1974-1977 Living in Plymouth, MI

Posted on March 10, 2021 by Mike

Life outside of U-M, in Plymouth and beyond. Continue reading →

I can remember a lot about the three years that Sue and I lived in our apartment on Sheldon Rd. in Plymouth, but in some cases the chronology is a little fuzzy. I have consulted with Sue on many of these items, but grey areas persist.

The area north of 845 Sheldon Rd. has greatly changed since we left. The train tracks were, I think, near what is now called Beech St. The houses on that road and the large cul-de-sac on the left did not exist when we lived there.

One strange and memorable aspect of life in that apartment concerned light bulbs. The train tracks just to the north of the house were, in those years, quite active. Long freight trains rumbled through at a rapid pace day and night. Whenever a train passed, the entire building shook as if in a mild earthquake. Nothing was ever damaged except our incandescent light bulbs. We did not have a great number of lamps, but we routinely needed to replace bulbs at least monthly.

Fortunately, our electric company, Detroit Edison, had a policy of providing free light bulbs¹ to its customers. So, we would just pick up a couple at their local store every time that we were in the vicinity.

Pets: We brought Puca, Sue’s boa constrictor, to Plymouth from Connecticut. He lived in his cage in the bookshelves in the living room throughout our time in Plymouth.

Having a snake means that one must also have a supply of animals to feed it. We fed Puca mice. We found a very nice pet store in Northville, the town immediately north of Plymouth. It was only a ten-minute drive unless, of course, a train was coming through.

On our first visit we bought a few mice to feed to Puca. We needed a place to keep them; he never ate more than one. We bought a fish tank with a lid of wire mesh. We also needed some wood shavings for the floor, a water bottle, and some Purina Mouse Chow².

The athleticism of the mice amazed me. They looked fat and slow, but their appearance was deceptive. Any mouse could easily jump from the floor of the cage to the lid—a leap of about a foot. It could at the same time whip around and grab the lid with all four paws in one smooth motion. They appeared to just will themselves up.

When Puca was like this it was safe to feed him. Only the S-shaped coiled part strikes. In this position he could only strike something an inch or so away from his head.

Keeping a few mice around was acceptable as long as Puca was eating. However, he was unpredictable in that regard. We knew that boa constrictors generally hibernated in the winter. They drank a little water, but they were very lethargic. Puca’s cage had a heat lamp, but it seemed that he somehow knew when it was time to hibernate.

Snakes can unhinge their jaws. They can swallow animals that are much larger than one might expect.

We expected Puca to be hungry pretty much all of the time in the other three seasons, but that was not always the case. Fairly often he refused to eat.

The thing about mice is that if you have a male and a female, you almost always have quite a few more before you know it. Although they are born blind and hairless, mice nurse for only twenty days. They can be fertile at an age of four to six weeks. The gestation period is only twenty days. The litter size can be up to thirteen! Pregnant mice can barely walk on the last few days. One of our mice, named Mellow, had a litter of twelve, and all of the pups survived.

So, we soon needed more cages. We bought a twenty-gallon tank with a lid of wire mesh and a Deluxe Habitrail. We acquired a small wire cage that we used to isolate pregnant females. Fortunately it is easy to determine the sex of mice, and so I was generally able to keep the breeding down. However, over one winter our mouse population still rose to fifty-three.

I kept careful records of the mice. I was not doing research. I just likes to keep records. I assigned a name to each mouse and gave him/her a file card that documented date of birth or purchase, appearance (I tried to buy mice with interesting colors and patterns), parentage, and date fed to Puca (or other demise).

Occasionally a mouse escaped. I chased the each fugitive until I had it cornered. Then I picked it up by the tail. Their only weakness was their inability to hide their tails, and I never gave up.

Once a mouse on the lam ran—I swear that I saw this happen—through the wire cage that we used as a maternity ward. Less than a half inch separated the vertical bars on this cage, but the mouse did not even seem to slow down when he passed between them.

To feed Puca I would grab a mouse by the tail. I would wait for an occasion in which he seemed active but not on the prowl. He would almost always flick his tongue, his best sense, whenever I opened the door to the cage. If he was interested in eating he would slowly stalk the mouse. When he struck he seldom missed. He then squeezed the life out of the mouse and swallowed it head-first. If he was skinny (which he usually was), you could see the mouse move through his body.

Was I afraid of Puca? No, not at all. We sometimes took him out, but we never let him roam. He was too good at hiding, and once he got himself wrapped around something, it was very difficult to pry him loose. My biggest fear was that he would somehow get into our heater.

Actually, I was more afraid of the mice than Puca. Puca struck at my arm once. It felt like getting punched. His teeth also made small puncture wounds, but there was not a lot of pain. The wounds did not last long.

This is the recipe box that contained cards with the details for each mouse.

I was also bit by a mouse once, and it was MUCH worse. I was holding the little critter by the tail, as I had done dozens of times. This one must have had great abs because he whipped his head up to my hand and glommed onto the loose skin between my thumb and forefinger with all four of his oversized front teeth. The bite really hurt, and he would not let go no matter how much I shook my hand. I whacked my hand up against a wall three times before he let go. When he hit the floor he sped off, but eventually I caught him.

The area of the bite was sore for a few days, but there was no permanent damage.

Our Charlie was much better looking than Charlie Haggers.

Sue and I often drove to the pet store in Northville even when we had no need of mice. We looked at all the potential pets for sale there. In 1976 we decided to buy a guinea pig. We picked out a Peruvian (long hair) with a very interesting color that involved a mix of silver and light brown hair. We named him after the Charlie Haggers³ character on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, which we watched every night in 1976-1977. The guinea pig’s full name was Carlos Cavia y Vega, but we called him Charlie.

In those days I loved to bake in the sun in the backyard of the apartment house. During the summer of 1976 I brought Charlie with me outside, where I would liked to read a book or work on something. I had removed the bottom and lid to a large cardboard box to provide Charlie with an open-air fenced in place to enjoy the outdoors. It may sound boring, but this array of fresh edible greens was like paradise to a guinea pig.

This photo of Charlie doesn’t do him justice. His coat was very nice when he was not all wet like this.

In the apartment we kept Charlie in a twenty-gallon fish tank for a while. I decided to build a cage for him and a potential family to fit on the barnboard shelves. It was a split-level, and it featured a ramp that, when lowered, let them roam in the living room and return home when they wanted. They were very well-behaved. They were not fast; their only defense mechanism in the wild was to hide in a hole or cave, and, to tell the truth, these long-haired guinea pigs had not been in the wild in many generations.

I thought that it would be nice to take Charlie for “walkies”, as Barbara Woodhouse called them. Charlie had very short legs, of course. I did not anticipate that we would cover a lot of ground. I bought a very cheap leash for Charlie, and he did not seem to mind it. I put the leash on him and carried him outside. He made a beeline for the nearest dandelion. He spent a few minutes there until he had devoured all of the greens. He then moved to the next dandelion about six inches away, and he spent the next few minutes chomping on the delights that it had to offer. I terminated our walkie without ever doing more than shuffling my feet.

When the guinea pig mansion was completed, Sue and I decided to get Charlie a companion. Her name, of course, was Loretta. We decided on the name before we ever departed for the pet store.

As soon as we reached the store we walked to the section in which they kept the guinea pigs. They usually had between five and fifteen of them, a very good selection. Most people do not realize that guinea pigs whistle when they get excited. I was quite adept at emulating a guinea pig whistle, and I always exhibited this talent at the store. Pretty soon the whole clan would get in the act. All of the customer would come over to the guinea pig area to witness the excitement.

Loretta, with her three-toned face and white torso, was at least as cute as her namesake (when she dried off). Also, my arms were never as hairy as they look here.

We picked out a suitable Loretta and brought her home with us. She got along fine with Charlie, and before too long she had a litter of three.

Guinea pigs and mice are both rodents, but the similarity ends there. Loretta carried her babies for about two months. The last few days we could see them moving around inside her. They came out with their eyes ope, a full set of teeth, and beautiful coats. By the time that we saw them they were on their feet and moving about.

Another important difference between mice and guinea pigs: The best way to pick up mice is by the tail. However, NEVER pick up a guinea pig by the tail; its eyes will fall out.

Guinea pig babies certainly must rank with the cutest animals ever. When we let down the ramp Loretta would go for a walk in the living room, and the babies followed her in a line nose-to-tail. To top it off they all made what I called “monk-monk” noises. I don’t know how else to describe them. Adults never made these noises. I am positive that Sue took some photos of this furry little train, but I cannot find them.

The big trip: Sue and I took no vacations during the years that we lived in Plymouth. In the fall of 1976 we learned that Patti Lewonczyk and Tom Corcoran were getting married in Newington, CT, on January 7, 1977. They invited us to the wedding, and we decided to go. We planned to fly to Kansas City⁵ to spend Christmas with my family in Leawood, and then fly back to Hartford. We then would drive to Enfield to celebrate a late Christmas and New Year’s with Sue’s family. Then we would return to Michigan after the wedding.

I don’t honestly remember too much about the trip to KC, but Sue took a number of photos. My sister Jamie was apparently not there. She was nineteen or twenty at the time. I think that she had left college and moved somewhere. She also got married around this time if my math is correct. Father Joe drove down from Kelly, KS.So, there were six of us (counting Molly the dog) for Christmas.

From the photos it appears that Sue and I spent most of our time at my parents’ house playing with Molly, whom I have always considered to be Jamie’s dog. My dad, who had no use for live animals of any description, was forced into several pictures that included Molly.

My parents and I certainly attended mass on Christmas day. I am almost positive that I was still going to church regularly in late 1976. If not, I definitely was not ready to tell my parents. Sue might have attended out of courtesy to my parents. I can’t think of any other reason for her to be wearing such a nice dress.

The whole experience was more than a little awkward; things were always awkward in that house. My parents were both devout Catholics from birth. They had raised me to be one, too, but, after a very promising start, I failed to meet their expectations. They never said anything, but it was in the air.

Two young guinea pigs and Sue’s present for Betty.

From the top: Loretta in her split-level pad, Charlie on his hind legs sniffing around in the 20-gallon tank, and their two offspring in a wire cage that I don’t recognize.

From KC we flew back to Metro Airport in Detroit.

Shortly thereafter we drove to Enfield in Sue’s Dodge Colt. We must have gone through Ohio and Pennsylvania because we brought with us several guinea pigs—Charlie, Loretta, and some of their offspring. They occupied the back seat in at least two cages, including the split-level house that I built for them.

I have almost no recollection at all of this part of the visit. Sue’s photographs indicate that gifts were exchanged, and the guinea pigs always seemed to be right in the middle of the festivities.

Snow at the church. That may be the legendary Hergmobile.

Although Tom and Patti were not very religious, their nuptials were performed at the Catholic church in Newfield. That was what people whose parents were Catholic did in the seventies. We attended the ceremony, but I don’t remember anything about it. In the Catholic church the wedding ceremonies are generally part of a mass. So, a large portion of the time was devoted to the usual rites.

