In 2013 I was still working full-time at TSI. My bridge was mostly limited to evenings and weekends. My involvement with District 25 (New England) was mostly limited to maintaining the NEBridge.org website, but I did accept an appointment to be one of the people who represented Unit 126 (Connecticut) at the twice-yearly meetings of the Board of Delegates. The big attraction was the free breakfast.
The Larry Weiss award was about eighteen inches in diameter.
The Larry Weiss Award was actually instituted in 1982. Its history is recorded here. The first presentation that I witnessed was at a Board of Delegates (BoD) meeting in 2013. The winner that year was Frank Hacker1, an expert player from Vermont whom I had contacted about contributing materials to the district’s website. The presenter was the previous winner, Jim Rasmussen. Frank seemed shocked and a little embarrassed to receive it.
I read about the award on NEBridge.org. It was named after an expert player who had a national reputation for being very congenial at the table. The evident purpose was to recognize a good bridge player from New England who had similar comportment. In those days2 an accomplished player who was also friendly was rare.
Jim Rasmussen.
I was fascinated by the award, which was the only physical trophy given out by the district. I examined the list of previous winners. Most of the names were not familiar to me.
Not long after receiving the award Frank moved to Florida. No award was presented in 2014 or 2015. In 2016 someone retrieved the tray from Frank, and Jim Rasmussen was pressed into service to find a suitable recipient. I posted a notice on the website for him asking people to submit nominations to Jim’s email address. I submitted two names, mainly because I was afraid that no one else had bothered to respond.
Luke Gillespie.
A few months later I was taken aback when Jim called me aside at a tournament and asked me if I would be amenable to him just selecting the person to receive the award. I said that I certainly had no objection. The award that year was given to Luke Gillespie, whom I had played against a couple of times. I was a little surprised that he won. I had only seen him at a few tournaments. I had also encountered him at no meetings or in any of my undertakings as webmaster. Luke was very surprised when his name was announced. That was the only time that I ever saw him at a BoD meeting.
Both of Jim’s presentation speeches were brief. He described the award, but he never went into any details about the process used to determine the winner.
In 2017 I was again asked by someone on the Executive Committee to post an item on the website soliciting nominations for the award. This time I did not nominate anyone. The award was presented at the BoD meeting in Nashua NH in June. Earlier in the week Jack Mahoney had greeted me in an elevator with “Congrats on the Weiss!” I don’t remember what I responded. However, this revelation game me a day or two to think about what I would do if they actually gave me the award.
At the end of the meeting Luke Gillespie presented me with the Larry Weiss award. When he introduced me, he admitted that he did not actually know me. In fact, I had only played against him once or twice. The memorable occasion was in Johnston, RI, at a sectional. I distinctly remember one hand. He was playing with Sheila Gabay. My partner, Steve Smith (introduced here), had opened 3♦. Sheila had bid 4♣. I raised to 4♦. Luke ventured 5♣, and Steve said 5♦, which was doubled.
Sheila Gabay.
As I lay down the dummy, I remember my exact words: “I don’t know; I don’t think that they are making 5♣. Afterwards, Luke and Sheila gently chided Steve for usurping my captaincy.
I was well aware of the criteria for this prestigious award, at least one of which I did not in any way meet. I gave a little speech in which I argued that if they were going to lower the standards to consider a Bracket 4 player, they should have chosen my friend and frequent teammate, Bob Derrah, who had established successful youth bridge programs at two middle schools in Springfield. His devotion of time, energy, and his own money for this and other projects was truly “superior behavior.” His wife (and bridge partner) Shirley had also been a great help, but Bob had been the driving force.
Shirley and Bob Derrah.
At the very end I emphasized that I felt honored, but Bob would have been a better choice. I spelled Bob’s last name so that the fill-in secretary, Beth Bertoni, would be certain to get it right in the minutes. Sandy DeMartino said that I made a good point in that players should be encouraged to nominate people that they thought were deserving of the award.
Early in 2018 I followed the instructions that were posted on the NEBridge.org website. I organized a committee of nine players that had representatives each of the eight units in Di25. My first choice was Luke Gillespie. The text describing the award indicated that preference should be given to former winners. Luke agreed. The other members were Susan Smith, Shirley Wagner, Jack Mahoney, Wayne Burt, Linda Ahrens, Karen Hewitt Randall, and Bob Sagor.
Ausra Geaski.
I once again posted a notice for the submission of nominations. This time I asked people to reply to my email address.3 Only nine people responded; seven nominated one person, and Carolyn Weiser nominated Wayne Burt, Dick Budd, and David Rock. The other nominees were Paul Harris, Sabrina Miles, Joe Brouillard, Bob Derrah, Don Caplin, Pat McDevitt, Felix Springer, and Frank Merblum. I nominated Bob Bertoni and Ausra Geaski. No one was nominated by more than one person.
I created a pdf file of all of the nominations, included the arguments provided by the nominators and sent it with the following email to the members of the committee.
I received thirteen nominations for the Larry Weiss Award. I have enclosed them in a pdf file and a Word doc file. To some of them I have appended comments when I had personal knowledge of the recipient.
I think that the next step is to gather comments from committee members. No one can know everyone, and so in some cases we must rely on the judgments of others. Please read the documents and send me whatever comments you might have this week. During the week of April 9 I will assemble a new package that includes them. Then we can start the balloting.
One note: The last ten winners have been men. No woman has won the award since Jane Smith in 2003. This seems peculiar to me, since there seems to be nothing in the criteria that would predict such a bent.
Thanks for your participation.
There were only a few comments, but one person was very upset that one of the nominees was even under consideration and asked that I include that comment without attribution. Since I had said that I would allow anonymous comments, I did. The subject of that comment, who was also a voting member of the nominating committee, offered the opinion that only positive comments should be accepted. I did not remove the comment.
In the first round of voting I allowed all members to name up to three nominees who best, in their opinion, met the criteria. Only three people were named by more than one person: Joe Brouillard, Ausra Geaski, and Bob Bertoni. Bob and Ausra were named more often than Joe.
So, the final ballot was between Bob and Ausra. Ausra got four votes; Bob get five. I would have been happy with either result. In retrospect it seems remarkable to me that if I had not been on the committee, they would not have even been considered.
I announced on the website that the award for 2018 would be given out at the meeting of the Board of Delegates at the Granite State Getaway ( a regional tournament held in Nashua, NH) on Sunday, June 24, 2018. I did not disclose the winner’s name to anyone—not even my wife Sue.
I brought the award with me to the Senior Regional in North Falmouth, MA. When I gave the trophy to Carolyn Weiser to be engraved, I had to tell her who had won. A big smile appeared on her face.
My presentation of the award to Bob has already been chronicled here (search for “Weiss”), but that account did not include my actual description of the winner: “My friend, my boss, my guru, my hero, Bob Bertoni.”
This was the last presentation of the Larry Weiss award. Bob died in 2021. No one seemed to know where the silver-plated tray ended up.
My relationship to the award that replaced it has been described here.
1. I also played against Frank in a sectional in New Hampshire. He told me that he was an actuary. He also asked me if I knew Joel Wolfe. I did know him from the Tuesday evening games at the Hartford Bridge Club, but I was terrified of him. I never told Joel about the encounter in New Hampshire.
2. Behavior was apparently much less friendly in the eighties. In 1988 the ACBL instituted a set of laws governing behavior at the bridge table called the Zero Tolerance policy. Over the next three decades bridge gradually became a much more friendly game as it became “bad form” to be rude or abusive to the others at the table.
3. I am not sure why I did not send a district-wide email asking for nominations. The district certainly had its MailChimp account by that time, and I had been maintaining the database for many years. The description of the award says that the website should be used to ask for nominations, but when that admonition was written the district had no way to send a large set of emails. Perhaps I was worried about the cost, which would have been about $7.50.
2012 was long before “ACBL Live Results”1 made it easy for bridge players to find out within an hour or so the results of tournaments.Late in that year I saw a notice on the NEBridge.org2 home page that District 25 (i.e., New England) was seeking someone to post on the website the results from its tournaments as the tournaments were running. It asked interested players to contact the president of the New England Bridge Conference (NEBC), Ausra Geaski. I did, and after a short training session from Bob Bertoni, who owned and operated Megaherz Computer, the company that designed and implemented the website, I took over the responsibility.
On the evening of each day of the 2013 Knockout Regional in Cromwell I posted the results. The tournament director sent me a text file for each event. I amalgamated them into one large file text file using a program that had been provided to me. I made an HTML file that had an index at the top with one line linked to the anchor for each event that I had inserted at the top of the appropriate text. It was more basic HTML than rocket science.
Bob thought that I had done a good job in getting the results posted promptly. He told me that someone who was webmaster at one of the other units had tried to do it at a previous tournament and had made a big mess.
Bill Braucher.
I subsequently told Ausra, whom I occasionally saw at the Hartford Bridge Club3 (HBC). that I was willing and able to do more. Shortly thereafter another notice was posted on NEBridge.org. This one said that the district needed a webmaster. Bill Braucher was resigning from the post that he had held for seven years. I let Ausra know that I thought that I could do it. I also told her about my own website, Wavada.org (which was introduced here), but I don’t think that anyone ever checked it out.
One evening at a tournament Bob spent about an hour with me explaining how the district’s website was structured and how the built-in page editor worked. During this session he discovered that I already knew HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.4 He exclaimed, “Oh, you can code! You won’t have any trouble with this.”
A little later we realized that we had something else in common. Bob had attended Boston College on a debate scholarship.5 His coach was Tuna Snider, whom I knew fairly well. In the end Bob offered me the webmaster job at the same salary that Bill had earned.6 I countered with a demand for a 75% raise, and we settled on 50%.
The bridge world was very different then. The district’s website was its primary method of communicating with its members. It did not publish a newsletter, and it had no program for using email. For the most part postcards and flyers were snail-mailed to the clubs. The district relied on their owner/managers to pass the information on to the players. This method was somewhat costly and totally unreliable.
Allan Clamage.
Furthermore, the webmaster was not allowed to post any material unless the website editor, Allan Clamage7, had checked it for style and errors. Allan also taught me about standards that the district had established to govern the decisions. For example, the website never published an obituary or promoted any unit’s tournaments or other events.
Rich DeMartino
The Website Committee (Allan, Bob, District Director and NEBC Treasureer Rich DeMartino, and myself) had a strategy meeting during one of the lunch breaks at every tournament. I don’t remember much that transpired at these meeting, but the other members mostly endorsed my ideas for improving the website. After three or four meetings Rich declared that we seemed to know what we were doing and disbanded the committee. At about the same time Allan began to review what I posted only after the fact. I considered that show of trust as a great compliment. I only embarrassed him a few times, and he never got angry at me.
