My mom and dad never visited Sue and me while we were living in Plymouth, MI. They visited us only once after we moved to Detroit. That uncomfortable experience was described here. We did not visit them in Kansas City much either. Our excuses were that we had very little money, and we were busy trying to build a company. Their excuse was that my dad was working.
If they were smart they flew, but my dad was not averse to long drives.
In 1982 my dad retired. What little I know about that event has been chronicled here. At some point in or around 1983 my parents decided to visit New England. Both of these pieces of new disconcerted me. “Lucy, let me ‘splain.”
My parents treated me exceptionally well. It would be absurd for me to complain. They provided me with everything that I needed to survive and in fact thrive. I never have understood exactly how they did it. They had next to nothing when I was born.
Driving would be much easier than it was in 1959. Practically the entire route would be on Interstates.
Nevertheless, being around them made me more and more uncomfortable as I got older. They very seldom got angry at me or disciplined me, but they were both devout Catholics who never ate meat on Friday and never missed mass on Sunday or a holy day “of obligation”. Although they never mentioned anything about it to me, they certainly must have disapproved of the fact that Sue and I were living together. They may also have been cognizant of the fact that I had become a skeptic almost overnight in the late seventies. They probably had had several “where did we go wrong?” conversations about me. However, I did not worry much about that aspect of our relationship. I expected them to avoid these subjects while they were in New England, and I certainly would as well.
The thing that bothered me was below the surface. I called it “The Curse”1. My parents had taught me an eleventh commandment: “Thou shalt be the best.” They repeatedly insisted that they did not care what I did with my life, but they wanted me to be the best. Not the best that I could be, the best period. The only good thing about The Curse was that it had no time limit.
So, at this point I was thirty-four or thirty-five. My dad had already retired, and my parents were traveling around the country doing who-knows-what. The business that Sue and I were running was still a shoestring affair. Our income was low, and our prospects were at best mediocre. I was light years away from being the best at anything.
When I was on my own, I could easily postpone the assessment of my progress towards the superlative. When my parents were around I wasn’t sad or angry, I was just uneasy. They never said anything about it. They were just there.
Old Sturbridge Village.
In point of fact I remember very little about their trip. They definitely had a car, but I cannot remember whether they drove up from Kansas City in a reprise of the great eastern vacation that was described here. They might have flown to Connecticut and rented a car. Sue’s memory was no better than mine in this regard.
The four of us definitely spent a day at Old Sturbridge Village, which is a recreation of a New England village from the 1830s. Sue and I still had the Plymouth Duster, which could easily hold four. Either Sue or I probably drove. I remember that it was rather chilly. So, it was probably spring or fall. I was uncomfortably cold, but my parents seemed to enjoy the experience.
I am pretty sure that the four of us ate at the Bullard Tavern that was located on the grounds of OSV. My parents thought that the meal was great. I did not like what I ordered, but I don’t remember the specifics. I just know that I never went back.
I don’t think that my parents stayed with us in Rockville or ate any other meals with us, but I might be wrong. I am pretty sure that they drove to Maine and perhaps a few other spots in New England before heading home.
1. The Curse is described in a little more detail in my analysis of the “First Crisis”, which is posted here.
In the latter half of 1986 Sue and I realized that a serious business required a better office space than our house in Rockville could provide. For one thing we realized that neither of us was a salesman, and we had no place for a salesman to work. It was also a little embarrassing to bring in clients, especially since we now had two cats in residence, Jake and Rocky.
Google took this photo of the west side of 178 N. Maple. The large building on the left was already there. Our space was in the addition on the right. The entrance to TSI was the white door on the far right on the other side of the wall.
At the same time Sue’s dad was in the process of converting one of his barns at 178 N. Maple in Enfield, two doors north of Sue’s parents’ house, into office space for the Slanetz Corporation. Sue worked her magic with him to design a headquarters for TSI there as well. The new building also was designed to serve as a headquarters for Moriarty Landscaping1 in the basement below TSI’s space.
This is the view from the south. The drainpipe in the middle roughly approximates the border between TSI and Slanetz Corp.
Two doors allowed access to TSI’s offices. The first was on the east side, where our space bordered on that of the Slanetz Corporation. The other was on the south side. It was eight or ten feet below the level of the office. From the door a staircase led up to the middle of TSI’s office space
That arrangement meant that a good bit of the space on the west side—between the staircase and the west wall—was essentially wasted2. There was not enough room for both a corridor and a work area.
The north and east sides of TSI’s area had no windows. The west side had two sets—the double in Sue’s office and another one in the wasted area. The south side had three windows.
I found some of the partitions in our basement.
Sue bought white wooden shelves that were deployed to create a corridor from the door on the west wall almost to the stairs. The programming and reception/accounting areas were partitioned into work areas with dividers.
South of the building was a parking lot that could hold eight or nine cars.
Sue and I were well aware that we had enjoyed a sweetheart deal in our lodging in the front house of the Elks Club in Rockville. Since January of 1980 we had rented—without a lease—a nice old three-bedroom house with another room that was large enough for an office for three or four people. We paid the Elks, as I recall, $300 per month, we had no lease, and no one ever bothered us. On the first of every month we put the check in an envelope labeled “Rent”, walked it up to the Elks Club bar, and gave it to the bartender. I don’t think that we ever missed a payment.
In October of 1986, Sue received the following letter from the Elks Club:
October 16, 1986
Sue Comparetto TSI Tailored Systems 9 North Park St. Rockville, CT 06066
Dear Ms. Comparetto:
This letter is to inform you of several changes which are taking place in the landlord/tenant relationship between the Rockville Elks and you. From now on, all correspondence is to be directed to the Chairman, Board of Trustees. Until April 1, 1987 this is David Mullins3 (address and phone number below), All correspondence should be directed to the Chairman at his personal residence. When a new Chairman takes over, you will be informed and given any necessary address changes. Normally, this will occur every April.
Rent payments are to made as they are now except that the full rent is to always be paid. Do not deduct for anything unless authorized by the Chairman – no other member of the Board of Trustees has this authority.
New rental rates will be taking effect as well (a lease is enclosed). Your new lease will run from April 1 to March 31. For your benefit, we are phasing in the rental increases until April 1, 1987 (when the new lease takes effect). Starting December 1, 1986 your new rent is as follows:
Additionally, you are now responsible for minor repairs and maintenance totalling less than $100. Starting with your new lease (4/1/87 – 3/31/88) you will receive a $100/moth rent credit if you meet the following conditions. First, the rent must be received on time (by the 5th day of every month). Second, all minor repairs and maintenance described above are to be taken care of by you. This credit may be deducted off of your rent payment. If you fail to meet both of these requirements you forfeit the rental discount for that month.
Please sign both copies of the enclosed lease and return them to me ASAP. I will sign one and return it to you.
David Mullins
We did not sign the lease. Instead, Sue negotiated a temporary arrangement with the Elks Club for us to stay a few months until we could find another place. We paid more than $300/month, but nothing close to $11004. Sue thinks that we actually paid them $600/month. Evidently they did not want to try to find another tenant.
We moved all of TSI’s stuff over a weekend in early 1988. I don’t remember if we hired a moving company or not. I don’t recall lifting desks, and so I suspect that we hired some local people to do it. If someone helped us, we might have been able to do it. The Slanetzes had an old grey pickup truck. I am pretty sure that I brought most of the computer equipment in my Celica, which was a hatchback.
