1993-2006 TSI: AdDept Client: Foley’s

Posted on July 22, 2021 by Mike

May Co. division based in Houston. Continue reading →

I remember getting two phone calls from Beverly Ingraham¹, the Advertising Director at the May Company division based in Houston, Foley’s. The first one came in early 1993 before we had hired Doug Pease to handle our marketing. I spoke with Beverly about AdDept, TSI’s administrative system for large retail advertisers. She had learned of it from one of our mailings.

Foley’s flagship store at 1110 Main St. was demolished in 2013. I am not sure what replaced it.

I informed her that we had installed the system at a “sister division”, Hecht’s. I emphasized that it had been helping the employees at Hecht’s with their monthly May Company reports as well as many quotidian administrative tasks. She asked me to fly to Houston and show the system to them. Although I don’t remember the occasion, I must have spent a day or two talking with potential users, primarily Richard Roark² in the business office at Foley’s off in one of the top floors of the flagship store on Main Street. The demo must have been at an IBM office. Sue might have come with me to Houston, but neither of us remembers the trip. We met Beverly and Linda Knight, the Senior VP of Advertising³. The people at Foley’s all seemed enthusiastic and exceptionally nice, as they did every time that I visited there.

After we returned to Connecticut, I wrote up a proposal to run the AdDept system on the F10 model that had recently been introduced by IBM. There is little doubt that I also included quotes for some custom programming—I forget the details.

I was very excited about this. I knew that Foley’s advertising must have had money because the May Company had recently merged the D&F division, which had been based in Denver, with Foley’s. The combined operation would be run from Houston. That gave them stores in Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado. The May Co.’s purse strings were bound to be a little looser than usual.

I was also excited because I was quite certain that most of the work that we had done for Hecht’s would be usable for Foley’s with only minor adjustments. For once we seemed to be on familiar ground.

Over the next week or two I talked with Richard Roark about some of the items in the proposal. When I finally got the second call from Beverly, she did not immediately say that the project had been approved. I had to ask her. She said, “Oh, yeah. Sure.” She then corrected my assumption that Richard Roark would be the liaison. She assured me that she would tell me who it was, and she did a little later.

I remember very well my first visit to Foley’s in May of 1993 to install the system. I flew on Continental Airlines from Bradley to Intercontinental Airport⁴, which was twenty-three miles north of the city center. I took a shuttle bus to the Hyatt Regency Hotel, which was only a couple of blocks from Foley’s headquarters.

The Hyatt featured a lobby that was both luxurious and sometimes very noisy. A bar was right in the middle of it, and the area above was open all the way up to the roof, thirty stories up. It was like an echo chamber or a natural amplifier. So, half of the rooms had windows that viewed the lobby. After my first stay there I always requested a room with an outside window.

That’s the Hyatt’s bar way down there in the middle of the lobby.

The elevators all had glass walls on the lobby side. I am not ordinarily affected by heights or tight locations, but the rapid descent in these glass cages made me quite uneasy.

I distinctly remember my first stroll to Foley’s from the Hyatt. It was March. I knew that I would not need the overcoat that I had worn to the airport in Connecticut, but I did have on a wool suit. The lobby of the Hyatt was very cool. I went through the revolving door and I was smashed in the face by the heat and humidity. It was like walking into a sauna.

By the time that I ~~swam~~ walked the few blocks to Foley’s big brick building, I had grown tolerant of the humidity. However, I was not expecting to see ten or so mendicants sitting on the sidewalk near the employees’ entrance. This crew was not the aggressive kind I had encountered in my life in Detroit and visits to New York. They just seemed hopeless. I don’t know why, but I was shocked to see this in Texas.

I don’t actually remember too much else about that day. That is a good thing. In TSI’s thirty-five year history we only had a few near-disasters or crises, and I distinctly remember each one.

I recall that one of our first big assignments for Foley’s was when the Houston Chronicle bought out the Houston Post and its assets in 1995. Foley’s was by far the largest advertiser in both papers. They ran dozens of ads every week, and the newspaper coordinators had already recorded the schedules for both papers for several months ahead.

Their first requirement was a list of all ads that were scheduled to run in the Post but not the Chronicle. That was not difficult; I wrote a query to produce the list. They would need to decide what to do with those ads and adjust the schedules for the Chronicle where necessary.

