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.
My adventures playing with members of the Simsbury Bridge Club (SBC) before I became a Life Master at the end of 2009 are recounted here.
I met Jeanne Striefler at the SBC in my first few weeks there, but I don’t think that we ever played as partners there until much later. She seldom played with anyone besides Jerry Harrison during that period. We did play together at the Hartford Bridge Club (HBC) a few times, mostly when her regular partner and my regular partner were not available. I have no vivid memories of any details of those occasions.
I definitely do recall the holiday parties that she and her husband Fred held at their house in West Simsbury. Since we had played together seldom, if at all, I was flattered and surprised when she invited Sue and me to join the celebration. I particularly remember the one that celebrated her achievement of Silver Life Master (1,000 masterpoints), a party that she shared with Susan Seckinger, who had recently become a Gold Life Master (2,500 masterpoints). Susan remarked that it was not a big deal; it just meant that you had been playing a long time. That is not precisely accurate. In most cases it meant that you had played a lot in tournaments—and done fairly well. It has always been very difficult to amass thousands of points in club games, even if you usually finish at the top of the list.
Jerry, Jeanne, CJ, and me. In the photos that I took at tournaments I NEVER cut off a head.
I have a pretty strong recollection that the biggest thrill that Jeanne and I had experienced was as teammates in a Swiss Teams game at the regional tournament in Cromwell. However, I was unable to locate such a result. On the other hand, I did discover that we won a Compact Knockout in 2011. I played with Jerry Hirsch, and Jeanne played with CJ Joseph. Someone even took our photo1.
I have also played with CJ once or twice at the HBC. She attended the University of Michigan; I think that she graduated two years before I did. She does not live in New England any more. In 2021 she has a house in Florida. I seem to remember that she also had one in the Chicago area.
Jeanne is my age, and she grew up in the state that is just north of where I did. She met her husband Fred at the University of Nebraska. Fred was a professor at the University of Hartford.
I am not sure that I ever played opposite Donna Lyons at the SBC, but I have included her in this section because she has played there for a long time, and she still supports the club. In December, 2021, in fact, she was driving up from her winter home in Florida with the intention of playing in a few games in December at Eno Hall. I am sure that this was not the only reason that she was making the trip, but I like to think that our little game was the focal point.
I was disappointed to receive the following email from her on December 11:
Had to turn back after 6 hours, little dog not doing well. Sorry, won’t be there till May games, happy holidays, Mike!
I learned some time ago that Donna formerly taught Latin at Enfield High School. She actually knew my Italian teacher, Mary Trichilo (TREE key low), as well as one of the other continuing ed students who also formerly taught languages in Enfield. How big of a coincidence is that?
I can’t remember the first game in which Donna was my partner. Before that she had been playing with Michele Raviele, among others. I do remember playing with Donna in both games of a Connecticut sectional. We did not do very well, but I remember that one of our opponents, a guy from the Worcester area, later asked me about her. She must have made a strong impression.
Donna made a great impression on me because she obviously read—or at least looked at the photos there—one of my travel journals. I wrote about the star-crossed tour that Sue and I took in 2011 of South Italy that began with a few days in Rome2. Donna liked a couple of the photos that I took in Rome and Paestum. She asked me if she could use them for a project that she was doing for an association that promotes the study of classical periods. I enthusiastically agreed. She later gave me a SWAG bag that contained the resulting notebook and cards and a few other things. I still have all of these.
Donna was not a great player when she started. I have the feeling that she did not spend enough time in college at the bridge table. For some reason she seemed to consider me something of a guru. Over the years she sent me questions about various aspects of the game, mostly bidding. I always answered them, and she seemed very appreciative.
We got Sue to take this photo.
Whenever I could not find partners for tournaments, I sent out emails to people whom I enjoyed playing with. I had an opening in my schedule for the 2019 Ocean State Regional in Warwick, RI. Donna volunteered to drive all that way just to play with me for one day, August 28, in the Mid-Flight Pairs.
We had a pretty good session in the morning. We were definitely among the leaders. We also got off to a good start in the afternoon session. With only a couple of rounds to go we faced a husband-and-wife team from Vermont, Steve and Karen Hewitt Randle. We all took out our cards from the first board and started to bid the first hand. Before we got very far Karen announced that she did not feel well and needed to be excused. She left the room, and Steve went with her. When the round was almost over, and they had not yet returned, we called the director, who gave us a “No Play” on all three hands.
Not long after that the Randles returned. Not only did they finish the round, but they also had the best score of all the pairs and vaulted up among the leaders.
When we finished playing the last hand, I checked our score on the Bridgemate. Our percentage was about the same as what we had scored in the first round. I told Donna that that should be good enough to finish first or second.
I was stunned by her reaction: “I don’t want to be second. I’ve never been first at anything. Since I made Life Master playing with Margie, I haven’t even won any gold points.”
Donna got her wish. We won by a very narrow margin. I wondered how we would have fared if we had actually played the three hands against the Randles. Their score in the second round was considerably better than ours.
The Ocean State Regionals in 2020 and 2021 were canceled. If Donna wants to defend her title in this event in September 2022, she will need to find another partner. I now have too many points to play in Mid-Flight games.
In the summer of 2021 I played in one face-to-face game at the HBC with Donna as my partner. We did pretty well, but Donna told me that she preferred to play online. One reason was that it was safer, but she also disclosed another one that might have been nearly as important to her. “I don’t have to put on lipstick.”
After Dick Benedict told me in 2010 that he did not want to play at Simsbury any more, I looked around for a new partner. I decided to ask Sue Rudd. Sue was ten years older than I was and had played a lot more bridge than I had, but she was not yet a Life Master. So, I resolved to help her get the gold and silver points that she needed. We went to quite a few tournaments together. We had some success, but we never won an event together, at least not that I can remember. Come to think of it, I think that those years that I played with Sue were the only ones in which I failed to win at least one flight or strat in an event at a tournament.
I learned that Sue formerly worked for the Massachusetts Department of Revenue. She had two sons. One lived in Boston, the other in Minnesota. Sue lived in an apartment in West Springfield that was not far from the house occupied by my sister Jamie’s family. Later Sue moved to a condo complex that was only about two miles from our house in Enfield.
Sue was in good shape. She was an avid tennis player and cyclist. She told me that she had skied all over the US and Europe when she was younger. She also took several international vacations.
Sue insisted on driving half of the time. I agreed, but I never felt comfortable when she was driving. If there was snow, I drove. On one occasion the trip began with a light drizzle. It got heavier, and the visibility was not too good. She was driving at first, but when it began to get a little difficult, she agreed to let me finish the drive.
