My recollection of the early years of TSI is a period filled with frustration. However, aside from the abortive attempts to take existing installations and transform existing code into marketable systems (as described here), I can remember only three occasions in which we got as far as meeting with the prospect and did not win the contract. Only two possible explanations for this come to mind: either IBM only told us about the basket cases who were desperate to automate, or I have suppressed the unpleasant memories.
One failure I remember fairly vividly, but I cannot recall the name of the company. Sue and I met with a couple (I don’t remember their names either) who were considerably older than we were. So, they were at least in their forties. They owned a parking lot on Route 75 in Windsor Locks, the home of Bradley International Airport. Their business catered to people who needed a place to stow their cars for a few days while they were away on trips. The airport had its own lot, but at least a half-dozen lots in the vicinity offered shuttle services to the terminals and lower rates than the airport’s lots.
I was very interested in doing a system for them. It seemed to me that we could get it up and running fairly quickly and then pitch their competitors who must, I assumed, have very similar requirements for keeping track of the slot numbers in which the cars were parked and the work schedules for the employees.
It did not work out. I am pretty sure that we sent them a letter with a proposal, but we never heard from them. They might have been put off by the cost, especially if they had read about or heard about PC’s for under $1,000. The other possibility is that the owners were afraid of computers. People born before World War II were, for the most part, completely ignorant of what computers could and could not do. In fact, I am pretty sure that this company was out of business by the time that I started flying a lot in the nineties.
It was probably good that we did not pursue this further. Over the next decade or so, almost all of the parking lots changed hands or were sold to hotels. Even if we had gotten a few installations, the long-term prospects were not good.
My memories of the Laurentano Sign Company are not as distinct. It was (and is) located in Terryville, which is several suburbs west of Hartford. I am not even sure exactly what software, other than fairly standard bookkeeping systems, they were seeking. The business consisted of designing and either manufacturing or arranging for the manufacture of signs of all types for their clients. Signs are probably the oldest form of advertising, but for most agencies they are a negligible portion of the workload. So, our experience with ad agencies did not count for much.
I was quite impressed with the company even though there was almost no potential for selling any custom software that might emerge to other businesses. I am pretty sure that we sent a proposal to them, but we never heard from them.
In 2021 the company is still in business, and it is still in Terryville. It claims to be the largest custom sign company in the world.
The Perri Sausage Company was (and still is) located in New Haven. Every grocery store in the area carries their products. The company’s website claims that its secret recipe is 450 years old.
I don’t think that we met with the company’s representative in New Haven, and he certainly did not come to Rockville. Maybe our meeting was at the IBM office in downtown Hartford.
We really had nothing to offer them. If we attempted to do this project we would need to design a very complex inventory system from scratch. Their products obviously changed in value with age. The guy with whom we met told us what they called sausages that because of their age required to be reworked as a different product. I don’t remember the precise term, but it was reminiscent of “the bloom is off the rose.”
At one point he mentioned that one of the other software companies with which he had spoken had no experience at all with food manufacturing or distribution. I immediately admitted that we did not either. That pretty much ended the conversation.
There must have been other prospective clients that we failed to land. If I think of any, I will add them here.
We were very fortunate that IBM announced the Datamaster in 1981, the same year that Harland-Tine (H-T), an advertising agency in downtown Hartford, began its search for a computerized administrative system. Most advertising agencies both produce and place ads. At almost any ad agency that was large enough to consider automating, those two functions were assigned to separate groups of people. All previous low-end (under $20,000) IBM computers had no way for two users to share data. More details about the Datamaster can be read here.
Harland-Tine’s offices were in this building at 15 Lewis St., near Bushnell Park.
1981 was also the year that Sue and I moved back to Connecticut. We were also fortunate that Harland-Tine happened to have the same accountant, Dan Marra from Massa and Hensley, that TSI used. Dan told Dave Tine, the president of Harland-Tine about the time and materials billing system that we had written for his firm. As Bob Dylan sang in “Idiot Wind”, “I can’t help it if I’m lucky.”
The unique nature of advertising agencies is described here. The system that we designed for Harland-Tine is described in considerable detail here.
The installation, which began in December of 1981, went pretty well. Westy Jones1, the office manager, oversaw the installation. In phase 1, which lasted about six months, the system consisted of a job costing module, production and fee billing, accounts receivable, accounts payable, and general ledger.
Near the end of the first phase Sue worked with the people at H-T to generate some publicity for both companies. The Basic Society News, a tabloid-sized monthly newspaper dedicated to the Datamaster community, published on the front page of its August 1982 edition a rather detailed account of the installation. It was a really nice write-up with well-chosen photos. We showed it to whomever we encountered.
Until I reread the article for this blog entry, I had forgotten that H-T had also purchased a second Datamaster to use for word processing. The Datamaster had outstanding WP software, but I don’t remember ever having seen a daisy-wheel printer in H-T’s office. The Datamaster’s dot-matrix printer did have a “letter-quality” mode that sort of filled in the dots, but I would not expect any advertising agency to settle for that. Agencies are all about presentation, and dot-matrix output has never really been considered appropriate for important communications.
I have no memory of anyone named Janna Sherman. Maybe she used the Datamaster for word processing.
The second phase of the installation involved the module for media scheduling—including insertion orders, media billing, and media payables—and cost accounting (client profitability). My recollection is that H-T was able to use most of what we had developed for Potter Hazlehurst without significant changes.
I am pretty sure that H-T purchased the 30MB hard drive when they for the second phase. I don’t remember whether they purchased a third Datamaster for the media department. They might have used the one that had originally been intended for word processing.
Westy is standing. The guy is an artist who had little or no involvement in the installation. This photo was probably staged.
Considering how much time that I spent on this project, I have surprisingly few vivid memories. Westy hired Diane Ciarcia2 as a bookkeeper and primary operator of our system. She was, thank goodness, easy to work with. She was good at explaining why she didn’t like something that the software did. So, we were able to make the system rather easy to use without too many missteps.
At about the same time that Diane was hired, Sandy Bailey, a wise-cracking New Yorker, was hired as Director of Finance. She and I got along very well. She must have still been there in 1988. I remember remarking that we were furiously pitching the advertising department at Macy’s in New York. She said “If you get Macy’s, you’re all set.”
In 1984, I think, Harland-Tine merged with another Hartford agency the name of which escapes me. The other agency had been one of the very first agencies in the country to automate. Fortunately for us, their system ran on an outdated IBM 5120. So, the new agency, which set up shop in H-T’s office space, continued to use our software.
This, I take it, is a Sunfish.
The new agency was named Harland, O’Conner, Tine, and White3. I never met O’Conner; I don’t even know the right pronoun to use. I occasionally saw Will White4 in his office, which contained several copies of The Sunfish Book that he wrote. I guess that it contained all that you ever need to know about a type of sailboat that I, a native of Kansas, had never heard of. You can still get a copy on Amazon.
Diane Ciarcia left the agency during this period. A young lady from Jamaica was hired to replace her. Because the system was rather stable by this time, we did not need to work closely with her. Eventually someone discovered that she had been issuing checks to accounts that she had opened under various reasonable-sounding names and booked them as production expenses for the agency’s largest account, Hitchcock Chair.
She was not able to run this scam for very long. Dan Marra discovered discrepancies using the month-end reports that our system produced. He credited the audit trails that the system provided with unearthing the scheme. H-T definitely fired her. I don’t know if she was ever prosecuted.
Everyone should agree that flavored coffees have no place in an office. If employees what to put stuff in their cups, fine. MAKE MINE BLACK!
I have one other strong memory of TSI’s first agency installation. This was the beginning of the period, which lasted for more than two decades, during which I consistently worked long hours often seven days per week. I also needed to be very alert whenever I was working. It was very easy to make catastrophic mistakes, and, as always, nobody checked my work. I had become dependent on help from coffee, especially when I was on the road.
