2024 Bridge: Sectional Tournaments

Posted on March 6, 2024 by Mike

Johnston Sectional in March: In January of 2024 Abhi Dutta asked me to play with him at the Rhode Island sectional tournament scheduled for March 2-3. I could not play on Saturday because it was my wife Sue’s birthday, but I agreed to play in the Swiss on Sunday. Abhi was out of town for most of the month of February, but he contacted me late in the month to report that he had acquired teammates. In Johnston I learned that our teammates were the DiOrios, Lou and Megan. I had worked with Megan on the committee for the NABC event in Providence in 2022 (introduced here), and I had played on a team with Lou some time before that.

I was not sanguine about our chances. The partnership of Abhi and me had really recorded only one good result (described here), and that was nineteen months earlier. Our more recent games were not memorable. I also did not remember great successes recorded for either Lou or Megan. The fact that we drew #13 did not raise my hopes, although I always remind people that for Wilt Chamberlain that number was reportedly lucky 20,000 times.²

In the first round Abhi and I played against Al Votolato and someone whom I did not know. The very first hand was weird. Al’s partner opened 1♦ in the second seat; Abhi passed; Al responded 1♠; I passed, and so did Al’s partner! Abhi made the mistake of doubling, which gave Al a chance to bid 2♦, which was the final contract. I asked Al if they had an agreement that allowed his partner to pass his response. He said that he was as surprised as I was. His partner at first defended his pass, but when he understood the situation he said that he did not realize that he had passed.

In the end, even though they were an A team, and we were a B team, we defeated them 29-0, which was a “blitz” that converted to the maximum victory point score of 20. We scored at least one imp on six of the seven hands, and the seventh hand was a push.

In the second round we played another A team, Dan Jablonski and Cilla Borras. They were both very good players whom I had played against several times. I made a horrible mistake in playing a 5♣ contract that Abhi put me in. For some reason I thought that we had nine trumps, not eight. I was therefore quite confident of making the bid when I dropped Dan’s queen on the second round of trumps. A little later, however, I mistakenly led a low diamond from the board. Cilla, who was on my right, ruffed it, and I underruffed even though I had a diamond! I took the requisite eleven tricks, but I was penalized one trick for revoking. Abhi insisted that he warned me when I did it.¹

This faux pas cost us 11 imps. We would have lost the match anyway, but our running total of victory points was four fewer—21 as opposed to 25. This was not all bad because we got to play a much weaker B team in the third round, and we beat them 31-0—another blitz.

In the last round before lunch we played a much better B team, Mike McDonald and Tom Floyd. We beat them by 12 imps. At the break we had amassed 56 out of a possible 80 victory points. That was good enough for second place.

I had ordered a salad for lunch. I ate about half of it as well as a bag of chips and a Diet Coke. I sat by myself. I don’t know where my teammates went.

In the fifth round we played the team that was in first place. It included Sheila Gabay and Alan Watson, who had won both sessions of the pairs game on Saturday. The foursome had blitzed both of their last two opponents. Abhi and I played against another very fine pair, Max Siline and Carrie Liu. On the first hand I made 3NT, and our Sheila and Alan had a misunderstanding in their bidding. That was enough for a ten-imp swing, but we would have won the match anyway. The final score was 30-13. Abhi and I had no negative scores at all. I was wondering if it were possible to lose with no negative scores (Yes!), and I was worried that I would find out. I had played against Sheila’s teams at least six or seven times, and I had never won before.

I thought that I played pretty well in the sixth round, but we lost by 16 points to a very good B team. It seemed to me that most of the problems were at the other table. I was most proud of the fact that two of our twelve imps came from when I passed in the fourth seat.

In the last round we played against people whom I did not know. I again passed in the fourth seat, and this time it was worth five imps. Since our margin of victory in this match was only nine imps, I was very surprised to learn that we had won the event by two victory points over both the Siline team and the team from the Hartford Bridge Club (HBC)—Tom Gerchman, Linda Starr, and Bob and Ann Hughes. I was still in a foul mood because at the very end of the last hand Abhi had trumped a trick that I would have won anyway. That mistake cost us six imps, which would have given us two additional victory points. Even so, we brought home 7.15 silver masterpoints.

I did not receive much satisfaction from this result. I had made one huge and embarrassing mistake, and Abhi had made several smaller ones. However, out teammates were very excited about winning. They even asked Tom Gerchman (of all people) to take a photo of the four of us with a cellphone. He had a great deal of difficulty with the assignment.

Was our victory a fluke? I thought so at the time, but after examine the results, I am more inclined to think that we were the best team that day with that set of cards in a fairly weak field. We played all but one of the top teams. We never played against a C team. We beat the top-seeded team decisively in our match with them. We could easily have had quite a few more victory points than we did.

I still had a ninety-minute drive ahead of me. The traffic was slow, and for the first half hour the sun was really brutal even though I had on sunglasses and pulled down the visor as low as I could get it. The high temperature that day was 67 degrees.

On the way home I stopped at Big Y in Stafford and bought a cake for Sue. I should have done it so she could have enjoyed a piece on her birthday, but this was much better than nothing.

St. Patrick’s Day Sectional in Orange, CT: Bill Segraves did a tremendous job of setting up and running this tournament, which occurred the weekend of March 15-17. I am glad that he took the job of president. I would not have had the energy to pull something like this off. The date was the best that could be arranged, but it conflicted with the first weekend of the NABC spring tournament in Louisville. So, undoubtedly some of the best players could be expected to be at that event. That date also meant that it might be difficult to find a director. Robert Neuhart from Troy, NY, was hired. I had no previous familiarity with him.

The design and promotion of this tournament was much better than what was done for the previous ones. I thought that the St. Patrick’s Day theme, which I in fact suggested, was a little overdone, but people seemed to be having fun with it. I planned on wearing on Sunday my bright green sweater that my dad bought in Ireland. Before play started Bill paraded around in a hooded green jumpsuit and a green mask. To goose the Sunday attendance the games on Sunday were designated to support the Grass Roots fund.

A decision was made to increase the masterpoint limit for the Friday and Saturday limited pairs games to 750 masterpoints, but only non-Life Masters were allowed to play. This turned out to be a good decision. The limited games, which had been a problem, were pretty well attended throughout.

I decided to play all three days. Eric Vogel agreed to play with me in the pairs games on Friday and Saturday. I had difficulty finding a suitable partner and teammates for the Sunday Swiss. I sent out a solicitation to my usual list of potential partners, but the only responses that I received were from Buz Kohn, Joan Brault, and Terry Lubman. Terry said that she was still in Florida. Buz was the first to respond positively, but he backed out shortly thereafter. So, I agreed to play with Joan. No one expressed any interest in teaming up with us. So, I sent a request to the email address for partnerships that was on the flyer. Bill replied with an email that indicated that he would find someone. He eventually assigned us to play with Ivan Smirnov from Staten Island and Joe Lanzel from Foxborough, MA. I told Ivan that I would be wearing a bright green sweater with “Ireland” on the chest.

I commuted all three days by myself. Each trip to Orange took a little over an hour, but that included my usual stop at the McDonald’s in Cromwell to purchase a sausage biscuit with egg sandwich. The price at the McD at the end of the ramp for Exit 21 charged a dime less than the one in Hartford. However, the man taking the order on Sunday entered it as “sausage biscuit, add folded egg.” The cost was almost $1 less.

I left each day at about 8:25 and arrived at 9:30. The traffic was heavier on Friday, but it did not really slow me down. A strange thing happened with my car in the mornings. I was accustomed to turning on the front window defogger on cold days. This heated up the car on Saturday, but on Sunday it blew nothing but cold air.⁴

The return trips were as uneventful as the morning drives, except for the Sunday evening drive. The line of cars backed up on the parkway at the exit that led to I-91 north was more than a mile long. It took me more than ninety minutes to complete that trip.

I decided to wear a mask throughout the tournament. Almost no one except Bill and Frank Blachowski wore one.

Since I arrived on Friday morning before Eric did, I got in line to buy our entry fee. For some reason the director did not allow purchasing of both sessions. I charged the first session. Eric later bought the afternoon session. There was no problem with the transactions on Friday and Saturday. However, the computer connection with the card reading device did not work on Sunday. and so everyone had to pay in cash. I was the customer for whom the malfunction first was discovered. I don’t know if the problem was ever fixed.

The first thing that I noticed about the pairs games on Friday was that Peter Marcus was in attendance and was actually playing with Bill Segraves to fill out the movement. I had seen him at many tournaments, but I had only seen him play bridge once, and that was at the HBC.

The second peculiarity was that there were no clocks to keep track of the time remaining in each round. I cannot remember ever playing in a tournament in which there were no clocks. I never heard why this was the case in Orange. Perhaps the unit has depended on the directors to bring them.

Once play began it was pretty evident that, although the attendance was good (seventeen tables), the field was not as strong as it usually was. That was definitely reflected in the results. Eric and I were in first place after six rounds, but in the last round we were passed by a C team from the HBC, John Lloyd and Donna Simpson. We still won 5.84 points. I did not think that we played particularly well.

Eric and I had two egregious bidding mistakes in the morning session, but only one of them hurt us. Eric had apparently not reviewed our card thoroughly enough.

