In the second half of 1999. after my sister Jamie Lisella had left TSI (explained here), the situation at the company was simultaneously the most exciting and the most perilous of its entire experience. On the one hand, business was very good; our services were much in demand, and the relationship problems of the previous few years were pretty much behind us. We had a good staff that could produce great code on a reasonable schedule. We also had plans to move into a new office in East Windsor that we were designing to fit our needs (described here).
However, the company did face some serious issues.
TSI had no marketing director, and we had done no marketing of any note for at least a year.
TSI no longer had an administrative assistant. I had take over these tasks, and I had better things to do.
The size of the potential market for new sales of our primary product, AdDept, an administrative system for retailers, was dwindling, mostly do to mergers and consolidations in the retail industry. Another factor was the fact that AdDept was already installed in a large number of locations.
The computer that we knew best, the AS/400, had limitations that made it difficult to sell to companies that were not familiar with it. Specifically, the screens and output were not considered “modern”.
The Internet posed a serious challenge. At the end of the century every business could see aspects of the opportunities that it offered, but few could see a clear pathway to using it profitably.
My partner, Denise Bessette, and I discussed these issues fairly often. We knew that we were understaffed in critical areas. Although a good case could be made for getting a new marketing director forthwith, the previous marketing person, Doug Pease, had left the company a few years earlier because I asked him to stop selling new AdDept systems for the simple reason that our existing clients were so demanding that we were struggling to keep up with their requests for new programming. It seemed to me that we should address our other problems before we hired someone to generate more sales.
I was aware that René Conrad was frustrated with her position as planning manager at Kaufmann’s in Pittsburgh (introduced here). I had great respect for René and her work. In the wake of Jamie’s departure I discussed with Denise the possibility of asking René to work for TSI. Denise was receptive to the idea, but there certainly were a lot of detail that needed to be put in order.
After talking with René over the phone a few times in August of 1999 I sent the following letter to her:
I have been thinking a lot about this. I also met with Denise. As usual, she had some good ideas. It seems to me that there are three things we need to address: 1) a job description that we all can live with; 2) a solution to the relocation problem; 3) a suitable compensation scheme. You may have other issues, too. If you do, I would greatly appreciate it if you would tell me as soon as possible.
1) Job description
You asked me if this was Doug’s job. The answer is no. We hired Doug to sell AdDept systems. We hoped he would be able to do other things, but the only other one that he was accomplished at was setting up time and action plans and agendas. In the last five years we have taken an immature product with a small client base and made it into a comprehensive administrative system used by a large portion of the most powerful and successful retailers in America. What we really need now is someone with insider knowledge to help us shape our company for the next 10-15 years. This is the primary role we would like you to pay. We realize full well that this is much less structured than what you are used to. We hope you would look forward to the challenge and can adjust to this type of environment. The second most important objective would be to relieve some time pressure from Denise and me. I hope that you would be able to relieve me of some of the training time either by eliminating the need for it by improving our documentation or by taking some of the trips yourself. The other side of the coin is that neither Denise nor I can afford to take on new unbillable responsibilities. The case in point is supervision of the administrative assistant. Jamie did this work for such a long time that she required very little oversight. I don’t see how we could afford to hire you if you did not supervise this person. I don’t see how this job can be performed from anywhere except our office, certainly for the next few months. You will have an awful lot to learn about how our company works. You know all about Kaufmann’s and a little about the other May divisions, but we have 17 other clients. We work very closely together at TSI. I don’t see how this could be done by phone. We also do not have the infrastructure for remote use of our system. We have a dial-up connection through the network, but it uses phone lines.1 We would spend a fortune on long distance if someone had to dial in to our system, and, of course, that is the only way to dial in to our customers. Setting up an internet connection is expensive, and we would probably have to hire someone to do it. It also drags security issues in as well.
2) Relocation
I don’t exactly know how to sell you on Connecticut. Our new office promises to be very nice. You will have the biggest office with three windows. We will make sure that you have whatever you need to be productive. I have made a commitment to everyone to make the work environment so nice that people will love to come to work.
As I said, we have no death marches.
I think you will like working with our staff. If there was any negative feeling in our office, it left with Jamie. We are in the process of hiring an administrative assistant.2 If you don’t like the person we hire, you can get someone else.
The area is pretty nice. The weather is certainly no worse than Pittsburgh’s.
We are two hours from Boston, which is full of activity. We are only three hours from New York by train. Vermont is only 1.5 hours. The long island shore is an hour or so.
You will have to make new friends. That is never easy.
We would REALLY like you to come see what we have to offer. Denise is eager to show you Northampton, MA (about 20 minutes north), where she went to school.
3) Compensation
I am pretty confident that the compensation issue can be worked out without much difficulty. I told you about how much Doug had been making. I neglected to tell you that 2/3 of that was in commissions. I think that we need to revamp the compensation scheme somewhat. Doug concentrated on new AdDept sales. It took him a few years, but eventually his efforts outstripped our ability to support the new customers. I get the distinct impression that you aren’t interested in that kind of job. We want to sell AdDept systems, but we think we need to develop other sources of income as well.
We propose that you receive 35% of the profit on hardware sales; 10% of the revenue on AdDept sales (assuming I take all the sales trips by myself); 20% of AdDept module (e.g., CAPS interface) sales; and 50% of “project management” income. The last would be defined as any trips (at $900 a day) that you get customers to agree to let you take. If you can persuade them to pay you without taking a trip, all the better.
You will be part of the process of developing new products or services. We will negotiate with you what percentage you get.
The starting base salary would be $50,000. e will agree to pay you an additional $2,000 per month as salary in lieu of commissions for the first twelve months. If your commissions were $500, $4,000, $800, and $3,000 in the first four months, you would be paid $2,000, $2,500, $1,500, and $2,300.
We have done no marketing in more than two years. Nevertheless, in the next year I think that one AdDept sale is almost certain (Carson’s)3 and one is likely (Dick’s)4. It is possible that Dick’s will happen very soon, in which case I will have to pay Jamie commissions. There are two almost certain hardware sales (Carson’s and a box for Saks Inc.). At least three or four customers could definitely use faster boxes, and the new 170’s are very attractive.
Adapting to life in a small company will not be easy for you. On the other hand, I think that the profiles of TSI and René Conrad mesh well. We are stable, free of debt, and full of kindred spirits. We need a smart, aggressive, well-connected person. You’re it.