I remember wandering into Harland-Tine’s kitchen5 one morning. I poured myself a cup of bitter black caffeine and ported it back to the accounting area. When the first few drops hit my tongue I almost spit them back into the cup. Evidently someone thought that it would be “a nice change” to add a little flavor.
The second ad agency that we landed was Potter Hazlehurst Incorporated (PHI) of East Greenwich, RI. As I recall, they responded to a mailing that we did in 1982. Sue and I drove to their office on Route 2, where we met with Russ Hahn, the office manager, and Bruce Brewster, the accounting manager. Russ said that he liked what we had done, but they also needed a system for media. He also said that they needed to be able to see a summary of the profitability of each client on one report. He showed me what he did by hand for Herb Sawyer, the agency’s president.
We drove back to Rockville and drew up a proposal. IBM proposed two Datamasters and the hard drive that acted as a server for both data and programs. One computer was designated for accounting and one for media.
Potter Hazlehurts’s offices were in this building. The parking lot was bigger in the eighties. They had about forty employees. Herb had a reserved spot for his black Celica.
On the second trip we met with Herb for lunch, which was served all’aperto. He had not been available to meet with us on the first visit. I was almost as nervous as I had been back in 1962 in my first debate in high school, which is described here. Herb was friendly but serious. I could see that he had some doubts about our ability to pull this off. In the end he signed the contract, and we went to work.
A very fortunate thing for us was that PHI billed all of its media in advance. For example, they billed in the month of November the ads scheduled to run in December,. We designed the system so that prebilling the media was the norm. This helped us in the future in two distinct ways.
It was much easier to accommodate billing in the same month or a later month than it would have been if we had started with the assumption that the ads had already run and tried to come up with a way of handling prebilled placements.
It gave us a valuable selling feature. If the agency already prebilled their media, the system could handle it. On the other hand, if it did not, using our system gave the agency the opportunity to try to convince their clients that they should get the invoices in the preceding month so that they paid in the month that the ads ran. In those inflationary times, receiving the money a month or two earlier could be a big factor.
In the eighties “Online” and “Mobile” were science fiction, but “Print” included newspapers, magazines, direct mail, polybags, yellow pages, and others.
A difficult decision had to be made about the design of the media scheduling system. The different types of media differed greatly. For example ads in print media generally ran only once in an issue of a publication. Broadcast ads almost always ran repeatedly, and most of the time the date and even the program might not be specified. The size of a print ad was measured in column inches. The size of a broadcast ad was measured in seconds. The most surprising thing to me was the “broadcast calendar” that began every month on a Monday.
Furthermore, some types of ads, like billboards or yellow page advertising were sui generis.
On the other hand, it would be easier for the accounting people if the important financial information was in one place. Data entry for billing and payment would be easier, and the programs would run faster.
I decided to designate one file in which all ads were defined. It contained all the financial information and all of the other information for print ads. The fields that were peculiar to broadcast were kept in a separate file. Eventually we created a file for yellow pages, too.
The key to the ads file was the client number, the ad number (usually, but not always the production job number), and a one-character version code to distinguish different sizes of the same basic ad. I never regretted handling media this way.
I spent many days at PHI. I remember every inch of the drive. Most of the morning drives were toward the east. The sun was directly in my eyes. The return trips were mostly due west, and the sun was again in my eyes. I did not own prescription sunglasses. If there were clip-ons available, I did not know about them. It was brutal.
The Burger King in Killingly is still there, but now it has a lot of competition.
There was not much in the way of retail between Rhode Island and Rockville. On return trips I would almost always stop at the drive-through window of the Burger King on Route 101 in Killingly, CT. The consistent part of my order was a large Diet Coke to keep me alert for the rest of the journey.
If, as often happened, it was late, I would also order a whopper. One time they had a special on “Bullseye burgers”, which were two regular BK hamburgers that were a little thicker than usual and cooked with Bullseye barbecue sauce. The burgers were placed on a long roll and topped with bacon. I ordered one, and I really liked it. Ever since, whenever I cook burgers for myself on the grill, I mix Bullseye barbecue sauce in with the ground beef before cooking.
Hold the cheese.
Incidentally, I have very long fingers. At the time BK advertised that “It takes two hands to handle a Whopper.” I can assure you that I was easily able to drive while holding any BK sandwich in one hand. It did get a little clumsy if I had to change gears on my Celica.
I remember that one time I worked so late that I had to stay overnight. PHI arranged a room for me at a motel in North Kingstown, the next town to the south. It was run by an Indian couple (a rarity in New England in the eighties) with forty or fifty children who had the run of the place. It was an unusual experience for a Kansan, but I did not encounter any difficulties.
I cannot remember much about any of PHI’s employees other than Russ and Bruce. I remember noticing that over half of them had Italian names.
Bruce was a little younger than I was. He was a big guy. He was really into sailing. He had a boat of his own, and he devoted most of his spare time to it. He also disclosed to me that he would really like to be a crewman on a yacht that competed for the America’s Cup.
Russ was a few years older than I was. He was a bit of a fuddy-duddy, but he always took me to lunch. I really appreciated that. When the agency’s fortunes began to slide in the nineties, he was one of the first employees to be laid off.
I am not sure of the year in which PHI closed its doors for good. At the very end Herb Sawyer was operating the Datamaster by himself and calling us for help in closing the books. I found this rather sad.
When the PHI installation stabilized, we no longer had two customers with separate systems. We had two diverse advertising agencies using customized versions of the GrandAd system. I was fairly confident that we could market it successfully.
1. I think that Westy’s last name is now King, and in 2021 she resides in Enfield.
2.Diane’s married name is Carrabba. In 2021 she apparently lives in Bloomfield.
3. The accepted abbreviation was “Hot W”. If I had been asked my opinion, I would have suggested putting Mister White first and using “White hot” for short. It is probably a good thing that they didn’t. Shortly after incorporating, they changed the name to Harland & Tine & White.
4. I think that Will White is living in Arcadia, FL, in 2021.
5. It was a real kitchen, not just a place to make coffee and keep lunches. Susan Harland often prepared gourmet meals for clients and prospects.
In early 1988 Sue Comparetto, who had handled the GrandAd accounts in New York City, received a call at TSI from IBM’s Manhattan office. One of our contacts, Quique (KEY kay) Rodriguez1 wanted to talk with us about Macy’s New York. Its advertising department had been using software programs on an obsolete System/34 to keep track of its advertising expenses and income. The system had been developed internally by people who no longer worked for Macy’s. Documentation was minimal.
Macy’s New York had recently merged with Macy’s New Jersey. The new entity was called Macy’s Northeast, and its offices were on an upper floor of the “world’s largest store” on 34th St. in Manhattan. The advertising department’s existing system had already been stretched to the limits and would never be able to handle the increased load. Moreover, the users were not happy with some aspects of the code. Alan Spett2, one of a very large number of vice-presidents at Macy’s, had been provided by corporate with a budget for replacing or updating the existing system.
This may have been the last time that I actually jumped.
I jumped for joy and clicked my heels when I heard about this opportunity. For some time I thought that companies that produced and/or scheduled their own advertising represented a attractive untapped market for the skills and knowledge that we had acquired from our seven years works with advertising agencies. Evidently I was right. We had never approached any of these departments because I had absolutely no idea how we could even identify which companies created and placed their own ads.
Coincidentally, IBM had just announced a new mini-computer, the AS/400, to replace the System/36 (which had replaced the System/34 in 1983). This announcement and its implications for TSI are described in considerable detail here.
The train brought us to Penn Station, only a block or so from Macy’s.
I made several trips by Amtrak train to the city to document the requirements for the new system. Sometimes I was accompanied by Michael Symolon, TSI’s marketing director at the time, and sometimes by Sue. We soon learned that Macy’s advertising department did everything that an ad agency did except keep track of the amount of time spent on individual production jobs. In fact, they had an advertising agency name that they used when ordering media. In addition, the department had many other needs that regular ad agencies lacked. Specifically, they were required to allocate both production and media expenses to the selling departments. These departments were identified by three-digit numbers. Each was assigned to an administrative group that also had a number. In turn there were three levels of vice-presidents who “owned” administrative groups3.