Harold Feldheim.
My primary goal was to attract more eyeballs to the site. Expert players Harold Feldheim and Jay Stiefel allowed me to post articles that they had written for The Kibitzer, the newsletter of the Connecticut Bridge Association (CBA). I also received material from Frank Hacker, Steve Rzewski, Bill Braucher, and a few others.
I began writing The View from B-Low under my nom de plume, Single Session Swiss8. After each tournament the webpage for The View whimsically recounted my own completely inexpert experiences. Most were true; a few were fish stories. Most of those articles still exist.9 The index to them is available here.
Database Manager: I remember that during one of my conversations with Allan, I exclaimed, “We don’t know who our players are!” He disagreed. He then showed me how he downloaded csv10 files of the entire ACBL roster every month. He then arranged for the ACBL to allow me to do the same. Allan used spreadsheets, but I undertook the major task of designing a MySQL database for use by the district and myself. At the time I wasn’t quite sure what I would do with the information, but I knew that we needed it.
I maintained two copies of the database, one on my local hard drive and one on the Wavada.org website that I had purchased from iPower so that I could share my travel journals with friends, family, and fellow travelers.
The database’s primary table had one record per player. Every table in any database should have a “key”—a field that uniquely identifies the record and cannot be changed. On the player table the key was the seven-digit ACBL number. Using it as the key would be a small problem if I wished to add records for non-ACBL members. Fortunately, if that ever happened, I could assign them a bogus number less than one million. The ACBL never used those numbers.
When a new roster was released I updated both the local and remote copies of the players table using scripts that I wrote in php. At first I did this only for currently active players in New England, but after a few months I decided to expand it to cover all of North America. The script11 that updated the players table also wrote records on a history table that contained each player’s point total at the time that the roster was posted.
One of my jobs as webmaster was to post a list every month of the New England players who had advanced in rank during the month. I decided to maintain a sub-table for these advancements using the file that was sent to me by the ACBL.
I soon realized that what I really wanted to know was who had been attending the tournaments in New England. I knew that the results posted on the district’s website as well as on the websites of the units listed all players in attendance. There were two major difficulties: 1) the ACBL numbers were not on the lists; 2) the formats were not consistent. It was an ugly project, but I eventually came up with scripts that could handle nearly all of the entries on all of the lists.It wasn’t close to perfect, but it was much better than nothing. I convinced myself that it was worth the effort.
I created two sub-tables for attendance: one for players whose ACBL numbers I was able to deduce from the name and town on the list and one for the others. The biggest problem was people with more than one address. The second-biggest problem was people who changed their names. I figured out ways to handle these problems, but they were labor-intensive and introduced the possibility of mistakes. Since I knew from the beginning that the table would not be perfectly accurate, I felt that I could live with this approach.
I also went through the same process for the three NABC tournaments that were run every year. Those files were much larger. It took me a day or more to process each one. I learned the importance of processing them promptly. If even a month elapsed, a lot of addresses changed.
Sending emails: Eventually, I wanted to use the database to send emails promoting the district’s tournaments. The first problem was that the email addresses on the ACBL’s database were incomplete. I reached out to my acquaintances throughout the district and found correct email addresses for at least half of the ones that were missing. I also went through the wooden box containing index cards with member data at the HBC and found a few there. To make sure that my good addresses were not overridden by the ACBL’s blank, confidential, or wrong addresses, I added a field to the player’s table for the source of the email and changed the php script so that it only used the email address on the roster if the previous source was “ACBL”.
<Mrk Aquino.
The second problem was that I had no authority and no budget for anything like this. At about the same time District 25’s president, Mark Aquino, had created a “B’s Needs Committee” to address the reasons that lower-level players (like myself) avoided attending the district’s events when their masterpoints exceeded the 750-point maximum for the “Gold Rush” games. Mark attended some of the meetings. I told the committee about the database that I had created, and I mentioned that I would like to send emails to promote the events sponsored by District 25. I was very pleased when Mark said, “Go for it!”
Ginny Farber.
The great thing about php was that it was—even in those days—thoroughly documented on the Internet. I discovered a way of sending emails through php. My first project was to promote the 2014 Senior Regional/Cape Cod Sectional in Hyannis, MA. The chairperson was one of my partners, Ginny Farber (then Ginny Iannini), who was introduced here.
I sent the emails to all members of District 25 and to anyone who, according to the attendance table on the database, had attended a recent tournament in New England or a national tournament. Realizing that I needed to be careful about being considered a spammer, I stated quite clearly in the email that anyone who wished to be removed from the list should reply to the email with that indication, and I would take care of it. I added an “OK to email?” field to the players table. I never mailed to anyone who had asked to be removed, and I was scrupulous about keeping this designation up to date..
Sarah Widhu.
The emails were very well received, and the attendance at the tournament exceeded expectations. The chairperson of the next event, the Summer Regional in Nashua, NH, was Sarah Widhu. She asked me to promote that event, and I did so. It was also well received, and the attendance was quite good. I was pretty sure that I had this whole process was worthwhile.
Email problems: The php script that I executed on my Wavada.org account was not completely fool-proof. Every so often it would send up to fifteen copies of the email to one person. This was, to put it mildly, quite annoying. I contacted iPower about it. Because I was unable to reproduce the problem for them, they could not solve it. However, it eventually went away. I never understood how this could have happened.
Unfortunately, this problem was completely dwarfed by another issue that raised its ugly head shortly thereafter. There were no errors, but none of the emails went out! Once again I contacted iPower. It took several weeks, and they never told me what they did, but the support team somehow fixed this.
However, after a few successful executions, the problem appeared again. After several weeks of interchanges with iPower support, I was finally informed that my account had been black-listed as a spammer by someone. Therefore, the iPower email server did not send out my emails.
Bob Bertoni.
I used the one phone call that I was allowed to tell Bob Bertoni that I was in email jail, and I asked if he could bail me out. He did some research and eventually negotiated a contract with MailChimp, a company that specialized in sending mass emails for businesses and non-profits, for the purchase of two million “credits” for emails for only $2500. The Executive Committee approved the appropriation. From that point on I never tried to send emails directly from iPower.
MailChimp: My credentials on the district’s MailChimp had a user ID of Guastafeste, which is the Italian term for party-pooper. I taught myself how to use the software to create the lists, which MailChimp called audiences, and the body of the emails, which MailChimp called campaigns. For the first few years the account was allowed to create as many lists and emails as we wanted. I created a new list for each email until MailChimp prohibited me from creating any additional lists.
I generally sent out the first set of emails five weeks before the event. A second set would be sent two weeks later. Each set would consist of a few slightly different emails to groups based on geography, masterpoints, and/or tournament attendance. The content sent to each group would differ, at least a little.
Because I was accustomed to composing my emails in HTML, I always used the “Code your own” template. I always wrote the code for the emails in UltraEdit on my PC and pasted the HTML code into the editing window on MailChimp. The editing program would immediately display the way that the email would look in the window on the left side of the screen. This method allowed me to position and size images exactly. It also allowed for the use of tables and almost anything else that could be done on a webpage. An unanticipated benefit was that if someone who needed to promote something had sent me an email that was already formatted, I could extract the HTML code, tweak it a little, and then paste it into the HTML editing window.
I reported one bug that I found in this process. If I tried to change the color (or anything else) for part of a word, MailChimp inserted a space between the two parts. The example was GOLDmother, which MailChimp changed to GOLD mother (with a space before the “n”). MailChimp refused to fix this obvious problem. By the way, it was not easy to get WordPress. which is the product used for these blogs, to produce this effect either.
The oldest HTML file that I found in the MailChimp folder on my PC was dated July of 2015. I suspect that the first tournament promoted on MailChimp was the Individual Regional in 2015. From that time through 2021 I composed, tested, and sent almost all of the emails promoting District 25’s events. They were amazingly successful, and I became known in New England bridge as “the email guy” rather than “the webmaster”. All told, I sent over one million emails.
Other projects: The database also allowed me to undertake posting on NEBridge.org photos12 of winners of events or strats at regionals (Winners Boards). The first tournament for which I implemented this feature was in the Knockout Regional in Cromwell in 2014. My plan was to ask winners to come to a spot where I could take their pictures with my point-and-shoot Canon. Only one or two complied.
There were several other problems. My friend Bob Derrah volunteered to help me chase winners down, but he had no camera of his own, and he could not figure out how to use mine. Eventually I discovered that the best time was either right after the round or the next day before the start of play. Still, I was lucky if I got photos of half of the winners.
I usually spent the better part of the week after every tournament assembling the five or six webpages of winners’ photos. I sent emails to every winner whose photo I lacked. A very high percentage of them responded, especially among the newer players. For the others I either pieced together substitutes from photos that I previously took or just put up an empty spot for them. The HTML code for the pages themselves was generated by a php script that ran off of a set of tables that was itself generated from a spreadsheet on my PC.
Was it worth the effort? I don’t know. I strongly believed that the regionals should be special, and the winners boards—and a lot of other things—contributed to making them feel that way to a lot of people. Most of those things disappeared during the pandemic. To me the post-pandemic regional tournaments seemed vacuous whereas before they always excited me.
The ACBL had two annual contests that rewarded the players in each of the fifteen ranks that had accumulated the most points. One exclusively counted points won at clubs. The other included all points. I decided in 2017 to create an award for each rank for points won in the events sponsored by District 25. That included the NAP and GNT qualifiers as well as the four regional tournaments and the two hybrid events—the Rainbow Weekend and the Senior Regional/Cape Cod Sectional.
My ability to do this without a great deal of effort was due to the access that I had to LZH files from the ACBL. An ACBL employee named Keith Wells provided me with these files that had all the information on the “masterpoint winners” lists that I had been using to populate the attendance tables, plus they had both the ACBL numbers and the total number of masterpoints that the players had at the time of the event. They also included players who had attended but earned no points. I was trained by Peter Marcus, the district’s chief director, in how to use the ACBLscore program to create csv files from the ones that I received from Keith.
It was pretty easy to keep the fifteen totals in the database. The only real difficulty I encountered was when a player who had participated in events in foreign countries was awarded masterpoints that the ACBL used solely for the purpose of eligibility. After each event I sent out emails to everyone in each of the fifteen masterpoint categories that listed the top fifteen players in that category. At the end of the year I created certificates honoring the winners.
I doubt that this effort by itself induced more than a few people to play, but, like the Winners’ Boards, they helped to contribute to the special atmosphere of regional events.
BridgeFinesse.com, a company in Florida established by Jay Whipple13, somehow got involved with sending emails to all players who had achieved a new rank in the previous month. The emails, which were signed by the appropriate district director encouraged the recipients to respond to the emails with their own ideas. Rich DeMartino was D25’s District Director (DD) when this process began. He asked me to post each comment that he received and to ask each player for whom I did not already have a suitable photo to send one. I did this for Rich and for his successor, Mark Aquino.
