By 1999 the office in Enfield no longer seemed suitable for TSI. We had been doing more training there than we anticipated. Fortune 500 companies had been sending employees to be trained for three or four days in a converted barn with no training room. My office, which was already also serving as the home of our AS/400s, System/36s, and their system consoles, had to be used for the training sessions, It did not give us a professional appearance.
There were many other reasons that Denise Bessette (introduced here) and I wanted to move. In the first place, since Sue Comparetto was no longer working in the building much (explained here), I felt uncomfortable being in a building owned by her father and shared with his company and Sue’s siblings, all of whom worked for the Slanetz Corporation.
I was sure that Denise would be happy to move into an office that she designed rather than the one that she had shared with Sue. Sue was hardly ever there, but many of her bags, boxes, and piles of her junk were still in evidence.
Big junk …
Behind the office building was a lot that was the home of (literally) tons of discarded equipment and machinery, including a fire truck, a blue school bus, a rusty tractor from before World War II, innumerable tires, and at least twenty fire hydrants. These all belonged to some iteration of the Slanetz Corporation. Personally I did not care if they wanted to have a junkyard there, but as the proprietor of the business, I had to think about what our clients thought. If we ever needed to bring someone really important to the office, we would certainly be embarrassed.
… junk of all shapes and sizes.
My workspace in Enfield when I had only a “dumb” terminal. The photo on the wall depicts my nieces Cadie and Kelly. The stacked trays held materials for each client. The accordion files on the left contained program listings. The shoes are Stan Smith models.
One important person whom we wanted to contact quickly was someone to manage our marketing. Doug Pease (introduced here) had done an outstanding job working out of what was supposed to be a closet, but we could not expects someone who could acquire contracts with billion dollar corporations to do so.
We also needed to rewire our office to allow easy access to the servers from PCs and to use the Internet. Denise took charge of all of this, and she preferred to do it from scratch rather than to retrofit the scheme onto what we had.
Another neglected priority was the furniture. We had a mishmash of second-hand pieces that we had accumulated over two decades. In general we wanted a more functional and more modern working environment. Jamie Lisella (introduced here), who was doing the administrative and bookkeeping functions, needed a better setup. We also wanted to move Sandy Sant’Angelo (introduced here), who dealt with support calls from clients, an area in which her voice, which really carried, did not disturb the programmers.
A limiting factor was the fact that Denise lived in Stafford, which was already a twenty-minute drive. Most of the available office space would be towards Hartford and therefore farther for her. She was amenable to increasing her commute a little, but she did not relish the prospect of a two-hour round trip.
Kohl’s is the big white building in the upper left. The space that we looked at was the other white building labeled “Blush Med Spa:.
Jamie did most of the research into places looking for tenants. I remember that she found a place in a medical building near Kohl’s. Denise and I went to look at the space, which was on the second floor of a building that had mostly medical tenants. I thought that it was OK, but Denise did not like the fact that it was so close to a shopping center where people might be hanging around in the evening. She sometimes worked by herself and did not leave until it was dark.
A place on Hazard Ave. would have been very convenient, but the only space that was available was disqualified for some reason. I never saw the interior of the place. I think that a chiropractor moved in.
My lobbying to move the operation to North Hollywood, CA, (explained here) was dismissed by the other participants in the search.
The door to 7B was on the far right.
I am sure that Jamie located the site in East Windsor. I remember her saying, “I think that I have found TSI’s new home.” It was in Pasco Commons, a group of buildings that were designed to be homes, offices, or both. Building #71 was owned by Rene (RAY nee) Dupuis, the owner and operator of Tours of Distinction2, a travel agency that specialized in arranging bus tours in New England.
TofD took up the bottom floor, Suite A. Rene wanted to rent TSI the second floor, Suite B. We would be able to add or remove interior walls and shape it the way that we wanted it. There was also a unit in the basement, which he rented as Suite C once or twice.
The red balloon indicates Pasco Drive. Building #7 was a little bit east of the balloon. The river is on the left. The yellow road labeled “S. Main St.” is Route 5.
The location was East Windsor just off of Route 5, a major US highway, and less than a quarter mile from the Connecticut River. The location was quite good. Building 7 had its own parking lot with five or six slots on each side. Two doors opened onto the parking lot, one from Suite A and one from the stairs to Suite B. The rent was not much more than we paid Sue’s father. If the traffic was light I could reach the office in fifteen minutes—my record was twelve.
Preparations: I found some graph paper that we could use to plan where all of the walls and doors would be. We put a conference room, the area for Sandy and the administrative person and the sales office on the south side. The programmers and office equipment were in the middle, and offices for Denise and me were on the north side. The east side had the server room, the kitchen, and the bathrooms. The server room was supposed to be big enough to hold our supplies, too, but somehow we lost a couple of feet of space. Fortunately, Rene allowed us to make a last minute change to wall off an area for supplies and storage.
Denise made most of the arrangements for the transition. The furniture was mostly new, or at least new to us. We got a nice table for the conference room with comfortable chairs and a beautiful bookcase that I claimed when we closed down in 2014. We ordered five phone numbers. The last four digits were 0700-0704, which was convenient. In the entire history of the company no employees—not even Denise and I—ever had personal phone numbers or extensions. I have always thought that that was smart for a company of our size.
The part of the old building used by the Slanetz Corporation had a kitchen, and they let our employees use the small refrigerator. The new kitchen also had a small refrigerator, a microwave, and a table. It also contained a sink, counter, and cabinets, but no stove.
My office in Enfield. My big red mug is visible in front of the window with a photo of W.C. Fields and a Realistic radio from RadioShack. Later I purchased Bose radio to replace it. The big red mug was lost when I left it on the roof of my car one evening.
The big move: We did not take occupancy of 7B immediately. The furniture and the new separation panels arrived at separate times. I must have been involved to some extent in the assembly and placement, but I have no distinct memories. I am pretty sure that I brought the computers from Enfield over the weekend in my car. I probably needed some help with the AS/400.
After all the furniture had been received and the equipment collected we moved in and shortly thereafter we had an open house party. I don’t remember everyone who came, but I do recall that Denise’s mother and at least one of her sisters were there.
Someone brought us two nice plants in large pots. Both of them survived our entire stay of more than fourteen years in East Windsor. By 2014 they were both gigantic. I sold them to someone who probably dumped them somewhere and kept or sold the pots.
La Notte had a huge parking lot.
Life in East Windsor: Before Pasco Commons existed, Jonathan Pasco’s restaurant was an institution on Route 5. TSI had a couple of outings there, and we occasionally entertained clients or others we were trying to impress. I think that we also went to La Notte, an excellent Italian restaurant in the middle of a nearby industrial park.
On many evenings and weekends I went for runs on the roads around that industrial park and the adjoining Thompson Road. I often did as much as ten miles. I sometimes left my water bottle at the Thompson Road entrance. Once I was approaching that spot having completed my first loop. A police car was surveilling the bottle from across the street. When I approached it the officers accosted me and asked what the “device” was. I told them that it was my water bottle. They asked me to take a drink, and I did. This occurred shortly after 9/11, when half of America was paranoid about terrorist attacks.
On one of my runs I aw a very large snapping turtle on grass besidee Thompson Road. Inside the industrial park I often saw wild turkeys and once spotted a bobcat. I also once observed two hawks “doing it” on the ground.