Next, they needed to delete all of the ads scheduled for the Post. This was was a little more difficult. I had to replicate exactly the process that would have occurred if they canceled them individually. That meant that I had to write history records for each deletion, and all subsidiary files and summary records needed to be updated as if the deletions were being done one at a time.

Finally, they needed me to find all the ads in the Chronicle that were full depth (the longer dimension), which, if memory serves, was twenty-one inches. All of these ads would be one-half inch deeper because the Post’s presses, which the Chronicle planned to use going forward, cut the paper to that size. That meant that the costs (Foley’s kept track of actual costs billed by the papers and costs marked up to reflect production expenses that they showed the merchants) had to be recalculated.

Since any paper could change its size (and many subsequently did), I made this one into a program that could be attached to a menu available to the users. Since AdDept’s rate calculations had been externalized into separate callable modules, this was also not too difficult. History records and updates of subsidiary files and summaries were required for this step, too.

They needed all of this in just a couple of days. There was no test environment. No one helped me, and no one tested the code that I produced. On TSI’s developmental system I simulated a few ads of each type and tested the code on them. When I felt satisfied with it, I sent the code to Foley’s over the phone lines, crossed my fingers, and ran the programs.

I must have done a pretty good job. No one complained.

Visits to Foley’s were frequent during the nineties. Sometimes they wanted training, but usually they wanted to describe enhancements that they desired. Two of the trips had a comical aspect. The first one was when I asked Sue to take one of the early trips for me. I cannot remember what the objective for the trip was. She did not have a credit card in those days, and she forgot to bring any cash. Fortunately, someone at Foley’s cashed a check for her, or she might have needed to join the beggars clustered by the employees’ entrance.

On another occasion I wore my running shoes on the flight to Houston. When I had arrived in Houston, as usual I took the shuttle to the Hyatt. When I opened my suitcase at the Hyatt, I was aghast to discover that I had brought only one leather shoe. How could my valet have been so careless?

I recalled that I had seen a Payless Shoe Source, at one time a division of the May Company, between the hotel and Foley’s. I bought a pair of black leather shoes at Payless for $20. They were so uncomfortable that I threw them away as soon as I arrived home after the trip. However, they saved me from embarrassment during the three days of that visit. I figured that my misbegotten purchase was the equivalent of a bargain-priced rental for less than $7 per day.

One of Robert’s most important jobs was to keep the printers clean and full of paper.

Our first liaison at Foley’s was Robert Myers⁵. I think that he must have come from the IT department. He helped to set up a system whereby the store managers could view the contents of their ads on systems in their stores before the ads were run. He tried to get me (of all people) to market the arrangement to other retailers. I suppose that he meant that we should try to offer it as an enhancement to AdDept, but the guts of what he had done involved infrastructure that was unique to Foley’s. I didn’t understand most of it, and I was too busy with things that I understood a lot better to devote time to learning it.

Robert attended nearly all of the training sessions when I came to Houston, and he did a good job of writing up software requests when I was not around. He was one of our best liaisons.

That is Robert talking and facing the camera. The bearded guy in the foreground is Doug Pease⁶. This picture was not taken at Foley’s. I don’t recognize the other three.

Robert once expressed the opinion to me that XML would become the solution to all of the interoperability problems of software systems. I had read a little about it, but I did not understand it. He did not do a good job of explaining it. He may have been right, but to my knowledge XML never entered the main stream among software developers. TSI implemented a lot of interfaces with software from other companies. Sometimes we sent them files, and sometimes AdDept received and processed files. We never considered using XML.

One day Robert took me on a road trip. This must have been over a weekend, probably the one in which I oversaw the migration from the F10 that Foley’s initially purchased in 1993 to a faster model with more capacity, the 270.

We drove down⁷ to the Johnson Space Center (now called Space Center Houston). We spent some time at the exhibits that they have about manned space flight. It was OK, but ever since I was required in 1967 as a member of the varsity debate team at the University of Michigan (explained here) to argue against the concept of putting an American on the moon, it has always seemed to me that it was an expensive and dangerous idea with very little payoff. So, I was not as gung-ho as most of the visitors to the center.

I found notes that indicated that I went out to dinner with Robert Myers and his wife in 2000. I have no clear recollection of the occasion.

The May Company determined that AdDept should be installed in all of its department store divisions. The process of reaching this decision is described here. Robert was assigned by the May Company to help with the installations at several other divisions. On a few occasions we crossed paths at other divisions.

