Tag Archives: Wavada, Dolores

1994 August: Jim Wavada’s 70th Birthday

Posted on by
Reply

Fun and crisis. Continue reading →

My dad was born on August 25, 1924. His seventieth birthday was therefore in 1994. It was a Thursday. 1994 was a pivotal year for TSI and for my relationship with Sue, as explained here. I was up to my armpits in alligators. By then Jamie had five children. By my calculation Cadie was 16, Kelly was 14, Gina was 6, Anne was 5, and Joey was 3. I could be off by a year for any of them.

Although it was torn down decades earlier, the company that designed this building still featured it on its webpage in 2023.

A decision was made that my parents would come to New England to celebrate my dad’s epic birthday with his grandchildren. Jamie probably negotiated this with our mother. Her conversations with my dad seldom ended pleasantly, and I am pretty sure that neither Sue nor I had any input. The plan was for them to stay at a hotel that was near the Lisella’s house in West Springfield. I think that they stayed at Howard Johnson’s, but they might have chosen the Hampton Inn if it was open yet. I don’t think that they rented a car.

The party: Jamie reserved a large room at the Simsbury 1820 House for the gathering. My recollection is that on the big day Sue and I picked up mom and dad at HoJo’s and met the Lisellas at the restaurant. A total of eleven of us attended—three couples and Jamie’s five children.

The party did not get off to a great start. The chair reserved for the guest of honor, who certainly weighed less than 170 pounds, collapsed beneath him and left him on the floor. Fortunately, he was not seriously injured, and the event proceeded more or less as planned.1 I had prepared an interactive presentation. I think that I took the floor for it after the meal. I hoped to involve Gina and Anne by asking each of them a question that I was pretty sure they could answer. They both let me down. Gina remonstrated me, “Uncle Mike, we are only children.”

I struggled through the rest of my little talk as well as I could. I think that I rescued the evening, however, by leading everyone in a non-traditional rendition of what all of us called the family song, “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” It was my dad’s favorite song of all time. So, we sang it all together, each of us singing the same words but using different melodies, keys, and tempos. My dad, who was completely tone-deaf2, thought that it was great. That was all that I can recall about the evening.

The name was changed to Baystate Noble Hospital.

The basketball game:I am not positive that the following event occurred on this same trip. I did not keep track of when my parents came to New England for visits. They only did so on a few occasions.

Every meal that we consumed at the Lisella’s was a cook-out. Joe fired up the Weber and cooked hamburgers and/or hot dogs. The grill was placed near the garage, which was at the end of the driveway. On the side of the driveway was a basketball goal set at precisely the regulation height of ten feet.

Before and after every meal there was a basketball game of some sort. On the occasion in question some of Joe’s brothers competed. I had played with them a couple of times in the eighties, but by 1994 I was not in nearly good enough condition to compete. Instead I kicked a soccer ball around with the kids.

At that point I had known my dad for seven and a half decades. For a few of those years we had a basketball goal at the end of our driveway. I used it extensively. I have no recollection of him ever taking a basketball shot, much less playing one-on-one with me. On this occasion, however, some demonic spirit overcame his reason, and my dad decided to play.

I did not see how it happened, but my dad fell down and broke his arm. Joe had to drive him to the emergency room at Noble Hospital. He was admitted and stayed for a few days.

I am unfamiliar with the details concerning the next few days. I may have had to take a business trip. By 1994 my mom’s mental condition was not good, and she depended greatly on my dad. She was almost certainly under a great deal of stress.

Other memories: I am pretty sure that it was on this trip that the following exclamation burst forth from Gina, “Uncle Mike, you have the same hair as Grandma!” She was right. Our hair matched in color (both before and after aging), texture, and waviness. I don’t think that she previously had put two and two together to realize that her grandmother was her uncle’s mother.

One time my mom mentioned that the Lisella house did not have many books. I had noticed that myself. Joe’s reading was mostly confined to World War II. I don’t know what Jamie read. She might not have had time.

1. Jamie talked with me later about this incident. I understood her to say that she had refused to pay the bill provided to her by the Simsbury 1820 House. I may be wrong about this. I have remembered quite a few events incorrectly.

2. His favorite musical genre was Gregorian Chant. That was also the only kind of music that met the approval of Pope Pius X, who was also tone-deaf.