Have you seen the W.C. Fields movie, “The Bank Dick”5? Fields’ character Edgar Soucè (accent grave on the last syllable) has a prospective son-in-law named Og Oggleby who works in a bank. Fields is trying to talk him into embezzling money to invest in shares of stock in The Beefsteak Mine. The pitch is “You’ve got to take a chance when you’re young.” Soucè explains, “My uncle Huffnagle, a balloon ascentionist, took a chance. While he was aloft in his balloon one day, he espied a haystack 2,000 feet below him He took a chance. He jumped out of the balloon and aimed his flight at the haystack.”
“Gosh,” says Og. “Did he survive?”“Uh, no,” says Soucè. “But that’s the point. If he’d been a younger man, he might have. You’ve got to take a chance when you’re young.”
We contacted René, and arranged for her to fly to Connecticut and spend some time talking with us in our new office. We bought a round-trip plane ticket for her and arranged for her to stay at the nearby hotel, which was, I think, a Best Western at the time.
I picked up René at Bradley on, I think, a Saturday morning in December 1999 or January 2000. Denise drove in from her house in Stafford. We tried to explain that the situation at TSI was very positive, but we wanted to hire someone who could help us face the issues of the twentieth century. René’s biggest concerns were the fact that she was used to fixed goals and rewards for meeting them and whether her presence would be required in Connecticut. Unbeknownst to me she had strong ties to Pittsburgh and was not impressed by the social scene in the Hartford-Springfield area.
A few days before Denise and I left for our trip to PartnerWorld in San Diego I received a letter from René in which she declined our offer. It was disappointing but not surprising. When we got back from San Diego, I wrote up my thoughts for Denise’s consideration and then on February 7 I set this letter to René:
Denise and I were disappointed but not very surprised to receive your letter. I think that the three of us would have had an enjoyable and successful time working together, but there is more to life than work. At least, I think I read that somewhere.
We both gave careful consideration as to whether the job could be performed remotely. We also examined whether there was a feasible arrangement that involved two weeks here and two weeks there. The thing is that we want someone we can work closely with, and we just don’t see how that would be practical without the person being in the office. Denise and I often have impromptu conferences, and I think that the close sharing of ideas has helped the company immensely. Our primary objective is to find someone with slightly different experiences and a somewhat different outlook to join in the process.
We are still convinced that you would have been the best person for the job, but we accept that we now have to look elsewhere. We both look forward to working with you.
We did not get to work with her for long. In 2002 the May Company moved the administration of the Kaufmann’s stores to the headquarters of the Filene’s division. René began working with a local non-profit theatrical organization, about as different from TSI as imaginable.
TSI did not get to add Dick’s, which is also in Pittsburgh, to its client list until 2004. On a training trip I met up with René. She showed me where she worked, and we had supper together.
What if?: It is difficult to say how different things would have been if we had hired her. In the short term there might have been very positive results. I wrote on February 17, “It occurred to me in a fit of melancholy at 5 PM on Friday that René Conrad could probably have forestalled the Cato fiasco. She could also probably have taken the Meier & Frank trips, or at least one of them.”
On the other hand, she could not have helped us much with the May Co. It is almost impossible to imagine getting much more work from them. Perhaps she could have penetrated the barriers that Macy’s set up, and we could have continued our relationship with them after the grand consolidation. Even if she did, how would it have helped us.
I don’t think that she could have helped much with AxN. Denise came up with a great solution to the problem of marketing it to newspapers. I cannot imagine what René she could have figured out a way to use the connections we established between advertisers and newspapers for some other purpose that was valuable to one or the other.
While working on this project I contacted René through LinkedIn. Her page is here.
1. In 2023 it is strange to read about concern about telephone charges. At the time we used MCI for long distance. Every month our bill was in the thousands..A few years later our network and Internet connections made it feasible for employees to sign on to our AS/400 from home through a local carrier. In fact, one of our programmers, Michael Davis (introduced here), did this from Pittsburgh after changing from local employee to remote contractor. Denise worked from her home on Cape Cod during the last year of so of TSI’s existence.
2. The administrative assistant whom I hired was Nadine Holmes (Introduced here).
3. I can hardly believe that I was ever “almost certain” that TSI we would get Carson’s (introduced here as P.A.Bergner). Steve VeZain must have told me or Doug something that I later repressed.
4. The Dick’s Sporting Goods installation has been described here.
5. I planned to insert a link to this routine, which I consider the best comedy sketch ever, on the Internet, but I could not find it posted anywhere.
I vividly remember my first night at the Simsbury Bridge Club. Paul Pearson had given me contact information for the director of the club, Paula Beauchamp (pronounced BOW shahmp). I told her that I would like to play on the following Wednesday, which was, I think, May 19 or perhaps May 12, 2004. She told me that the games were held at Eno Hall, located on the main street in Simsbury (Hopmeadow Street better know as Route 10/202). Parking was in the back, and the game, which was in the basement, could easily be reached from the parking lot via a handicap ramp. She told me to arrive a few minutes before the 6:30 starting time, and she would pair me up with someone.
I consulted MapQuest to try to figure out the best way to get there. I think that I may have driven on Route 20 all the way to the intersection with Route 202. There are three or four better routes, but I allowed plenty of time.
Roz Sternberg.
I located Paula, and she assigned me to play with Roz Sternberg. I had only played a few hands of bridge in the previous twenty-four years, and I remembered very little. I had relearned Stayman and Blackwood, and the course that Paul had taught at Fermi had familiarized me with five-card major openings, transfers, and negative doubles. Roz was accustomed to playing with rookies. She told me that jumps were weak, and everything else was mostly natural.
I also did not know how to keep score on the travelers. So, Roz had to sit North. We were assigned to table #3, which was right in front of the air conditioner that blasted away all evening. My South seat was directly before the fans. Cold air blew on my neck all evening as I sat there shivering. The opponents at the first table had to show me how to use the bidding box. I remember nothing about the hands; I was concentrating all my attention on following suit and bidding or leading only when it was my turn. I was proud that I had successfully avoided any director calls. I was unable to turn up a copy of the results, but I seem to remember that Roz reported that we finished about in the middle.
After that I played with Roz a few times and against her countless times. I don’t have any great stories about her play. For some reason she never came to Eno with a partner. That was a little strange because after she retired she mostly played at the Hartford Bridge Club (HBC) with a few steady partners.
Roz was employed as the IT director for the New Britain Public School System, which had one or two AS/400’s. Nobody there really knew too much about them. Several years after our initial game she found out that I had a lot of experience with AS/400’s. She asked me to come to her data center to see if I could help her with a problem. I can’t remember exactly what it entailed, but it was something rather tricky that I had previously encountered. Furthermore, I had documented my work-around. So, I went there, implemented the fix, and explained what I had done.