I usually arrived at work before 6:00 in the morning. I worked for an hour or two and then took a nap on a mattress from a portable cot that Sue had bought for camping and only used once. On a couple of occasions someone was surprised to find me asleep on the floor of the server room.
Every few days I would go to Geissler’s grocery to buy Red Delicious apples and diet cola in two-liter bottles. On one of those occasions I ran my Celica into the side of a Lincoln. I was driving on the exit lane on the right in the photo. The Lincoln was traversing the lane in the foreground.In my hundreds of trips to Geissler’s I had never seen a car using that lane.
The policeman investigating the accident did not give me a ticket. He said that the East Windsor police were called for accidents there every week. Eventually they reconfigured the parking lot to prevent the kind of accident that I was involved in.
Every day I brought my lunch from home or bought a sandwich or salad at Geissler’s. If the weather was good, I generally ate at a picnic table in a small park by the river. I almost always took a nap after lunch, either in my car or in the park on my notorious mattress.
One of the biggest events in the history of East Windsor occurred while we were tenants there. Walmart opened a Super Center a mile or so north of TSI’s headquarters. The first time that I went there I wondered how they had found so many people who looked like they were from Appalachia.
178 N. Maple: TSI left behind some furniture in the Enfield office. Sue continued to go there on occasion. At one point she obtained a great deal of fabric from someone that she knew. She tried to run a small business selling the fabric for a while.
The Slanetz Corporation made an effort to rent out the space at least once, but as of 2023 it is not in use.
1. When I researched this in 2023, I was surprised to discover that Building #7 was for sale as a “new listing”. All of the interior photos are of 7A, and the one exterior photo shows only the door to 7A. It was weird. It was obvious that something (the other door) had been excluded. I found the photo at right at this website.
2. Tours of Distinction has moved to Simsbury. Its website can be viewed here. When I looked there I could find no information about who owned or operated the agency.
The story of the pets who shared the house in Enfield with Sue and me begins here. It recounts the first fifteen years of our lives there with, for most of the period, two cats named Rocky and Woodrow. Rocky died in the summer of 2003 after a very full life.
In late 2003 or early 2004 Sue’s sister Betty told us that a friend of hers had a family of cats that were too much for her to manage. Sue went to meet her one evening and chose on the spot to adopt a long-haired black male that was about the same size as Rocky and Woodrow. The woman called him Fluffy, which, of course, would never do. I dubbed him Giacomo after my favorite opera composer, Giacomo Puccini, and Giacomo della Chiesa, better known as Pope Benedict XV.
For a few weeks Giacomo was, to put it mildly, very wary of his new surroundings. We did not keep him cooped up for more than a day or two, and thereafter I personally spent a lot of time looking for him and trying to remove him from various hiding places. I remember that one day he somehow crawled under the dishwasher in the old kitchen. Fortunately, he was just shy, not a bit aggressive or even defensive. As soon as I got a good grip on him he let me pull him out of his hiding spot without much of a struggle.
Giacomo on the chair showing off his thumbs and his anteater tail. Woodrow looks up from the floor.
Finding him when he hid outdoors was even more challenging. He liked to retreat beneath some evergreen bushes on the north side of our house. When I approached him from one side, he slipped over to the other. It took me at least thirty minutes to retrieve him whenever he did this.
Woodrow, who made new friends very easily, took the new kid under his wing. Giacomo followed his lead in nearly everything.
Eventually, Giacomo became comfortable in both our house and our yard. However, he did not seem to comprehend the value of the cat door (described here). It looked like a trap to him.
Finally, one day Sue and I decided to team up to help him understand it. Sue held him on the outside of the cat door and pushed him through. I was in the basement standing on a chair by the cat door. When he appeared on the top shelf of the bookcase, I grabbed him, took him in my arms (which he liked), and walked around the basement enough so that he could figure out where he was. I then returned him to the top shelf by the cat door and pushed him back through it. Sue grabbed him and held him for a minute or two. Then she pushed him back through to the basement again.
All of a sudden I could see the light bulb appear over Giacomo’s head as he emerged into familiar surroundings. The message penetrated through all the fear to his little brain. He finally realized that this little door meant that he could come and go as he pleased. It was no trap; it meant freedom!
Meanwhile, to our surprise, Giacomo continued to grow. After a couple of months he was a good two inches taller than Woodrow and three or more inches longer. He had one broken (or at least shorter) fang that bothered him not even a little. He also had polydactyly on both front paws. Each had an extra toe sticking out on the inside. They looked a lot like thumbs. One other thing was quickly noticeable about Giacomo—he was left-pawed. I called his left front paw “Lefty”. If it came towards you, it generally meant business.
During his first summer in Enfield Giacomo cleaned out the mole colony that had resumed residency when Woodrow retired as master exterminator a few years earlier.
For the most part Giacomo followed Woodrow around the house and the yard. Woodrow habitually came in to the bedroom every morning when my alarm went off at 5 AM. Giacomo began to join us. I was expected to acknowledge both of them, although Woodrow wanted nothing more than a rub or two on his head. Giacomo liked to be rubbed all the way down his spine, but he did not like his belly rubbed.
In the summer the coolest sport for a nap was this sink. Giacomo learned this trick from Woodrow.
From the start Giacomo preferred me over Sue. Whenever I sat down on a chair he jumped onto my lap. If I was seated at my desk (which was really a tabletop astride two file cabinets), he often got bored and went exploring on the table. If I was watching TV, he lay lengthwise on my lap (on a stadium blanket that I always set there) when he was younger and across it when he got older. I don’t know why he changed. Whenever I lay down he walked (he was so long that he hardly needed to jump) up onto the bed and settled himself next to me.
I never teased Giacomo in the way that I tortured Woodrow with that stick and feather. However, I occasionally took advantage of the fact that he allowed me to do almost anything to him. I liked to lift him up over my head and make him pretend to walk on the ceiling.
Woodrow and Giacomo were left “home alone” during our trips to Village Italy in 2005 (described here) and Eastern Europe in 2007 (described here).
Suburban raccoons are too fat for cat doors.
Woodrow was still around for a startling occurrence in May of 2008. The cat door drew the attention of a masked varmint, a raccoon that was too chubby to fit through the opening. Raccoons are known to be very crafty, but this one used brute force to solve the problem. He made short work of my (very) amateurish carpentry by pulling the door out of its wooden frame in the window. Sue and I knew that the rascal had made it all the way into the house when we found the cat bowl empty and water all over the floor. Cats are very meticulous when drinking water; they seldom spill a drop. Raccoons are meticulous in a different way. They wash their food before they eat it; they always spill water, and they never clean up after they are finished eating.
Chick Comparetto let us borrow his Havahart trap, and he showed Sue how to use it. She then put it outside near the cat’s entrance (which we had temporarily closed off) and put some food in it. On the very first night the raccoon got caught in the trap. Sue and Chick then transported the raccoon—still in the cage—in her car across the Connecticut River to Suffield, where they released it in a wooded area.
Sue immortalized the raccoon adventure by recording a video of the release in Suffield. You can watch it here.
I bought a new sturdier cat door and affixed it to the board blocking the window a little more securely.
In the late summer of 2008 Woodrow died. He was eighteen years old, the same age that Rocky was at his death. Woodrow was weak and very ragged looking the last week or so. I stayed home with him on his last day.