When Bob Bertoni became DD, he posted the comments he received on his own website. When he died in 2021, his temporary successor ignored the comments, but when the position was eliminated in favor of a Regional Director, the first one, Mark Aquino, asked me to post the new comments. I retrieved the ones from Bob’s website and posted them on NEBridge.org. I also posted the ones that Mark received.
The disaster: In October 2015 the system that hosted NEBridge.org suffered a catastrophic hardware failure. In the 30+ years that I had spent in the business I occasionally had to face some really bad situations, but I never had to deal with anything like Bob needed to address with this one. I told him that if I were he, I would be looking for a tall tree and a short rope.
NEBridge.org was the least of his problems. We were trying to get people to play our favorite card game at our events. His other customers’ depended on their websites for their very livelihoods.
Nevertheless, Bob got the district’s website back up and running pretty quickly, but most of what I had posted in the first few years was not recoverable, including all of the articles by Frank and Steve. I could have gone back to original sources and salvaged some of it, but all of the new projects that I had started left me no time to attempt more than I did.
Bob temporarily allowed me to use FTP to send files from my PC to the server. That saved me a lot of time. The new version of the website had a slightly different editing program for the pages. I liked it in some ways and hated it in others.
The Communications Committee: At the last meeting of the B’s Needs Committee Bob, who at that point was president of the NEBC, announced that he wanted to form a marketing committee. He then asked me to be its chairman. I wanted to be on the committee, but I had never been the chairman of a committee. I suggested Allan, but Bob was rather insistent. I eventually agreed, but I wanted it to be called the Communications Committee or, better yet, Comm Comm.
Beginning in 2016 a group of us met at tournaments for several years to talk about all aspects of communication—website, emails, tournament Bulletin, posting of results, guest lecturers at tournaments, signage, microphones, etc. I found the meetings useful, but a subsequent president, Jack Mahoney, decided that they were no longer necessary. I think that the biggest problem was that almost everyone on the committee was also on other committees. It also did not help that the only time available for the meetings was at 8:30 a.m. on Saturdays.
The front page of the last Bulletin.
Bulletins: In 2018 I was asked by Lois DeBlois, NEBC president, to begin editing the Bulletin for tournaments. Previously it had been published every day, but Lois wanted to reduce it to one publication that covered the entire tournament. The results that had been printed in the daily editions were by then available online. So, it was not necessary to provide a daily edition. I took on the responsibility of creating it in the new format as well as the setup for online bulletins that were provided by the same service that provided Live Results.
After the pandemic the Executive Committee considered the cost of both bulletins to be excessive. I wrote one last Bulletin for the Optical Regional in Southbridge, MA, in November of 2022.
In November of 2021 I informed the Executive Committee that I intended to resign as webmaster and all of the other positions that I held at the end of 2022. I feared that it would be difficult to find people who were willing and able to keep going many of the things that I started. The story of that process has been recorded here. I did not immediately resign from any of the committees.
1. ACBL stands for American Contract Bridge League, the governing body for competitive bridge in North America. The Live Results program was run by BridgeFinesse.com, a private company in Florida.
2. NEBridge.org is the website of the New England Bridge Conference, the governing body of competitive bridge for District 25 of the ACBL.
3. At the time I was still working at TSI and playing bridge only on Tuesday evenings and weekends. Ausra also played in some of those games, but my skill level was far beneath hers.
4. HTML (hypertext markup language) is the language of browsers. JavaScript is an object-oriented language used for screen design. CSS (cascading style sheets) allow for organization of styles.
5. Bob was eight years younger than I was. He probably graduated from BC in or around 1978. Therefore, he was probably at the party that Don Huprich, Stewart Mandel, and I attended at BC in 1977. That hair-raising adventure was described here. Bob died in 2021. His obituary can be read here.
6. I hate to explain the jokes, but it may not be obvious that neither Bill Braucher nor I was paid anything as webmaster. I did get $100 for each Bulletin. They were always around twenty pages.
7. I later learned that Allan was also a Wolverine, but he was nineteen years older than I was. He was shocked to learn that I had been a math major. He died in 2018. His obituary can be found here.
8. Every tournament that held knockouts also scheduled Single-Session Swiss events. They were team events held in the afternoon for players who had been eliminated in the morning session of the knockout. The event was commonly called “Loser Swiss”.
9. Unfortunately, as of 2024 this statement is not true. Someone deleted or moved almost everything that I posted during the ten years that I managed the website. He/she/they did not notify me of their intentions, and I cannot conceive of any reason to do this other than spite or obsessive concern about disk space. However, I also recalled that the first thing that I did in my first professional programming assignment was equally foolish. I removed all comments from a program created by my predecessor. The details can be read here.
10. A csv (comma-separated values) file was a text file in which each element of data in a record was separated from the others by commas or other delineators.
11. Web-based programs are for some reason called scripts. The ones that I wrote for the district were all in the php (personal home page) program language that could be downloaded at no charge.
12. The website committee was eventually cool to the idea of publishing photos. Some members were worried about showing favoritism towards some players. Rich insisted that the criteria for inclusion be very clear. When I explained that I wanted to include anyone who won any strat or flight in any event and that I would send emails to solicit photos from players whom I could not reach at the tournament, he agreed to the idea.
13. Jay eventually became president of the ACBL. He visited the district’s tournament in Nashua when Mark Aquino was district director.
In 2003 Sue and I took the “Best of Italy” tour sponsored by Rick Steves. I then wrote a journal compiled from the notes that I had recorded every day. After I was satisfied with the results I assembled them into a pdf file called “How I spent my Italian vacation” that I shared with other tour members and a few other people. That document is posted here.
The programming tools: During this same period IBM discontinued support for the Net.Data product that I had used to write the software for AxN (introduced here), TSI’s online clearinghouse for insertion orders from advertisers to newspapers. Instead, IBM had agreed to offer the php environment that had been developed by Zend1. I had previously learned about php from Ken Owen (Introduced here). He had told me that I could create and run php programs on my Windows computer for free by downloading WAMP, which stands for Windows (operating system) Apache (HTTP server) MySQL (database) php (scripting language). I downloaded it to my PC, set it up, and used it to write a little problem management system for TSI that was actually used for several years.
I had already learned that in order to do programming for the Internet that accessed a database you really need to know five languages: HTML, JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), SQL, and a scripting language to fit all the pieces together. I had books that documented the first three. I soon discovered that books on php and MySQL were not necessary. The syntax of each was thoroughly documented online, and answers to every question that I had were easily found using google. I never had to ask anyone for help.
The first project: Sue and I had planned for another trip to Italy in 2005. This time we invited our long-time friends Tom and Patti Corcoran to accompany us on another Rick Steves tour, “Village Italy”2. I intended to take notes and assemble them into another journal. This time, however, I wanted to do it a little more professionally. I purchased a Cascio point-and-shoot digital camera, mostly using points from one of my credit cards. Since I wanted to allow others in our tour group to be able to enjoy the journal, I needed to build a website. I knew how to do that on an AS/400, but I wanted projects like this to be independent of the business, and I was not about to buy an AS/400 and try to run it from my house. I wanted someone else to manage the site for me.
I did a little research on the Internet. A company named iPower seemed to offer everything that I needed at a fairly reasonable price. Its tools seemed to be well documented, and, especially for the first few years, the technical support was excellent. My first contract with them was signed in July of 2005. I might have had a free month or two before that.
I decided to name the website Wavada.org. Wavada.com was available, but I had no intention of using the website to make money. I wanted to a place to noodle around with Internet programming (my personal computer, which at the time was a laptop) and a separate place where I could show some of the things that I had developed to the world.
I needed some tools on my PC to let me edit the text and images. I had previously downloaded TextPad, a “shareware” (free but with requests for donations) product that was better at editing text than the program that came with Windows. I purchased a copy of UltraEdit, which could be tailored for use with the color-coded and spaced text of php scripts, and Paint Shop Pro, an inexpensive program for editing image files. My plan was to do all of the development on my PC and, once everything was working, upload everything to Wavada.org using either File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or the File Manager program that iPower provided.
The first journal: My first big project used php to create one web page for each day of the 2005 trip. I created a folder named Images and inside of that folder a folder the trip (VI). Inside the trip folders were folders for each day (VI01, VI02, etc.) and one each for the full-page version of the photos3 and the page (VI00) describing the preparations and the travel day. I later wrote a php script that was included at the top of the code for each trip that. This contained all the common scripts for handling layout and navigation as well as the unique elements such as character sets for foreign words.
A separate php script for each page contained the code necessary to display the page. Most of the necessary functions were stored in a file named JournalFunctions.php. A file named JournalSetup.php contained other settings. These were all “required” on every page. Styles were stored in JournalStyle.css and JournalMenuStyle.css.
For the most part the original design worked fairly well. One difficulty that I had no way to anticipate was that the Unix version on the iPower servers was more sensitive to capitalization than the Windows version. I had to be careful with the file names assigned to images.
Twenty years later I find it astounding to report that I completed all of this within a few months. To each member of the tour group I sent an email that invited them to view the finished product on Wavada.org. Quite a few of them looked at a good portion of the journal and responded that they really liked it.
Other projects: I needed to design a home page. I knew that I wanted to have a huge wave as the background so that people would know how to pronounce the name Wavada. I found a photo of with very high density that depicted a monstrous wave better than I could have even imagined. It was on the Internet, but I don’t remember the location.
iPower offered an incredible array of free features that were associated with the website. The two that I made the heaviest use of were email and WordPress. I only needed to create three or four email accounts, but I made good use of them. I made Mike@Wavada.org my primary email account. Much later I created another account called Yoga (the name of my laptop at the time). Email sent to the Mike account was automatically downloaded to Outlook on my desktop. The Yoga account was not. So, I could send or forward emails from Mike to Yoga for activities (such as ZOOM meetings) that required the laptop.
I also set up an account for Sue, but I don’t think that she ever used it.
The other free feature that I employed a lot was WordPress, the software that I used to make this and hundreds of other blog entries. The oldest object in the WordPress section of Wavada.org is from 2010. However, I don’t think that I made much use of the product until March of 2012. That is the date of the oldest images that I uploaded. I might have written a few earlier blog entries that contained no images. An incredible number of these images—and a few other files—were uploaded during the pandemic and the subsequent months.
At first the home page for Wavada.org simply contained links to the few items that I wanted to allow the public to see. I changed the format dramatically when I discovered a widget that was available in google’s jQuery library. This allowed me to present the table of contents in an attractive tabbed manner.