Macy’s also billed the merchandise vendors (Clinique, Ralph Lauren, Levi’s, etc.) a portion of the expense for ads that featured their products. The cost to the merchandise department was net of these “co-op” billings. The contract could be for a percentage of the media cost or it could be a fixed amount.
The first phase of this job entailed providing Macy’s with everything that they needed to get the ads in all media scheduled—printed schedules in the format that they liked, “insertion orders” (called “delivery tickets” by other retailers) to accompany the materials sent to the media vendors, and so on—in every media. It also included keeping track of expenses and co-op for each level of the merchant hierarchy. There were several different formats that they used for reporting these breakdowns.
I envisioned that the creation of any ad would consist of five steps:
An ad number within the season and a version code that was usually blank would be entered, or ad numbers could be assigned by the system by pressing a function key.
A new ads screen allowed selection of the ad type (e.g., black-and-white ROP) and entry of the primary run date, which must fall with the season.
The other information that applied to all of the media for the ad would be entered on a header screen. This varied by type of ad, but each screen included selection of a pub group—a list of newspapers, markets, or stations.
A media selection screen showed one line for each pub in the pub group with dates, quantities, rates, and other costs or discounts. Any line could be edited or deleted. Additional pubs could be specified.
A participants screen to provide the list of departments or groups for the ad with the expected cost percentages and co-op amounts for each.
Storewide ads could be entered rather quickly. Ads with many departments or groups might take a few minutes. This approach was warmly received. The employees were accustomed to specifying the participants for each pub in the ad.
After the schedule was created, any aspect of an ad could be changed, or the ad could be killed, (in exceptional cases), deleted, or moved to a different date. New ads could be defined. Once the ad was run, the actual participants and the actual co-op could be provided. History records with dates, times, and user ID’s were kept for all changes.
How did Macy’s determine the percentage of the actual cost of each ad that was to be allocated to each department or administrative group? The process astounded me. In one room4 were seated from three to five clerks. Each was provided with a stack of newspapers and a list of ads that were scheduled to be run as well as lists of department numbers and the numbers of administrative groups. They looked through the newspapers to find the ads that Macy’s had run. They then measured—with a ruler!—each of the “blocks” in the ad to see how many columns wide (six columns to a page) and how many inches deep (i.e., vertically) the block was. They then entered the column inches for each block. For blocks that were not specific to a department or group, a special “storewide” department #999 was created. The total of the measurements must exactly equal the total size of the ad.
My approach changed this process so that the clerks measured ads, not insertions (the ad in a specific paper). If the ad was already measured, the clerk could see what had been entered, who did it, and when.
A similar process was also required for each page of each direct mail piece and newspaper insert. The ads for other media were not measured, but actual percentage breakdowns were recorded.
Similarly, the actual co-op dollars received from the selling departments (a process called “turning in”) could be recorded. Lists of missing co-op could be printed.
The most important financial reports for Macy’s compared the committed co-op and costs with the actual measured costs and actual co-op. They could be run for any or all merchants (the vice presidents who owned the departments) and any or all media.
Camex was located at 75 Kneeland St. in Boston.
In addition to all of this, Alan had ideas for other modules such as an inventory system for the merchandise used for photo shoots in the studio in Newark and a system to manage the shoots themselves. He also wanted us eventually to work on an interface with the Camex system that Macy’s used to create the images for the ROP6 ads and books. Thank goodness these ideas were not included in the original contract.
TSI’s GrandAd system for ad agencies had been built around a file for ads, the key to which was a three-digit client number and a five-digit job number. So, each client could have up to 99,999 jobs. For the departmental system, which I decided to call AdDept, I designed a similar structure, but, since Macy’s itself was the only client, I made the three-digit code stand for the season. 891 meant spring of 1989. 892 was fall of 1989. Eventually, a one-digit code for the century was added as well, but otherwise this proved to be a very feasible approach.
Many other structural changes were necessary. The most significant one was the designation of a one-character version code as part of the unique identifier (key) to the main media file. This could be used to make distinctions that varied by pub (media vehicle). For example, one item in an ad might be “swapped out” for a different item in another ad. The catalogs sent to some markets might not include some pages.
The new table for the pub groups mentioned above allowed Macy’s to identifying papers in which they often ran the same ad, e.g., the tabloids. There was no limit on the number of pub groups, and pubs could be in any number of pub groups.
I did not mention this to anyone at the time, but while I was gathering requirements, I noticed a very serious flaw in the design of Macy’s existing software for the S/34. The same ad was run in a few papers, but each insertion in each paper was given a separate ad number. The clerks doing the measuring were each assigned one or more newspapers. They measured and then entered into the computer the amount of space for each department in each ad. The person next to them might have already measured the same ad in a different paper, but there was no way for them to use that information; they had to key it all in again. So, with the S/34 design the increase in the number of papers added by the merger would more than double the work in allocating costs. My approach would decrease the work even with more papers. They would only measure the ad in one paper.
How great was this? The ROI for this feature alone would easily surpass the cost of the entire system in the first year!
How was such a colossal blunder possible? Well, the S/34 programs were designed for Macy’s New York, which advertised almost exclusively in only three papers: The New York Times (a broadsheet), the Daily News (a tabloid), and Newsday, a Long Island newspaper with a unique shape. Each of these would require separate versions and therefore separate measurements. However, all of the new papers were either tabloids or broadsheets. There was no need for separate measurements.
At some point in mid-summer TSI needed to do a presentation for Macy’s at IBM’s office on Madison Avenue in New York. There was no competition; no other software developer wanted anything to do with this project. The alternative for Macy’s was to enlist their IT department to do something. No one mentioned this, but I was quite certain that the IT department would not be able to deliver a functioning system that met all the requirements within the required time frame. Of course, I was not certain that we could do it either. However, we had delivered several large projects on schedule, and I was willing to put in the hours5 to make this one a success.
590 Madison Ave., then known as the IBM Building.
I wanted to demo the GrandAd system and explain how we would adjust the database to fit Macy’s. I made arrangements to use a S/36 in IBM’s office at 590 Madison Avenue to show how our advertising agency system currently worked and how it could be adapted. I considered–and still do–this to be the most important presentation that I ever gave. It was my only chance to persuade Macy’s Advertising Director, Howard Adler, that TSI should be contracted to do the project. I figured that if we got Macy’s, and we did a good job, a whole new market would be opened to us. At that point I was still naive enough to assume that other retailers would surely be much less difficult because we had already done the programming for the largest retail advertiser in the country.
I needed to transport our GrandAd programs and our demo data to New York. Not only was it not possible in 1988 to send them there electronically using something like FTP. We did not even have access to a compatible medium. The I/O device on IBM’s S/36 in NYC read 8” diskettes. Our system in CT used 5¼” diskettes. So, I saved our programs and our data onto nine 5¼” diskettes. Then I used a machine that I had purchased for just this purpose to copy the 5¼” diskettes onto previously blank 8” diskettes. I then loaded the 8″ diskettes into a “magazine” that I had obtained somewhere. The S/36 in New York included a device for reading diskettes from such a magazine.
This is the only photo that I could find of a magazine. The diskettes are inserted in and removed from the opposite side.
You say that you are not familiar with the concept of diskette magazines? For over a decade IBM used them on the S/34 and the S/36. As far as I know, no other system from any manufacturer followed suit.
They were almost completely plastic. Their width was about an inch and a half. The other dimensions were just large enough for 8” diskettes. One side was open to allow insertion and removal of diskettes. Small plastic rails on the top and bottom of the open side kept the diskettes separate from one another. The only thing on the magazine that was not plastic was a small metallic bar near the top of the open space that held the diskettes in. The bar could be lifted up on a hinge to allow access to diskettes. The machine that read the diskettes could also do this (like a juke box), and it was smart enough to read them sequentially.