Many of our friends at the Hartford were there, and, as far as I know, they all attended the reception. I only remember one detail. At the meal Sue and I were seated near Jim and Ann Cochran. Someone asked me about what I had been doing. I told them how thrilled that Wayne, Mitch, and I were the previous year to make it to the National Debate Tournament in Boston. I also probably told them about Don and Stewart. I may have told a few debate stories, too.

An hour or so after the meal Ann came up to me and said, “You don’t even know what you’ve got, do you?”

I didn’t think I had anything, but my last physical was when I left the Army almost five years earlier. Before I could relay this information, she put her arms around my neck and planted a huge smacker on my face. You could have knocked me over with a feather. Later, I saw her sweet talking a guy that I had never met.

I think that there must have been a second round of festivities at the 345 Club. Quite a few photos show people without suits and ties in rooms with old wallpaper and antebellum furniture.

Scott Otermat in the foreground and Tom Corcoran with the drink.

Damon Panels, Someone, Scott Otermat,
and the Cochrans.

The following photos are at the 345 Club.

Fashion note: Yes, there was probably still a suit in my closet, and I certainly had some ties. However, as an impoverished graduate student, I was well within my rights to wear to any “formal occasion” my trusty corduroy jacket over a bulky wool sweater. Besides, it was cold.

The last forty or so miles were through the Pocono Mountains.

The first half of the drive back to Plymouth was something of an adventure. As we reached the northern section of the Pocono Mountains it started to snow. Thereafter we saw very few cars. Sue was driving, and I was nervous. At the time this was the scariest drive I had ever been on, but that record lasted less than a month.

We finally arrived at a motel near Scranton, and we obtained a room. The motel had a no-pets policy, but we snuck the guinea pigs and their cages into the room. All four had long coats, but they were not used to cold weather.

It was sunny and bright the next morning, and the drive to Plymouth was easy.

Sue’s jobs: Sue’s first job after we arrived in Plymouth in 1974 was a very convenient one. It was in the center of Plymouth, only a few blocks from our apartment. The company was a business association for insurance companies in Michigan. I am not sure what her responsibilities entailed. She was called a “correspondent”.

Sue liked this job, but her employers considered her a potential rabble-rouser. Unions were still very big in Michigan, and management did not want anyone who might undertake to bring one to the organization. They asked her to leave.

She found a job pretty quickly with a company named Michigan Basic. This company developed software for IBM mini-computers, such as the System/3. Sue’s boss’s name was Chuck Glore. Sue learned from him how to program in RPG (Report Program Generator).

I don’t remember where the office was, but I recall accompanying Sue there on a few evenings or weekends. I was very interested in the concept of computers that a small company could program themselves.

After a while, Sue and Chuck had a falling out over something. It might have been because of a recession in the auto industry. Since nearly every company in southeast Michigan was heavily dependent on the auto companies, at least indirectly, all businesses suffered. At any rate, Sue was back in the job market, but she now had a marketable skill.

She took a job as a placement for an employment agency. In many ways it was a perfect job for Sue. She has always loved to talk on the phone, she enjoys introducing people to one another, and she really believed that there was a seat for every butt.

Unfortunately, the local economy being what it was at the time, there were far more butts than seats. Sue often came back to the apartment crying in frustration.

One of the few thriving companies in Detroit was Brothers Specifications. As “white flight” took hold in Detroit a lot of fairly nice houses were abandoned. The federal department of Housing and Urban Development hired the company to inspect the abandoned houses and to assess the cost, if any, of making the houses habitable. The employment agency that Sue worked for had been contacted by Frank Yee, the computer guy at Brothers. Sue tried to convince him to hire one of her job-seekers. He told her that he would rather hire her than the applicant whom she was representing.

Sue took Frank up on his offer. She liked this job a lot. She got along well with the people there, and there was a very active social life, which was right up Sue’s alley. The details and many photos will be posted in the Detroit section of the blog.

Visitors: Sue has told me that her peripatetic grandmother, Molly Locke, visited our apartment and slept on the waterbed. She was on a trip to western Michigan to visit the family of her son Bob Locke or on the way back to Enfield. I must have been away on a debate trip. She slept on our waterbed but did not enjoy it much. This visit probably occurred in the spring or fall. I would have known about it in the summer, and tourism in Michigan in winter is seldom advisable.

Sue also told me that her female cousins (her Uncle Bob’s daughters) also visited her while I was on a debate trip.

Mark (?) is on the waterbed. Jamie is sitting on the floor looking at the Mean Reserves album. I am probably sitting on a kitchen chair. We are all facing the television set.

I reckon that our other visitors arrived in late winter or early spring of 1977. My sister Jamie drove up with, I think, her new husband Mark. I remember absolutely nothing about this visit, but Sue took a photo of them, and I am in the picture. I suspect that we talked mostly about our pets. We were very serious pet owners at the time.

They stayed overnight on the waterbed. I think that they left the next day.

Entertainment: Sue has always loved live music. She found a bar named The Crows Nest inside the Mayflower Hotel, which was right in the center of Plymouth. It often featured live musicians. She had two favorite singers, a blonde whose name was Jane or Janet, and Elaine Philpot, who had darker hair and claimed to be 5’12” tall.

Elaine had an interesting song that she used for sing-alongs. The title is “Piccolomini”⁶. Here are the lyrics:

Piccolomini Piccolomini Piccolomini Picco-
Lomini Piccolomini Piccolomini Piccolomini Pi-
Ccolomini Piccolomini Piccolomini Piccolomini 
(repeat faster and faster until totally out of breath).

I remember Elaine best for her pet waterfowl named Kensington. I thought of him as a large duck; Sue remembers a goose. She is probably right.

Whatever he was, he enjoyed biting people’s bare legs. He brazenly walked up to strangers, turned his head ninety degree, opened his beak and thrust at the exposed flesh. When he hit the target, he twisted his head back to the upright position before releasing. This really hurt.

Sue photographed the RMSB playing hard and fast at Floyd’s in Ann Arbor.

Our other favorite hangout was a bar in the center of Ann Arbor called, if memory serves, Floyd’s. We went there several times to listen to the Red Mountain String Band, a bunch of people who occasionally came up to God’s country to perform before returning to “that school down south” in Columbus. At least once Don Huprich joined us at Floyd’s.

This was from an article in the OSU newspaper about the group wanting to play in prisons.

They were very good musicians. The leader, Larry Nager⁶, was also very funny. We always sat quite close to the band. I asked Larry once to specify the location of the Red Mountains. His answer disappointed me a little. He admitted that they were a figment of the imagination. In his position I would have made something up.

Cards: I think that I got interested in card magic and card throwing while watching Ricky Jay⁷ on the Tonight Show. He performed a hilarious trick called The Lethal Four-Card Fist. He made Johnny Carson put on a studded mitt designed by a goaltender in hockey. Then he gave Johnny a banana to hold in his gloved hand. He began a long tale about the origin of the technique of the four-card fist (one-card between each finger and one between the thumb and forefinger), which he attributed to Somebody “the heathen”. In the middle of his patter who once slew five separate assailants when he was apparently unarmed. In the midst of this patter he whirled and threw all four cards at the banana HARD. At least one or two definitely struck the banana or the glove.

Afterwards Johnny examined the banana and remarked that the attack did not appear to be very lethal. There was not even a scratch on it. Ricky sternly reproved him for the plebeian mistake of judging a book by its cover. He then explained the art of ubiwasi that he had learned from the inside back cover of Superman DC comics. With one finger an ordinary man can bring an assailant with a single finger without leaving a mark.

Ricky advised Johnny to peel the banana carefully. The fruit of the banana fell onto the carpet in five neat pieces. Even with no training I could figure out how he did the trick, but his presentation was flawless.

I purchased Jay’s outstanding book, Cards as Weapons. I did not use Ricky’s throwing technique; I invented my own, in which I compensated for my rag arm with a method that allowed me to snap my shoulder, elbow wrist, and finger joints in rapid succession. I threw one thousand cards a day for the better part of one summer. It was a minor miracle that I did not do permanent damage.

I once threw a playing card forty yards outdoors against the wind. That’s ten yards less than Ricky’s best (long since eclipsed by others), but it was farther than my bunkmate in Basic Training, Rosey, could throw any object.

I bought quite a few other books about card tricks and some trick decks at a magic store. I practiced my sleights for at least an hour a day. I could do a few tricks, but none of them very well. I only perfected one, Scarne’s Color Change, which required very little skill. I watched the Amazing Kreskin use it to baffle Charlton Heston, who held the deck in his own hands through nearly all of the experience. on national television.

Once, when Elaine Philpot was sitting at our table at the Crow’s Nest, I pulled a deck of cards from my pocket and said that I had learned a magic trick. I then told her that scientists in Switzerland had determined that a few sensitive people were able to determine whether a playing card was red or black solely through their fingertips. The cards with red suits and numbers allegedly transmitted slightly more heat. I asked her to try it. When the trick was over she was absolutely convinced that her fingers could discern red cards from black even though I started by telling her that it was a trick.

Wedding: Mitch Chyette married his longtime girlfriend, Andee, in the summer of 1976. It was the only Jewish wedding that I have ever attended. The debaters were all there, but I don’t remember many details. If I find any photos, I will post them.

Sports: I played a few rounds of golf with Don Goldman. I don’t remember any details.

I bought a pair of Adidas running shoes and started jogging when I noticed that I was getting fat. I jogged at least a couple of times a week for forty or more years.

The only recognized sport in the Ann Arbor area is college football. If the team and I were both in town, I went to the game. If I was out of town, I gave my ticket to Don Goldman or someone else. He did the same for me. In that way Sue was able to see a few games, too. The team’s records during the three years were 10-1, 8-2-2 (tying two out-of-conference games and losing to Oklahoma in the Orange Bowl, and 10-2 (losing to USC in the Rose Bowl).

Rick Leach was the star of the 1976 team.

One game—or actually half of a game—stands out in my memory. Sue and I attended the game with Mitch Chyette and wife Andee. For her the best part of the game was the show that the band put on at halftime.

We watched the first half of one of the home games—I think that it must have been the 1976 game against Minnesota—in the rain. I was miserable. Andee opined that we should leave after the half. I said that if we stayed for the halftime show, we were definitely staying for the second half. We decided to leave at the end of the first half and watch the rest of the game at their nearby apartment.

For years I thought that the game we saw with Mitch and Andee was the one in 1968 in which Ron Johnson set the NCAA rushing record (broken many times in subsequent years) with an unbelievable second half in the mud. I must have conflated two events that were actually years apart. It happens when you become a geezer.

I am pretty sure that we also went bowling once with Mitch, Andee, and her sister, who was dating a Chaldean guy who apparently smoke a smattering of Arabic. He told us how he had been hired by some Black guys to read some Muslim texts to them. They liked the way that the Arabic sounded, but none of them understood it. He said that he always threw in some jokes, malapropisms, and obscenities.