1995 October: Mike and Cadie at Dolores Wavada’s 70th Birthday

Posted on by
Reply

D is for … Continue reading →

I took notes on all of my business trips, and I often took photos. I did not, however, take any notes or photos in the course of this adventure. So, I needed to rely on my memory.

My dad had retired from his job at Business Men’s Assurance (BMA) in 1982 at the age of 58. For the first few years of his retirement my parents played a lot of golf and did some traveling together. They visited New England at least a couple of times, and they also took a few other trips. Sue and I made only one trip to KC during that period (described here). We were as poor as the proverbial church mice.

Throughout the early nineties I traveled a lot for business. Whenever I could, I stopped in Kansas City on the way to or from a client or prospect in order to pay them a visit. I always notified them that I was coming. I generally took the shuttle service1 that was available at the KCI airport. By 1995 I had stopped at their house in Leawood, KS, two or three times, and it was evident to me that both of them were going downhill. My dad had somehow2 lost vision in one eye. Mom was having a lot of trouble with her memory, and she no longer drove a car. She had been to see doctors about her condition, but they had been unable to diagnose the source of the problem. They assured her that she did not have Alzheimer’s Disease. Both mom and dad walked much more slowly than I remembered. In fact they walked more slowly than everyone.

In the late summer of 1995 my dad called me at TSI’s office to tell me that their friends were throwing a party for mom’s seventieth birthday. I am pretty sure that he must have invited Jamie and the rest of the Lisella family (introduced here) as well. Jamie said that she would not be able to attend, but her oldest daughter, Cadie Mapes, would go. I bought airline tickets for Cadie, who was about 17, and me, who was three decades older. My dad had said that we could stay at their house. I would sleep in my old bedroom, and Cadie would sleep in Jamie’s. My mom knew about the party, but she did not know that Cadie and I were coming.

My mom’s birthday was October 2, which was a Monday in 1995. I suspect that Cadie and I flew in on Sunday. Cadie was still in high school, of course. So, the party may not have been on the evening of October 2. I do not remember whether Cadie had to deal with being absent from any classes. Maybe the entire trip took place on a weekend.

The drive took about 45 minutes.

When we arrived at the airport I rented a car from Avis. We decided not to drive directly to the house. Instead we stopped somewhere for a late lunch or supper. I have a vague recollection that it was a Mexican restaurant.

When we arrived at 8800 Fairway, my mom was in the front yard with one of her friends, perhaps Rose Goral. The other lady asked mom who had arrived. She immediately said, “That’s my son!” I was somewhat relieved that she recognized me.

I do not remember what we did that evening. I think that the party was on the following evening. It might have been at the Blue Hills Country Club, where they had been members for many years. In any case I remember that my dad was driving, mom was riding shotgun, and Cadie and I were in the back. I think that we were on State Line Road, a fairly busy thoroughfare on the south side of Kansas City.

At some point we came across a dog that seemed to be lost or at least confused. He was on the side of the road, and he meandered onto the pavement near us. My mom insisted that my dad stop the car. He knew better than to argue. He eased the car off to the side of the road. My mom got out of the car and made sure that the dog was all right. I remember this incident up to that point as though it were yesterday. I do not, however, remember exactly what she did to assure herself that the dog would be all right. She finally got back into the car, and we drove to the party without further incident.

The reason for my faulty memory is probably traceable to the fact that I was mentally rehearsing the speech that I planned to give at the party. The speech had seven main points; each topic began with one or the letters of my mom’s name D-O-L-O-R-E-S. I no longer remember the topics, but I definitely worked the episode of the dog into my presentation. Who else would stop a car on a busy street to deal with an animal? I also remember that I truthfully recounted that in all of the years that I had spent with my mom I had never heard her say a bad word about anyone. The only other thing that I recall is that the topic that started with L was “Libraries”. I recounted how the two of us had taken the street car to the public library in Kansas City, KS, and how she later encouraged me to read copious amounts of all kinds of literature at an early age.

The only other thing that I recall about the party is that one of their friends said that I sounded just like my dad. I did not consider that a compliment, but I suppose that it was intended as one.

Did our trip to KC make my parents happy? I suppose so, but I cannot remember any details that would prove it. No one broke into tears of joy or agony.

Cadie did not say too much on the trip. I probably should have made a greater effort to get to know her. She was definitely nervous about being the family’s representative.

We flew back to New England on the next day. I don’t remember anything else of note before I returned Cadie to her family’s house in West Springfield.