Actually she sent a check.
Roz then had me look at a few connectivity issues. I was less certain of my abilities in these areas, but when I left, everything seemed to be working the way that they wanted it. I considered this just a favor for a friend, but she insisted that TSI send her an invoice for my time. So, we did. It was for $100 or maybe $150. She probably had a budget for this sort of thing.
I was afraid that Roz would start calling me for technical support whenever they encountered a problem, but, in fact, she never asked again. My recollection is that within a year after my visit the school system replace the AS/400’s with a different system.
Peg Corbett1 also never came to Eno with a partner. On the second or third Wednesday that I attended at the SBC I played with Peg, and we actually won a fraction of a masterpoint from the ACBL. Here is the published scoresheet:
Open Pairs Wednesday Eve Session May 26, 2004
Scores after 24 boards Average: 48.0 Section A North-South
Pair Pct Score Rank MPs
4 57.81 55.50 1 0.60 Jean Seale - Sonja Smith
3 56.77 54.50 2 0.42 Peg Corbett - Mike Wavada
1 49.48 47.50 Ellen Tabell - Tony Tabell
2 46.88 45.00 Don Verchick - Nancy Campbell
5 39.06 37.50 Carl Suhre - Dorothy Suhre
Open Pairs Wednesday Eve Session May 26, 2004
Scores after 24 boards Average: 48.0 Section A East-West
Pair Pct Score Rank MPs
2 55.00 52.80 1/2 0.51 Claire Tanzer - Alice Rowland
5 55.00 52.80 1/2 0.51 Dorothy Clark - Roz Sternberg
1 51.25 49.20 Jerry Hirsch - Mel Hirsch
4 50.63 48.60 Maureen Denges - Pat Matthew
6 50.63 48.60 Marylou Pech - Russell Elmore
3 37.50 36.00 Louise Alvord - Carol Schaper
I am pretty sure that I played with Peg a handful of times. Most of them were not memorable, but on one occasion she seemed to be on another planet. She explained to me that she had taken her prescription allergy medication, and it made her a little loopy. Both her bidding and her play of the cards were abominable. We finished last.
Winning points with Peg was exciting. However, it was nothing compared to the thrill that I ever felt came a month or so later after I had been assigned by Paula to play with Russ Elmore a couple of times. He asked me to be his regular partner!
My first game with Russ was a unique experience. He handed me a one-page typed sheet—not a convention card—and informed me that this is what we would be playing. It was close to Standard American, the system popularized by Charles Goren, but there were a few significant differences. I remember that we did not open 1NT if we had a worthless doubleton in one of the suits.
I did not complain about the eccentricities. Russ had played much more bridge experience than I had. Maybe his approach was outdated, but at least we would agree on what we were doing. Besides, Russ was cool. He was much older than my fifty-six years, but he often came to the bridge games on his motorcycle!
I realized that the primary motive for Russ wanting me as a regular partner was to avoid being assigned to play with Roz or Peg, who would argue with him about using his sheet of paper as the basis for bidding and playing agreements. Ordinarily these are negotiated with both sides willing to give in on some things. Even so, I was ecstatic that someone actually agreed to play with me on a regular basis.
At the Christmas party in December of 2004 or 2005 Russ confided to me that he intended to open every hand with a bid of 1♠. Yes, this was a party, but no one was drunk. I, for one, still took the games at the SBC very seriously. Those Wednesday evening games were the only time that I got to play all week, and I was very conscious of how many masterpoints I had accumulated. So, I asked Russ to just bid his hand as usual, and he respected my request.
When I played with Russ I got in the habit of analyzing every hand afterwards. Since we did not have hand records (sheets of paper that shows the location of all fifty-two cards on deal), I could only go by how well we did when I played a hand vs. when Russ was declarer. We did much better when Russ played. I told this to Russ, and he laughed.
I bought a book called How to Play a Bridge Hand by William S. Root. It had hundreds of examples with quizzes at the end of each chapter. I converted these quiz question into 4×6″ cards—problem on the front and answer on the back—that I could study during lunch breaks at work. It did help; I got a little better.
I later made an interactive web page that included all of these problems for declarer play and included other interesting ones that I encountered over the years. I posted a link to it on the web site that I designed for the SBC. The problem page is located here.
If an odd number of people showed up on a Wednesday, Paula Beauchamp3 played with one of the players who came without a partner. Since she was a very skilled and experienced player, everyone who came without a partner—usually three to five of us—hoped to get to play with her. She had many chances to play with me, but she only picked me once.
I made few obvious mistakes, maybe even none. No, that was not likely. Let’s just say that I did not notice any errors. If Paula did, she did not mention it. We finished first with a very good score, and after I played one hand she said, “You played that like a surgeon!” My buttons were busting.
I once was surprised to see Paula in the terminal at Bradley International Airport. She had apparently just returned from a vacation, and I was on my way to visit a client. I don’t remember the date, and it is hard for me to place the time, too. I generally left very early in the morning, before any flights had arrived. I do remember that she was wearing a pair of those rubbery shoes with holes in them, Crocs.
Paula’s favorite movie was Life is Beautiful (La Vita è Bella) with Roberto Begnini. I had also seen this film. I sometimes called Paula Principessa, the term of endearment used by Begnini’s character for his wife. She liked the way that I pronounced it.
I persuaded my friend Tom Corcoran to play with me at the SBC five or six times. He worked in Simsbury at the time, and so it was not much of an inconvenience for him. He had not played at all since he graduated from Brown in 1972.
I was surprised to find when researching this entry that we actually finished first at least twice. However, those occasions are not the ones that stand out in my memory. Once Tom opened 2♣, which showed a very powerful hand with more than half of the aces and face cards. In contrast, an opening bid at the two-level in any of the other suits show a weak hand with six cards in the bid suit. Tom had intended to show a weak hand with clubs. Unfortunately, I had a pretty good hand, and I did not give up on the possibility of bidding a slam (committing to win twelve or thirteen tricks) until he passed my 5NT bid. We ended up five or six tricks short for a big penalty.
Tom, who was only two years younger than I, stopped playing after a few months. The only remark he made was “Those people are sure old.”