1. This policy began in the nineteenth century. In 1974 Detroit Edison was sued for antitrust violations by a drug store. In 1978, after we had moved away from the tracks, Detroit Edison terminated the policy.

2. I don’t think that Purina still markets specifically to mice owners. I looked for a picture on the Internet, but I could not find one.

3. Charlie Haggers was played by Graham Jarvis. He died in 2003 at the age of 72.

4. Loretta Haggers was portrayed by Mary Kay Place. She won an Emmy for her performance.

5. It is quite possible that the Kansas City trip took place a year earlier (1975).

6. I later learned that Piccolomini is the family name of two popes, Pius II and his nephew Pius III. Pius II as a young man wrote some erotic literature. His nephew’s pontificate lasted less than a month.

7. The band is long gone, but Larry Nager has had a very productive career in performing music and writing about it.

8. Ricky Jay died in 2018. He was one of my very few idols.

1976-1977 U-M: Debate?

Posted on March 3, 2021 by Mike

My last year coaching at U-M. Continue reading →

I did not learn of the demise of Michigan’s debate program in time to take steps to finding somewhere else to coach during the 1975-76 school year. Also, I seem to remember that I still needed at least one class to complete the requirements for my leisurely masters degree. I had not yet decided what to do. At some point during the fall I wrote a letter to George Ziegelmueller about coaching at Wayne State University in Detroit beginning in the 1977-78 school year. This was somewhat difficult to do. I had very little respect for George as a coach and none as a judge. However, Wayne State had by far the largest debate program in the state and had a PhD program in speech. I frankly doubt that I could have gotten hired anywhere else.

Early in the school year I had a long talk with Don Huprich. He told me that U-M’s debate team was a hopeless mess. The new coach, Jack Nightingale (I think that was his name, but I never met him), was a new graduate student in speech who knew less about competitive debate than the previous year’s novices, Dean Relkin and Bob Jones. Don wanted to debate with Stewart Mandel on the national circuit. He said that he would fund the expenses for the whole year himself. He asked me to coach and accompany them on trips. He owned a car that we could use. It was newer and nicer than mine, and because it had automatic transmission, anyone could drive it. He may have even offered to pay me a little money to help.

This little door financed U-M debate in 1976-77.

I was astounded by this offer. Don explained that his father held the patent on “fruit doors”, the little devices on the back of refrigerated trucks. He had reportedly made a LOT of money on this invention. Don evidently had access to enough of it to finance a two-person one-coach debate team. He also had figured out how to represent the Michigan debate team without going through the speech department. I am not sure how he managed it, but he was able to choose the tournaments that he wanted to attend, and he mailed in the registration forms himself. Neither I nor Jack Nightingale had anything to do with it.

I had no reason to reject Don’s proposition. I had nothing planned for either semester, and I was definitely not yet ready to abandon the quest on which I had set out two years earlier.

The debate topic for 1976-77 was “Resolved: That the federal government should significantly strengthen the guarantee of consumer product safety required of manufacturers.” A few cases were very popular that year: cigarettes, air bags for automobiles, and gun control. What was left of the U-M debate team had many disadvantages vis-à-vis the other schools, but we had one huge advantage—the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI) and its enormous library. Don and Stewart spent a great deal of time there.

I don’t remember too many details about the season, but I do remember watching an octafinal round at an early tournament, maybe Western Illinois. Stewart and Don must have been debating in another room. If they had been eliminated and I had not been scheduled to judge, we would certainly have gone home. I don’t remember which teams participated in this debate. The affirmative ran a case that banned automation. Really. All automation.

Occasionally the best arguments are simple.

Both affirmative and negative debaters were always expected to justify their claims with evidence. Some ideas, however, are so ridiculous that no one has bothered to research or write about them. This was clearly one of those ideas. It is difficult to attack such a case using any usual approach. The other team doubtless has a few documented examples where automating a process was a bad idea, but what researcher would bother to document the myriad cases in which machines improved life? Does anyone want to return to the days when fields were plowed by horses and oxen? Does anyone want to eliminate machines that allow people to survive life-threatening injuries or illnesses?

I don’t remember many of the negative’s arguments, but the second negative won the debate (and probably removed the case from the circuit) when he pulled out a dictionary and read the definition of “automation”. He then just spoke frankly for a few minutes and outlined a strong case for a civilized country with a modern military and health system and an economy that took advantage of science.

The judges all voted negative, and I never heard of this case again. What surprised me was that the affirmative must have prevailed in a few previous rounds. Maybe the used a different case.

On the whole this was definitely an affirmative-biased topic. It was relatively easy to find a manufactured product that was apparently causing problems. It was much more challenging for the negative to show that the proposed regulation of that product would make things worse. Furthermore, there were thousands of consumer products, and the affirmative chose which ones were the subject of the debate. The negative had to be prepared for almost anything.

The three most important debates of the year— the semifinals and finals of NDT—were all won by the affirmative teams. Of the fifteen ballots cast in these debates, twelve were for the affirmative. Southern Cal won its semifinal on the affirmative 5-0 but lost the final round on the negative 4-1.

Those debates completed a pattern that was established much earlier in the year. If a team had a choice between debating affirmative or negative, it almost always chose affirmative. In contrast, in my senior year seven years earlier the team that won the coin flip in every elimination rounds in which I participated chose negative.

In 1976-77 many negative teams depended on the writings and research of Sam Peltzman of the University of Chicago. His books and articles claimed that in many cases when people’s devices were made apparently safer by a governmental requirement, the people using the devices adopted riskier strategies because they feel more comfortable doing so. For example, people wearing seat belts might drive faster or more recklessly. He had documented some cases in which adding safety devices apparently resulted in the increase in deaths or injuries.

Another approach used by many negative teams was to label harmful effects documented by their opponents as “self-imposed”. Plenty of philosophers have argued that in a free society individuals should be allowed to judge their own costs and benefits. This approach could be used, for example, against a law mandating helmets for those riding motorcycles. A person who is not wearing one may be putting his own life in danger, but his lack of a helmet is extremely unlikely to harm others. Any harm that he might suffer is self-induced.

I really liked the case that Don developed based on speed governors for automobiles and trucks. Because of the energy crisis it was already illegal to drive over fifty-five miles per hour almost everywhere in the United States. Why then were many cars built to go ninety miles per hour or more? It was easy to show that decreasing the maximum speed saves lots of lives every year. In fact, speed governors had been tried in some jurisdictions. The harm was not self-imposed, at least not entirely, because most serious accidents involve more than one vehicle, and passengers seldom were allowed to vote about how hard the driver pressed the accelerator pedal. The “Peltzman effect” does not apply either. What can drivers do to offset the limitation on speed? Take a nap? Drive on two wheels like Joey Chitwood?

Many teams in 1976-77 had nearly unbeatable cases. Negatives had to be very clever. Sometimes the best approach was to argue topicality¹. However, most debaters and their coaches were averse to these arguments. They were more comfortable arguing about facts and analysis than about semantics.

I don’t remember if Don and Stewart wen to the tournaments in California. I definitely did not.

For me the most memorable event of the year was the “east coast swing”. As I recall, Don’s original plan was to attend all three tournaments—Boston College, Harvard, and Dartmouth. So, the three of us set out early in the morning on Friday, January 28, 1977. As always, we drove through southern Ontario. The roads were perfectly clear all the way through Canada, but as we approached the U.S. border we noticed that the snow was piled up pretty high on the sides of the road. We were not aware that Lake Erie, which is south of Ontario and west of Buffalo, had at that point been frozen over for forty-five days! Several feet of powdery snow had been accumulating on the surface.

We drove on Route 405 to the border crossing between Lewiston, NY, and Niagara Falls (red arrow in upper left corner). At this point we were right on schedule. The roads were clear, and the visibility was good as we headed southeast on U.S. 62 skirting the northeast suburbs of Buffalo. On each side of us the snow was piled at least ten feet high. We could see no buildings. We knew that we were in a populous area, but the only evidence of civilization were a few road signs peaking out over the snowpack. It was an awesome experience, but we had no reason to feel threatened. The change in conditions only began when we reached the New York Thruway (I-90) near Williamsville (second arrow from left).

All these photos (except the toll booth) are from the Buffalo or Batavia area during the Blizzard of 1977.

Quite suddenly the wind, which blew from the west, picked up dramatically, and the snow began to fall. The wind whipped the snow around the front of our car from both sides. Visibility dropped to near zero. At times we could not see to the end of our car’s hood. Soon it became impossible even to tell where the lanes were. It was cold, but Stewart and I rolled down our windows and helped Don, who was driving, keep the vehicle on the road by continually reporting to him him how far it wase from the snowbank. He slowed down to 10 miles per hour or less.

This was the famous Blizzard of 1977 that killed twenty-three people, many of them on the stretch of road that we needed to travel. We were quite familiar with this stretch of the NY Thruway. There were no cities of much consequence near the highway until we reached Syracuse, which was most of the way across the state. Something bad would probably happen to us if we tried to go that far.

While we were inching along the highway, semis occasionally passed us. Perhaps the drivers thought they could outrun the storm. However, the wind, which gusted up to sixty-nine miles per hour, was a bigger problem than the snow. It was picking up powdered snow from Lake Erie and from Buffalo, which had already received more than ten feet of snow that year, and dumping it on the Thruway. We caught glimpses of several jackknifed eighteen-wheelers on both sides of the eastbound portion of the highway.

We quickly determined that we needed to leave the highway at the first exit that we came to. We looked and looked, but we never saw an exit. We could not see any of the road signs well enough to read them. In fact, for a long time we could see nothing in front of or behind us and only the snowbanks to the left and right. We continued moving slowly eastward for almost three hours.

At last I spotted a sign for a Rodeway Inn peeking over the snowbank on the right. It was perhaps fifty yards away. I figured that in all likelihood there must be an exit nearby. I was so concerned about missing the exit that I actually considered recommending that we abandon the car and try to make our way toward that sign by crawling over the snowpack, which was at least ten feet deep. Instead Don slowed down the car even more to avoid missing the exit.

We never did see any signs for the exit, but by maintaining a constant distance between the car and the snowbank on the right we accidentally departed the highway at the exit for Batavia, NY (arrow on the right in the above map). Our first indication that we were no longer on the Thruway was the array of toll booths ahead of us, and we could not see them until we were almost upon them.

It was a great relief to see a live human being in the toll booth. We paid our toll and told him that the Thruway should definitely be closed. He replied that it had been closed for more than an hour. We asked him if there was a hotel nearby. He advised us that there was a Holiday Inn² near the end of the ramp.