Left to right are Charisse Cossey, who was the TSI liaison after Robert, Sharon Mullins (the second-in-command), Beverly Ingraham, Ralph Annunziato, and Angela Hurry. That’s my big blue mug in the foreground. This room was called “The Wall Room” because the ads for the current week were always displayed on the wall.

Beverly Ingraham had a nameplate on her desk that said “Bevo”. I don’t know whether she was an alumna of UT⁸, or if it was a play on her name. Maybe both.

I remember doing one project that Beverly was especially interested in. The IT department was able to provide us with sales by department by store by day. I wrote a program to convert this file into a usable format for AdDept programs. We then used the information in reports and screens for each merchant that showed them in each market the total costs of their ads (or parts of ads) and the associated sales.

The ability to provide this kind of information was a big feather in Beverly’s cap. This was the first of several TSI projects aimed at evaluating the productivity of the advertising. The concept was actually more useful as a sales tool to show the power and reach of the AdDept system than as a practical tool for the advertisers. If more than one media was employed for a sales event, it was impossible to attribute which of the ads produced the results.

I don’t have distinct memories of most of the projects that we undertook for Foley’s. For the ones after Denise Bessette became VP of Software Development (as explained here) I only wrote up the requests. I don’t have an excuse for forgetting the ones between 1993 and 1997 I probably did most of the coding myself.

This is Robert at a buffet lunch at the department. I don’t remember the reason for it.

I unearthed some notes for a visit in 2000 about insertion orders for newspapers. Foley’s two newspaper coordinators were Hedy Wolpa⁹ and a lady named Leila, whose last name I don’t remember. I was shocked when they told me that they had not been faxing insertion orders to the papers directly from the AS/400 because they could only order by date, not by publication. They thought that this made it difficult for them to specify positioning (such as “Back page of main section”) while ordering. I also learned that they also did not realize that they could specify much longer special instructions as well.

This would never do. They had paid us to provide insertion orders in the precise format that Foley’s had specified, and they had paid IBM for the faxing hardware and software. We might have even gotten a commission on that. Furthermore, TSI needed for them to be ordering in AdDept so that we could switch them to using the product that we were about to release, A^xN (described here).

I think that this picture was taken at Filene’s. Robert is seated with two fingers raised. I don’t recognize the other people. That’s definitely my yellow spiral binder on the table.

While I was at Foley’s I wrote a new front end program for the insertion orders. It allowed them to order for one paper at a time. They were very happy; it was just what they wanted.

Denise hated for me to do things like this on the road. She did not want me to modify any code on the fly. I understood that. In this case, however, I thought that it was better to beg forgiveness rather that to ask permission from Denise. The top priority of this trip was to get Foley’s on board for insertion orders. They became an enthusiastic users, and all their papers subscribed to A^xN¹⁰ a soon as we made it available.

Foley’s was, by most measures, our best client. They used almost every aspect of the system. They even used the SmartPlus interface for broadcast that was originally designed for the GrandAd system for ad agencies. Their agency, which was in Dallas, sent them files with schedules and audit data.

Several Foley’s users also became very adept at using Query/400 to design some of their own reports. They used this product as much as or more than any other client. They sometimes used their queries and a product called ShowCase Strategy without any assistance from TSI.

As of 2000 TSI had delivered and installed approximately 200 custom programming projects to Foley’s.

1. Beverly Ingraham was promoted to Senior Vice President of Advertising at Foley’s in January of 2000. She held that position until the division was dissolved after Macy’s acquired the May Company in 2006. I am pretty sure that she went to the Macy’s Central division in Atlanta and headed the advertising department there for several years. I think that in 2021 she lives in Spring, TX, twelve miles north of the airport. If I am correct, then she is my age and therefore probably retired.

2. Richard Roark’s LinkedIn page is posted here.

3. In 2000 Linda, who was by then known as Linda Knight Quick, resigned as Senior VP of Foley’s to take a job at Penney’s. Foley’s sued to prevent this because of a non-compete clause in her contract. I was unable to determine how the situation was resolved.

4. In 1997 it was renamed George Bush Intercontinental Airport.

5. I have a note from January of 2000 that indicated that he was doing Internet development for Foley’s IT department using Cold Fusion, but I do not know what he has been up to in the last two decades.He helped me identify some of the people in photos of employees from Foley’s and other May Co. divisions. He also said that his association with TSI changed his life, but he did not explain how.