When Russ moved away I had to find a new partner. I had noticed that in 2015 two guys, Roger Holmes and Dick Benedict, began playing and did pretty well. After a month or two Roger seemed to stop attending, and Dick played much less frequently and with different partners. I sent Dick an email that explained my situation and asked him if he would consider playing with me. I told him that I knew all of the conventions on the Yellow Card4, and I was willing to learn new ones. He responded enthusiastically.
June 9, 1953 could have been Dick’s last day.
Dick and I played together for several years at the SBC, at the HBC whenever I got a chance on a weekday, and at tournaments that were within driving distance. We got to be pretty close. I learned about his two ex-wives, one dead and one divorced, his two daughters, and the father with whom he had played cribbage. I learned a lot about the tornado in Worcester from which Dick’s father rescued him. I also learned from Dick that New Hampshire was the best place to buy liquor. Dick stocked up on The Famous Grouse whenever we drove up to Nashua for a tournament.
Dick and I played on many teams together. In team games5 four people form a team. One pair plays East-West and the other plays North-South. You play a match against another team. Your East-West pair plays a set of hands against their North-South pair and your North-South plays the same hands against their East-West. Two types of team games were bracketed. Between eight and sixteen teams with similar masterpoint totals played against one another in either a knockout or Swiss format. Our foursome concentrated on these bracketed games so that we did not encounter the really good players.
Usually Dick and I played together. He was good at convincing people to play with us at tournaments. Our best results came when playing with Robert Klopp6, who lived at the Duncan Hotel in New Haven, and Brenda Harvey7 from Orange, CT. I remember sending email to my dad in Kansas City from the Panera Bread in Nashua, NH, when we had won two knockouts in a row. I think that Robert Klopp may have already been a Life Master when we started, but both Dick and Brenda Harvey achieved that rank at tournaments in which our foursome played as a team.
Some of our results were spectacular. I remember that in one Bracketed Swiss at a regional tournament we won our first six rounds by such lopsided margins that we had built up an insuperable margin. We actually could have gone home without playing the final round, which we also won. However, we did not always do so well. At an Open Swiss at a sectional in Auburn, MA, we finished dead last out of twenty-five or thirty teams. Neither Robert nor Brenda played with us on either of these occasions.
Helen Pawlowski.
Dick was not sitting across from me when I made Life Master. At the time the requirement for that rank was 300 total masterpoints that had to include some number of silver and gold points that could only be won at tournaments. In late December of 2009 I had enough silver and gold, but I was a small fraction of a point short of 300. I informed Helen Pawlowski (pahv LOFF skee), the director of the SBC game at the time, about my status before the game on December 23. She immediately declared the game a “club championship”, which meant that extra points would be rewarded.
Unfortunately, both Dick and I played poorly; he was bad, but I was worse. I made a really stupid bid when playing against Claire Tanzer, who never said a bad word about anyone. She remarked that if I played like that I did not deserve to make Life Master. She was right.
However, deservedly or not, I was awarded the necessary points at the last Saturday game in December at the HBC after playing with Tom Gerchman. In those days it took the director a few minutes to enter all the scores in the computer. Everyone else had already left by the time the results were posted, and it was confirmed that Tom and I had scored well enough to earn the needed points. There was no one to celebrate with.
There was a game scheduled for that Sunday at the HBC, and, because I had set a goal of making Life Master before the end of the year, I was scheduled to play. However, the Sunday game got snowed out. So, I achieved my goal at the last possible game of the year.
Dick was, however, my partner for my Life Master parties at both the SBC and the HBC. At the SBC he gave a little speech in which he announced that I had called him up and told him something—I don’t remember what. I Immediately denounced that as a damnable lie, and asked the group whether I had ever called any of them on the phone. No one spoke up. Of course, I probably did say whatever it was that he claimed that I had said, but I never talked with Dick on a telephone. Dick and I corresponded only by email and in person. In fact, I have almost never called anyone about bridge.
My LM party at the HBC was a unique occasion for at least three reasons. In the first place it was held on a Friday evening in March 2010. I know of no other Friday evening game ever held there. Although I sat North across from Dick in the “throne” reserved for the honoree, he was only there for three hands. The format used that night involved individual scoring. Everyone played with seven or eight different partners. Only the Norths stayed at the same table. I know of no other occasion in which that format was used at the HBC.
There was one other odd thing about it. I won! Well, officially I tied with Cecilia Vasel, but I discovered later that on one hand I had made a mistake in scoring8 in the opponents’ favor. The honoree almost never does well in this game; there are too many distractions. Perhaps on that evening everyone was distracted by the weird format.
Dick and I stopped playing together later in 2010. I made a sarcastic comment when he passed what was—-to my way of thinking—clearly a control-showing cue bid. He took offense, which was not unreasonable. There was no great rancor. In fact, we did play together occasionally after that. He moved to Bradenton, FL, at some point in the teens. When he came back to Connecticut to visit we usually paired up at least once.
Inge Schuele.
Dick introduced me to tournament bridge. Four of us went to the District 3 tournament in Danbury, CT. I played with Dick, and Inge Schuele played with Virginia Labbadia. The team that we played in the first round had more than ten times as many points as we did. The guys we played against used the Mini-Roman convention. I had never heard of it, but using the 2♦ opening bid to describe a hand with three four-card suits and 11-15 points seemed to me like a great idea at the time. In fact, however, it is one of the few well-known conventions that I have never played.
I thought that Dick and I had performed reasonably well against the guys, but we lost the match by a lot. So, we needed either to drive back home or find another event for the afternoon session.
On the schedule we found a 199er game in the afternoon. Inge and I qualified to play in it, but Dick and Virginia had too many points. They played together in some kind of unlimited game.
Things went very well for Inge and me. We ended up in first place, and it was not even close. Our photos were printed in the tournament’s Daily Bulletin, and we each got a small trophy, the first bridge trophy that I ever won, and the only one that they let me keep.
I have a couple of other very vivid memory of playing with Dick. I remember that I earned my final gold points in one of the first Gold Rush Pairs events ever held in New England. In the afternoon session we bid and made 7NT on the first hand and held on to win our section.
The other memory is literally painful. We were playing in a pairs game in Danbury, and something was wrong with my neck. Every five or ten minutes I would—without any warning—experience a sharp pang there. I took some Advil for it, but it did not seem to help much. I found it very difficult to concentrate. We finished the event, but we did not do well.
The plan had been for me to stay overnight at Dick’s house in Avon and ride back with him to Danbury for another event on Sunday. I told him that I did not want to play again until the neck pain ceased. He agreed that that was a good idea. I rested the next day, and the pain disappeared, never to return.