I wrote a large number of programs concerning the game of bridge (introduced here) for my own use. For a while I maintained a complicated set of programs that I wrote to keep a detailed record of the bidding agreements with my partners. Eventually I decided that this was too much work (as of 2023 I had played with 141 different partners). I also created online programs for displaying an article index for topics covered in the Bridge Bulletin (posted here) and for providing game plans for challenging declarer problems (posted here).
I figured out how to parse the pdf files for hand records from bridge games. I created a database of these hands so that I could establish probabilities to associate with certain bridge situations. For example, I determined that Losing Trick Count4 was more accurate at predicting the number of available tricks at game level or lower than point count that has been modified as suggested by Marty Bergen in his Slam Bidding Made Easier book. However, the opposite was true for higher contracts.
I started to attend Wednesday evening games at the Simsbury Bridge Club in 2004. At some point I created a webpage for the club. It was still in use in 2023. The link is here.
As an adjunct to my job as webmaster I created a database of bridge players throughout North America on Wavada.org for District 25 of the American Contract Bridge League (ACBL). That story has been chronicled here.
I adapted the code for the travel journals to create online pages for each chapter of the book that I wrote on papal history entitled Stupid Pope Tricks. The book is posted here. The story of the Papacy Project that led to its creation is chronicled here. I also posted in the same format Ben 9, my historical first-person novel about Pope Benedict IX, here.
1. In 2023 this product is still offered for the i5 operating system. Zend has been purchased by other companies a few times.
3. I used the same file names that Cascio provided with the letter b at the end. For later journals I dispensed with the uploading of the smaller versions of the photos and instead uploaded a full-page version of each image and used HTML to specify the size displayed in the journal. I also changed the naming of the images in the daily folder to be meaningful.
4. Losing Trick Count is explained here and elsewhere on the Internet and in print.
In the spring of 2019 the American Contract Bridge League (ACBL) named Providence as the site for the summer North American Bridge Championship (NABC) in 2021. The bridge players in New England were very excited about the prospect. It had been a very long time since a summer edition of the NABC had been held in New England.
Lois and Joe.
At the time of the announcement Bob Bertoni was the District Director, and Lois DeBlois was the President of the New England Bridge Conference (NEBC). Bob immediately appointed as co-chairs Lois and Joe Brouillard, who had shared the same responsibility for the 2014 Fall NABC that had been held in Providence. Their first acts were to notify the state and local officials that the tournament would be held in Providence in July and to reserve space in the Rhode Island Convention Center (RICC), the same site that had been used in 2014.
Joe, who was the Treasurer of the NEBC, also was in charge of finance. Hospitality was to be handled by Helen Pawlowski, who had the same job in 2014, and Sally Kirtley, the district’s Tournament Manager. Sponsorships were assigned to Phyllis Chase, another veteran of the 2014 event, and Megan Mihara DiOrio. Brenda and Neil Montague reprised their roles as chairs of registration and prizes. Sue Miguel was again in charge of the Intermediate/Newcomer program.
I immediately volunteered to help with the massive project of organizing, promoting, and running the tournament and anything else that they wanted me to do. I was not on the first list of committee chairs. At that point I was one of the “ministers without portfolio”. The other member at the outset were Bob, Jim Rasmussen, Meg Gousie, Paula Najarian, Sonja Smith, Linda Ahrens, and Paul Burnham.
At some point Joe asked me to write and send a few sets of promotional emails using the database that I had developed for the district. I was happy to take that on. It meant a lot of work preceding the tournament, but I was still full of vim and vinegar, and I had enjoyed working at the 2014 NABC in Providence immensely.
This was an all-star cast if ever there was one, and it only got better over time. The first meeting was held during the lunch break on Friday, August 30, 2019, at the Ocean State Regional in Warwick, RI. The emphasis was on the need to begin planning and execution as soon as possible because July of 2021 was not that far away. I think that the logo had already been designed by then. Everyone at the meeting liked it.
I attended several of the meetings at regional tournaments, but I did not participate much. I was there to get ideas about marketing the event in Providence. I remember that at one meeting the discussion was about what type of souvenir shirt should be sold. A few samples were passed around. Someone asked for my opinion, but I deferred to the others, explaining that “I have no taste.”
On June 30, 2020, a one-year-out Zoom meeting was held with Mark Hudson of the ACBL. The only additions to the committee at that point were David Rock, who had been the Partnership Chair in 2014, and Debbie Ouelette. I did not attend the meeting.
COVID-19’s effect: At least since I had been involved with tournament bridge, the American Contract Bridge League had every year sponsored three NABC tournaments—one in March, one in July, and one in November. They were dubbed “spring”, “summer”, and “fall”. Each lasted ten or eleven days. Games were available for players of all ages and experience levels. At the beginning of 2020 everyone planned on three NABC events.
COVID-19 forced the cancellation of all three NABC events in 2020—March in Columbus, OH, July in Montreal, and November in Tampa. Even so, plans continued to be made for the July event in Providence. By the end of the year incredibly effective vaccines were being produced, and seniors—by far the dominant age group for bridge players—were among the first in line to receive them. My most pressing question was when I should start promoting the “Big Deal” in Providence.
Then in fairly rapid succession two important events took place. In an abundance of caution the ACBL canceled the NABC scheduled for March 2021 in St. Louis. The Marriott Hotel in Washington, D.C., that had hosted the 2016 Summer NABC and was scheduled to do so again was no longer available. So, despite the fact that the number of new cases decreased rapidly in the late spring and early summer of 2021, the NABC scheduled for Providence was moved to July 13-24 of 2022. We received notice of this in February of 2021. No NABC was held in the summer of 2021. In fact, the ACBL also canceled all sectional and regional tournaments through the end of August, thus wiping out the Ocean State Regional, District 25’s largest tournament.
So, the organizers of the Providence tournament were provided an additional year to prepare for the big event, but the committee members would have little or no opportunity for face-to-face communication for much of that period. Because of the ACBL’s action, there would only be at most one regional tournament in District 25 in all of 2021. In fact, however, the one tournament, the Harvest Regional in Mansfield, MA, that might have been allowed by the ACBL was also canceled by a vote of the district’s Executive Committee.
The other event that dramatically affected the preparations for NABC Providence was the death of Bob Bertoni on June 29, 2021. He had been our direct link to the ACBL, a role that Lois and especially Joe had to assume.
The ACBL resumed holding NABC tournaments in Austin, TX, in November of 2021 and in Reno, NV, in March of 2022. Vaccination cards were checked at both tournaments. Masks were required in Austin, and the number of new COVID cases reported was relatively small. In Reno masks were not required, and the number of cases was much larger. By that time the protocol was determined by the CDC rating for the incidence of new cases for the county in which the event was held. Since Washoe County was rated low throughout the tournament, no masks were required1 in Reno.
Attendance at both of these tournaments was very low by historical standards. People at both ends of the spectrum were upset by the ACBL’s approach. Roughly one-third of the United States refused to get vaccinated. The percentage of the anti-vaxers was probably lower among bridge players, but it was significant. A significant percentage of the rest of the players had great difficulty with wearing masks. Some found them unbearably uncomfortable, and some just did not like the idea of never seeing a smile. On the other hand, a large number of bridge players, including me, thought that the ACBL’s policy was too lax. I thought that the event in Austin was lucky to escape with few infections and that the idea of hold a tournament in a casino in Reno was crazy. I did not attend either event, but both Joe and Lois attended both events, and Sally attended at least one.
In MailChimp you can paste your code in the window on the right, and it displays the email on the left.
The first email campaign: I exchanged a few emails with Joe about which vendor to use to process our emails. I was most familiar with MailChimp; he had used a different vendor in 2014. There were a few things about MailChimp that annoyed me, but the district already had a contract that provided an incredibly cheap rate of 800 for $1. If we used another service, it would be at least a little more expensive, and I would need to learn it. MailChimp allowed me to design my emails in HTML. I could therefore make sure that their appearance was exactly what I wanted. If we used another service that did not allow this, I would undoubtedly have felt frustrated. Joe agreed with my choice of MailChimp.
I questioned whether it was permissible to use the district’s account—which at the time contained enough credits for over one million emails—for this project. Joe assured me that it was kosher. I trusted his opinion. After all, he was also the district’s treasurer.
The database2 that I set up for District 25 contained one record for each ACBL member. It also contained records for tournament attendance at events in New England and for NABCs, including the 2014 event in Providence. My plan was to craft several emails based on whether players had attended any recent NABCs and whether they were within driving distance of Providence. New England players would receive separate emails depending on whether they had attended the previous event in Providence.
I began working on the first batch in January of 2022 and communicated my basic strategy for the first mailing on January 21:
I plan four distinct emails: 1. Attended 2014 Prov: 1,067 players. 2. D25 not in 1 above: 4,826 3. D3, D24 (at least 50 points) not in 1 above: 2,838 + 2,327 4. Attended recent NABC not in 1, 2, or 3 above: 10,107
I will send tests for approval as I finish them–probably today.
Joe, Lois, and Sue provided feedback on the four emails. They asked me to swap out a few of the photos that I had chosen. I don’t recall that they asked me to change any of the text. We had to hold off sending for a while because the ACBL had not published a schedule yet. Then when they did, the schedule for the first Saturday was obviously wrong. The emails finally were sent on February 5, 2022.
A sample of #1 can be viewed here. It was opened by 60.9 percent of recipients. 11 percent clicked on one or more of the links. A sample of #2 can be viewed here. It was opened by 46.9 percent of recipients. 2.9 percent clicked on one or more of the links. A sample of #3 can be viewed here. It was opened by 46.4 percent of recipients. 2.7 percent clicked on one or more of the links. A sample of #4 can be viewed here. It was opened by 43.1 percent of recipients. 4.2 percent clicked on one or more of the links.
The reaction was mostly positive. Quite a few people asked about the COVID-19 policy, which the ACBL did not publish until March. Joe and Lois received the following email from Joann Glasson, Grand Life Master and President of the ACBL:
Hi Joe and Lois,
I just received the terrific email about your upcoming NABC. I hope this got a wide circulation – did it go to all ACBL members?
The website looks great as well – really professional. I can’t wait to get to Providence this summer… Thanks for all your great work.
The locally maintained website3, which you can visit here, certainly was professional. Joe did all the work on it.
The one complaint was in regards to the captions on a few of the photos. There was nothing wrong with the code, but some email clients (including Microsoft Outlook, which is what I used on my desktop PC) did not interpret the code correctly. I spent several hours trying different methods of displaying the caption, but I never was able to get them to display correctly. You can see how email #3 looked when it was opened and then printed in memo form in Outlook here. So, I very reluctantly decided not to use captions on subsequent tournaments.
Hotel Reservations: On February 28 I felt confident enough that the ACBL would not cancel the tournament that I made hotel reservations. I decided that I would like to play in (or at least be around for) ten of the eleven days of the tournament. The schedule for the first Thursday did not appeal to me.
I redeemed 170,000 IHG Rewards points to pay for seven nights at the Crowne Plaza in Warwick, which is about fifteen minutes south of the site of the tournament. I also redeemed some Hilton Honors points at the Warwick Hampton Inn for the two preceding nights. I had to pay an additional $155. Since the lowest bridge rate in downtown Providence was $179 per night, I felt that nine nights for $155 was a pretty good deal.
Months later Joe offered to provide a free hotel room for me in Providence. I told him that I had already cashed in my hotel points. In addition I preferred to stay in Providence while I was playing.
The Partnership System: Joe wrote a program to handle requests for partnerships and teammates. It was tested out during the district’s first regional in Marlboro, MA. Denise Bahosh managed partnerships there and deemed the programs to be working successfully. Since I was on my European River Cruise (documented here), I was not part of the testing process.
Meanwhile, the Chairs of the Partnership Committee for the NABC had been named. Jan Smola handled pairs, and Carol Seager was in charge of teams.
Partners: In the previous few NABC tournaments that I had attended I designed my schedule around playing in a couple of national (as opposed to regional) events. However, the schedule for Providence did not provide any national events—other than the GNT, which required qualification at the district level—that appealed to me. I had too many points for the Red Point Pairs and the lowest flight of the Life Masters Pairs. So, I would just try to play in as many bracketed team events as possible.
Shortly after making the hotel reservations I sent notices of my schedule to all of my usual partners and a few others with whom I had played at tournaments. Responses were very slow in arriving. The first confirmation came from Sohail Hasan. I had played with him in Mansfield in 2019, and we did pretty well together. On June 20 we agreed to play together the last three days of the NABC in Providence in team games if we could find teammates.
At about the same time Paul Burnham, with whom I had played a handful of times, agreed to play with me on Monday, Wednesday, and (the second) Thursday. That still left open Friday, Saturday, Sunday, on the first week and Tuesday.
Donna Lyons, whom I have known for years, finally claimed the first two spots. Mike Heider and Jim Osofsky had asked me to play teams with them on the first Saturday and Sunday. So, Donna and I planned to play with them on Saturday. I decided to take Tuesday off.
This was my schedule going into the tournament.
I tried to use the tournament’s partnership system to secure a partner for the bracketed team game on the first Sunday. I had to decide whether to fill out the partnership form or the team form. Since David Rock had told me quite clearly many times that the first step is to get a partner, I tried to fill in the partnership form. I was stifled when I had to specify the event, a required field that did not allow specification of a team event.
So, I filled in the team form and specified that our team was looking for one person. The only person that Carol paired me with was Abe Fisher. Here is the email that I got from him:
Hi Mike—
While in principle I’d love to play with you, if I’m reading the thread correctly, you’ve got 3 and need a 4th. I’ve also got 3, and need a 4th. So that doesn’t seem like it works.
Good luck,
Abe
I asked Carol if it was OK for me to fill out a pairs form and lie about the event. Then I might be able to persuade the prospective partner to play in the team event instead of the pairs. She said that was not allowed. I told her that, in my opinion, this was a very large flaw in the system.
So, the new partnership form failed both Abe and me. At the start of the tournament I still had no partner for Sunday. Nevertheless, I was not too worried. I expected a large number of people would have filled out cards for themselves by Friday or Saturday.
The second emailing: Here is the email that I sent to Joe and Lois about the plans for the email to be sent in April of 2022, three months before the tournament.
Joe and Lois,
I have set up segments for the next set of emails. There will be five basic emails based on masterpoints:
2-300: Emphasize 299er, Gold Mine, and Bracketed Round Robin. Sent to districts 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 24, and 25. The D25 one will be a little different from the one for the other districts. 18,140
300-750: Emphasize Gold Mine, and Bracketed Round Robin. Sent to districts 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 24, and 25. The D25 one will be a little different from the one for the other districts. 5,255
750-2500: Emphasize bracketed Round Robin, three-flighted events, and some national events. Sent to all districts. The D25 one will be a little different from the one for the other districts. I don’t know this number yet. 19,480
2500+: Emphasize national events. All districts, but D25 one will be a little different. 6,077
Players who have attended a recent NABC or the 2014 Providence NABC will be excluded from the four just listed.
NABC attendees (all masterpoints): Emphasize national events and why Providence is different, but D25 one will be a little different. 12,071
It bothers me that this misses a lot of snowbirds, but I don’t know how to find them.
I tried three new approaches to captioning images. All of them work fine in the displays inside MailChimp, but my Outlook client did not display any of them correctly. So I will not use captions for now.
I have almost finished the 299er version. I will send it to you some time today.
Mike
Joe, Lois, and Sue all liked the approach, but they had small but important suggestions for the photos and the copy. I incorporated them before I sent them out.
Samples of the mailings: 299er, 300-750, 750-2500, Over 2500, Attended NABC. I made an embarrassing mistake in the dates for one of the more obscure national events, and no one caught it before it went out. I communicated with a few people who noticed it, but I decided that it was not critical enough to send a correction.
Site visit and walk-through: On May 25 I received this email from Joe:
The ACBL site visit in Providence will be on June 2 at 10 am. If you will be working during the NABC please plan to attend if you are available. If your committee work will be completed prior to the NABC you are welcome to attend but not required. We will meet on the third floor which is the level the exhibition halls are on.
Please let me know if you will be attending by Friday, May 27, if you will be attending.
The Rhode Island Convention Center.
I quickly responded that I would attend. I had a few questions to ask the ACBL people about educational events at the NABC. At that point they had posted very little information about that area. I also wanted to take some photos of the site. Most of all, I wanted to see other members of the committee. I had great respect for all of them, and a few of them were good friends. I had not talked with any of them (except Sally Kirtley, the director of the Simsbury game) for more than two years. I decided to bring both my camera and my audio recorder.
My one misgiving concerned Sally. I knew that she had recently tested positive for COVID-19. I wondered if she would make the trip. Although she now lived fairly close to me, I certainly did not volunteer to car pool with her. Whether she was there or not, I definitely intended to wear my N95 mask.
I slightly underestimated how long it would take me to reach Providence. I arrived at the parking lot a few minutes before ten and parked on the fourth floor, which matched up with the third floor in the RICC. I saw the Montagues in the parking structure and said hello to them. Before I joined the group, which did include Sally, I visited the men’s room to dispose of the large coffee from McDonald’s that I had consumed on the drive from Enfield.
Sara Beth Raab left the ACBL a few months after the NABC in Providence.
In attendance were, by my recollection, all of the Chairs. That group now included Paula Najarian, who created the restaurant guide, and the two Chairs of volunteers, Linda Ahrens and Meg Gousie. The ACBL sent Sara Beth Raab and at least one other person. Lisa Watson represented the RICC. Erin Degulis of the Convention and Visitors Bureau was also there.
The traveling “Beyond Van Gogh” exhibit4 was occurring in the RICC while we were visiting. Therefore, we would not be able to see some of the playing areas. Everyone on the committee remembered them from 2014. The setup for playing was simple. The 299er and Gold Rush games would be held in one of the big rooms on the third floor. The other two big rooms would be used for team games and pairs games. The meeting rooms were on the fourth floor. The national events were on the fifth floor.
A good bit of the visit was devoted to determining the best places for the ancillary activities and exhibits—the partnership desk, the vendor area, the “In Memoriam” exhibit, etc. Others had strong opinions about these matters. Since I was only tangentially involved, I kept my mouth shut.
Afterwards we met in one of the fourth-floor conference rooms. I took advantage of this opportunity to ask about the educational programs. Sara Beth consulted her phone and then replied that the list of speakers and events had just been added to the ACBL’s version of the website for the tournament. When I returned to my house that evening I checked the website. There was no such list. I kept checking for three weeks, but nothing appeared. I sent an email to Joe to see if he could check up on this.
Eventually it did appear. They put it under the Intermediate and Newcomer (I/N) section. I guess that someone at the ACBL decided that once you have earned a few hundred points, you no longer have a desire to get better at bridge
The best part of the day, from my perspective, was the lunch at Murphy’s, a pub that was within a block or two of the RICC. I sat on the end of a long table. I made sure that Sally was far away from me. On my right was Paula, one of my favorite people. No one was on my left or across from me. Across from Paula was Lisa Watson, our contact at the RICC.
Lois and Paula won the Mid-Flight Pairs at the Presidential Regional in 2018.
Paula had not heard about my vacation in Europe. So, I actually had something to add to the conversation. I also told her about my two clients in East Greenwich, her home town.
The food was good, too. I had a huge Reuben sandwich and broccoli on the side. People were amazed that I cleaned my plate. I told everyone that if I had left food on my plate, my sainted mother would haunt my dreams.
This might have been my most enjoyable day since the pandemic hit.
Email campaigns in June: On June 5 Sue Miguel sent me the materials for an email that she wanted sent to 299ers. I had figured out how to do this for her. I opened the email in Outlook. I then took print screens of each image in the email, made jpg files of them, and stored them in the MailChimp folder. Then I saved the HTML code for the email as a text file. I removed the parts of the email that were not meant to be sent. I loaded the jpg files up to Mailchimp using the “Content Studio”. Then I replaced the URL’s on the “src=” parameters of the img statements in the email with the ones on the MailChimp server. I then enclosed the entire email in a table with one column that was six hundred pixels wide. That last step seemed to be the only way to set the width of any email in a way that all email clients recognized.
I selected all members of D25 with between 20 and 299 masterpoints. A sample of the email that was sent on June 7 can be seen here. 813 the 3,000 emails were opened, and 13 recipients clicked on a link. Those are not good results, but one must remember that most of those people had probably never played face-to-face bridge. It would not be an easy task to convince them that they should try it out at a national tournament.
On June 12 I received an email from Linda Ahrens, who was the co-chair with Meg Gousie of the Volunteers:
I was hoping you could use your creative genius to send out an email to everyone in District 25 requesting volunteers.
For every two-hour shift we will provide a $5 chit towards an entry fee. Volunteers will be able to play in any event as they will be scheduled prior to events or directly afterwards.
To sign up they should go to ProvNABC.org and then click on the blue volunteer tab on the left hand side of the page.
There is youth bridge on the Thursday, Friday and Saturday of the second weekend and we need volunteers for either half days or full days to work with beginners to provide support at the tables as they play. These volunteers will probably not be able to play on those days.
Meg and I will send out a schedule ten days prior. Volunteers will be asked to go to the volunteer/information desk prior to their shift where they will check in, get their assignments and upon completion of their shift they will get their chit.
If you need any more info please let me know. This might be too much info for one email so I will defer to what you think is best.
I wasted no time composing the email that you can view here. It was sent to about 6,000 people. 3,189 people opened it, and 51 clicked on the link.
Lois and Sue decided to sponsor a Zoom call that they labeled as an “Open House”. Sue designed the following image to serve as an invitation.
This went out to 6,000 New Englanders. Although only 38.2 percent opened the email, 110 clicked on the image, which allowed them to download the link.
On June 27 I finally received the email from Sue that she wanted to send to players with less than twenty points. You can view it here. I sent it out on the same day. Of the thousand or so recipients, 476 opened it, but only two clicked on a link.
In May Lois had sent me an email asking if I possessed or knew someone who possessed high-resolution photos of two recently deceased players from the Boston area, Bill Hunter or Shome Mukherjee. They were needed for the “In Memoriam” area of the tournament site in Providence. I looked through the photos that I had posted on the website, but I did not find anything that was usable.
A few weeks later she was frantic about obtaining the photos. She asked me to send an email immediately. I sent the email that is posted here on June 13. It went to about 1500 players in the Eastern Massachusetts Bridge Association (EMBA). 824 of them opened it, and six clicked on the link. She was only looking for two photos, and eventually one of the respondents helped her obtain them.
Victor King.
In 2022 I was on the Board of Trustees of the Hartford Bridge Club. We voted to sponsor a day at the NABC to honor Victor King, a Grand Life Master who was a member of the club. He had been murdered in his own house by a tenant. I was asked by Felix Singer to send an email to people in the rest of New England who might be interested in donating to the project. I wrote and sent an email to players in central and eastern Massachusetts with over 1,000 points. Quite a few people donated. Al Muggia offered to curate the photos.
Steve Diamond, a player from Shrewsbury, MA, who knew me pretty well, sent a large check to my home address. I put it in the bottle with the rest of the donations. I overheard Felix telling someone that he could not believe that one of the participants in the novice group had been so generous. I told him that this was a different Steve Diamond.
Emails in July: Lois provided me with a list of items that she wanted to make sure that the people who were planning on attending the tournament knew about. I composed an email that contained these “nuggets” as well as the link to the ACBL’s well-hidden schedule of celebrity appearances. On July 1 I sent short emails to players in D25 and its two neighboring districts in the United States, a total of approximately 14,000 players. About 45 percent of recipients opened the email, and over six hundred clicked on one of the links. A sample has been posted here.
A week later I was asked by Sue Miguel to send an email to people in the district to promote the “Learn Bridge in a Day” program. I am not sure why the ACBL could not do this, but not enough time remained to argue about it. I sent out roughly six thousand emails. You can view the email here.
A scene from Bridge to Nowhere.
The last email that I composed and sent was designed to promote a play written by bridge teacher, columnist, and professional playwright, Adam Parrish. Bridge to Nowhere was scheduled to run for three nights in a small theater near the RICC.
This innocuous email, which I have posted here, generated as many replies as any that I had sent. Several tournament veterans challenged my claim that an NABC had never included a play about bridge. I deferred to their superior knowledge.
One person, who did not sign the email, said the following:”Remove my name from your mailing list. This email is an abuse of the bridge federation list if that is where it came from.”
Here was my reply:
I have done as you asked.
I have no interest in this play. I do not know the author or anyone associated with the theater. I sent the email at the request of the co-chair of the tournament committee in order to apprise potential attendees of a last-minute addition to the entertainments available in Providence during the NABC.
The Providence NABC Tournament Chairs: Here is a complete list of the chairs and co-chairs of the local committee. Tournament: Lois DeBlois and Joe Brouillard Hospitality: Sally Kirtley and Helen Pawlowski Sponsorships: Megan Mihara and Phyllis Chase Welcome and Prizes: Brenda and Neil Montague Volunteers: Linda Ahrens and Meg Gousie I/N and Gold Rush: Sue Miguel Partnerships: Jan Smola and Carol Seager Email Marketing: Mike Wavada.
Volunteering: I knew that I would be in the area for ten days. I volunteered to help whenever I might be useful. I also said that I had had a lot of experience working at partnership desks. When I filled out the form on the website, I indicated that I would be available from the first Friday through the second Sunday, but I would like to take Tuesday off. On July 1 I received the following email from Meg Gousie.
Thank you very much for volunteering at the Providence NABC. Your assistance will go a long way to helping make this event a big success! We notice that you have generously offered to volunteer, and have taken the liberty of assigning the following shifts to you:
Saturday, July 16. 1:30pm. Registration Desk Sunday, July 17. 8:30a, Partnership Desk Tuesday, July 19. 1:30pm. Partnership Desk Thursday, July 21. 8:30am. Partnership Desk
Please review and confirm your availability ASAP so we can plan accordingly.
Please plan on going to the volunteer desk 15 minutes before your scheduled assignment. The desk is located on the third floor by the escalators. After your scheduled shift, please come back to the desk to pick up your $5 chit which is good for $5 off an entry fee in Providence. You will also receive discounted parking.
I persuaded them to remove me from the Tuesday afternoon assignment. Shortly before I left for the tournament I checked my emails again and sent the following to Meg and Linda:
The email that you sent on 6/30 had me listed two shifts on 7/16: registration in the morning and partnership in the afternoon. The email sent on 7/1 had me working on registration in the afternoon on 7/16.
Two questions: 1) What is my schedule for 7/16? 2) Do I have any additional responsibilities other than the ones for 7/17 and 7/21 that are on this email?
By the time that I shut down Outlook my desktop computer5 before leaving for Providence I had not received a reply. I figured that I could check on it when I arrived.
My adventures at the Providence NABC itself are chronicled here.
1. Of course, only a very small percentage of the players at the tournament in Reno were from Washoe County. More than a few were from Europe or Asia. Using the rating for the county was like the old joke about the drunk looking for a lost coin under a lamppost that was a block away from where the coin was dropped—because the light was better. Furthermore, the event was held in a casino.
2. Starting in 2014 I designed and implemented every aspect of the database using MySQL and php.
3. The ACBL also had a webpage for the tournament, but it could not hold a candle to the one that Joe designed and implemented.
4. No one in our group went in on June 2. A description of the exhibit is posted here.
5. Incoming email was configured to download automatically downloaded to the Outlook application on my desktop computer in Enfield. If I did not close down Outlook, I would not be able to get email on my laptop for either of my email accounts.
The Worst Year Ever?: The virus seemed to appear in or around Wuhan, China, in late 2019. It appeared to be extremely contagious. It was given the name COVID-191 on February 11, 2020. In the past such scares (SARS and Ebola) had pretty much bypassed the West, but within two weeks Italy had become a global hotspot. China, South Korea, and New Zealand fought the disease relentlessly, and had very good results. If all other countries had done the same, the disease probably would have run its course in a few months. However, because in many cases the disease had mild or even undetectable symptoms, many people did not take it seriously and were scornful of those who did.
Editorial note: I have decided to capitalize Pandemic as a sign of respect. There have been other pandemics in my lifetime, but Covid-19 was the only one that had a significant effect on the U.S.
Cases began appearing in the U.S. in early February. The first death was reported in the state of Washington on the 29th. On March 11 the World Health Organization declared it a pandemic. Two days later the Trump administration declared a national emergency and issued a travel ban from 26 non-European countries. However, the ban only applied to people who were not U.S. citizens. Need I add that this was an election year?
On Sunday March 15 Felix Springer and I played in a STaC game at the Hartford Bridge Club. The talk that day was largely about Colorado Springs, where a woman who had played in a sectional tournament may have been a super-spreader. She competed in the Bridge Center there in six events between February 27 and March 3. She died on March 13.
I later learned that Fred Gagnon had played in the same tournament, but he never was at the same table with her. Before the Pandemic struck Fred played both in Simsbury and Hartford and frequently partnered with my wife Sue. Details about the Colorado Springs incident can be found here.
Too close for comfort.
New York and its suburbs were hit hard very early. While attending a large gathering at a synagogue in Rob and Laura Petrie’s hometown of New Rochelle, a man who had recently been abroad passed the disease on to many people, including the rabbi. At one time 108 of the state’s 173 cases were in Westchester County, which borders on Connecticut.
My notes about the bridge game at the HBC on March 15 record that despite some mistakes Felix and I won.2 I remember that one woman who played that day wore a medical mask of some sort. We already knew that the club would be closed indefinitely after the game. Felix and I were the last two to leave the Bridge Center. He was responsible for locking up after we left. At the last minute I dashed over to the shelves that contained non-bridge books and selected Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz3 and Fatherland by Robert Harris. Both books resided in my house for much longer than I had planned, but I did eventually return them.
Sue and I had signed up for a bridge cruise on the Danube River with the famous expert, Larry Cohen. We were scheduled to leave on March 17. That cruise never happened. The details of the story are provided here.
Trump at the CDC.
Responding to the Pandemic: Although President Trump had declared a state of emergency, he, like most Republicans, absolutely refused to take the disease seriously. He made it clear that masks were not mandatory, and he refused to wear one. He then proceeded to make an utter ass of himself whenever he tried to talk about the Pandemic. He even predicted an “Easter miracle” that absolutely did not happen. Despite the fact that it was obviously an irresponsible if not evil idea, he actually encouraged everyone to go to church on that day.
Not only did this laissez-faire approach probably cost him the election; it also cost the country several hundred thousand lives. The Center for Disease Control also fumbled the ball. For some reason they refused to accept the test that had been developed by the World Health Organization, and their own test proved unreliable. So, for months as the virus spread geometrically throughout the country, the U.S. had no test. Soon the situation was much worse in America than anywhere else in the world.
To be fair Trump did direct more than a billion dollars to a virtually unknown company named BioNTech to develop a vaccine using mRNA technology. Others also were funded, but BioNTech received the biggest prize because its leaders claimed that with proper funding they could produce a new vaccine in a few months. Their effort was dubbed Project Lightspeed. Obviously Trump hoped that they would deliver by election day, but they missed by a few weeks. In fact, Pfizer, which did not participate, developed and tested a similar vaccine a little sooner, and the Chinese were already using a somewhat inferior vaccine by then.
Although most people who contracted the initial virus recovered after a week or so, the aged and those with comorbidities did not fare as well. The death rate in 2020 was over 3 percent. Nursing homes throughout the country often experienced horrendous situations. Hundreds of thousands of people died needlessly.
Of course, many people still had to work, but most of us hunkered down and stayed in our houses. We had to learn to order groceries—and anything else that we needed—online. I wrote a little program to allow members of the Simsbury Bridge Club to send me descriptions and/or pictures of their new lifestyle. I then posted them on a webpage that anyone could view. A few people sent responses, and I promptly posted them. You can view them here.
Reading: I also posted quite a few entries about my own life. I took advantage of the extra free time to read more. By June 28 I had read nine novels: The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, Magpie Murders, Fatherland, Supermarket by Bobby Hall, Moriarity by Anthony Horowitz, Two for Texas by James Lee Burke, The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz, The Brothers K by David James Duncan, and Wayfaring Stranger by James Lee Burke. Supermarket, which I bought at a rare venture to the Target store, was awful. The others were all pretty good. The Enfield Public Library was closed. I purchased several books from Powell’s in Portland, OR. It took them almost a month for them to send them, but their selection of new and used volumes was outstanding.
What I especially liked about Powell’s was the number of books by Jack Vance that were offered for sale. I found some listed there that I had never seen in a library or bookstore, including the one that won an Edgar award for him, The Man in a Cage.
One of the last books that I later ordered from Powell’s was Jack Vance’s autobiography. Because I like a challenge—especially when I had an enormous amount of time on my hands—I selected the version in Italian, Ciao Sono Jack Vance! (E Questa Storia Sono Io). Vance has always been one of my favorite authors, and his last book was certainly one of his best. What a life he led! He managed to finish the book even though he was in poor health and nearly blind. He had to dictate the entire volume.
I was so inspired by this book that I decided to undertake this set of blog entries, which I later labeled The 1948 Project. The details surrounding its genesis have been recorded here.
Most aspects of life were put on hold in the spring and summer of 2020. The American Contract Bridge League (ACBL) canceled all three of its national tournaments and prohibited its units and districts from holding tournaments for the rest of the year. The National Debate Tournament was also canceled. Hollywood closed shop.
Most schools attempted to reopen in the fall, but the result was a huge spike in the number of cases of COVID-19. The election was held in November, of course, but a very large number of people voted by mail rather than in person.
I walked southwest on North St. until it ended at Hazard Ave. (190). I turned left and walked west to Park St. Then a left on Elm St. I walked past Carris Reels to School St. and then north back to North St.
Exercise: I also exercised more during the lockdown. I was walking 35-40 miles per week, outside if the weather was tolerable, and on the treadmill when it wasn’t. On May 2 and a few other occasions I walked ten miles outside.
Later in the summer, however, I could no longer walk more than a mile or two without a pain gradually developing in the top of my right foot. This condition, which caused me to limp, bothered me throughout the year. I still walked, but I had to stop and stretch my IT band for a couple of minutes. Sometimes I would need to perform this ritual two or three times in a 2.5 mile lap. I often stopped after one lap. However, when I walked on the treadmill it hurt a lot less.
Therefore, I began to walk indoors more frequently. On my convertible laptop computer, a Lenovo model called Yoga, I watched many operas from the Metropolitan Opera’s streaming service that were new to me, including Ghosts of Versailles, La Wally, Orphée et Eurydice and many operas by Massenet and Bellini. I was really impressed by performances by Natalie Dessay, Teresa Stratas, and Marilyn Horn. The most bizarre moment occurred when Renée Fleming appeared in Rossini’s Armida. In a tender moment she rubbed cheeks with tenor Lawrence Brownlee, who happened to be black. When they parted more than a square inch of his brown makeup remained on her cheek.
I also watched operas on YouTube while I was walking on the treadmill. The quality was a little spotty—both the performances and the recordings. However, this introduced me to several of the more neglected operas, some of which were delightful.
The best thing about the YouTube operas was that I was able to make MP3 files of them using a piece of free downloadable software called MP3Studio. I had already made MP3 files out of my opera CD’s and downloaded them to a small MP3 player that I had purchased at Best Buy.4 I added quite a few operas from YouTube. My favorite was Tchaikovsky’s Cherevichki. I liked it so much that I purchased a DVD of its performance at Covent Garden in London.
I also downloaded hundreds of great rock and roll songs of the sixties and seventies. I could scarcely believe that most of the best songs from Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones were now available for free.
When I walked around the neighborhood I listened to music on the tiny MP3 play. In the cold weather I used my Bose headphones. When it was warmer I used ear buds.
My new and improved arch supports. The one on the right is inside-out.
Toward the end of the year I misplaced one of the arch supports that I had purchased from Walmart before the Pandemic. These were springy pieces of metal (I think) that were inserted into bands that wrapped around the foot and were secured by Velcro. I bought new ones at the same store that were spongy balls in elastic bands. They cost $10.
After I had used the new ones for about a month, the pain in my foot ceased, and I could walk five miles without stopping. I understand that post hoc ergo propter hoc is a famous fallacy, but I did not even consider reverting to the original pair when I discovered the hiding place of the lost arch support.
The Montalbano crew stayed together through all thirty-seven episodes.
I don’t remember how I heard about it, but on November 2 I subscribed (for only 8$ per month!) to a streaming service called MHz Choice. It had all thirty-seven of the Commissario Montalbano movies that I had learned about in 2016 in Sicily5 as well as dozens of other European mysteries and other offerings. All of them were captioned in English. I started with Montalbano (and a prequel called Young Montalbano), but I soon found many other shows that I enjoyed tremendously. There were also a few mysteries on YouTube, including the entire set of Inspector Morse shows.
During one of my walks around the neighborhood a bizarre event occurred. Just after I reached my house a car pulled into the driveway. It was driven by a man carrying three large cheese pizzas from Liberty Pizza. Evidently my phone, which was securely in my pocket, had somehow activated the Slice app to order the pizzas while I was walking. I was billed for them, but the charge was eventually removed from my credit card account after I complained about it.
On August 4 there was a tornado watch. A branch fell and damaged our gutter. A very large branch fell from a tree near the house on 10 Park St. It landed on and crushed a pickup truck that had been parked nearby. A week or more was required to clean it up. I don’t know what became of the truck.
Translation: In desperate need of a project to occupy my mind during the day, I decided in June to translate one of my travel journals into Italian. My Italian teacher, Mary Trichilo (TREE key low) agreed to read my efforts and to provide suggestions. I chose our 2005 Rick Steves trip to Italy that was billed as the Village Italy Tour.5 It was the first one on which the Corcorans joined us, and the first one for my first digital camera.
Reliving that experience was great fun; some of the best moments in my life occurred during those sixteen days. It was also a pretty good way to build my Italian vocabulary back up. I could only hope that I would be able to use it one day. I discovered a few websites that helped me a lot—translate.google.com, of course, but also Reverso.net and LanguageTool.org.
Masks: In the last three quarters of 2020 masks were required virtually everywhere. During the summer it was discovered that the disease was spread by aerosols from exhaling, talking, and singing. Moreover, being indoors greatly increased the probability of transmission. So, it was generally considered acceptable to go outside unmasked, but people were warned to stay at least six feet away from strangers. The last practice was called “social distancing”.
My favorite mask, but the straps tended to break.
The Center for Disease Control (CDC) had a problem. Although they knew that the N95 masks that had been approved for use by NIOSH for painters and others who were often exposed to aerosols were by far the most effective, their official announcements said that people did not need them. Instead they recommended that any type of face covering would work just as well. So, a lot of people made their own masks or even wore bandannas across the lower half of their faces like outlaws in westerns. Others, such as I, purchased ten cheap cotton masks made by Hanes that could easily be washed.
There was a good reason for this deliberate misinformation campaign. A shortage of N95 masks was feared, and it was considered critically important that the best protection (and tightly fitting N95 masks offered much better protection) be available to those who dealt with known COVID patients or with large numbers of people in situations that precluded “social distancing”.
For some people masks, especially the ones that worked the best, were very uncomfortable. They did not bother me much at all. I was, however, quite happy when, during the summer, it became apparent that masks were not necessary outdoors. Still, when I took walks I made certain to keep at least six feet away from other walkers whenever possible.
Health: I was never healthier than in 2020. I experienced no significant ailments at all—not even a cold or indigestion. That pain in my foot bothered me a bit, and on one occasion the nail on my left little finger got bent back and eventually fell off. On the other hand, I was exercising so much that I had to make a shopping trip to Kohl’s to buy a smaller belt to hold up my pants.
My mental state was pretty positive as well. I was able to concoct several interesting projects to occupy my mind when I was not exercising or reading. I would have appreciated a diversion now and then, but most of my life had been good preparation for an extended lockdown. I had a lot of experience at keeping myself occupied.
Sue was also pretty healthy physically, but she got winded very easily. Moreover, she has always been a much more social animal than I was. The strain of the isolation on her spirit was quite evident.
We took a couple of short trips just to get out of the house. At some point in June or July we drove down to Gillette Castle and had a little picnic. We found a spot that was shady and isolated. The walk from the parking lot to our site was uphill, and it definitely wore Sue out. After lunch I took a hike up to the castle by myself. Only a few people were there, and I kept my distance from all of them. This was a very simple outing, but it felt like a small taste of freedom. Perhaps prisoners have the same feeling the first time that they are allowed into the exercise yard.
Lunch at the zoo.
On September 24, when it finally appeared that the Pandemic had abated a bit, we made a road trip to Roger Williams Zoo in Providence. The highlight for me was when we went to see the sloths. I got to show the attendant there that I was wearing a tee shirt with a sloth on it. Sue had bought it for me in Costa Rica.8
On the way back to Enfield we made a stop in Willimantic so that Sue could show me the Shaboo Stage, an outdoor venue that she had frequented to watch local musical performers, mostly blues bands. Sue was friendly with several of these people, and she was very worried for them. The lockdown had eliminated their primary source of income.
We made a third stop at Oliver’s Dairy Bar where we ordered burgers and listened—in our cars—to Bruce John singing and playing his guitar. A few people got out of their cars and danced. It was all a little weird, but it was something to do. Sue had claimed that the food would be very good, but we were both disappointed in it.
People our age were terrified to be among strangers, and reasonably so. Not everyone survived that first year. I did not hear of anyone who died directly from COVID-19, but all of the following members of the debate community died in 2020:
Max Horton, whom I knew quite well from the Simsbury Bridge Club.
David Waltz, whose wife I knew from Tuesday evenings at the Hartford Bridge Club and at tournaments. The three of us even went out to dinner one evening in Hyannis, MA.
Elaine Jaworowski, who was a regular player at the HBC morning games.
Gladys Feigenbaum, who only played occasionally at the HBC and did not seem to be in great health before the lockdown. I did not know her well.
Victor (blue shirt) with Lew Gamerman, Kate McCallum, and Sheila Gabay after a victory in 2019.
The most shocking news was the murder of Grand Life Master Victor King in his own home in Hartford on July 26. He was a very popular player and, to all appearances, had no enemies. His assailant was also his tenant. I had played against Victor a few times and I had talked with him about a few matters concerning the district’s website. At the time the incident was covered in local and national outlets as well as abroad. I was not able to find any information about the disposition of the case.
On July 23 my occasional bridge partner, boss, and good friend Bob Bertoni was operated on for the second or third time in recent years. He recovered enough to continue working as the District Director for the rest of the year, but I think that everyone knew that the handwriting was on the wall.
Sue’s friend and occasional bridge partner, Ginny Basch, also went into the hospital in July. A few days after she had been released she needed to return and have a heart valve inserted. She seemed to recover well enough after that.
On November 16 we learned that Tyesha Henry, Sue’s long-time protégée, had COVID-19. Sue had been with her in an automobile on November 6, but Sue did not develop any symptoms. She dodged a bullet.
Food:Few restaurants were open, and those that were provided only delivery and pickup orders. Most of the time Sue and I ate at home. I continued going to the grocery store, but I always wore a mask (as did nearly everyone else), and I always used the automated checkouts. I seldom was within ten feet of another human. Sue usually ordered groceries online and drove to the store to pick them up.
The hybrid Yum restaurant in E. Windsor.
We ordered pizza perhaps once a month, and we drove to KFC three times7, once in West Springfield and twice in East Windsor. The first drive to East Windsor, which was probably in May, was very strange. There were almost no cars on any of the roads, but there was a long line at the drive-through window at the KFC/Taco Bell restaurant. I did not get my order until twenty-five minutes after my arrival. When I arrived home we discovered that the bags contained both our $20 fill-up and someone else’s Taco Bell order.
On July 18 Sue and I drove over to the beautiful house of Ken and Lori Leopold in Avon, CT. We were originally planning to go to a restaurant for supper, but the negotiations between Lori and Sue for a suitable place with outdoor seating broke down. We enjoyed a very nice supper and then played a few rubbers of bridge. I played with Sue and then Ken. Lori had never played rubber bridge before! That was the only time in the last nine and a half months of 2020 that we dined indoors with other people.
Sue and I celebrated all of the holidays alone together in our house. That was what one did in The (first) Worst Year Ever.
The Neighborhood: The big news was that in the spring the family that lived diagonally across the street from us (“cattywampus” as my Grandmom Cernech would have said) on the southwest corner of North St. and Allen Pl. unceremoniously moved away. This was the family with several trucks and an ATV that the kids rode around on. The father often flew the “Don’t tread on me” flag and other right-wing banners on their flagpole.
The house (a small ranch house with one garage) and yard were both in bad shape when the family abandoned them. Workers spent weeks getting it back in marketable condition. It was auctioned off; no “For Sale” side ever appeared. It was purchased by a woman who has kept it in immaculate conditioned. She even resuscitated the lawn.
The flagpole has never been used since the other family left.
Three doors to the west of them the “patriotic” cause was taken up by a couple. She grew sunflowers accompanied by Bag-a-Bugs and had a statue of an owl that turned its head occasionally. I scoffed at the former and was enthralled by the latter.
He was another kettle of fish. He also had a flagpole. He flew the “Don’t tread on me” flag, but also other flags including a Trump-Pense banner ones about POW/MIAs or respecting the police. Another Trump sign was proudly displayed above the garage. He also had a “concealed carry” sticker on his car’s window. Most bizarrely, he had a fenced-in back yard with red triangular signs on both gates with the word “MINES” on them, as if the back yard contained mines. I took him seriously; he seemed to be retired from both the military and law enforcement, and he was obviously “gung-ho”.
I generally gave these people a wide berth, but my walking took me past their house quite often.
We really only have one next-door neighbor, the residents of 1 Hamilton Court. A couple with children had been living there for quite a few years. He disappeared from the neighborhood at some point before the Pandemic started. A different man moved in and immediately started making over the house and the back yard. I talked to him for a few minutes once. He seemed friendly enough. Anything would be better than his predecessor, who had said he would kill our cats if they ventured onto his property.
This photo was taken from my chair in the office. Giacomo is the one with the long bushy tail.
The Pets: Our two cats, Giacomo and Bob, really enjoyed the lockdown. Sue and I got in the habit of watching television together from 8 p.m. until I could no longer keep my eyes open, which usually occurred between 9:30 and 10. The cats loved the idea that we were both sitting still. Giacomo often sat peacefully on my lap, as he had done for many years. Now, however, the two of them would also sometimes lie together on a blanket that Sue had laid out on the floor. Giacomo seemed to enjoy having a friend. They assumed every position imaginable, including spooning.
Giacomo showing off his thumbs on the bed on November 1.
In October Giacomo surprised me by catching a moth. When he was younger he was a fearsome hunter, but in 2020 that was the only time that he showed much interest in any wildlife.
Sue and I never knew Giacomo’s real birth date, but we celebrated it annually on November 1. 11/1/20 was his seventeenth birthday. When I returned to bed for my first nap of the day I was shocked to find Giacomo had climbed up on the bed. We enjoyed a nap together for the first time in at least a year.
On Christmas Giacomo found a comfortable resting spot. He was left-pawed. Here he is using his business paw to ask for petting.
On August 4th, the day of a tornado watch, I discovered that at least one of the cats (I suspected Giacomo) had stopped using the ramp in the basement that led to the cat door and had instead designated an area of the newer side of the basement as an open latrine. After I cleaned up the smelly mess I drove to Target and purchased a large litter box and some cheap litter.
The cats quickly adjusted to using the litter box, but they tracked litter all over everywhere. I solved the problem by switching to Clean Paws, which was much more expensive but did not stick the their feet as much.
Friends: Sue had many, but I really only had one friend, Tom Corcoran. He left the Land of Steady Habits shortly after the Pandemic struck and rented an apartment in Burlington, VT, which is where his children lived.
In 2020 we only saw him once in person. On August 1 he was back in his house in Wethersfield to take care of some business, and Sue and I drove to meet him there. Sue brought with her and antique ice box that Tom pledged to fix it up somehow.
We celebrated Tom’s birthday with a Zoom call on October 27. You should be able to calculate his age if you have read these blogs carefully.
Bridge: There was no face-to-face duplicate bridge in 2020 after the middle of March.
Many people played online. The ACBL even set up an arrangement for “virtual clubs” that held online sanctioned games of eighteen boards. I did not participate.
On November 18 District 25’s Executive Committee held a meeting on Zoom. It was depressing. The ACBL was probably going to cancel the NABC in the spring in St. Louis and the one scheduled for Providence, RI, in the July of 2021. Most of the members of the Executive Committee, including me, were also on the committee for the latter event. It was crushing news.
The North American Pairs and Grand National Teams would be contested online. I did not like this news at all, but I asked Ken Leopold, Felix Springer, and Trevor Reeves to play with me, and they all agreed. I told Ken that I would practice as much as I could online. We played online on Christmas Day, but that was the only time in 2020. I hated the experience, but this might be my last chance to play in Flight B of the GNT.
Sports: The National Basketball Association, like all other forms of indoor entertainment, suspended play when the Pandemic hit. In order to salvage part of the 2019-2020 season the league spent $190 to build a “bubble” at Disney World in Orlando, FL. Twenty-two of the league’s thirty teams were invited to the city to play the remaining eight regular season games and the playoffs behind closed doors. Of course, the games were televised.
Yes, they actually played all of the games in Disney World surrounded by pictures of imaginary fans.
This approach worked very well. Everyone involved in the games stayed in the bubble and was tested regularly. No cases at all were reported. The season ended on October 11, with the Los Angeles Lakers crowned as champions. The league generated about $1.5 billion is revenue.
Other sports did not follow the league’s example. The only one that I was interested in was college football. The Big Ten was pressured by Trump into playing the season, sort off. All non-conference games were canceled, and the beginning of play was postponed until October 24. Games were played in empty or nearly empty stadiums.
Michigan was ranked #18 in the preseason and beat #21 Minnesota 49-24 in the opening game. This was followed by three embarrassing losses. In week 5 the Wolverines used a new quarterback, Cade McNamara, to beat Rutgers in three overtimes. In week 6 they lost to Penn State at home. Since all of its remaining games were canceled due to COVID-19 outbreaks, the team ended the season 2-4, the worst record in living memory.
The whole idea of playing during a pandemic was idiotic. The NCAA ended up granting extra eligibility to all of the players.
I guess that sports addicts enjoyed watching the competitions in empty stadiums and arenas. I did not watch any sports at all during the entire year.
Miscellaneous: I filed my income taxes in February. I did not receive my refund until August 1. There were two reasons for this: Most IRS employees were working remotely, and a large number were busy distributing the $1400 stimulus checks that Donald Trump made sure had his name on them. I am not complaining.
The class that I took in Advanced Italian held only nine of its ten classes. The last one was canceled (without a refund) because of COVID-19. I signed up for the fall class, but it was canceled on September 9.
On August 8 we received a check from AIG for the trip insurance for our cruise in March that had been canceled. AIG, the largest company in the trip insurance market, must have taken a real bath in 2020.
I purchased and tried to read a couple of Montalbano novels by Andrea Camilleri. They were difficult for me. The narrative was in standard Italian, but most of the dialogue was in the Sicilian dialect, which is much different.
On August 11 Bank of America refused the automatic payment of the bill for our homeowners’ insurance policy. I had received a new credit card and had not yet changed the number on Travelers’ website. It was resolved in a few days.
Beginning on November 10 we enjoyed almost a week of really beautiful weather. Sue and I drove up to her property in Monson, MA. She wanted to walk up to the top, but she got less than a hundred yards before she was out of breath and exhausted. We rested a few minutes and then walked back to the car.
Desperate for something to do, on November 11 I began polishing up my novel Ben 9, which I have posted here. I just had to do this. It had been inside of me, and I had to let it out. I doubt that anyone will ever read it. Who is interested in reading about the clergy in the eleventh century?
What else? I feel as if I have left out something important that happened in 2020. What was it? Oh, yeah, the election. You can read about it here.
1. I don’t know why all the letters are capitalized. It is not an acronym. The five letters stand for Coronavirus Disease. “Corona” is the Latin word for crown. The -19 was added to indicate that it began in 2019.
3. I tweeted that I thought that Magpie Murders was the best mystery that I had ever read. Anthony Horowitz thanked me in the comments and wished well to the HBC.
4. The Best Buy in Enfield was a casualty of the Pandemic. The building was still empty two years later.
5. The journal for the Sicily trip is posted here.
6. The English version of that trip can be read here.
7. The excursion to the sloth sanctuary is described here.
8. There once was a KFC in Enfield on Route 5, but the owner retired, and the store closed. Enfield contains almost every other kind of fast food place, but for years no one sold fried chicken until a Popeye’s opened in August of 2022.