Don guided the vehicle into the hotel’s snow-covered parking lot. At the reception desk they told us that only a few rooms were still available. Needless to say, we took one. We then asked if the hotel had a restaurant. It did, but the desk clerk said it had been closed when the food ran out. He assured us that there would be a breakfast buffet in the morning. We would have greatly preferred to have a breakfast buffet that evening, but it wasn’t in the cards, and we did not even discuss taking the car out to search for a restaurant or market. Instead we each purchased several candy bars from the machines. An hour or so later those machines were empty.

We called Tuna Snider, the coach at Boston College, and told him that we were stuck in Batavia. He was surprised to hear how bad the conditions were. I am not aware of any other teams that got stuck in this morass. I told the BC people that I did not know when we would arrive, but I would be happy to judge when we got there. Tuna said that that would be greatly appreciated. He said that he would pay me $10 per round, which was the usual rate.

We also called home and told everyone that we were alive and safe.

I am pretty sure that we had missed lunch, and we definitely had nothing but candy bars for supper. Don, Stewart, and I were therefore hungry and disappointed. However, we all appreciated how much worse it could have been. We set our alarms and asked for a wake-up call in time for us to be at the breakfast buffet as soon as the doors were open. That night we slept the sleep of the just.

By daybreak the snow had stopped. The wind was still blowing, however. So, snow that was pushed to the side of the road by the plows was often quickly replaced by snow blown off of the snowpack. The Thruway was still closed in both directions.

On the way to breakfast we saw that dozens of people had set up camp in the hotel’s lobby. Many were still sleeping. We were near the beginning of the buffet line and piled on the food. The restaurant usually allowed unlimited trips to the buffet, but on this occasion the management sensibly limited everyone to one trip. Nevertheless, they ran out of food while we were finishing our plentiful meal.

Many of the people stranded in the hotel were truckers. They were able to obtain up-to-the-minute information about the road conditions. We learned from one of them that from Syracuse to the east the Thruway was open, but that it was doubtful that the area near Batavia would reopen until the following day.

I don’t think that I-490 and I-390 existed in 1977.

A more promising development was reported later in the morning. Evidently Route 33, a two-lane road that connected Rochester with Batavia had just opened. From Rochester we could allegedly take another two-lane road, Route 31, toward Victor, NY. The Thruway was allegedly open from there to New England.

We allowed a few intrepid truckers to blaze the trail before we decided to try it. Maps were still plentiful in 1977, and I think that Don had one. Having made sure that we had good directions for making the proper connections on these side roads, we cleared a few feet of snow off of Don’s car and set off for Rochester. Initially we had to drive a mile or so south to reach Route 33 in the middle of Batavia. The roads were surprisingly passable in Batavia. The residents had never seen this kind of storm, but they had considerable experience at dealing with snow.³

The interstate shown on this map from Rochester to Victor did not exist. We took Route 31.

Route 33 was a little precarious. Snow that was continually blowing onto the highway made conditions a little slippery, but at least we could see. In a few places the width that had been cleared was not sufficient for two cars, but we encountered almost no vehicles headed for Batavia. By the time that we reached Rochester the conditions were much better. The drive on Route 31 was even easier. In fact we faced no more significant delays all the way to Boston.

I am pretty sure that I judged quite a few rounds at the Boston College tournament. They paid me, and I gave the money to Don. Don and Stewart rested up and then watched at least one elimination round. I also have a dim recollection of all three of us going to a party thrown by the tournament staff and the BC coach, Tuna Snider.

I don’t actually remember anything else about the part of the trip involving the debating. Don and Stewart surely debated at Harvard, but I don’t remember how they did. I have a vague recollection of being on the Dartmouth campus. I seem to remember that the guys did well there. I might be wrong

I have one strong memory of the drive home. Since there were three potential drivers, we elected to drive straight through with only minimal stops. We did not run into any snow. It was, however, dark and very cold when we crossed the border into Canada. Don was exhausted. He handed the keys to me.

I was alert for the first hour or so, but then I also became very sleepy. There was almost no traffic. Don and Stewart were both dead to the world. I unilaterally adopted a policy of pulling the car over to the breakdown lane every twenty or thirty minutes. I then exited from the car and stood for a second in the bitterly cold air before I walked completely around the car. I then got back in and drove on.

By the time that we reached Windsor, I had my second wind. I drove straight through from there to Plymouth, where I gave the keys back to Don.

When I arrived home Sue told us that she had been praying that we would find an Eskimo lady to take us in.

My only recollection of the remainder of the debate season before districts was an elimination round that I, along with two other debate coaches, judged between Harvard and Georgetown. They were two of the very best teams in the country. Georgetown was on the affirmative, arguing in favor of mandatory air bags.

At the conclusion of the debate the other two judges quickly signed and turned in their ballots. I, however, was not a bit certain who had won. I spent at least fifteen minutes asking to read various pieces of evidence from both teams. In the end I voted for Harvard. One of the other judges had voted affirmative and one negative, but neither thought that it was close.

I was not too worried about Don and Stewart’s prospects at districts. Northwestern’s top team had received a first round bid. I did not think that anyone else could touch the case on speed governors, and I was pretty sure that Don and Stewart, who had done well in some prestigious national tournaments, could win at least two rounds on the negative.

I was right. We all got to go to NDT at Southwest Missouri State University⁴ in Springfield.

The drive to SMS was long, but we were accustomed to long road trips. We had plenty to discuss on the way. For once we knew exactly the set of teams from which our opponents would be drawn.

We did not stay at the hotel recommended by the tournament. Don found one a couple of miles from the SMS campus that featured much lower rates.

The black & white episodes are much better than the ones in color.

I should mention that the people in southern Missouri talk with a much more pronounced drawl than the residents of KC, St. Louis, and points north. Springfield is near the Ozarks, the home of Jed Clampett and his kin. It resembles Arkansas much more than it resembles northern Missouri

The SMS campus was very nice. I have a pretty clear recollection of one debate round that I judgied. Two guys from UMass were on the affirmative. Their case had two distinct parts. One part advocated gun control; the other mandated speed governors. That part was similar to Don and Stewart’s case.

The room in which the debate took place was in a building facing the quadrangle in the middle of campus. It was a beautiful spring day, and someone had opened a window or two in the room. The first affirmative had completed his presentation of the case. Prep time for one of the subsequent speeches was in progress when a fair amount of commotion could be heard through the window. Some SMS students were evidently being overly boisterous.

Someone in the room, perhaps a judge, asked, “What was that?” Because I took judging very seriously, I kept my peace. However, I thought of an extremely appropriate answer: “They probably heard that some Yankees had come down here talkin’ about takin’ their guns away and slowin’ down their cars.”

For NDT every judge was asked to explicate his judging philosophy in a paragraph or two. These were accumulated, duplicated, and included in the tournament welcome packets. We also had brought the accordion file of U-M ballots from previous tournaments (and years). Before the tournament started every team was allowed to name three judges that they wished to exclude from judging them. This process was called “striking”. I don’t remember which judges we struck, but the emphasis was definitely on competence rather than who associated with whom. I did not generally go to coaches’ parties and so I was not really aware of those relationships.

In the eighth round Don and Stewart faced a very good team, Fabiani⁵ and McNamara from Redlands. They had received one of the coveted first-round bids. I do not recall which team was on the affirmative. I also do not remember the other two judges, but one was Brad Ziff from Georgetown. Everyone in the tournament knew that this was an important round. A few people from District 5 approached me to tell me that I should have put Brad Ziff on our strike list. They said that he never voted against Redlands.

At any rate Redlands won the debate 3-0 and advanced to the elimination rounds. In fact, they made it as far as the semifinals. Don was convinced that Redlands had won on reputation, not arguments. He was so upset that he refused to attend the final assembly in which the qualifiers were announced, and speaker awards were presented. I had no real jurisdiction over him, but I was six years older. I said that we were all going to swallow our feelings and go to the assembly with our heads held high.

Don protested that I had made an angry display at Harvard once. I admitted that I did, and it was wrong. I insisted that we all attend the assembly, and we did. If anyone knew how he felt, it was I. Still, attending was the right thing to do.

The drive back was not a lot of fun. Don really wanted to debate in the elimination rounds at NDT. He deserved it, too. I suspect that he had worked harder that year than anyone in the entire history of U-M debate.

Georgetown won the NDT that year.

At some point during the year I drove to Wayne State in downtown Detroit and met with George Z. He said that he had talked with Dr. Colburn, who had informed him of an incident involving expense reports. I explained that I had turned a large number of them at once, and the secretary got upset. He just laughed at that. He offered me a job as a teaching assistant. I seem to remember that they also waived the tuition.

1. “Topicality” refers to arguments about whether the affirmative’s plan is a legitimate interpretation of the resolution. For the 1976-77 resolution some might argue that the federal government was not the actor, that the action was not significant, that manufacturers were not required to do anything, etc.

2. My recollection is that it was a Holiday Inn, but the hotels that in 2021 are located near the exit that we stumbled upon do not include a Holiday Inn. There are also no Rodeway Inns nearby either.

3. A first-hand blog of the event in Batavia can be read here.

4. The university is now called Missouri State. The “Southwest” part was dropped in 2005.

5. Mark Fabiani was only a sophomore in 1977. He was the top speaker at the 1979 NDT. He later became a very prominent political figure both in Los Angeles and nationwide. His Wikipedia page is here.

6. Brad Ziff’s LinkedIn page is here.

1974-1976 U-M: Academics

Posted on February 22, 2021 by Mike

Taking classes in subjects in which I had little interest. Continue reading →

Graduate school in the speech communications department¹ at U-M was a joke. The department had several areas of study. The only thing that they had in common was that they all had something to do with making noises with one’s mouth. One of them was fairly rigorous—speech therapy, which dealt with solving the problems of people who have difficulty making certain sounds. All the others—communication theory, rhetoric, mass communication, theater, and oral interpretation (reading aloud)—were all squishy, with an abundance of theories and almost no science. The worst was oral interp. The students would read something aloud, and the professor would tell them what they did wrong. Often they would read a translation of a work originally written in another language! How could anyone take this seriously?

Because I was eligible for seven years of veterans’ benefits, I was reimbursed by the Veterans Administration for my tuition. The way that it worked was a little perverse. I was paying in-state tuition, and the rate was a little less than the amount of my benefits. However, if I dropped or failed classes, the payment from the Veterans Administration was not adjusted. They paid for classes, not success in classes.

As an undergraduate I had taken a few graduate-level classes in math and Greek. They were very challenging. I struggled to pass them. In contrast, none of the graduate-level speech classes that I took in my second stint at U-M were as difficult as my freshman math classes. I found it ridiculous that people who passed these speech classes were somehow on a par with people who had mastered math or science. I had very little interest in subjects I was learning, I devoted the absolute minimum time possible, and I still skated through with no problem.

I discovered that my previous approach to selecting classes may have been misguided. As an undergraduate I avoided papers like the plague. Graduate students in “social sciences” cannot avoid writing papers. I discovered that I was good at the type of expository writing that professors appreciate.