The process of saving and converting the programs and data, which I probably did over a weekend, took several hours. I then inserted the 8” diskettes into the magazine, put it in my sample case with my other materials, and then stowed the sample case in the trunk of my Celica. I do not remember why, but I must have left the car in the sun for several hours. When Michael and I reached New York and took out the magazine, we could see that the little iron bar that restrained the diskettes had apparently become hot enough to melt little notches into all the diskettes. The magazine drive on IBM’s system refused to read them. O tempora, o mores!
Michael had a brilliant idea. He used a sharp knife to slit the edge of each damaged diskette and nine new diskettes that we borrowed from IBM. The actual data was not, of course on the plasticized paper that one could handle (and therefore slit). It was on a very thin circle of magnetized film inside. For each new diskette Michael replaced the blank film disk inside with the one that he had retrieved from a diskette that I had made. Then he carefully inserted the nine new diskettes that hopefully contained our programs and data into the magazine. I then loaded the magazine into the S/36’s magazine drive again and entered the command to restore the files. The machine successfully read six diskettes. However, at that point it made an awful noise and totally mangled the seventh diskette including, because we had no way to reseal the side that Michael had slit, the precious film inside.
My dog could not juggle six balls.
So, I was faced with the prospect of making the most important presentation of my life with absolutely no software to demonstrate. The pony in my “dog and pony show” was a stick-figure drawing. Would anyone notice?
Fortunately, my many years of experience in debate at adjusting a presentation at the last minute kept me from panicking. I began the presentation by apologizing for the technical problem. I then illustrated the approach that we proposed to take using the whiteboard that IBM provided, and I answered questions as well as I could.
It was enough. Macy’s agreed to put in motion the process of contracting with TSI. As Alan later said, “You were definitely the only game in town.”
The plan was to install the system in the “System/36 environment” of a B30 model of an AS/400. The I/O devices were a single 8” diskette drive and a ½” tape drive. TSI had no system that had either of these drives, and so our only choice was to execute the cumbersome conversion process every time that we needed to make changes.
TSI could not even afford J. Cheever Loophole.
I sent Alan our usual two-page contract. He sent it to their legal department and returned one with about twenty-five pages. I should mention that the TSI was dirt poor at this time. Sue and I had been low on funds before, but this was the first situation that rose to a crisis level. Details are posted here. We certainly could not afford a lawyer. I had to read the contract very carefully and assume the worst. After a few changes, we agreed, signed it, and started work. I did almost 100 percent of the coding. The other programmers were busy with work for our other clients, and I did not trust Sue to do the work.
I was not able to use a single program from the GrandAd system. I thought that at least one of the many insertion order programs that we had written for ad agencies would be usable without much modification, but I was wrong. The people in retail advertising just do not think like the people in advertising agencies. Every single program was written from scratch.
We had no time to produce a detailed design document describing the project. Our drop-dead deadline was the end of the season in late January. All programs must be totally functional. The process was:
Write the code.
Get it to the point where there was something to show to Macy’s.
Save the changes to 5¼” diskettes.
Copy the 5¼” diskettes to 8” diskettes.
Take the train to New York.
Install the new software from the 8″ diskettes. This could take up to an hour.
If changes had been made to the database definitions, make them on Macy’s system.
Make changes on the fly as necessary.
Show Macy’s how the new code works.
Save the changes to 8” diskettes.
Bring the 8″ diskettes on the train ride to TSI.
Copy the 8” diskettes to 5¼” diskettes.
Install the changes on TSI’s system.
The luxurious Windsor Locks Amtrak stop. This is the view looking north. From the parking lot the engine’s light could be seen under the bridge.
This was, to be sure, a terrible way to do things. It required me to make at least one trip to New York every week for several months. Usually it was up and back on the same day. I stayed overnight at a hotel a couple of times. Often I made two up-and-back trips in a week. Each trip required a twenty-five minute drive to the train platform. I boarded the train at 6:00 AM in Windsor Locks. There is only a platform there. I therefore sat in my car with the heat on until I saw the light of the train approaching.
The word you did not want to see was “DELAYED”.
If everything went well, I arrived back at the train platform at 9:30PM. The trains in the evening, however, were almost never on time. Those trains originated in Miami, FL. There were plenty of opportunities for delay as each one crawled its way north. A report on my most memorable Amtrak experiences is posted here.
During this process Alan would quite often come up with new thoughts as to what should be in the “base system” covered by the contract. I grumbled, but I almost always did what he asked. One morning I saw a Daily News in Penn Station with the headline “Macy’s Computer System is Driving Me Crazy!” I bought a paper, cut out the headline, and taped it to the inside of my sample case.
Meanwhile, TSI had received only a deposit from Macy’s. However, we were desperate to receive that final check. I saw no alternative to this nightmarish schedule.
The scope of the project was enormous, and almost nothing from the GrandAd code was usable for this project. In addition to everything else, the emphasis at Macy’s was on newspaper ads. In my experience ad agencies used the term “print”, which for them referred to direct mail and magazines. Most agencies treated newspapers as magazines that published more often on cheaper paper to a geographically limited audience. The ingrates who ran the papers did not even offer discounts to ad agencies. Macy’s, on the other hand, could run a dozen or more ads in one issue of a newspaper.
Time to go home.
Mirabile dictu! By February, 1989, the system was stable enough that Macy’s paid us most of the balance. This did not end the crisis at TSI, but it allow us to meet the payroll for a few months. In retrospect, I cannot imagine how we pulled it off. I remember working seven days a week. I was always at work by 6AM, and I seldom left before 7PM7. I admit that I always went home for lunch, and I usually took a short nap.
Gary Beberman.
What enabled the completion of this seemingly impossible task in that amount of time was the fact that Alan somehow got Gary Beberman8 to serve as the project manager. He could speak advertising to the workers at Macy’s and geek to us. I only trained one person; Gary trained the others. I am not sure where Alan found Gary or how he got assigned to the project, but he was a godsend. He saved us a huge amount of time and frustration, and he was also quite adept on pouring oil on troubled waters during the frustrating periods in which I was working feverishly on the code.
The next two projects for Macy’s were an inventory system for the “loan room” (usually called “merch room” at other retailers) and a more sophisticated system of entering and reporting actual costs, what Macy’s called “financials”. I gathered the specs for these projects on trips to Macy’s and produced detailed design documents, which Alan quickly approved.
Denise Bessette did almost all of the programming on these two large requests, and she did an outstanding job. I installed the code and showed the people at Macy’s how to use the programs.
Merchandise that was afraid of the traffic could have just as easily taken the train.
The loan room gathered merchandise needed for photo shoots and sent it to the photo studio in Newark or to some other location. Part of the automation of this process was the printing of tags for each item. Almost as soon as this was implemented, the amount of pilferage reportedly decreased dramatically. The merch room manager told me that previously a lot of merchandise had trouble remembering the way back to Manhattan from Newark. She was extremely happy with the new system.
Denise also completed the other project according to the approved design document, and I delivered it. The finance manager then produced a bevy of changes that she wanted. I offered to quote the changes at TSI’s usual fee of $75 per quote. Alan said that Macy’s was under the impression that these programs fell under the terms of the original contract. It clearly did not include them. He was also surprised that I insisted on charging for my time at Macy’s after the warranty period. I would not give in on these matters, and this caused some bitterness.
At some point in this process TSI leased an AS/400 model B10 from IBM. We hooked everyone up to it, and we converted all of Macy’s programs to run in the native environment instead of the System/36 environment. This project went fairly smoothly. I don’t remember any great headaches, and the programs were considerably faster.
In other respects the installation also proceeded rather smoothly as long as Gary was there, but when he and his wife moved to the West Coast, things started to get a little testy. Alan hired Satish Rahi9 (accent on the second syllable in both names) to manage the installation. Satish must have presented himself as an alternative to paying TSI to program reports. He thought that he could produce any desired output using a third-party query product from a company called Gupta Technologies. Their Wikipedia page is here.