On Friday we were doing business out of Rockville. On Monday our headquarters was in Enfield.
For a few months Sue and I commuted from Rockville to Enfield. Since we worked drastically different schedules—she is a night owl; I am an early bird—we always brought two cars.
The living area is to the left of the front door. The window to the right of the door is now my office. The double window is on the largest of the bedrooms, which is now called (inappropriately) Sue’s sewing room. The other bedroom is directly across the corridor from this room.
Near the office Sue found two houses that were for sale. We ended up purchasing the one shown above situated on a large corner lot at 41 North St. in the Hazardville section of Enfield. From North St. it still looks much like it did when we bought it in 1988. The maple trees were much smaller forty-three years ago, and the Burning Bush on the left must have grown to be ten times as large as it was then.
The lawn in 2021 undoubtedly has far more weeds. Both the previous resident and the one before him were landscapers. Their care for the lawn amounted to an obsession. One of them even installed a sprinkler system. The first time that I mowed the lawn with my new Sears lawnmower, I filled twenty-three large black garbage bags with clippings. It took me over three hours. For the second mowing I set the machine to mulching mode and never set it back.
I undid all of that TLC with a few years of neglect. As you can see from Google’s photo, it still looks fine.
The sidewalk was added between April 22, the day on which we signed the mortgage for $135,000, and some time in June when we finally finished moving in. On the west side of the house was a fence. Beyond it was a driveway and walkway leading to Hazard Memorial Elementary School, which Sue had attended decades earlier.
So, our lot actually bordered on only one other, 1 Hamilton Court.
Behind the house was a one-car garage. Between the house and the garage was an entryway that was about 10′ by 15′. We installed one of the Datamasters and the daisy-wheel printer on a long table in that room5.
The house had a rather small kitchen, a pretty large area for a living and dining area, one bathroom, and three small bedrooms. To that extent it reminded me of the house on Maple St. in Prairie Village, KS, in which my family lived from 1954-1962.
We had accumulated a lot more stuff during our years in Rockville. For weeks I filled up my Celica before I drove to work every morning and emptied it at the new place before I returned home. Even so we had to hire movers to move the big things.
Our bed went in one bedroom and another double bed appeared from somewhere in another, which was in theory a guest room. The other bedroom became a kind of library. The barnboard shelve were located there. It soon hosted another resident, Buck Bunny, as is described here.
This house, thankfully, had much more storage space—a full basement and an attic. That was only sufficient for a year or two. The garage was soon too filled with junk for a car—or anything else—to fit.
This is actually the current door. The old one was fitted inside the square on the right.
We made one important improvement to the house. We installed a cat door in the basement window that was below the guest bedroom. Some wooden shelves were already in the basement near that window. The cats entered on the top shelf. I built a make-shift ramp so that they could easily get down, but they often preferred to walk to the edge of the shelf and jump from there to the washing machine and then the floor.
1. In 2021 Moriarty Landscaping still occupies the basement area of 178 N. Maple.
2. I wondered why the entrance was placed there instead of next to the east wall, with the steps outside. Sue said that she thought that it might have been a town requirement for two fire exits. My other question was why the staircase could not have been to the immediate left of the door.
3. In 2021 David Mullins apparently lives in Farmington.
4. $1100 might have seemed like a fair price on paper. However, there were at least three major drawbacks to the property: 1) The ceiling in the living room/dining room space was severely cracked. The middle was at least 6″ lower than on the edges. It was a pretty scary situation. 2) There was no shower on the floor with two bedrooms, only a bath tub. 3) The heating bills were outrageous. The hot air went right up the staircase to the unused floor.
5. The garage and the entryway were eliminated during the renovation that is described here.
In 1988 Rocky and Jake, the two cats that had adopted us as caretakers a couple of years earlier, made the move with Sue and me from Rockville to Enfield. After spending their first winter indoors in Rockville, they had been allowed to roam in the neighborhood of the Elks Club. They always came back to one of our doors when they wanted food, shelter, or a massage. They seemed to have learned what was dangerous, although for Rocky earning the knowledge probably knocked him down to eight lives, as explained here.
Neither seemed to have much difficult adjusting to the change of scenery. There was so much more for them to explore, both inside and out. Rocky particularly liked the fact that when he was outside he could leap up to the windowsill near the dining area and gaze through the window at the activity going on inside. After we started opening the window for him when he did so, this became his preferred form of ingress. Rocky was a real leaper. None of our other cats ever attempted this feat.
Rocky and I watched football games. Popcorn was one of the few human foods he did not like.
Rocky loved to be petted. His favorite technique was the full-body massage, but he would accept any kind of petting by just about anyone whom he knew well.
Jake was a much more private cat. He always seemed to pick a corner and sit there silently analyzing the situation. He tolerated a little petting as the price to be paid for a constantly full bowl of Purina Cat Chow.
The night of October 31, 1988, was a sad one. Sue and I went out for supper, as I remember, and when we came back we found Jake’s dead body on the street. I buried him in the yard, but I don’t remember where.
Sue and I did not feel devastated at Jake’s demise. We had lost quite a few pets by that time. We liked Jake, and we missed him, but neither of us had formed a strong attachment to him.
I don’t remember where our next pet, Buck Bunny, a very large grey and white rabbit with long floppy ears, came from. I am quite certain that I had nothing to do with the acquisition, but Sue had no recollection of us even having a rabbit during this era until I showed her his photo. Buck’s home was a large wire cage in the westernmost small bedroom. The barnboard bookshelves were also in that room. It was a sort of library, but it held as many games as books.
We kept Buck in his cage most of the time because, like most rabbits, he had an instinct to gnaw on things. Before we released him from the cage, we placed all electrical cables up out of his reach. That was possible because, unlike Slippers (described here), he was not much of a leaper.
Sue visited her friends Diane and Phil Graziose in St. Johnsbury, VT, pretty regularly. Sometimes I joined her, but just as often she went by herself. On one of those solo trips she brought home a tiny tan and white kitten. It was so small that it fit in the breast pocket of her flannel shirt. the mandatory state uniform of Vermont.
The kitten was one of many feline denizens of the trailer park in which the Grazioses lived. It probably should have been allowed to nurse for another week or so. However, this was probably the best chance that it would ever get to avoid spending a Vermont winter outdoors. The situation worked out well. We gave him milk for a few days, and then he found the bowl of Cat Chow and the water bowl on his own.
Rocky enjoyed exploring the big yard.
Rocky had little use for the pipsqueak, but the kitten immediately made friends with Buck Bunny. They really hit it off. The kitten liked to sit near Buck’s cage, and when Buck came out they played together or just snuggled.
When the kittne was more mature we got it fixed, of course. By then it had become rather obnoxious, and so we were not a bit surprised when we learned that it was a tom. I named him Woodrow1 after Woodrow F. Call, one of the protagonists of my favorite novel of all time, Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry.
After his medical procedure Woodrow decided that I was his buddy. He loved to take naps next to me. Almost any time that I went into the bedroom and got into bed, Woodrow climbed up to join me.
Meanwhile, Rocky had claimed Sue as his BFF. When Sue and I sat in the living room chairs (purchased used from Harland-Tine Advertising, which is described here, and draped with white cloth) Woodrow sat on my lap and Rocky found Sue’s. The two cats were totally different.