Folded traveler in board and traveler with scores.
Over the years I have often told people that the most important thing that I learned from playing with Dick Benedict was the preferred method of folding the “travelers”, the score sheets that traveled with the boards that contained the cards from one table to the next. The only really important thing was for the board numbers (and almost nothing else) to be visible, but Dick’s method was definitely the easiest, most reliable, and most esthetically pleasing.
Mass Mutual in Springfield.
In 2009 I teamed up with a young guy named Steve Smith. I knew his mother Sonja, who was a fine tournament player and the best regular player at the SBC. Steve worked at Mass Mutual as an actuary. He was an FSA, but his main interest was finance, not insurance. Steve and I were a good match. I learned that he had been a successful debater in high school, but he did not participate in the rigorous type of policy debate that I did.
Steve lived in the area just north and west of the park.
Steve owned a house in the Forest Park section of Springfield. He rented out two of the bedrooms to other guys. It was not quite the Animal House, but I never knew what to expect when I picked him up to go to a tournament. He often forgot to bring cash, which was the only form of payment most tournaments accepted.
Playing with Steve was nothing like playing with Dick. Dick was the model of stability; Steve was up for anything.
Steve and I played together on a regular basis at the SBC and also in tournaments quite a few times. Considering how little experience we had, we had an extraordinary record . The highlight was the afternoon-evening of Saturday October 10 at the Sturbridge Host Hotel in Sturbridge, MA. Steve and I were playing in the qualifying tournament for Flight C of the North American Pairs, a national championship with three separate divisions, called “flights”. Three teams would qualify from our C Flight to represent New England in the national finals in Reno in March of 2010.
We played fairly well in the first session. I think that our score was a little above 50 percent. We ate supper at the Oxhead Tavern, which is adjacent to the hotel, with Steve’s mother Sonja, her partner David Rock, and two guys from New Hampshire, Bruce Downing and Mark Conner. Sonja, David, and the NH guys were playing in the B or A flight.
We needed to make up quite a bit of ground in the evening session to have any chance of qualifying. Fortunately, we caught fire in the second session. We actually turned in the best score of any pair.
In those days the directors still tabulated the results from scores recorded on pieces of paper. Therefore, it took them a fairly long time to enter and check the results. When they finally posted them, we had finished third. We were qualified for the North American Bridge Championships (NABC) in Reno!
Actually there was still one hurdle. Mark Aquino, who was the district’s NAP/GNT coordinator, called me and asked if Steve had qualified at a club game. I told him that he had done so at the HBC; I even provided him with the date and time. He said that it did not appear that Steve had won any points. I agreed that he had not, but he did earn a “Q” on the results page. I knew where to find it on the Internet and sent Mark a copy.
As it turned, out the team with the best score in our flight in Sturbridge—a couple of guys whom I had never seen at a tournament—participated even though they had not qualified at a club game. They were disqualified, and we moved up to second place. As I recall, the district paid us $100 each to play in the tournament in Reno.
Not the best bridge book ever.
Steve and I both were still working. In fact, he had been in college at the University of South Carolina just a few years earlier. So, we could only play one or two sessions per week to try to get better by the time that we played in Reno. I thought that it would be a good idea if we played a system that was somewhat different from what most people played. I bought two books on playing systems based on weak 1NT opening bids. We settled on an approach outlined in one of them. In those days my memory still worked, and Steve, as I mentioned, was very adaptable.
Steve and I had a great time in Reno. On Wednesday March 17 we boarded our Southwest flight to Las Vegas and changed planes. On the last leg—the short flight from Las Vegas to Reno—-I sat in the window seat and studied (or at least pretended to study) my Russian flash cards9, and Steve sat on the aisle. The middle seat was not occupied until the plane was almost ready to take off. A woman of about Steve’s age (or even younger) with enormous gazoingies settled there. Steve chatted her up a bit. I must admit that I listened; her answers to most of his queries were completely off the chart. Steve was remarkably adept at keeping a straight face during the interview.
The tournament was at a resort hotel/casino a few miles south of downtown Reno. We planned to play in three events—the NAP and Red Ribbon Pairs, both of which were scheduled for afternoon-evenings, and a compact knockout that was scheduled for two mornings. The Red Ribbon Pairs were held on Thursday and Friday March 18-19. The NAP was on Saturday and Sunday. Here are a few of my most vivid memories of the tournament:
The first night that we were there we were invited to a social gathering sponsored by District 25 (New England) and hosted by Helen Pawlowski and Steve’s mom. This was the first time that I ever met Rich and Sandy DeMartino. Rich was the District Director, and Sandy was (maybe not yet in 2010) chairman of the national Goodwill Committee. We told Rich which events we intended to play in. He opined that our schedule might be too difficult for first-timers. We didn’t care.
The Red Ribbon Pairs was the first time that I ever seen a Bridgemate, the hand-held battery-powered electronic scoring device. Tournaments in New England did not use them yet. I sat North and had to figure out how to operate it. It made me very nervous. I feel certain that it affected my play. I should have just switched positions with Steve. He was much more familiar with learning how to use new electronic equipment. We were well below 50 percent in the afternoon session. We did a little better in the evening, but we missed the cut for the second day. We did make friends with a few people in our sections, however. People thought that we were a father-son team.
We played in a compact knockout in morning sessions on Friday and Saturday. Our teammates were a father-daughter pair from Michigan who had only played together online. They lived in the same state, but they decided to go to Nevada to play face-to-face. Our team won both of its matches in the morning. So, we qualified to play the second half on Saturday.
At some point I remember going for a fairly long run in the area. There was not much to see.
I think that on Friday Steve and I ran into Ron Briggs and Andre Wiejacki (vee YAH skee), the other pair representing New England. Ron was a little bristly, but Andre and I became pretty good friends.
We played in a pairs game, I think, on Friday. I seem to remember that a woman criticized me for not explaining one of our conventions properly.
On Saturday morning we easily won the semi-final match of the compact knockout. In the finals we faced a husband-wife team from Texas. I made a serious mistake early in the match, and I was afraid that I had blown it for our teammates. However, we ended up winning by just a few International Match Points. We each won a clear coffee mug with the ACBL logo on one side and the tournament’s logo on the other. I still have mine. In 2021 I drink tea out of it almost every day.
It was really exciting to play in the NAP. The directors made everyone who had a cell phone or other electronic device turn it in before play started. The competition was not as tough as in the Red Ribbon Pairs, and once again we did better in the evening, but we did not make it to the second day of this event either.