Satish was shocked that the product did not work on most of our tables. I told him that there was nothing in our contract that said or implied that third-party products (of which even then there were quite a few) would work with tables that we designed and implemented. IBM’s Query/400 product had no trouble with any of our tables. After considerable digging I determined that the source of the problem was that we wrote records in BASIC, not in SQL10, which was not even available on the AS/400 yet. The designers of Gupta’s product evidently did not take this into account when they began marketing to AS/400 customers.
Satish started lecturing me about industry standards for databases. I explained that the industry standard for writing x-digit positive integers in BASIC was N x, which left-pads these numbers (such as the ad number) with blanks, as opposed to ZD x, which left-pads with zeroes. In fact, most versions of BASIC did not even have a way to write “zoned decimals” without writing extraneous code to do it11. One day I got so upset while arguing with Satish about this that I seriously considered driving down to the Amtrak stop so that, after sitting on a train for over three hours, I could ride the elevator up to his floor at Macy’s and punch him in the nose.
Not long after this conversation Alan fired Satish, and eventually we changed all the programs to “zone” all the integers. Of course, we got paid for neither this project nor the conversion to the native environment, but we felt that we had to do them to hope to stay in IBM’s and Macy’s good graces.
Denise Jordaens.
From that point on we dealt with Denise Jordaens12 and Lee Glickman13 at Macy’s. Things stabilized, but the department did not get nearly as much out of the system as it could have.
Over these years Macy’s went through a lot of changes. In January of 1992 the company declared bankruptcy, thereby leaving TSI with a stack of unpaid invoices. In 1994 Macy’s was absorbed into Federated Department Stores, which had itself just emerged from bankruptcy. This gave them a new set of standards to abide by. Eventually other acquisitions gave Macy’s in New York a large number of new stores to manage on the east coast. They continued to use the loan room system and to pay our maintenance bills. They never asked about any of the enhancements that were installed at Macy’s South and Macy’s West.
There were other complications as well. On one occasion Macy’s asked for someone from TSI to visit so they could explain their problems with and aspirations for the system. My schedule was totally booked for weeks in advance. I asked Sue to take the trip. She did. I don’t know what transpired, but Denise Jordaens later told me that they made a voodoo doll of Sue and stuck pins in it.
I may have made some bad decisions about Macy’s. I did not yet understand how decisions about products and services like those offered by TSI were made in a large retail advertising department. This issue is discussed in more detail here.
TSI probably should have charged more for the original installation and used the money to hire another full-time programmer. Maybe we should have tried to borrow money from somewhere. I was unwilling to put all of our eggs in the Macy’s basket. Macy’s declaration of bankruptcy was a devastating blow to TSI. When Macy’s was acquired by Federated Department Stores14, it appeared to me that the decision to concentrate our efforts elsewhere had been a sound one.
As it turned out, however, Macy’s eventually gobbled up nearly all of the regional department stores in the entire country. The strategy that I chose helped TSI succeed for more than twenty years, but if I had gambled on Macy’s, we might still be in business in 2021. On the other hand, we would have been working almost exclusively for Macy’s for most of that time. Such an experience might have really driven me crazy.
The story of the Macy’s installation had a bizarre final chapter. It is recorded here.
1. According to his LinkedIn page (which is here), in 2021 Quique Rodriguez is retired and enjoying family time. I suppose that it is possible.
2. Alan Spett lives in Atlanta in 2021. His LinkedIn page can be found here.
3. So, I designed the database with five levels of participants. The lowest level was always called a department, but the names of the other four levels to be used on reports and screens could be specified by each AdDept client. At all Macy’s divisions they were called Administrative Groups, Group VP’s, Senior VP’s, and Group Senior VP’s.
4. This same room housed the AS/400, at least for a while. I sat at an empty desk when I was there. When the first phase of the installation was completed, some of the measurement clerks were reassigned to other tasks.
5. Unfortunately, I don’t think that I was careful enough to account for the large number of unproductive hours that I would spend on trains, in meetings at Macy’s, and in converting files. The round-trip train ride alone accounted for six or seven hours and a drive of nearly an hour, So, each full day at Macy’s was matched by another full work day getting there and back!
6. ROP stands for “run of press”. All display ads (as opposed to preprinted inserts) that are run in a newspaper are called ROP. It is not an acronym; all three letters are pronounced.
7. I am a “morning person”. Any work that I did after 7PM was likely to be counterproductive. Moreover, I needed a few caffeine-free hours so that I could fall asleep at 10PM and stay asleep.
8. I have kept in touch with Gary Beberman. He moved to California to work as a consultant and then was employed by Macys.com. Macy’s West and Neiman Marcus hired him as a consultant during their AdDept installations. He was the only consultant whom I ever respected. He has lived in Marin County for the last five years. He and his wife are hoping to retire to Italy.
10. SQL (structured query language) was invented in the seventies by two IBM researchers, but at the time of the debut of the AS/400 no IBM computers used it much. The reason, we were told, was that it was much less efficient than the ISAM methods that IBM endorsed. Later IBM computers, including the AS/400, were designed to maximize the efficiencies of SQL queries.
11. What I said to Satish was correct from my perspective, but perhaps I should have asked him what made Gupta Technologies think that the AS/400’s relational database conformed to these “industry standards” that he cited. After all, SQL had been invented by IBM, and IBM was not yet positioning its AS/400 as an alternative to the “standard” databases such as Oracle, Sybase, or Informix.
12. According to her LinkedIn page (here) Denise Jordaens still works as coordinator of media systems for Macy’s.
13. I think that this might be Lee Glickman’s LinkedIn page.
14. A more detailed discussion of TSI’s long and torturous relationships with Federated Department Stores can be found here.
I am no salesman. I could make a pretty good case for the GrandAd system either in a formal presentation or in a meeting, but I was the worst at closing sales. For one thing I have had a lifelong abhorrence of talking on the telephone, especially to strangers. TSII probably could have closed some of these if I had just called people back to find out what they were thinking.
I just noticed that this guy is swinging left-handed with a right-handed club.
I also could have spent more time researching our opponents’ products. I could not think of a way to do that without devoting a lot of time and effort. I had other priorities. Maybe we should have hired one to do it.
My middle game was also poor. I did not know how to ask what a prospect’s budget was. I could tell if I was dealing with a gatekeeper, but I did not know what to do with that information.
Some of our problems were substantive, and there was not much that we could do about them.We wanted to reach agencies that had between five and one hundred employees who did not yet have an administrative system and (before the introduction of the smaller models of the System/36) were within driving distance. During some periods IBM offered no systems with any appeal to our target market. We never seriously considered hooking up with another vendor, but in retrospect it seems incredible that IBM let this happen.
In nearly all cases IBM’s prices for hardware were higher. They should have been. IBM equipment was more reliable and the service was beyond compare. However, the price differentials were often enormous. Purveyors of systems that ran on UNIX or PC’s could claim many of the same advantages that we claimed, charge more for their software, and still show a bottom-line price that was considerably lower than ours.
So, we faced a lot of rejection in our years of dealing with ad agencies. I feel certain that I have repressed the memories of a fairly large number of failures in this arena.
The following are arranged alphabetically. It might make more sense to put them in chronological order, but I have found few records to help me to remember the dates.
The Hartford Area
Probably the most painful failure was the loss of Elbaum & Co., Inc. We had been pitching or negotiating with Marvin Elbaum1, the owner, for several months. Finally, in early June of 1986 he had signed the contract, which included some custom programming, and put in the hardware order.
Marvin Elbaum.
I am pretty sure that the phone call came on June 13, 1986. Marvin himself called and said that a new opportunity had suddenly arisen, and he wanted to cancel the order. He said that he had an unexpected opportunity to merge with Lessner Slossberg Gahl and Partners Inc. I advised him that we had already begun work on the custom code that he approved. He told me to bill him for it. He also said that he would plead the case in the new agency for using the GrandAd system. This was pure BS. If it wasn’t, he would have arranged for us to do a presentation for his new partners at LSGE Advertising, Inc.2
This was the worst possible news. I knew that Lessner’s agency already used the system marketed by one of our biggest competitors. Since the merged agency would be located in Lessner’s headquarters in Avon, there was no chance that it would junk the system just because Marvin asked politely, and Marvin also probably realized this. Besides, Marvin was the president of the new agency, but Gary Lessner was the CEO.