A very young Woodrow.
Woodrow liked all people. Whenever anyone visited us, Woodrow greeted them immediately. Rocky usually hid.
Rocky loved almost any kind of human food; Woodrow liked only Cat Chow and ice cream.
Woodrow was a hunter; Rocky preferred to snuggle. He exalted in his full-body massages.
Woodrow liked to be carried with his back down and all four legs up. Rocky did not mind being picked up, but he insisted on the chest-to-chest method.
Woodrow liked the top of his head to be rubbed hard, but any other style of petting annoyed him.
Woodrow climbed trees (although he usually waited to be helped down); Rocky never did.
Rocky was mostly silent. In his later years Woodrow gave off all manner of soft sounds as he walked around. I called them his “play-by-play”. Except for that one time in the flea bath he preferred not to speak English.
Woodrow and Rocky eventually became buddies. When I returned home after work, they were almost always together on the lawn next to the driveway waiting for me. The sight of them always cheered up, no matter how rough the day had been. I often sang to myself, “with two cats in the yard, life used to be so hard.” Our house was indeed a very fine house.
However, Woodrow did not abandon his first friend, the lagomorph. He still like to lie or sit next to Buck’s cage, and when we let Buck out, the two still socialized.
Actually, they socialized too much. Buck tried to hump the fully grown Woodrow whenever they were together, and Woodrow put up with it. It wasn’t just a phase, either.
Sue and I decided that we needed to get Buck Bunny fixed. I loaded him inside his cage into Sue’s car, and she drove him to the vet. She explained the problem to the doctor. He examined Buck and reported to Sue that “Buck” was actually a female.
Sue asked him why the rabbit was engaging in these activities if he was not even a male. The vet replied that he was only a veterinarian, not a psychiatrist. So, we still let the two buddies hang out together. If the rabbit (who was by then officially renamed Clara, after my mother’s mother, Clara Cernech, who had died in 1980) got too amorous, we just put her back in her cage.
I don’t remember the circumstance of Clara’s death. She was a French Lop, a breed with a lifespan of only five years. She was fully grown when we adopted her.
My favorite moments with Woodrow and Rocky were when I came home for lunch in the summertime. Both cats napped under bushes. Rocky customarily slept in the cluster of forsythia bushes in the northeast corner of our lot. Woodrow favored the burning bush halfway between the house and the driveway to Hazard Memorial School.
The one-piece table in the background was repurposed as a place to pile dead branches when we got the red one.
I liked to eat my lunch while sitting at the picnic table in the yard and reading a book.When I brought my food (no matter what was on the menu) out to the picnic table, Rocky stumbled groggily out from his resting spot. He sat on the ground next to me for a while and looked up hopefully. Then he raised his front paws up to the bench and nudged my elbow with his snout. Eventually he often leapt up on the table. He knew it was not allowed, but he could not help himself.
I always broke down and gave him a tiny piece of meat. No matter how small the morsel was, he purred loudly while he ate it, got down, and retreated back to his bush to finish his nap.
A mole’s-eye view of Woodrow.
After lunch I usually took a short nap in the yard on a mat or blanket. As soon as I had made myself comfortable, Woodrow emerged from his bush to check out what I was doing. I always slept on my side. After I had assumed the sleeping position, Woodrow walked up so that he was about a foot from my chest. He then flopped over toward me, and we both stacked a few z’s.
In inclement weather they repeated their tag-team act. Rocky begged for food at the table in the dining area, and Woodrow climbed up on the bed to join me for a nap.
The boudoir with the modesty curtain held open by the hamper.
When he was not napping with me, Woodrow moved from place to place in search of the best locations for sleeping. One of his favorite places was on a towel in the small storage area in the bathroom. He arrived there by jumping up on the clothes hamper. He then moved aside the curtain with one of his front paws and sprang into the niche. I called this obscure hidey-hole “Woodrow’s boudoir”. Occasionally when someone used the toilet or the shower, he startled people when he stuck out his head from behind the curtain to look at them with sleepy eyes.
Woodrow preferred Cat Chow to all other forms of food except ice cream. The only time that he paid much attention to Sue was when she sat down with a bowl of ice cream. Then he became more of a beggar than Rocky.
Although Woodrow loved to hunt, he was not possessive about his catches and kills. He often was seen parading around the house with a mouse in his mouth. Sometimes he dropped one at my feet or Sue’s. I had to pick them up quickly. There was a fifty-fifty chance that the poor crittur was still alive. I released many outside; after that they were on their own.
Two were distinctive. One day I was taking my daily postprandial nap in the bed. Unbeknownst to me Woodrow brought into the bedroom his latest prey, a small bird. He silently entered, crawled under the bed with his catch in his mouth, positioned himself directly below my head, and commenced to crunch the bones between his jaws. It was a very disconcerting addition to my dreamscape. Needless to say he left the remains beneath the bed for me to clean up.
A dove only weighs about 4 oz. Woodrow could carry one easily.
On another day I came home for lunch to find that Woodrow had apparently brought home a guest, a full-grown mourning dove. Evidently Woodrow had lost his appetite, but the bird may have thought that he was on still on the menu. He flew about, crashing into one window after another in a panicked attempt to escape. I finally chased him into the library, where I opened the window and closed the door. When I came home after work there was no sign of him. We have never found a cadaver, and so I presume the dove found his way out.
Imagine him with 20 sharp claws.
Woodrow was the only pet that we ever had who clearly had multiple personality disorder. His was more like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde than The Three Faces of Eve.
I called Woodrow’s alter-ego Nutso Kitty. Whenever he entered this state his eyes glazed over, and he stalked and attacked anything that moved. One day Woodrow was placidly napping with me when, unbeknownst to me, he underwent the demonic transformation. I must have moved my hand a little. He pounced on it with all twenty of his switchblades extended. After literally throwing him out of the room, I rushed to the bathroom for first aid. My hand throbbed in pain for a few days. Fortunately it was my left hand, which has never been much good for anything except typing.
This even looks like Woodrow.
In 1992 or 1993 Sue and I made a trip to Dallas to pitch TSI’s AdDept software system to Neiman Marcus (described here). We then drove our rental car to Austin so that Sue could visit her high school friend Marlene Soul. Marlene exhibited a toy she used to keep her cats active. It was a long very limp stick with a feather on the end. With every slightest move of the hand the cat was drawn inexorably to the dancing feather.
As soon as I got home I purchased one so that I could torture Woodrow. He absolutely could not resist it. After he chased it for at least an hour he hid under a chair so that he could not see it. I pulled it out every time that I thought about that bloody left hand.
We had to take Woodrow to the vet twice to patch him up after fights. Both times he had abscesses that the vet had to drain and then sew up. After the first one, I tried to teach Woody to keep his left up, but he got tagged again a few months later. I never got to see how the other cat did in these scrapes, but I doubt that he escaped without some damage.
I don’t really have many good stories about Rocky. He was consistently a very sweet cat for all of the eighteen years that I knew him. He never got into a fight, or at least he never got seriously hurt. When we brought him to the vet for shots he went completely limp when we put him on the examination table. The vet called him “catatonic cat.”
Once, however, Rocky was missing for three days. Sue and were quite concerned. I had walked up and down the nearby streets looking for him several times. I also took the car and expanded the search area. Sue and I searched everywhere in the house. No luck. However, when I checked the garage for the third time Rocky came slowly out from behind some junk. He followed me inside and nonchalantly drank some water. Within a day he showed no sign of any problem.
How, you may ask, could the cat have hidden in the garage? Why not just pull out the car and search thoroughly? Well, there was no car in the garage. It was full of Sue’s junk, packed from floor to ceiling, as is her new garage as I write this. A thorough search of the garage would have entailed taking all of the junk out piece by piece and piling it somewhere on the yard. Then, whether I found him or not, I would have had to reassemble the mess in precisely the way that I found it.
I did call for Rocky each time that I opened the garage door, but he must have been asleep or just obstinate.
Show no mercy!
Both Rocky and Woodrow stayed outside a great deal during the summer. They both were tormented by fleas every year. I felt great sympathy for them. They were obviously suffering terribly. I tried to help them.
I tried to pick the fleas off. During each session, I slew several dozen by squeezing them between my fingernails. I could hear their shells crack, but a few days later there would be just as many.
I tried flea collars. Rocky, who must certainly have had a set of bolt-cutters secreted away in the bushes, always showed up without it within a few hours. The collar helped a little with Woodrow, but there was no guarantee that the fleas would cross it. He also hated the collar, but Rocky would not lend out his tools.
I tried flea powder. It helped a little for a short time.
Flea baths actually worked, but both cats hated them. After a short struggle Rocky submitted meekly, but he also gave me a look that asked what he had done to make me despise him so much. Woodrow, of course, fought me tooth and nail. I had to don gloves and my army field jacket to pick him up. One time—I swear that this is true—he clearly screamed out the word “NO!!!!” as I dipped him in the medicated water in the tub.
Advantage was even better than Frontline.
Of course, if we did not attack them quickly, the fleas got in the carpet, and, after we got them off of the cats we had to “bomb” the house. That was not a bit pleasant.
Fortunately, the flea problem was solved when our vet supplied us with Frontline2, the monthly drops on the back of the neck, at some point in the nineties. I don’t know if there were side effects, but the product sure worked on the fleas. It was great having flea-free cats and a flea-free house.
Not long after Woodrow established residency with us, I bought a cat door and installed it in a window that led to the top of the basement. It was located just below the bathroom window. Just below the window on the basement side was the top of some shelves that were there when we moved in. From the shelves I placed a spare door at a 45° angle to serve as a ramp down to the ping pong table. A box served as a step up to the table or down to the floor.
Rocky seldom used the cat door. He preferred for a human to let him out through one of the doors or in through his favorite window. When he did enter through the cat door, he did not use the ramp. Instead he jumped from the bookshelves to the washing machine and from there to the floor. He exited the house by jumping up on the picnic table and climbing the shelves.
Other cats occasionally tried to use the cat door. Brian Corcoran gave me his Super Soaker, which proved to be very effective at chasing them away. However, the felines were most active at night, and I was not. Occasionally one would get in and help himself to some Purina Cat Chow.
I often heard the distinctive caterwauling of two or more cats that were about to engage in that furious and bloody activity known as a catfight. Once I saw Woodrow in the basement on the bookshelf near the cat door loudly warning a cat not to poke his head through. He definitely meant business. His body was crouched and taut, ready to for action. His right paw was raised with all five claws drawn. He reminded me of Horatius at the bridge.
Ours was indoors, and I only saw him from the rear before he scurried away.
There were a couple of other uninvited guests. One night I heard some very loud munching coming from the hallway. I jumped out of bed, turned on the hall light, and beheld an opossum helping himself to the Cat Chow in a bowl at the other end of the hall. I assume that the opossum was a male since it did not have a dozen babies on its back.He had evidently found his way through the cat door, down to the basement, and up the stairs. My footsteps frightened him enough that he rushed down the stairs, never to be seen again.
The story of the other remarkable intruder can be read here.
Sue and I took quite a few long trips after Rocky and Woodrow moved in, and the cat door was installed. We also invested a few dollars in a gravity-fed Cat Chow dispenser. Whenever we took a trip we left Rocky and Woodrow “home alone”. We provided them with plenty of food and water, and Sue arranged for someone to check on them every few days. This arrangement worked well for our trip to Texas (described here), our cruising tour of Greece and Turkey (described here), our trip to Hawaii in 1997 (described here), our misbegotten adventure in Maine and Canada (described here), and our first tour of Italy in 2003 (described here).
Rocky died later in 2003 at the age of eighteen. I am pretty sure that he used up all nine of his allotted lives. Even though I was much closer to Woodrow for the many years that we had both of them, I cried when Rocky died. He was so tough and such a nice cat. I really missed him.
1. A better choice probably would have been “Augustus”. His personality was much more like the free-spirited Gus McCrae’s than the rigid Woodrow Call’s.
2. I later switched to Advantage II. It was cheaper and worked better.
TSI’s first, last, and best programmer was Denise Bessette. The beginnings of her career at TSI are documented here. At some point in the second half of the eighties she decided to finish her undergraduate degree in economics and mathematics at Smith College in Northampton, MA, and then get a masters degree in econ at Trinity College in Hartford. She lived in Stafford, which is forty-two miles from Smith and thirty-two miles from Trinity. She commuted to both schools. During this lengthy period Denise continued to work part-time at TSI. She also raised her son Chris. Frankly, I don’t know how she did it. She never seemed burnt out or exhausted.
After she graduated she returned to work full time. At that time I named her vice-president of application development. I also arranged that Denise could share a portion of Sue’s office. At the time I did not think that there was much more that I could do. The layout of our office in Enfield (described here) provided for only two offices. Sue had the corner office. The other one was used by our salesmen. I worked in the computer room.
This arrangement seemed to work fairly well for a while. In 1994, because of TSI’s “second crisis” (described here), Denise was able to establish herself in that office. A few years later Denise decided that she needed to try to work at a company in which she had more control over her situation. This prompted TSI’s “third crisis”, which is described here.
After that situation was very pleasantly resolved, Denise and I worked productively as partners until the company was dissolved in 2014. She was in charge of getting the programming and support done and hiring the technical staff. She also continued to handle the payroll. The administrative and sales people reported to me. I continued to do the sales calls, demos, installations, and training. I also spent countless hours researching alternative approaches to our way of doing business.
After TSI moved its office to East Windsor and installed a network with a connections to the Internet, Denise handled all phases of it and worked with our clients to establish and maintain access to their computer systems. I was more than happy to let her deal with those issues.
She also managed the people who cleaned the office and a few other similar functions.
Memories: Denise caught on to my style of programming faster than any other coder that we hired. I was somewhat upset when she went part-time to be able to finish college. The silver lining was that it was unlikely that she would quit before she got her degree, or as it turned out, degrees.
In the eighties Denise sometimes brought her son Christopher into the office. She stashed him in the supply closet. No, she did not shut the door. He seemed to be content with whatever she gave him to play with there.
I remember that on one occasion Denise invited Sue and me to supper at the house in Stafford where she lived with her husband Ray for supper. It was a very nice house with a deck. The heating was provided by one or two stoves that burned wood chips. I had never seen such a thing.
That was the only time that we visited them. If you are wondering whether we reciprocated the invitation, the answer is no. I am not sure why, but we almost never invited anyone over to any of our residences in Connecticut. We probably were still living in Rockville.
I played golf with Ray and his dad a few times. They liked to play at Grassmere, a short public course in Enfield with only nine holes. I seem to remember that one hole had a huge tree right in front of the green. If you did not hit your drive far enough, your only shot to the green was to try to hit a wedge or nine-iron over the tree.
When we hired Denise she was a smoker. In the late eighties she quit cold turkey at about the same time that Sue, Patti Corcoran, and my dad also quit. I don’t remember her getting irritable or fat during the drying out period.
On one occasion her kitchen sink got backed up because Denise poured instant mashed potatoes down it. I bought her a box of instant mashed potatoes as a memento. Later I kicked a dent in one of our cabinets when I got upset at a client. She bought me an inflatable Fred Flintstone to punch when I got angry. It is still in the basement in 2023, but I haven’t tried to inflate it in a few decades.
Denise knew that I read quite a bit. She was taken aback when I casually remarked that I did not enjoy reading female authors, especially ones in the science fiction or fantasy genres.1 On her recommendations I read several Anne Tyler books. They were all fairly good, but I had to admit that Breathing Lessons was close to a masterpiece.
I was always envious of Denise’s cars—a sporty Mazda when she started working for us and a string of BMW’s thereafter. When in 2007 I bought my sapphire blue Honda Accord coupe, she said, “That sure doesn’t look like my grandmother’s Honda!”
She was almost never ill in the thirty years that I worked with her. Then again, neither was I. I remember that she got an infection from inner-tubing on the Farmington River on one of TSI’s summer outings. We never tried that again.
Denise and I enjoyed a very productive trip together when we attended the IBM PartnerWorld convention in San Diego in 2000. The details are described here.
Denise drank mostly tea and Diet Coke in cans.2 She ordinarily just dipped the teabags in the hot water once or twice. I’ve never seen such a weak beverage. Her favorite was Earl Grey. I purloined for her envelopes of tea from the hotels at which I stayed. She seldom took a lunch break; she just grazed on what she brought with her.
At some point in the nineties Sue Comparetto, Denise, and I attended a performance of Carmen at the Bushnell Theater in Hartford. We all enjoyed the opera well enough, but I was disappointed that, as usual, Sue was late and so we missed the talk that was presented before the show.
Several years later Denise and I spent an hour or two at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. She wanted to show me some impressionist paintings. They did nothing for me. I am a Philistine when it comes to art.
Denise was afraid of escalators. She avoided them if possible. If not, she was very tentative. She did not like the moving sidewalks at airports, either.
When Christopher was in high school Denise told me that his best friend was a girl in his class. She alleged that they were just friends. Although this sounded preposterous to me, I kept my mouth shut.
Competition.
I remember when Christopher graduated from high school and was in the process of selecting a college. Denise wanted him to go to a good school in New England. He wanted to go to Penn State. I advised her to tell him that he would have a better chance with the girls at a local school. At PSU half of the male students were linebackers on the football team. I doubt that she took my sagacious advice. He became a Nittany Lion.
She especially did not like it when Christopher joined a fraternity in State College, but he somehow survived the experience, and Denise is now a grandma.
Their cottage was much smaller and a few blocks from the Sound.
Denise loved bodies of water—oceans, lakes, ponds, rivers, anything. She was always happier when she was close enough to experience a body of water through any sense. For years she and her husband Ray had a cottage in Old Saybrook near the Long Island Sound. Several times they took vacations in Aruba.
In 2013 Denise and Ray sold both their house in Stafford and the cottage and moved to Cape Cod. I saw her only a few times in the last year that we worked together and never since.
Business Relationship: For the most part Denise and I had a very productive relationship. Largely it was a case of staying out of each other’s way and (after I made her a partner in 1997) coming together in November and December to evaluate progress and distribute bonuses.
A blog entry about the agendas for the periodic meetings that the two of us enjoyed from 2001 through 2006 has been posted here.
Denise provided some needed organization and discipline to TSI’s approach to programming. My “cowboy coder” philosophy dictated that when I was at a client’s site, and someone complained about a problem, I would immediately investigate it. I often was able to fix it on the spot within a few minutes. This often made me a hero at the client’s office, but a pain back at TSI. It was not easy to isolate all of the things that I had changed, bring them back to the office in an orderly manner, and integrate them into the master copy of the system without disrupting processes used by other clients. Keep in mind that I installed thirty-six AdDept systems, and they were all running the same code.
I eventually had to refrain from addressing any problems at a client’s site. I documented them but did not change the code. … All right, I’ll fess up. Sometimes I could not keep myself from making changes that I was 100 percent certain would not interfere with what was being done at the office. Denise was not a bit happy when I did this. Perhaps we were fortunate that eventually our clients lost the willingness to pay for me to travel to visit them.
The only other point of contention between Denise and me involved research. Both of us knew that the platform on which we had built AdDept–BASIC programs on the AS/400–was considered obsolete by many people in the world of data processing. In most cases these people had veto power over a purchase of our system. It was generally a waste of time to try to persuade them that their evaluation was erroneous. They were hired as experts. We were just potential vendors.
Denise and I agreed that the ideal solution would be to move the whole system to the Internet to avoid the standards that were being established by IT departments. This approach is now called Cloud Computing. However, we were never satisfied that we could do it without man-years of work and considerable expense.
If there was no pathway to the cloud-based approach, the issue was whether the problem was BASIC or the AS/400. I thought that we should investigate the programming languages that coders were using on platforms outside of IBM. At that time the most popular languages were C and C++. C was somewhat similar in structure to BASIC. C++ was its object-oriented version. I spent some time researching the IBM version of C and concluded that a transition to C was possible but unquestionably difficult.
For reasons that I never understood Denise was quite upset at me for spending any time investigating this possibility. I had absolutely no intention of asking her to convert the programs. I was just trying to see whether it was a possibility.
The other side of this coin was Denise’s advocacy of converting all of our BASIC programs to a version of RPG, a language that was popular on the AS/400 but nowhere else, dubbed ILE.3 I never understood the reason for this, but it kept the programmers busy after the requests for programming began to dry up. So, for the most part I kept my opinions to myself.
After Denise moved to the Cape she only came into the office a few times a month. She was in rather constant communication by telephone with Jason Dean, who, at that point, was our only programmer. I liked it a lot better when Denise was in the office all of the time, but my philosophy had always been to take advantage of whatever time she could give me.
1. I need to explain this. I have no doubt that women can write as well as men by virtually any measure. In 2023 (as this is being written) they definitely dominate the publishing industry. However, I contend that women have a basic fantasy about being rescued, and men have one about being heroic. I contend that this is not cultural but innate. Nature, not nurture.
I find that reading about the latter fantasies more interesting than the former. Is that a crime? I have never like a science fiction or fantasy book by a female author. Several times I got suspicious in the middle of one in which the author used initials or a pseudonym and looked up the author used initials or a pseudonym. After looking the author up and discovering the secret I stopped reading. Before you ask, I have never read a single word of the Harry Potter books.
2. I always thought that cola from plastic bottles tasted a little better. For some reason the two liter bottles are always cheaper and usually on sale somewhere. I like both Diet Pepsi and Diet Coke equally. I always have bought whichever one was cheaper. After the business closed I switched to the caffeine-free versions.
3A 220-page document from IBM that aims to show why ILE is a superior approach can be viewed here.
In the mid-eighties we finally took two real vacations, one in 1985 and one in 1986. We had such a good time on the first one that we tried to replicate the experience the next year, but, of course, it turned out to be rather different.
Sue and I discovered that we could spend a week in February cruising the Caribbean for only about $1,000. The price included air fare from Bradley to Miami. Curt Hussey had advised me that cruises were the best kind of vacations. You could do as much or as little as you wanted, and there was no hassle at all.
This plan suited me. I have always said that the only good thing about February is that it is short. We made reservations for a seven-day cruise on the Song of Norway, a ship of the Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines (RCCL), in the western Caribbean. It would start and end in Miami.
By the end of 1984 the business seemed to be doing a little better. Hiring Denise Bessette and Kate Behart had worked out well, and we actually had a little money in the bank. We notified all of the clients that we would be gone for a week. We would try to stay in touch, but it might be difficult on some days.
We did no research at all for either of these cruises. We were simply looking for warmth, pleasure, and relaxation. There was nothing wrong with that, I suppose, but on subsequent long trips I totally changed my mind about the objectives of traveling to distant locations.
Who needs these?
Neither Sue nor I had a credit card. I don’t think that we would have brought hundreds of dollars in cash. We might have bought some travelers’ checks.
It is hard for me to believe in retrospect, but at the time we had no pets! So, all we needed to arrange was transportation to and from the airport. Perhaps one of the employees drove us to the airport, and one of Sue’s sisters picked us up. We might have taken a cab. Maybe we left one of the cars at one of the parking lots that surrounded the airport. Some offered weekly rates.
It was, of course, very cold when our plane took flight from Bradley in the morning and warm when we arrived in Miami around noon. However, the differential was not as great as the time that Bill Davey and I flew there from Detroit in 1970, as described here.
I remember that we were met at the airport by a representative from RCCL. I think that they provided transportation to the port. My recollection is that we were allowed to board pretty much immediately.
A photo of the Song of Norway in 1985.
The cruise itself got off to a rocky start. Somehow our luggage got misplaced. The staff told us that they would get it for us, but we would need to do without until the next day. This was a problem because the first night’s supper, which had open seating, was the only occasion of the entire trip that was designated as somewhat formal. Everyone else was dressed up. As it turned out, our attire was a pretty good ice-breaker. Everyone was sympathetic when they heard about our problem.
Fortunately, that was our last real problem. The rest of the cruise was absolutely delightful.
Sue told me that she recalled that there were only 750 passengers, but the ship’s passenger capacity then1 was actually 1,196. There may have been some empty cabins, but I do not remember a lot of empty tables at dinner.
We did not have our luggage that first night, but our employees (or maybe it was Tom and Patti Corcoran), ordered a bottle of champagne for our cabin. I think that RCCL gave us a fruit basket, too.
We got the cheapest cabin available. It had no view, twin beds that were pushed together, a small bathroom, and a desk. It was about as small as could be imagined. I did not intend to spend much time there. Sue complained about the size of the shower, but I found everything satisfactory. She also objected to the cabin steward going through her luggage every afternoon to find something sexy to lay out on her bed. My recollection is that nearly all of the cabin stewards were Filipinos.
The ship seemed gigantic to us, totally oblivious to the puny waves below us. By twenty-first century cruising standards, however, it was a canoe.
The ship each issued each passenger a credit-card sized piece of plastic. This card served as an identity document in getting on and off the ship and as the means of payment for anything on the ship. It was possible to avoid most expenses, but even a penny-pincher like me ended up spending hundreds of dollars on excursions and tips.
Although we eventually sailed as far west at the Yucatan Peninsula, the ship stayed on Eastern Standard Time throughout the cruise.
The ship’s first stop was at a private island owned by RCCL, now called CocoCay2, where the staff put on a picnic lunch. There were a few other activities in the afternoon as well, but there was nothing very elaborate. There were plenty of picnic tables, some volleyball courts, and some trails. Basically, it was just a place to relax for a few hours and get to know a few of our fellow cruisers. I took a little hike, but there was nothing much to see.
Back on the ship there were two seatings for supper: 6:00 and 8:00. I would have much preferred to eat at six, but Sue protested that she needed to get cleaned up and dressed, and she has never liked being rushed. So we ate at the second seating. The down side was that the after-supper entertainment was too late for a morning person like myself.
We ate at the same table every evening. Some tables were larger, but ours had only four chairs. Our dining companions were a couple from Wisconsin who were about our age. The same waiter served our table every evening. Ours was from Greece. I forget his name, but all four of us rapidly became very enamored with him. The menu changed every night. There were three or four choices for the entrée. The selection was good, the quality was good, and the quantities were unlimited.
Needless to say, the couple from Wisconsin were sheepshead enthusiasts. They were excited to hear that we had played the game, an event that is described here. We agreed to play with them as well if they explained ALL the rules to us. They listed them in a couple of minutes. I protested that I was certain that there were additional rules. They insisted that it was a simple game.
This time we got to the third or fourth hand before the first undisclosed rule made its appearance. Others soon followed. I am convinced that all people from Wisconsin are given at birth two sets of rules, one that they disclose to foreigners and one to mention only when they apply.
We were surprised that there was so much to do on the ship. In the movies there only seemed to be four activities on cruise ships: dancing, shuffleboard, sitting on deck chairs, and gazing at the stars in formal attire. On most days I tried to run on the Promenade Deck, but it was very boring. A lap was only about one tenth of a mile. Also, you had to dodge strolling passengers and be on the alert for slippery spots.
I had no interest in shopping in any of the ship’s stores or losing money in the on-board casino. I spent as much time as possible in the sun by the swimming pool drinking free Diet Cokes or iced teas.
Our route to Jamaica took us between Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic) and Cuba. In fact, Cuba was visible on the starboard (or as we say in Kansas, “right”) side of the ship for most of the first part of the cruise and on the port side on the return voyage.
I don’t remember any high-rises in Ocho Rios in 1985. Unless you were looking for weed, the town was very dull.
The second stop was at Ocho Rios on the south side of Jamaica. West of the harbor was a large brick-red wooden factory that produced aluminum, which the locals pronounced with an extra syllable as the British do, from locally mined bauxite.
I don’t think that the water was flowing this fast when we were there. This looks dangerous.
Several excursions were offered. I wanted to climb the rocks at Dunn’s River Falls. I was surprised that Sue was willing to try this. She never has felt comfortable around open water. The rocks were as slippery as they looked. The suggested footwear was sneakers with no socks.
Our guide’s name for the excursion was named Philippe. His reply to almost any statement or question was, “No problem.” A group of us were driven by van from the harbor to the falls. We stopped once or twice. Philippe told us to get out and “take your lovely shots.” I did not have a camera, but I was happy to stretch my legs.
When we reached the falls, we formed a single-file line and held our neighbor’s hand tightly. Several people were to scared to try the ascent, but even Sue managed to get all the way to the top.
Sue took several photos of this and our other stops, but I have not been able to locate them.
The excursion took a few hours. After lunch Sue and I walked into town. I still had my beard and could have easily been mistaken for Tommy Chong’s younger brother. At least three times I was approached by people who offered to sell me marijuana. There were a lot of souvenirs on sale there. I might have bought a postcard or two, but no souvenirs.
I think that we took a second excursion in the afternoon, but this may have been in 1986. In any case we went green-water rafting on Martha Brae (MAR tuh BREE), a very slow moving stream. Our guide for this adventure was named Nigel.
The rafts were made of bamboo. They had seats toward the back for the passengers, but the “captain” stood in the front and directed the raft with a long pole. According to Sue our captain’s name was Tony.
The experience was very relaxing, but I don’t think that very many people would do it twice. On the road from Marta Brae to the harbor our guide pointed out a large dwelling by the sea. The house had belonged to Arthur Ashe, the famous tennis player who died in 1980. At least that is the way that I remember it. I could find no support for this on the Internet, but he had been dead for four decades when I googled it.
Most of the suppers had themes—Italian, French, Mexican, etc. Every meal was tasty, filling, and fun. The waiters and the other staff members dressed for the occasions. There was also music, and the waiters marched around and waved to the people at their tables. It was very festive, and, in my opinion they managed to make it fun without too much kitsch.
The third stop on the cruise was in George Town on Grand Cayman. Unlike most other islands in the Caribbean the Caymans are NOT mountainous or even somewhat hilly. They did not appear on the horizon until the ship was almost there.
The islands have an interesting history. They were discovered by Christopher Columbus on his third voyage. No evidence of an indigenous population has been discovered. For years the islands served as a haven for pirates. They have been a British territory since the middle of the eighteenth century. They have never had income, wealth, or capital gains taxes. We heard the story that the British king issued a decree that England would never tax them because he was grateful to the colonists for saving one of his family members.3 We did not learn about the slavery. When it was finally abolished in 1833, 950 Black people were enslaved by 115 white families.
In the eighties the Caymans had not yet earned renown as a place to hide dodgy funds. We were surprised to learn that the country had more teletype machines per capita than anywhere else on earth. In fact, even by then there were only two sources of income there—tourism and tax evasion.
The contrast between Ocho Rios and George Town was striking. Jamaica seemed like a very slow and backward place that had a few interesting attractions. The people all seemed devoted to selling knickknacks of no utility. Nothing had a fixed price. There were only a few stores. Transactions generally took place on the street.
George Town, on the other hand, was a clean and modern town. No one tried to sell anything on the street. I did not feel as if I had to keep my hand on my wallet.
There was not much to do in town if you were not interested in buying duty-free jewelry. I think that a snorkeling excursion was available, but it did not interest me that much. I probably would have enjoyed it, but I knew that when I left the water I would be shivering for a half hour or so.
If there is a ship in port, 7 Mile Beach is never this empty.
The spectacular beach by George Town is seven miles long. The hotels jealously protected their portions. RCCL had an agreement with one hotel that its passengers could hang around at the beach. That was good enough for me. After a once-around in the town, I parked myself on a towel on the beach and read a book.
Sue has always been averse to both sun and heat. She spent most of her time in Grand Cayman nosing around the shops.
The ship made two stops in Mexico. The first was at Playa del Carmen, which is south of Cancun. About half of the passengers departed from the ship in Playa. Of those most went up the coast to the resort town of Cancun. We joined the group that had signed up for the excursion to Tulum, an ancient Mayan city located about fifty miles to the south.
We had been warned by the cruise directors about the street vendors in Playa del Carmen. As soon as we set foot on land we were all set upon by people selling stuff, mostly extremely low-grade silver jewelry. It was a little difficult even to make it to our buses.
I have a few pretty clear memories of Playa Del Carmen. It seemed like a very poor town to me. Very skinny dogs roamed the streets. No one from our ship considered stepping into one of the stores. Based on the photos that I have seen on the Internet, I would guess that things have improved there at least a little.
The bus ride to Tulum was hot and boring. I think that they served Mexican Coke on the bus. The land was perfectly flat, and there were almost no towns at all. There appeared to be lots of trees, but none grew very tall. Only a few locals could be seen, and they all seemed destitute or nearly so. We saw very little traffic.
I don’t remember the town of Tulum at all. Apparently it has become a tourist destination in the intervening years. It certainly was not on anyone’s bucket list in 1985.
I remember the area just outside of the ruins. Flimsy booths were set up so that some of the local people of Mayan descent could sell things. I seem to remember that the main thing that they sold was cloth. There were no souvenirs.
The ruins area was, I am pretty certain, surrounded by stone walls. On the other side of the walls was jungle, not like in the Tarzan movies, but a sea of trees, none more than twenty feet high. On one side from the top of the wall you could see the sea and a lovely beach, but there was a cliff between the wall and the sea. Waves were smashing against the rocks. The beach did not look inviting that day.
We did not have a guided tour. We were told to meet back up at a particular time.
The big attraction was the temple in the middle. I climbed all the way up to the top and looked around. It was pretty impressive. We had already been told about the carvings of the “descending gods” that festooned the temple and some of the other buildings. Some people have taken this as an indication that the Mayans had been visited by extraterrestrials, who created these stone cities for them.
The ruins area was not very crowded. Almost everyone there was from our ship. That has no doubt changed in the intervening years.
From Tulum we drove up the coast to Xel-Há4 (pronounced shell-hah), which is a beautiful lagoon. I think that we ate lunch there. I don’t remember much about this place, but it had some facilities.
After lunch most people took a quick dip in the lagoon’s waters. I don’t remember if I did or not. I doubt it.
The bus then returned us to Playa del Carmen, where we took the ferry to the island of Cozumel. By that time it was the middle of the afternoon, and it was extremely hot. In those days, however, I could stand just about any amount of heat. I decided to walk by myself into the town of San Miguel, a resort town that was a mile or more from the harbor. Sue shopped at little stores on the pier.
There was not much to see in San Miguel. A goodly number of the ship’s passengers were enjoying drinks in a bar there.
I was happy that I made the journey. I got a little exercise, and I saw dozens of iguanas of all sizes. I stopped to watch them several times. Some were large enough that if they had made aggressive moves I would have been frightened. They mostly just sat on rocks, and they were all grey. Nevertheless, I felt the pure sense of joy that I have always seemed to feel whenever I unexpectedly encountered wild animals in their native habitats.
The last leg of the cruise was a long day at sea sailing past Cuba back to Miami. I am pretty sure that it took two nights and one day.
One of the highlights of the trip for me occurred on that last day. The cruise directors had announced that if anyone had purchased something at one of the stops and could no longer remember why they did so, he/she should bring the “white elephant” to the staff. They planned to hold an auction to try to regain something for the disgruntled purchaser. The auctioneer was very talented. He invented provenances and romantic attributes for each item, no matter how junky. Most of them were sold, a few at a profit.
Here are some other things that I remember from the 1985 cruise:
I went with Sue to a line-dancing class. She participated. Of course they taught “Achy Breaky Heart”, but there were not enough cowboy hats to go around. I watched for as long as I could stand it.
There was a midnight buffet every night. Since most passengers gorged themselves at all three meals and got little exercise on this cruise, I was surprised how popular this was.
The Viking Crown Lounge was one of the highest points on the ship. It was pretty much de rigeur to visit it, have a drink, and gaze at the horizon. We did, but only once.