The very first class that I took, Introduction to Graduate Studies, provided the most entertaining session that I encountered in my ten years of college courses. The teacher was Rich Enos², a rhetorician who had just received his PhD from Indiana University. The graduate students in speech at U-M came from all areas. So, some people wanted to learn about radio and television, some were studying film techniques, some wished to become actors, some wanted to read aloud (!), and a few, like me, allegedly wanted to learn the theory of communication or rhetoric. We were a really diverse group. Nevertheless all new students were required to take the same Intro course.

Most lessons in this course were real snoozers. We learned about the style required for papers and a few other things that I have long ago forgotten.

Nose-to-nose or mouth-to-mouth, and what is that Mexican in the corner doing?

I will never forget however, the class conducted by guest lecturer Bob Norton³, who was asked by Rich to explain the use of statistics in speech. Instead, he chose for his topic the research in “Proxemics”, which deals with the effect of space between two people and their ability to communicate. He said that the measurement of the distance between two people was very controversial.

One of the currently accepted paradigms was the “nose-to-nose” method. This approach yields very different results from those of the “mouth-to-mouth” method, according to Norton, if one is talking about two Jews rather than two Chinamen (his words, not mine). He then proceeded to draw a lot of stick figures on the board illustrating problems of various types involving escalators, staircases, and, in one case, a Mexican peeing in a corner.

Almost all of the other students sat in stunned silence during this presentation. A few were even taking notes. I was laughing so hard that at one point I literally fell out of my desk. Don Goldman, who was sitting next to me, snickered a bit, but his heritage as a Southern gentleman prevented full appreciation of the farce.

When the presentation was over, Norton opened the floor to questions. One woman raised her hand and, when recognized, asked, “How do you do a T test?”

Norton answered, “Are you in theater?”

She admitted as much,. He said that that confirmed his suspicions, and he immediately asked if there were any other questions.

She insisted, “I really want to know.”

Norton waited a few seconds and then declared, “I don’t know. I always have to look it up.”

I have not done justice to this presentation. He must have devoted quite a bit of time to working on it. It was the most outrageous thing that I had ever witnessed in any medium. Enos was stunned at first and furiously angry by the end.

I spent a bit of time with both Enos and Norton, separately, of course—they did not get along. Dr. Enos was shocked to find out that I could read both Latin and Greek but had little interest in the ancient writings on rhetoric. I was equally shocked that he could not but did have.

Dr. Norton spent a lot of time with one PhD student who was using Norton’s “Communicator Style” construct in his dissertation. Every other student in the department was scared to death of him. Late one afternoon I went into his office, which was on the other side of the building, and asked him to explain Communicator Style (which now has at least 657 citations on the Internet). He opened the bottom drawer on the left side of his desk and extracted a bottle of sherry. He offered me a glass, but I demurred.

He explained that he had developed a series of questions that supposedly measured psychological trait. He postulated nine traits—dominant, dramatic, contentious, animated, impression-leaving, relaxed, attentive, open, and friendly. I don’t know what basis was cited for limiting the construct to these particular traits, and I don’t know how he determined that the questions actually measured the traits. In both cases he might have built on someone else’s work.

Norton’s contribution involved applying a statistical tool that someone had developed to show the “distance” between the traits in a group of subjects in two dimensions. There was not too much to this; it simply used the correlations between traits and produced a chart that minimized the tension between the thirty-six sets of correlations (dominant with the other eight, dramatic with the other seven, etc.). Traits were arrayed so that they were closer to the ones that they were highly correlated with and distant from the ones with which they had negative correlations.

A three-dimensional depiction would have been more accurate, and, for all that I know, he may have tried this. However, displaying it on paper for a book or journal article would be problematic. Going beyond three dimensions would be even more accurate, but no one would be able to envision the maps in n-space.

After I understood his approach, I objected that these depictions didn’t mean anything. Not only did they not represent how the brain—or anything else—was organized. They were actually less meaningful than the raw statistics. That is, simply listing the correlations between the various traits was more meaningful than visually depicting the distances between all traits in the construct. People allegedly felt that they understood the relationships if they could see a picture rather than a set of numbers.

He said that I missed the point. His Communicator Style construct could be used to study virtually any group of people who were willing to fill out his questionnaire. For example, he could take a group of debate coaches (or football coaches or politicians or members of any identifiable class) whom he could assess by some means. Since the construct had been accepted in the literature. he could write a paper that contrasted the communicator style of the successful ones with the construct of the less successful ones. The possibilities were limitless.

At this point he opened the bottom drawer on the right side of his desk and showed me a set of eight or ten papers that he had already written using this approach. He told me that he planned to submit one or two a year to various journals. I admitted to being impressed with his initiative and his laziness.

Evidently he went through with his plan. He published a book on this subject in 1978.

I took Dr. Norton’s statistics class. There were only four students: myself, Goldman, a woman who had attended Tulane and was working on her PhD, and a guy from the mass media area. Norton actually taught the material this time, but the other students had little or no exposure to math since high school, and they were definitely at sea in this class. I helped Goldman.

Norton invited some researchers to present their findings to the class. These guys had administered a lot of questionnaires to people in Toledo. I don’t remember the details, but they had expected to find a correlation between some answers and the result of some event. They were disappointed, but they did find an unexpectedly strong correlation between some other answers and something else.

Norton asked me what I thought about the presentation. I replied that it showed that if you get enough data, you are bound to find something. What they found may have served as the launching point for a separate study, but since what they found did not agree with the null hypothesis, it was not per se meaningful.

The statistics class only had one test, which was multiple-choice. Norton told everyone that he was going to penalize guessing. Did he ever! The scoring was straightforward: number right minus number wrong. I got a pretty good score even though I protested that one of his “correct” answers required a horse in a race to finish both first and second simultaneously. He saw my point, but he was too lazy to change the score. Goldman scored much lower. The woman’s score was just above zero. The mass media guy would have done better to turn in a blank sheet of paper. He had more wrong answers than right ones. Imagine the effect of getting a negative score on a final exam in graduate school.

My recollection is that no one signed up for this class the next semester.

The only class that I really liked was a seminar in Group Dynamics in the psychology department. It was taught by Dorwin Cartwright⁴. Our textbook, which was also called Group Dynamics, was written by Cartwright. Much of the time in class was spent explaining the ideas of his mentor, Kurt Lewin (pronounced leh VEEN), who was largely responsible for bringing statistical methods to the social sciences.

I was most interested in the research about “shift to risk”, a theory that groups are more likely to accept risky outcomes than individuals. Lewin helped design the original set of ten questions that had been used by many researchers to explore this topic. Some of these studies formed the basis for the best-selling book, Victims of Groupthink by Irving Janis. My final paper for Cartwright’s class was a review of this book, which, in my opinion ignored some important facts about the decision-making processes in both the Bay of Pigs incident and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I don’t remember too much about my other classes.

The course in Classical Rhetoric was taught by Dr. Enos. I got little or nothing out of it.
Rhetoric of Social Movements was taught by a professor whose name I don’t remember. He liked me, and he especially liked the fact that I chose the worldwide anarchist movement for the topic of my final paper. However, he did not like the paper itself, which used Transactional Analysis to dissect the oratory. I concluded that the movement was doomed to failure from the start. He said that if I were right, it would be incoherent, which I certainly think was the case. You can’t herd cats, and you can’t organize anarchists.
I took an undergraduate radio-television class overseen by another grad student. It had two projects. One I was completely unprepared for because I had been out of town on a debate trip. I extemporized a how-to presentation on filing debate evidence. The instructor liked it. On the other one, which was a short radio play in the style of Bob and Ray⁵, I worked fairly hard, and Don Goldman co-starred. The instructor didn’t think much of it, but the class really enjoyed it when he played the recording for them. I suspect that he thought that it had been serious.
I missed a lot of classes in a programming course in Algol. When I finally showed up for a class, the instructor made me go to the blackboard (actually green) to explain something. It was embarrassing. I dropped the class rather than risk another such event.
Don Goldman taught a course in directing forensics. Many of the debaters were also in it. None of us ever attended the classes. One day Don came to me and said that he might get into trouble if he gave all the debaters A’s. I told him to give me the B. I did not care two cents about my grades, and they were all concerned about getting into a good law school.
I must have taken another class or two, but I can’t recall any.

One day I was walking rather rapidly on the sidewalk on North University. Books and stacks of papers occupied both hands. The lens popped out of my glasses and disappeared into a snowbank. I made a cursory search but found no trace.

About two months later I was walking in the same area and I spotted a lens in the grassy area between the sidewalk and the street. It was scored by deep scratches, but it was definitely the one that I had lost.

Masters candidates at U-M had a choice of writing a thesis or taking more classes. Since the VA paid me to take classes but did not pay me to research and write, I selected the leisurely method of taking more classes. I got my degree in 1976.

1. The speech department no longer exists. Most of the areas were appended to the journalism department. The resulting department is now called “Journalism and Screen Studies”. U-M now also has a communication department. I am not exactly sure what is in it. The theater and speech therapy areas are, I think, in other “schools”. Theater is in the School of Music, Theater, and Dance. The speech therapy people have their own department called “Speech-Language Pathology”, which I think is in the School of Medicine. The debate team is not associated with any of these departments.

2. According to his LinkedIn page Rich left Michigan in 1979 and taught at Carnegie-Mellon University for sixteen years. Since 1995 he has been at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth.

3. Bob left Michigan some time before 1978. He spent his academic career at the University of Wisconsin.

4. Dorwin Cartwright died in 2008. He has a short Wikipedia page.

5. Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding produced hilarious radio skits for the long-running NBC show, Monitor Radio. They were interviews or pseudo-dramas in which all of the characters were played by one of them or the other. My dad was a loyal listener to Monitor Radio. I found most of its offerings boring, but I loved Bob and Ray. I still have a copy of their book, Write if You Get Work.

1966-1970 Miscellaneous Events

Posted on February 19, 2021 by Mike

Things unrelated to life at U-M. Continue reading →

The Leishmans lived at 8801 Fairway, which was directly across the street from our house.

During each of the four years that I was an undergraduate at Michigan I came home for the Christmas holiday. A very unusual event occurred in one of those holidays. I think that it was the first one, 1966, but it might have been 1967. During the fall I had been alerted by my parents that my cousin and my classmate at Rockhurst High School, Terry Cernech, was getting married. The bride, Debbie Leishman, lived directly across the street from my family’s house in Leawood. They wanted me to be an usher at their wedding.

Terry, who lived nearly twenty miles away in Sugar Creek, had met Debbie during the production of a musical that featured performers and crew from Rockhurst High School, which both Terry and I attended, and Debbie’s high school, Notre Dame de Sion, a Catholic preparatory school for girls. Strange as it might seem, I had absolutely nothing to do with them getting together.

Terry and I were seniors when the play was staged. Debbie was a year or two younger. I am therefore pretty sure that she was still in high school at the time of the wedding. Terry was in college. His Facebook page says that he “studied at University of Notre Dame.”

