the neighbors, but the only ones that she socialized with were the Leahys. I remember that once when I was in second or third grade she was late getting home from somewhere. For perhaps the only time ever I was all alone after the school bus dropped me off. I started crying, and Jean Wallace, the lady with three kids of her own who lived directly across the street, calmed me down.

At some point we procured a phonograph player and a few records, probably 78s, which in those days were made of very brittle shellac. My dad’s favorite song was Eddie Fisher’s version of “Oh, My Papa”. I was playing it one day. When I took it off the turntable, I dropped it, and it broke. I was very upset, but mom consoled me.

The only television shows that I remember my parents watching were Your Hit Parade and Perry Como’s show. As the English say, my mom fancied Perry. We watched a lot of other shows, too, but none of them stand out in reference to my mom.

When she was working, which seemed to be doing all of the time, she often broke into a song. The one that she sang the most was the Andrews Sisters’ version of “Dance with a Dolly”4.

Jamie

One day shortly after we moved to PV my parents announced to me that they were “praying” to have another child5. I thought that this was a great idea. I would have a baby brother whom I could boss around and eventually teach “the ropes”. Imagine my shock when dad told me that mom had given birth to an girl on January 4, 1956. Did they actually pray for a girl? Why?

Jamie was nothing like me. Her face was decidedly not mangled. By the time that she was a few years old she had blonde hair6. Even I thought that she was good looking. Furthermore she avoided crashing into objects much better than I did. Her visits to Dr. Battey’s office were always routine.

I was approximately seven and a half years older than Jamie. I figured that she could figure out pat-a-cake on her own, and so I mostly ignored her. However, we often watched Captain Kangaroo and Romper Room together before I went to school.

The fact that mom had another little one to mind nearly all the time that I was in grade school made it even more remarkable that she was willing to drive me to all my activities. I think that it also explained why she let me roam the neighborhood with no evident supervision. She even let me shoot off firecrackers on the Fourth of July.

Decades later Jamie told me that as she was walking to kindergarten at Tomahawk School some older boys accosted her. I had heard nothing about this, but I was often oblivious. I wonder what I would have done if I knew about this. I would have been in the eighth grade, at least two years older than anyone at Tomahawk.

I remember that I asked mom one year whether I could help with playing Santa Claus on Christmas eve. She let me do it. I don’t remember any details.

Our pets have been discussed in some detail here. My mother’s role was central. My dad had no use for animals. He was obviously either fearful of or disgusted with them to an extent that I never saw in any other person. Mom made sure that they were

Mom handled the tricky situation that begin with the appearance of a dachshund (eventually named Sam by me) with no tags brilliantly. She allowed him to go back to his owners on his own, but for some reason he seemed want to stay at our house. She advertised somewhere that we had him, and eventually someone claimed him. Jamie was crushed, and I was also upset, but mom explained to us that we had no right to take him from the other family.

My grandmother Hazel came to the rescue by giving us her pet dachshund Tippy. However, he seemed to want to spend most of his time with me.

Leawood

At the end of the 1961-62 school year the Wavadas moved south and east a few miles to 8800 Fairway in Leawood. Once again we were in a new parish, Curė of Ars. Jamie started grade school in September at C of A, and I started my freshman year at Rockhurst High School. So, this was a new experience for everyone.

I don’t recall having many conversations with my mom. I cannot remember asking her any probing questions. My recollection is that on most days she worked pretty much from the time that she got up until the supper dishes were in the dishwasher, and all of the food and accoutrements had been put away. The one major incident in my youthful life that she had to deal with was the time in 1964 when she had to accompany me to traffic court. Nothing came of it, but I did grow up a little bit that evening.

My mother was a great cook. We enjoyed delicious meals almost every day except, of course, on Friday. My parents decided that instead of eating out occasionally, we would have steak on Saturday evening. My dad grilled them over charcoal on the patio in good weather. If the weather did not allow that, mom broiled them. My favorite meal, by far, was fried chicken7. We had it once a week, usually on Wednesdays.

I was not big on breakfasts. Cereal usually sufficed for me. A special treat was “pigs in the blanket”, which were link sausages baked inside of biscuits that had been folded over them.

My lunches were the envy of everyone in my classes. Usually I had a ham sandwich, an apple or other fruit, a small bag of chips, and a thermos of soup. Most kids had to put up with cheese sandwiches or PB&J with little or no variety. I went to a Catholic school; many of those moms were making at least a half dozen lunches. In high school I usually ate lunch in the cafeteria.

Trips

My dad worked in the sales department at BMA. Every few years my dad and mom would take a business trip together for big meetings. They were generally at a resort or in the vicinity of special events. They were usually gone for the better part of the week. Sometimes they hired someone to take care of Jamie and me. I had very little interaction with these women. I remembered that the suppers that they prepared with uniformly disappointing.

I found four photos that were labeled “Easter 1957” by the company that developed them. At the time I was finishing second grade, and Jamie was a little over one year old. They show my mom and dad stepping onto a train. Based on her outfit, this must have been a business trip on which she joined him. Someone must have taken the photo. I am guessing that it was Clara Cernech. She probably took care of us while they were gone.

My mom did not regale us with tales of these adventures. I remember that she was most impressed by the one in Banff, Canada. I have no recollection of her talking about any of the other places, and I doubt that I pestered her for details.

Details about our family vacation trips have been provided here.The four of us took one big vacation to the east coast while we were living in PV. Mom took over the driving for a part of the trip. That was the only time that I ever saw my dad riding shotgun. Most of her time was spent with Jamie, who was only three or four years old. Our other trips were usually to Minnesota. Mom must have enjoyed the breaks from cooking and cleaning, but she mostly seemed to busy herself with other things.

Health

My mom was in good shape. She did not smoke. She drank very little, and ate mostly fresh foods in moderate amounts. She also exercised. I remember her watching Jack LaLanne and his dogs, Happy and Walter. I never partook of these activities, but I remember being awestruck when Jack nonchalantly did vertical pushups on a step on a ladder.

She also played golf a little. She played with my dad and me a few times, and while I was waiting to get drafted we played as a twosome. I think that she played with other ladies off and on. She was a good athlete, but her golf swing got worse the more that she played. In the end she bounced her torso up and down on every swing. This peculiar motion made it very difficult to hit the ball cleanly. I always suspected that advice from my dad was responsible for the degradation of her game. I don’t know how much (or even if) she played after I entered the army.

She wast 5’7″, which was considered quite tall in the forties. She was skinny enough to be nicknamed bird-legs in high school. She never got fat or even a little pudgy.

I only remember mom being sick a few times, mostly during the Christmas season. Overworking and the pressure probably got to her. She did have a few issues. Her “sinuses” bothered her a lot. She took Dristan tablets for the “sinus headaches”, but they did not help much. I also remember some kind of saltwater purge that she did. When my dad quit smoking many years later this issue disappeared almost immediately.

She also suffered from varicose veins. I don’t know any details. She might have also had diabetes. I know that her mother did. Mom never complained about anything, and she never let any symptoms slow her down.

When she was in middle age she started to have problems with memory and confusion. It was not Alzheimer’s, but the doctors never were able to pinpoint what caused her so much difficulty. My dad said that she asked him one time, “Jim, what did I do wrong to deserve this?” Of course, he had no answer.

When she died in 1998 (described here) my dad did not request an autopsy to determine what the source of her problems was. I rather hoped that he would, because I wanted to do something about it if I inherited it. I am older when I write this than she was when she died. So, I guess that I did not get it.

The biggest regret in my life is that I squandered the opportunity to know this wonderful woman better.

What I inherited from my mom:

  • Skin color
  • Hair
  • Build
  • Social reticence
  • Love of music (but different taste)
  • Work ethic
  • General demeanor
  • Aversion to arguments
  • Early bird.

1. The fact that I asked no more questions is, to me, convincing evidence that I must be somewhere on the autism spectrum. I have never asked people about their lives. Although I have always been good at remembering names, I almost never remember the names of relatives of acquaintances, even if I have seen them many times. For example, I have a great deal of difficulty remembering names of members of Sue’s family. I know my own cousins, but I could not name any of their children. It never really occurred to me that I was excessively solipsistic. I just considered myself less nosy than most. In my defense I always try to think of the potential effect on others before I do something, and I never deliberately do anything that might inflict pain on someone else.

2. Uncle Rich apparently died in 1972. My recollection is that he worked for a company called Gustin Bacon Mfg. that manufactured pipe joints and, for a time, air horns for trains. I have no idea what he did there. I also don’t know if he remained in the house on North Thorpe after the Wavadas moved south in 1955.

3. I don’t know when we purchased the TV, but I was a big fan of the Howdy Doody Show, and I am almost certain that I watched Hopalong Cassidy, which only ran until 1952. I cannot picture our television in the house on N. Thorpe, but we must have had it there.

4. This was a bizarre song: three women fantasizing about dancing with another woman. “All the fellows wishing they were me.”

5. This naturally raises the question of whether my parents employed birth control. The Church has never sanctioned anything besides the “rhythm method” for birth control. If that was what they did, they were certainly good at it. I was conceived a little over two months after their marriage. Jamie was conceived shortly after they moved to a new house with a spare room.

6. It turned quite a bit darker by the time that she went to school.

7. When I started cooking for myself I almost immediately tried to fry chicken. I never got it quite right. It is difficult and time-consuming. The spattering of grease makes a mess. I eventually just gave up. It did not seem to me to be worth the effort.

8. In my dad’s estate I found a used ticket for Super Bowl III and one for the Rose Bowl in 1970 that featured Michigan and Southern Cal.

1948-1979 Catholic Upbringing

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Catholicism and me. Continue reading →

This is a painting of the Ursulines arrive in New Orleans in 1627. I can testify that heir fashions did not change a whit in the next 335 years.

I have been a Catholic or an ex-Catholic for all but a few days of my life. My parents arranged for me to be baptized as a Catholic as soon as it was possible. My mother and father were Catholics. Every single relative whom I met was Catholic. I attended Mass every Sunday and holy day of obligation for approximately three decades. I went to Catholic schools for twelve years; most of my teachers were Ursuline nuns or Jesuits. I was an altar boy in grade school, and a member of the Sodality in high school. I went to a state university, but I never missed Mass, even when I was out of town on vacation or a debate trip. I never missed Mass when I was in the army, working in Hartford, or living in Plymouth, MI, in the seventies. Catholicism formed me in many ways.