On one hand we were on defense after I had opened 1♠. I led the ace and then the queen. Eric ruffed it. After the hand I explained that when I led ace and then queen of a suit that I had bid, it meant that I also had the king. He asked why I didn’t just lead the king after the ace. I said that if I did, he would not know that I also had the queen.

Our level of play did not diminish in the afternoon, but our results dropped off a lot. I did not circle a single hand on the scorecard. We finished above 50 percent, but we did not make the overalls, and so we did not get any points.

We actually played better on Saturday. We earned over 9.37 masterpoints over the course of two days. That was not close to Rich DeMartino’s total. He won all three pairs games in which he participated.

We might have gone over the ten-point mark if Eric had not made an uncharacteristic blunder near the end. Acting as declarer, he intended to set up a cross-ruff for the last three tricks, but he discarded the wrong card from his hand. That left him with a heart and two trumps in both hands.

A strange situation occurred on Saturday. The opponent on my right was about to declare a hand. His partner was in the act of setting down the dummy when he accidentally dropped most of his cards on the floor. I did not look, but he said that some were face-up. He said that he was not able to get down on his knees to pick them up, and therefore he called the director, who was also not very spry. I volunteered to put my lead on the table and gather together the cards, but the director insisted on doing it himself.

Eric and I bid a slam in spades after he had opened 2♣. He had hearts and spades. We decided to change our response to the 2♠ follow-up so that the relay to 2NT could be broken if responder had spade support. This eliminated the ambiguity of the sequence 2♣-22♦-2♠-2NT-32♥-4♠. Previously it could have meant signing off in spades or Kickback for hearts.

Ordering lunch was embarrassing. I only wrote the six letters of my last name, but on both occasions the result was almost unreadable.

By the way, both lunches were good. The only problem with Friday’s salad with lots of meat and cheese on Friday was that the only beverage available was a small bottle of water. The sandwich on Saturday was even meatier. This caterer also brought cans of soft drinks. There were only two Diet Cokes, but I managed to claim one. The pizza on Sunday was OK, but the pairs game was still in process when the ninety-six people playing in the Swiss went to lunch. Usually there is enough pizza for seconds, but by the time that the pairs players ate, the teams were back in combat.

Our first round was against Debbie Prince’s team. We won by seven. In the second round we were blasted by 26 imps by a very good team. Joan and I thought that we had more or less held our own, but no hands showed positive results. Our teammates failed to set a 4♠ contract that I could see no way to make. They also bid an impossible slam that got doubled. We won the third round by 13 imps over a C team.

After lunch we played Mike Heider’s team. The results on two 3NT contracts startled me. On one I went down, and they made it at the other table. On the other they made it at our table with two overtricks, but our teammates did not even make the bid. In the fifth round we faced the team from the HBC that had done well in Johnston. Joan and I played against Ann and Bob Hughes. We thought that we had done pretty well, but we were worried about one hand on which we bid 3♠ but made 4. In reality, that hand was our only positive result in an extremely painful 17-imp loss.

Halfway through the sixth round against a team that obviously was over its head I lost interest and started playing badly. Nevertheless, we won the last two matches by 21 and 5 points to finish with four wins and 70 victory points—exactly average.

Our worst hand all day was the last one. We were playing Cappelletti, the only notrump defense that Joan will play. Cindy Lyall, sitting West, opened 1NT, and Joan doubled for penalty. I had a flat hand with only one honor, a queen. Cindy ended up making 3NT for 380 points. It would have been better for them to bid and make 3NT, but at the other table Joe went down in 1NT. Since I did nothing except follow suit and discard the four spot cards in hearts that I was dealt, I have no way to know whether Joan’s defense or Joe’s declarer play was more to blame for this fiasco.

Shekhar and Shashank won the afternoon session of the 0-750 pairs! They won almost three silver points in their first day at a tournament.

The attendance at the tournament was good through the entire weekend. That proved to me that good planning, good marketing, and a good schedule are still the keys to successful attendance in the world of tournament bridge.

Summer on the Sound Sectional in Stamford, CT: The tournament was held at the Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church on August 9-11. No one asked me to play, and it is a very long drive for me. So, I did not attend. The attendance was good: 57 tables on Friday, 50.5 on Saturday, and 52.5 on Sunday.

I heard from Mike Heider that they ordered far too many pizzas on Sunday. He said that at least a dozen boxes of them were being given away at the end of the tournament.

Western Mass Championships in Great Barrington, MA; The annual tournament in Great Barrington, MA, began on my 76th birthday. I had played with Abhi Dutta in this event in both 2022 and 2023. Our teammates in the Sunday Swiss in those events were Mike Heider and Jim Osofsky. They also agreed to team up in 2024.

The weather forecast was for some rain on Saturday night and Sunday because of Hurricane Ernesto, which was in the Atlantic Ocean heading northeast. It was not expected to land, but locations near the ocean had really been deluged.

On Saturday morning the weather was clear. I took the Mass Pike to Lee and then drove south to GB. I stopped at the McDonald’s near the Berkshire South Regional Community Center that hosted the tournament every year. The event was being held in the gymnasium. I remembered from previous years that it was somewhat cold in there at times, and so I brought my nylon windbreaker, even though it has picked up a few bullet holes over the years.

Tables and chairs replaced the exercise equipment.

When I arrived in the gym I found a table near the back of the building and ate my sandwich while wearing my jacket. The director, Tim Hill, began selling entries a little after I arrived. By the time that I finished the sandwich the line for purchasing entries was pretty long. I had nothing better to do, and so I got in line. The entries cost $15 per session, and the credit card reader was working. I bought both entries for Saturday and let Abhi buy the Sunday entry. We started as E-W at table V5, which happened to be the same table at which I ate breakfast.

I accidentally sat in the East chair. I almost never play East. Perhaps I should have switched as soon as I noticed it.

Before the event started Mike Ramella conducted some sort of raffle. The acoustics in the gym were deplorable, and very few people were able to understand anything that he said. A woman also gave a presentation promoting some kind of show. She carried a poster about it. I couldn’t understand what she said either.

In the morning there were two sections in the open pairs and one five-table Howell in the 299er pairs. There were 21.5 pairs in the open.

The morning session was chaotic. Somehow the BridgeMates got fouled up, and the results (and player numbers) for the first few rounds were lost.

For some reason Abhi and I made games when we bid partials and slams when we bid games. Our opponents made mistake, but they always seemed to end in the right spot.

Abhi failed to take advantage of a once-in-a lifetime situation on hand #6: I opened a strong 1NT, and he had a hand with seven hearts and only four losers. After trying Stayman (because he also had four good spades), Abhi jumped to 4♥, which I passed after mulling over what in the world had possessed him. He easily made 6♥.

I could not immediately concoct a “scientific” bidding sequence that could find the slam. On Sunday morning I wrote up a better sequence that had him start with a transfer and then used cue bidding. At the end he would jump to 5♦ or 5♥ and leave the final decision to me. Because I had prime values, I would have certainly bid the slam.

I did not even check the results for the first round. I was sure that we were in the forties, which would be a miserable score. We had correctly been placed in the A strat. Most of the players in attendance had much less experience than I did.

I only enjoyed two moments. The first was when we had time after the against Debbie Prince and Janice Bazzini, whom I knew from the HBC. Debbie remarked that she could not come to the Simsbury Bridge Club games because her book club met on Wednesday evenings. I asked her if she had ever heard of John Banville. She said that she had not, but she wrote down his name. On Sunday I brought two of his books to loan her, but the two ladies did not play on Sunday.

The other good moment was also at the end of a round. Elizabeth Gompels, who lived in Cambridge, whom Abhi knew much better than I did, thanked me for all that I had done for bridge in New England. I told her that I no long did the emails or website. I also told her that all my pages on the website had been deleted. She was duly sympathetic to my frustration.

The sandwiches at lunch were tiny but tasty. I had tuna. They also provided chips, soda, and dessert. The previous lunches that I had had at this tournament were not to my liking, and I do not have high standards.

The afternoon session was much better. The only embarrassment was when Abhi forgot what defense we were playing against a weak 1NT opening. The opponents, Al Votolato and Grace Charron, asked what Abhi’s double meant. I said that he had a strong hand with at least fourteen points. Actually, he had a long suit and a mediocre hand.

The 299er pairs game had too few participants. Those people had to play in the open pairs, which had 24 tables in two sections. We placed fourth in our section, which earned us .84 masterpoints.

The drive back to Enfield was uneventful. Sue heated up some leftover pork chops. We watched Person of Interest and Raising Hope together.

Patty Tucker and Robert Minter have published books on Kickback.

The weather was still dry when I left on Sunday morning. I arrived at the gym and almost immediately saw Judy Hyde, with whom I planned to play in the regional tournament in Warwick a few weeks later. We sat together for a few minutes. I briefly explained the Minorwood, Redwood, and Kickback⁵ versions of Roman Key Card Blackwood to her. She then had to rush off to talk with her partner for that day, Philippe Galaski.

When Abhi arrived, I went over Hand #6 (above) with him as well as two somewhat obscure variations on the Stayman convention.

In the first round we faced Mike Ramella’s team. I thought that we had won easily, but I did not realize that Abhi had been conservative with an eight-card club suit, which caused us to miss another game. In addition, our teammates had a serious bidding misunderstanding. We ended up losing by four IMPs. We then defeated two C-strat teams, but only by nine IMPs and 1 IMP respectively.