It is strange to say, but I cannot remember ever eating supper with Sue. I know that we went to at least a few overnight tournaments, but I cannot remember going to a restaurant together. Sue usually stayed with Helen Pawlowski, who by then was the Tournament Manager for the district. Maybe they ate together. I was still working. So, we must have gone to regional tournaments—the only ones that pay gold points—on weekends. Therefore, there would have only been one supper per tournament.
There was almost always ice or snow on the sidewalk and parking lot in Cromwell.
I remember only a few specific incidents. We were in Cromwell playing in a compact knockout event. that required us to play twelve hands against the same pair. One of the opponents on the other team was a little bit rude, especially to Sue. Sue got flustered and played badly. We lost the match.
I mentioned this to Helen. She immediately knew whom I was talking about. She said that she wished that she had heard about it earlier. She also said that I needed to protect Sue from people like her. This gave me pause. I wasn’t ready for that role. At that point of my life I had pretty much abandoned the tactic of arguing with anyone about anything. I would make my case, but if they could not accept my point of view, I almost never pressed the point. The reason was that my voice had a tendency to get much louder than I realized in situations like this, and the scene quickly became uncomfortable for everyone.
Harold Feldheim.
I remember encountering Harold Feldheim3 in the men’s room at a tournament. He asked me how I was doing, and I frankly replied that I was frustrated with my partner. He said that in his years of experience he had concluded that whenever someone felt that way, he should look for a new partner.
Sue and I won a few gold points together. She was getting very close to what she needed for Life Master. I am not sure which tournament it was, but we were playing in the last round of a bracketed Swiss teams event. We were in contention to finish first or second in our group. The bidding on the last hand of the last match had convinced me that my spade support and runnable club suit provided a good chance for a slam in spades that I did not think that most people would bid. It was risky, but I decided to bid 6♠. It turned out to be a good contract. The only problem was that Sue had to play it.
She had to begin by drawing trump, which she did. Then she had to take her ♣K, which she did. Then she needed to lead a low club to the board and take the ace and queen. She made both of those plays. I could see that the clubs split 3-2, which made the three remaining clubs good, guaranteeing the needed twelve tricks. At this point she could have tabled her cards and claimed. The opponents would have conceded without an objection.
But she didn’t claim. She thought about the situation for what seemed like a very long time. Then she started leading red cards and fell short of the contract.
As I suspected would happen, our counterparts at the other table had only bid 4♠, but they made six. So, instead of getting a positive swing that would assure us of winning gold points, we suffered a double negative swing that dropped us out of contention—all because she could not count the clubs.
This was not a mistake of inexperience. There were no distractions; it was early in the play of the hand. There were only two possible explanations. Either she did not count the clubs, or she forgot that every suit had thirteen cards. I was completely exasperated. The situation was so perfect, and I had analyzed it correctly! I could not hold back my frustration, and my reaction was so intense that even the opponents castigated me for it.
After the long mostly silent drive home I sent her an email in which I apologized for the way that I acted and stated that we should not play together any more. It was just too frustrating for me. Years later she told me that she was very tired that afternoon because she did not sleep well the night before. Fine; that is why coffee is always available at tournaments.
Sue did not give up. Some months later she won enough gold points for her Life Master playing with Sally Kirtley. I don’t think that they ever won anything in the “overalls”, but they did finish first in their section a couple of times. Those two awards were enough to push her over the threshold. I don’t think that she ever won any gold points4 at all after that.
Since then I have driven Sue to games in Simsbury almost every Wednesday before the pandemic and after the club reopened in the fall of 2021. I have even played with her a few times at the HBC. I also gave a little speech at here LM party there. Here is the text.
Sue sometimes rides with me to bridge games at local clubs, and almost always I have remembered to bring her home. During one those rides some years ago she confided to me that her goal was to have “Life Master” in her obituary. So I looked in the Hartford Courant’s Future Archives for her obituary. It took quite a while, but I found it.
Susan F. Rudd–I’ll skip the dates–worked in the Collections Section of the Massachusetts Department of Revenue, where she was known as Rudd the Ruthless. After retirement she divided her time between her family and her many hobbies. She is survived by her sons Paul and David, eight grandchildren, twenty-seven great-grandchildren, forty-two great-great-grandchildren, and one great-great-great grandson.
Susan is best known as being the only woman to win the American women’s super-senior tennis championship as an octogenarian, a nonagenarian, and a centenarian. However, her proudest accomplishment was to become a Life Master in bridge, a game without electronics that was popular in the twentieth century.
My wife Sue and I attended her eightieth birthday party in 2018. She asked me to reprise the LM speech, and I was ready to do so. However, Sue’s daughter-in-law, who organized and ran the fete, put the kibosh on the idea without telling anyone.
Sue left her car in this parking lot.
By the way, it was true that on one occasion I drove Sue Rudd to the HBC for a Tuesday evening game. I had a bad game playing with a different partner and left in a foul mood. Just as I reached the bridge over the Connecticut River on I-91, I realized that I had left Sue back at the club. I turned around at exit 44 and returned to the club. It was all dark and obviously empty.
I learned the next day that Sally Kirtley had driven Sue to TSI’s office in East Windsor, which is where she had left her car.
I had no difficult whatever in deciding whom I should ask to play with me at the SBC. By then Ken Leopold had been attending somewhat regularly, and he seemed like he knew what he was doing. The good thing was that he was younger than I was—his memory still functioned. The only drawback was that he wasted a lot of time on his family and his job. He and his wife Lori had six kids, a couple of whom were still living at home. He also had an unhealthy commitment to the idea of helping his patients beat cancer. He was a doctor, you see. He worked (and still does in 2021) at Hartford Hospital in the field of radiation oncology.
Ken wore a blue shirt to the Christmas party at the HBC in 2013. The two ladies at the table are Sue Rudd and Kay Hill.
So, Ken and I mostly played together just on Wednesday evenings at the SBC. I attended almost every tournament within driving range, and i always asked him to play, but I usually had to settle for his participation in the Sunday Swiss events.
On most of these occasions our team consisted of Ken, me, Dave Landsberg, and Felix Springer. Much more about Dave and Felix can be read here. Sometimes I played with Dave, and Ken played with Felix. Often we had to rearrange things to accommodate a different fourth.
We did amazingly well, and our results formed a pattern. We were almost in the lowest group, the C strat. I was on the board of the Connecticut Bridge Association (CBA), which always met before the Sunday Swiss. I would generally emerge from the meeting five or ten minutes before game time and frantically scan the playing area for the rest of “the band”. When I found them I fished some bills out of my wallet and reimbursed whoever had paid my entry fee. Then I had only a few seconds to peruse the convention card to refresh my memory about what conventions we were playing.