The ceremony might have been held here at St. Ann’s church in Independence.

If there was a bachelor’s party, I was not invited, or maybe my parents neglected to tell me about it. I am pretty sure that the wedding ceremony was at a Catholic Church. Since the Leishmans were not Catholics, I am quite sure that the ceremony was not at our parish, Curé of Ars. So, I figure that it must have been held at the Cerneches’ church, St. Ann’s in Independence, MO, Harry Truman’s home town. I am almost certain that Terry went to grade school at St. Ann’s school.

So, why did the happy couple choose December for this occasion? Well, it probably wasn’t for tax reasons—both the bride and groom were full-time students. Everyone knew the answer, of course. In the language of the day, they had to get married.

Terry’s brother John was the best man. Before the ceremony he talked for a while with my parents. He said that he had been up all night talking with Terry. According to John, his brother had ingested a large amount of “Dutch courage” to prepare himself for the big event. John was dubious about the whole situation.

My job as usher was trivial. People sat where they wanted. I don’t recall that I had to wear a tuxedo or any other kind of costume. My real responsibilities began at the reception where I discovered that no one in the Leishman household was talking to anyone on the Cernech side. My dad did not get along particularly well with either Terry’s father, my Uncle Dean, or Mr. Leishman. So, I was drafted to pass messages between the two patriarchs. I do not precisely recall any particular message, but the flavor of most of them was something like the following:

“Tell that son of a bitch that if he thinks that he is going to …”
“He said what? Tell that worthless sack of shit that that will never happen until hell freezes over.”
“That’s NOT what we agreed on! You tell that two-faced bastard …”
“That’s it. I’ve had enough of that asshole. Just tell him to shove it.”

Needless to say, I sanitized the messages a bit before I delivered them. For a while I found this farce slightly amusing, but eventually it wore me down.

The marriage did not last very long. I don’t know what became of any of the Leishmans. Terry remarried; in 2021 he lives in Springfield, MO.

During the exam period right before Christmas, in December of 1967 (I think) I came down with influenza. When I have recounted this story, I called what I had the Russian flu. However, apparently the disease, which started in November in Michigan and Florida, was actually popularly known as the Hong Kong Flu. I somehow got through my exams, but I was completely wiped out. I slept through the entire plane ride to KC, and then I spent another day or so in bed at my parents’ house. This was my last real illness until my tuxedo-wearing cat Jake gave me cat-scratch disease in the mid-eighties.

A different member of my high school class, John Williams, also got married and had a son while he was going to college. He invited me to attend a play that his younger brother was in. This must have happened either over the Christmas break in my senior year or during one of the summers. John was driving, and for some reason his wife was not there.

At some point John was talking about the toddler. When I asked him a question, I mistakenly called the kid “your brother”. At least three of my acquaintances fathered children while I was in college, but I never actually saw any of them. I was so immature and aloof that I could not internalize the fact that people my age were reproducing.

One baby that I did see was Dr. Colburn’s youngest daughter. When the child, whose name escapes me, was baptized, I stood in for the real godfather, who could not make the trip to Ann Arbor. The event occurred in September of either 1968 or 1969. This was the last baptism that I ever attended.

In 2020 I discovered evidence of two events that I am quite certain that I never attended. I found these two football tickets among my dad’s possessions after he died in 2011.

They did not even call it the Super Bowl.

I have no recollection at all that he had attended one of the most famous football games of all time, the 1969 Super Bowl. This was the game between the New York Jets, quarterbacked by Joe Namath, and the Baltimore Colts, led by Johnny Unitas. The Colts, who had defeated the Cleveland Browns 34-0 in the NFL¹ championship game, were heavily favored, but the brash Namath guaranteed that the Jets would win, and they did.

In fact, it was not a close game. The defense of the Jets completely stymied Unitas and the Colts, who were held to a field goal in the fourth quarter. The final score was 16-3.

The game was played in the Orange Bowl in Miami, FL, on Sunday, January 12, 1969. I would have been back in Ann Arbor by then. I have no recollection that my dad went to this game. Of course, it had no effect on me; I was probably either at a debate tournament, returning from one, or busily preparing for one.

I wonder if my mom also attended this game. My dad often traveled on business, and some of those events included entertainment for the local salesmen. If this was part of the company’s annual convention, then my mom also probably came. In that case, they would have probably needed to get someone to stay at the house with Jamie, who had been a teenager for eight days when the game was played. Surely this would have been a topic of discussion over the holidays, but I have no memory of it whatsoever.

I definitely do remember the other game.

Michigan played against Southern Cal in the Rose Bowl in my senior year. I watched this frustrating nail-biter at home in Leawood. I am pretty sure that both of my parents attended, but I don’t remember if they left Jamie with me (I was twenty-one, and she was almost fourteen), or if someone stayed with us.

Southern Cal was undefeated. Michigan was coming off of its best game ever, the upset of undefeated Ohio State in Ann Arbor. I had missed that game because of a debate tournament in Chicago.

Both teams in the Rose Bowl had very stout defenses and unimaginative offenses. The game was tied 3-3 at the half. The only touchdown was a thirty-three yard pass from Jimmy Jones to Bob Chandler. Southern Cal won 10-3..

The backs of both of these tickets have diagrams of the seating in the stadiums. In both cases the tickets are on about the twenty-five-yard line, a little less than halfway up. Those are very good seats! Note that the price of the Rose Bowl ticket was only $8.

My two fondest memories of Jamie occurred, I think, during one of the breaks from college. The first one was in 1966, the year that Barry Sadler’s song, “Ballad of the Green Berets”² topped the charts. We invented a dance to accompany this song. It involved standing at attention next to one another. Then one of us would stand on tip-toes for a beat while the other squatted. Then we returned to attention. On the following beats we reversed roles, and so on until we could not keep straight faces any longer.

At some point when I was not paying attention Jamie learned to play the guitar. She had a Bob Dylan songbook that contained the words and music for a dozen or two of his early songs. A few times we made music together; she would play the chords and I would sing. I can carry a tune, the songs were in a key that stayed in my range, and I could do a passable imitation of Dylan’s voice. We should have recorded one of these songs—I had a tape recorder. It would be fun to hear what we sounded like.

1. The NFL and the AFL had not yet merged. The first four Super Bowl featured the champions of each league.

2. This horribly unimaginative song tied “California Dreamin'” as Billboard’s top song of 1966. Surely this was the worst song ever to become so popular. Sadler was a medic in Vietnam. His one hit made him a lot of money, but his life subsequently went quickly downhill. In 1979 he was charged with second-degree murder and pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in Nashville. He went to prison for thirty days. In September of 1988 he was shot in the head in a taxicab in Guatemala City. He died early the following year.

1972-1974 Connecticut: Sue and Mike

Posted on February 3, 2021 by Mike

Could a relationship between a preppy lad from Kansas and a country lass from Connecticut last? Continue reading →

For the few weeks that I worked in the Variable Annuity area of the Life Actuarial Department at the Hartford, my desk was behind Sue Comparetto’s, and we shared a phone. She was the head clerk in Bob Riley’s section. This meant that she was the only person there entrusted with an electronic calculator. Those silent marvels would soon replace the gigantic noisy Fridens, but they still required an AC connection and cost about $1,000.

I am pretty sure that Sue’s first impression of me was negative. Our only noteworthy interaction was when I was called upon to talk with someone on the phone. My desk had no phone; I had to use hers. I never called anyone, and most of the calls that I received were nerve-wracking; I perspired all over the receiver. I wiped it off before I gave it back, but it was still rather gross.

I did not know Sue well, but what I heard about her was somewhat disconcerting. She lived in East Hampton, CT, with Diane DeFreitas and, I think, another young woman. She did not have a car. A “Cuban plumber” sometimes gave her a ride part of the way to the Hartford. She hitchhiked the rest of the way. She had picked up a black Labrador puppy at a flea market and named him Siddhartha. At some point she must have realized that this situation was not sustainable, and she took the dog to the pound. Someone else may have catalyzed the decision.

I remember that one day both she and Diane decided to dress slutty for work. Sue did not like dress codes. She told me that she had been suspended from high school for vigorously protesting the dress code. Her parents were not amused by this behavior.

Oh, yeah. One other thing—Sue smoked. My dad smoked, but hardly anyone else with whom I had ever spent much time did. John Sigler also spoke, but he hardly ever lit up in my presence.

After I was assigned to the Individual Pensions area I only saw Sue in passing and at the Friday evening gatherings at the Shoreham Hotel’s bar, situated very conveniently between the Aetna and the Hartford. At some point one of the most important events of my life occurred, and yet I have no clear memory of the details. For some reason Tom Herget set me up with Sue for some event. I don’t remember when it was or even what we did. I have a vague recollection of the Aetna Diner (Sue liked their moussaka) on Farmington Avenue, but maybe that was on a different occasion. I am pretty sure that Sue told me on that occasion that I reminded her of her husband, and she was astonished to learn that my middle name was Dennis. She explained that her husband’s name was Dennis, and his middle name was Michael.

I don’t think that I previously knew that she had been married. This explained why she did not look even vaguely Italian. I certainly did not know that she was still legally married. I had to make a snap judgment whether being with her was a mortal sin or a venial sin. It was a tough call, but I was pretty sure that any further contact would move the needle over the line. For twelve years I had attended Catholic schools, and I had never missed going to mass on Sunday. Not once. I probably confessed more impure thoughts than I actually had. You have to confess something.

I somehow quieted my conscience and had a good time that night, and Sue and I started “seeing each other.” By this time she had moved to Rockville and rented a room in the basement of a house owned by a female employee of the Hartford named Jackie. She also had somehow persuaded a bank to finance her purchase of a 1972 Dodge Colt.

During this period Sue was also, at least in theory, studying for Part 1 of the actuarial exams. She was at a huge disadvantage compared with others taking the test in Hartford. Most of them got study time and took classes in the subject. She did not pass.

It must have been on an evening in October that Sue offered to fix a steak supper for John Sigler and me. Jackie must have let Sue use the kitchen; Sue’s apartment barely had room for a bed and a couple of chairs. We all sat around after dinner drinking Mateus, talking, and listening to Leonard Cohen records. Finally John departed. I spent the night with Sue on her small waterbed, a totally new experience for me.

Over the next few months Sue and I went to numerous places together. A bunch of us walked down to Constitution Plaza together to attend a noontime rally for George McGovern. 1972 was the first time that I was allowed to vote in a national election. In 1968 the voting age was twenty-one, and I was only twenty. Sue, who was born in 1951, was barely old enough to vote this time. I really hated Nixon. I suspected (correctly, as it was later revealed) that he had deliberately scuttled the peace talks in Paris about Vietnam. Never mind his secret war in Laos and his part in the overthrow of the democratic government in Chile. I never had to serve in Vietnam, but I blamed Nixon for stealing two years from me when I was in my prime.