The lunch was rather strange. They only allowed people to take one piece of pizza, and they only offered two choices—vegetarian and pepperoni. Chips, soda, and home-made desserts were available. I ordinarily avoided dessert, but on this occasion I ate two cookies because of the limit on pizza.

Our team ate together. One of the topics of conversation was obsession with results. Jim related how one of his previous teammates, Bunny Kliman, used to run (I doubt that!) around announcing how many matchpoints the team had won by multiplying the number of victories times the match award. I insisted that I did not even want to know the value of the match award because it distracted from the actual goal, which was always to finish high in the overall results.

Jim and Abhi went somewhere, which provided me with a chance to chat with Mike. He was wearing his famous tee shirt, which was emblazoned with a drawing of a dog and the words “In dog years I’m dead.” He had worn this to every Sunday Swiss event for many years, but the lettering was not very faded. When I asked him if the one he was wearing was the original, he said it was the second one. I then inquired if he washed it. He answered in the affirmative, and then quickly corrected his answer to “My wife washes it.”

I responded, “You really mean that she tells you that she washes it. She probably just throws it in the dryer, folds it, and gives it to you.”

That led to a discussion of getting old. I told him about my baseball cap with the text “It’s weird being the same age as old people.” I then mentioned my favorite saying was “Women my age are very old.” That always got a reaction.

A big smile appeared on his face as he said, “It’s true.” I had not seen that smile for some time. He had been experiencing health problems. They definitely affected his walking and his balance, and I suspected that they also affected his bridge game. I was very glad to see him smile.

In the first round after lunch we lost by thirteen IMPs to a B team that Abhi and I did not think was very good. The scores that Mike and Jim produced were discouragingly bad. At that point we were in tenth place overall, which was terrible for an A team. Jim said to me privately “Remember what you said about the match awards.”

As it turned out, losing that round was a blessing in disguise. The all-star team captained by Judy Hyde had been mowing down every opponent. The team that we lost to in the fourth round was one of their victims in the afternoon. Our low standing meant never had to play them. At the end Judy’s team had the remarkable total of 122 victory points out of a possible 140.

The back side of our scoresheet showed us scoring a six-IMP victory over an A team followed by a resounding twenty-five point win over a B team. That gave us a total of 70 victory points after six rounds, which tied us with the team from the Hartford Bridge Club—Tom Gerchman, Ben Levine, and Ken and Lori Leopold. We played them in the final round. Abhi and I played against Tom and Ben.

As luck would have it, the match came down to the last hand. Ben opened the bidding with 2♠, a preemptive bid that showed a relatively weak hand with six spades. After Abhi passed, Tm made the unusual bid of 4♥. I passed. Ben thought for a while and then bid 4♠. After Abhi passed, Tom bid 5♥, and that was the final contract.

When I led the ♣Q, Tom scoffed and said to Ben, “I know that you are void; that is why I jumped to 4♥ to show you I had a self sufficient hand.” He was obviously disgusted that he was now forced to take eleven tricks. It was generally considered a good idea for a person who made a preemptive bid to refrain from bidding thereafter.

In fact, Ben had two hearts, six spades headed by the AKQ, two diamonds, and three clubs. Tom called for a low club. Abhi and Tom also played low clubs. So, I surprisingly won the trick. I wondered why both Abhi and Tom let me win it. Abhi’s was the ♣6. I could see every club lower than the 6. We were playing standard carding. His signal clearly indicated that he did NOT want me to lead another club. Unfortunately, I could not figure out what he did want me to lead. I settled for a trump. I was afraid that a switch to diamonds would finesse give declarer a free trick.

I learned later that Abhi had both the ace and king of clubs, but his only other club was the 6. He was quite upset with me for not continuing clubs. He asked, “What possible reason could there be for not continuing clubs?” I reminded him that he clearly signaled that he did not want me to continue, and at trick one in such a weird auction I did not know what to do. I did not mention it, but he obviously should have overtaken my queen, and led clubs himself. Evidently this never occurred to him.

So, long story short. Tom took his eleven tricks. Abhi was beside himself.

Short story a little longer: At the other table the bidding was the same, except that Mike passed 4♥, and Ken doubled. Lori, holding my hand, was on lead. She led a spade. This allowed Jim to take twelve tricks. We won eight IMPs on that hand and won the match by six.

This vaulted us into third place overall, which was precisely the same result, earned in an eerily similar fashion, as what occurred the previous year (described here).

The weather both days featured pleasant temperatures, but the sun was never visible because of clouds and particulates that had been generated by forest fires in Canada.

The drive home after winning the last round of a Swiss is almost always pleasant. This was no exception. However, just before I reached Westfield, MA, the traffic in both lanes slowed down to only 35 mph, which is less than half the usual pace. As I got closer to I-91, the traffic thinned a little, but it began raining. By the time that I reached Springfield, it had reached the level of a downpour. The last twenty minutes of the trip was not pleasant. It was well before sunset, but the sky was dark enough, and the rain was heavy enough to make it somewhat dangerous.

Oxford received a once-in-a-thousand-years rainfall.

Sue had spent the day at the Davis family reunion. She heated up some leftovers for both of us. I ate mine while watching Reacher and Endeavour. She made a plate for herself, but she was so tired that she fell asleep in her chair without touching her food.

I later learned that southern Connecticut had experienced severe storms all day long on Sunday. Oxford received more than sixteen inches of rain in one day!

Fall Sectional in Johnston, RI: At some point in August Abhi asked me too play with him at the sectional tournament in Johnston, RI, scheduled for September 21-22. He was looking for a partner for Saturday and for teammates on Sunday. Knowing that I would be missing on two consecutive occasions my standing game with Peter Katz at the HBC, I declined the invitation for Saturday. I asked a new partner, John Lloyd (introduced here), to play with me on Sunday. We worked out a convention card and arranged to meet at 8am at the Park & Ride at Exit 70 on I-84. He would be coming from Avon, CT. I would drive down Route 32 from Stafford.

John had recently purchased a white Audi that he was quite proud of. So, he drove from the parking lot to Johnston. As expected on a Sunday morning, the drive was quite uneventful. Since the rising sun was obscured by clouds, we were not bothered by the usual blinding rays on the predominantly eastbound journey. We talked about a few things with which John had little experience, such as defending against weak 1NT bidding and strong club systems.

When we arrived at the Johnston Senior Center at a little before 9am, I was surprised to see relatively few cars in the parking lot. In fact, only a dozen teams participated in the event. That was 20 percent fewer than the number in the March sectional described above.

Abhi arrived a little after we did. He introduced us to his partner, Vipin Mayar, who had about 170 masterpoints. So, I had more masterpoints than the rest of the team combined. We were in the B stratum, which contained five teams.

We played eight rounds of six boards each. I would have preferred to play six rounds of eight boards. It probably would have gone a little faster and minimized the number of mismatches in the late rounds.

We narrowly lost our first match to another B team from Rhode Island. We then won a close match against a team of HBC players, the Leopolds, Rob Stillman, and Ronit Shoham. It would not have been close except for the fact that Abhi somehow went down three in a 5♥ contract whereas John and I defeated Ken by only one trick in 6♥. We then won two close matches against a B team and a C team. So, at lunch we were 3-1 with 42 victory points.

I can’t comment on the lunches that they sold. John and I both brought sandwiches.

We won our fifth match against the first A team that we had faced. John and I played against Sheila Gabay and Alan Watson. After we compared scores, I found it incredible that Abhi and I had defeated Sheila in both matches in 2024. I had played against her many times in Swiss matches in the previous fifteen years with absolutely no success.

In the last three rounds we were beaten badly by two other A teams, and we defeated a C team. We won five matches, but our total of only 73 victory points kept us out of the overalls. I found the afternoon session to be very tedious. I played one partial against Sheila’s team, no hands in round 6 and 8, the two rounds that we lost badly. I called such situations in which you feel powerless “playing D&D”—defense and dummy.

The drive home was not bad. My navigating instructions were basically all “Keep to the right.” I enjoyed being with John. He is serious about bridge, and he was a pretty good partner. He forgot a couple of conventions, which caused a few embarrassing moments. He asked me later for advice on how he could improve his ability to spot the situations in which they might occur. This is what I wrote to him:

One key to remembering might be to do it earlier. When you put down a pass card, and your partner has not bid yet, try to categorize your hand as garbage, possibly supporting, or invitational. Then look at your major suits and make a plan as to how you might support. Since one new convention, Drury, is part of that support process, this will allow you to put it into your memory process more often.
When you open a minor you would prefer to end up in NT or a suit. Plan ahead. If partner bids a major he is showing four pieces. If you have four, you are set. However, if you have three pieces you should immediately think about the two tools for finding a 5-3 fit. You can tell partner about your three with a support double or redouble. Partner can tell you about his five with new minor forcing. If partner does not bid a major, then you need to determine whether you should end up in NT or a minor. These require a different set of tools.
Memory improves with repetition, but the repetition need not come under fire. If you plan ahead for potential fits, you activate the right memories without necessarily deploying them.
I used Bridge Baron to learn new conventions. It provided a large number of samples or nearly every convention imaginable. Sometimes the convention was appropriate. Sometimes it wasn’t. Unfortunately, my copy disappeared at some point.