6. Doug Pease was TSI’s most successful marketing director. Much more can be read about him here. I think that Doug and I must have stopped at Foley’s as part of a marketing trip to Stage Stores, also in Houston. That installation is described here.

7. I wonder if I had a rental car for that trip. Robert lived a long way from downtown Houston. He generally took the bus to work!

8 The mascot of the University of Texas Longhorns is a steer named Bevo. The current one in 2021 is Bevo XV.

9. Hedy Wolpa’s LinkedIn page can be viewed here. She worked at Foley’s for thirty-one years!

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

1994-2002 TSI: AdDept Client: Kaufmann’s

Posted on July 22, 2021 by Mike

May Co. department store chain based in Pittsburgh. Continue reading →

Kaufmann’s was a department-store division of the May Company. Its headquarters was in downtown Pittsburgh. It had stores throughout Pennsylvania and neighboring states. TSI was contacted in the spring of 1994 by Mary Ann Brown¹, Kaufmann’s Advertising Director. I think that she probably heard of us from someone at either Hecht’s or Foley’s.

In May of 1994 Sue and I drove to Pittsburgh to meet with her. We made the trip by car primarily because we had very little money at the time. We also had scheduled a meeting in the same city with an ad agency, Blattner/Brunner Inc. That meeting and our subsequent visit to the Pittsburgh Zoo has been described here.

Our appointment at Kaufmann’s was scheduled for late in the afternoon, 5:00 as I remember it. We left Enfield fairly early in the morning. Sue, who in those days was famous for her lead foot, did most of the driving. We arrived at the outskirts of Pittsburgh about thirty minutes before the scheduled start of the meeting. At that point we encountered extremely heavy traffic. We were in unfamiliar territory, and, of course, cell phones were still a few years away. So, we arrived a few minutes late.

The beginning of the meeting was rather tense. Mary Ann demanded to know why we were late and why we did not call to tell her we were going to be late. If TSI had not already developed a reputation for good work at Hecht’s and Foley’s, I think that she might have told us to reschedule or to forget about it.

Eventually she got down to business and informed us that the people in her department had developed a system for administering the department’s projects. They were satisfied with what it produced. However, they knew that it would not work in the twenty-first century, and they needed to make a decision about whether to rewrite it or replace it. I guaranteed her that AdDept would have no difficulty with the Y2K issue and explained how AdDept’s approach of a multi-user relational database worked. I do not remember meeting anyone else that day.

Sue and I stayed throughout the visit at a Holiday Inn (if my memory is accurate) a few miles north of downtown. We probably presented a demo at IBM the next day, but, if so, I don’t remember it. My recollection is that the entire event was amicable but not decisive.

For years Doug Pease, TSI’s sales person, stayed in frequent contact with Kaufmann’s. I think that Mary Ann must have spent the time arranging funding. My memory of the next trip to Pittsburgh centers around my meeting with René Conrad² (female), who was the department’s Planning Manager, and John Borman³, who managed the department’s networks and its computer hardware. I don’t know if we had a signed contract yet, but by then they were definitely committed to installing AdDept. In fact the installation did not take place until May of 1998.

I had only limited contact with Mary Ann thereafter. I do remember that she joined René and me for lunch once, and she disclosed that she had for a very short time been (or at least had applied to be) an FBI agent. That was, to say the least, a surprising bit of news.

My first memory of René was her presentation to me of an absolutely enormous D-ring binder with a black cover. Collected therein were samples of all of the reports that they needed. She spent the rest of the day answering questions about the selection criteria and the precise definition of the contents of each column of each report. The bad news was that very few of the reports matched up closely with work that we had already done. The good news was that the design document that resulted from the meeting came closer to meeting the client’s expectation than any that we had produced or would produce later. René was our liaison at Kaufmann’s from the beginning all the way to the end, and she was a very good one.

John, René, and TSI programmer Steve Shaw in a training session in Enfield.

I did not need to spend much time with John. Once their new AS/400 was connected to their network, and I explained that the demand for bandwidth would be minimal since the system was totally text-based, he was satisfied. He took charge of getting the necessary software installed on Macs and PCs, and he connected the AS/400 to the department’s network.

I remember two experiences involving credit and debit cards on trips to Pittsburgh. In those days we kept our cash at Bank of America. The best thing about that was that if I needed cash on a trip I could almost always find a local branch with an ATM. I remember that once I used such a machine at the airport and forgot to reclaim my card when I was finished obtaining the cash. I don’t know what happened to the card after that, but nobody else ever tried to use it.