Sue and I both voted for McGovern. I even put a McGovern-Shriver¹ sticker on Greenie’s bumper. I felt as if I had gotten McGovern one more vote than he would have otherwise received. Of course, it made no difference. Most Americans believed Tricky Dick really had a “secret plan” to end the war, they were afraid of the godless communist menace, and for some reason they did not like McGovern.

Sue and I attended a couple of movies in theaters. I seem to remember that there was a theater in West Hartford that showed older movies. I am pretty sure that we saw Blow-up together and at least one Marx Brothers movie.

We ate at a few restaurants in Rockville. I am certain that we shared a ham and olive pizza a small restaurant on Main St. near Route 83. It must have been part of a chain. It had a number after its name. Sue liked to go to Friendly’s. At the time their menu consisted of overpriced hamburger, overpriced cheeseburgers, overpriced “Friendly Franks”, and ice cream. Sue focused on the ice cream.

I cooked a few meals for us in my apartment. For example, I fixed a sirloin beef roast using McCormick’s Meat Marinade², a trick that I learned from my mother. Sue was pleasantly surprised at how good it tasted. She said that she had never liked beef roasts. She explained that when her mother cooked them she left them in the oven until they were grey, dried out, flavorless, and chewy. I tried to fry a chicken, but it did not work out too well. I had to put it in the oven before serving because some parts were not done. Microwave ovens existed, but I did not have one. After that we stuck to extra-crispy chicken from the colonel. However, I bought at least three cookbooks, and I developed a few very tasty specialties.

I took Christmas very seriously in 1972. It was only the second holiday season that I had spent away from my family, and this time I was really on my own. The feeling was much different from any previous Christmas. I spent a lot of time shopping for little gifts and writing personalized Christmas cards for my friends. Sue and I attended the Carol Sing at the Hartford Times Building in downtown Hartford. The Times³ published a half-page photo of the huge crowd that was assembled. My off-white cowboy hat and fleece-lined suede coat made it easy to spot us in the photo. We showed the clipping to all of our friends.

My first New Years in Connecticut was also memorable. I decided to roast Cornish game hens for supper, and we invited Tom Corcoran and Patti Lewonczyk to join us. The four of us were also invited by Tom Garabedian and Gail Mertan to a party at Tom’s house in East Hartford. The meal was a big success. I think that Sue cooked some kind of vegetables, maybe her famous carrots Lyonaise. Of course, we also served wine.

We all probably ate too much. No one felt like going to a party. However, it was less than a mile to the Garabedian house. So, we all piled into one of the cars and drove there.

The only two people in the house when we arrived were Tom and Gail. Evidently Tom had persuaded his parents to make themselves scarce. Tom and Gail had laid out a cornucopia of food and beverages—enough for several dozen people. No one else ever came. It was not much of a party, but if we had submitted to the lethargy induced by the supper, it would have been a disaster.

Over the holidays I got to meet some of Sue’s family. Her parents, Art and Effy Slanetz, and siblings all lived in a farm house on North Maple St. in Enfield. Sue was the oldest child; she had two sisters, Karen and Betty. They were nothing alike. She also had a brother Don. I met Effy’s dog, Queenie, and a bevy of Sue’s uncles, aunts, and cousins, all of whom lived within a few miles of the Slanetz’s house⁴. Many of them seemed to make a living by driving trucks in one way or another. Their favorite sport was NASCAR. I did not contribute much to the banter.

Behind the house was a fairly large field that was actively farmed by the Polek family that lived in the house that was between the Slanetz’s house and a warehouse in which Art stored all kinds of old mechanical junk. Sue told me that that the field was their family’s land at one time. When she was little they raised potatoes.

The winters in the seventies were brutal. Early in 1973 (I think) I was driving Greenie, and Sue was riding shotgun after a snowfall of a couple of inches. We were headed south on I-91 through Hartford. I was driving at a very reasonable speed in the right lane, and, thank God, there were no cars nearby. All of a sudden my car’s rear wheels began moving to the left, but the front wheels did not. The car performed a spin of about 315°, and my left front bumper whipped into the guardrail on the left, which brought us to a halt.. Neither of us was injured. We were both wearing seat belts—I never let anyone ride in my car without a seat belt. It was amazing that my car suffered only a negligibly small bump, and the vehicle was positioned so that I could quickly steer back onto the highway. This scary event made me realize that I had to be very careful with this car in dicey road conditions.

Sue had a very large number of friends. My favorites were Bob and Susan Thompson. Bob worked in a small factory. He complained about the smell of the chemicals there. His job might have had something to do with linoleum. I think that Susan was a teacher. They had a house in Coventry and an extremely amorous dachshund. Once he gained purchase on a pants leg he was difficult to detach. Bob owned a Plymouth that saw its best days in the Eisenhower administration, or maybe earlier. In snowy weather he liked to take it into an empty parking lot and make it spin donuts.

When we had not seen Bob and Susan for a few months, I asked Sue why. She said that she had loaned them some money, and she was pretty sure that they were avoiding her because they could not afford to repay her.

On Valentine’s Day 2013 I bought Sue a present and a card. She had forgotten about it, and therefore she did not reciprocate. I took it a little hard.

Eventually I learned that Sue and time just did not get along. She regularly forgot holidays, birthdays, and appointments. She also could not gauge the passage of time. She might think that events occurred a week ago actually happened two months earlier. If she said that something would take fifteen minutes, it usually took an hour or more. If any food (e.g., beef or lamb) needed to be cooked for a specific amount of time, I had to do it. In retrospect I marvel that she had chosen to grill steaks for John Sigler and me. I cannot remember how they turned out. I was not paying too much attention to the food that night.

Sue was always late. I adopted the habit of carrying a book around with me for the inevitable waiting periods.

The fridge that we moved wasn't wrapped. — The fridge that we moved wasn’t wrapped.

I recall that in February of 1973 Sue and I helped one of her many friends move to a new place. The woman who was moving might have been one of Sue’s roommates in East Hampton. I remember that I was one of the people assigned to get an old refrigerator up the staircase. We succeeded, but I could not describe what technique was employed beyond brute force. At one point the woman who was moving asked what day it was. I said that it was Saturday the 24th (or whatever it actually was). She said “No. I mean, what month?”

I decided that Sue’s twenty-second birthday on March 2 should be Sue Comparetto Day. I offered to buy her anything that she wanted. She wanted to shop for a camera. We drove to a camera shop of her choosing, and she selected a thirty-five-millimeter camera with a leather case. I would have inserted a photo of it here if I knew where it was. I guarantee that it is in the house somewhere. Sue would never have thrown it out. I did find the case, which still had one of her combs in it.

We went to two concerts together in March. The first was at the Bushnell Auditorium in Hartford on Tuesday March 6. The headliners were Loggins and Messina, whose only real hit “Your Mama Don’t Dance” was very popular at the time. Sue and I must have attended in hopes of seeing the advertised opening act, Jim Croce. Neither Sue nor I can remember him appearing. Apparently he canceled for some reason. Almost everyone in the audience was at least five years younger than we were, and they enjoyed the L&M performance a lot more than we did. By the end of the show we really felt like old fogeys.

The other concert was at the Palace Theater in Waterbury. Pink Floyd had just released “Dark Side of the Moon”, which is widely considered their masterpiece. There were huge speakers blasting out sound from all four corners of the theater, and there was an abundance of strobe lights and other dramatic flashes. The crowd went crazy, but I was definitely ready to leave after fifteen minutes. You can listen to the whole two-hour concert here.

On April 1, 1973, Sue’s husband Dennis committed suicide. Sue went to the funeral. He had attempted suicide at least once in the fall. Sue had visited him in the hospital on that occasion.

When the weather got warmer Sue and I enjoyed a very pleasant trip to Gillette Castle, a bizarre structure that overlooks the Connecticut River. It was built of local fieldstone by the actor William Gillette. He is most famous for his portrayal of Sherlock Holmes more than 1,300 times on the stage, once in a silent film feature, and twice on radio programs. The estate is now a state park. I found it to be a very interesting place. The grounds were very relaxing. There was even a small train that had been used by Gillette himself. We had a very nice picnic.

We also spent some time in the interior⁵ of the castle. The extremely ornate inside was at least as fabulous as the grounds and the view. This was one of my favorite days in my first trip to Connecticut.

At some point Sue decided to quit her job at the Hartford. She found a new line of work at Travelers Equity Sales. She had to take a test to become a registered rep. She passed on the first try and worked there through the spring and most of the summer. While she worked at the Travelers she became a close friend of Diane Robinson, who originally came from Passumpsic VT, and Karen Peterson.

Around the same time that she changed jobs Sue moved to an apartment on Jefferson St. (or maybe Washington St.) in Hartford. I don’t remember much about it. My only clear recollection is of the only time in my life that I ever ran out of gas. I was about two blocks from her house and perhaps one hundred feet from a gas station. Even though it was slightly uphill I was able to push Greenie up to the pump all by myself. I was only a little stronger then; Greenie was very light and easy to push.

During her time at T.E.S. Sue and I started to grow apart. She was a whirlwind of activity, and I often felt left out. She had a gazillion friends of both genders, and sometimes I became jealous. She probably started to think of me as too clingy.

When I met Sue, she already had a boa constrictor named Puca, but he was barely six feet long and skinny. She did not feed him much, and when she did, all that he got was a dead mouse heated over a light bulb to fool his heat-detecting senses. One evening we visited her friends Stan and Pat Slatt in Marlborough. They had a ten-foot boa constrictor that Stan fed live rats and a thirteen-foot python that regularly ate a full-grown rabbit. I had no fear of Puca, but these two monsters gave me pause.

In the summer of 1973 Sue moved to an apartment complex on Wales Rd. in Andover. Her apartment was right across the street from the one that Scott and Cindy Otermat lived with their huge dog Cinders. I saw her only a few times before her big trip.

Sue, Diane, and Karen decided to quit their jobs and drive to Alaska. I am not sure that their plans were any more specific than that. I don’t know what they used for money. Maybe they knocked over a bunch of banks in those states along the Canadian border, or they might have found a big nugget of gold in the Klondike. They did not take Sue’s car. She left it at her apartment, which she “sublet” to a guy who worked on roofs for a living. I am pretty sure that they were “involved” before she left. He also was supposed to take care of Puca, but the reptile escaped from his cage either just before Sue left or just after.

This was the greatest adventure in Sue’s young life, but I was absolutely miserable. I felt sorry for myself. It was hard for me to face all my friends. I took a lot of long walks.

During the trip the three ladies all hooked up with Air Force guys stationed in Alaska. Diane ended up marrying Phil Graziose. They lived in a trailer park in northern Vermont for a number of years and then bought an old house in St. Johnsbury with a storefront in which Phil ran a locksmithing business.

On the trip Sue became seriously involved with an Air Force guy name Randy, who came from, of all places, my home town of Kansas City. I refused to listen to the stories of her adventures, but I could not help overhearing that there was one incident in which someone nearly drowned.