We decided to play in the huge B/C/D Swiss on Sunday morning. Our teammates were a pair of guys from the DC area whom we had met in the NAP. Our team got off to a strong start, which is not necessarily a good idea for a team in the lowest strat of a Swiss. Steve and I were very tired. We both made stupid mistakes for which we had to apologize to our teammates. Steve started to set his hand down as dummy twice when he was actually the declarer. My mistakes were more subtle but also more costly.
Helen, who had a rental car, took us into town one evening for supper at an Armenian restaurant. I can’t say that I thought too much of it.
Our flight back also went through Las Vegas. Steve and I sat a couple of rows behind superstars Jeff Meckstroth and Mark Lair. Meckstroth boarded first and sat in the aisle seat looking ferocious. Lair boarded much later and quickly settled into the adjacent seat that Meckstroth had been guarding.
The Crowne Plaza calls it “The Garden Pavilion”.
I remember one other great experience playing with Steve. It was on Sunday at the first tournament held at the Crowne Plaza in Warwick, RI. We were in the big tent playing in the bracketed Swiss with Marcia West and Paula Najarian. In the last round we played against Ron Briggs’ team, which was in first place. We found ourselves in second, but we were within striking distance. On the last hand Steve had bid an impossible 4♥ contract. I was dummy watching Steve futilely play the last five or six cards. I observed that Ron had absentmindedly discarded a club on one of Steve’s hearts and then followed suit on the next round of hearts. The dummy is not allowed to speak until the last card has been played. So, I unobtrusively moved that trick out of alignment by a fraction of an inch. When the hand was over, I drew attention to the revoke, and we ended up winning both the match and the event by the narrowest of margins.
I have not seen Steve since he accepted a job in New York City working for Goldman Sachs. I seem to recall that Sonja said that he got married. He and I follow each other on Twitter, but his account is not very active. I could find no photos of him on the Internet.
Photo of the 2004 Xmas party: Dorothy Clark is on the left; Shirley Schienman is in the seat in which I sat on the first night.
I played with at least five other people in those early years at the SBC. I played exactly once with Bob Nuckols, Dorothy Clark, and Sonja Smith. I don’t remember anything about the games with Bob and Sonja. I remember one hand in which Dorothy and I were on defense. I led a very low card in a suit that I knew that she could ruff. The fact that my card was low should have told her to lead the lower of the two side suits back to me, but she led the other side suit. When I mentioned it to her, she admitted that she was not good at noticing suit-preference signals.
I played several times with Sonja at the HBC and once or twice in tournaments. On one occasion I was scheduled to play with her at the HBC, but I had to cancel because of a severely upset stomach probably due to food poisoning of some sort. By lunch time I felt fine. This was one of the very few times that I missed a game because of illness.
I played two or three times with Paul Pearson. He and his wife came to my Life Master party at the SBC. Much more about my relationship with Paul is detailed here.
Jerry Hirsch started playing at the SBC in 2009 a few weeks before I did. We were partners a few times at the SBC, a few times at the HBC, and also at a few tournaments. I probably played against Jerry more often than any other bridge player. At the SBC Christmas party one year Jerry took a photo of me wearing a gigantic red Christmas bow as a tie. He had the photo blown up to poster size, and he gave it to me as a present. In 2021 it still is prominently displayed in our living room.
Jerry Hirsch.
Jerry and I played together in at least one qualifier for the NAP and the Grand National Teams (GNT). We never made it to either national event, but one year we finished third in the GNT qualifier, and in the last round of the Swiss we defeated the team that won the event. Our teammates were Dave Landsberg10 and Dan Koepf.
Jerry kept a small piece of paper in his convention card holder with one word written on it: “FUN!”. I occasionally needed to be reminded of the primary reason for which we all played at such a frustrating game for so many years.
Every holiday season Jerry took on the responsibility of taking up a collection for a gift for the directors. As far as I know, no one asked him to do it.
1. Peg Corbett, who was a regular attendee at the club, stopped playing suddenly. Tom Gerchman, who started each day by reading the obituary page in the Courant, informed me she had died.
2. Russ Elmore and I stopped playing together when he moved to New Hampshire. However, he must have moved back to the Berkshires a few years later. I saw him playing at a sectional tournament in Great Barrington, MA. This really surprised me because Russ never showed any interest in tournaments while I was playing with him. I approached him and reintroduced myself. He said that he remembered me, but at the time he did not seem to.
3. At some point Paula Beauchamp and Larry Wallowitz, a teacher and director at the HBC, moved to Bradenton, FL. I think that this occurred in the early teens. This raised a lot of eyebrows at the HBC. Most people, myself included, did not even know that they were “an item”. Larry died after they had been there a few years. I did not have many dealings with Larry, but I remember attending a talk that he gave to novices about opening leads. One thing that he said really hit home: “It’s OK to finesse your partner, but it is not OK to finesse yourself.” For example, if you have a king of a suit, and you suspect that the declarer (on your right) has the queen, it is a terrible idea to lead that suit. Paula remained in Florida, but she returned to Connecticut and played at the HBC a few times.
4. The Yellow Card is a piece of paper that was designed by the ACBL to provide a set of conventions that could be used in casual partnerships, new partnerships, or specific events such as individual tournaments. It is also used by a fairly large number of pairs who just do not like to memorize conventions.
5. Details about the mechanics of team games have been explained here.
6. Robert Klopp died in, I think 2014, not too long after the four of us stopped playing together at tournaments. He did not drive a car, and he brought his own food to tournaments to save money.
7. I played with Brenda Harvey at a sectional tournament in Connecticut at least once. She moved to Saint Augustine, FL. She remains an active bridge player in 2021.
8. In duplicate bridge North traditionally keeps score. Tradition at the HBC insisted that the new LM sat North at table #1. At the time I had almost never sat North.
9. In August of 2010 Sue and I accompanied Tom and Patti Corcoran on a river cruise from St. Petersburg to Moscow. It is described in some detail here. I studied the language pretty diligently for several months, but I was seldom able to communicate with Russians outside of the tourist industry, and all of them spoke—and preferred—English.
10. My partnership with Dave Landsberg is described here.
In the late nineties Denise and I had decided that we needed to investigate ways for TSI (or at least the two of us) to develop a new product or service and to modernize, if possible, our work on the AS/400. In late 1999 we learned about PartnerWorld, a convention for IBM’s business partners that was scheduled to be held in San Diego in late January of 2000. We decided to attend. Our objectives were two-fold: 1) to hear about IBM’s approach to the Internet; and 2) to meet other vendors with whom we might team up. I also bought two tickets for the San Diego Opera’s performance of Verdi’s Il Trovatore on Tuesday, January 25. We decided to spend the last day at the zoo.