Catechism

Biblical stories were rare in Catholic schools.

Catholicism is fundamentally different from other Christian religions in at least three ways. Catholics are not educated using biblical stories, and they are not encouraged to read the Bible on their own. I never heard about Bible studies until I started associating with Protestants. Young Catholics are taught what to believe using the catechism, a thin book of fundamental questions and correct (or at least authorized) answers about God and humans. Catholic students—at least in those days—spent hours memorizing them and many more hours being drilled about them. The first two pairs in the version that we used were:

  • “Q: Who made you?” “A: God made me.”
  • “Q: Why did God make you?” “A: God made me to show forth his goodness and to make me happy with him in heaven.”

There were many more. I remember that Sr. Lucy’s second-grade class had an oral exam that covered eight or ten pages1 of these questions and answers. Before the test I was quite certain that I had all of the answers memorized, but I totally blanked on one of them. This failure totally crushed my spirit. I might have even cried. Sr.Lucy tried to comfort me, but at that point I was accustomed to academic success and just could not countenance my failure.

The catechism was comprehensive and coherent. It represented what Catholics believed. You could argue about other things, but contradicting anything in the catechism was, literally, heresy. For decades I assumed that other sects also had a fixed set of beliefs. When much later I participated in a group reading religious literature, I was shocked to find that the participants—al members of the same Protestant denomination—did not understand and agree upon the fundamental concepts of faith and hope. These people did not share the same religious beliefs. They just liked their minister and the other members of their flock.

To Catholics faith was agreement with the postulates of the catechism. Hope was confidence in God keeping up His/Her/Their side of the bargain. Love was respect for all of creation.

Seven Sacraments

The second identifying feature of the Catholic religion is its seven sacraments.

Other denominations baptize their members. A Catholic baptism has the primary purpose of providing absolution for “original sin”, a tarnish inherited from Adam and Eve that precludes salvation2. That explains why the ceremony is arranged by Catholic families almost immediately after birth, and why the infant has no say in the matter.

We were taught that if someone who had not been baptized—whether a solid citizen or a mass murderer—was about to die, it was your duty to baptize them. A priest was NOT required. The nuns taught us that there were several forms of baptism, some of which did not even require holy water. I remember kids arguing about whether water from the radiator of a car could be used in an emergency. The answer may have involved the percentage of antifreeze.

The sacrament that involves confessionals is called penance3. Few, if any, other denominations have meticulously prescribed methods for forgiveness of the myriad sins committed after baptism has wiped one’s slate (that is how I thought of it) clean. Some protestants (commonly called heathens by Church members) claimed that faith alone was enough, but that has always seemed transparently flawed to me. What’s faith got to do, got to do with it? You sinned; you died without absolution; you go to hell.

Cleansing the slate requires confessing one’s sins to an ordained priest. Catholic priests can withhold absolution if they are skeptical of either the penitent’s “heartfelt contrition” or the expression of a “firm purpose of amendment”. To me it made sense that the well-trained clerics were called on to make these important decisions.

Heathens often want to know what it is like to go to confession. For me the anticipation was worse than the event. No priest ever asked me to provide any sordid details, and certainly none ever withheld absolution. The “penance” prescribed could be anything, but in my experience it usually was a small number of Our Fathers and/or Hail Marys as well as “a good act of contrition”, in a prescribed format. After a few years of Catholic schools I (and everyone else whom I knew) could recite these prayers very rapidly. We used to hold races.

I never confessed any “mortal sins”, offenses that would be serious enough to merit eternal damnation. Should I have confessed my involvement with Sue while her first husband was still alive? I don’t think so. The Catholic Church did not recognize their marriage; why should I? Whether the Church would have condoned the forty years that elapsed before we were wed in a short civil wedding is a moot point. By that time I had fallen by the wayside.

Youngsters were allowed to receive the Eucharist when they reached “the age of reason”, usually in the second or third grade. That does not mean that they understand the concept of transubstantiation on which the sacrament is based. However, they were required to make a good confession before their first communion, and the two requisites for absolution demand the ability to distinguish right from wrong. By second or third grade most Catholic youngsters had a pretty good idea of what was “class participation” and what could get your knuckles rapped.

The Eucharist has always been part of the Mass. In my youth the priest lay the consecrated host on your tongue; he did not hand it to you. The priest drank a little wine, but he did not share it with the communicants.

Before receiving the consecrated host for the first time our class had a dry run. It felt like a piece of paper that wants to adhere to the tongue. It has neither of the taste nor the texture of food. I had a lot of difficulty swallowing the (unconsecrated) host the first time that a nun put one on my tongue. I don’t know why; I never experienced any subsequent difficulty.

You can tell he’s a bishop by his crook and his miter.

I never really understood how confirmation fit into the sacraments4. It was supposed to make you stronger. You were allowed to pick a name; I chose Peter. The archbishop came to town. We all lined up, and he went down the line and gave each person a gentle slap on the cheek.

Almost no one has ever received all seven sacraments. One would need to be ordained as a priest (holy orders) and married (matrimony). Since women have never been allowed to be priests, half of the population was immediately excluded. A few widowers have been ordained late in life. I never asked whether priests who disclaimed their vows could be married. A vow is a vow, but there may be some wiggle room that I don’t know about.

Father Brown whipped out his stole and ointment and performed extreme unction on lots of murder victims.

Up to the end of the sixties the seventh sacrament was called extreme unction. “Unction” meant anointing with oil; “extreme” meant that it was reserved for terminal cases. I considered this a great name, but it has undergone several rebrandings in the last few decades. It was called last rites for a while and then the sacrament of the sick. At some point it was renamed anointing the sick.

As I understood it, the oil lubricated the pathway to heaven for someone who was deathly ill. On television it was sometimes used even when the symptoms included the termination of all bodily functions. You can never be too careful. Maybe the living soul was stuck between two non-functioning organs. Why take a chance?

Popes

For most of my life only two popes who served since the eleventh century were canonized. John XXII and J2P2 recently doubled that.

The papacy is the other unique institution. One person, the Bishop of Rome, is given the lifetime occupation of administering the Church worldwide. It has worked pretty well for 2,000 years or so. In the twentieth century I was about as familiar with the popes as the average Catholic. The popes in the first fifty years of my lifetime—Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I, and John Paul II—were well respected by most Catholics. In general they did a good job directing the Church in all areas except one. The elephant in the room will be discussed below.

Several decades after I dropped out of Catholicism I conducted an incredibly detailed study of the papacy—the institution and the individuals. I discovered that the popes were quite diverse. Some were geniuses, some were greedy or vindictive, one was hen-pecked!. A fairly large number of them spent little or no time in Rome. The Holy Ghost, operating through the College of Cardinals (and a number of other diverse electorates), has demonstrated eclectic taste in pontiffs.

The illustrated book that I wrote about the popes is posted here. The story of how it came about is related in this blog entry.

The Calling

I never liked telephones.

The nuns and, to a lesser extent, the Jesuits talked about “the calling”. They uniformly insisted that at some point in their lives an event of some kind occurred that demonstrated to them that their God-ordained destiny was a religious career. None of them described the nature of that event, but each one indicated that anyone who received such a calling understood that God had definitely designated his intention for them.

While I was in grade school and high school I was a devout Catholic and, at the same time, extremely arrogant. I expected to receive the calling from God, probably just after I was an all-America wide receiver at Notre Dame. I listened intently for the call. In my senior year of high school I went on a retreat for several days with the members of the Sodality at Rockhurst. The priest conducting the event emphasized that everyone should listen carefully for his calling. I did, but I heard nothing. I was quite disappointed.

Years later I gave some thoughts as to what the events that so many of my teachers interpreted as a calling could have been. If it was not the usual hormonal firestorm occurring in an unusual setting, I could not hazard a guess. Here’s a clue, however: two of the nuns who were my teachers at Queen of the Holy Rosary were Sr. Ralph and Sr. Kevin. Where did they come up with those names? They are supposed to choose the name of a saint. The following was published by the Houston Chronicle in 2005:

There are two Saint Ralphs in the Catholic hagiography: Ralph of Bourges, a ninth-century French abbot, and Ralph Crockett, a 16th-century English martyr. Compared to Saints Peter and Aquinas, the Ralphs were theological underachievers. Crockett tried to convert England to Catholicism but was hanged, drawn and quartered. Ralph of Bourges’ principal accomplishment seems to be taking part in the Synod of Meaux. Ralph, it appears, is the patron saint of mediocrity.

St. Kevin lived (allegedly for 120 years!) as a hermit in a very small cave in Ireland. This was on Wikipedia:

One of the most widely known poems of the Nobel prizewinner Seamus Heaney, ‘St Kevin and the Blackbird’, relates the story of Kevin holding out his hand with trance-like stillness while a blackbird builds a nest in it, lays eggs, the eggs hatch and the chicks fledge.

No wonder I didn’t hear anything on that retreat.

“Falling Away”

My transition from ardent Catholic to complete skeptic was a fairly sudden one. The events involved were described in this blog entry.

I must emphasize that in the twelve years that I attended Catholic schools I did not witness or even hear any rumors of any kind of questionable conduct from any teachers or administrators. Furthermore, I did not hear of any inappropriate behavior at any parish that I lived in.

One slightly peculiar event occurred in the few months that I was stationed at Seneca Army Depot in 1972. I have described it in this blog entry.

My dad once told me a story that he heard from his brother Joe, the Benedictine priest (introduced here). Evidently, when he was still in Burlington, IA, he approached the prior or the abbot or some other Catholic bigwig to complain about abusive conduct by one of the other priests. The only result was that the offender was moved to another part of the country. My uncle may have made a minor stink about this and/or threatened to make a major stink. In any case he too was transferred. His destination was as remote as is imaginable, Kelly, KS4. Imagine a small country town with a pastor who was a Benedictine monk with a masters degree in economics from the University of Chicago.