I almost always made mistakes in the first round, which we usually lost. We then almost always won our next two matches, which forced us to face a pretty good team in the fourth round. I am not sure that we ever won a fourth round. So, we would invariably go into the pizza break in the middle of the pack. We then almost always won two of the last three rounds to finish in the top half, which, for a C team, was good enough to win quite a few silver points5. It was truly remarkable how often we did this. Here is an example from the Swiss held in Hamden on March 1, 2015:
I just loved playing with these guys. Earlier in the tournament Felix had played in pairs games with both Dave and me. I am not even sure who played with whom in the Swiss. I don’t think that Ken ever played with Dave, but any other combination was possible.
My fondest memory of the four of us is from the North American Bridge Championships held in Providence in November and December of 2014. On both Sundays at the tournament some or all of us played together in the bracketed Swiss events.
The band: me, Felix, Ken, and Dave.
I am disappointed and embarrassed to report that I can find very little documentation of those two events. I am absolutely certain that I posted detailed write-ups of them on the NEBridge.org website as part of my “View from B Low” series. Unfortunately, all of the web pages posted between January 24, 2014, and July 22, 2015, were lost during the catastrophic system failure of July 2015.
I thought that perhaps a draft copy of this work was on my desktop computer, but I could find no trace. I then looked for the photos that I took on those two weekends. I found about forty of them, but I am pretty certain that I took more than that if only to add more atmosphere to the “View” article. I suspect that I moved the best of those photos somewhere to facilitate uploading them to the NEBridge.org website. The uploaded copies are gone for good, but the originals should still be on my computer. I just can’t locate them.
Ginny Farber.
So, I must rely on my fading memories and the results that I found on the ACBL website. My partner for the first weekend, November 29-30, was Ginny Farber6, whose last name at the time was Iannini (eye ah KNEE knee). She lived on the Cape. We had played against each other at tournaments a few times. After her husband died shortly after the Cromwell tournament of 2014, we began playing as partners at tournaments.
Ginny and I played in pairs games on Saturday, but we did not do too well. For the bracketed Swiss on Sunday we were joined by Dave Landsberg and Pat Fliakos, both of whom I had met in the Tuesday evening games at the Hartford Bridge Club.
Pat Fliakos.
We played well through the first six matches. We won them all. However, we could not rest on our laurels. In the last round we faced a foursome from Montreal that was only four points behind us in the standings. I don’t remember the situation precisely, but I do recall that there was one critical hand in which Ginny had reversed, a bidding sequence of two different suits showing a strong hand in which the first suit is longer than the second. An example would be 1♦ followed by 2♥ after partner has responded 1♠ or 1NT.
Somehow we ended up in an impossible slam, and the contract failed. I was certain that our counterparts at the other table probably did not bid the slam, which would provide them with a big swing. Ginny and I were extremely nervous at the end of the match when we went to the other table to compare scores. Fortunately, Dave and Pat had had a good round. We lost the match, but only by two points
Imagine our shock when the opponents came over to get us to agree that they had won the match by ten points, not two. It turned out that they had recorded a 0 on one hand in which both of our pairs had actually won three points. When we pointed this out to them, they were, of course, bitterly disappointed, and our relief was palpable.
As the results clearly show, the third-place teams were not even close. In the second weekend our team was Felix, Dave, Ken, and me. I cannot remember who played with whom on Saturday when we lost in the semifinals of a compact knockout. On Sunday we played in another bracketed Swiss. I played with Dave, and Ken played with Felix.
This time a very weird thing happened in an early round. There were repeated director calls on one hand. Then the same thing happened on a subsequent hand. Dave and I finished long before Ken and Felix. After we compared the scores they explained that the director had twice ruled against them, and they had appealed both rulings. Evidently neither appeal was successful. I don’t remember the specifics. Ken and Felix weren’t exactly angry about it, but they weren’t satisfied with the ruling either.
It hardly mattered. This time I knew that we were doing well, but I never checked the scoreboard. After the last round Ken checked the scores. He reported that “We lapped the field.”
So, the tournament had the best possible ending for “the band”, and it left us hungry for more. After that we played together whenever we could.
Ken made Life Master in July of 2015. The HBC sponsored a party for him and Felix, who achieved the rank a little earlier. It was a five-round team game using the Swiss format. Dave and I were their teammates. Ken and Felix sat North-South at table 1 in the A section. We sat East-West at table 1 in the B section. We won our first three matches, but we did not have any big victories.
Then there was a break for food and speeches. Dave said to me sotto voce, “Did you see their résumés? Why do they play with us?”
Of course, what I thought was, “What do you mean ‘us’, Paleface?”, but I didn’t say any thing. A little later I took the floor to give my little speech. I began with a trivia question:
What do the following three famous people have in common?
Champion golfer, Phil Mickelson, who can consistently hit a golf ball 300 yards.
Four-time Pro Bowl quarterback, Michael Vick, who can throw a football 80 yards.
World-class physician and Life Master bridge player Ken Leopold.
I told them to think about it. I would come back to it at the end. Meanwhile, I had a survey that Mark Aquino, the District Director, asked me to conduct:
“Are you aware of the procedure at a regional or national tournament for appealing a director’s ruling?” Most people were.
“Have you ever appealed a director’s ruling?” About half the players raised a hand to indicate that they had. I pretended to count and record the result.
“Have you ever appealed more than one director’s ruling in the same tournament?” Only Felix and Ken still had their hands raised.
“In one very short eight-board match of a bracketed Swiss event, commonly known as a Round Robin, have you ever appealed more than one director’s ruling?” Still only Ken and Felix.
“Have you ever won such an appeal?” They both sheepishly lowered their hands.
I then asked if anyone knew the answer to the trivia question. Dave, of all people, piped up, “They are all left-handed.”
“No!” I said. “Actually, they are all right-handed. Mickelson swings left-handed and Vick throws left-handed, but they both do everything else with their right hand. Similarly, Ken plays bridge left-handed, but his right hand is dominant.”
We won the fourth match, but our margin of victory left us a couple of points behind the first place team. We faced them in the last round. Our opponents were Laurie Robbins and Tom Lorch. The hands were not very exciting. The match came down to a hand in which the West player had to decide whether to accept a game try. I passed, and my counterpart at the other table bid the game. Since the tricks for game were not actually available, we won the match and the event. As I have often said, most of my best calls are green.
Donna Feir, the manager of the HBC, announced that never before in the history of the club had the players being honored ever won a team event, and never had they won all five matches..