This must be in SD. Everyone in New England wears a coat in January.
On Sunday, January 23, Denise’s husband Ray drove her to Bradley International. I met them there and took a photo or two. Since we gained three hours en route we probably landed in San Diego in the afternoon. The airport was surprisingly close to Seaworld, Coronado Island, and downtown. I was accustomed to fairly long drives from airports to downtown locations. We boarded our rental car at Avis. The weather was fantastic throughout our stay.
Click to enlarge.
I had booked rooms for us at the Best Western Inn by the sea in La Jolla, which was about a twenty-minute drive from the airport and the conference center. This was an excellent choice. It was a nice hotel that was reasonably priced and within walking distance of La Jolla cove. I seem to remember that Denise and I walked down to the beach as soon as we had gotten settled. There we saw both a beautiful stretch of sand and a large group of seals or maybe sea lions. Both species liked to hang around in the vicinity.
I found no notes about this trip. I found about ten photos that I took with disposable cameras. I must have had two and switched halfway through the trip; there are two different sizes of photos.
I bought a copy of Frommer’s guide to San Diego. I know that I used it to find the hotel because there was a business card marking the page for it. It said the prices were “moderate”, and they included a continental breakfast and free parking. A map was evidently torn out of the back of the book.
The business card was from Yvonne Carl, whose job was “Customer Advocate” at The 400 Group in Dedham, MA. By the time that I wrote this entry in 2023 I had no recollection of her or the group. When I tried its website, I was treated to a large and graphic ad for a combination flashlight and male sex toy.
The conference: On Monday we drove to the gigantic conference center and parked in the basement. When we registered we each received a faux leather black duffel bag, some printed materials, and an orange PartnerWorld tee shirt. Mine, for some reason had “Morpher” on the back. Denise’s had something equally meaningless.
The first event was the “kickoff” in a very large auditorium. I don’t know how many people were there, but the total attendance at the conference was about 4,000. Lou Gerstner, IBM’s celebrated Chairman, did not attend, but he sent a video. His message was that IBM was now all about e-business, by which he seemed to mean using the Internet directly or indirectly for commerce. IBM wanted everyone to use its servers and, more importantly, services. Another big emphasis was on the object-oriented programming called Java1 and JavaBeans2, both of which were developed by Sun Microsystems and licensed to everyone at no charge.
Sam Palmisano,
I remember two speakers. A lady who was in charge of marketing claimed that IBM “owned” the term e-business3. This was in reference to an advertising campaign that had associated IBM with the term. The other was Sam Palmisano, the number two guy at IBM, who must have thought that he was addressing the IBM sales force. He was very upset at EMC and Sun Microsystems, who were evidently using former IBM employees—of whom there were a large number—to undercut IBM on some accounts. He used the phrase “kick butts”, which seemed totally out of place for a gathering of people who had worked with IBM for years.
Denise and I usually split up to attend other presentations. In the only one that I remember a panelist said that in hiring you should always get the best person available. This was undoubtedly good advice, but I had learned that it was also crucial to find a way to keep them no matter what happened to your business.
AS/400 sign-on screen.
We also visited some exhibits that were sponsored by third parties. At the time we were on the lookout for ways to provide a GUI4 front end for AdDept that we could implement without a great deal of work. We did not find anything of interest.
One of our major objectives was to make contact with people from other companies with which we could partner for mutual benefit. We were disappointed in this endeavor. IBM was not interested in helping its partners find partners. It wanted its partners to tell their customers to buy IBM computers and services.
Sinbad.
Entertainment: I think that the comedian Sinbad performed on Monday evening. Denise and I attended. He began by telling the audience that he was a Mac guy. At the time Apple was not yet a major player in either servers or the Internet. Its computers were good for designers, but most people in business had little use for them. I was not very impressed with the rest of Sinbad’s routine either. I don’t think that he understood the nature of the audience.
On Tuesday evening we went to the San Diego Opera to see Il Trovatore. I remember being disappointed that the members of the orchestra did not take time to throw a baseball around during the overture. I also remember being very tired. In the last act I had to fight off drowsiness, and I was unable to prevent various Warner Bros. characters such as Sylvester and Bugs Bunny from appearing on the stage.
I remember that Denise and I were very impressed with the soprano who sang Leonora5. She rightly judged the arias to be beautiful. I also was surprised. I had listened to the opera several times and had never before been so impressed with these pieces.
On Wednesday Denise and I attended a party in the conference center. The music was supplied by what was left of the Beach Boys. Mike Love and Bruce Johnston were definitely there. Brian Wilson and Al Jardine were not. The other members of the band on the stage were much younger than Love and Johnston, who were both pushing sixty.
You won’t find any pictures of Mike Love without a hat. Bruce Johnston is on the left
There was nowhere to sit. Perhaps they expected people to dance, but this was a group of uber-geeks, predominantly male. Many may not have even heard of the Beach Boys. A few people may have danced, but I never would unless I had at least ten beers. I was at least nine short of that mark.
Two old guys singing about hot rods and surfing seemed weird in the twenty-first century. None of the magic of the performance that I witnessed at the concert at U-M (described here) remained.
Private experiences: I remember having two suppers with Denise. We went to a Mexican restaurant in Old Town one evening. I am pretty sure that we also went to a Chinese restaurant in La Jolla. I don’t remember where we ate lunches or breakfasts. Denise probably skipped some of these meals. When we ate together we almost exclusively discussed what we could do to enhance the business.
I don’t see any ear flaps. They must be seals.
We also spent some time walking up and down the beach and viewing the seals from a safe distance. The entire experience was at once exhilarating and disappointing. We were already starting to focus on using the Internet for insertion orders. We both had moderate confidence that we could make it work, and we were excited about the challenge. It was disheartening that we found nothing of value with regard to modernizing AS/400 applications.
The zoo: We spent the entire last day at the famous San Diego Zoo. We saw a very large number of animals, but the foliage used to establish the settings for the animals and the ambience of the zoo was nearly as stimulating.
I took dozens of photos with disposable cameras. This type of camera was totally inappropriate for a visit to the zoo. It had no ability to zoom or adjust the focus. They were not stored digitally. I had to take photos of the photos with my digital camera. That process lost some of the resolution. However, fuzzy memories are better than none.