This matchbook cover is the only trace of Fast Eddie’s that I could find on the Internet.

Meanwhile, back in the lower forty-eight Friday, August 17, 1973, was a memorable day. Since it was my twenty-fifth birthday, I invited everyone to help me celebrate. At least eight or ten of us went to Fast Eddie’s bar on the Berlin Turnpike. I had never been drunk in my life, and I had no intention of overindulging that evening. The problem was that we were drinking beer by the pitcher, and people kept refilling my glass without asking me. I never asked for a second glass. My mother had drilled into us that if there was food on our plate or beverage in our glass, we were expected to consume it. If there was a possibility that we might not want it later, we were not to put it on the plate. Once it was there, however, …

At any rate, this was the only time in my life that I have driven a car when I definitely should not have done so. Fortunately, Greenie pretty well knew the way back to my apartment, and there were no incidents. The next day I awoke with my first hangover and played my epic tennis match with Jim Kreidler. It is described here.

Tom Corcoran and Tom Herget had been living in a large old house at 345 Hartford Avenue in Wethersfield. The third housemate had been a guy named Monty. Herget had furnished the house from items he picked up at second-hand stores on Park St. in Hartford. In August of 1973 Monty had to leave for some reason. They asked me if I wanted to take Monty’s place. It was a no-brainer. The rent was less, and life would surely be more interesting. In addition, I would be rid of a lot of scenery that connected with memories that now seemed bitter to me.

In August of 1973 I bought and read the popular book I’m OK—You’re OK by Thomas Anthony Harris. It described the research on hemispheric separation in the brain that showed that under certain circumstances people clearly have two (or more) relatively independent decision-making mechanisms. We identify with only one of them, the one that can read and talk. When something happens that this portion of the brain did not order, we are likely to say “I don’t know why I did that.” Understanding that the first “I” and the second “I” in that sentence are largely independent agents really helped me to understand people, including myself, better.

During this period I was being paid to study for Part 5 of the actuarial exams. The subject matter was indescribably boring. Can you think of anything more tedious than studying the history of mortality tables? I liked my work, and I had made some great friends in Connecticut, but there was one aspect that I really missed—debate tournaments and the thrill of competing at the highest level. I began to think about going back to college to coach debate. I wrote to Bill Colburn at the University of Michigan to inquire if that was feasible. He replied that I needed to apply to graduate school. He thought that he could arrange for financial assistance for me. I also did a little bit of research on my veterans’ benefits.

I heard that Sue had come back from Alaska, but I did not see her for quite some time. Finally she came over to the “345 Club” one evening. For some reason I was up in my bedroom. I think that the two Toms tried to talk her out of it, but she came up to see me. I don’t exactly remember what happened, but she ended up staying the night with me.

I learned that Sue had landed a new job at the “Little Aetna” section of Connecticut General. When she returned from Alaska she discovered that the roofer had not been paying the rent. My recollection is that her car was also repossessed. She eventually found Puca—alive—between two towels in a linen closet.

So, Sue and I began what I think of as the “toll bridge” section of our relationship. In those days the Charter Oak Bridge and the Bissell Bridge had toll booths in both directions. The fastest way from the 345 Club to Sue’s apartment was via the Charter Oak Bridge and I-84⁶. One could save a little money by buying a book of prepaid tickets, and that is what both Sue and I did.

The worst ice storm that I have ever seen hit central Connecticut on December 16-17. More details are provided here. The storm affected Wethersfield much worse than it did Andover. So, like my housemates, I abandoned the 345 Club, brought some clothes to Sue’s apartment, and stayed there for a while.

One morning during that winter—I don’t remember if it was before or after Christmas—I was driving from Andover to Hartford. Greenie was headed westbound on the portion of I-84 between Manchester and Bolton. It was early in the morning; the sun had just come up. The road conditions did not seem too bad, and I was going a moderate speed in the right lane. This time my rear wheels decided to go to the right. My car did a 180° spin before coming to a stop in the breakdown lane on the right side of the highway. I waited for traffic to clear and then, taking advantage of Greenie’s extremely small turning radius, executed a tight U-turn. I then continued on my journey. My mantra was the same as that of every male in his twenties: “No harm; no foul.”

I had decided to fly to Kansas City at Christmas to visit my family. Sue was somewhat shocked when I asked her whether she wanted to come with me, but she said yes⁷. We were only there for a few days, but she got to meet a lot of my family, including Fr. Joe and my grandfather, John Cernech, who by then had become very nearly deaf. She must have slept on the roller bed in Jamie’s room. My recollection is that Jamie had a date on most of the evenings while we were staying there.

Mad Murphy’s was in this building on Union St.

Another event that I remember clearly during the subsequent few months was the night that Sue and I and a group of friends grabbed a table at Mad Murphy’s, a bar near the train station in Hartford. We came there to listen to Sue’s neighbor, Carl Shillo, and his band. We stayed until the closing time, and we had a great time. The highlight was when they played “Ob-la-di Ob-la-da” just before closing. Everyone marched around in a long conga line and sang along.

Passumpsic is an unincorporated village in the town of Barnet. The community is located 3 miles south of St. Johnsbury, the last civilized outpost on I-91.

By April or May I had arranged to coach debate at U-M. I asked Sue if she would come with me. She, who was in those days always ready for an adventure, agreed.

Sue and I drove up to Passumpsic to see Diane and her many siblings at least once. I don’t remember when. Tom Herget came with us. I don’t think that Phil had arrived yet. The Robinsons held a barn dance, which I cannot say that I enjoyed much; dancing is definitely not my thing. My favorite memory of this trip was when Diane’s father claimed that he had always wondered why he and his wife had so many more offspring than the other couples until someone explained to him what caused it.

I am pretty sure that Sue made other trips without me. She considered the three-hour drive an easy one, and she was enthralled by the simple lifestyle of Diane’s family.

In 1972 the Hartford recruited three single guys named Tom. The next year two married actuarial students named Jim were hired—Jim Cochran and Jim Hawke. Their wives were Ann and Lesley respectively. The Cochrans were from Wisconsin. The Hawkes were from Texas, although Jim had a bachelor’s degree in math from UConn. I don’t know how they ended up in the Land of Steady Habits.

I remember at least one evening spent at each of their houses, although I cannot say when either event happened. The Hawkes lived in a house in Manchester and a son named Ethan⁸. Sue and I had supper with the Hawkes and spent most of the evening enjoying Jim’s renditions of rags by Scott Joplin.

A short time after that Jim and Ethan joined Sue and me on an excursion to her property on “Bunyan Mountain”⁹ in Monson, MA. We parked well below Sue’s property and climbed up. I think that we had some sandwiches and toasted marshmallows.

Sue took photos of this occasion. If she can locate any of them, I will post something here.

Jim and Ann Cochran lived in a house in Glastonbury. They invited us over to play the state card game of Wisconsin, Sheepshead. Neither Sue nor I had ever heard of it. I don’t think that anyone outside of the state of Wisconsin has ever played it more than once. Jim and Ann patiently explained all of the rules to us. Then on the first hand something—I don’t remember what—occurred. As a result both Jim and Ann triumphantly yelled out “It’s a leaster!” They then introduced a whole new set of rules as to how this particular hand would be played.

A brief glance at the Wikipedia page for this game lists some of the “variants” to the rules and hints at many others. Even though tournaments of games are allegedly held in Wisconsin, I suspect that the real purpose of this game is to lure unsuspecting non-cheeseheads into playing the game under a small subset of the rules. The Wisconsinites can then introduce new rules often enough to make the foreigners so confused and frustrated that they leave. Then the Wisconsonites can enjoy their fondue in peace.

Sue’s family played a trick-taking game called Setback or Auction Pitch, which has the benefit of far fewer rules. I played a few times, but there did not seem to be much to it. When someone in Sue’s family asked if anyone wanted to play cards, they meant Setback.

In June of 1974 I broke the patella (kneecap) on my right leg playing pickup basketball. The event itself is described here. I had to miss a few days of work, and I was unable to drive at least until the cast was removed. I decided to move in with Sue in Andover. This also seemed like the best time to tell my parents about that she would be taking care of me in her apartment. They were not thrilled by the idea, but at least they did not commandeer a plane and come to rescue me from her clutches. They weren’t too surprised when I told them that she was going to accompany me to Ann Arbor in a few months.

The rest of the summer was rather blissful for me. I could not play softball or golf, but I attended all of the Mean Reserves games and all the other get-togethers. I cannot remember any unpleasant occasions.

1. Senator Tom Eagleton was nominated for Vice President at the 1972 Democratic Convention. Shortly thereafter he resigned from the ticket when it was discovered that he received psychiatric treatment for chronic depression. The Republican Veep candidate, Spiro Agnew, was a crook, but his crimes did not come to light until after the election.

2. Sue and I returned to the castle in the summer of 2020, but because of the pandemic the interior was not open. We had another nice picnic, and I took some spectacular snapshots of the river beneath the castle.

3. For some reason McCormick’s discontinued this wonderful product in 2019 or 2020. Someone has started a “Bring Back McCormick’s Meat Marinade” Facebook page.

4. The Hartford Times was a moderately liberal paper owned by Gannett and published in the afternoon. In 1972, however, it endorsed Nixon. I wrote a letter to the editor in protest. They published one or two of the hundreds that they received about the endorsement, but not mine. The paper was sold in 1973. In 1976 it accepted the fate of most PM papers and ceased publication.

5. I did not realize at the time that I had only met the Lockes, Effy’s side of the family. The Slanetzes were not homebodies at all. They were widely dispersed. Only one Locke had moved away, Sue’s Uncle Bob, whose family lived in western Michigan.

6. Prior to 1984 the interstate highway that runs from Hartford to the Mass Pike just north of Sturbridge was called I-84 from Hartford to Manchester and I-86 east of Manchester. The never completed road that led from Manchester toward Providence was called I-84. Since 1984 the former highway has been called I-84, and the latter I-384.

7. Sue helped with the production of her high school’s musical Oklahoma. She strongly identified with the character of Ado Annie, the “girl who can’t say no”. I hereby affirm that I have hardly ever heard her turn down an invitation to do something, although she will sometimes cancel later when she realizes that it would be impossible for her to be in two places at once. This may be the biggest difference between Sue and me. I have almost never committed to anything unless I was certain that I was willing and able to do it.

8. The youngster grew up to be Ethan Hawke, the famous actor.

9. Evidently this “mountain” is actually part of Chicopee Mountain. Sue obtained this property as part of an agreement with her father-in-law, Chick Comparetto. There is a nice view of the valley from one spot that is either on or near her land.

Wavablog

Memoirs, bridge, popes, travel, and other stuff

Tag Archives: University of Michigan

1974-1977 Living in Plymouth, MI

1976-1977 U-M: Debate?

1974-1976 U-M: Academics

1966-1970 Miscellaneous Events

1972-1974 Connecticut: Sue and Mike