I cannot register any surprise at the Church’s response to the flood of allegations of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy. I can only think of three explanations for such behavior by a clergyman:: mental illness, possession by the devil, or simple unwillingness to resist the temptation. In any case the perp was probably called to account for his deeds. He was undoubtedly asked if he was contrite and whether he would be able to prevent recurrences. He almost certainly answered “yes” to both questions. If the bishop felt that he was sincere, he would have no choice but to provide absolution. The man’s immortal soul was at stake. The actions may have been (usually were) criminal, but they did not put anyone’s soul in jeopardy.

If the bishop was not convinced, then he would be faced with the prospect of choosing between mandating mental health assistance, initiating an exorcism, or calling the cops. All of these options would be considered disastrous by any bishop. Keep in mind that the offender had received a calling to work for the Church. He and the other clergy were the tools that the bishop was asked to deploy in order to provide eternal salvation, In my day the number of vocations was critically low and decreasing. So, why not see if the situation could be salvaged?

I don’t think that it was an official policy. Nevertheless, the bishops made the same decision almost without exception: They quietly tramsferred the perps to a different location. This would solve the problem if the subject was actually willing and able to stop his crimes, or if the new location did not provide the same temptations. This may have occasionally worked, or it may have worked long enough for either the perp to die or become unable to commit the crimes or for the bishop to die or be replaced. The other solutions mentioned above would have certainly removed one of the clergy on whom the bishop depended and generated publicity that would likely reduce vocations in the future.

Altar Boy

One server was plenty at a high Mass.

I served as an altar boy for two or three years. At Queen there were two Masses every weekday. One was at 6am. The other, which was attended by all of the students. was held at 8:30. The 6 o’clock mass was always a low mass, which meant that only two candles on either side of the tabernacle had to be lit by the senior server, mostly because there was no music. These Masses were also much shorter and required only two servers. Actually one would suffice in a pinch, but two looked more balanced.

Sometimes the 8:30 Masses were high Masses. That required lighting six candle that were much higher on the altar. A device6 with a long wick at the end of a brass pole is used both to light and snuff the candles. This was the one thing that required a bit of skill. If a lit wick broke off and landed on the altar cloth, there would be heck to pay.

The Mass always proceeded in the same order. The only variation was for the epistle and gospel readings and the sermon. The first two were determined by the Church’s official calendar. The sermon was determined by the priest. At the daily Mass, low or high, it was generally omitted. It was hard enough to keep hundreds of squirmy youngsters under control even when the nuns required that each leave room for his/her guardian angel on one side.

The rest of the Mass was called the “ordinary”. While I was a server it was all in Latin. To become a server you had to memorize all of the responses. Some of these, like “amen” and “et cum spiritu tuo” were easy, but the ones in the beginning were somewhat challenging. The very first response was “ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam.”7 Probably the reason for multiple servers at nearly all Masses was to make sure that at least one was able to say the proper response out loud.

We assumed that God liked Latin best.

At a high Mass the following were sung by the entire congregation: Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei. There were several sets of music for these. Some of them were quite elaborate. There were often hymns at other spots as well. All of these were in blue books that were available in the pews.

The servers were not asked to sing, but each had designated duties. The one on the right rang the bells to wake up parishioners that the important part was coming. The two in the middle handled the cruets that were used in the ablution section The one on the left was called “the dead end” because he (no girls!) had no special responsibilities. When they were not busy, the servers knelt8 at the foot of the altar. They got to sit during the epistle, gospel, and sermon. One of the nuns would always be on the lookout for squirming or poor posture.

The priest’s dressing room, called the sacristy was on the left (from the point of view of the congregants) of the altar. Priests wore (at a minimum) a white chasuble and cincture beneath the vestments, which varied in color depending on the type of Mass and the calendar. Green was the most common. The servers’ room was on the right. They wore white short-sleeve surplices over black cassocks. There were about ten of each to choose from, first come first serve. I like to get there early. In the eighth grade I was one of the tallest, and only two or three went down to my ankles. Both the priest and the servers were fully dressed before donning their religious attire.

It was considered an honor to be an altar boy. In retrospect I find it amazing that my mom was willing to drive me to the early service. She was supportive of almost anything that I wanted to undertake.

Mackerel Snappers

Those fish were not “wild caught” within 500 miles of Kansas City.

In the Wavada household meat was NEVER served on Friday. It was likewise absent from my grade and high schools. My recollection is that I had cereal for breakfast and cheese sandwiches for lunch. There was no fresh lobster in the Kansas City area. The only offerings for supper that I remember were spicy boiled shrimp, fried catfish, fish sticks, and tuna and noodle casserole. The last was by far my favorite of those four. However, I don’t think that I complained much. My mother was a very good cook.

Why did we (and nearly every other Catholic family) deliberately refrain from eating meat on Fridays? I don’t think that it was actually decreed by the Church in the way that attending Mass was. That was derived from one of the Ten Commandments. The fasting was just one example of the “offer it up” approach to life that was drummed into us. Whenever you were disappointed, upset, or frustrated, a nun or priest would tell you to offer the situation up to God. Friday was chosen in memory of Good Friday, on which Jesus suffered so much for the rest of us.

Catholics were also encouraged to give up something for Lent, the forty-day period before Easter. Most of the kids whom I knew gave up candy or nothing. Since I did not have a sweet tooth, that would not have been much of a sacrifice for me. I might have tried to do without Coke or potato chips, but I doubt that I had the willpower to endure forty days without them.

Prayers

Praying in the Catholic Church is largely a matter of rote. For example, saying the rosary consisted of saying 53 Hail Marys and a handful of Our Fathers and Glory Bes at a supersonic pace while cogitating about one of three sets of “mysteries”. My family recited the same prayer, which we called “Grace”, before every evening meal. At QHRS my vague recollection was that we all stood up at our desks and recited the same prayer right before lunch. My mother may have made me say it before breakfast. Here is what we said:

We never invoked “Baby Jesus”.

Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts, which we are about to receive from Thy bounty through Christ, our Lord. Amen.

I never noticed before that there were two Lords in this prayer. One apparently owns the bounty; the other distributes it. If I had asked about this, I wonder what the nuns would have said.

Here is what I think about prayers with a specific purpose—asking for something, thanking for something, etc. If God is all-powerful, then He/She/They is also omniscient and therefore knows about the situation. Why would God care about whether someone debased himself to obtain something or express an emotion? Surely, if God is ever willing to tamper with nature, the decision would not be induced by nagging. Similarly, why would God care about whether someone was willing to forgo meat on Friday?

To me it is a lot easier to understand why the Church and its clergy would care about enforcing discipline than to think of a reason why an omniscient and omnipotent Being would be impressed by prayers or self-imposed suffering. I remember thinking how strange it was when both Argentina and Great Britain fought over the Falkland Islands. Both countries insisted that God was on their side in the conflict. I wonder if there were many conversions in Argentina from Catholicism to Anglicanism when the Brits prevailed.

Saints and Miracles

A few other religions have saints, dead people who are purportedly now in heaven. In the Roman and Greek Orthodox Churches they are a big deal. Cults that worship saints—especially Mary, Jesus’s mother—have developed over the years. “Queen of the Holy Rosary”, the name of our parish, was an example of the strange twists that the cults can take. Mary had nothing to do with the rosary. It was invented many years later. I don’t know if there is a singular “holy rosary” somewhere, but the only way that Mary is associated with the beads is the fact that the Hail Mary prayer is recited fifty-three times.

As far as I was concerned the popes decided—using a complicated legal process that involved the assessment of miracles and a “devil’s advocate”—who was a saint. Since the pope was infallible, that was it; they were in. Later I learned that during the first few hundred years of Christianity, lists of martyrs and other prominent Christians were created. At some point all of the people on the list were referred to as saints even though the process of getting on one of these lists was much less sophisticated than the rigorous process with which I was familiar.

The medals that I remember were pinned to the visor on the driver’s side.

In my day St. Christopher was one of the most popular of all saints. Many Catholics carried a medal of the saint. It supposedly provided protection against accidents. There were many contradictory stories about St. Christopher, but the evidence that he was a real person (as opposed to a fable or a composite of different people) was scant. In 1970, the year that I graduated from college, the Church removed him from the calendar, but he was still worshiped as a saint in some places. For that matter Charlemagne, who routinely executed thousands of people whom he captured, wass widely considered a saint and venerated as such. Although the emperor was never canonized, his statue was placed prominently in the narthex of St. Peter’s Basilica.

I think that my mom had a St. Christopher medal in her Oldsmobile 88. I could be wrong.

To be confirmed as a saint you had to have several miracles attributed to you. I firmly believed that there were thousands of documented miracles associated with these holy people. I took it as a “given”, not worth thinking about any more.

The nuns and priests that I encountered did not spend a lot of time discussing the saints. The one story that I remember vividly featured St. Dominic Savio and his biographer, Don Bosco. The saint died when he was only fifteen. Evidently he was extremely intelligent and absolutely devoted to becoming a saint. For a while I was inspired by his attitude, but eventually I reverted to my previous philosophy of doing whatever I could get away with.

The champion canonizer has himself been canonized by Pope Francis.

I am not sure which miracles Pope Pius XII (discussed in great detail here) attributed to little Dominic. By 1978, the beginning of the pontificate of Pope John Paul II, advancements in science had made obsolesced the standards of evidence previously used for verification of miracles. J2P2 canonized approximately 480 people, probably more than all of his predecessors combined. What process did he use? He just announced every so often that the list of saints was longer.

Much later I did a little research in the area of hagiography. I concluded that anyone who lived before the Renaissance and is considered a saint should be treated with suspicion. Some almost certainly were fabrications, others were probably composites of two or more stories, and some who were real people were rascals or worse..

Sacred Objects

The duomo in Milan is one of the most amazing plzdes that I have seen.

The Catholic Church has for a very long time made use of statues, paintings, and relics. The duomo in Milan has over 3,400 statues, including a very large number on its roof and a very famous one in the church of a flayed St. Bartholomew carrying his own skin. The altar in every church contains a blessed relic—usually a fragment of a bone alleged to be from a saint.

No holy cards for Mike.