1. Two or three passengers would travel together from KCI to Shawnee Mission, which was what the southern suburbs on the Kansas side were called.

2. He blamed his detached retina on cosmetic surgery that he had undertaken to improve the appearance of his eyelids. He never took any legal action, and he did not like to discuss it.

1997 September: Mike at The Wavadas’ Golden Anniversary

Posted on by
Reply

Mom didn’t want to go. Continue reading →

Jim and Dolores Wavada were married on September 1, 1947. I was not there, and so I cannot provide details of that occasion. I found a few black and white photos of the event among my dad’s possessions. The one at the right is by far my favorite.

I don’t remember them making much of an occasion about any of their anniversaries. By the time of their 25th anniversary in 1972 I was working at the Hartford (story begins here). If they had a celebration, I did not attend.

In May of 1997—after living at 8800 Fairway in Leawood for thirty-five years—my parents moved to a bi-level apartment or condo in Overland Park.

At about the same time my parents had a falling-out with my sister Jamie Lisella. I did not learn of this until six months later when my dad wrote the following to me:

When you were here for my birthday I almost showed you the Mother’s day card, the last one, she sent your mom in 1997, which mom received just a few days before we moved from Fairway. The front says: Mom, I always thought it was great the way you cared for helpless animals. Inside it says:…. especially Dad. I can still see your mother’s tear-filled eyes as she said: “Isn’t she awful? She ruins everything.” I still have the card, which was sent about a month after she hung up on me when I told her mom was too ill to move to New England.

I don’t know if anyone invited Jamie. She was living in West Springfield, MA, and working at TSI at the time. I certainly would have paid for airfare for her. She did not attend.

In 1997 their many friends in the area wanted to throw them a party. I am pretty sure that it was held at the home of Ed1 and Betty2 Rafferty. September 1 was a Monday in 1997. I flew by myself to KCI and took the private shuttle service to my parents’ place.

I did not take any notes about the trip. Why would I? I did not own a camera at the time. If I took any photos with a disposable camera, I do not know where they are. My memories of the entire trip are very sketchy. In fact, I only remember clearly one detail.

My recollection is that my dad had been in the hospital. I think that he might have had pneumonia. There was quite a bit of chaos concerning the party. By this time my mother was having a great deal of trouble with her memory. She did not want to go to the party because she was afraid that she would not remember people’s names or commit some other faux pas. My dad did not know what to do. I sat down beside her and put my arm around her shoulder. I said something like, “Mom, these people are your friends. They don’t care about that. They want to see you and to help you celebrate this occasion.”

That was enough to convince her to go. She and my dad both had a great time. I don’t remember much about the party itself. I recall a feeling of relief when it was over. On the plane ride back to New England I was, of course, greatly concerned about my mom’s condition.

1. Ed Rafferty had been a naval air pilot during World War II, which meant that his planes took off and landed from aircraft carriers. He never talked about it. He died in 2017 at the age of 94. His obituary can be found here.

2. Betty Rafferty appeared to be living in Overland Park in 2023.

1998 March: Mike and Sue at Dolores Wavada’s Funeral

Posted on by
Reply

Distraught at the loss. Continue reading →

After the Golden Anniversary party in 1997 (described here) my mother’s physical condition deteriorated. I worked in at least one visit to Kansas City in the next several months. She was miserable and hated her life. She asked my dad what she could have done to deserve her condition. There was, of course, no answer. My dad communicated with me by telephone and email during this period. He told me that the doctors did not know what she had. They had given her a couple of blood transfusions. On Friday March 6 he called me at the office and told me in a broken voice that she was slipping away. I immediately booked a flight for the next morning.

I flew to KC and rented a car. When I arrived at my dad’s apartment he did not need to tell me that mom had died. It was written all over his face and his feet—he had on one slipper and one dress shoe. He was distraught but not sad. Neither was I. It had been apparent that she was very unhappy, and no relief was in sight. My mother was a doer and a planner. Her disease deprived her of the meaningful part of her life.

My dad and I talked about what needed to be done. He told me that he had an appointment with the funeral director. I agreed to drive him there. He did all the talking; spots at the Catholic cemetery in Lenexa, Resurrection, had already been reserved for both of them.

I think that the wake was held on Monday, and the funeral mass and burial were on Tuesday. I don’t remember whether anyone wrote an obituary to appear in the Kansas City Star or not. There is no obituary available online. II had not thought of this oversight even once in the intervening decades.