I’m not even slightly superstitious. If I were, I probably would have noted that the horrible phone call took place on Friday the 13th. Furthermore, Denise was on vacation, and Sue and I were looking after her cat. Yes, the cat was all black.
On the other hand, I don’t remember walking under any ladders, breaking any mirrors, opening an umbrella indoors, or spilling any salt that day.
Maier Advertising3 (the first syllable is pronounced like the fifth month of the year) was famous. When the lists of the top agencies were printed, Maier was always at or near the top of the rankings of local agencies in terms of billings. Everyone who had anything to do with advertising knew that this was baloney. How? Everyone in the advertising community knew where everyone else in the community worked. Maier did not employ enough people to do all the work to justify those reported billings.
Bill Maier.
For a while Maier claimed to have branch offices. I am certain that one was announced in Boston, but I think that there were also others. Actually, there were no offices, but they did have a phone number with a local area code and exchange, but it rang in Hartford.
I was invited to meet with Maier’s bookkeeper at the company’s headquarters, which was then in Hartford. My recollection is that only two or three other people were there. Bill Maier was definitely not present. I counted only six or seven desks, and I only saw one office. This did not look or act like a major agency.
I roughed out a tentative proposal, but I could tell that the bookkeeper was in no position to make a decision or to put me in contact with such a person. Actually, I doubt that Bill Maier would have deferred on this subject to anyone.
The Charnas account was not exactly a whiff. It was more like chipping in for a double bogey. It is described here.
There were two other agencies in the Hartford area that I visited, but I do not recall the names of either one. The first one was really a public relations firm in, as I recall, South Windsor. In fact, its strategic approach was the opposite of advertising. Its employees searched for businesses that were spending money on advertising and promised to get the same or better results using press releases. I think that we outlined a stripped-down GrandAd system for them, but we could not strip down the hardware cost enough to make a competitive bid.
My recollection is that the other local agency was in Glastonbury. Sue and I came to meet with the female financial manager. The only thing that I remember about this meeting was that she was the most strikingly attractive woman whom I had ever met. However, I never saw her again. I can’t even visualize her,
Sue was surprised when I told her that I thought that the woman was very attractive.
The Boston Area
Our biggest disappointment of the many whiffs in the Boston area was the involvement with Rizzo Simons Cohn. It is described in detail here.
OK. That explains a lot.
I met with a woman from Epsilon once. They were a big company then, and they are gigantic now. I tried to explain to her what we did, and she tried to explain to me what they did. At the time I did not understand what she said. I have looked at the company’s current website, which is here, and I still don’t fully understand what it means to be outcome-based. What is the alternative?
I did learn enough from our conversation to realize that our GrandAd system was nothing like what she was looking for.
At the IBM office in Copley Place I did several demos. One that I remember was a morning session for several employees at an ad agency on Tremont St. in Boston. The name escapes me. The demo seemed to go well. They invited me to meet with them in the afternoon at their office. I asked for the address. They gave it to me, but they warned me not to drive. They said that I should take “the T”, which is what people in Boston call the commuter rail system, MBTA.
I was disdainful of their suggestion. I had a map of Boston and plenty of experience driving in Beantown. I knew that the roads were unpredictable and that people made left turns from any lane. I grabbed some lunch and then headed out in my Celica.
It was an adventure, but I made it. Tremont was one-way, of course. I was prepared for that. I was shocked to discover that the streets that paralleled it on both sides were also one-way, and all three ran in the same direction. I had to steer my Celica all the way to Boylston Street to get past their office so that I could turn onto Tremont. Then I was very fortunate to spot the P (public parking sign) forty or fifty yards to my right. I parked and entered the office with seconds to spare.
This meeting seemed to go OK, too. At the end I asked how to get back on the Mass Pike. They told me that it was easy to get there from Copley Place, but the only route from Tremont was very difficult to describe.
Maybe it was a good thing that I never heard from them again.
Gray Rambusch, Inc. is a complete mystery. I know that we billed them for something, but I am almost positive that I never visited them or did a project for them. Doug Pease might have sold them something. The agency is still in business.
The Big Apple
The term “boutique agency” is used a lot in New York City. I knew that the large agencies were beyond our abilities, but to me “boutique” just indicated smaller size. Then I talked with people who worked at a couple.
The first was an agency that specialized in theatrical productions—Broadway and smaller. The lady who worked there explained that, as any fan of The Producers knows, each show is a separate company, and they tend to go out of business very abruptly and disappear without a trace. The most important things for the agency were to get their invoices to each show before it opened and to hound them for payment.
The other boutique agency that I talked with specialized in classified ads. They had hundreds of clients for whom they placed ads in the handful of papers that served the city. I don’t think that there was much chance that this agency would survive the Internet.
Kate Behart3 and I rode Amtrak to New York City on one occasion. I think that it was to talk with an ad agency, but it might have been for some other reason. TSI was watching every penny at the time. I had purchased a book of ten tickets. On the trip to Penn Station I used one, and Kate used one.
On the return trip I gave my ticket and the book to the conductor; he took the ticket. Then I handed the book to Kate, she tore out a ticket, and she handed it and her ticket to the conductor. He refused it. He said that only one person could use the book at a time. I directed his attention to the back where it clearly stated that it entitled “the bearer” of the ticket and booklet to passage to or from Penn Station. I bore the booklet when I paid for myself. Then I handed it to her, and she became the bearer.
He had the gall to tell me that I did not know what “bearer” meant. I said “Bearer: one who bears. ‘To bear’ means ‘to carriy’.” I argued that the term bearer was not ambiguous. It was like a bearer’s bond; anyone that has possession can redeem it. He claimed that it was Amtrak’s policy that tickets from booklets could not be used for more than one person. I said that Amtrak’s policy was actually clearly explicated on the back of the ticket book. Where was his evidence of anything different? He said that a letter had been sent to conductors. When I asked to see it, he threatened to throw both of us off the train at the next stop. I asked to speak to his superior.
This was not a big train. It was unlikely that there were more than two conductors. So, I was fortunate that there was anyone on the train who was senior to the fellow who threatened to evict us. The other conductor took Kate’s ticket, and he asked me politely not to do this again.
I never needed to do it again. If the occasion had come up, … I don’t know.
We pursued another New York agency during a period in the early nineties when we had no salesman. I took the train to New York and gave a presentation at IBM’s office on Madison Avenue. Terri Provost5 accompanied me. We then took a cab to the agency’s office. The discussions there seemed to go pretty well.
This agency was much more like what we were accustomed to dealing with than the boutique agencies. I thought that we could do a good job for them. On the train ride back I first consumed my fried chicken supper from Roy Rogers. Then I talked with Terri about the potential client and emphasized how I thought that we should proceed.
The next day at the office I asked her to compose a letter to send to the agency’s president. The letter was friendly and polite, but it did absolutely nothing to advance the sale. I don’t know why I thought that she would know how to do this, but I was wrong. I had to pretty much dictate the whole letter to her. It also made it clear to me that I could not depend upon her to follow up on it, and I did not have the time to do it myself. We whiffed again.
Others Within Driving Distance
Sue and I drove down to Englewood, NJ, to visit an ad agency called Sommer Inc. It was a small business-to-business agency run by a couple who were older than we were. I don’t remember too much about the experience, but I thought that we would be a great fit for them.
My clearest memory of the trip is that I was very hungry by the time that we reached the Garden State, and Sue stopped at Popeye’s so that I could wolf down a few pieces of chicken before we met with them.
We did not get the account. I think that they might have been put off by the price and instead purchased a cheaper PC system.