I remember that my class had a raffle of a few such tokens one year. Kids bought raffle tickets. First prize was a statue of Jesus that was perhaps fifteen inches in height. The secondary prizes were far inferior, probably “holy cards” with a picture of a saint or a miracle and some explanatory text on the back. For some reason I really wanted that statue. My only source of income was my allowance, which, if memory serves, was twenty-five cents per week. However, I spent almost nothing. I bought quite a few baseball cards over the years, but otherwise I was miserly.

On the day of the auction I brought all of my money to school and purchased more than half of the total tickets. Sure enough, I won the statue, but I did not win any of the other prizes. In retrospect I should have bought no tickets. After the auction I could have made the winner an offer he/she could not refuse.

I don’t remember what happened to that statue. I don’t think that it survived the move from Prairie Village to Leawood. For the most part my family did not take part in the iconography that was prevalent in Catholic homes in the fifties and sixties. However, I do remember wearing one religious item for quite a few years, a Brown Scapular.

The scapular was composed of two cloth rectangular pieces connect by two straps. One piece went on the front and one on the back. It was inspired by the habit of the Carmelites, which was, or course, much larger. The ones that I saw were woolen. Evidently, that requirement was dropped at some point.

You can’t just buy scapulars. I don’t remember this happening, but at some point the older kids at QHRS must have been “enrolled”. Part of the admonition is “Wear it as a sign of her [i.e., Mary’s] protection and of belonging to the Family of Carmel.” Furthermore, “whoever receives the scapular becomes a member of the order and pledges him/herself to live according to its spirituality in accordance with the characteristics of his/her state in life.”

She only works on Saturdays.

Although it has never officially been part of the Church’s teaching, the Brown Scapular has for a very long time been linked with the “Sabbatine Privilege”, which promises that the wearer will be released by Our Lady of Mt. Carmel10 from Purgatory on the first Saturday after death. This was great! Purgatory was the place to which people were sent if they died with venial sins that were not absolved. Every “impure thought” was such a sin. Practically every adolescent who died would be forced to spend time—an hour, a year, a millennium?—roasting in purgatory. If, however, he had the Sabbatine Privilege, his time there would be less than a week. If he got in a car crash after partying hard on a Friday evening, he might go straight to heaven as long as he was still wearing his Brown Scapular. “So long, losers!”

My scapular had several pieces of cloth in each of the two sections. That is all that I remember of it. I don’t remember when I stopped wearing it. I certainly did not wear it in Ann Arbor.

There also was a version of the scapular that was a medal.

Big Events

The two big events on the Church’s calendar were, of course, Christmas and Easter. I remember being surprised that I was chosen for the boy’s choir as an eighth grader. We sang “Oh, Holy Night” at the midnight Mass.

For Easter I was chosen in the eighth grade to serve either at the high Mass on Maundy Thursday or Easter Sunday. I do not remember which.

1. This is almost certainly an exaggeration, but I remember quite clearly that this was a momentous event. Maybe it was preparation for First Communion or Confirmation. The most famous version is the Baltimore Catechism, which has been posted here.

2. In my day babies who died unbaptized supposedly went to a place called Limbo. In 2007 the Church waffled a bit on this and concluded that there is hope that God will do what humans were unable to do, namely baptize them himself. Don’t try to visualize this.

3. For some reason it seems to be called “Penance and Reconciliation” in 2024.

4. I wonder if it was added later to bring the list to seven. Most religious lists seem to have three or seven items. I might be on to something. The Encyclopedia Britannica The number of sacraments also varied in the early church, sometimes including as many as 10 or 12. In the sixteenth century the Council of Trent specified the list that we learned.

5. My experiences with Fr. Joe after he was sent to Kelly are posted here.

6. I expected to discover a Latin name for the pole, but it is merely called a candle lighter.

7. I discovered in my Latin class that some heathens might have been able to read this, but they would not have understood us when we said it. They had a markedly different way of pronouncing some letters. They rendered Caesar’s famous dictum “Veni; Vidi; Vici” as “WAY knee WEE dee WEE kee”.

8. What a wonderful thing it was to still have cartilage!

9.In my day the three sets were the Joyful Mysteries, the Sorrowful Mysteries, and the Glorious Mysteries. They told the story of Mary and Jesus in chronological order. Each had ten “decades”, one for each group of ten beads. I had never heard of the Luminous Mysteries, which are apparently prayed on Thursdays. All of these have been explained in detail on the Internet here.

10. I am 99 percent certain that “Our Lady of Mt. Carmel” is the same as Mary, the mother of Jesus. For some reason she has dozens of titles, each of which emphasizes something different about her. Incidentally, the Church has never officially preached that Mary shows up and checks for slightly charred scapulars every Saturday. However, it dies claim that Mary never died. She was “assumed” into heaven. If an archeologist ever makes a case that Mary’s tomb has been found, all Catholics must immediately denounce him/her/them as a heretic.

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I watched MST3K by myself.

Since 1972, when Sue and I first got together in Hartford, we had spent many evenings together watching television. I liked a few shows (including wrestling and Mystery Science Theater 3000) that were too silly for her. She liked a few shows (such as Grantchester, Gilmore Girls, and many old flicks on Turner Classic Movies) that were too schmaltzy for me. On the whole, however, our tastes were mostly compatible. During most of this period we watched whatever was on the major networks or we did something else like jigsaw puzzles or two-person games.

Not for me.

Two developments changed these habits: the ability to schedule broadcasted programs to be recorded easily and the ability to watch programs at will through streaming services on the Internet. Streaming, in this context, means watching over a rather short period of time all (or at least a large portion) of the episodes for a television series in order. In the twentieth century the characters on most television programs evolved very little over the life of the series. Basically the primary characters might change within an episode (or occasionally a few episodes), but eventually they returned to their basic original state. So, if a viewer had missed a few episodes, the plot of the current episode was easy to follow.

In the twenty-first century some series still followed that format, but many others deviated. In those shows plot lines might not be resolved within the episode, and characters might have life-changing experiences or even be seriously injured, contract a chronic illness or die. In any case it was much more enjoyable to watch these shows in order once that became practical.

During the year of isolation for the pandemic Sue and I developed a habit of watching a couple of hours of television together every evening. Sometimes we watched public television or a movie on Turner Classic Movies, but our mainstay was streaming. The research for this entry tuned up a surprisingly large number of shows. My comments about the ones listed below are almost all overwhelmingly positive. The reason for that is simple. If either Sue or I did not like a show, we stopped watching. So, the list includes only well-acted shows with interesting plots and characters and a minimum of violence and schmaltz.

Masterpiece/Mystery

For decades Sue and I had been watching the PBS programs shown under the titles of Masterpiece Theater and Mystery (later combined and labeled “Masterpiece”). Four or five times a year very good British shows were presented, one season1 at a time. The first one that I can remember watching was the version of Sherlock Holmes that starred Jeremy Britt in thirteen episodes that closely followed the plots of Doyle’s famous stories. We also enjoyed the first version of All Creatures Great and Small. These two shows appeared on PBS at about the same time in the second half of the eighties.

Here is a list of other Masterpiece shows that I can remember. They are roughly in chronological order.

  • The Poirot show in the mid-eighties that featured David Suchet was. in my opinion, far better than any of the movies based on the many Agatha Christie novels. We found this show on Amazon Prime in November of 2024, but the network announced that Season 1 would only be available for a few more days. We watched all ten episodes and enjoyed them as much as we did previously.
  • Lewis was the sequel to the wildly popular Inspector Morse series that I later watched on YouTube both on the television and on my laptop. My favorite characters were Laurence Fox as Hathaway and Clare Holman as Dr. Hobson.
  • Sherlock starring Benedict Cumberbatch was a spectacular updating of the Holmes stories. At times it got a little too spectacular. My favorite character was Una Stubbs as Mrs. Hudson, the landlady at 221B.
  • Endeavour was a clever prequel to the Morse stories set in the sixties and early seventies. The supporting cast was great, especially Roger Allam and Anton Lesser as Morse’s bosses.
  • Sue and I both really liked Baptiste with Tchéky Karyo, but it only had three seasons. This show was a continuation of a British series called The Missing that was never shown on Masterpiece.
  • We also really liked Press, which focused on the conflict between two of London’s newspapers. The BBC did not renew for a second season.
  • We struggled through a whole season of Broadchurch. It had its moments.
  • Unforgotten was a great series. The first episode after Nicola Walker’s departure was a little disappointing.
  • Guilt was a quirky show about two brothers in Scotland and their dealings with a crime family.
  • A new version of Around the World in Eighty Days appeared on Masterpiece in 2021. It was obviously shot before the Pandemic.
  • Anthony Horowitz’s Magpie Murders, which I consider the best detective novel since A Study in Scarlet, was magically transformed into a great television series on Masterpiece. AH’s comments at the end of each episode were a special treat. The sequel, Mayflower Murders, was somewhat disappointing, both in print and on the screen. At the end of the last episode Horowitz announced that there would be a third book, but he was noncommittal about a third television series.
  • The biggest disappointment was was Roadkill, which starred Hugh Laurie (the star of House and the British show Jeeves and Wooster), as an ambitious member of the British parliament.
  • A second version of All Things Great and Small on Masterpiece resumed the story just before World War II. The new Mrs. Hall, Anna Madly, was great. Tristan was disappointing.
  • Mr. Bates Versus the Post Office was an interesting documentary on Masterpiece about a British scandal. The legal ramifications were still ongoing when it was shown in 2024.
  • I liked Nicola Walker’s showpiece, Annika on Masterpiece, better than Sue did. It also starred Jamie Sives, who played a principal role in Guilt.
  • Maryland on Masterpiece was a fairly interesting portrayal of two sisters’ responses to the surprising news of their mother’s secret life and death on the Isle of Man.
  • The Marlow Murder Club, which was shown in the fall of 2024, was about a group of amateur sloops who solved a set of three murders and narrowly foiled a fourth. The setting is the wealthy Buckinghamshire town of Marlow, a town on the Thames about 35 miles from London. The plot gimmick (three murderers with air-tight alibis for two of the three murders) had previously been used in a season of Unforgotten. In that case the killers had all suffered somewhat similar abuses. In this case they were just former members of a rowing team who met by happenstance and decided to form their own murder club. I was not too impressed. A second season was announced before the first was shown in the U.S.