Sue caught a plane on Sunday and flew to KC. I picked her up at the airport. We stayed in the spare room in dad’s apartment.

Jamie’s entire family crammed into their van and drove to KC non-stop. I would have gladly paid the airfare. They stayed in a hotel. The younger kids were actually pretty excited about it because the hotel had a swimming pool.

I have no memory of the wake whatever. I am not even sure that there was one.

I clearly recall the funeral mass, which was performed at Curé of Ars in Leawood. Fr. Edwin Watson1, a long-time friend of the family, was the celebrant. In his sermon he had mentioned that he had been with my mom in her last hours, and he said that he had absolutely no doubt that she was now in heaven. I had prepared a few words to say, but I was too choked up to try to speak. Jamie made a nice tribute.

All that I remember about the burial at the cemetery was that it was cold.

We probably all went out to eat somewhere afterwards, but I don’t remember any details.

My dad told me that the doctors had recommended an autopsy, but he had refused to grant permission. I would have liked to know what my mom had. I inherited half of her genes; I certainly did not want to end up the way that she did. However, I did not argue the point.

On the following day we all went back to New England. Sue and I flew; the Lisellas drove.

1. Fr. Edwin died in 1999. The story of his life can be read here.

The 1948 Project

Posted on by
1

Why and how. Continue reading →

I would have called it: Mi Chiamo Jack Vance. Ecco la Mia Storia.

Motivation: The primary inspiration for this monstrous undertaking was Jack Vance’s remarkable autobiography, This is Me, Jack Vance! When the pandemic suddenly endowed me with an unexpected surfeit of leisure time in the spring of 2020, I read many books. One of the best was the Italian version of Vance’s award-winning autobiography. Three things impressed me the most about the man and his work:

  1. Jack Vance was such a cool guy. He did so many interesting things (including cheating on his eye exam to get into the Navy), and he and his wife took truly amazing international vacations.
  2. Vance was tremendously talented, and not just as a writer. Even more impressive was his discipline. He wrote most of his books when he ran out of money on extended vacations! He could sit down in an exotic location and churn out four thousand words a day. His wife typed up his output as fast as he could write it. He evidently sent his second drafts to the publisher, and nearly all were accepted.
  3. He dictated his autobiography when he was in his nineties and BLIND! He must have relied almost entirely on his memory; his friends and colleagues were almost all dead when he started the project.

When it became evident that the pandemic would be around for months, if not years, In June of 2020 I realized that I had been accorded a unique opportunity to attempt a huge project. The idea of trying to document my own life in a thorough manner took root in my imagination. I had often claimed that I had a million good stories. In the beginning my primary objective was to assure that as many of those amusing anecdotes as possible were recorded while I could still remember them. I had no doubt that many people and events had already faded from my memory or morphed into something that no longer resembled reality. Even so, I felt compelled by fate to transcribe as many as possible as accurately as possible.

I started with my Army days. So many utterly bizarre things happened in those eighteen months that I wanted to write about them before more memories became blurred or distorted. My biggest regret in life—bar none—was my failure to keep a journal when I was in the Army. I certainly had plenty of free time. I had no social life; I played golf, but my evenings were almost always free. I even had a typewriter. It just never occurred to me to write about my experiences.

After completing a few blog entries about my heroic stint defending the country, I wrote about my last undergraduate semester at the University of Michigan. This was one very painful entry that I just wanted to get out of the way.

I soon became enchanted with the process of researching and writing. I no longer just wanted to retell humorous anecdotes. I thoroughly enjoyed digging up references to familiar people and events and reliving ancient memories. I set up a timeline in a spreadsheet and gradually filled most of it in. From that point on, I have released entries in a close approximation of chronological order.

The Format: I did not spend much time mulling over how to present the text and images. Wavablog, the collection of my blog entries on Wavada.org that use WordPress, seemed like an obvious choice for such an open-ended project. The other possibility would have been to use the same php1 format that I developed for my journals and other writings. The biggest advantage of WordPress was its ease of tagging names and other items for cross-referencing. I would have needed to write a lot of code to duplicate this feature.

Some aspects of WordPress annoyed me. Its WYSIWIG format provided no easy way to handle footnotes. I seem to be unable to write without them, and my php functions make them easy. WordPress allows user-defined functions, but I don’t see how they could be used for footnotes.

I never seriously considered changing formats after I started. WordPress was adequate for what I hoped to accomplish.