October Sectional in Orange: The CBA’s final sectional of the year was held in Orange on the weekend of October 25-27. Eric agreed to play with me in the Open Pairs, but I was unable to find a partner for the Swiss on Sunday even though two different pairs contacted me about teaming up with them. I had to decline, of course.

The tournament was both very well organized, and the attendance reflected the effort. Bill Segraves, Cornelia Guest, and others did a very good job.

At the beginning of the tournament I was in a terrible mood. I had received a very strange email from Bill on the previous Saturday:

I just stumbled upon your blog and write to express my concern about two aspects of this:
1) It would have been my thinking that CBA board members engaging in communication while acting in that capacity have a reasonable expectation that their communication is not all for public display and consumption. If that is not something you can accept and act on, then I need to bring it up to the board for discussion right away.
2) In your blog, you are presenting a particular viewpoint on various things, but it is not the only viewpoint. I don’t think you even meant to have caused hurt by some of your comments and omissions, but you have.

Of course, I did not agree that people had such an expectation, particularly when they used “reply all”. I certainly did not intend to “cause hurt”. I replied as follows:

I have never purposely done anything hurtful to anyone in my adult life. Prior to Covid there was practically no communication on the Internet among members of the CBA. If there are boundaries about this, I am unaware of them.
Let me know what you want removed. I will tend to it. I know of no one who reads my blogs regularly. I have a hard time believing that people do not want me to express my opinions. I have written over one million words in blog entries. Someone is bound to take issue with some of them.
I am very unhappy with life. I have no family or pets. The only things that I have left are bridge and writing. I already concluded that people were actively trying to take the former away from me. I am very reluctant to accept censorship about the latter.

He wanted to talk on the telephone about the situation. It was very strange and awkward conversation. He refused to provide details. He only said that he would censor himself in future communications with me. This has been my practice for thirty years; it surprised me that he would only start at that point.

On Tuesday I had learned that Peter Marcus had sent a “scathing” email to Donna Feir complaining about the HBC’s supposed supporting of my opinions or activities. She offered to let me see it, but I declined. She did show it to Eric, who was surprised, to say the least.

I inferred that he had been “hurt” by my blog entry on the ridiculous Tonto scandal. I took down the entry. I was tired of fighting. I have never been combative. When I told Bill on Friday that I had done this, he asked me if I had taken care of the “phone numbers”. I had no idea of what he was referring to. He explained that some of the photos of the “partnerships” had phone numbers on them. I should have asked for more details, but he was quite busy.

On that same day I received an email from Carolyn Weiser, the Secretary of the New England Bridge Conference, asking me to remove phone numbers and “addresses” in my blog entries. I went to several of the entries concerning my partnerships over the years, but I could find no way to display addresses or phone numbers with regard to the numerous photos.

On Saturday Bill specified that the photos were in the entry concerning the Pro-Am game (posted here) in Nashua. I discovered that two 300-pixel photos contained quite small and faint phone numbers and email addresses on index cards or Sue’s notes. I could not make out any of them when I looked at the screen, but perhaps someone could have blown the image up and enhanced the contrast. I deleted the photos and slightly modified the text. I sent an email to Carolyn saying that I had done so.

The bridge at this tournament was not memorable for me. It seemed as if our opponents were making mistakes, but Eric and I failed to bid games when we should have. We were a little below 50 percent in all four sessions. It was an extreme embarrassment.

My only strong memory is of the first round of the second day. On two consecutive hands I had no aces and no face-cards. On the third one I had only one king.

As I said, the attendance was pretty good. The open games on Friday drew 33.5 tables. The limited games had 15.5. The numbers on Saturday were 36 and 21.5. The two-session Swiss on Sunday had 23 tables, and the limited game in the morning had four.

This is still somewhat short of 2019’s results: Friday open 39; limited 27. Saturday open 38.5; limited 17. Sunday open Swiss 26; limited 6. It should be noted that the limited games in 2019 were for 299ers. The limited games for 2024 were for 499ers. Prior to Covid the CBA board never considered changing the top level of the limited game.

1. Abhi said that he warned me, and I have no reason to doubt that he did. However, if I were the dummy, and my partner did what I did, I would have announced, “Wait a minute. Are you sure that you did not have any diamonds? You underruffed!” I take great pride the fact that none of my partners has revoked in more than fifteen years.

2. In his 1991 book, A View From Above, Wilt claimed to have slept with 20,000 different women during his life.

3. In the period after the pandemic I have had trouble getting teammates from the HBC. Perhaps the problem is the timing. Some arrangements are made many months in advance; many are made at the very last minute. My efforts seem to fall in the middle.

4. I brought the car into Lia, my dealership, on Friday, March 22. They gave me a lift home in their shuttle. I had only been there a minute when they called to tell me that the heater was working perfectly. I had tried it on Tuesday and Wednesday without success. There must be more to this story.

5. Roman Key Card Blackwood asks for the number of aces plus the king of trump. The bid that starts the convention is always 4NT. Redwood and Minorwood change the first bid if the trump suit is a minor. Minorwood uses four of the trump suit, Redwood uses one suit higher. Kickback uses one suit higher than the trump suit for all trump suits.

6. Vipin’s LinkedIn page can be found here.

7. The fall sectional was traditionally held at various sites in the Hartford area. Since Covid-19 no appropriate site seemed to be available there. In 2072 Carole Amaio contacted the Portuguese Club in Newington. They were supposedly remodeling their facility. However, they stopped returning her telephone calls.

8. I was disabused in the the early nineties of the notion that my electronic communications were in any way private when dealing with Sheree Marlow Wicklund during the early days of the installation of the AdDept system (chronicled here). Sheree was our liaison, which I thought that she would act to help us keep the users happy. Instead, she forwarded all of my communications to all of the managers of areas that would be using the system. Some of my replies criticized some manager’s responses as out of bounds. This did not go over well.

1997-2006 TSI: AdDept Client: The Bon-Ton

Posted on January 30, 2022 by Mike

The Bon-Ton is where? You get there how? Continue reading →

The Bon-Ton was a chain of department stores based in York, PA. For nearly a century the company was owned and operated by the Grumbacher family. In fact, Tim Grumbacher only retired from the company’s Board of Directors in 2017. So, for 119 out of the company’s 120 years of existence members of the family were closely involved with the ownership and/or management of the company.

In the years that TSI was involved with B-T, it was expanding fairly rapidly. I am pretty sure that the original call to TSI inquiring about the AdDept system was received in 1996 or 1997 and came from Jo Harnish¹, who was the Production and Finance Manager for the advertising department at B-T. This was an extremely unusual combination of responsibilities. Ordinarily the production manager and finance manager were separate people with markedly different skills.

Doug Pease, TSI’s Marketing Director, talked with her and arranged for the two of us to come to York to make a presentation. We were surprised when they suggested that the easiest way to get to York was to fly to BWI Airport, which is south of Baltimore, MD, rent a car, and drive north for more than an hour. That’s what we did. At the time US Airways offered several nonstop flights to BWI every day.

My recollection is that the entrance was in that little alcove to the right of the Burlington Coat factory. That entire area later was transformed into a Walmart Supercenter.

The address that we were given for B-T’s corporate headquarters was 2801 E. Market St. It turned out to be in the middle of a fairly large strip mall. The door through which we entered was next to a Burlington Coat Factory outlet. There was only a very small sign on the door that indicated that the corporate offices lay within. I frankly wondered what kind of operation we were getting involved with.

I am sure that on that first trip we met with Jo and Tom Vranich², the Senior VP of advertising. I already knew Tom. My recollection is that I had talked with him briefly at the Retail Advertising Conference³ that Tom Moran and I had attended in Chicago in the early nineties. At the time Tom V. was the Advertising Director at Hess’s, a chain of department stores based in Allentown, PA.

I remember few of the details of B-T’s requirements. I seem to recall that the paper in York still printed twice a day. I am pretty certain that none of the requirements seemed insuperably difficult to me.

I also don’t recall much about the installation itself or the support trips to the Bon-Ton offices in the subsequent years. What I mostly remember was the time in the rental car. The drive to and from BWI was not particularly difficult, but it was time consuming.

I think that the hotel in which I stayed was behind the strip mall in which the Bon-Ton office was located, but the route to get back and forth was circuitous. I probably stayed at the Hampton Inn that was (and still is in 2022) located in that vicinity. I don’t remember any restaurants that I frequented in York. I think that I generally got take-out and ate in the hotel room. On the other hand, I can visualize parts of the highway and the Market St. area rather clearly.

At some point Bethann Matroni⁴ became the head of the advertising business office and our primary contact. The only notes that I could locate indicated that in 2001 she requested that we add a third rate for ROP (display ads for newspapers). The two rates that were already on AdDept’s media schedule file and the rate table represented the actual rate charged by the paper and a marked-up rate that was shown to the merchandise departments and, for co-op advertising, the vendors. The former was often called “net” and the latter “gross”, but because those terms were also used to mean something else, we just called them rate 1 and rate 2. I don’t recall that we ever added a rate 3 to these files.

At about the same time I talked with someone named Tina Hagarman, maintained the schedule for newspaper advertising and ordered the ads. According to my notes, she had just returned from maternity leave. I think that I was in York to explain to her how A^xN⁵, TSI’s system for management of insertion orders over the Internet, worked. The Bon-Ton was one of the first users of that system. I also promised to send Tina a copy of the booklet that I had made about inserts, the preprinted flyers that are sometimes included with the newspaper.

I think that I went into this store in Westfield once, but I don’t recall if I bought anything.

In 1998 I was startled to learn that the Bon-Ton⁶ was opening a store on Route 20 in Westfield, MA, which was not far at all from where my sister Jamie and her family were living at the time in West Springfield. The surprising thing was that it was the only Bon-Ton store in New England. I had to wonder how it could possibly be profitable to run only one store in an area. This was not part of an acquisition either. Someone at the Bon-Ton just decided that it would be a good idea to locate one of their department stores in this strip mall on the outskirts of a rather small town in western Massachusetts. It was also the last outpost of civilization before the sparsely populated Berkshires.

In 2003 the Bon-Ton surprised most of the retail world by acquiring the stores run by Elder-Beerman, another department store chain that had been using AdDept to manage its advertising. This move approximately doubled the size of the company in terms of the number of stores. The signage for the acquired stores still referenced Elder-Beerman, but management of the advertising for the combined operation was done at the Bon-Ton headquarters in York. Because both of the advertising departments already used both AdDept and A^xN, the transition was rather smooth. I don’t think that I even made a trip to York to oversee it.

I don’ t know how much the Bon-Ton paid for the logo.

In 2005 Bon-Ton somehow came up with $1.1 billion in cash to purchase the Northern Department Store group from Saks Inc. This group consisted of three former users of AdDept: P.A. Bergner, Younkers, and Herberger’s⁷. So, for the second time in two years the company doubled in size.

The advertising for this group was run out of Milwaukee. The facility in Milwaukee was much larger than the one in York. It had a large area devoted to the production of ads as well as a photo studio. The Bon-Ton closed the department with which we had worked in York and moved all of the advertising to Milwaukee. None of the people that we knew in York made the move to Milwaukee.

B-T’s incursion into New England did not stop at Westfield. This store in Concord, NH, was closed in 2018.

I knew very well that there was no possibility of persuading the Senior VP in Milwaukee, Ed Carroll, to use AdDept even if we agreed to let them use it for free. However, I did make an effort to contact the newspaper manager to see if we might interest them in using A^xN. It would have been difficult to construct an interface, but the new organization ran a lot of advertising in a very large number of papers. If I had succeeded in convincing him to use A^xN, TSI might have been able to limp along until the entire Bon-Ton retail empire after many consecutive unprofitable years gave up the ghost in 2018 and ended up selling all of its properties to liquidators.

I might have been mistaken about the Bon-Ton store in Westfield. It stayed open until the Bon-Ton declared bankruptcy in 2018. I don’t know whether it was ever profitable.

1. Jo Harnish’s LinkedIn page can be viewed here.

2. Tom Vranich’s LinkedIn page is here. On it he claims (three times) that he worked as Senior VP at the Bon-Ton for over thirty years. I am almost positive that for most of that period he was actually employed at other stores that were eventually acquired directly or indirectly by B-T. Also, since his name was not Grumbacher, I doubt that he started as Senior VP.

3. The adventures of Tom and Mike at the RAC in Chicago have been described here.

4. I could find little on the Internet about Bethann Matroni. I think that in 2022 she may be known as Bethann Brodbeck.

5. A detailed description of the genesis of the A^xN system has been posted here. Details about its structure can be found here.

6. A very detailed account of the long history of the Bon-Ton is posted here. Unfortunately it stops in 2001 just before things got really interesting.

7. Detailed blog entries have been posted about each of these installations: P.A. Bergner, Younkers, Herberger’s.

1997-2005 AdDept Client: Proffitt’s Inc./Saks Inc.

Posted on August 13, 2021 by Mike

Holding company in Birmingham, AL. Continue reading →

Proffitt’s (under the name of the Elliott-Proffitt Co.) began in 1919 as a department store in downtown Maryville (locally pronounced MARE vuhl) TN. Decades after it became a chain of department stores TSI’s AdDept system was installed in its advertising department. The account of that process is detailed here.

In 1984 the company and all of its stores were purchased by the RBM Acquisitions Co. It was led by R. Brad Martin, who had previously been a very young member of the Tennessee Legislature and a real estate mogul. Proffitt’s Inc. soon began an ambitious series of acquisitions and openings of new stores. In 1994 it purchased McRae’s, a chain of department stores based in Jackson, MS, that was actually larger than Proffitt’s by any measure except ambition.

Previous new stores that had been purchased by RBM were run under the Proffitt’s logo and administered from the company’s headquarters in Alcoa, TN. McRae’s was allowed to run as a separate division, as were subsequent acquisitions of the Parisian, Younkers, Herberger’s, and Carson Pirie Scott.

The lobby in Birmingham was rather impressive.

After the Parisian division was acquired, the corporate headquarters was moved to a beautiful office located at 750 Lakeshore Parkway² on the north side of Birmingham, AL. However, all advertising was still administered by each local division in its home location. The data center and the IT department were at McRae’s headquarters in Jackson, MS.

TSI had repeatedly sent promotional materials to advertising directors at each of the divisions. Doug Pease, TSI’s marketing director, followed up on the mailings and eventually encountered Fran Jose², who was a top executive of Proffitt’s Marketing Group (PMG), the organization that supervised the advertising departments in the divisions. He was impressed enough with the AdDept system that PMG made the decision to implement it in each of the advertising departments. By the time that I got involved in this endeavor Fran had moved on. This was fine. Doug referred to him as “a little Napoleon”.

In 1998 Proffitt’s Inc. bought Saks Fifth Avenue and immediately changed the name of the company to Saks Inc. AdDept had been installed in all of the divisions, including Saks, although Carson’s was no longer using the system (as explained here). In 2000 Martin divided the company into two divisions. One was Saks, the other was everyone else. Martin then moved to New York and ran Saks with little success for a few years before he had to sell it and all of the other pieces of his crumbling empire.

The people: I dealt mostly with Steve VeZain³, who hailed from Louisiana and LSU. He joined PMG in September of 1997. Steve had rather grandiose plans about managing the advertising departments of the various divisions. He made a couple of trips to visit TSI to discuss some of them. Only a few of those were ever put into play. I have rather extensive notes dating from 1999 about our interactions.

Steve’s wife worked in the same building in Birmingham as he did, but I think that she was a buyer or maybe the boss of buyers for the Parisian.

Steve took me to supper several times when I was in Birmingham. His favorite restaurant was Joe’s Crab Shack. I think that his wife accompanied us on one occasion.

I fond the above photo after I had posted this entry. I think that it must have been taken in 1996 or 1997 after the installation at Younkers but before the installation at Proffitt’s. I have no memory of this meeting, but attached post-its identified the participants. From left to right they were Tom Henry from Proffitt’s, Roger Wolf from Younkers, Tom Waltz and Cindy Karnoupakis from Proffitt’s, a guy named Chris from Younkers, and Steve VeZain.

One of Steve’s first moves was to hire Josh Hill, a native of Minnesota who was a recent graduate of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. In fact, Despite his accent, Josh was designated as Mr. UAB in 1997.

I spent a fair amount of time with Josh at various divisions. Steve sent him to oversee some of the AdDept installations, and he accompanied Steve on at least one of his visits to TSI.

Josh liked to lift weights and to ride his motorcycle at high speeds. I don’t know why he (or anyone else who grew up north of the Mason-Dixon line) decided to come to Birmingham for his education.

In late 1999 my sister, Jamie Lisella, quit working at TSI and moved to Birmingham to work for Steve VeZain at PMG. The circumstances have been detailed here.

In January of 2000 Jamie told me that Josh’s car had been involved in a serious accident, but he was OK. She also informed me that the employees at Saks Inc. were allowed to sign on to the Internet, and many of them wasted a lot of time there.

I have only sketchy memories of others who worked at PMG (or whatever it was later called). Kathy D’Andrea kept the corporate books for marketing. I don’t remember her, but I found a photo of her. One of the documents that I found mentions that she would be at Herberger’s at the same time that I was scheduled, but I do not remember seeing her there.

Dave Weeast was in charge of the AS/400’s for all of the divisions. We dealt with him fairly often, but I don’t think that I ever met him. I think that he worked in Jackson, MS, for Windell Manuel⁵.

I have no recollection of Corky Wicks⁶, who worked as a business analyst for the company from 1997-2006, but his name is in my notes.

By March of 2001 Jamie had left Saks Inc. I found an email from her to Dave Weeast and Windell Manuel, about the five AS/400’s that had been running AdDept.

What was the purpose of PMG? I had the impression that it did not have a specific agenda. Perhaps the idea was to impose standards upon the advertising departments of the divisions that had, in most cases, been operating independently for decades. What standards? I think that was a big part of the problem. TSI probably did not help. One of our selling points was that the system was easily adaptable to different philosophies of the administration of marketing. Some of the procedures used by the divisions were real outliers.

I think that Steve, Josh, and Jamie had all left Saks by early 2001. Perhaps the marketing group itself had been disbanded. The other organizations that we had worked with had nothing that was similar to PMG.

SPM: All five divisions (and even Saks Fifth Avenue) had been using an ad agency named SPM to place their newspaper ads. Saks dropped them some time in 1997 or 1998. All of the divisions hated working with SPM. Steve decided to drop them in the Spring of 1999. This was a break for TSI. All the divisions suddenly needed to produce insertion orders. We were rapidly able to implement insertion orders and faxing without too much difficulty.

Three interesting visits: This event was not mentioned in my notes, and so it probably happened before July of 1999. When I arrived in Birmingham on the first day of that visit Steve told me that he wanted me to attend a demonstration of a system that was being used for some aspect of either creation or production of ads at Carson’s.

The demo was conducted by two people from a software company that I had never heard of. These two guys were accompanied by Ed Carroll, who was still the Senior VP there. I knew him fairly well. He was the SVP at P.A. Bergner when the company declared bankruptcy in the middle of the AdDept installation. When Ed Carroll saw me he greeted me with a sarcastic “What are YOU doing here?”

I wasn’t quite sure myself. Steve had said that they were interested in implementing an interface with AdDept. After the demo—which I did not think was very good—I went to wherever I was supposed to be on this trip, probably upstairs in the Parisian advertising department. I later asked Steve if he wanted me to pursue this and quote an interface. He quickly dismissed that idea.

On another trip the SVP of advertising for Herberger’s—I don’t remember his name—was there for a meeting. At the time Herberger’s was about open two new stores in the Minneapolis area. They had scheduled an open house to hire people to work in the stores, but they had forgotten to run ads in the local newspapers. He spent several hours on the phone with local radio stations dictating copy to them and begging them to run ads for his company. I found it amazing that he did not trust anyone back in St. Cloud to handle this for him.

I also encountered the advertising director from Saks Fifth Avenue, the company that had just been acquired. I don’t remember her name, but at the time I knew her fairly well. I always wondered why she was in Birmingham that day. Maybe they were just telling her not to worry about any interference in the way that SFA did business.

The big project: At the end of July in 1999 Steve and Josh came to TSI’s office and described how they wanted a system for the corporate marketing group that was fed by the other five systems. Apparently they were able to sign on to the systems and get some of the information that they wanted. However, they wanted all of this to happen automatically when the departments closed their books at the end of the month.

I could see many problems. The divisions did not all play by the same rules. The May Company and Macy’s had methods of standardizing the reporting of their many and diverse divisions. I knew that some of the Saks Inc. divisions were keeping their records in ways that were anything but standard. I am not sure that some of them were even legal. This sounded to Denise Bessette and me like a huge amount of work with no evident benefit.

Problems at the divisions: My notes from 2000 foreshadow some big problems that were beginning to appear:

The infrastructure at the divisions needs attention. Each division has only one printer, and it fails often. They should get the most recent version of Client Access and set up sessions for the printers (at least some of which were put on the Mac networks for some reason). Some divisions use a version of 5PM Mac software that has bugs. Dave Weeast is in charge of all of the AS/400’s in Saks Inc., and he is hard to get in touch with.
The divisions cannot approve requests unless they take it out of their own budgets, which they will do under practically no circumstances. The current process for approving requests is difficult. The divisions request something. Denise and I write a description of it and send it to Jamie. She runs it by Steve when she gets a chance. There are dozens of issues from the divisions from the pre-Jamie period that have never been addressed. If Steve thinks there is some merit in the request (which usually means that one of the Senior VP’s has been yelling at him), he tells me to quote it. I quote it and send the quote to Jamie. She tries to get Steve to look at it and approve it.

I can’t look at hobbles, and I can’t stand fences. Don’t fence me in.

The email: By 2000 AdDept systems had been installed on separate AS/400 systems in Des Moines IA (Younkers), Alcoa TN (Proffitt’s), Jackson MI (McRae’s), St. Cloud MN (Herberger’s), and Birmingham (Parisian). When the responsibility for advertising for McRae’s was transferred to the Proffitt’s division, and the ad scheduling for Herberger’s was moved to the Carson’s division, Jamie arranged for the McRae’s and the Herberger’s AS/400 systems to be shipped to the computer room in Birmingham. I know this because I was a cc on an email that she sent to Dave Weeast and Windell Manuel on March 29 of 2001.

Dave, Windell,
I understand there is some confusion regarding the location and status of the five AS/400’s that I administered. I will be happy to work with the two of you to facilitate any restructuring of these systems. I would prefer to communicate only with you, as I have not had much, if any, cooperation from the personnel in Birmingham and I am tired of doing charity work. I reviewed this information repeatedly with management and IT staff at Saks Inc. prior to my departure. I would like to reiterate that sending one of these AS/400’s to Jackson for their big ticket system was being done as a favor.
There are three systems on hand in Birmingham; PARADV, HERBADV and MCRAEADV. All three boxes are located in the computer room on the second floor. The PARADV system is active and used by the advertising department of Parisian. Operating system level is V4R2, but the upgrade package V4R4 is on hand in Birmingham.
HERBADV and MCRAEADV are the surplus AS/400 systems due to fusion. I had these boxes transported to Birmingham last fall and upgraded the operating systems on both to V4R4. The IP addresses for network connection for these systems has been issued through Jackson and changed on both of the AS/400’s. However, the connection failed. I had been working with Jerry Aultman in Birmingham’s IT Department to get this resolved. My hunch is that the problem lies with the DNS entry, or lack thereof. Additionally, the advertising personnel also utilize the IBM FAX/400 product which requires installation of an inbound and outbound fax line via 7852 modem.
I ordered these lines through Jeff Bass. Although I provided him with account numbers to pay for installation and usage on these lines, as of my departure on 3/14, I had not been advised that they were installed and functional.
The fourth system, YNKADV, is physically located in Des Moines. This machine is an older model 40e. This is the system I had planned to ship to Jackson for the Big Ticket application. Before it can be shipped, the network connection on the HERBADV AS/400 must be resolved and the MAC connectivity issues addressed. Two phone lines must be active. The base AdDept software application is intact on this box. The data libraries for TSI’s AdDept application need to be copied and installed. TSI will need to consult on this process, as well as the installation of any subsequent custom software programming and the fax configuration. I have cleared out the user profiles on the HERBADV box and added the current Younkers’ users.
I had also planned to move the existing PROFADV system (located in Alcoa, TN – V4R2- also an older model) to the MCRAEADV box. The MCRAEADV system holds the base software previously used by McRae’s advertising personnel. This will be an advantage on the software side. Once again, the network, phone, fax and software issues described above apply to PROFADV, also.
All of these AS/400’s are covered by a software subscription valid through December, 2001. PARADV, HERBADV, MCRAEADV and PROFADV are all covered by a one-year, 24 x 7, focal point contract for IBM hardware and software. The YNKADV system is set up on monthly maintenance, so that the monthly payment could be assumed by Jackson after it is transported there. However, I did purchase a software subscription for YNKADV, so the Jackson personnel could order the OS upgrade at no cost. Mike Wavada at TSI should be able to assist with any questions regarding the IBM maintenance, as they were purchased through his company as a business partner with first right of refusal.
If there are any additional issues, please let me know.

I found this email remarkable. I don’t remember what model of AS/400 Younkers had, but there was never a model e40. However, the most remarkable thing was that Jamie had, at least according to this email, arranged for the two boxes to be shipped from St. Cloud and Jackson. I doubt that anyone cared much about the box in Herberger’s advertising department, but the one in Jackson was in the corporate data center. I cannot imagine how she had managed to get it out of there. It took a lot of chutzpah and, I imagine, some maneuvering.

After Steve, Jamie, and (presumably) Josh left Saks Inc. in 2001, we still had rather good relationships with the advertising people at Younkers, Proffitt’s, Parisian, and, especially, Saks Fifth Avenue. We were never able to convince Carson’s to use the AdDept system even after the division was purchased by the Bon Ton, which had been using it for years.

1. Incredibly, Brad Martin has no Wikipedia page. A biography is posted here.

2. Beautiful photos of this building were posted here. It is apparently occupied in 2022 by Evonik Industries.

3. I don’t think that I ever got to meet Fran Jose. He does not appear to have a LinkedIn page.

4. Steve VeZain left Saks Inc. in 2001. His LinkedIn page is here.

5. 6. Windell Manuel’s LinkedIn page is here.

6. Corky Wicks LinkedIn page is here.

7. SPM was affiliated with an agency that handled newspaper advertising for Sears and a few other retailers. The two agencies were across the street from each other. I met with them when I visited Sears. That adventure is recounted here. In 2023 SPM was still in business. Its website could be found here.

1991-2006 TSI: AdDept Client: Hecht’s

Posted on July 20, 2021 by Mike

A May Co. division with headquarters in Arlington, VA. Continue reading →

In 1991 I received what probably was the most welcome business telephone call in my life. At the time TSI had only two AdDept¹ clients, Macy’s Northeast_², and P.A. Bergner & Co.³ I had recently sent to the advertising directors of several dozen other large retailers a letter that described the AdDept system and the positive effects that it had produced at its first two installations. The phone call was from Barbara Schane Jackson⁴ of the Hecht Company, a department store chain in the mid-Atlantic area. I did not realize it before that first call, but Hecht’s was one of the divisions of the May Company.

Barbara explained that the advertising department was looking for a system that would handle its administrative requirements. She emphasized that it absolutely must be able to produce the data for the 790, a monthly report required by the May Co. that broke out advertising expenses and co-op at the CCN⁵ level. She explained that at the end of every month the financial area of the department struggled to get the report out by combining the data from many spreadsheets. They were barely able to do this by leaving six or seven PC’s running all night. There were two big disadvantages. 1) If anything went wrong, they had no plan B. The May Co. required them to file the report within a week after the end of the month. 2) Hecht’s had recently acquired more stores, and they anticipated more acquisitions in the near future. Their PC approach probably could not handle the additional load.

When I assured her that this sounded feasible, Barbara invited us to visit their headquarters in Arlington, VA, and, if possible, do a demo of the system. This was music to my ears. Not only was Hecht’s a very well qualified prospect for the AdDept System. If we did a good job, we would have a much better chance of signing up the eleven other divisions of department stores owned by the May Company that were all very well-qualified prospects for the AdDept system .

Our marketing person at the time was Tom Moran⁶. Sue Comparetto, Tom, and I drove down to Washington in Sue’s Saturn station wagon. We certainly could not have afforded to buy three round-trip plane tickets at the time. We stayed at a Motel 6 in Maryland just outside of Washington. We could afford nothing better. Actually we could not afford that.

I don’t remember too many of the details about the visit. We met in Hecht’s Arlington store, which was in the Ballston Common Mall. In addition to Barbara and the advertising director, whose name was, I think, Steve, we also probably met with the media, production, and finance managers. Barbara certainly provided me with all the requirements for the 790 report. It did not seem too daunting. The rules were more complicated than the ones that Macy’s used for their reports by Vice President, but the principles were very similar.

Barbara at some point demonstrated the process that they used at the time, which involved Lotus 123 spreadsheets. I could not believe how adept she was at the use of this product. Her fingers flew around the keyboard executing commands and macros.

I did a demo for them at an IBM office in . Barbara later told me that she and Steve had serious doubts about how the answer to their problems could possibly be this ugly. She might have been referring to my appearance, but I think that they were most likely underwhelmed by the AS/400’s⁷ green screens and the pedestrian nature of its reports. There were no graphics of any sort anywhere. The only flash that my presentation had was how fast the screens appeared. In those days users were accustomed to substantial delays going from one step to the next.

The proposal that I wrote for Hecht’s was much more detailed about the contents of the first stage of the installation than what I had submitted to Macy’s or Bergner’s. We recommended, as I recall, that they purchase a model D10, a box that was considerably faster than TSI’s developmental system, but probably not as fast as the one used by Macy’s and Bergner’s.

The hardware determination was largely guesswork. IBM did not provide the usual performance numbers about its systems. For example, there were no statistics about the clock speed of the processors. I later came to understand why IBM did this, but at that time it seemed very strange that two different models actually had the same processors. The only difference was that the more expensive one had the capacity for more disk drives and memory cards. It did not come with these features; it merely had a way to attach them. I always recommended the more economical system unless the client really had a need for those drives or cards.

The installation began in October of 1991. The process of integrating the necessary changes was, as expected, difficult. However, it was never unpleasant. Barbara was a superb liaison, and most of the modules went in with no significant problems. The changes that I had to make to the cost accounting⁸ programs caused me quite a few headaches.

At one point I tried to document the steps of the “explosion” process—TSI’s term for the set of program that created the detail and summary files used by the programs that produced the 790 report. I quit after I had produced ten pages. I was not close to finished, and the result was totally unreadable. Every sentence started with the word “If”.

A major enhancement for Hecht’s provided for different types of costs being allocated in different ways. This required establishment of a table of allocation codes as well as an interface with the mainframe’s sales system to obtain the sales by department for the month. We also provided for a set of reconciliation programs to check the consistency of the results.

I distinctly remember two of the first attempts that we made to generate the cost accounting files. In both cases, Barbara submitted the program to run in batch mode (not tying up any input devices). I was in Enfield, but my AS/400 session had “passed through” to Hecht’s system. At the same time I was on the phone with Barbara.

Angus Podgorny was humanity’s last hope at Wimbledon.

In the first instance I was a little bit worried about how large the detail file that the system created might become. I monitored it and what the percentage of the ads that the program had already handled.

After just a few minutes I realized that the file was becoming very large very quickly. “Oh, no!” I warned Barbara. “The program is eating up the disk like the Blancmange! You’ve got to go to the system console and kill the job immediately.”

I am not sure whether Barbara understood the Monty Python reference (in which a Blancmange from planet Skyron of the Andromeda Galaxy eats people in order to win Wimbledon), but she laughed anyway. She certainly knew what a blancmange was; she had actually majored in French. She killed the job in plenty of time, and I deleted the records in the file.

The disk-gobbling program could have been a serious problem. If the the system’s disk drives had approached 100 percent usage, I am not sure what would have happened. It would not have been pleasant; we almost certainly would have had to involve IBM. After the job was killed, and the file was whittled down to size, I had to change the program to summarize in a few places where it had been writing details. This was a major repair, and it took me a while.

The second incident involved some kind of tricky allocation that I had not anticipated. I don’t remember the details. Barbara had already called two or three times to report that this aspect of the program was not working correctly. Each time I thought that I had fixed it. In the last call I admitted that “I just can’t seem to get this right!” I did not mean that I was giving up on it. In fact, I found the final problem in less than an hour after acknowledging my failures.

When we got the cost accounting program to work perfectly, Hecht’s was very happy.

The airport is at the bottom of this map. Taking the Metro was fine unless there was a problem.

I made quite a few trips to Hecht’s during the first phase of the installation. There were direct flights from Bradley to National Airport in Washington on US Airways. From the airport I took the Metro or a taxi to Ballston. I could be at Hecht’s before business hours, a feat that I could never manage at Macy’s, which was less than half as far away from Enfield.

If my visit was for more than one day, I generally stayed at a Comfort Inn that was within a few blocks of the mall.⁹ I always left the hotel early in the morning. I bought a Washington Post from the dispenser just outside of the mall—for twenty-five cents! I then took the escalator down to the food court and bought a Big Breakfast or an Egg McMuffin and a large coffee from McDonald’s. I ate my breakfast while reading the Post. I also drank about half of the coffee.

Coffee in hand, I rode the escalator back up. I then entered Hecht’s through the employee entrance, signed in, and took the elevator up to the advertising department. I worked mostly with Barbara. She did most of the training or the other users.

About half the time Barbara and I ate lunch at a restaurant in the mall. It was called the American Restaurant or something similar. We talked mostly about the installation and related matters. She knew that I went jogging in the evenings when I was there; she was surprised that I could survive without my glasses. She was a swimmer. The ropes that marked the lanes evidently kept her from getting lost.

She also told me something about needing to use a shop-vac on one occasion.

All of this seemed a little strange to me. Her husband, Kevin Jackson, also worked in the advertising department. My recollection is that he was an art director; he had no contact with the system. He never came to lunch with us.

Barbara resigned from Hecht’s in May of 1993 to work for Barrister Information Systems, a company that created and marketed a software system for law firms.

After Barbara left, Hecht’s continued to use the system, but they did not ask us for much more work, and they did not take advantage of many of the programs that they had. I do not remember the names of very many employees. In fact, the only one whom I recall was Ellen Horn, and that was mostly due to the fact that I saw her so often at her next stop, Belk.

I discovered quite a few notes about the account that covered the period from 2000-2003. I have somewhat vague memories of some of them. Here are some of the people who were mentioned.

Jim Tonnessen surrounded by his computers.

Jim Tonnessen¹⁰ was our liaison at the turn of the century. I think that he also managed the department’s network, which was installed after AdDept was functional. Jim took a job with UUNet in February, 2000.
Jim was replaced by Clint Gibson, but he also departed in August of the same year.
The nexttechnical liaison was Sam Wiafe, who was later known as Kwadwo.¹¹ I guess that he knew computers, but he knew nothing about AdDept, the AS/400, or the needs of the advertising department. The IT people tried to implement a firewall for the AS/440 in order to control access. It was a silly idea that angered me a little.
Jennifer Jones¹² was the manager of the advertising business office in 2000. Chris Dechene¹³ held that position before her. I made a trip to Hecht’s in June of 1999 for the specific purpose of getting Chris acquainted with the cost accounting programs. One of the problems that we encountered at Hecht’s was that the financial people were rotated around every two years. So, as soon as anyone got a good handle on the cost accounting process, we could expect them to be transferred to another area. These people also were not exceptionally good at documenting their procedures.
Prior to 2000 Hecht’s for some reason did not use one of AdDept’s best features, insertion orders for newspaper advertising. On a trip there in that year I met Renee Gatling¹⁴, Ellen Rison, and someone named Sharon. Renee was already pretty good at getting around in AdDept. I convinced them that they should be faxing their orders using AdDept.
By the end of 2000 I think that our primary liaison at Hecht’s was someone named Amy. I don’t remember her, but when we installed the Media Management + interface for broadcast, she was involved. The broadcast buyers at that time were named Krista and Tiffany. I found their names in my notes.
In October 2002 Brian Kipp, whom I had worked with at Meier & Frank, became the planning manger in the advertising department. Carolyn Thompson and a woman named Renée worked for him.
I spent a good deal of time on one visit with Rene Basham¹⁵, who was the manager of the advertising business office. I was astounded to learn that she had not been using the reconciliation process that we set up for the cost accounting. I went through this with her and also worked on documenting the process for the next person who was rotated into the slot.

In looking through the notes I discovered two other interesting things. The first was that Hecht’s used a product called Wam!Net to deliver its ads electronically to the newspapers. The Associated Press developed a product called AdSend, which most large advertising departments used. At the time (early 2000) TSI was beginning to roll out our A^xN¹⁶ product for insertion orders via the Internet, and we were contemplating using the connection that the program established to send ads as well.

One day while I was at Hecht’s in 2002 the performance on the machine was terrible. In the notes I had attributed this to CFINT, an IBM program that I had completely forgotten about. It was a misbegotten effort from IBM to make customers pay more for use of the system for interactive jobs than for batch jobs by slowing the entire system down if the percentage of CPU used by batch jobs was too high!

The main effect of this effort, as far as I could ascertain, was to infuriate the customers. It is possible that the real motivation was to prevent the AS/400 from encroaching on the sales of other IBM systems.

I have one other peculiar recollection. At some point after 2002 I was in the office on a Saturday. It must have been November, and I must have passed through to Hecht’s system to help someone there with a problem. We exchanged a few messages. I then whimsically invited her to come the following day to a big party that I was throwing to celebrate the divestiture of the foliage on the nine maple trees on my property. I recommended that she recruit a bunch of people with their own rakes. An early start would reward them with the spectacular view of the sunrise from the New Jersey Turnpike. I reckoned that they should have time for six or seven hours of New England’s favorite autumnal sport before returning home. They could make it back by midnight unless they encountered traffic.

On February 1, 2006, Federated Department Stores, which had purchased the entire May Co., dissolved most of the former May Co. divisions, and the existing Hecht’s stores were divided between Macy’s East and Macy’s South. Few, if any, employees from Hecht’s headquarters in Arlington went to work for Macy’s.

1. The design of the AdDept system is described in a fair amount of detail here.

2. A description of the Macy’s installation has been posted here.

3. A description of the installation at Bergner’s can be read here.

4. Barbara Schane Jackson has her own consulting firm in 2021. Her LinkedIn page is here.

5. Every department was assigned to exactly one CCN. The CCN’s were the same for each division of the May Company. The N stood for number, but I don’t think that I ever knew what the two C’s referred to.

6. More information about Tom Moran’s career at TSI can be found here.

7. The AS/400 was a multi-user relational database computer introduced by IBM in 1988. It is described in some detail here.

8. In AdDept we used the term “cost accounting” to describe the process of allocating costs to departments (or, in some installations, stores) for the ads in which their merchandise appeared and the cost of more generic ads (called “storewide”). This was a complicated activity that would require a small army of clerks if not done on the computer. Although the May Co. had precise rules about this process, it was almost impossible for the smaller divisions, which ran just as many ads (in fewer newspapers) and had just as many departments, to accomplish it within the deadlines. They therefore cut corners.

9. The mall is now called Ballston Quarter. It was (pretty much) closed down in 2016 and reopened in 2018. The hotel is still nearby.

10. In 2021 Jim works for Lockheed-Martin. His LinkedIn page is here.

11. Kwadwo’s LinkedIn page can be viewed here. In 2023 he was working for Inova Health Systems.

12. Jennifer Jones works as treasurer of a school. Her LinkedIn page can be found here. I wonder how many of her acquaintances have also seen The Song of Bernadette, the movie that won the actress Jennifer Jones an Oscar, and read all thirteen of the articles championing Losing Trick Count in the Bridge Bulletin written by the bridge expert Jennifer Jones. Not many, I wager.

13. Chris Dechene’s LinkedIn page is posted here.

14. Renee Gatling’s profile on LinkedIn can be found here.

15. Rene Basham is still in the Washington area. Her LinkedIn page is here.

16. The design of A^xN is described in some detail here

1989-1993 TSI: AdDept-Camex Interface

Posted on July 3, 2021 by Mike

An exciting new feature. Continue reading →

The first time that I ever heard the word “Camex” was when I was researching the requirements for the first installation of TSI’s AdDept system¹ at Macy’s East². One of the job titles that Macy’s used for employees assigned to production of a newspaper ad was “Camex operator”. I asked Alan Spett, a vice president at Macy’s who was our principal contact during this period, what a Camex was. Alan told me that Camex was a company in Boston that had designed and implemented software and networking for workstations from Sun Microsystems. The workstations were used by many newspapers and some of the largest newspaper advertisers to help with the design of pages to appear in newspapers.

I later did a little research on the company. It was founded in 1974 by George White and a partner whose name I never discovered. The first customer was the Boston Globe. Once that installation stabilized, the company grew dramatically by selling expensive systems (roughly $2 million each) to newspapers around the country and then to large retailers.

In 1989 the company was sold to DuPont, the chemical giant. George White stayed with the company until 1993.

Camex had a booth near TSI’s at the Retail Advertising Conference in Chicago that Tom Moran³ and I attended in 1991 or 1992. Our booth was the smallest allowed. Camex’s booth, which was near ours, was perhaps ten times larger. They must have brought twenty salesmen and lots of workstations and network servers.

Alan may have voiced an interest in creating an interface between AdDept and Camex in those early days. However, it was included in neither the original installation nor the first set of enhancements.

Dan Stroman, TSI’s contact for the AdDept installation at P.A. Bergner & Co.⁴, told me that Bergner’s wanted to implement an interface between AdDept and Burgner’s Camex computers. I told Dan that Macy’s might also be interested in such an interface, and I gave him Alan’s telephone number. The two of them agreed to make a joint project of the interface.

My recollection of the details is fuzzy. I think that AdDept was supposed to create a file that contained all relevant production job information for jobs in specified ad types that had not yet been released. Camex would create files for AdDept that indicated job steps had been completed on those jobs.

There were many issues to resolve.

What was the naming convention for jobs on Camex? That field would need to be added to the AdDept database.
Should AdDept require that each Camex job name be unique? If not, will uniqueness be enforced at the time of the interface? If not, how will Camex handle two jobs with the same name?
Should the source for the interface file from AdDept be the live database or the history records?
Are history records for the interface itself necessary?
How should AdDept tell Camex about jobs that have been killed?
What if the size or shape of the ad had changed?
And so on.

There were also technical details about the nature of the interface files. IBM’s PC Support program for the AS/400 could be used to transfer data to and from a PC, but it probably would not work with a Sun workstation. So, a PC would probably be necessary between the Sun Workstation and the AS/400.

My recollection is that two meetings were held at Camex’s headquarters at 75 Kneeland St. in Boston. The first was mostly just to get acquainted and set an agenda. I have no notes from these meetings, and I don’t remember anyone’s name. I seem to remember that Alan may have attended. Sue Comparetto and I drove up to Boston. Camex’s office was very close to Chinatown, and the Camex people treated us to lunch at one of the nearby Chinese restaurants. My other vivid recollection is of my wonder at what Camex had accomplished in a fairly short time.

I am pretty sure that Dan attended the second meeting. Sue and I definitely drove up from Enfield. This meeting was disrupted by a fire alarm. Everyone was asked to abandon the building and stand around in a nearby parking lot. It does not take much for me to be cold, and I was absolutely freezing. I am sure that we were outside for at least an hour. We finally did get to go inside for an hour or two. My recollection is that we made a little progress, but at the end I still did not know what data Camex was planning to send to AdDept. This was because the people with whom we were talking knew very little about the database portion of their system, and the database programmer was not available.

I wrote up a programming quotation for the portion of the interface that AdDept would initiate. I submitted the quote to Dan and Alan. They both approved it. I even started work on it.

Then a very strange thing happened. The person who served as the client liaison at Camex called Dan and told him that Camex had decided not to participate in the interface. They also volunteered to refund deposits that Bergner’s had made for additional equipment.

We got paid for the work that we did—luckily avoiding the bankruptcies of both Macy’s and Bergner’s. Shortly thereafter DuPont split Camex up into pieces and spun them off as separate companies. Camex did not last long after that.

I cannot remember where this happened, but I overheard someone at a large retailer talking with their rep from Camex. The rep said that Camex no longer recommended the Sun workstations. Instead they recommended that advertisers just buy Macintoshes and off-the-shelf software. I was both dumbstruck and disappointed. I had envisioned our relationship with Camex as a possible entrée to many excellent AdDept prospects. Sic transit gloria mundi.

The episode has an epilogue. A few years later I had a meeting in in Mobile AL with some programmers who previously worked at Camex and Gilbert Lorenzo, the advertising director at Burdines department store. That meeting is described here.

1. The design of the AdDept system is described in some detail here.

2. The AdDept installation at Macy’s East is described here.

3. Tom’s time at TSI, including our time at the RAC, is described here.

4. The ups and downs of the AdDept installation at Bergner’s are detailed here.

Wavablog

Memoirs, bridge, popes, travel, and other stuff

Tag Archives: P.A. Bergner

2024 Bridge: Sectional Tournaments

1997-2006 TSI: AdDept Client: The Bon-Ton

1997-2005 AdDept Client: Proffitt’s Inc./Saks Inc.

1991-2006 TSI: AdDept Client: Hecht’s

1989-1993 TSI: AdDept-Camex Interface