For my first couple of installation and support trips, Kaufmann’s asked me to stay at the William Penn Hotel, which was only a block or so from Kaufmann’s. I sometimes arrived in Pittsburgh late in the evening. On one of those occasions some sort of event must have been going on downtown. In the lobby of the William Penn there were unexpected lines of people waiting to check in. In those days it was possible to make a hotel reservation without providing a credit card number. Several people in line had discovered that doing so did not mean that a room would necessarily be available when they arrived. There were a lot of angry people there that evening. Fortunately, I had already heard about this problem, which had been perfectly explained by Jerry Seinfeld with regard to rental cars. You can listen to it here.

The gilded clock on the corner of Fifth Ave. and Smithfield St. is still a landmark.

I usually brought an unusually large bright-blue suitcase with me to Pittsburgh. Because I sometimes had trouble sleeping when I traveled I often include the foam rubber pillow that I found much more comfortable than the soft feather pillows that old stately hotels favored. One day after working at Kaufmann’s I was unable to find the pillow in my hotel room. Evidently the maid had confiscated it. I complained at the desk, and they eventually located it and returned to me.

It was nice having such an identifiable suitcase. On an early-morning US Airways flight on July 25, 1999, from Bradley to the Pittsburgh airport that served as a hub. I was the only passenger who checked a bag to Pittsburgh. I went to the carousel listed for my flight. No bags ever appeared. I was worried that the bag had not been removed from the plane. Here is what I wrote about the incident in my notes:

When I got into Pittsburgh, my bag was missing. I went to the baggage office. They had no record of my bag. I had seen them put it on the plane and take it off. I told her [the baggage agent] so. She went to look for it and found it. She said the tag had come off. I can’t imagine how this happened. But guess what. I didn’t get angry through any of this.

While staying at at the William Penn I experienced one of the worst incidents that I ever encountered in my trips to see clients or prospects. I was suffering from the only disease that I contracted in all the years that I traveled extensively. Throughout the visit I was constantly running a low-grade fever and had a few other annoying but not debilitating symptoms. I soldiered on, and I somehow got everything accomplished that was on my list. When I returned home I went to my doctor, Victor Sonnen⁴. He gave me a blood test and eventually diagnosed the problem as a urinary infection. Some antibiotics knocked it out.

I did not really like staying at the William Penn. I could get to Kaufmann’s in two minutes, but this was not a great advantage from my perspective. I was always up early, and there was nowhere very close that served breakfast. I could eat in the hotel, but I have always found that hotel food was not very good and terribly overpriced. The evening meals posed a similar problem. I won’t go to a swanky place by myself. The only restaurant within walking distance that I liked was a Chinese takeout place.

In later years I stayed at a Hampton Inn in the Greentree section of town on the south side of the Ohio River. I loved the free breakfast bars at Hampton Inns, and this one sometimes served tasty snacks such as pizza or chicken wings that were good enough to serve as a supper in the evening. The only drawback was that there was nowhere that was reasonably flat to go for a jog. If you live in Pittsburgh, you must learn to like hills.

On two occasions I went to supper with René and her assistant, Maggie Pratt⁵. Since they both took the bus to work, I drove us in my rental car. They directed me to small restaurants that they knew near the University of Pittsburgh. I don’t remember the food that well, but I do remember that dining alone on the road is not a hard habit to break.

One thing that I remember clearly was that René suffered from migraine headaches. When she got one she still tried to work, but it was obvious that she was in considerable torment.

René volunteered as an usher at the Pittsburgh Opera. In the 1999-2000 season Verdi’s La Traviata was performed. In the last act the heroine, Violetta, who has been suffering from consumption (tuberculosis) dies. René did not like this part of the opera at all. It seemed to long to her: “She should just die and get it over with!” I did not dispute this assessment, but I find parts of other operas to be much more tedious.

Luxury apartments occupy most of the upper floors of Kaufmann’s flagship store now. Target is scheduled to open a store on one or two low floors. There is now a skating rink on the roof!

Kaufmann’s advertising department was on one of the top floors of the flagship store on Fifth Avenue in Pittsburgh. The most peculiar thing about it became evident when one needed to use the men’s room. One was located on the same floor as the advertising department, but the only way to reach it was to walk through the beauty salon. I did not feel at all comfortable doing that. Therefore, I took the escalator up to the top floor, the home of the bakery. This restroom was a little farther away, but I found the atmosphere much more pleasant.