There were very few children on the cruise. The cruise staff formed them into a club and arranged activities for them. For the most part the kids were invisible.
The cruise staff also organized activities and games at poolside almost all day long. I found them annoying. I wanted to read. Nevertheless, I was embarrassed that they stumped me when they asked who sang the hit song, “Winchester Cathedral”. It was the New Vaudeville Band. I should have remembered it. It was released in late 1966, when I was at Allen Rumsey House. If, God forbid, it had been on our juke box, I probably would have known it. I did not listen to Top 40 music in Ann Arbor.
A small newsletter was pushed under the door every day.
I think that our room had a TV. After we left Miami it showed only short films about RCCL, the ship, or ports of call.
The cruise staff conducted an orientation class about each of port of call. I went to most of them. They were not well attended. The guy giving the one on Ocho Rios emphasized that the town was a good place to purchase some straw if you needed any.
Sue went to some of the shows at night. She has always loved live entertainment of almost any stripe. I might have gone once.
Sue and I both had a great time. The trip itself was both relaxing and entertaining. I liked the fact that I had absolutely no responsibilities. Sue liked being able to set her own pace. She probably would have preferred cooler weather, but it does not really ever get cool in the tropics.
The timing was perfect. When we left, we were both grouchy with cabin fever. When we returned, it was almost time for Sue’s birthday and, shortly thereafter, spring. We promptly called the travel agent—another common occupation that has almost disappeared in the intervening decades—to go on essentially the same cruise in the following year.
The Viking Crown Lounge at night.
The second cruise was similar, but not identical. We flew non-stop to Miami again. We were met by the RCCL people again. They did not misplace our luggage this time. After the very first stop the schedule was almost identical.
The interior of the Viking Crown Lounge.
Over the winter two big things had happened at RCCL. The first was that the Song of Norway won all of these awards from World Ocean and Cruise Liner Society: Best Food, Best Crew, Best Housekeeping Service, Best Dining Room Service, Best Cruise Staff, Best Ship Activities, Best Shore Excursions, Best Overall, and Ship of the Year. They had sweatshirts made that bragged about that last one. Travel Holiday Magazine also named RCCL the world’s best cruise line.
The other big development was the purchase by RCCL of an isolated peninsula on the north side of Haiti5. The name was Labadie, but the company changed it slightly to Labadee. Our ship did not go to CocoCay in 1986. On the first day of our second cruise, the Song of Norway became, I think, the first cruise ship to visit Labadee.
Before we landed the ship was boarded by heavily armed Haitian soldiers. I don’t know what their function was, but they were more than a little scary. As far as I know, however, they did not interfere with any of the planned activities.
Tthe local citizens apparently knew that we were coming. A dozen or so rowboats surrounded us as we landed. Each contained two or three of the local people. They were trying to sell their art work. Their boats do not look at all seaworthy. These people were just doing what they could to survive a very bad situation.
None of that development was there in 1986. A clearing for a picnic and volleyball had been established, nothing more. The real world was on the other side of those mountains.
The time on shore was pleasant enough. There was not much to do.6 There might have been some hiking paths, but most people dared not venture too far from the picnic area.
Our experience here was remarkably similar to the one on CocoCay a year earlier. In fact it is difficult for Sue and me to distinguish between the two occasions.
We met our companions for supper after we returned to the ship and cleaned up. They were a couple from Long Island. Sue remembers that he owned a chain of garages there. I only remember that he ordered seconds of the main course at both meals that we ate with them. After that they arranged to join the first seating, and we ate by ourselves during the remainder of the cruise. I can’t say that we missed their company.
It was definitely never this bad.
The seas were a little high the night after we left Labadee. Many passengers got seasick. Sue felt a little woozy, but she did not get sick. I wasn’t bothered at all, but walking in the hallways was something of a challenge. The creaking sound that occurred whenever the ship rocked was rather spooky. By morning it was smooth sailing for the remainder of the cruise.
Sue and I decided to do something different in Jamaica this time. We signed up for a trip up in the hills to an old “estate”. I did not remember the name of it. Several of these places still offer tours, including Brimmer Hall, which is the only one that sounded at all familiar. I remember that it was a long drive through very hilly country. This was the first time that it occurred to me that islands in the middle of deep seas almost have to be mountainous.
Sky Aquarius: “We should love animals, not eat them, Jim.”
They definitely served us lunch in the plantation house. One of the offerings was goat, and I was courageous enough to try it. I would not say that it was delicious, but at least I did not get sick.
It was a worthwhile excursion if only for the fact that it got me to thinking about the geography, history, and sociology of Jamaica. The truth is that in the eighties I would never have thought of a vacation as a time to learn about other countries. I was just charging my batteries.
I knew that Jamaica had been a British colony. I did not know that in 1838 England abolished slavery, but there was never anything like reconstruction and no distribution of assets. It was more a case of “Take these broken wings and learn to fly.”
I don’t remember what we did in Grand Cayman. We might have taken an excursion. I seem to remember something about turtles.
I did not think much about Grand Cayman’s sociology either. I don’t remember seeing many Black people, certainly nothing like in Jamaica.
Ixnay on the imbingclay.
The one excursion that we repeated was the one that featured Tulum and Xel-Há. We were a little disappointed. The area of the Tulum ruins was considerably more crowded that it had been the previous year. Also, visitors were no longer allowed to climb or walk on any of the ruins. I suppose that it is only reasonable to take every effort to preserve them for posterity, but it was still disappointing.
I remember a few other things about the 1986 cruise.
We did not fall in love with our waiter this time. He was nice enough, but I don’t even remember his home country. The waiters (I don’t remember even one waitress or cabin stewardess on either cruise) were from all over the world.
I have few memories of the other passengers. I do remember one fellow with whom we talked a few times. His wife never left the ship. She shopped for jewelry in the ship’s store.
On both trips the official photographer took lots of photos of us. They posted them in one of the public areas of the ship. The only way to get them to remove your photo was to buy it. We bought a couple on the first cruise, but not on the second.
The only obnoxious part of the cruise was the semi-mandatory tipping. The maître d’ and the sommelier both appeared at our table for the first and only time at the last supper before it was tip time.
We could not afford to go on vacation in either 1987 or 1988, but in 1989 …
1 .In 1977 RCCL took the Song of Norway out of service, cut it in two, and added a large new piece in the middle. This feat increased the ship’s passenger capacity by 40 percent. The ship’s fuel consumption was only slightly increased, and the seaworthiness was not affected at all. The ship was sold in 1996 to another cruise line. Over the next few decades she changed hands and names several times before being sold for scrap in 2013.
2. RCCL subsequently invested hundreds of millions of dollars in this island and turned much of it into a gigantic water park for its customers. It is now officially called “Perfect Day at CocoCay”, which makes me think that the company pronounces the last syllable like the letter “K” rather than like the word “key”. An aerial view is shown at the right.
3. Wikipedia says that this story is not true. The evidence cited is here.
4. The area that we visited is now called Xel-Há Park. It still has the lagoon, but it also offers a water park, a buffet, a zip line, and other diversions. The website is here.
5. Haiti was in the middle of a coup. The ruler, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, had fled to France on a plane supplied by the U.S. on February 7. He had named a commission to govern in his absence.
6. In the twenty-first century there are plenty of activities available on Labadee. A list of them is in an article posted here.