YouTube

The quality of shows on YouTube has always been hit and miss. Most of the ones that I have seen were recorded and uploaded one at a time by individuals, not the owners of the material.

The cast of Vera in season 13.
  • Inspector Morse was so popular on ITV in England that in 2008 it was named the greatest British crime drama of all time by readers of Radio Times. It also generated a long-running sequel and a very popular prequel. As far as I know, it has never been shown on free television in the U.S. Fortunately someone uploaded every episode to YouTube, and I watched them all.2 I liked both Lewis and Endeavour a little better.
  • If the poll were run again Vera, which started in 2011, might win. Brenda Blethyn’s performances were just outstanding. Many, but by no means all, of the shows have been uploaded to YouTube, probably illegally. I tried to read a book by Ann Cleeves, who wrote the Vera novels, but I hated it. We got to watch the first season again when it was shown on Amazon Prime.
  • Sue really liked Rosemary & Thyme, which was about a pair of middle-aged women whose main business was consulting about gardening. People tend to get killed wherever they tended shrubbery, and they solved the crimes. Somehow it worked.

MHz Choice

I am not sure when or where I heard about Mhz Choice, the streaming service that provided (very well done) closed-captioned versions of European mysteries and other shows. It only cost $8.50 per month. The only drawback was that you could either watch on Cox or on a computer. If you wanted to do both, you had to buy two subscriptions. It was difficult to set up the computer to display on the television screen through Cox. In any case Sue didn’t enjoy depending on captions. So, I watched all of the below on my laptop in the basement while using the rowing machine.

The Montalbano series spent a lot of time on balconies of Sicilian restaurants.
  • I learned about the Detective Montalbano made-for-television movies (called “fiction” in Italy) while on our tour of Sicily (documented here). Every one of them (except the last) was outstanding. I tried reading a few of the books written by Andrea Camilleri, but the use of Sicilian dialect in the dialog was off-putting.
  • The prequel Young Montalbano was pretty good, too.
  • I watched the Norwegian drama Acquitted through all of the episodes. By the end I was quite tired of it.
  • Detective DeLuca was a slow-paced crime story about the Mussolini era.
  • I really enjoyed the quirky Swiss show called Allmen. It was about a down-on-his luck thief/con man and the butler who kept him out of jail. There were only four episodes, and they have been pulled from MHz Choice. I discovered that a fifth one was released in 2023, but I have no idea how to watch it.
  • In 2024 I have made it through several seasons of The Undertaker, a story about an undertaker who formerly was a cop. The premise holds up surprisingly well, although I had the impression that he solved more than 100 percent of the murders in the area.
  • BarLume, which means “glimmer” in Italian. was a comedy about an owner of a bar in which three old guys hang out. The two women in the show were fantastic. The premise sort of fell apart after the first season.
  • I absolutely loved Vanessa Scalera’s performance as the title character in Imma Tataranni: Deputy Prosecutor. I would watch her in anything. I also enjoyed the depiction of the amazing town of Matera, which Sue and I visited in October of 2011 (documented here). However, the basic story line went off the rails in the second season and never recovered.
  • I watched two seasons of The Bastards of Pizzofalcone. That was enough. Pizzofalcone is a neighborhood of Naples.
  • Beck was a well-made Swedish cop show. I have watched several seasons. Most of the shows were stolen by Mikael Persbrandt as Gunwald Larsson. I will probably watch more.
  • The only two French shows that I liked featured very quirky women, Corinne Masiero as the title character in Captain Marleau, and Isabelle Gélinas, who has appeared in ten episodes of Perfect Murders.
  • There were a great many German shows that I have not yet watched. Two that I really enjoyed are the Borowski part of the long-running Tatort franchise and Murders by the Lake. Both have very interesting settings that I would love to visit—the port city of Kiel and Lake Constance. Axel Milberg was outstanding as Klaus Borowski, and the show paired him with three intriguing female colleagues. Nora Waldstätten was stunning as Hannah in Lake. She also appeared in one of the Allmen episodes. Unfortunately, she left the show in the third season. I watched a few episodes, but the chemistry was gone.
  • The Bridge was a Swedish production about cooperation between Swedish and Danish authorities concerning serial killers who drive across the long bridge that connects the two countries. The best reason to watch was to see the performance of Sofia Helin as the Swedish inspector who is clearly pretty high on the autism spectrum.
  • I watched one season of the German version of Professor T. It had no magic. I was very disappointed. For some reason MHz Choice does not have the Belgian version.
  • The four seasons of the German period piece Babylon Berlin were mesmerizing. It was set in the Weimar Republic years that followed World War I. The production values were absolutely incredible. Evidently there will be one more season, probably in 2025.
  • I got hooked on a bizarre show from Finland called Reindeer Mafia. It was about a group of guys in Lapland. Their gang was called The Wolverines. They were tangentially involved in a large land deal that may or may not have involved mining in the land of the reindeer herd. The ending was very strange. Almost everyone except the Wolverines got killed. I had to wonder if there will be a second season.

Peacock

NBC’s streaming service was available for free on Cox Cable for over a year during the pandemic. Sue and I took advantage of this nearly every evening. We were disappointed when they started charging for the service, but by then we had watched most of the good series.

Jim, Freddie, and Lance in “Nice Guys Finish Dead.”
  • The Rockford Files, which was broadcast in the seventies, was my all-time favorite television series. The only bad episode was the pilot. James Garner was, of course, outstanding throughout. The two episodes that featured Tom Selleck as Lance White, and James Whitmore, Jr., as Freddie Beamer were truly outstanding.
  • Monk was a notch lower, but the humor surrounding Tony Shalhoub’s character was generally good. I especially enjoyed Monk’s second assistant, Traylor Howard as Natalie Teeger, and Monk’s brother Ambrose, played by John Turturro.
  • The best thing about Psych was the premise that most people can be deceived into believing in paranormal powers. The cast was good, too. The only really bad episode was the musical.
  • 30 Rock won an Emmy almost every year, and it richly deserved each one. The cast was exceptionally good from top to bottom. Nobody but Tina Fey could have played Liz. My favorite character was Dennis Duffy, the Beeper King, played by Dean Winters. Every episode was golden, and they were just as funny the second and third time.
  • Parks and Recreation was not quite as good, but Amy Poehler held it together with her spiral binders. Nick Offerman as Ron Swanson stole most shows. The last year or two were not up to par.
  • Leopard Skin was an extremely bizarre set of eight beautifully shot episodes. I enjoyed it; Sue missed an episode or two, and could not make sense of it after that. I would gladly watch it again, if only to see Gaite Jansen as Batty.
  • The Resort was almost as bizarre, but the plot held together fairly well to a very strange ending
  • The comedy Rutherford Falls started out pretty well, but the last few episodes were tiresome. The best characters were the Indians.
  • The Capture had an interesting premise about being able to doctor the transmission of surveillance videos. I was not that enamored by the principal characters.
  • Vigil was about a murder aboard a nuclear submarine. It was very well done. Shaun Evans (Endeavour) appeared as a navy officer with a beard.
  • Five Bedrooms was an Australian series about five single people living together. I found it very engaging, and Sue absolutely loved it. We saw season 1 and 2 on Peacock. Season 3 and 4 were supposed to be on Amazon Prime, but the only place that they seemed to be available in 2024 is on Apple TV+.
  • Intelligence was a silly low-budget British comedy about the worst intelligence agency imaginable. Parts were funny.
  • The first season of Hitmen, a British show about two female freelance assassins who are also lifelong best friends, was hilarious. I watched every episode twice. The second episode, filmed during the lockdown, was disappointing.
  • Code 404 was a moderately funny British comedy about a cop who died and then was resuscitated with an electronically augmented brain. Sue did not like it much.

AMC+

  • Sue and I watched several seasons of the extremely popular show, Mad Men. on FreeVee. Amazon pulled it from the lineup when we were in the penultimate season. We bought a monthly subscription to AMC+. Almost all of the shows were good, but it was clear that the wind was going out of the writers’ sails in the last few episodes.
  • Before we canceled the AMC+ subscription we also watched the first two seasons of Dark Winds. It was based on the the novels of Tony Hillerman that featured native American cops Joe Leaphorn, Jim Chee, and Bernadette Manuelito. The third season will reportedly be shown on AMC in 2025. I will look for it.

Freevee

I take back all of the bad things that I have ever said about Amazon. The Internet giant bought IMDB’s free streaming service (with commercial interruptions), added a great deal of content, and relabeled it as Freevee. Some of these shows were really outstanding, and the price was unbeatable.

Giovanni Ribisi was the central character.
  • Many shows and movies have been made about con men, but Sneaky Pete might be the best. Every member of the cast was really outstanding. Sue and I also enjoyed the fact that it was largely set in Connecticut. My idol, Ricky Jay, had a small role in the final season. Because he died during the filming, the last episode needed to be rewritten.
  • Sprung was a very funny show that was about one of the side effects of the pandemic—people being released from prison in order to reduce the spread of Covid. This show only had one season, and the ending precluded any chance of a second season.
  • Alpha House was a comedy created by Gary Trudeau, the cartoonist of Doonesbury. It centered around a house in Washington in which four Republican senators stayed. I found it fairly funny, but it only had two season. Trudeau’s wife, Jane Pauley, appeared in one show.
  • Bosch was a treasurer. It was probably the best cop show ever. It certainly was the best that I have ever seen. Titus Welliver was perfect. The rest of the cast was also outstanding. Crate and Barrel, two detectives whom everyone addressed by their nicknames, were hilarious. I read one of the books by Michael Connelly and was severely disappointed.
  • It was hard to believe that Bosch Legacy, the sequel that focused on Bosch’s daughter Maddie, would be nearly as good as the original. Sue and I kept asking how the producers could have known that Madison Lintz, who appeared on Bosch as a gangly teenager, would grow up to be believable as a female version of Bosch.
  • Jury Duty was a “reality” show that was played for laughs. The judge, bailiff, witnesses, and all but one juror were actors. It was fairly amusing.
  • Taboo was a bizarre British show about one man’s bizarre encounter with the British government and the East India Company in the early days of the United States. Tom Hardy was compelling as the main character, James Delaney. It only had one season.
  • Sue and I both liked Eric McCormack in Perception. He played a schizophrenic professor of neurology who solved crimes as a hobby when he wasn’t writing seven books, teaching postgraduate classes, or doing crosswords while listening to Mahler on his Walkman.
  • The Amazing Mrs. Maisel was probably the best home-grown Amazon show that was migrated to FreeVee. The entire cast was very impressive, and the writing was very sharp. It was set in the late fifties and early sixties. The title character was good friends with Lenny Bruce. Many Emmys were won by this show. We watched season 5 on Amazon Prime
  • We also both liked Mary McCormack and the rest of the cast of In Plain Sight, a show about the federal witness protection program. It was filmed in and around Albuquerque, which made it a little more interesting for me.
  • The premise of Person of Interest was that it would be possible for a genius to write a program that simultaneously monitored all forms of electronic data and analyzed it all person by person in order to recognize people who were a threat or being threatened. Plus, it was completely secure, and only one person knew how to use it. This was, of course, preposterous, but if you suspended disbelief, the writers and actors could get you interested in the plots. Michael Emerson was perfect as the genius. We watched three and a half seasons of these shows before Amazon suddenly pulled them from Freevee and started charging $2.39 per episode in December of 2024.
  • The Mallorca Files was a British show about the police on the island of Mallorca. Ellen Rhys and Julian Looman were cops. She was English; he was a native of Munich who moved to Palma and has gone native. The tone was just right. The second season ended abruptly when production was stopped for Covid. However, a third season is in the can and will be shown on Amazon Prime.