A few years later Ken thought that we should play a weak 1NT opening. I think that he got this idea from Doug Doub, a pro who gives lessons at the HBC. I went along with the idea, mostly because I already played a different version of that approach with Peter Katz7 on Saturdays at the HBC. Ken sent me the link to a detailed write-up of how it worked. We have been playing that weak 1NT system ever since, and I review the manuscript before each game. Even so, I sometimes forget that we are playing it.
Ken also insisted on playing the Wolsey defense against strong 1NT openings because that was what he played with Lori, and he alleged that he could not remember two different defenses. I much prefer a more disruptive approach, especially in the balancing seat, but I have agreed to grit my teeth and play Wolsey.
Ken was one of the driving forces behind the resuscitation of the SBC in 2019. That story is told here.
The spreadsheet that contains my list of partners includes a line for Helen Pawlowski, and so I must have paired with her at least once, either when she was running the club or when she dropped in to play after she no longer did. It is also possible that I might have played with her at a tournament or at the HBC.
I find it remarkable that I have no recollection of the occasion. Helen was a very good player, and playing with her would have been a big deal at any point in my career.
In 2023 Helen lived in Bluffton, SC.
On at least one occasion before the Pandemic, when Ken could not play, I played opposite Al Carpenter. Al was not a great player, but he was very enthusiastic and gregarious. He had a hearing problem, and so he often was speaking too loudly for the size of our room.
At the time that I played with him Al was working for Enterprise Rent-a-Car. I seem to remember hearing from someone that Al died, but I could not find an obituary or any other reference on the Internet. .
Chuck Pickens.
Chuck Pickens played at the SBC occasionally before the Pandemic. I played with him once when Ken was not available.
Al Gee began playing regularly at the SBC after the Pandemic. His usual partner was Kathie Ferguson. On one evening Kathie had another commitment, and so did Ken. So, I played with Al.
I learned that he had taken up bridge after his wife died, and he credited the game with getting him through that crisis. He originally played at the Newtown Bridge Club, but he found the SBC after moving to the area. Al was retired from a career at 3M.
We played Al’s convention card, which was not very sophisticated. We finished last.
Al was still playing pretty consistently at the SBC in late 2023.
Shown at left is a photo of Al that I took at the Limited Sectional at the HBC on March 26, 2023. Al and his old partner from Newtown won their section in the morning session of the 199er Flight. The fellow behind Al is Howard Howard Schiller, another regular at the post-Pandemic SBC.
Allison Ryan came down from her home in Northampton, MA, to play at the SBC on an evening on which I happened to be available. This occurred before Covid-19. She was a new player at the time, but she obviously had a lot of potential. I don’t recall how we did, but I don’t think that we were last.
In 2023 Allison was retired or at least mostly retired from her career as a neurologist. I have seen her a few times at tournaments. My wife Sue and I had a very pleasant supper with her and her bridge partner at the tournament in Nashua, NH, that has been described here.
On many occasions I drove Maria Van der Ree from her apartment in Enfield to the games at the SBC on Wednesday evenings. On almost every occasion she played with either Sue Rodd or my wife. Once, however, she got stuck playing with me. Line most new partnerships we had a few misunderstandings in the bidding.
In 2023 Maria turned 93. She had difficulty with new bidding concepts, but she was still quite good at playing the cards. Sue Wavada saw her often at the non-sanctioned games in Somers and East Longmeadow.
1. I found this photo in the bag that contained the ones that I shot in my disposable-camera days. However, by this time I had been using my Canon point-and-shoot camera for six years, and I was too cheap to have prints made. So, someone probably took the photo with Jerry’s camera, and he gave me a print.
3. Harold Feldheim died in 2019. Much better than his obituary are the comments from fellow bridge players that are posted here. After I had been working for District 25 for a few years Harold paid me one of the nicest compliments that I have ever received: “If more bridge players were like you, everyone would enjoy the game a lot more.”
4. To put this in perspective, as of the end of 2021 I had 697.41 gold points.
5. Through the end of 2021 I have amassed 548.03 silver points, almost all of which were won at sectional tournaments, and the bulk of those in the Sunday Swiss games.
6. Much more about my partnership with Ginny can be read here.
7. Details about my adventures with Peter Katz are posted here.
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 resignation from TSI by my sister Jamie Lisella in the summer of 1999 (as explained here) left the company with neither an administrative employee nor a marketing director during a critical period. We were in the process of moving to a new location that Jamie had found, we had a huge backlog of programming jobs, and Denise Bessette (introduced here) and I were establishing a new working relationship (explained here) and trying to figure out how to adapt to the new world of the Internet.
More like “reasonably good pay”.
Prior to this time I never had hired an administrative person. In each of the cases in this entry I wrote a help-wanted ad and ran it in the Hartford Courant and the Journal Inquirer. I kept a record of the responses in a spreadsheet. I interviewed a few of the respondents and then picked one or started over.
In 1990 the one whom I liked best was named Michele Stewart. At the end of August I called her on the telephone and offered her the job. She told me that she was probably going to accept another job because my description of our post sounded complicated. She was most concerned about the sales tax aspect. Perhaps I did not explain that computer programs provided all the numbers. The administrative person’s role was just to see that the forms were filled out, and the payments were made on time.
So, I ended up hiring Nadine Holmes, my second choice. Se was single and in her twenties. She took longer than expected to catch on to how TSI did things, but she had a good attitude. I wrote this on October 18:
Nadine came into my office at 4PM with a very solemn look on her face. She announced that she had to tell me that she could no longer work for my company. I sighed, leaned back in my chair, and folded my hands. Then she said, “The time goes by too fast here.” She has shown remarkable progress in the last few days. She is still a little sloppy, and her spelling needs work, but she definitely is a keeper.
By February of 2000 we had moved into our new office at 7B Pasco Drive in Enfield. The first month or so was hectic because of address changes and other transition issues, but then things slowed down. A few problems began to appear.
I had lunch with Nadine Thursday. I don’t know if I got through to her, but at least I think she has a little better idea of what the company is about. She told me that it is hard for her to get used to the idea that she is the low man on the totem pole and always will be as long as she works here. I told her that we planned to hire someone to help with marketing and that when we start marketing again, we will have plenty for her to do.
The next week I sent this e-mail to Denise:
I told Nadine that I want her to become an expert at Word and Excel. My real objective is for her to become reasonably competent at them. It may be useful for her to go through some of the exercises in the book that Harry1 had. I was hoping that we would have received the book to use as the basis for a mailing, but it didn’t come yet. If you can think of anything for her to do, by all means ask her to do it. I told her that I think of you as my alter-ego.
My recollection is that this was reasonably successful. She could maintain a spreadsheet if I told her precisely what to do. However, other problems arose. I wrote this on December 27.
I discovered before anyone came in that Nadine forgot to pay the sales tax in December. I was so angry about this that I was almost out of control. I got less than four hours of sleep on Monday evening. I needed to rest for a few minutes on Tuesday morning before everyone came in, but this made me so upset that I couldn’t do it. You will be happy to know that even though I had my boots on, I did not take it out on the furniture (but it was tempting). I didn’t yell at anyone either, but I was very grumpy.
The “boots” reference was about an occasion at our Enfield office on which I kicked a dent in one of our steel filing cabinets. By the middle of January I decided that Nadine was not the solution to TSI’s administrative needs. I explained my attitude to Denise.
I think that I found a good metaphor for Monday’s conversation. In addition to the part about a new direction, I plan to emphasize to Nadine that I want to hire someone who is “on the same wavelength” that I am on (or we are). If she wants more specifics, I will have a list of things that I asked her to do, but that she didn’t do or didn’t do until I hounded her about them. You can contribute to the list if you want.
I hired a woman named Paula to replace Nadine. I don’t remember her last name. She seemed to be more than intelligent enough to handle the job. The other big factor in her favor was that she lived in East Windsor almost within walking distance of the office.
On the other hand, she had at least one young child. Paula lasted less than a week. She called in sick while I was on a business trip. Denise was furious about this. I fired her, but I did not feel good about it.
She explained that she is having a lot of problems with her husband. She said that she was hoping that the job would either provide a solution to the problems or the wherewithal to let her stand on her own two feet if it came to that. This is about what I expected. I don’t know if I am happy that she told me or not. I have not been dwelling on this subject, but I still find myself waking up worrying about her.
I really liked working with Lucia Hagan (pronounced (LOO shuh HAY gun), who started in the spring of 2001. She was, in my opinion both a very nice person and a superlative employee. Her tenure coincided with a period that required the most administrative changes. TSI was in the process of setting up a system to manage the hundreds of newspapers that were beginning to subscribe to AxN. Accounts receivable and billing records had to be set up, and, for the first time ever, we needed to keep track of contracts.
Here are some of my memories of Lucia’s time at TSI.
Lucia had a tattoo on one of her calves. I had never interacted for any length of time with anyone with a tattoo. Hers seemed out of place to me, but I guess that I should not have been surprised. She lived and grew up in Stafford, a town built around auto racing.
Lucia was into NASCAR. She was especially a fan of Jeff Gordon, who drove #24 for Team Penske. She was upset when Penske “gave all of Gordon’s best cars to the kid”, meaning Jimmy Johnson.
Lucia was amused that I napped in the computer room early in the morning and on weekends. She bought me a pillow and a University of Michigan pillow case that I am still using in 2023.
Her husband Rick worked at Leonard’s Auto Parts in West Stafford2. She once remarked, “It’s not a real job.”
Every year Lucia and Rick went overboard on decorations of their house in Stafford for Halloween. On two occasions I drove out to see their house just before Halloween.
Lucia had no children.
She was working at the time that we terminated Sandy Sant’Angelo’s (introduced here) employment at TSI. She asked to move to the space by the window that Sandy had occupied. I had been oblivious to the fact that she did not like sitting so close to the bathrooms. Presumably Nadine did not like it either. Needless to say, I concurred.
I never had any problems with Lucia’s work or her attitude, but I was dimly aware that something was amiss in her relationship with Denise. I arrived in my office at TSI early one morning after having returned from a multi-day trip. I was surprised that Lucia came to my office at about 7:30 and explained that she was not coming in to work. It took me a minute to realize that she meant that she was resigning immediately. I asked her what the problem was, but she did not want to talk about it. She was adamant that she could not work at TSI any longer.
I never did find out what had actually happened.
At the end of that year TSI sent Lucia a check for her share of the profit-sharing distribution, but she never cashed it. Over the years I have thought about Lucia many times when I drove on Route 190 through Stafford.
The choice to replace Lucia was easy. Eileen Sheehan-Willet (LinkedIn page here) stood out from the other applicants. She had previous experience in a small business, and she had an extremely positive demeanor. She did not catch on to new tasks as quickly as Lucia had, but each time she kept her nose to the grindstone until she had mastered every detail.
Here are some of my recollections of my second-favorite administrative helper.
Eileen had a green thumb. She nursed the neglected plants in our office back to health.
I met Eileen’s husband’s a few times, but I don’t remember his name. My most vivid memory is of the extremely overcast day on which I forgot to extinguish my Saturn’s headlights before eating lunch and enjoying my postprandial nap in the park near the Connecticut River. Eileen called him. He picked me up in his truck. When we arrived he charged the battery with a stand-alone unit. It took only a minute or two.
I don’t think that Eileen had any children.
While working at TSI Eileen was diagnosed with cancer in one of her legs. She was the only employee who ever filed a claim on the disability policy that the company maintained for two decades. I worried about her subsequent use of the stairway that was the only entry to or exit from TSI’s office, but she had no trouble with it when she returned to work. It was a very nice feeling that she could recover from such a serious issue.
After a few years Eileen and her husband decided to move to New Hampshire. I seem to recall that it had something to do with his job. She gave us several weeks notice, and so there was time for her to train her replacement.
The person whom I hired to replace Eileen was named Debbie Hlobik. She had a son who gave her some problems and a daughter. Eileen warned me that, although Debbie was certainly capable of doing the job, she worried about her attitude. This assessment turned out to be prescient. Debbie was married and had a son whose behavior gave her a lot of problems. I am not sure what she wanted to do with her life, but she eventually made it quite clear that it did not involve TSI. I finally had to fire her. When I did, she said that I had nothing to be sorry about. She immediately applied for unemployment benefits.
Perhaps the strangest few weeks in the history of the company was after I had hired Chrissy Ralph or maybe it was Chrissy Poloski to replace Debby. Chrissy seemed fine in the interview and for the first few weeks. At some point she either got married or divorced (I don’t remember which) and changed her name. After that her behavior became erratic. One day she left at lunch time and never returned. She had written and signed a letter detailing her resignation and left it on her desk next to her PC. I also found several unpaid bills in her desk drawer, including sales tax bills for a few states. TSI had to pay fines on a few of them.
Then, unbelievably, she filed for unemployment benefits and claimed that I had fired her. Denise and I contested the filing, and the state arranged for a hearing of the case. Chrissy did not appear, and her claim was terminated forthwith.
The hiring of our last administrative person, Ashley Elliott, in 2010 put an end to our losing streak. Although I spent several years working with her, I have a hard time coming up with any anecdotes at all. She certainly did a good gob. She seemed to be rather friendly with Jason Dean, TSI’s programmer during her tenure at TSI. They were both more than a generation younger than I was.
She was still employed with TSI when the company shut down in 2014 (described here). Here is the letter of recommendation that I wrote for her.
To Whom It May Concern:
I am the president of TSI Tailored Systems, Inc., a small company that has designed, implemented, installed, and supported computer software for thirty-five years. Ashley Elliott has served as our administrative person since April 26, 2010. Before that she worked for a temporary employment agency and was assigned to our account for three months. We were so pleased with her work and her attitude that we offered her permanent employment. This was the only time in the long history of the company that we have done that.
Ashley’s job at TSI involved many diverse tasks. Essentially she was responsible for almost everything except for development and support of the software. She managed both the Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable systems and used our home-grown computer systems to generate invoices, statements, and numerous reports. She was very good at interacting with both customers and vendors. She managed the cash flow in Excel, filed sales and use taxes online in many states, and did most of the work required for closing the books every month. She also was responsible for routine purchasing and other aspects of managing the office.
Ashley did very good work for TSI. It takes a special type of person to be able to execute such a large number of small tasks, some menial and some challenging, and Ashley adapted very well. My partner and I have been very impressed with her attitude and her ability to get along with everyone in the office. We came to depend upon Ashley, and she did not disappoint us. She made the trains run.
Ashley’s termination had nothing to do with her work, which was of consistently high quality. Business conditions necessitated that we close the company rather abruptly.
I wholeheartedly and unreservedly recommend Ashley for any similar position. I would be very happy to talk with any prospective employer about her work at TSI. I can be reached at Mike@Wavada.org or 860 386-0700 (through July 31, 2014) or 860 763-3694 (home).
Of all of the blog entries that I have written this one was the most frustrating to write. I worked with these people for a total of thirteen years, but I had trouble remembering any details. Furthermore, aside from my experience with Nadine, I found little in the way of notes. I recently discovered some spreadsheets dated in 2006 (Eileen?) and 2009 (Ashley?) concerning recruitment of administrative assistants. I am at a loss to explain the fact that none of the names on the list seem even vaguely familiar. There was one person named Paula. She may have been the same as the short-term employee described above, but the last name and the year did not seem right.
I also searched on the Internet for information about the women who handled the administrative functions to determine what they had done since leaving TSI. I found almost nothing about any of them.
I have had a few email exchanges with Lucia and Eileen, but otherwise no communication. It puzzles me how I could have worked fairly closely with these people for such a long time, but until I tried to put this page together, I hardly gave them a thought.
1. This was a reference to Harry Burt, a programmer at TSI who was introduced here.
2. Leonard’s was in business long after Lucia left TSI. I drove by it many times on the way to and from bridge tournaments. At some point it became Carquest Auto Parts. On my last drive past it in August of 2023 I noticed that the store appeared to be out of business. Its website was no longer working, and the Facebook page indicated that the owner had retired.
3. Debbie died in 2019 at the age of 60. Her obituary is posted here.
By the mid-eighties Sue and I really needed help with marketing. We had some good products to sell, and our service was fantastic. However, our salesmanship was poor. I could often persuade people that I could develop a solution to a difficult problem, but I was not very good at persuading them that TSI’s product and approach were better than those of our competitors.
The first person whom we engaged to represent us was Joe Danko, who lived on Cape Cod. At first the relationship was on a commission-only basis. Later we considered hiring him as our salesman, but we decided against it. The details are described here. Joe was never actually an employee, and we never paid him for his services. I don’t know how much effort, if any, he put in on our behalf.
Trust me; Paul was nothing like this guy.
We hired some consultants to help us. They, in turn, hired a graduate student named Paul Schrenker, to sit in Sue’s office in Rockville when she was on the road. We provided a list of presidents of ad agencies and their phone numbers. In only a few cases was it a direct line, but, even so, quite a few people agreed to talk with him. Ad agency executives were all about relationships. Whether Paul was a potential client or a potential vendor did not matter that much; many agency heads were always on the lookout for connections. So, a surprising number of advertising executives accepted a cold call from a graduate student who knew a lot about biology but very little about any aspect of the business world.
The Patriots debacle was not O&P’s finest hour.
One of the ad agencies, O’Neal & Prelle in Hartford, agreed to an appointment, and we eventually closed the sale. Paul did not participate in closing the sale, but he did make the first appointment.
TSI severed its relationship with the consulting firm. We decided instead to hire a full-time salesman, and we approached it in the same way we had recruited programmers and administrative people—by placing an ad in the newspapers. I think that we interviewed a couple of people. One stood out, Michael Symolon. He seemed excited about the job, and he was quite well-spoken. He was a graduate of Central Connecticut. He had worked in marketing for five years at Triad Systems, a company that specialized in software for dentists.
What about TSI?
I think that we hired Michael at some point in 1987. His LinkedIn page, which can be found here, was no help in this determination. Although he included previous and subsequent employers, he left TSI off of his list of experiences. We paid him a pretty good salary as well as commissions.
I remember that when he first began to work at TSI Michael was gung ho about setting up a nationwide sales organization. He advised me to schedule annual trips to exciting destinations exclusively for the most productive reps of our software systems.
Michael.
This attitude shocked me a little, but he eventually revised his expectations when he discovered how complicated the GrandAd product was. Our competitors could undercut us on price on the hardware, and there was not much that we could do about it. The key to selling was almost always our willingness to customize the system for the prospective client. The idea of setting up a network of sales agents seemed unworkable to me. If I could not deal with the people personally, how could I assess what changes were necessary and feasible?
We gave Michael room to be creative in his approaches, but I was not ready to discuss how to celebrate sales generated by imaginary salesmen.
9.5 rounded up.
Terri Provost left the company shortly after Michael was hired. Michael interviewed and hired Linda Fieldhouse to take her place as administrative assistant/bookkeeper. Both of them are described here. Michael assured me that Linda was “at least a nine and a half.”
I am pretty sure that Michael and I went on a couple of ad agency sales calls together. I remember driving up to Vermont with someone—it probably was Michael. When I got out of the car I realized that I was wearing the pants for my pin-stripe suit with my blue blazer. We did not get the sale, but I don’t think that my fashion faux pas was the cause. Vermont is not known for haute couture.
I also remember that Michael accompanied me to Keiler Advertising once. Evidently he had once dated Shelly, who at that time was in charge of bookkeeping there. Michael was very embarrassed by the incident. I did not ask him for historical details.
I don’t remember him closing sales of any new GrandAd clients.
We took Amtrak from Hartford’s Union Station to NYC.
Michael also came to New York City with me for at least one very important presentation to Macy’s in 1988. He was almost a hero, as is described here.
Michael invited Sue and me to supper one evening at his house in Farmington. We got to meet his wife and kids. It was a very nice house, but I don’t remember any details.
I am sorry to report that Michael was at the center of TSI’s first great crisis, which is described here.
I ran into Michael at Bradley International one day in late 1988. He told me that he was working for a company that sold advertising software to magazines. I told him that Macy’s had finally signed the contract, that I had been working my tail off to get all the software written and installed, and that TSI would send him his commission check as soon as we got the final check from Macy’s. There did not seem to be any hard feelings.
For a couple of years TSI muddled along without a salesman and with very little effort at marketing. Those were very difficult years in a number of ways. By the spring of 1991 the AdDept system had two pretty substantial accounts, and we felt that it was time to start marketing it seriously nationwide.
Meanwhile, our ad agency clients seemed perfectly content with their current hardware and showed no interest in converting to the AS/400, the system that IBM had introduced in 1988. It is described here.
We hired a young man named Tom Moran to help with marketing. He was a very nice guy, but he knew next to nothing about computers, advertising, retail, or, for that matter, marketing. He was definitely eager to learn, and he was willing to follow up on leads, which was the most important thing. Plus, both Sue and I liked him.
I remember going on two trips with Tom. The first was for a meeting with Hecht’s in Arlington, VA. Sue, Tom, and I drove down to the Washington area. A Motel 6 on the Maryland side of DC kept the light on for us, and I am happy to report that no murders were committed (or at least none reported) there that night. It was the first and last time that I stayed at a Motel 6.
The three of us met with Barbara Shane Jackson, who was in charge of Hecht’s patchwork PC system and her boss, the advertising director, whose name I don’t remember. Tom did not contribute much, but it was a good meeting on the whole. In the end we got the Hecht’s account.
The RAC was held at the Hilton in downtown Chicago.
Tom and I also attended RAC, the Retail Advertising Conference, in Chicago. It was a huge pain to get everything prepared for our booth there. We had to rent an AS/400 from IBM and to hire union employees to set everything up. Nevertheless, we did manage to get our demo computer system working by the time that the attendees came to visit the vendor area.
Some vendors who were familiar to us were there. Camex, the company from Boston that specialized in programming and selling heavy-duty Sun workstations for the production of ads, had an exhibit that was ten times as large as ours and had a dozen or more people. Tapscan, the broadcast software company. was right across the aisle from our booth. One young lady who worked there must have accidentally left her skirt at home. It appeared that over her black pantyhose and high heels, she was wearing a wash cloth that she purloined from her hotel room.
Most of the conventioneers were drunk or at least tipsy by the time that they reached our area. We made one contact with the ad director of Hess’s, a department store chain with headquarters in Pennsylvania. Tom gave him a copy of our sales materials and got all of his contact information. Unfortunately, almost as soon as we had begun correspondence with him, Hess’s was acquired by another retailer, and his position was eliminated.
The convention would have been a complete fiasco except for two things. The first was that I got to introduce Tom to the indescribable pleasure of Italian beef sandwiches purchased from street vendors in the Windy City.
The other redeeming event was the appointment that I had made to do a demo at the convention for Val Walser, the Director of the Advertising Business Office at The Bon Marché, a department store chain in the northwest. The programs worked without a hitch, and she was very impressed with what the system could do. She even invited us out to Seattle for a presentation to the relevant parties at the IBM office there.
Tom accompanied me on that trip, too. Our plane landed in Seattle very late, well after midnight. We checked into our hotel, but we only managed to get a couple of hours sleep. We went to the IBM office, where I checked that all of the software was working correctly. By this time I had been chain-drinking coffee for several hours, and still I felt very sleepy. This was an important presentation, and I had to be at my best.
The demo seemed to go pretty well. Everyone was attentive. The people from the IT department were asking tough questions, which usually boded well for us. I was so tired that I could barely concentrate. As we were putting away our materials I realized that I had been drinking decaffeinated coffee all day.
Nevertheless, I convinced Val and the other important parties. We put together a hardware and software proposal, and they submitted a requisition to the IT department, which also approved it. However, the powers that be at Federated Department Stores1, the mother ship, vetoed it.
This episode taught me that TSI needed someone who could navigate his way through the bureaucratic structure to find out what the hold-up was. Tom was not ready for this kind of responsibility. In the end, we decided that we could not afford someone who just tagged along for demos. In fact, we were really in the position where we could not afford anything.
Fortunately, we were able to use the Hecht’s installation as an entrée into the May Company, which at the time had about ten divisions. Not long after that I persuaded Foley’s in Houston to install the system, too. I also convinced Neiman Marcus in Dallas to get the system.
A grainy photo of Doug in an airport.
Those sales gave TSI both a solid base of accounts and enough revenue that we again looked for a marketing person in 1993. We found what we were looking for in Doug Pease, who had actually worked in the advertising department at G. Fox, the local May Company chain.
At first I had hoped that Doug could do some of the demos, but I soon gave up on that idea. I knew exactly what the system did, what it could potentially do, and what was beyond us. The programmers were generating a lot of code every week, and so these lists were in a constant state of flux. Besides, I had a great deal of experience at public speaking, and Doug did not. I don’t think that I would ever have trusted anyone with the demos.
Doug was a real bulldog once he had a hot lead. He was extremely good at following up on everything. In his first year we closed extremely profitable sales to Lord & Taylor, Filene’s Basement, and Michaels Stores.
Susan Sikorski
In April of 1994 I received an email from a woman named Susan Sikorski, who worked at Ross Roy Communications, Inc. in Bloomfield Hills, MI. The company at the time had eight hundred employees (!) and seven satellite offices. They wanted a production billing system that would feed their Software 2000 accounting system and some internally developed applications.
A few years earlier I would have considered this opportunity a godsend. We had already written interfaces for Software 2000 accounting systems for two AdDept clients. We loved to do interfaces, and the more complicated they were the better. However, we were so busy with programming for clients that Doug had landed that this was my response:
Unfortunately, as I looked over your package, I realized that our system does not really measure up to your requirements. We would have to make very substantial modifications to meet even the minimal requirements. Since we specialize in custom programming, this would not ordinarily be a great issue to us, but at this time we would not even be able to schedule the work for many months. So, I guess that we will have to mass.
And it was almost certainly a good thing that I was forced to make that decision. In 1995 Ross Roy Communications was purchased by the mega-agency called Omnicom Group. If TSI had been chosen for the project, I strongly suspect that the plug would have been pulled on it before the system became fully operational. Susan found a new job at Volkswagen in 1996.
Meanwhile, in the next few years Doug managed to get TSI’s AdDept system into all of the remaining May Company divisions, as well as Elder-Beerman, the Bon-Ton, Stage Stores, two Tandy divisions, Gottschalks in California, and all but one of the five divisions of Proffitt’s Inc., which later became Saks Inc..
Doug and I took many sales trips together. The most memorable one was in December of 1997 to Honolulu to pitch Liberty House3, the largest retailer on the islands.
Doug using a client’s AS/400 for something.
We had a little free time while we were there. Doug and I used it to climb to the top of Diamond Head together. He was an enthusiastic mountain biker, he had been a soccer player in college, and he was quite a bit younger than I was. I was in pretty good shape from jogging. So, neither of us held up the other.
Sue accompanied us to Honolulu, and after Doug returned home, she and I had a great time on four different islands, as is described here.
The other trip that was the most memorable for me was when we flew to Fresno, CA, to pitch Gottschalks, a chain of department stores in the central valley.
In those days you could save a lot of money by flying on Saturday rather than Sunday—more than enough to pay for a day’s food and lodging and a car rental. Doug and I considered going to Yosemite on our free day, but there was a problem with the roads there. Instead we decided to drive along the coastal highway from north to south to maximize our views of the coastline.
Somebody else’s photo.
I did not have a camera, but Doug did. His was a real camera of some sort. I was not yet into photography, and I had not brought a disposable camera on the trip. Doug took lots of photos. In fact, he ran out of film. When we stopped for lunch he bought some more film.
Doug took a lot more photos on the rest of the journey, or so he thought. When we got to Fresno he discovered that he had no photos at all after lunch. I don’t remember whether he forgot to load the camera after he took out the film. Maybe he did not wind it, or there was a technical problem. That was not the worst of it. He also somehow lost the first roll of film when we stopped for lunch, and it also contained the photos of his newborn child taken before we left.
But, hey, we got the account.
I guess that Doug is unloading new equipment in Enfield.
Doug and I almost never disagreed about what the company should be doing. However, near the end of his tenure he came up with an idea that I just could not sanction. He wanted us to start a new line of business in which we contracted for large chunks of advertising space from newspapers at a discount and then resold it to small businesses at a profit. Maybe he could have sold a lot of space; maybe he couldn’t. In any case such an undertaking would leverage no TSI products or services and none of the skills that the rest of us possessed. In short, he was asking me to backstop a new source of revenue for him. I declined to do so.
Doug and I made a great team. I gathered specs and did the demos. He attended, met the players, and subsequently followed up on everything. When the prospect had signed the contract, he made sure that all the i’s were dotted and the t’s crossed and ordered the hardware if they bought from TSI or a business partner.4 By 1999 we had more work than the programmers and I could handle. I told him to stop selling new software systems until the programming backlog could be reduced to a more manageable level, which would not be for at least a year. He made the imminently reasonable decision to look for another job.
After TSI moved to East Windsor in late 1999, we hired one more AdDept salesman, Jim Lowe. His previous experience was with a company that marketed hard cider. The challenge was to get retailers to give them adequate shelf space. It was retail experience, but not exactly the kind that we had dealt with.
Jim was a smart guy, and he could have been a good salesman for us. We went on a trip together to Wherehouse Music in Torrance, CA. Wherehouse was a large chain of music stores in California. Jim and I stayed in a nearby Holiday Inn the first night. We used MapQuest to find to the Wherehouse headquarters the next morning. At the very first turn MapQuest advised us to turn right. This seemed wrong to me, and I turned left instead. We reached the building in less than ten minutes. I don’t know when we would have arrived if I had turned right.
It was a very strange meeting. Rusty Hansen, whom I knew from Robinsons-May, had told them about us. We never got to meet with him or anyone else who seemed to know what they wanted. We did get to meet the president of the company, who was wearing jeans and a tee shirt. I never did figure out what this whole episode was about. The company went out of business within a couple of years.
Jim only worked for us for a few months. He took an offer that was very similar to his old job. Before he left he helped me with a mailing that produced some good leads. I sold the last few AdDept systems to some of those retailers by myself.
Jim’s advice to me when he left was that TSI should concentrate on AxN, which is described here. I don’t think that he ever really understood that the horse must precede the cart. We needed retailers to be sending us insertion orders in order to be able to send them to newspapers.
Bob in Denise’s office.
Bob Wroblewski was, as I recall, a relative of Denise’s husband. In November of 2003 Denise came up with the idea of paying Bob to get the newspapers signed up.
I got to know Bob on a trip taken by the two of us to California to persuade Rob-May and Gottschalks to use AxN. We both misjudged how well the two demos went. The people at Gottschalks seemed excited; Rob-May was somewhat cool. However, Rob-May soon came around, and I never did persuade Stephanie at Gottschalks to use AxN.
Here is how the marketing process worked. After a retailer’s advertising department that scheduled its newspaper ads in AdDept agreed to use AxN for insertion orders, it provided us with a list of its newspapers with contact information. I wrote a letter to each paper asking them to subscribe to the service. The letter was printed on the retailer’s letterhead and was signed by the advertising director or ROP manager at the newspaper. However, it was sent by us along with a contract that I had signed. The monthly rate was approximately what the newspaper charged for one column inch in one issue. This was a negligible fraction of what the advertiser spent. Then Bob called each one and persuaded them to sign up.
I don’t know (and I don’t want to know) what Bob said to the papers, but he had a very high success rate. He also earned quite a bit for himself in commissions. At one time we had over four hundred newspapers that subscribed for the service!
Bob’s wife died while he was still working with us. I drove to Providence, which is where he lived, for the wake.
1. Federated Department Stores owned many large chains that were all very promising potential AdDept clients. The rejection of The Bon Marché’s request may have been a blessing in disguise. In January of 1990, shortly after this meeting, Federated filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. It could have been really ugly.
2. Susan Sikorski is apparently working as a consultant for Avaya in 2021. She is featured as a graduate of Wayne State on this webpage.
3. We learned later that the advertising department at Liberty House had approved the purchase of the AdDept system, but the order was never placed because in March of 1998 Liberty House filed for Chapter 11, and the funds for new systems were frozen.
4. TSI was throughout its existence a certified member of IBM’s Business Partner program. However, because of the size of the company we were bit allowed to sell IBM hardware directly. Instead, we needed to pair up with a “managing Business Partner” who actually could place orders. We dealt extensively with several of these companies—Rich Baran, BPS, Savoir, and Avnet. There may have been others.