I think that these photos are from our second visit to the panda exhibit. There are two photos from the first visit, too, but the panda is almost completely hidden by shrubbery.
The only fairly distinct memories that I have of the experience involved the panda exhibit. We began our visit there, and on that occasion we stood in line for a long time. When we finally got to the viewing area, the panda was very visible. We came back in the afternoon and got a better look.
The lady who ran the Bird Show.
The Big Cat Show.
We went to at least two shows. One of them involved birds that flew around but always returned to the trainer on command. The other featured a couple of big cats.
Here is a selection of the other photos in no particular order.
Two grouses. The dark one is facing left. The light one below it is facing right.
I thing that this is a sun bear.
Giant tortoises.
Elephants.
Flamingos.
Warthogs.
Orangutan?
Some sort of pig.
Who knows?
Crocodile?
Condor or eagle.
Polar bear.
Giraffes.
Zebra.
Dig those ears.
Horace, the Bactrian camel.
I don’t remember the trip back to Connecticut.
Epilogue: The result of TSI’s search for an Internet product was AxN. The story of that project begins here. In the spring of 2006 Sue Comparetto and I returned to San Diego for a short vacation. That trip is described here.
1. I had read ten books on Java, and I did all of the exercises in each. I could do what they asked, but I could see no way to do most of what I wanted to do. On the AS/400 (and presumably on other machines as well) a Java Virtual Machine needed to be installed and configured. IBM put all of this stuff under the rubric of Websphere. The implementation on the AS/400 had horrendous performance compared to programs in the native environment.
2. JavaBeans are classes that encapsulate one or more objects into one standardized object (the bean). This standardization allows the beans to be handled in a more generic fashion, allowing easier reuse of code.
3. I liked to tell our clients that TSI was working on an Internet-based system for convents and monasteries. We planned to call it “Monk E-Business”.
4. GUI stands for “graphical user interface”, which means using screens that take advantage of all of the properties of personal computers. AdDept’s screens were still text-based, which made them less attractive but not necessarily less functional for the tasks that they performed. GUI front ends took advantage of the mouse and displayed information using colors, images, and such things as check boxes, radio buttons, text boxes, and pull-down windows.
5. We were right to be impressed. I discovered twenty-three and a half years after the fact that Leonora was played by Sondra Radvanovsky. At the time she was an up-and-coming star. Within a decade so she was an international diva recognized both for her singing and her acting ability. She gave several legendary performances at the Metropolitan Opera.
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 AS/400 hardware, the OS/400 operating system, and the and DB2 database were introduced in 1988. The AdDept system that TSI developed for the administration of the advertising departments of large retailers was one of the very first systems developed … Continue reading →
The AS/400 hardware, the OS/400 operating system, and the and DB2 database were introduced in 1988. The AdDept system that TSI developed for the administration of the advertising departments of large retailers was one of the very first systems developed on and for the AS/400. At the time TSI was an IBM Business Partner for its GrandAd system on the System/36. Earlier TSI had been one of the first software companies to be recognized as an IBM Business Partner for the Datamaster.
Prior to the late nineties the only requirement for a company to become a Business Partner was to have some successful accounts that were using its software or services. At times it was a huge advantage to be an IBM Business Partner. At other times IBM employees treated the partners as competition.
At some point the concept of Value-Added Retailer (VAR) was introduced. VARs were at first allowed to order and sell systems for which their software or services had qualified as adding value to the sale of IBM equipment. Too many bad sales by VARs prompted IBM to take away the ability to take orders from smaller companies such as TSI. Instead they were assigned to a “Super-VAR” who vetted and placed the orders for them. In 1999 TSI was assigned to a company called BPS, which shortly thereafter renamed itself Savoir.
The next, but by no means last, set of restrictions imposed by IBM was to require any company involved in sales of IBM equipment to have at least one employee who had passed proficiency tests for the the equipment. At the outset there were two levels with separate tests, one for sales personnel and one for technical.
My partner Denise Bessette and I judged at the time that it was critical to the future marketing of AdDept and any other future product that we continue to participate in IBM’s partnership program. I knew more about the hardware offerings than she did, and so I was chosen to study up and take the technical test. It made little sense for a different person to study for the sales one, which was reportedly much easier.
I think that I must have taken the exams in the first half of 1999 or late 1998. I have a lot of notes from the second half of 1999, and there is no mention of them.
IBM still publishes Redbooks. I think that WAS was in version 1 in 1999.
IBM published study guides for both exams. One or two Redbooks may have also been on the syllabus. I remember that there was a considerable amount of technical material about several things with which I was not at all familiar. One was the cabling required to connect two AS/400s. The other was setting up partitions on a single AS/400 so that each partition had a separate file system. It was more complicated than it sounds because each device needed to be defined in each partition that used it. I remember practically nothing about either of these topics, but we did encounter partitioning at Dick’s Sporting Goods (introduced here).
I spent as much time as I could bear going over the course material. Hardware and operating systems have never really been my thing. It took a lot of discipline to force myself to understand the details of things that we would never use.
The day arrived on which I was scheduled to take the tests. I drove to an office in Farmington that specialized in administering exams for corporations. I had already consumed one 20-ounce bottle of Diet Coke before I arrived, and I brought another with me.
I gave my registration document to the receptionist. She asked me which test I wanted to take first. I selected the sales test. I seem to recall that each test lasted for about ninety minutes. All questions were multiple choice. I was required to enter my answers on a PC.
The sales test was not too difficult; I reported back to the receptionist ten or fifteen minutes before the deadline. She told me that I had passed.
I told her that I wanted to take a break before taking the technical test. I went to the men’s room and sat in the lobby. I drank my second Diet and tried to clear my mind. Then I took the second test.
It was much more difficult than the first. A few questions were beyond my ken. I skipped them. I read all of the others carefully and only answered after I was fairly certain. I used up nearly all of the allotted time. I was pretty relieved when the receptionist assured me that I had passed both tests.
It doesn’t look familiar.
So, I was certified by IBM as knowledgeable about both the sales and technical aspects of the AS/400. If I ever had physical certificates, I certainly have not seen them for a decade. TSI’s Sales Manager Doug Pease told me that his contact at Savoir had told him that almost nobody ever passed the technical exam on the first try.
I am not sure how much good my success did us. I am not sure that TSI sold any new hardware at all in the rest of the time that we were in business. We might have ordered an upgrade or two through our Super-Var.
On the other hand, we did get to go to the PartnerWorld convention in San Diego. That adventure has been described here.