Tubi

Tubi was another free streaming service that was available on Cox. Its commercials were a little more annoying than FreeVee’s. The selection of programs were not as good, but we (or mostly I) found a few good ones.

Robert Carlisle played Hamish. He had two different dogs. Both were named Wee Josh.
  • We originally watched Hamish Macbeth, a show about the constable for a remote Scottish village, on the local PBS station. We recorded the episodes when they were shown late (for me) at night on Saturday and watched them together on Monday evenings. We saw the entire series again on Tubi. This series was very loosely based on a series of novels by Marion Chesney. I read one of the books and hated it.
  • The Prague Mysteries was a short but intriguing detective series set in Prague after the dissolution of the Austrian empire. I thought that it was pretty good.
  • The story line for Vexed was similar to that of The Mallorca Files. A straight-laced blonde female detective was paired with a wise-cracking lazy guy. It only lasted two seasons. The blonde in the first season was much better (and hotter) than the one in the second season. For some reason several of the shows in the second season were captioned in Portuguese.
  • Tubi has been my go-to site for Mystery Science Theater 3000. I did not realize that they had made so many of these shows. I also did not realize that there were so many really bad movies. I mean horrendously awful movies that someone presumably paid to watch. I liked the shows with Mike Nelson better than the ones with Joel Hodgson. The real stars were Joel’s robots, Tom Servo (voiced by Kevin Murphy) and Crow (Trace Beaulieu). I was impressed with Kevin’s singing ability, but Crow held a special place in my heart.

Amazon Prime

I subscribed to Amazon Prime just so that we could watch the second season of Mallorca Files. I intended to drop the subscription after we finished watching. However, we discovered quite a few series that we enjoyed quite a bit.

  • I watched Season 1 of Reacher on Freevee. I did not think that she would like it because it was so violent and she is not into body-building types. However, we both watched season 2 together and enjoyed it immensely.
  • In Plain Sight told the story of a small group of U.S. Marshals who managed members of the federal Witness Protection Program in Albuquerque. The writing was good. Mary McCormack and Fred Weller were both charismatic as the two stars. We watched all 61 episodes and liked them all.
  • We had watched an episode or two of Raising Hope on Freevee. It was created by Gregory Thomas Garcia, the brains behind the one-season wonder, Sprung. Two of the principal actors in Sprung had also appeared in RH. Sue and I liked RH, but Amazon wanted us to pay $3 per episode after the second one in the second season, and we demurred.
  • Mr. & Mrs. Smith won many awards in its first season. Donald Glover and Maya Erskine were exceptional. as was the writing.
  • I rewatched all of the episodes of Endeavour, some by myself and some with Sue. This time around I was greatly impressed by the writing of Russell Lewis, who wrote and “devised” every single complicated episode.
  • We both greatly enjoyed the first season of Deadloch, an Australian comedy/mystery about a serial killer in a beach town in Tasmanian that is dominated by lesbians.
  • In the fall of 2024 Prime Video began showing one season of shows from other streaming services. We took advantage of this to watch Poirot (as mentioned above) and My Life is Murder, the story of a retired female detective in Melbourne, Australia. Lucy Lawless was engaging as the principal character. I was not willing to subscribe to Acorn to see the rest of the seasons.

Recorded

I had read Lonesome Dove, the truly epic novel by Larry McMurtry, twice before it was shown as a four-part made-for-television movie. It was the most entertaining book that I had ever read, and the movie was just as good. It was very true to the novel; only one character, Charles Goodnight, was left out. It won seven Emmy awards, but somehow Robert Duvall was denied one. We bought a tape of it and watched it a few more times. Prequels and sequels have also been made, but none was as good as the original.

Tom and John Barnaby hardly made a dent in the ongoing bloodbath in Midsomer.
  • Midsomer Murders has been on British television for over twenty years. It was set in an imaginary county called Midsomer that had only one town, Causton, which seemed to be surprisingly crime-free, and a large number of villages in which murder was as common as gossip. For the first decade of the series every single actor was white. Then the producer was changed, and subsequent every episode had one or more actor who was not white. Many of the murder weapons were outlandish. My favorite one was an episode in which two people were trampled to death by dairy cows in a barn.
  • Elementary was another Sherlock Holmes update. This one was set in New York City and featured a Dr. Joan Watson (Lucy Liu) and a suitably British Holmes (Jonny Lee Miller). This was a really good show that ran on CBS for seven years. The last few shows were weak. We recorded reruns on an off-brand network.
  • Sue and I discovered Resident Alien on Peacock. We watched the first season there and the second two on recordings of showings on the Syfy channel. Alan Tubyk played the title character, who came from another planet who took over the body of a doctor in a town in Colorado. Tubyk has been perfect throughout, and the rest of the cast has also been very good. It must have been difficult to come up with plausible scripts with this premise. The second and third seasons were, however, only slightly inferior to the first.
  • One of the first British shows that we watched on PBS was Father Brown, based on the mysteries written by G.K. Chesterton. The shows were set in a village in the Cotswolds. Mark Williams was perfect as the priest, and I especially liked Nancy Carroll as Lady Felicia.
  • Shakespeare and Hathaway was set in Stratford-Upon-Avon. The shows were mildly amusing, but the plots were never gripping, and—aside from haircuts—the characters never developed.
  • We watched two different versions of Wallander. The first season of the Swedish version was excellent, but it went swiftly downhill. I did not like the British version that starred Kenneth Brannagh. He even changed the pronunciation of the chief character’s name.
  • The Belgian version of Professor T. was weirdly delightful. Koen De Bouw played a criminology professor with extreme mental problems that included frequent interactions with hallucinations. The rest of the characters put up with him to varying levels. I missed some of the episodes. If I had a chance I would love to see them. Apparently it is available on PBS Passport.
  • Sue and I enjoyed the first season of Marie Antoinette, which focused on the teenager shipped from Vienna to live at Versailles. Evidently a second season has been filmed.

1. On the major networks a “season” once consisted of twenty-six or even more episodes. It was designed to run from the middle of fall to the end of spring. In the summer reruns or pilot productions were show. In other countries a season might consist of just a few episodes. Most of the Masterpiece and Mystery shows had only four or five episodes, but sometimes they exceeded the expected length of just under one hour.

2. I did not provide a link because when I looked on YouTube in 2024, I was unable to find the set of uploaded Morse episodes that I had watched.

3. I was astounded to discover that the screenplay antedated the novel. Many years earlier McMurtry tried to get it made as a feature film with John Wayne, James Stewart, and Henry Fonda. The project was scuttled when Wayne insisted on playing Gus McCrae.

2024 June: The Pro-Am in Nashua

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In “Pro-Am” events one player in each pair has a limited amount of experience, usually short of Life Master rank. Bob Bertoni ran such contests on Friday evenings at the sectionals sponsored by the Eastern Mass Bridge Association. As an … Continue reading →

In “Pro-Am” events one player in each pair has a limited amount of experience, usually short of Life Master rank. Bob Bertoni ran such contests on Friday evenings at the sectionals sponsored by the Eastern Mass Bridge Association. As an officer of District 25 he brought them to regional tournaments. The first one few were moderately successful. The last one before the pandemic, held in Nashua in June of 2018, was a huge success—21 tables! I attended the first Pro-Am, the last one, and all in between.

The last item discussed at the district’s Executive Committee meeting at the 2023 Gala in Marlborough, MA, was how to attract people to the evening games. At the last minute I, remembering that the Pro-Am had attracted so many players before the pandemic, suggested trying a Pro-Am pairs game. Susan Miguel, the district’s vice-president at the time, asked after the meeting if I would volunteer to “run it.” Thinking that she meant at the next tournament in February in Southbridge, I agreed.1

Well, the district’s February tournament was not held in Southbridge; it was in Mansfield, MA. Furthermore, it was not a real regional—it was limited regional with a simultaneous open sectional. So, there no Pro-Am was on its schedule.

There was a tournament in April in Southbridge, but Susan, who by this time was the president, wanted to have the Pro-Am at the June tournament, the Granite State Getaway, in Nashua, NH. I guess that I could have said no, but I did not want to go back on my word. She let me choose whether the event would be on Friday or Saturday. My wife Sue, who agreed to help with the project, and I selected Friday. I sent the first promotional mailing on Saturday, April 6. It is posted here.

While researching the 2016 event I discovered that one of the big attractions was the half-price entry fee. I emailed Sue Miguel to ask whether we could offer a similar incentive in 2024. Here was her incongruous reply.

This time we’ll charge the full amount BUT we’re going to make sure we have LOTS of things making it fun and are will be [sic]great to advertise.

For starters we’ll have special food. We can also offer raffles, prizes and a little trinket everyone can receive just for playing.

As soon as we wrap Southbridge, we’ll put our minds on it.

 Let’s see if we can find a theme to run with…

This sounded horrible to me. The atmosphere at a Pro-Am is less relaxed than the atmosphere in an Open Pairs game, but the theme is well established. Pros are there to give tips and confidence; Ams are there to get better. Both are there to get acquainted with someone from the other group.

That’s the theme!!!

I’ll make an ad but I need a couple of days to regroup and recover.

Directors in Hawaiian shirts, themed party food and gifts. Everyone gets a lai [sic] at the door.

Can’t wait….

Anyone for bridge?

I had to wonder if she had ever been to a luau. Most people who vacation in Hawaii for a few days attend one, but no one ever goes more than once. The hula dancing and the juggling of flaming torches are rather spectacular, but the food is secondary.

When I told my wife about this scheme, she had the same reaction that I did: “Are they going to make people eat poi?”

Anyway the only way that I could imagine to connect luaus to Pro-Am events was that professional hula dancers in grass skirts often tried to train unsuspecting (and usually intoxicated) amateur tourists in the art of hip swiveling. I doubted that we could persuade many people at a bridge tournament to participate in anything similar.

So, I decided to keep promoting it as an event with interesting bridge and painless learning without emphasizing the luau angle. Several people responded to my first email. Two volunteered as Pros. I was able to match Curtis Barton up with the only Am who responded, Daniel Sheinen. So, counting Sue and me, we now had one full table and one extra Pro.

On April 29 I received an email from Stuart Showalter, who had been appointed editor of a newsletter that Sue Miguel dreamed up.

Sue Miguel tells me you could write a short piece for the District 25 newsletter concerning the Pro-Am returning to Nashua. I think something about 250- 300 words would work well.  See the attached copy of our March issue. Your article could be along the lines of the “Bridge Fest Returns” article in that issue.

Thanks, and let me know if you have any questions.

I composed about 250 words and sent them to him with a bunch of photos. He thanked me, but I never saw a newsletter that contained any of them. Before writing this I looked on NEBridge.org for newsletters, but I found nothing.

On May 20 I sent an email to all of the non-Life Masters in the district with less than 750 masterpoints. It featured a photo of the hotel, some gold bricks that I found on the Internet, a full-width photo of the Pro-Am event in 2018, and a photo of a wahine throwing a shaka. I argued that Friday was the best day for a non-LM to attend the tournament. They could pick up some gold in the morning and afternoon at the Bracketed Open Pairs and get some tips from “pros” in a fun setting. It is posted here.

This email received quite a few responses. The one that I received from Sue Miguel was totally unexpected.

The countdown has begun to the Pro-Am. I can’t wait. Already have a date to play with Denise.

As much as we appreciate everything you’re doing to make the event a success, I have to remind you that the only person who is authorized to send out emails on behalf/for the District is Neil Montegue.

In addition, we added a new communications protocol to our governance routine…..ALL emails from EVERYONE (even me) need to be reviewed by Denise before they are sent. In this case, she would have pointed out you omitted Bridge FEST! from the list which is now going to create much confusion.  Also, we already had an email scheduled to go out today. We promised our members we wouldn’t be over sending emails and we need to adhere to what we promise.

Let me know if there is anything you need for the Pro-AM and keep us in the loop about the level of BUZZ you’re feeling.

Thanks again,

I immediately crafted this response:

I was unaware of any such “protocol”. I certainly never tried to edit or approve emails sent by authorized others when I was Communications  Manager. Nobody approved any emails that I sent.

The only BridgeFEST event on Friday is the bracketed pairs, which I definitely highlighted (although I did not use the term because I sent the email to all “Ams”, some of whom would presumably not be considered “New and Advancing Players”). It is difficult to promote a full-price red-points-only event held in the evening at a regional. I expect few (if any) players to participate who did not play on Friday. The only other event on Friday is an Open Swiss that is unlikely to appeal to many Ams. So, the focus of the email was on the unique bracketed pairs and the Pro-Am. I mentioned the Hawaiian theme, but I could not think of a way to tie it in to the Pro-Am, and the best Hawaiian foods are fresh fruits and freshly caught fish, neither of which are likely to be served in Nashua.

I hope to send out an email to Pros by the end of the weekend. I plan to emphasize three things: the bracketed pairs, the pleasure of playing with “advancing players” (unless you are married to one), and a wager that Sue and I have made as to whether more pros or ams will attend. I will send it to you and Denise for approval.

I had a few positive responses to the first email. One person asked if the pros could play for free. I matched up one pro with an am.

I did not mention that if she had told me that I would not be able to do my own marketing, I would never have agreed to manage this process in the first place. For the last couple of years I have submitted my emails for the Connecticut Bridge Association to the unit’s Communications Committee. The only negative comments were from Esther Watstein, and they always encourage more “WOW!”

The email that I proposed was ready to go on May 26. Denise, whom I hardly knew at all, kept it a few days and then sent it back to me with much of it rewritten. I was frankly insulted. Who did she think she was? I have written scores of emails promoting bridge. No one has ever tried to rewrite one. One of her complaints was that it was redundant. Nothing was internally redundant. Did she mean that it repeated information that was available elsewhere? It certainly did, but is that wrong? Of course not.

I replied as follows: “This is lifeless.”

She replied:

I am not sure what you are stating.  Most of your email has remained.  The lei insinuations have to be taken out. Some of our members would be offended.   Pls consider a happy medium and let me read another draft. I have offered to help. I am at the partnership desk every morning and during the break between games.  I would be happy to discuss this.

She left her phone number. The last thing that I wanted to do was to “discuss this” with her over the telephone. I would be trying to persuade her that I had much more experience and knowledge about how to persuade bridge players than she did. What do you think were the chances of being able to do that?

I wrote the following: “I am not going to argue about this. Send whatever you want, but leave my name off of the bottom.”

What they did send, a few days later was the following image with no text whatever:

Please note that it does not say anywhere where this will be held or the date. The email address on it was mine, but the reply-to address was not. Every inquiry that I received asked where and when it was. I had to apologize to them that that information had not been included.

I would never have sent an email that used the word “kahuna” to refer to a bridge event. Since the word has religious connotations, I probably would have avoided it entirely. Also, I noticed that the definitions of the three categories had changed from what Sue Miguel had told me previously. I had relayed the (suddenly erroneous) information to a few people who had asked about the event. All of this made me pretty angry because it made me look stupid or incompetent.

I decided to compose my own email and send it using my free MailChimp account. I made sure to make it clear that it was my personal requests, and I used my personal database and account. It did not violate the dictum: “the only person who is authorized to send out emails on behalf/for [sic] the District is Neil Montegue [sic].” On June 7 I sent it to all Life Masters in New England with more than 750 masterpoints. It is posted here.

910 people (68.3 percent of the addressees) opened this email, an astonishingly high number. I received many very positive responses. Some people volunteered to be Pros. Others said that they would have volunteered if they were going to be at the tournament on Friday.

On Monday June 10 I received an extremely disconcerting email from the ACBL. I scanned it and decided not to let it ruin my tournament. I postponed dealing with it when we returned from Nashua. The email and my response are discussed in the section below.

Sue and I divided the partnership task into two parts—making sure that everyone knew about the event and matching up “Pros” with “Ams”. Before the tournament we primarily used email to achieve the first goal. At the tournament we primarily relied on word-of-mouth. Sue also was asked to give an impromptu speech at one of the “”Fest” events.

I decided that we should use index cards to keep track of the people who wanted to play. There may be other ways of organizing a Pro-Am. If anyone had ever documented the process, I was unaware of it. I bought a pack of 100 at Target for the astounding price of $.80. According to the rules that Sue Miguel published, there would actually be three categories. Group 1 was composed of all non-Life Masters. Life Masters with over 750 masterpoints were in Group 3. Group 2 was the other Life Masters. In actual fact the only player in the middle category who contacted me was John Lloyd. He played with an Am.

We filled out a card for each player. I bought a Sharpie with a very wide nib. On each card we placed a very prominent P, A, or 2 to designate the category that the play was in. I waited until June 7 to do this so that I could use the most up-to-date rosters for the ranks and masterpoints.

If both a Pro and an Am contacted me, I sent an email to the Pro and asked him/her/them to contact the Am. Only one Pro told me that “it was not a good fit”. Every other Pro contracted the Am in question and both agreed to play. By the time that the tournament started we had matched up enough Pros with Ams that we were fairly certain of at least a four-table game. I used a paper clip to keep the matched-up pairs together.

I had also heard from several Pros who reportedly were not only coming but were actively working to increase attendance. I expected to discover a lot of activity concerning the event in Nashua. When we left on Tuesday afternoon I was projecting ten or so tables, a very respectable turnout that would mean that we could have a standard Mitchell movement.

Sue had a different idea about contacting people. She asked me to provide her with a database of Ams that she could manipulate on her ancient Hewlett-Packard laptop. She had somehow obtained a copy of Word and Excel, but she had almost no idea how to use them. I made a CSV file for her, put it on a flash drive, and gave it to her. I then showed her how to upload it into Excel. She spent several days working on this, and I had to be available for technical support for this entire period to teach her the control keys, how to select a large number of cells rapidly, and the vagaries of sorting.

She planned to contact people whom she knew personally, but she apparently ran out of time. As far as I know, she only talked with one or two people and received no commitments. Still, she invested a great deal of time, at least as much as I did.

This poster was attached to the mirror behind our table when I arrived on Thursday morning.

On Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday mornings I arrived at a table in the information/partnership area of the hotel at 9am. I brought with me a resealable plastic bag that contained all of the index cards and the Sharpy. On all three mornings I got a cup of coffee and, except on the morning that Sue and I ate breakfast together, a bagel or roll from the concession area that was right across the hall from our table. No one ever approached the table to inquire about the Pro-Am game. It was a complete waste of time.

A better strategy would have been: 1) create handouts that explained the essence of the events and 2) wear something that identified me as the Pro-Am guy. I should then have gone out at 9:10 and 9:40, milled about with the players seated at the tables, distribute handouts, and inquire about interest and questions. This might have gotten a few more Ams interested in playing and would have made me feel less like an idiot for sitting idly at the table.