Somehow we got a tip about an advertising agency in Vermont that was looking for an administrative software system. It might have been in Burlington. I talked to the proprietor on the telephone, and he seemed serious. I think that this might have been in 1987 or 1988 when we were desperate for business.
Our marketing director, who at the time was, I think, Michael Symolon7, accompanied me on the trip to the north country. We left Enfield fairly early in the morning. The weather was cold enough that I wore an overcoat. When we arrived at the agency I realized that I had put on the pants that went with my suit, but I had mistakenly donned my blue blazer instead of the suit coat. The combination looked ridiculous.
It was pretty warm in the agency’s office. So, when I took off my overcoat, I also took off the blazer. I still probably looked strange in shirtsleeves when Michael was wearing a suit, but I did not feel like a clown.
The presentation went OK. Michael may have followed up on the visit, but it was probably another case of sticker shock.
The only other ad agency that I remember driving to was in Schenectady, NY, northwest of Albany. The building in which the agency was housed had obviously been repurposed. The ceiling was crisscrossed with large and small pipes or air ducts. Each had been painted in bright primary colors. The effect was quite striking.
The agency had been using the AdMan software system on PC’s for a couple of years. It seemed to me that there must have been something about the system that the users did not like. Otherwise, why was he looking for new system? I tried to talk with the office manager about it. He was, however, very reluctant to discuss what they were currently doing or what they would like to do. Instead he wanted me to describe the advantages or our approach. Of course, he also wanted to know the cost.
I hated it when prospects did this. A major strength of our system was that we could adapt it to meet the needs of almost any user. This was difficult to present. I much preferred to tell people how we would address their problems. Then I could introduce ideas that they did not expect.
During the drive back to Rockville I did not feel good about this call. I suspected that I had been used to gather information for some sort of hidden agenda of the office manager. I had no concrete evidence to go on, but the whole situation did not feel right.
Distant Prospects
Touchdown Jesus could not have made a sale in South Bend.
I had flown to Chicago in late 1988 to meet with some IBM representatives who specialized in retail about the AdDept system that we had just installed at Macy’s. I rented a car afterwards and drove to South Bend, IN, for a presentation at the IBM office for people from local advertising agencies. We had sent letters to all of the agencies in the area, and four or five had expressed interest in the GrandAd system.
Three little old ladies attended the demo, and they all sat together. No IBMers showed up. It reminded me of the debate in which I performed at Expo ’67, which is described here. I talked with the ladies, or rather one of them; they were all from the same agency. They told me that their agency currently used a system marketed by one of our competitors. They told me that the system had actually been installed by someone who lived in South Bend. When I asked who supported the system they claimed not to know.
.The whole trip was a complete waste of time. We got nothing from any of the people that I met in Chicago, and the South Bend agency later told us that they were not interested.
In February of 1989 we were pitching two important prospects in the Milwaukee area. Both the journey to Milwaukee and the return trip were memorable. They are described here.
It is a safe bet that I had Usinger’s brats on any trip to Milwaukee.
I took a cab to the ad agency first. I do not remember the name of the agency, but I recall that they seemed to be very interested in our approach. I had to sell a bit of blue sky concerning the hardware. I pitched running the System/36 ad agency system on an AS/400. They would be the guinea pig for this, but the alternative was to try to sell an approach that IBM had publicly abandoned.
I thought that the meeting went very well. I gauged that we had a very good chance of getting this account. I was not able to follow up immediately, however, because Sue and I took our first vacation ever immediately following this trip to Milwaukee.
In the end we did not get the account. After returning from the vacation we soon became so busy that our failure might have been a blessing in disguise.
V-R was in the Commerce Tower downtown.
In 1990 (I think) I received a telephone call from Ernie Capobianco, whom I knew from RGS&H (described here). He said that he now was working for an ad agency in Kansas City, Valentine-Radford. They already had a System/36, but they were not satisfied with what they were getting out of it.
I arranged to stay with my parents while I pitched the account. My dad told me the agency was one of the largest and most respected in KC.
I met with the systems manager in the morning. They had been using standard accounting packages and were trying to use their general ledger for client profitability analysis. It did not work. It would never work. There were a lot of other problems, too.
Two or three officers of the company took me to lunch at Putsch’s 210 on the Country Club Plaza, the swankest restaurant in the Kansas City area. They wanted to know what it would take for them to get the kind of information from their S/36 that Ernie got at RGS&H.
I informed them that their software system was not designed for a business as complex as an ad agency. They were trying to eat soup with a knife. If we were going to do the project, we would do it right. We could probably convert some of the data for them, but we wouldn’t be able to patch their software. We would want to install our system.
It was not what they wanted to hear.
Kaufmann’s clock.
Our last pitch to an ad agency was, I think, in May of 1994.8 Sue and I drove to Pennsylvania to talk with people from Blattner/Brunner, Inc.9 We also met with Kaufmann’s, the May Co. division, on the same trip. We spent a day at the Pittsburgh zoo before we returned.
The people at B/B were definitely serious about getting a system They asked all the right questions. They even questioned whether the AS/400 was really a relational data base. Their doubt was understandable. Every other database (Oracle, Sybase, Informix, etc.) had a name, but at that point IBM had not yet begun calling the AS/400’s database DB2/400 even though the design of the system had been fully relational since the introduction of its predecessor, the System/38, back in 1978!
The agency was rapidly growing, and it was famous in the area for its “Killer B’s” billboard, which was nominated as one of the best ads in Pittsburgh’s history. Winning this account might have really launched ADB, which is what we called the AS/400 version of GrandAd.
I left the follow-up on this account in Sue’s hands. I had my hands full with Kaufmann’s, which gave us a huge notebook of reports that they wanted us to include in their system. Sue definitely fumbled the ball. She could have handled this; she just chose not to. This was one of the main reasons that I became very upset with her in 1994. The details of this “second crisis” are described here.
1. Marvin Elbaum has had several careers since the merged agency folded in 1992. I think that in 2021 he is a realtor for William Raveis in southeastern Connecticut. His LinkedIn page is here.
2. The Hartford Courant declared LSGE, Inc. defunct in 1992.
3. By the time of the pandemic Maier Advertising had “evolved” into a business-to-business agency named Blue Star Communications Group. Its website is here.
4. A write-up of Kate Behart’s career at TSI can be found here.
5. Much more about Terri Provost’s stint at TSI can be found here.
6. Sommer Inc. was acquired by Greenstone Rabasca Roberts of Melville, NY, in 1989.
7. Michael Symolon’s time as TSI’s marketing guy is discussed here.
8. Ernie’s ad agency in Dallas, Square One, bought Valentine-Radford in 2003.
9. I am pretty sure of the date because there was an annular solar eclipse. The only solar eclipse in the nineties that was visible from Pennsylvania was on May 20, 1994.
10. Joe Blattner has departed, but in 2021 the agency is still active as M.J. Brunner, Inc. The agency’s website is here. Joe Blattner’s web page is here.
Northeast magazine was a “Sunday supplement” for the Hartford Courant. In April of 1989 the magazine sponsored a contest to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, which was written when Mark Twain and his family lived in Hartford. Each contestant was asked to write a story of 5,000 words or fewer that updated Twain’s tale. The first prize was a two-week trip to England. I had never been anywhere on the east side of the Atlantic. I felt ready.
This contest appeared to be right in my wheelhouse. I was pretty sure that I had read the book when I was a kid; I certainly had seen the movie with Bing Crosby. I went to the library and checked out the book. It took me a couple of weeks to read; I was surprised by the dark tone and the carnage at the end. If I had read it in school, I was pretty sure that I would have remembered those scenes and discussed them with my friends. Young guys like to envision massive destruction. Maybe I only read the Classics Illustrated version.
Twain left out the Rhonda Fleming character; so did I.
I had a month or two to write my story. Who would be the protagonist? The people from Connecticut with whom I was most familiar were in advertising or computers. I decided to go with an ad agency executive who knew just enough about computers to be dangerous.