Everyone at TSI worked very hard on the programming projects for Kaufmann’s. The people there were uniformly supportive, and everyone seemed pretty good at what they did. I am embarrassed to say that I don’t remember the names of any of the media managers. The name Debi Katich is in my notes from 1999. I think that she was the Direct Mail Manager, but I may be wrong.

I do not remember the name of the Senior VP (Mary Ann’s boss) at the time of the installation. As I recall, he let Mary Ann pretty much run things. I definitely do remember the name of his replacement in 1999, Jack Mullen⁶, who had been Doug’s boss (or maybe his boss’s boss) at G. Fox in Hartford.

I also do not remember too many details of the code that we provided for them. The detail about newspaper ads that I recall most clearly is that the store’s contract with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette provided for significant discounts if they ran several full-page ads in the same issue. It was like buying two-liter bottles of Coke or Pepsi. The first three ads might cost $X but once the fourth ad was ordered, the price on all of them changed to $Y for all four ads. This was not easy to code because individual ads could be added, deleted, or moved (to another date) at any time. Also, the size could change. Any of these events could change the rate for all the other full-page ads in the paper that day. Not only did the rates and costs for all the affected ads need to be changed, but history records were also necessary.

Kaufmann’s used AdDept for keeping track of all of its advertising. They even uploaded their broadcast buys from the SmartPlus system that they used.

In 2000 Kaufmann’s was an enthusiastic supporter of the implementation of the A^xN project. Several people offered the opinion that the newspapers would never pay for subscribing to the service. Mary Ann did not agree. She said, “They’ll subscribe if we tell them to.” I visited three of Kaufmann’s largest papers to explain what we planned to do and to solicit suggestions. When I mentioned that I was meeting with the IT director at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, John Borman confided to me, “I want his job.”

In 2002, the Kaufmann’s stores’ Pittsburgh business headquarters closed, and its back-office operations were consolidated into those of Filene’s Department Stores in Boston. The consolidation was probably inevitable, but everyone at TSI would have greatly preferred for the new managing entity to be located in Pittsburgh.

1. In 1921 Mary Ann Brown is the Administrative Manager at her alma mater, the University of Pittsburgh. Her LinkedIn page is here. I don’t know why she left her role at Kaufmann’s off of her résumé.

2. René Conrad’s LinkedIn page is here. After the May Company folded the Kaufmann’s division into Filene’s in 2002 I tried to get René to work for TSI. She was interested enough to pay us a visit in East Windsor, but she turned down our offer. Instead she went to work for a theatrical company in an administrative role. We stayed in touch for a few years, but I had not heard from her for more than a decade. However, she recently sent me an email in which she confessed that she owed me a book.

3. John Borman’s LinkedIn page is here.

4. Dr. Sonnen died in 2010 at the age of 96. He was certainly in his eighties when he treated me. His obituary is posted here.

5. I am pretty sure that Maggie Pratt’s LinkedIn page is here.

6. Jack Mullen’s LinkedIn page is 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

The 1948 Project

Posted on July 16, 2021 by Mike

Why and how. Continue reading →

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some of the more impenetrable areas of the basement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2000 Trip to Maine, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia

Posted on July 9, 2021 by Mike

The most mysterious of all of the trips that my wife Sue and I took together was the only one for which she did all of the planning. My recollections of this bizarre experience have mostly been repressed. In 2023 I could remember the basic route that we took and a few of the experiences. I did not recall most of the names of places we visited or companies with which we interacted.

I do not even remember when this event occurred. I have assigned the date 2000, but it could be off, even by a year or more. If it was in 2000 we must have gone in the fall or late summer. Denise Bessette and I went to San Diego (described here) in January. This trip could not have been scheduled for the subsequent months in which I was very busy with work.

I hypothesized in 2023 that we planned to start on a Friday morning, stay for two nights in Nova Scotia and return on Sunday. Sue agreed with this, but we may very well be wrong.

Sue somehow won two free round-trip tickets on a regional airline that was based in Boston. My dim recollection is that it was called Executive Airlines¹ or something like that. We could fly to any destination that the company served. We had a certificate but no tickets; we had to fly stand-by. So, in effect, the airline gave away seats that would have been empty.

Sue wanted to fly to Halifax, Nova Scotia. I suspect that this desire stemmed from tales told by her grandmother, Molly Locke, whom Sue idolized, of her adventures in the maritime provinces.