Despite my closeness to him, I wasn’t overcome with grief when Woodrow died. The Woodrow that I wanted to remember was the devious rascal and hunter, not the decrepit bag of bones of his last few days. I still retain so many vivid memories of him. He was an immediate friend to everyone whom we let in through a human-sized door, but I think that, at least in his younger years, he would have fought to the death to defend against an intruder trying to get through the cat door.
I buried Woody under the burning bush, his favorite outdoor napping spot. I don’t honestly know whether Giacomo missed him as much as I did. He could not have missed him more.
Franklin.
For about a year Giacomo was our only pet. Then Sue learned that Betty’s friend, who was absolutely thrilled to find out how much we liked Giacomo, told Sue that she could have Giacomo’s litter-mate, whom she had named Frankie. I insisted on elongating his name to Franklin.
Franklin was black, like Giacomo, but he had short hair, and he was not as long and lean as his brother. I thought of them as the anteater and the aardvark. Giacomo was the bigger anteater with his luxurious fur coat. Franklin was the much less attractive aardvark.
Giacomo on the futon.
Giant Anteater
Aardvark
Pretty good analogy, no?
Franklin did not share Giacomo’s pleasant disposition and love of human companionship. He never fought with his brother, which we recognized as a big plus. However, Franklin did not especially like either Sue or me. He would only occasionally let us pet him. mostly when he was outside. Once or twice, however, I actually found him up on the bed with Giacomo, but after a couple of strokes he became antsy and departed.
This sturdier version of the cat door was installed with the new addition in 2013.
The aspect of living with us that Franklin hated the most was the monthly application of flea drops. I suspect that he had never been allowed outdoors at his previous residence. He discovered the cat door in the basement without our assistance, and he seemed to appreciate the freedom that it provided. However, he had never learned the fundamental lesson of civics class: with all freedom comes responsibility. In this case, the monthly flea drops were the price civilization exacted for his liberty.
This is the basement side, with a ramp down to the floor.
When the weather was warm Franklin put me through a frustrating and exhausting ritual every month. When I was sure that Franklin was in the house, I shut the door to the basement so that he could not retreat there. I then chased him from room to room trying to corner him. Sometimes he hid under one of the barnboard shelves in the library. When he did, I had to wait for him to move. Eventually I always trapped in the bedroom, where he would take refuge under the bed. I had to remove the mattress and box springs to get at him. I always eventually managed to apply the treatment, but the experience was a gigantic pain in the coondingy1.
In contrast, I merely waited for Giacomo to jump in my lap. He did not mind getting the drops at all. He trusted me completely.
Giacomo and Franklin stayed home together while Sue, I, and our friends the Corcorans toured Paris and the South of France in 2009 (described here). We also took a Russian River Cruise in 2010 (described here) and an ill-fated tour of South Italy the following year (described here). I learned of no untoward incidents either caused by or inflicted on either cat.
Franklin on the futon.
For some reason Franklin insisted on exploring our neighbor’s3 property. The gentleman who lived there called me aside while I was trimming the forsythia bush near his property one day and informed me that he had a problem with our cats. They made his dog bark too much. I told him that I would see what I could do.
I thought of responding, “Oh, you have a dog problem. I thought that you said that you had a cat problem.” After all, in Enfield, although dogs must be fenced in or kept on a leash, there is no law against cats roaming free.
I was pretty certain that Franklin was the instigator. Whenever I saw him near the neighbor’s property, I chased him back to our yard. However, I worked all day, and I slept at night. Franklin had ample opportunities to roam. One day, when I was not home, the dog owner accosted Sue and told her that if he caught one of our cats on his property, he would kill it. I won’t repeat Sue’s precise response, but it was not neighborly.
The situation did not escalate any further. I wrote a letter to the neighbors that explained the situation with our cats and offered to pay if they did any damage. Shortly thereafter the family got rid of its noisy dog, and eventually the man of the house departed as well.
In 2012 Franklin got hit by a car on North Street. I did not dig a grave for him, the only domestic animal that I have ever really disliked.
After Franklin’s death Giacomo was our only pet3 for quite a few years. He went through a period in which he spent a lot of time on Allen Street, a dead-end street that was directly across North Street (the site of Franklin’s untimely demise) from our house. Quite a few outdoor cats lived in the neighborhood and congregated informally. The situation reminded me of the old Top Cat cartoons.
I did not like this new lifestyle, but there was not much that I could do about it without turning Giacomo into an indoor cat. Sue was equally concerned. She came to see me when I was in my easy chair wearing my cardigan sweater and reading a magazine. She said, “Ward, I ‘m worried about Giacomo.”
Giacomo on the bed.
Although I don’t remember attributing his injury to the evil influence of the other gang members, one day Giacomo came home with a wound that had formed an abscess. The vet who examined him told me that if this happened again, we might need to keep him inside. That was something that we really wanted to avoid. She also told me that he definitely had a heart murmur, but she did not recommend doing anything about it. It made me think, however, that Giacomo would probably not match the longevity records of Rocky and Woodrow.
Bob in 2017.
Eventually Giacomo’s wanderlust subsided. By 2016 he almost never left the property. That was the year that another black cat decided that he wanted to take up resident at the Slanetz house, home of Sue’s siblings, Don and Betty, and their father, Art. Betty and Art were quite fond of the newcomer, a very stocky fellow with an inflexible tail that measured only four or five inches. Betty named him Bob in honor of his tail—bobcats are sometimes seen in the area. The tail reminded me more of a crank or handle.
A good view of the crank.
Unfortunately, Betty’s own cat had a fiercely hostile reaction to Bob’s presence. Betty therefore asked Sue to adopt him, and, needless to say, Sue agreed. Bob moved into our house on December 8, 2016, and for about two or three weeks Bob and Giacomo hissed at each other. They eventually became tolerant and, in time, quite friendly.
Giacomo held down the fort in Enfield by himself on several of our tours and cruises. Bob and Giacomo stayed in the house by themselves while we took the bridge trip/vacation in Hawaii in 2018 (details here).
Giacomo was much longer.
Not to mention his tail.
Bob exploring in the back yard.
Bob developed one very peculiar tendency. From the beginning his joints were not very flexible, especially by cats’ standards. Something also seemed to itch him on his spine, and he tried desperately to get at it with his teeth. To do this he rested his weight on one shoulder and used a back leg to spin around furiously. It reminded me of someone breakdancing.
After a while some tufts appeared on Bob’s spine. They looked like matted clumps of fur, but he would not let us touch them at all. They kept getting bigger, and eventually it became clear that they were growths of some kind. Maybe we should have taken him to the vet, but at the time Bob would not let me touch him under any conditions. Sue decided to let him be. Every so often she would say to him, “Oh, Bob, what am I going to do with you?”
Prior to Bob’s arrival Giacomo almost never made a sound unless I rolled over his tail with my office chair. Bob was quite talkative, and he had a pleasant voice. Giacomo began to vocalize, too, but he almost always squawked at a high volume. He sounded just like a blue jay. This was his only bad habit. We just had to put up with it.
Giacomo and Sue sometimes napped together.
Meanwhile, Giacomo was definitely beginning to show his age. Whereas he formerly sprang up to my lap or to his favorite perch on the back of the sofa, by 2019 he didn’t jump at all. He had to climb. He had also lost the ability (or at least the inclination) to retract his claws. When he walked on a bare floor, he always made click-click sounds. His right front paw also definitely bothered him. He never ran, and he walked with a noticeable limp.