Sources: Since I had not kept in touch with anyone from my grade school, high school, undergraduate days (except my collegiate debate partner, Bill Davey) at the University of Michigan, or the Army, I had very little to supplement my memory concerning the first twenty-four years of my life.

I certainly wished that I still had my yearbooks from eighth grade and high school. I don’t remember discarding them. It is possible that my mother threw them out when she cleaned out my room while I was in the Army. I know that she threw away my collection of baseball cards, and my saxophone also disappeared. There was not much chance of finding a copy of either of them online. My grade school doesn’t even exist any more. Rockhurst High School is flourishing in 2021, but I could find no trace of the 1966 yearbook on the Internet.

Even so, I think that I remembered the names of most of my fellow students in both my grade school and high school classes. It helped a lot that I took classes with mostly the same people throughout, and we sat in alphabetical order in almost all classes.

Wayne Miller helped me with my debate-coaching days at Michigan, and Scott Harris helped with the Wayne State period. Don Ritzenheim’s dissertation was also a valuable source of information.

I expected to find a great deal of information about the early days of our software company, TSI, by rummaging through our basement. My wife Sue never throws anything away unless it has rotted or is covered with mold. However, my search yielded very little that was of much use. So, either Sue squirreled a lot of files away somewhere else, or I did not investigate all the containers in the basement, large areas of which are virtually impenetrable.

Some of the more impenetrable areas of the basement.

I found on my desktop computer files containing dozens of business emails and my many trip reports from the period of 1999-2009. I also found all of the communication concerning the attempt to sell the business in 2010.

Images: I bought Sue a camera in 1973. She used it a lot for decades. I expected to find a large number of photos (or, even better, CD’s that contained photos) in the basement. I found a couple of albums that she had forgotten about and a few loose photos, but I never located the mother lode.

I used a series of disposable cameras to take a lot of photos of our first trip to Italy in 2003. They have been missing since shortly after the trip. I certainly did not throw them out. They almost certainly were stuffed in an envelope, bag, or box and now languish in a pile of junk somewhere. Also missing are the numerous photos that Sue took of that first big tour that we took.

The missing cable should be to the left of the one shown on the old hard drive that sits atop my desktop computer.

These three failed searches were the biggest disappointments of the whole undertaking. Close behind was my inability to find many electronic photos that I took with my two point-and-shoot cameras from 2005-2009. The files were lost when the hard drive on my laptop crashed. I had hopes that they might be on a very old external drive that for years had been plugged into a USB port on my computer. However, the device had a DC-in interface, but I located no such power cable. Furthermore, the company that marketed the drive in the U.S. for its Chinese manufacturer appeared to be out of business.

The good photos had been removed from the tan envelope shown here and filed before this photo was taken.

The most exciting discovery was an interoffice mail envelope that had been buried on a shelf in my office. They were beneath some three-ring binders and 9″x12″ envelopes that contained items from various trips. The envelope contained hundreds of photos that I had taken with disposable cameras in the late nineties and early two-thousands. About half were shots of employees at TSI’s AdDept clients, and some even had notations on the back identifying the people in the photos by name.

Whenever I found appropriate photos that Sue or I had shot, I used them in the blogs. Otherwise, I often looked on the Internet for whimsical or instructive illustrations. If I used something that I shouldn’t have, I will gladly donate a portion of the profits of this tome to a mutually agreeable charity.

I suspect that a cache of photos of the Wavada family is taking up space somewhere in our house. My family did not take a lot of photographs, but I remember that my mom kept a stack of them in the drawer of a round table in the living room. If I come across any, I will try to integrate them into the appropriate blog entries.

“Where are they now?”: I googled nearly everyone mentioned in any blog entry. If I could find any information about them, I included it, usually in a footnote. I tried to contact a number of friends and acquaintances. Only a few responded, but it gave me great joy to hear from them.

Of course, some of the people that I mentioned have died. The life expectancy of a male born in 1948 is only 73.1 years. If I make it to the end of September 2021, I will be in the upper fifty percentile.

1. My journals and books have been posted using programs that I wrote in php, a scripting language used to produce HTML code. The name of the language is an abbreviation of “personal home page”. It allows someone to produce web pages in almost any format, but getting started with it is not for the faint of heart. It was really designed for people who knew C or C++. I don’t, but it was close enough to BASIC that I managed to teach it to myself with a lot of help from online manuals and fora.