At that time the big controversy in the advertising community was whether agencies were required to charge Connecticut’s sales tax on any or all of the billings1. Some did, and they bitterly resented those who did not.
I contrived the deus ex machina for moving the action from the Land of Steady Habits to Arthurian Britain by conflating the confusing roads around the north meadows, a ghastly fog that I endured one evening, and a huge tree that I had seen growing in an intersection in Canton.
LJN produced the WWF action figures available in 1989. I put the wood carvers to work on the ones for the sixth-century knights.
The WWF (now called the WWE) was a client of CDHM Advertising, one of the users of TSI’s GrandAd system. When I combined wrestling with focus groups, the plot rather quickly came together. Coming up with an ending was the really hard part. I wrote one, but I wasn’t a bit satisfied with it. Has any time-travel story ever had a satisfying ending.
I never wrote anything out in longhand. I composed it in my head while I was jogging, which I did during my customary long lunches and in the evening.
The monks made trading parchments for the kids.
I keyed the text in on the Datamaster that was sitting on a table in the entryway between the garage and the house. Attached to it was the daisy-wheel printer. I seriously doubt that anyone in 1989 had access to better equipment for writing a story. I produced at least ten drafts.
I printed out a copy of the final version, which I entitled “Sir Consultant’s Strategic Plan”. I counted the words on the first page and multiplied by the number of pages2. It was about 5,000, maybe a little longer. Would they really check? I mailed it to Northeast magazine well before the deadline.
At some point in the fall, someone from the Courant called TSI’s office and asked to speak to me. She said that they wanted to publish my story, and she asked for permission to do so. Of course I agreed.
Lary Bloom
A few hours later I received a second phone call. This time Lary Bloom3, the editor of the magazine, was on the line. Chris Vegliante answered the phone and put Lary on hold. When she told me who was on the other end, she also added, “You won the contest, didn’t you?”
Lary informed me that I had indeed won the contest. He told me that there had been over two hundred entries, some from professional writers. He asked me if I had ever thought that I might win. I couldn’t lie. I had worked hard on it. I thought that it was a really good story, the best that I had ever written. Never mind that at that point in my life I had written almost nothing beyond technical manuals, TSI’s marketing and sales materials, and a few papers in graduate school. I had never even taken a single English class in my ten and a half years in school. I must have been very arrogant. I simply answered, “Yeah, I did.”
Don’t get me wrong. I was on a cloud for at least a week. I considered winning the contest one of the greatest accomplishments of my life.
Lary asked me to come into the office of the Courant on Broad St. to talk about it. When I arrived he warned me that I could not use “schmuck” or “schlub” because they were curse words in Yiddish. I looked both of them up at the library and decided that he was wrong about “schlub”. I did replace “schmuck” with “cutthroat”. I should have used the wrestling term “heel”, but no one in the wrestling world in 1989 admitted that they had assigned roles. I also didn’t know the industry term for the many wrestlers who always lose televised matches and never appear in major arenas. I subsequently discovered that the accepted description is “jobber”.
Dr. Miller.
Lary emphasized to me that the voting for the prize was very close. He said that one judge, Dr. James A. Miller4, a professor of literature at Trinity and Wesleyan, had lobbied hard for my story, and that had ultimately made the difference. The other judges were:
Justin Kaplan, author of Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain.
David E. E. Sloan, author of Mark Twain as a Literary Comedian.
Garret Condon, arts editor (and former book editor) of the Courant.
Dorothy A. Clark5, president of Literacy Volunteers of America.
Kamala Devi Dansinghani, an honor student at East Hartford High School.
Lary asked me if I had counted the number of words. I told him about my arithmetic approach. He told me that I absolutely must carefully count the words of the final version before they published it. He assured me that some of the other participants would check it and would raise a stink if it was too long.
He let me make whatever changes that I wanted. I tried hard to devise a better ending, but I did not have much luck. Instead I did a lot of work on the opening scene. I was pretty well satisfied with the results. When I reread it for this blog entry, I still liked it. Needless to say, there were a few passages that I would have changed.
I have always thought that this shot came out quite well.
Lary gave me three additional assignments before the article was published in December. The first was to go to the studio of a designated professional photographer (whose name I don’t remember) for the cover shot. I was told to bring a keyboard with me. He stuck a fake white mustache on my upper lip and fitted a white ball cap that he must have obtained from a BMW dealer. He wanted me to light a cigar and smoke it, but I balked. The idea of putting lighted weeds in my mouth has always been abhorrent to me. I agreed to hold it after he lit it.
While I was engaged in this, a friend and client of mine, Putt Brown, came into the photographer’s office. I had spent quite a bit of time with Putt a few years earlier, and I recognized him immediately. He did not recognize me at all, and he was astounded when I told him who I was and what I was doing there.
Phyllis Joffe.
For the second assignment I had to drive to the studios of Connecticut Public Radio. There I met Phyllis Joffe6, whom I had heard on the radio many times. She interviewed me about my story, and she asked me to read a couple of passages, including the “all-knighter” section that does not work on radio at all. The thing that I remember the most from her interview was that she thought that my style was more reminiscent of Raymond Chandler than Mark Twain.
I had read every word that Raymond Chandler ever wrote. I took what she said as a compliment. I loved his style, but I did not try to emulate it. I tried to write the way that a smart-aleck ad executive would in the eighties. When making a pitch to a client he took on a totally different persona. When he was disclosing his private opinions of those around him, he was often sarcastically dismissive. It wasn’t my style7; it was Ambrose’s.
The interview aired on National Public Radio on Sunday, December 10, the same day that the story appeared in the magazine. I think that it was on Weekend Edition, but I could be wrong.
The third assignment, to which Sue was also invited, was to appear at the Mark Twain House one evening in early December. It was a special meeting of the Samuel Clemens Society, which promotes the activities of the museum on Farmington Ave. The attendees were there to witness Lary announcing the winner of the story contest.
Frank Lord.
Before the event began I was somewhat surprised to see Frank Lord8, who was, as I recall, the president of the society at the time. I knew Frank quite well from the two years that I had worked at the Hartford Life, as described here.
When, after fifteen plus years, Frank saw me and Sue, he blurted out, “What are you doing here?”
When I told him that I had won the story contest, he was certainly stunned. He did not even know that Sue and I were back in Connecticut.
At some point in the event Lary introduced me to Dr. Miller. I may have met one or two of the other judges as well. I don’t recall any of the small talk.
The story was published in the Northeast magazine dated December 10, 19899. We subscribed to the paper. As soon as I awoke, I retrieved the paper from the driveway, extracted the magazine and read the story. I found two mistakes. I have footnoted them in the copy that is posted here. They bothered me, but they did not really disrupt the story.
I remember the reaction of my best friend, Tom Corcoran, after he had read the story in the Sunday paper. “I didn’t think that you had it in you, Mike. I don’t know why.”
Sue’s sister Betty asked me to do a dramatic reading for her and her friend, Jeffrey Campbell. Others may have also been sitting at the table with them. Everyone seemed to laugh in most of the right places.
Sue and I flew to London in February of 1990. That adventure is described here.
1. While I was writing the story for the contest, the state clarified the law. You can read the notice here.
2. It never occurred to me at the time that the Datamaster may well have had a word-counting feature. Does anyone still have one with IBM’s word processing software? Could you check for me?
3. Lary Bloom retired from the Courant in 2001. His LinkedIn page, which can be viewed here, says that he lives in Chester, CT.
5. Beginning in 2006 I played bridge with Dorothy Clark many times at the Simsbury Bridge Club, once as a partner and many times as an opponent. I did not recognize her name at the time, and she apparently did not recognize me. She died in 2018. Her obituary is here.
6. Phyllis Joffe died in 2002. Her obituary is here.
7. My other substantial piece of fiction, which can be read here, would remind no one of Raymond Chandler.
8. Frank Lord died on July 3, 2020. His obituary is here. His LinkedIn page, which lists most of his roles in Hartford, is here.
9. The Courant let me have ten copies. I still have two or three.