Meanwhile my wife never made it downstairs before the games started at 10. I was never sure what she did all day long while the rest of us were playing, but later discovered evidence that she had tried to put together her own list of who was going to play with whom on Friday evening.

Friday was different. By that time I had four or five unmatched Pros lined up and no Ams to pair them with. I abandoned the card system and instead kept two lists—one of unmatched Pros (memorized) and one of unmatched Ams (written). As soon as I learned of an Am, I chased down a Pro and tried to create a match. By Friday evening I still had a few matches to make. I was not too surprised when four or five pros came to the event unannounced. They were all friends of mine or friends of friends. I matched up as many as I could. In the end we had thirty-three pairs.

Even though someone allowed a pair of Pros to play together to avoid a sitout, I still had to send away a handful of unmatched Pros. The dismissal that bothered me the most was John Berry, a New Yorker who often attends events in New England. He had contacted me earlier in the week. I had given him a card with the name, email address, and phone number of an Am2 who had contracted me just before we left for Nashua. John tried both methods of communication, but he received no replies.

Three or four times I encountered an unmatched Am in the few minutes before the game I immediately sought out John Berry. On every occasion I could not find him in the chaos, and instead I placed them with the first unmatched Pro that I encountered. When I saw John on Saturday I apologized to him.

The Pro-Am game was a seventeen-table Mitchell. We played nine two-board rounds. Sue and I sat at table #2 North-South.

Every few rounds Sue Miguel interrupted play to present Hawaii-oriented door prizes to people. One went to the oldest player (99); one went to people who had been to Hawaii since the pandemic. I don’t remember the others.

The winning pair consisted of two guys from New Hampshire, Dan Maguire (one of the very first Pros to tell me that he would attend) and Graham Woerner. Note: When putting the finishing touches on this entry I tried to use the index page for the winners boards on NEBridge.org to find a photo of Dan. It had been deleted without warning.

I brought my camera, but I never felt like taking any photos. I didn’t feel like playing either, but I had committed to do so.

The “hospitality” consisted of two items. I tried the pizza that contained chunks of cheese and pineapple after the event when it was quite cold. I found it abominable. The other was chicken wings kept in a metallic semi-cylinder that clanged shut with a very large bang several times during the event. Neither Sue nor I tried the wings, but Sue noted that someone sitting South who had played the cards that she received must have. Her cards were sticky.

There was no coffee. I asked Sally Kirtley, the Tournament Manager, about this. She said that she thought that she had ordered it.

A renowned party-pooper, I found the interruptions and the theme-oriented food quite annoying. However, I must admit that everyone else seemed to be having a good time.

Here is the email that I received on June 10 from Gwynn Garthright, who identified herself as a “Marketing Specialist at the ACBL”:

Dear Mr. Wavada,

We have been informed of a recent communication you distributed to members of District 25 regarding an upcoming bridge event, which appears to have been sent on behalf of a club.

As stipulated in our Terms of Use, clubs are only permitted to use the personal contact information of members who have played at that specific club. We have received complaints from members who have not played at this club but nonetheless received your email.

Furthermore, while you are member of the District 25 Board of Directors, only district officers are authorized to use this list to promote a sanctioned bridge event. According to our records, you are listed as a teacher, and any communications you send to this list should be restricted to matters related to learning bridge.

Please remember that privacy laws regarding email marketing are very strict. When a member joins the ACBL, they only consent to what is outlined in the privacy policy and terms of use. Violations of these policies may result in disciplinary action by the ACBL, as per the ACBL’s Code of Disciplinary Regulations, and could potentially lead to civil lawsuits.

Note that merely having an unsubscribe option does not suffice. The policy explicitly prohibits contacting members who have not played at your club.

Any further violation of the ACBL’s Terms of Use may be reported to the ACBL’s Ethics Department.

Thank you for your attention in this matter.

I deliberately postponed researching an answer to this email until after the tournament. I did not want to spoil my concentration, and I did not want it to make me so angry that I was unable to enjoy anything about the experience.

I checked the “Terms of Use” that are currently posted on the “My ACBL” website that allowed me to download roster. Sure enough, the version dated September 2023 stipulated that only officers of districts and units could send out emails and that club owners/managers could only send emails to people who had already played at the club.

I sent this email in response:

It is hard for me to respond to this email since I do not know who you are. What does a Marketing Specialist do? I find it surprising that you would be involved in suppressing marketing.

Let me introduce myself. I have been a member of the ACBL for over twenty years. I belong to two clubs. I am on the Board of Trustees of the Hartford Bridge Club, which is the oldest in North America and the largest in New England. The other club is the Simsbury Bridge Club, an informal group that tries to scrape together a game on Wednesday evenings. I have been on the Board of Unit 126 for at least a decade. I am also on the Board of Delegates and the Executive Committee, the governing organizations for District 25, and have been so for several years. Prior to 2023 I spent ten years as the webmaster, database manager, communications chairman, and bulletin writer for the district. I also served as the email marketing director for the Summer NABC in Providence, RI. I have been on the ACBL’s Goodwill Committee for about a decade.

I apologize for the delay in responding to this email. For the last week  I have been in Nashua, NH, at the regional tournament. My wife and I organized and promoted the Friday evening Pro-Am game, which attracted seventeen tables.

Over the last decade I have sent well over one million emails promoting bridge events in New England on behalf of both clubs, the unit, and the district. I think that it is fair to say that I actually invented email marketing for bridge events. Before I began downloading rosters in 2013 I read the Terms of Use very carefully and consulted with the officers of the district and unit to make sure that what I was doing was within what was allowed. I have never made a penny on any of these projects. Incidentally I have received hundreds of complimentary comments about my email projects. NO ONE has ever complained to me about them except for two people who thought that I should not have mentioned the Lone Ranger’s faithful Indian companion, Tonto, in one of them.

I am not really a teacher. For two years I volunteered to teach bridge at two middle schools in Springfield, MA, with the late Bob Derrah. I received no pay, but they did honor us as the Volunteers of the year in the Springfield school district. I have mentored many newer bridge players over the decades officially as part of the HBC’s mentoring program and unofficially because I love the game. I am NOT a professional teacher, and I have never received a penny for my efforts in that area.

I have sent no emails for the unit in the last year or so. The only emails that I have sent for the district were to promote the Pro-Am game described above. I probably will never send another email for the district. It took over a year to find people who were willing and able to do what I had done for a decade, but they are now handling those areas. I sometimes advise them on technical matters, but they make the marketing decisions.

That leaves the clubs. I have promoted two events for the HBC. The first was a set of limited sectionals that were held at the club’s building. These one-day events were wildly successful, drawing 57, 35, and 50 tables of non-Life Masters. The other was to promote the beginner lessons that were conducted by one of the club’s teachers. I wrote to players within fifty miles of Hartford asking them if they knew anyone who would be interested in taking these lessons. Unfortunately, the response was less than we hoped to achieve.

So, I must assume that the complaint is about my emails to potential players at the Simsbury Bridge Club. I have no access to any list of players at the club, which struggles to attract more than three or four tables to its weekly games. So, I have sent invitations to players in the area. Does the ACBL really want me to stop doing this? I have received dozens of replies from people who received them. Nearly all expressed thanks. A few people asked me to take them off the list (which they could have done themselves with one click). I, of course, promptly complied in every case.

The SBC has only one game per week on Wednesday evenings. No club within driving distance conducts games at that time. No one could conceivably have been materially injured. Could you please provide me with the name of the coward who contacted you about this? In America people are allowed to confront their accusers. I can hardly believe that someone would take legal action about something as innocuous as inviting people to play bridge on Wednesday evenings. If he or she had contacted me in person–nearly all bridge players in the area know me–I am sure that I could have addressed their concerns. If they wanted help with their own marketing, I probably would have helped. I have done it several times.

I must say that the rule that clubs can only contact people who have already played in their games is profoundly stupid. How in the world does the ACBL expect existing clubs to attract enough people to sustain the game if they cannot use direct marketing? Moreover, what if I wanted to start a new club? I have been asked to do so in my home town of Enfield, CT, many times. Are you telling me that I would not be able to use my email marketing skills and experience to promote it? If your specialty really is marketing, can you not realize how inane this is?

If the ACBL decides to take civil action against me, I should warn you that it will not be lucrative. I have never received any income whatever from any of my efforts.

Emails like yours infuriate volunteers like me and often impel us to wash our hands of the bureaucratic nonsense that has caused appreciation of our beautiful game to to deteriorate over time.

I copied Bronia Jenkins, the ACBL’s Executive Director, Regional Director Mark Aquino, Donna Feir, Sally Kirtley, and Peter Marcus3.

The only one who replied was Peter. His harangue included an accusation that I was hostile to Hawaiians because I made fun of poi.

In the end I told Gwynn that I would never do any marketing for the district and that I would only send emails to members of the clubs to which I belong. Only the second bothered me; I had no plans to volunteer for anything at the district level ever again. The restriction on club mailing will, in my opinion, probably lead to the demise of the Simsbury Bridge Club. It may also have a severe effect on the success of the HBC’s limited sectionals.

Nobody with whom I have talked thinks that the concern about privacy is a reasonable justification for the ACBL’s restrictions on direct marketing.

This whole affair left me depressed about the state of bridge. I had a hard time convincing myself to get out of bed in the morning.

1. This was a mistake. I should have remembered the admonition from my drill sergeant on the very first day of basic training: “Never volunteer for anything.” Of course, he amended that a few minutes later, as described here.

2. Suresh Subramanian, of Action, PA, attended the tournament and received .55 masterpoints. I do not understand why he did not return John’s calls and messages. I searched through the results to try to figure out what event(s) he played in, but I was unsuccessful.

3. At first I thought that this might have been about weekly emails that I sent for the Simsbury Bridge Club. However, Peter’s vituperative response made me think that it was actually prompted by my “personal” email about the Pro-Am. Sue Miguel probably talked with Peter about it and the emails that I sent out promoting the Hartford Bridge Club’s fantastically successful non-Life Master Sectionals (documented here). I could be wrong, but it now seems clear to me that she and Peter ratted me out to the ACBL. She was probably upset that I bypassed the “protocols” for emails that she invented, and he still felt enmity about the humiliation that resulted from the brouhaha about Tonto. They both were, in my opinion, bullies.