This is a rare shot. B0b was seldom allowed in Giacomo’s main napping spot atop the couch. Bob always stuck out his right rear leg when resting.
I spent the week after Thanksgiving in 2019 in San Francisco at the NABC4 tournament (described here). Between and after the rounds my thoughts often turned to Giacomo. I really feared that he might die while I was gone. I would not have been too surprised if Bob had died as well.
I was wrong on both counts. Both Bob and Giacomo were still reasonably healthy and active when the Pandemic changed all of our lives in March of 2020.
1. I learned this word while I was in the army. I think that it is derived from a Korean word that sounds similar.
2. Because of the location of our house, we really had only one next-door neighbor, the residents of 1 Hamilton Court. I think that the person with whom I conversed was named Chris Simons. He no longer lives there in 2022, but I think that his wife still does.
3. I am not counting our third rabbit. At some point before, during, or after Franklin’s stay with us at 41 North Street, Sue accepted (without consulting me) another rabbit from a relative or a friend of a relative. She explained that it could live outdoors, and she promised that she would care for it. She neglected it, and it died within a month or two.
4. Prior to the Pandemic three North American Bridge Championships were held every year at rotating sites by the American Contract Bridge League.
In the latter half of 1986 Sue and I realized that a serious business required a better office space than our house in Rockville could provide. For one thing we realized that neither of us was a salesman, and the building offered no place for a salesman to work. It was also a little embarrassing to bring in clients, especially since we now had two cats in residence, Jake and Rocky.
Google took this photo of the west side of 178 N. Maple. The large building on the left was already there. Our space was in the addition on the right. The entrance to TSI was the white door on the far right on the other side of the wall.
At the same time Sue’s dad was in the process of converting one of his barns at 178 N. Maple in Enfield, two doors north of Sue’s parents’ house, into office space for the Slanetz Corporation. Sue worked her magic with him to design a headquarters for TSI there as well. The new building also was designed to serve as a headquarters for Moriarty Landscaping1 in the basement below TSI’s space.
This is the view from the south. The drainpipe in the middle roughly approximates the border between TSI and Slanetz Corp.
Two doors allowed access to TSI’s offices. The first was on the east side, where our space bordered on that of the Slanetz Corporation. The other was on the south side. It was eight or ten feet below the level of the office. From the door a staircase led up to the middle of TSI’s office space
That arrangement meant that a good bit of the space on the west side—between the staircase and the west wall—was essentially wasted2. There was not enough room for both a corridor and a work area.
The north and east sides of TSI’s area had no windows. The west side had two sets—the double in Sue’s office and another one in the wasted area. The south side had three windows.
I found some of the partitions in our basement.
Sue bought white wooden shelves that were deployed to create a corridor from the door on the west wall almost to the stairs. The programming and reception/accounting areas were partitioned into work areas with dividers.
South of the building was a parking lot that could hold eight or nine cars.
Sue and I were well aware that we had enjoyed a sweetheart deal in our lodging in the front house of the Elks Club in Rockville. Since January of 1980 we had rented—without a lease—a nice old three-bedroom house with another room that was large enough for an office for three or four people. We paid the Elks, as I recall, $300 per month, we had no lease, and no one ever bothered us. On the first of every month we put the check in an envelope labeled “Rent”, walked it up to the Elks Club bar, and gave it to the bartender. I don’t think that we ever missed a payment.
In October of 1986, Sue received the following letter from the Elks Club:
October 16, 1986
Sue Comparetto TSI Tailored Systems 9 North Park St. Rockville, CT 06066
Dear Ms. Comparetto:
This letter is to inform you of several changes which are taking place in the landlord/tenant relationship between the Rockville Elks and you. From now on, all correspondence is to be directed to the Chairman, Board of Trustees. Until April 1, 1987 this is David Mullins3 (address and phone number below), All correspondence should be directed to the Chairman at his personal residence. When a new Chairman takes over, you will be informed and given any necessary address changes. Normally, this will occur every April.
Rent payments are to made as they are now except that the full rent is to always be paid. Do not deduct for anything unless authorized by the Chairman – no other member of the Board of Trustees has this authority.
New rental rates will be taking effect as well (a lease is enclosed). Your new lease will run from April 1 to March 31. For your benefit, we are phasing in the rental increases until April 1, 1987 (when the new lease takes effect). Starting December 1, 1986 your new rent is as follows:
Additionally, you are now responsible for minor repairs and maintenance totalling less than $100. Starting with your new lease (4/1/87 – 3/31/88) you will receive a $100/moth rent credit if you meet the following conditions. First, the rent must be received on time (by the 5th day of every month). Second, all minor repairs and maintenance described above are to be taken care of by you. This credit may be deducted off of your rent payment. If you fail to meet both of these requirements you forfeit the rental discount for that month.
Please sign both copies of the enclosed lease and return them to me ASAP. I will sign one and return it to you.
David Mullins
We did not sign the lease. Instead, Sue negotiated a temporary arrangement with the Elks Club for us to stay a few months until we could find another place. We paid more than $300/month, but nothing close to $11004. Sue has told me that we actually paid them $600/month. Evidently they did not want to try to find another tenant.
We moved all of TSI’s stuff over a weekend in early 1988. I don’t remember if we hired a moving company or not. I don’t recall lifting desks, and so I suspect that we hired some local people to do it. If someone helped us, we might have been able to do it. The Slanetzes had an old grey pickup truck. My recollection is that I brought most of the computer equipment in my Celica, which was a hatchback.
On Friday we were doing business out of Rockville. On Monday our headquarters was in Enfield.
For a few months Sue and I commuted from Rockville to Enfield. Since we worked drastically different schedules—she is a night owl; I am an early bird—we always brought two cars.
This is the view from North St. looking north. Hamilton Court is on the right. The living room is to the left of the front door. The window to the right of the door is now my office. The double window is on the largest of the bedrooms, which is now called (inappropriately) Sue’s sewing room. The other bedroom is directly across the corridor from this room.
Near the office Sue found two houses that were for sale. We ended up purchasing the one shown above situated on a very large corner lot at 41 North St. in the Hazardville section of Enfield. From North St. in 2021 it still looked much like it did when we bought it in 1988. The maple trees were much smaller at that time, and the Burning Bush on the left must have grown to be ten times as large as it was then.
The lawn in 2021 undoubtedly had far more weeds. Both the previous resident and the one before him were reportedly landscapers. Their care for the lawn amounted to an obsession. One of them even installed a sprinkler system. The first time that I mowed the lawn with my new Sears lawnmower, I filled twenty-three large black garbage bags with clippings. It took me over three hours. For the second mowing I set the machine to mulching mode and never set it back.
I undid all of that TLC with a few years of neglect. As you can see from Google’s photo, it still looks fine.
The sidewalk was added on the south side between April 22, the day on which we signed the mortgage for $135,000, and some time in June when we finally finished moving in. On the west side of the house was a fence. Beyond it was a driveway and walkway leading to Hazard Memorial Elementary School, which Sue had attended decades earlier.
So, our lot actually bordered on only one other dwelling, 1 Hamilton Court.
Behind the house was a one-car attached garage. Between the house and the garage was an entryway that was about 10′ by 15′. We installed one of the Datamasters and the daisy-wheel printer on a long table in that room5.
The house had a rather small kitchen, a pretty large area for a living and dining area, one bathroom, and three small bedrooms. To that extent it reminded me of the house on Maple St. in Prairie Village, KS, in which my family lived from 1954-1962.
We had accumulated a lot more stuff during our years in Rockville. For weeks I filled up my Celica before I drove to work every morning and emptied it at the new place before I returned home. Even so we had to hire movers to move the big items.
Our bed went in one bedroom and another double bed appeared from somewhere6 in another, which was in theory a guest room. The other bedroom became a kind of library. The barnboard shelve were located there. It soon hosted another resident, Buck Bunny, as is described here.
This house, thankfully, had much more storage space—a full basement and an attic. That was only sufficient for a year or two. The garage was soon too filled with Sue’s junk for a car—or anything else—to fit.
This is actually the current door. The old one was fitted inside the square on the right.
We made one important improvement to the house. We installed a cat door in the basement window that was below the guest bedroom. Some wooden shelves were already in the basement near that window. The cats entered on the top shelf. I built a make-shift ramp so that they could easily get down, but they often preferred to walk to the edge of the shelf and jump from there to the washing machine and then the floor.
1. In 2021 Moriarty Landscaping still occupied the basement area of 178 N. Maple in 2021.
2. I wondered why the entrance was placed there instead of next to the east wall, with the steps outside. Sue said that she thought that it might have been a town requirement for two fire exits. My other question was why the staircase could not have been to the immediate left of the door.
3. In 2021 David Mullins apparently lived in Farmington.
4. $1100 might have seemed like a fair price on paper. However, there were at least three major drawbacks to the property: 1) The ceiling in the living room/dining room space was severely cracked. The middle was at least 6″ lower than on the edges. It was a pretty scary situation. 2) There was no shower on the floor with two bedrooms, only a bath tub. 3) The heating bills were outrageous. A great deal of the hot air went right up the staircase to the unused floor.
5. The garage and the entryway were eliminated during the renovation that is described here.
6. Prior to this move I had not realized that Sue was a hoarder. When I met her she had almost no material possessions. Over the decades she amassed so much stuff—mostly of no evident value or utility—that we could not invite people to the house, and when we needed a repairman or cleaner, we needed to scramble to make room.
No monumental events occurred during our seven and a half years in Rockville, but I remember all kinds of smaller ones.
Sports
Jogging: I continued to go jogging a couple of times a week, but Rockville was much too hilly for an occasional runner like me. I drove my car a mile or two into Ellington to find a surface that was relatively level. I took Upper Butcher Road, which turned into Middle Butcher Road and then Windemere Ave., up to Pinney Road (Route 286). I parked my car near the intersection.
I ran up Windemere to Abbott Road, where I turned right. I ran north alongside the golf course before turning on either Middle Road or Frog Hollow Road to return to Pinney Road. The only problems that I ever encountered were dogs. A few barked ferociously and came within a few feet of my ankles, but none ever bit me.
Basketball: During the winter of 1987-88 Tom Corcoran invited me to watch a basketball game that included some players that he knew from work. It was held at a high school gym. I can’t remember if Sue came or not. The game itself was not a bit memorable, but at halftime a door prize was awarded. It was a pair of tickets to a Hartford Whalers game, and my ticket had the winning number.
Hockey: You really should listen to “Brass Bonanza”, the Hartford Whalers’ fight song while reading this section. You can find it here. It will open in a new tab.
I had only attended one hockey game in my life, an intramural game at U-M. The tickets that I won were for the last game of the season. It took place in the Civic Center3 in downtown Hartford. The opponents were the Pittsburgh Penguins.
In those days there were nineteen teams in the NHL. Sixteen of them made the playoffs. At the time of the game the Whalers had already clinched one of the last playoff spots4, but the Penguins had been eliminated. So, the game was meaningless for most purposes.
The Whalers were clearly the better team, as even a neophyte like myself could discern. They held a 2-1 lead going into the third period. The home team continued to dominate play, but they could not get the puck past the Penguins’ goalie. At the other end the Penguins only took four shots, but three of them ended up in the net. So, the visitors won 4-2.
Art Slanetz also took Sue and me to a Springfield Indians hockey game. I don’t remember much about it.
Golf: I played a few times with Denise Bessette’s husband Ray and his dad. His dad was even worse at the game than my dad. I just could not afford to play regularly; golf was too expensive.
Television
Spare me Kirstie Alley.
We had cable in Rockville. In the days before bundling it was reasonably priced. I watched a lot of college football, and we watched a few shows in the evening, especially Thursdays. NBC showed Cheers and Frasier. I could not get into Seinfeld.
We also had the Playboy channel for a while. Its productions were awful . One show featured a woman from England. They introduced her with “And now, from across the Pacific …”
In the mornings I sometimes went downstairs to do exercises. I remember two different shows that I watched. One had a different woman leading every day. The other one, Morning Stretch, had only one hostess, Joanie Greggains. One of her favorite sayings was, “Your grew it; you lift it!”
Pets
At some point Puca and Tonto, our tortoise, died. Thereafter the home-made snake cage in the barnboard bookshelves remained empty.
I know that we had guinea pigs in Rockville for at least a couple of years. The last one was an all-white Peruvian that I named Ratso. He loved to be petted, and he whistled whenever I did. Unfortunately, he had a tumor on his belly, and it eventually killed him.
Slippers could win this competition.
Somehow we ended up with a very nice black rabbit named Slippers. That little guy could really leap. He could jump from the floor to the top shelf of the bookshelves, which was more than six feet off of the ground.
Slippers had a bad habit of chewing on electrical cords. I went to a local pet store that had a very knowledgeable proprietor. I waited until she was free. I then approached her to ask what I could use to prevent a bunny from chewing on the cables. She quickly answered, “Nothing.”
Slippers had a stroke, and we brought him to the vet. While we were there he let out a blood-curdling cry—the only sound that we ever heard him make. He was dead. I think that that was the saddest that I had ever felt.
In the summer of 1986 a stray cat that hung around the Elks Club gave birth to a litter of three in the courtyard behind our house. One was mostly white, one was tuxedo-colored, and one was black and white with a black mask like a raccoon’s. The tuxedo-attired one had short hair, perhaps inherited from his father; the other two had long hair. At first we called them Whitey, Blacky, and the Coon Cat. Based on her disposition, we think that Whitey was female; the other two were males. Sue wrote a children’s story about them and read it to Brian and Casey Corcoran.
We did not really plan on having cats as pets, but it did not seem too likely to us that all four of them would be able to survive the winter. We did not want to be responsible for that. So, I embarked on a plan to trap them. I bought some Purina Cat Chow1 and put a bowl of it in the courtyard about ten feet from our kitchen door. Every day I moved the bowl closer to the door. Then I left the door open and put the bowl in the kitchen. The two males came in, but the female was too timid to enter the house.
This photo of Rocky was taken by Sue. It is attached by a magnet to our refrigerator.
When the bowl was well inside the kitchen, and I knew that both male cats had come in to eat, I snuck out the other courtyard door and shut the kitchen door from the outside, thereby trapping them in the kitchen. The Coon Cat, whom we renamed Rocky shortly thereafter, threw himself at the door over and over while Blacky (later named Jake) sat in the corner and calmly assessed the situation.
I bought a litter box and some litter. As soon as they had grown accustomed to being with humans, we took the boys to the vet for their shots and to get them fixed. We kept our two new feline friends in the house all winter. In the spring we saw their mother hanging around the Elks Club, but there was no sign of their sister.
Rocky and Sue in the snow.
In the spring and summer we let Rocky and Jake roam wherever they wanted. When they wanted back in, they would wait patiently in the courtyard for someone to open the door.
In early October of 1987 Rocky did not come home for a couple of days. When he finally came to the door, his face and chest were covered with blood. We took him to the vet. He had a broken jaw. The vet wired it, and they kept him for a few days because we had a weekend planned in Washington (described above). All the staff loved him.
We brought Rocky home. Within twenty-four hours he broke the wire on his jaw. With his eight remaining lives he never looked back and lived for another seventeen years. He was incredibly athletic. I once saw him vault/climb the nine foot stone wall in our front yard in one smooth motion.
Jake was much less sociable than Rocky, but he was nearly as good an athlete. One afternoon while I was napping in the bedroom, I heard a very strange noise just outside of the window. It was the sound of Jake climbing the drain pipe for the rain gutter in hot pursuit of a squirrel that was taunting him from the ledge of the bedroom window. I don’t think that he got that squirrel, but he did figure out how to get down on his own.
Games
D&D: In the first few years after we arrived back in Connecticut, I staged a few dungeons. The best was when the debaters from Wayne State came to visit us as described above.
After that Tom Corcoran was always eager to play. Sue could usually be talked into it. Sue’s sister Betty and some of her friends could occasionally be coerced. We tried to talk a few clients into trying it, but there were no takers.
Patti Corcoran’s favorite game.
Board Games: We played a lot of board games with the Corcorans. We also played fairly often with Sue’s sister Betty. Her favorites were The Farming Game and Broadway. Sue and I occasionally played Backgammon together.
Murder Mysteries: It was easier to get people together for a Murder Mystery party, which became fairly popular in the eighties, than it was to arrange for a D&D adventure. We bought several of these games, which were sold in toy stores. The idea was that everyone was assigned a character and given secret information about the character. Only the murderer was allowed to lie. Then everyone guessed at the end.
We only played a few of these games. The quality was very uneven, as it was with the board games2. In one of them the most important clue was in the very first paragraph of the description of the setting that was read aloud. When we played it, the player who had that character (Ken Owen, introduced here) did a vivid portrayal of his role in that setting. The game was ruined. It was not his fault; he was expected to get into his character; the game was just poorly designed. Another problem was that you could only play each one once.
Camping
I have always loved camping, and when I say camping I mean sleeping on the ground in a tent that one set up for oneself, not sleeping in an RV that has more electrical doodads than a hotel. Sue liked camping, too, but the sleeping on the ground part proved to be too much for her. She bought a fold-up cot with a mattress that was about 2″ thick. That proved to be a pretty good compromise, and that mattress got considerable use after our camping days ended.
On a few occasions we spent a couple of days on our own at Mineral Springs Campground in Stafford Springs, CT. This place had spaces for a lot of trailers. Some people spent every summer there for years. We always stayed in the “primitive” areas, which were just plots set aside for people who eschewed electrical and plumbing hookups in the woods. We set up the tent and scoured the woods for firewood. On some occasions we needed to supplement what we could find with wood purchased from the campground’s store.
This is the headquarters building. There were arcade games and a ballroom inside, as well as a store..
The campground had a headquarters building in and around which all kinds of activities were scheduled. There were also several areas designated for volleyball and other sports. The small swimming pool did not interest me, but I think that Sue took a dip at least once.
Many kids were forced to spend time here, and the operators did their best to give them something entertaining to do while the adults sat around the campfire and drank beer.
I would have preferred something more rustic, but, after all, this was Connecticut. It had been civilized for more than three centuries.
I relished the challenge of creating a hot supper over an open fire. I was quite proud when the result actually tasted like a well-cooked meal. Sue’s favorite part of camping was making s’mores. I can’t say that I ever developed a taste for them. I preferred my graham crackers without the gooey stuff.
In the late eighties Sue talked her nephew, Travis LaPlante, and Brian Corcoran into joining us on camping trips. If she hadn’t, I doubt that either one of them would have ever slept outside.
This is the box that our tent came in. I found it in the basement. I don’t know where the tent itself is.
They were very different kids, but we all had a pretty good time. We played some board or card games together. I don’t remember the specifics, but the two boys enjoyed them. They also enjoyed tramping through the woods looking for firewood. Travis liked playing with the fire itself.
We tried a few other campgrounds after we left Rockville in 1988. Those adventures are detailed here.
Health
Not Jake, but similar.
My health, with one exception, was fine throughout our stay in Rockville. During the winter of 1987-88 we kept our two little buddies, Rocky and Jake inside the house. Therefore, we put out a litter box for them, and they used it.
One day Jake scratched me on the back of my left hand. I took care of the wound, but it would not heal. I ran a very slight fever, and eventually a bubo appeared under my left armpit. I continued working, but I could only concentrate for a couple of hours at a time before I needed to take a nap.
We did not have health insurance, and I had not seen a doctor since my knee healed. However, I knew that I needed medical help. I made an appointment with a doctor whose office was within easy walking distance. He asked me if my vision had been affected, which would have been an indication of toxoplasmosis. I answered that it might have been, but I was not sure. It was not significant. He told me to come to the emergency room at Rockville General Hospital at 9 a.m.
He met me when I arrived, and we skipped the usual ER routine. He lanced my bubo and gave me a week’s worth of antibiotics. As soon as he lanced the bubo I felt much better, but the antibiotics did not solve the problem. A week later he lanced again and gave me a different antibiotic. This was repeated one more time.
As soon as the third antibiotic circulated in my system, the wound healed rapidly, the bubo never formed again, and my fever disappeared. In short, I was cured.
I don’t remember what the doctor billed me for this treatment, but it was extremely reasonable.
Sue’s health problems were more chronic than mine. She had put on some weight in the time that we had been together. By the mid eighties she was having real problems sleeping.
She snored fairly heavily when she did get to sleep, and she would often wake up every few minutes with a start to catch her breath. She went to a doctor. He arranged a sleep study, after which he informed her that she had sleep apnea. I am not exactly sure what the difficulty was, but she got into a dispute with the doctor about something. I told Sue not to worry about the cost, but my efforts did not help the situation. She could be stubborn that way.
A good deal of time passed, and she only got worse. She finally got a CPAP3 machine that was connected to a mask that she wore in bed. She found it uncomfortable, but it did seem to help her sleep.
Unfortunately, I could tell that her mental acuity had deteriorated during this period. Evidently she just was not getting enough oxygen to her brain.
In late 1981 I received a phone call from Vince Follert. I knew him as a friend and fellow coach and teacher at Wayne State, as described here. I also knew that he had been diagnosed with colorectal cancer and had a difficult time with the treatment.
He told me that he had waited to call until he had some good news. This was not the fast-talking, wise-cracking guy that I knew from Detroit. He had obviously been through the wringer. I don’t even remember what the new was. It did not sound that good to me.
He insisted that the cancer had nothing to do with the Diet Pepsi that he chain drank. I did not mention the cigarettes. He seemed to be invested now in the power of positive thinking.
The next call that I got was a few months later. It was from Gerry Cox, not Vince. He told me that Vince had died. I was not surprised.
Effy Slanetz, Sue’s mother, contracted some kind of illness at approximately the same time in 1987 of 1988 that I got scratched by Jake. Her symptoms were similar to mine, and the treatments seemed similar. However, she did not make the instant recovery that I did. Instead, her disease dragged on for years. She never got over it.
Gardening
I got interested in vegetable gardening by watching two television shows on Saturdays. The one that I enjoyed the most was The Joy of Gardening with Dick Raymond. It was sponsored by Garden Way, makers of Troy-Bilt products. The other was Square Foot Gardening, hosted by Mel Bartholomew. He was a little preachier and more disdainful of other approaches.
Both hosts had books promoting their approaches, and I acquired both of them. Dick’s book was filled with lovely color photos. He had fairly instructions about the best way of dealing with each type of vegetable. The production values in Mel’s book were not as high, but he also knew his stuff. Both men argued that vegetables could be planted much more closely to one another than was done by most gardeners.
I did not have much space in the courtyard, and so I used their advice to maximize my yield. The open end of the courtyard was on the south, but the walls on the east and west sides limited the morning and evening sunlight. There was not much I could do about that. I imagined mounting huge mirrors, but I was never that fanatical. Besides, I was cheap
I grew a fairly diverse array of vegetables. I tried to do without pesticides. I used bacillus thuringiensis to thwart cabbage worms. I just picked the horn worms off of the tomatoes. The only insect species for which I resorted to chemical treatments to counter was Mexican bean beetle. These little monsters arrived en masse in early July and they attached so many larvae to the undersides of the beans that I could not keep up with them.
I had the most success with cherry tomatoes and sunflowers. My three cherry tomato plants produced over 250 tomatoes, and the vines were over twelve feet long. The secret for my success, I am convinced, is that I fertilized them with Slippers’ poops.
I also grew one plant indoors over the winter. It was not as big as the ones in the garden, but it produced a reasonably good output until white flies found it. My sunflowers were well over eight feet high, but the birds always harvested them before I did. I didn’t really care.
My onions were pitiful. The bulbs that I harvested were hardly bigger than the sets that I planted in the spring. Mel claimed that you only needed a 4’x4′ patch to grow corn, but I never had much luck. Corn really needs unrestricted access to both the sun and the wind.
Food
We ate at home most of the time. I usually skipped breakfast. I ate a piece of fruit if one was around For lunch I usually ate leftovers or, even sometimes in the summer, some kind of chicken noodle soup. I preferred the Lipton’s version that had “diced white chicken meat”, but I was not picky.
For outdoor grilling we used the hibachi that we brought back from Michigan for a while. Then we upgraded to an inexpensive barbecue grill with wheels from, I think, Caldor’s. It provided a means of regulating the distance between the fire and the grill. I did not understand how anyone could grill successfully without this feature.
We patronized a few local restaurants. Tasty Chick was a very good fried chicken takeout place on Regan Road just off of Route 83. The owners, Michael and Marie McGuire5, often were behind the counter. Michael would sometimes claim that they were almost sold out. All that remained, he explained, were “beaks and toes.”
We also liked to go to the Golden Lucky6 for Chinese food. The ginger chicken wing appetizers were to die for. Once in a while we thought that we could afford to go to J. Copperfield7 for a more elegant dinner and a drink.
Live Performances
Sue and I did not attend many concerts, but in October of 1981 we were among the 40,000+ in attendance at the performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida at the Hartford Civic Center. In some ways it was not really an opera. The singers were all wearing cordless microphones, which is absolutely prohibited in most opera houses. Because of the Civic Center’s poor acoustics, they had to allow this.
The emphasis in this production was on spectacle. “The Grand March” scene included not just dancers, but elephants, camels, and, if I remember correctly, snakes.
Although it has, in my opinion, the best final scene in all of opera, Aida has never been one of my favorites. The producers of this extravaganza spent a half million dollars on the production. There was nothing left to hire top-notch singers. Even so, I think that everyone had a pretty good time. The New York Times sent a reviewer, Theodore W. Libby, Jr. He had a similar opinion, which can be read (for free) here.
The next year they tried to repeat the experience with a production of Turandot, an outstanding opera of imperial China by Giacomo Puccini (finished by Franco Alfano). We didn’t go, and nearly everyone else stayed away, as well. I am embarrassed to report that I had never heard of this opera at the time. If I had been familiar with it, I might have gone. In the ensuing years I have probably listened to it fifty times or more.
Sue and I also attended a few second- or third-tier concerts. I can remember three of them:
Garnet Rogers.
Sue and I went to see Livingston Taylor, James Taylor’s brother, perform at a coffee house in Hartford. It was a guy’s name followed by “‘s”, but I cannot remember it. I enjoyed it, but … My friend from U-M Raz (John LaPrelle) went to high school with James Taylor in North Carolina. He never mentioned Livingston, I presume.
We also saw Garnet Rogers, the brother of Stan Rogers. Stan’s album Northwest Passage, was one of the very few that I bought during this period. I heard Stan’s music on a show on WWUH radio that featured acoustic music. I still listen to the album on an mp3 player when I go walking.
Sue and I went up to the Iron Horse Cafe to hear Donovan. He was one of Sue’s idols when she was a teeny bopper.
In truth I was slightly disappointed by all of these concerts. They weren’t bad, but there was no thrill. By the way, I think that all three of these guys are still alive and performing.
Sue loved (and loves) every type of live music. She probably attended additional concerts with friends or by herself.
1. In the subsequent thirty-five years I have never fed our cats any product other than Purina Cat Chow. None of them has ever had an illness more serious than a hairball. When people tell me that their cats will not eat dried cat food, I always reply, “Maybe not in the first week, but they will eat it.”
2. The quality of some games was so bad that I could not believe that anyone had ever tried to play them before they were marketed. Others were clearly ripoffs of other games that took advantage of a popular movie or television show.
3. Stafford Springs is the least “Yankee” of all New England’s towns. Its principal claim to fame is its speedway. The main street of town is often filled with motorcycles. It feels much more like Kentucky or Tennessee.
4. CPAP stands for continuous positive airways pressure. Sue eventually found a much less intrusive model.
5. The McGuires ran Tasty Chick from 1975-89. It stayed open under separate management until the early twenty-first century. Michael McGuire died in 2021. His obituary is here.
6. The Golden Lucky opened in 1983 and closed in 1988. The sad story is documented here. We never had a bad meal there.
7. J. Copperfield was in business from 1982 to 1996.
By the fall of 1980 my dream of a life as a debate coach seemed unattainable. I enjoyed coaching as much as ever, but I could not visualize how I could make an enjoyable career of it. A few colleges hired someone just to coach debate, but these highly prized positions seldom turned over. Although I had a good record, I had no strong connections. Moreover, I had no idea how to find and obtain such a job.
There was not an abundance of potential coaching positions, and the vast majority of them were for someone with a PhD who would act as Director of Forensics and would also perform other roles in the speech department. This path did not appeal to me for at least four reasons:
I would need to finish my PhD, which meant doing my dissertation. This did not appeal to me at all, for reasons that are described here.
I could not see myself as a faculty member of a speech department. I had little or no respect for any of the speech professors that I had met, and I dreaded the prospect of dealing with departmental politics.
I would be expected to research and publish. Nothing about the field of speech communication interested me enough to research.
I would be expected to teach and serve on committees of MA and PhD candidates. I would almost certainly get stuck teaching the statistics class that every grad student hated. I probably also would be the guy on the committee who forced students to deal all of the problems with the design of their studies. I cannot seeing myself approving any approach that misused statistics or drew only patently obvious conclusions. I would not mind much if some people didn’t like me, but I did not want to be the ogre of the department.
There was one other factor. Sue and I had very little money by the end of 1980. I needed to start bringing in some bacon pretty quickly. I knew that I had a real talent for computer programming, and I really enjoyed bringing an idea to life. So, I determined that I should try to help Sue turn TSI into a real business.
But not in Detroit. The neighborhood that we lived in had deteriorated markedly. The third break-in at our house (described here) convinced us that we had to move. Following the rest of the Caucasians to the suburbs would be expensive and would only address one problem. The other was that the entire Detroit area was in the throes of a severe auto recession. Finding customers there would be difficult for the next few years. Most of the rest of the country was doing better. Sue wanted to return to New England, and I concurred.
The third break-in was, in one way, a blessing in disguise. The thieves took the television and the stereo. They did not take the 5120 computer, which weighed ninety-nine pounds, or the printer. We didn’t have any valuables, drugs, or guns, but they certainly looked for them. Between the second break-in and the third we had bought renter’s insurance. So, we had fewer things to move, and the claim gave us enough money to hire movers.
I think that Sue made a short trip back to Connecticut in the fall of 1980 to look for a place for us to rent. Somehow her dad helped her find a wonderful house in Rockville. The rent was $300 per month. That was more than twice what we paid in Detroit, but it was still an incredible bargain, and it was a perfect place for a small business.
Rockville, a “village” in the town of Vernon, was less than a half-hour drive from downtown Hartford, even in rush hour. The prosperous part of the Hartford area was mainly on the west side of the Connecticut River. However, we would not have been likely to find anything comparable in the wealthy suburbs. If we did, our rent would probably have been a four-digit number.
Rockville at the turn of the century (i.e., around 1900) was a very prosperous mill town. Eight decades later it was still the location of many mansions that were once owned by the people who owned or managed the mills. One of the most impressive of the mansions was (and is) owned by the Rockville Lodge of Elks1. We rented the mansion’s Carriage House from the Elks. The address was 9 North Park St. North Park has one of the steepest slopes without switchbacks of any straight street that I have ever seen. I never tried to jog up it.
The Carriage House was a split-level dwelling. The stairway was in the middle. To the left of the front door pictured at left were levels 1L and 2L and the attic. To the right were the half cellar and levels 1R and 2R. The front door was on level 1R. Two rear doors were on level 1L.
Behind the house was a courtyard that was approximately twenty feet deep and twice that in width. The left side of the courtyard was open. The other two sides were brick covered with ivy. I eventually planted a vegetable garden here.
Level 1L contained the living room (which contained a fireplace), a dining area, pantry, and a kitchen on the far left. We used the massive barnboard shelves to serve as a divider between the dining area and the living area. A door led from the kitchen to a courtyard. A second door to the courtyard was on a landing at the foot of the stairs in the middle of the house. The only shower in the house was on that landing.
The half-cellar was across from the back door in the middle of the house. It had a sink as well as the oil burner, water heater, and fuse box. Above it was level 1R. The only use we had for the cellar was during my abortive sauerkraut experiment several years later.
Level 1R contained the main office. We placed the 5120 computer and printer and Sue’s credenza here. Eventually the office acquired additional equipment and furniture. There were windows on the front side and on the right. There were no windows on the courtyard side.
The master bedroom took up the front half of Level 2L. The spare bedroom housed the waterbed and later became Sue’s office. That room and the bathroom (tub but no shower) were on the courtyard side.
Level 2R was another bedroom with a sloped ceiling. We only used it for overnight visitors.
Level 3L was an attic that could be reached from the bedroom on 2R by a door at the top of three or four stairs. It contained possessions of a previous resident. We did not use it.
One-way driveways leading to the main house and the Elks Club bar were on either side of the Carriage House. The entrance could be seen from the main office on 1R and the exit from the kitchen on 1L.
The club had garage space for three cars. We were allowed to use one of them. The garage was forty or fifty feet from the kitchen door.
The grounds of the Elks club contained a fairly large wooded area. In the winter we scoured it for firewood. We could not afford to buy it at a store. We were quite poor throughout our first few years in Rockville. I think of these as the macaroni years.
The placement of the shower was inconvenient, but the only thing that I really hated about the Carriage House was the oil heat. It was horribly obsolete in 19812. I can hardly believe that I am still living in a residence with such an outmoded heating system forty years later.
When we moved in we only had one phone line. Eventually we bought a multi-line system.
Most of our friends from 1972-1975 were no longer in the Hartford area. We reconnected with Tom and Patti Corcoran, who were living in Wethersfield, the city just south of Hartford. By this time they had two kids, a boy named Brian and a girl named Casey.
I think that this photo of Casey and Brian is from 1983 or 1984.
We spent a lot of time with the Corcorans. They often fed us much better than we would have otherwise eaten. They came to visit us occasionally as well. I remember that I fixed country-style ribs and sauerkraut for them once. I don’t think that Casey tried any; in her early years she consumed only nectar, ambrosia, and the dew from daffodils. However, Brian was shocked when he took the first bite. “This is good!” he exclaimed with as much enthusiasm as he ever exhibited.
Sue registered TSI as a partnership at the town hall in Rockville. She was the president; I had no title. We never sat down and decided who was responsible for what part of the business. She arranged for her dad’s accounting firm to help her set up our books. Dan Marra3 of Mass and Hensley worked with her.
We hoped to be able to establish a relationship as the go-to programmers for IBM’s small business clients, but that did not work out too well at first. IBM went through periods when they loved the third-party programmers who specialized in IBM systems and periods when they were not eager to work with us. Early 1981 was one of the latter periods.
I tried to come up with ways to market Sue’s experience with IBM’s construction payroll system. Unfortunately, we had no access to any lists of IBM’s installations. Sue did some custom work for FH Chase Inc., a construction company south of Boston, and another firm in Boston. At FH Chase she worked with Victor Barrett4 and Mary Brassard. I also recently came upon an invoice from 1981 that Sue sent to Scott & Duncan, Inc. in Roxbury, MA, for a change to its payroll system. It was sent to the attention of Paul Williamson. I don’t remember anything about that company.
Sue sold one copy of Amanuensis, the word-processing program that I wrote, to Brown Insulation in Detroit, and I developed the retail inventory control and sales analysis system for Diamond Showcase. Sue also did some work for clients that she had contacted when we were in Detroit. They included CEI, based in Howell, MI, which owned a number of companies in various locations,
We were not making it. Sue and I were very frugal, but we were not reaching our “nut”. For one thing, the price of oil, which was at an all-time high, was killing us. I was just about at the point of throwing in the towel and looking for a job doing … I don’t know what. However, in July of 1981 IBM made an announcement that had a big effect on both our business and our personal lives. It was not the IBM PC; that came later. It was the System/23, also known as the Datamaster. At some IBM offices it was called the Databurger.
1. The Elks still own it in 2021.
2. I am embarrassed to say that forty years later we are still living in a house that is heated by oil. It makes me feel like a caveman.
3. Dan Marra lives in Colchester in 2021.
4. I am pretty sure that Victor Barrett works and lives in St. Charles, MO.