We drove from Enfield to the Boston area. I have a feeling that we parked in Framingham and took the T to the airport. I am pretty sure that we did this once, and if it wasn’t for this adventure, I cannot imagine when it would have been.

When we arrived at the airport we made our way to a room devoted to this airline. It wasn’t a ticket counter. I remember that we sat in plastic seats in a room and plotted our strategy. There were other people in the same situation, but it was not crowded. Sue had planned on flying to Halifax, Nova Scotia, but the flights on that day had no seats available. I remember being very upset by this development. If I had any inkling that it was a possibility, I would never have agreed to it. As I sat there helpless, I became more and more incensed. Sue tried to calm me down by telling me to relax because “we are on vacation.” I retorted that this was no vacation.

The time estimate from Google maps must reflect the fact that in 2023 there are no direct flights.

In the end Sue suggested that we fly to Presque Isle, ME—a destination that was apparently not in much demand that day. There we would rent a car, and drive to Nova Scotia. After we had spent a day painting the province red, we would drive back to Presque Isle and fly back to Boston. I considered it a close call between her suggestion and writing off the entire idea and thereby returning home to Enfield sadder but wiser.

Of course, I eventually capitulated, and we exchanged our certificate for tickets to Maine’s third-largest airport, which is located only a few miles from the Canadian border. The plane, as I remember it, was rather nice. I should actually say that I don’t remember anything good or bad about it. I think that it may have even been a jet. It had perhaps two dozen seats that were rather comfortable. The flight was short. I don’t think that anyone served as much as a beverage.

This is an “international” airport, not a bus station.

We landed at Presque Isle’s airport. It was by far the least impressive one that I had ever seen. I remember that the baggage claim was a chute that was less than ten feet wide and not even that long. We could see the workers take the few bags off the plane and plop them on the chute. The good thing was that there was very little danger of losing or misplacing a bag.

There was one car rental establishment. I don’t remember which company it was, but it may have been Avis, which had an office there in 2023. I remember that we had an option to rent a Volkswagen New Beetle, which had been introduced in 1998. I am pretty sure that we declined and settled on some kind of compact car.

I already knew that there was quite a bit of land between Maine and Nova Scotia. We discovered on the map that came with the rental car that it was mostly New Brunswick. We spent most of the rest of the day driving across one of Canada’s least famous provinces. I remember almost nothing but frustration about this experience. I do not remember if I drove, Sue drove, or we split it up. I have a feeling that I did the bulk of the driving because in those days some rental companies charged extra for a second driver. We must have stopped for lunch and/or supper somewhere, but I do not have any recollection of that. Likewise, I do not remember any of the cities or towns, although a few of the names seem familiar. The city of Saint John rings a bell, but it would have been out of our way to stop there.

We stayed overnight somewhere north of Halifax. It was a fairly rustic place with a view of the water. I remember something about Prince Edward Island, but from the map it does not seem as if we could ever have been in sight of it. Sue recalled us eating bay scallops from Prince Edward Island. I might have tried one, but people from Kansas—especially ones that grew up as Catholics—generally avoid marine insects. She thought that the water that I remembered was a tidal pool.

We visited Halifax on the second day. We spent some time at a fort or something similar with a view of the sea. The one vivid memory of the whole trip that I have retained is that we visited a room that had hundreds of butterflies. It may have been in the Museum of Natural History that listed a “butterfly house” among its attractions in 2023. This was the only time on the entire trip that I felt entertained or relaxed. Sue’s recollection of Halifax in 2023 was entirely different. She recalled only touring a garden.

That’s all that I remember. We drove back to Presque Isle. We flew to Boston. We took the T to Framingham. We drove from there to Enfield.

This was by far the worst mini-vacation that I ever took.

1. I could not locate much information about this or any similar airline on the Internet. I am almost positive that it went out of business within a month or two of our epic trip. One website mentioned such a company in New England. The post is here. However, in the seventies that airline was sold to Air New England, which went out of business in 1981. So, I am probably wrong about the name.

Wavablog

Memoirs, bridge, popes, travel, and other stuff

Tag Archives: Comparetto/Wavada, Sue

1993-2006 TSI: AdDept Client: Foley’s

1994-2002 TSI: AdDept Client: Kaufmann’s

1991-2006 TSI: AdDept Client: Hecht’s

The 1948 Project

2000 Trip to Maine, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia