Famous-Barr (FB) was a chain of department stores based in St. Louis Mo. It was owned by the May Company.
The FB store in downtown St. Louis.
The aspect of TSI’s dealings with FB that I most clearly recall occurred before the installation. I think that this was in 1993 before TSI hired Doug Pease (introduced here) as Marketing Director, but I may be wrong. TSI received a phone call from Vicki Rosenkoetter, FB’s Advertising Director. Vicki had heard about AdDept and was interested in attending a demonstration.
I immediately phoned the IBM office in St. Louis to arrange for a room for my presentation, a ritual with which I was quite familiar. For the first time ever the woman with whom I was speaking asked me a question that I had difficulty answering: “How many customers are coming?”
I calmly explained that the audience members would not currently be customers. They were prospective users of the AdDept system that my company, TSI, had developed to run on an IBM AS/400.
She repeated, “How many customers are coming?”
“I don’t know. Is there some kind of limit?”
“Find out how many customers are coming and call me back.”
I did. Vicki provided an estimate of a dozen or so. IBM then produced enough employees so that one was seated beside each person who attended. At the time I was amazed that Famous-Barr was able to allow so many employees to attend. I was ordinarily happy to address a handful of people.
In retrospect it seemed likely that some must have been May Co. people. The parent company’s headquarters was only a block or so away from the downtown FB store that also housed the Advertising Department, and the May Co. was definitely a customer that had a lot of IBM “iron” in its data center.
As for all of those IBMers, I don’t know what their function was. They did not interrupt my presentation, which seemed to go very well.
Dave O. Bad camera and worse photographer.
Nevertheless, there was a considerable delay before the contract was signed and the system for FB was installed. During much of that time I worked with Dave Ostendorf2, whose position at FB was “Advertising Systems Analyst & Admin”.
FB had been using a PC-based system for many administrative functions. Dave developed it. I was a little worried when I learned that Dave would be the primary contact. No coder is ever happy when his work was being replaced by someone else’s. However, Dave understood that he had squeezed as much out of his approach as he could, and it was not enough. Since he was already very familiar with both the expectations and the attitudes of everyone in the department, he was often a great help.
On the other hand, the fact that Dave was formerly their custom programmer and could deliver changes without worrying about other clients sometimes caused frustration in TSI’s relationship with FB’s users. I wrote this in 2000:
They loved this system, but they had to abandon it because the architecture could not accept the volumes they were trying to put through it. Essentially our strategy was to replicate the output from their previous system.
Because the department had a programmer on their staff, they became accustomed to quick customization. They are therefore frustrated by our inability to deliver what they want as quickly as they want it.
It is very difficult to get the managers to agree to use AdDept for anything new. They like their PC programs. They still use a lot of spreadsheets and small pieces of the old system.
Dave provided almost all the information needed from the media managers. It was seldom necessary for me to talk with them . I met often with Roxanne Shanks3, the Business Office Manager about the way that she wanted to handle financial issues. In 2000 Roxanne went to part-time, and Ervin O’Neal4 was named the Business Office Manager.
Jim.
After Vicki left in 2001, I think that Jim Anderson became the Advertising Director. I found some photos of him, but I do not remember working with him. It is embarrassing that I have so few memories of the FB installation. It may also be a testament to the fact that Dave was an excellent liaison who made my job much easier.
David Graves.
At some point David Graves became the official liaison with TSI, but I think that we only worked with him on hardware and connectivity issues. I don’t remember talking with him.
Vicki.
1. Vicki Rosenkoetter worked at FB until 2001. Her LinkedIn page is here.
Ervin.
2. After Macy’s took over the May Co. stores Dave went to work for Macy’s Corporate Marketing. He resigned that position in 2007.
3. Roxanne worked at Foley’s before coming to St. Louis. Her LinkedIn page can be viewed here.
Department store division of the May Co. with headquarters in Portland, OR. Continue reading →
Since 1932 M&F’s flagship store had occupied an entire block in downtown Portland.
Meier & Frank was a chain of departments stores owned by the May Company. Its headquarters was in Portland, OR. TSI never pitched the AdDept system to the store’s advertising department. In 1998 the May Company decided to order AdDept systems for the three department store divisions that were not already using it—Robinsons-May, Meier & Frank, and Filene’s.
M&F was by far the smallest of the May Company’s department store divisions. At the time of the installation it had only seven stores, which made it barely a quarter the size of the next smallest division.
These installations were quite different from the other systems that TSI had installed at May Co. divisions. They began with three days of rather intense sessions in TSI’s office in Enfield. We were teaching them about the system design of AdDept, and they were informing us about their policies and expectations for the system.
The previous May Co. installations began with a site visit in which I had learned about each department’s business procedures and priorities. TSI then presented a formal proposal for the base system and any custom code that I thought was needed. Only after the system had been delivered and installed did we provide training, and it took place at the company’s location.
At some point in 1996 a group of people from M&F visited TSI’s office for orientation and training. Those sessions were also attended by people who would be involved with the installation at Rob-May. Robert Myers, with whom we worked in the AdDept installation in the advertising department of the Foley’s division (described here), also was there to provide the perspective of a user of the system.
I found several photos that I took on the occasion of their visit as well as photos that I took in Portland. Since I was still using disposable cameras in those days, the quality of the prints is not great. I was lucky to have this much. On one trip I left a camera that was full of photos in my rental car. I called Avis on my next visit and learned that they had found the camera. They later mailed it to me.
The people: The photo at the left was taken after one of the training days in Enfield. On the last evening we all went to the Mill on the River restaurant, but I think that this photo might have been taken at a different place.
Robert Myers was seated next to me. In the photo he is on the far right. Three representatives of M&F are on the left. I am pretty sure that the guy with glasses was Brent Stapleton1, who managed the departmental network and was our liaison for the first part of the project. I do not remember the name of the fellow on his left, but I am pretty sure that his hobby was making root beer at home. He might have been Steve Mulligan, the Co-op Coordinator who moved to Ireland the following summer. I don’t remember the woman’s name or function, and I don’t recognize the next fellow. He might have been from Robinsons-May. None of these people appear in any of the photos that I took on my trips to Portland.
The last person on the left side of the table was definitely Doug Pease, TSI’s Marketing Director, who sat in on some of the training sessions. The other two people were from Rob-May and are described here.
The system was not actually installed at M&F until March of 2000. I think that they postponed it because Kaufmann’s and Rob-May were higher priorities.
The next five photos were taken at the department’s office on the thirteenth floor of the flagship store in Portland. The building had fifteen floors.
In the photo on the right, the seated woman was Dori Tierney2, who was responsible for scheduling M&F’s ads in the newspapers. She also produced the weekly calendar that was the primary document that was used by many people inside the department and out. The other woman was her boss, Sheila Wilson3, the Newspaper Manager. She formerly had worked at Hecht’s.
In the first year of the installation I worked with Dori more than anyone else because producing that calendar was the department’s first objective for the AdDept system.
I am almost certain that the woman surrounded by papers in the photo on the left was Kathy Reed, the Business Office Manager. One of her primary responsibilities was to produce at the end of the month the report of expenses and co-op income by CCN in the May Company’s required format, the so-called 790. AdDept produced this at all of the other divisions. We never succeeded at completely automating that process at M&F for reasons that are explained in the section about AdDept projects below.
I have no recollection of the people in the photo at right. Maybe I took this shot because they were both so photogenic.
Many of the people in the advertising department at M&F did their work on clunky old IBM PC’s. They complained that all of their machines were hand-me-downs from their counterparts at Robinsons-May in California.
I took the two photos shown above at the M&F office in Portland, OR. I do not remember the name or function of the woman on the left. The guy on the right was Bryan Kipp, the Planning Manager.
From searches on LinkedIn I discovered that the Broadcast Manager at the time was Shauna Thompson, and the Direct Mail Manager was Linda Farrington. I probably worked with both of them.
The first visit: A month or so after the training session in Enfield Doug Pease and I flew out to Portland so that I could install the TSI software on the AS/400 that IBM had delivered. We also met with several executives to make sure that we understood and could address the department’s priorities.
I was surprised to see that the entirety of eastern Oregon was essentially desolate, and the coast was so rugged as to be almost uninhabitable. The majority of Oregonians were concentrated in the cities along the Willamette River.
Multnomah falls is about 30 miles east of Portland on the Columbia River.
In those days it was much cheaper to fly on Saturday than on Sunday, and Doug and I did that on the first trip. I found among my M&F photos several of Mt. Hood and Multnomah Falls. On Sunday we took our rental car on a spin around the very scenic areas east of Portland. Kate Behart and I had also visited these sites on a sales trip to Fred Meyer4, another retailer based in Portland, a few years earlier.
Emily.
The Senior Vice-president of Marketing at M&F was Emily White5, whom Doug knew from when they both worked in the advertising department of the G. Fox department store chain in Hartford. She knew about TSI’s capabilities from her time at Macy’s West. The Advertising Director was Laura Rutenis6. I think that she had previously worked at Hecht’s.
On the first visit Doug and I spent quite a bit of time talking with Emily and Laura. They explained their difficulty as the smallest of the May Co. divisions. They had far fewer employees than the other divisions, but their stores had just as many selling departments, and they ran just as many ads (in fewer newspapers, of course), and they were expected to produce the same reports as all the other divisions.
The primary objective of the AdDept system would be to get the module for newspaper ads up and running as quickly as possible and to produce their weekly calendar in the format that they currently used. At the same time the quantitative and qualitative information for ads for all of the other media needed to be entered into the system so that all the expenses could be entered in AdDept (or imported from PC systems) and uploaded to the corporate accounting system. So, the remainder of the time on the first visit was spent familiarizing the employees with the programs for entering the data and showing them how to check their work.
The projects: I don’t remember much about most projects that we did for M&F. I am sure that the May Company wanted them to produce the 790 report using the AdDept system’s cost accounting programs. That would require them to enter (or upload from another source) all the expenses from every media. I am pretty sure that we reached the point at which all of the necessary data was in the system.
Nevertheless, AdDept never produced the 790 report at M&F because the department’s Business Office Manager had been fudging some of the allocations required by the May Co. The corporation’s internal auditor surely knew about this, but she had no assistants to help her in the Business Office, and it would not have been practical for her to implement all the required steps within the strict time restraints. I thought that it would be feasible for her to do it in AdDept, but I could understand why she did not want to commit to a process that she could never verify produced results that were consistent with her existing methods. Also, she was more confident that she could meet the deadline every month without using AdDept.
I definitely remember spending many hours working on the weekly advertising calendar, which was designed to be printed on a special Hewlett-Packard laser printer that the advertising department had purchased. It could handle very large forms. Printing from the AS/400 was ordinarily limited to text of at most 198 characters per line and a single non-proportional font, Courier New. So, it would not be easy to replicate what they were doing.
Every advertising department that we worked with produced a calendar that was the basis of communication with other departments and the brass. In every other case we had been able to convince them that what the AS/400 could produce in the usual way—with whatever changes they needed—would suffice. The alternative was for us to produce output files that could be downloaded to a PC and formatted for printing in Word, Excel, or other software, and a few chose that method. The people at M&F insisted that that was not good enough. They needed the calendar the way it currently looked and they did not want to take extra steps to provide it.
In order to produce the calendar that they required I decided to make use of research and coding involving PCL, the language that Hewlett-Packard’s printers used. Instead of creating “spooled files” that the AS/400 translated into PCL using its printer drivers, the program that I wrote for M&F created files of instructions that were sent directly to the printer. They bypassed the AS/400’s drivers because the files were already in the language that the printer understood.
This approach had the advantage of allowing the use of proportional fonts such as Ariel or Times Roman. It also allowed the use of simple graphics such as boxes, variable font weights and sizes, italics, bolding, etc. The end result was definitely more attractive, but the big advantage was that the format was already familiar to the executives from other departments to whom it was delivered. It could all fit on one page that included attractive fonts, boxes, and other things that no one ever saw on a computerized report in the nineties.
From TSI’s perspective there were, however, serious disadvantages to this kind of approach. None of the other people at TSI were even slightly familiar with PCL. On this project I wrote all of the code myself.
By 1998 I was generating only a fairly small percentage of the new code at TSI’s office. I spent the bulk of my time traveling to clients, installing new systems, training, writing up proposals for new systems, modules, and requests for custom programming. I also had important administrative obligations, including locating more appropriate offices for TSI.
I suppose that I could have asked Denise Bessette, TSI’s VP of Product Development to learn PCL 5 from the handbook that I had found somewhere, but there was no guarantee that we would ever use this technique again. Besides, time was of the essence, and she already had a lot on her plate. By far the fastest way to deliver the code was for me to do it. There definitely was too little time for me to teach her in a formal setting how it worked.
Also, as will become obvious, the logistics would not have worked if the programming “team” had more than one member. Denise did not want to travel more than necessary.
Another big disadvantage was that it took much longer to write code for the printer than to write reports that could be sent to the printer driver for translation. We had been using the AS/400 long enough that we had that process down pat.
Furthermore, because TSI did not have a printer that could handle the oversized form, there was no way to test the finished product in the office in Enfield. I had to write little programs that produced segments of the calendar, test them on an HP printer that we did have, and then write the code that stitched them together. Also, I could not even look at the output on the screen. I ended up delivering the code to M&F in person and testing it at their site with real data.
I should mention that Denise did not like this kind of cowboy coding at all. She thought that everything should go through the tried-and-true process.
Finally, if M&F had run into problems with the calendar when I was on the road—which I often was during that period—Denise and the programmers might have trouble isolating the cause.
In retrospect it might have made sense for me to decline this project. Someone from the May Company would probably have stepped in to help them find a reasonable substitute. However, I wanted a happy client, and I was quite sure that the people at M&F would not have been happy with anything less than what I did.
I did get the calendar program to work, and I do not remember them reporting problems with it after the first few days. I might have needed to make small changes to handle situations that they forgot to tell me about. That almost always happened.
According to my notes by February 25, 2000, things were going reasonably well:
So far I have not picked up specs for a lot of custom programming. I spent much of yesterday working on the calendar and the insertion orders. I finally got the calendar so that it is exactly the way they wanted it. The first faxed insertion order cut off the top ten lines of the page. I fixed it by rotating 270 degrees instead of 90. I can’t understand why that would make a difference. We also had a query class for the people who have some experience in working with AdDept.
Life in the M&F advertising department: In general the people in the department, like nearly everyone that I met from the May Co., were hard-working and enthusiastic about their jobs. They did feel that they were the parent company’s ugly step-child, and there were many things besides the outdated electronic equipment to bolster that feeling. For example, there were no restrooms on the thirteenth floor that the department occupied. The store’s selling floors certainly had very nice restrooms, and the employees were allowed to use them. However, that involved taking an elevator down from the thirteenth floor and back, which could add several minutes to the project.
The alternative was to climb the stairs up to the fourteenth floor. That floor must have had a purpose at one time, but by 1998 it was just a relatively empty area with plumbing. I found it sort of exciting to go up there. It was like being in someone else’s attic. You never could predict what had been put up there just to be out of the way.
I used the men’s room up there whenever I felt adventurous. It was quicker, and I had very low standards in those days. The picture on the right is surely worth a thousand words. There was only one stall in the men’s room, but it was almost never occupied even though, as you can see, the one urinal was permanently out of order. The sign on it helpfully advised “DON’T PEE HERE.” Someone had added a “K” to the verb.
I seem to recall that there was also a ladies’ room up there, but it did not get used much. At any rate I did not try to persuade anyone of the fair sex to take photos for me.
This was not the only unusual sight at M&F. Here is what I wrote on February 25, 2000:
Meier& Frank is a strange place. They have by far the worst facilities of any department store I have been in. I will try to take some photos today. One guy’s office is so small he can easily touch both walls at the same time. Several people are sitting in a former conference room. There is a pile of discarded computers in one hallway. Many places are dirty. One corner in the main part of the office had huge dust bunnies. It could not have been cleaned in months. Nevertheless, everyone seems in good spirits.
Most of my time in the the first few trips was spent with Dori. She had a small desk in a fairly large office that also held a lot of records and that big printer. Dori had one very peculiar trait, that she did not try to hide. She would verbally accompany her work with a softly spoken play-by-play: “I am walking over to the printer to get the schedule. Now I am getting last week’s schedule out of the file. Now I am taking them to …”
At the time I found it incredible that they would put up with this annoying behavior. In retrospect I think that I was too judgmental. She did her job, and they kept her isolated enough that she did not drive anyone else crazy.
I remember that for one visit they assigned me to work in a very small two-person office. I swear that it was so narrow that I could touch two parallel walls at the same time. I was put there because one of the occupants was on vacation. I found my temporary officemate quite funny. I remember that he had posted on the wall a cartoon of Beavis and Butthead talking about the newly elected team of Bush and Cheney. The balloons read “He said ‘Bush’, heh heh,” and “He said ‘Dick’, hee hee.”
In those days I drank a lot of Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi. I couldn’t tell the difference, but I could definitely tell if someone served me an off-brand. I happened to mention that I once tried to mix them. The guy with the cartoon solemnly warned me that that might not be legal.
I had completely forgotten about the following until I read it in my notes from February 23, 2000:
Brent got a call from someone from the May Company. Evidently they are considering getting new AS/400’s for both Meier & Frank and Filene’s because Dave Ostendorf told them that IBM is withdrawing support for the CISC systems.
Robinsons-May and Filene’s definitely got much faster systems, but I don’t think that M&F ever got an upgrade.
Life in and around Portland: I think that on our first visit Doug and I stayed in a Holiday Inn on the other side of the Willamette River. On later visits I think that I must have stayed somewhere closer to downtown. I ran nearly every day in those years, and I have a vivid recollection of running both through the streets of downtown Portland and in a large park along the Willamette River. I considered it very cool that the city allowed its citizens easy access to the riverfront. By contrast it was almost impossible to get from downtown Hartford to the banks of the Connecticut River on foot.
My memories of running in Portland are vivid and diverse, but I cannot remember being in a single restaurant or any other kind of store there. I think that I might have purchased lunch from a food truck or from a kiosk in the beautiful Pioneer Square, which was right across the street from M&F. I often saw a human statue there—a guy with silver clothes and makeup who posed in the square. In the above photo he is taking a break. I could not imagine a worse job than his.
Here are some tidbits that I wrote on June 12, 2000:
I often see strange things on the streets of Portland. Tuesday a pit bull was chained to a parking meter. It had a stick in its mouth. A guy was playing the “Lone Ranger” part of the overture from Rossini’s Guillaume Tell on a mandolin.
Someone from Salem Oregon stole over 300 lawn ornaments and decorated her lawn with them. She had hit houses in five counties.
I could park my rental car all day at a surface parking lot near the M&F store for a reasonable price if I arrived before the stores opened, which I always did. I also remember a building that had a huge octopus atop its front door, but I do not remember what was inside.
On the last few trips to M&F I stayed at a Homewood Suites hotel in Vancouver, WA. I selected it because it served free breakfasts and because it was fun to run along the mighty Columbia River.
The drive from the Homewood Suites to the M&F building, which was less than ten miles, was mostly on I5 and ordinarily took me only about fifteen minutes. If there was heavy traffic or an accident it might take twenty minutes, but I am pretty certain that I never spent as much as a half hour on the trip.
I remember that one of those evening runs was shortly after my tendinitis of the IT band had been diagnosed, and I had begun the prescribed exercise regimen. This outing was the first time that I had really tested how my knee had responded to the therapy.
I had to stop a couple of times because of the pain, but a thirty-second stretch allowed me to resume running. This was very encouraging to me because it indicated that the doctor’s diagnosis was accurate.
Homewood Suites.
My jogging path.
Sailboats on the Columbia.
Epilogue: The M&F advertising department used AdDept up until 2002, at which time the division was folded into the Robinsons-May division of the May Co. The stores still carried the M&F logo until 2006.
The flagship store in Portland, which at the time carried the Macy’s logo, was closed in 2017. The structure is still relatively intact in 2022. The developers have posted a web page that describes its current state. You can view it here.
The principal occupant is a luxury hotel called The Nines, but several other businesses are located.there including a Japanese store called Muji.
2. Dori Tierney’s Facebook page is here. When I looked she had three times as many friends as I had.
3. Sheila Wilson returned to Hecht’s after M&F was folded into Rob-May and then worked at Marshall Fields/Macy’s in Minneapolis. Her LinkedIn page is here.
May Co. department stores based in North Hollywood, CA. Continue reading →
Robinsons-May was a chain of departments stores owned by the May Company. Its headquarters was in North Hollywood, CA. Most of its stores were in southern California, but eventually the advertising department in NoHo bought space and time for stores with various logos throughout the western states.
Rob-May’s headquarters was in the upper floors of this department store. It had the largest parking lot I had ever seen for one store, much more than needed.
TSI never pitched the AdDept system to the store’s advertising department. In 1996 the May Company decided to install AdDept in the department store divisions that were not already using it—Robinsons-May, Meier & Frank, Kaufmann’s, and Filene’s.These installations were quite different from the other systems that TSI had installed at May Co. divisions. They began with three days of rather intense sessions in TSI’s office in Enfield while the hardware was on order from IBM. We were teaching them about the system design of AdDept, and they were informing us about their policies and expectations for the system.
I later learned that the Northridge earthquake of 1994 had demolished the rest of the 25-acre Laurel Plaza, but Rob-May’s headquarters survived.
Previous May Co. installations had begun with a site visit in which I had learned about each department’s business procedures and priorities. TSI then presented a formal proposal for the base system and any custom code that I thought was needed. Only after the system had been delivered and installed did we provide training, and it always took place at the company’s location.
At some point in 1998 a group of people from Rob-May visited TSI’s office for orientation and training. Those sessions were also attended by people who would be involved with the installation at Meier & Frank (described here). Robert Myers, with whom we worked in the AdDept installation in the advertising department of the Foley’s division (described here), also was there to provide the perspective of a user of the system.
I found several photos that I snapped on the occasion of their visit as well as a dozen or so that I took in California. I also found text files containing notes from 1999-2003 that helped me remember some of the details of the installation and other happenings in my trips to southern California.
Rob-May’s training visit at TSI: The training sessions were held in what was ordinarily my office. All of my stuff was moved out. Everyone sat around tables, one of which I ordinarily used for a desk. Training booklets were provided for everyone. The photo to the lett was of one of the first sessions, in which Sandy Sant’Angelo (pink shirt on the right) showed the visitors how to sign on to the AS/400 and how the AdDept screens basically worked. Yes, we were still using “green screens”. We occasionally fielded complaints about them, but seldom from the people who actually used them.
The photo on the right was taken after one of the training days in Enfield. On the last evening we all went to the Mill on the River restaurant, but I think that this photo might have been taken at a different place.
Robert Myers was seated next to me. In the photo he is on the far right. The other two people on his side of the table were Rusty Hansen1, the Planning Manager in the Rob-May advertising department and Beverly Curtis-Frethy2, the Controller. Across from Rusty was Doug Pease, TSI’s VP of Marketing. I don’t recall the name of the fellow across from Beverly. He might have been in charge of the department’s network. The other three people in the photo were from M&F.
Rusty Hansen was our primary liaison with Rob-May in the critical first few years.
The installation trip: The first of many enjoyable trips to Rob-May occurred a few weeks after the training session in Enfield. Doug and I flew to Los Angeles. from Hartford. We probably changed planes in Chicago. In those days I liked to fly on American Airlines because I could get frequent flyer miles both from the airline and from Avis for rental cars.
On those early trips I usually stayed at the Beverly Garland Holiday Inn3 in the Studio City neighborhood of North Hollywood, but I am pretty certain that Doug and I were advised to stay at the Sheraton in Studio City on the first trip to set up the AdDept system. I found a photo that I took of its entrnce
Robert was also present for at least part of this to provide another user’s perspective and to assist where he could. .
Rob-May treated us to meals with key employees more than once on that first trip and at least once on every subsequent trip. The smiling guy on the right across from Beverly (red coat) was Mario, the Direct Mail Manager. His last name was nowhere in my notes.
The main purpose of the visit was to install the AdDept software in the AS/400 that IBM had delivered. I did all of that myself. The secondary purpose was to make sure that a regimen had been set up whereby the tables that the system needed—newspapers and other vendors, selling departments, the organizational structure for the merchandise, employees, etc. I also needed to show Rusty how to set up user profiles both for the AS/400 and for AdDept and how to deal with the printers and errors reported by the system. Finally Doug and I needed to talk to the managers of the various areas of the advertising department to try to discover special needs and any procedures that were unique to Rob-May. For example, invoices from the Los Angeles Times were recorded in a general ledger account that was different from the one used for all of the other newspapers.
Beverly, Karen, and Robert at Karen’s favorite restaurant in Beverly Hills. Where was Doug?
Finally, and perhaps, most importantly, we got to meet Karen Jones, the Advertising Director. She provided us with insight as to the department’s highest priorities. Karen and I hit it off very well right from the start. She was (unduly) impressed by an analogy that I made: “Memory is to disk as electricity is to magnetism. If you lose power, the system loses what is in memory but retains what is stored magnetically on the disk.”
In retrospect this does not seem like a great pickup line to me, but she definitely became enamored of me and treated me royally whenever I visited Rob-May. I once casually mentioned to some employees at Rob-May that “Karen Jones loves me.” Everyone agreed. I did not think that we made good headway in the first year or two, but Karen always seemed to think that I could do anything.
Sonia.
My goal from the first trip was for the software for one of the media (newspaper, direct mail, or broadcast) produce something useful. It was very important that the system not be regarded as on that they fed a lot of information but got little in return.
As I usually did, I concentrated on printing a schedule for their newspaper advertising and the faxing to some papers of a set of insertion orders. To that end I worked closely with Sonia Ban. I think that there was still work needed on the schedule when I left, but we did manage to send some faxed insertion orders to newspapers, and they were impressed by that.
My home for the week.
View from the courtyard of the BG Hotel.
The new system: For various reasons the people in the IT Department of the May Co. decided that Rob-May’s system should be upgraded in 1999. The original system had been purchased from and installed by IBM. The new system was a model 270, and it was purchased from Savoir Technology Group, a company that was authorized to sell IBM midrange systems. I flew out to Robinsons-May to complete the process by installing the AdDept software on the 270 and migrating the data.
I still have the notes that I sent back to TSI about this trip. At the time American Airlines had a direct flight from Bradley International to LAX. I flew out on a Sunday morning and arrived early enough (gaining three hours) that I could pick up my rental car at Avis, drive to Malibu, the home of my icon, Jim Rockford, and spend some time at the beach.
I went to Topanga State Beach, which is in Malibu. It was pretty nice but cool. I don’t think that it even reached 80 degrees today, and there was a fairly strong breeze from the north. I made a little camp. I lay on my beach towel, listened to my CD’s, finished my Ethan Coen book4, and watched the surfers and the rest of the California scenery. I took a long walk all the way up and down the beach. I got a lot of sun. I think I am as dark now as my last day in Hawaii5. If I had stayed any longer, I would have been sunburned.
I think this was the first time since Hawaii that I have just goofed off during the day for more than an hour.
Incidentally, Malibu is where Jim Rockford parked his trailer on the beach. The Rockford Files is by far my favorite TV show ever. I looked for the trailer, but I didn’t find it6.
Valley Village Park is the green area in the middle. NoHo West is the new name of Laurel Plaza. I usually drove on the 101. The exit went right into Rob-May’s parking lot.
What I discovered on Monday did not meet my expectations. I had started the day at dawn by driving my rental car from the Beverly Garland Hotel to the park that was halfway to Rob-May to get my five mile run in. Then I returned to the hotel, showered, got dressed, ate breakfast, and drove to Rob-May. The following excerpt provides a glimpse into what it was like to be a cowboy coder at the turn of the century.
I expected the system to be set up and the TCP/IP connection established. I figured that I would install AdDept and BASIC. I would also migrate the user profiles and the data libraries from the old box. Instead, I found that the system was still in the box. I had to set it up using the instructions in the box. This went OK. However, when I got to the point at which I had to do a system save, it balked and said that QGPL and QUSRSYS were not installed. I had Rusty look through his boxes to see if he had system software. He did. I spent many hours installing the operating system and PTF’s. I kicked off the system save just before I left.
I don’t suppose there is any great harm. Everyone will have to use the old system tomorrow. Their connectivity consultant is coming in tomorrow. I hope he will be able to tell me how to do the TCP/IP connection.
Keep in mind that I was not (and am not) an engineer. Far from it. I am not good at this type of thing. I am good at designing systems and writing code. Things were still FUBB on Wednesday evening, when I wrote the following.
The problems we had here were cabling. They decided to run the new system on Ethernet rather than Token Ring, which meant that they had to change the hub into which they were plugged. The IT guy had no empty sockets. He unplugged something he thought was unimportant. It brought down the e-mail system. Before he found this out he was out putting out a fire somewhere else. People had a hard time chasing him down.
I don’t know if I got blamed by anyone for the company’s lack of email that day, but it would not surprise me. The dispatch I sent on Friday at least contained some good news.
Yesterday went much better. Their new system is now almost completely functional. I still spent most of the time putting out small fires. I ran CMPPFM last night for every member of QBASSRC to see if I can find any more changes that the black box was missing. Robinson’s new system is incredibly fast. Reports that took over half an hour run in one minute.
I figured out how to copy the system directory entries over to the new box. I had to copy a bunch of files from QUSRSYS that start with QAOKP.
I copied ADDEPT, QGPL, and QUSRSYS from the old machine to the new one and named them ADDEPTOLD, OLDQGPL, and OLDQUSRSYS. Last night I ran the source comparison program on QBASSRC in ADDEPT. I printed out the differences and was surprised at how many there were. I then realized that the old box was a week ahead of the 150 at TSI. I thought for sure that I checked this. I created a change library but there was no time to install it. I will have to do it after hours. This cut down on the number of differences, but there is still be a pretty good number. There must be a flaw in my updating routine.
By Thursday evening Rob-May had successfully used the system for one full day. I left fairly confident that the people in TSI’s office could deal with any remaining glitches. However, one of the last notes that I sent back to the office was prescient.
These guys need a lot of training. Most of them do not know what an error is and what to do about it. Rusty just kind of lets them go on their own, even the ones that he works with.
I flew back on Friday. It was an excruciating experience. Seven and a half hours after I left the hotel I was still in LAX! I wrote the following when we had finally boarded.
LAX, which is my least favorite airport in the country, was playing some kind of shrieking sound over the intercom the last 20 minutes that we were there. I was afraid I would miss an announcement, so I had put my CD player and headphones away. A couple to my left has not one but two babies. They paid for two tickets, but were using two rows! After they made us get off7, the situation became so ridiculous that I took it easier. This lasted until about ten minutes ago when the stewardess whacked my elbow, which was not sticking out at all. At the time it was about 40 degrees in the cabin. After takeoff it went up to about 90. Now it is dropping again.
The new team: The turn of the century brought a lot of changeover among the employees at Rob-May with whom TSI dealt. My notes said that when I came to install the new box, Karen Elmo had been replaced by Heidi Houghton. I have a vague recollection of Karen Elmo, but none of Heidi. The notes also report that I worked with the Co-op Coordinator, Doyle O’Dell, who asked for a report of committed co-op v. actual. I was able to show report #DM594 to him. I took a photo of him; he evidently was happy with the report.
Mary Ng at Rob-May.
The biggest changes happened in 2000. Rusty Hansen was replaced by Mary Ng8, and Beverly Curtis Fethy’s replacement was Steve Ornee9. Mary was the new liaison with TSI, and we worked closely together for several years. Chad Sesser’s title was Newspaper Analyst. He reported to Karen Jones.
The notes that I have from the three-day trip in October of 2000 show that Mary was very direct about what she wanted from AdDept.
Direct mail was on the menu for lunch in the Rob-May cafeteria with (I think) Kyle Levine11, Mary, and Dan Rothbauer12, the Direct Mail Manager.
Mary said that their objectives are to do all of direct mail on AdDept, to pay all invoices on AdDept and to upload them to CAPS10, to use AdDept for closing, and to use AdDept for planning. This was way too much to cover in three days. Even with three days I was barely able to gather enough information to put together a game plan.
They wanted to know which division they should visit if they wanted to see how to use AdDept for direct mail. I recommended Kaufmann’s. Lord & Taylor uses AdDept extensively for direct mail, but they do not use our cost accounting for closing of direct mail.
Chad is on the left. I don’t remember the fellow with whom he was talking.
I also spent quite a bit of time with Chad Sesser. He told us that he had already downloaded sales from the mainframe at least once. He did not remember how he had done it, but he knew the name of the person in their Information Services department who had helped him.
On the last evening Karen Jones again sprang for supper at the restaurant in Beverly Hills. I might have gotten lost crossing the hills; I distinctly remember that I did on one occasion.
At the restaurant I noticed a blonde woman who was much more buxom than Ellie Mae Clampett. She was sitting with some other people a few tables away from the group from Rob-May. The most astounding thing to me was that for all of the time that we were there—which must have been at least ninety minutes—she was talking on her cellphone while paying scant attention to anyone at her table.
I should mention that I did not have a cellphone in 2003, and the people who talked on them loudly in airports bothered me a lot. I could not imagine anyone answering a phone in a restaurant, much less talking for an extended period. It seemed unimaginably rude to me, but I realized that I was partaking of a totally different culture in Milburn Drysdale’s town.
The projects: TSI did quite a bit of custom coding for Robinsons-May. We also helped them to integrate the data from M&F when the responsibility for managing the stores previously in that division was transferred to North Hollywood. Fortunately, their 270 was easily up to this task. I did not need to travel to California to install another upgrade.
Rob-May had two types of ads that I had never heard of: TMC’s and PWP’s. TMC stands for “total market coverage”. On certain days of the week or on special occasions some newspapers delivered a greatly reduced version of their paper to all households in an area that did not subscribe to the paper. If the same ad (ROP or insert) was run in the regular edition and this reduced edition, it had a higher rate because more eyeballs would see it.
I don’t remember what a PWP was, but I think that the concept was similar. Newspapers were desperate to retain the same level of revenue even as their circulations shrank in the twenty-first century.
My first visit to Rob-May after Mary Ng’s arrival triggered a very large number of fixes (changed for free) and requests for changes (quoted). This was definitely good news in that they were finally interested in taking full advantage of the system. On the other hand, it meant more pressure on the programming staff to produce what Rob-May—and other clients—needed in a reasonable amount of time.
The programming that was most valuable from TSI’s perspective was constructing an interface with another system. In some cases AdDept was the sending system; in others it was the receiver. Our expense invoice entry and claims system had the ability to feed the corresponding corporate accounting system (CAPS). Several changes had to be made to this module to accommodate peculiarities at Rob-May.
Our sales analysis and productivity programs used tables that were fed by the corporate sales system. Most of the May Co. divisions used the same ad agency (Doner) for broadcast. The agency sent a file to Rob-May. The departmental employees ran a program that TSI provided to update the broadcast section of the schedule in AdDept.
The last item on my notes from the trip in April of 2003 reported:
I spent ten minutes talking with Chad, Bobby McIntosh14, and the QPS programmer about the interface that they want to create. Nothing came of it.
Chad said that he will write up the details of what they would like the QPS interface to do. We can then quote it. The problem that he could not handle with query is how to treat sections. QPS has a job for each page, but the media schedule is on the book.
Bobby McIntosh was the Manager of Advertising Systems. The advertising production area used the Quark Publishing System (QPS) to manage the workflow of some of their direct mail catalogs and newspaper ads. I do not remember this meeting described above at all. If we were to undertake an interface like this, it would have been a massive job that would have taken at least several months. Therefore, I don’t think that we ever got to the point quoting construction of the interface.
My adventures in southern California: North Hollywood is best known for the unbelievable attempted bank robbery in 1997 at a Bank of America branch that was only a mile or so north of the Rob-May headquarters. The two robbers wore home-made body armor and bore much better weapons than the police. Foiled in their escape, they shot it out with the lawmen for an extended period of time. They were eventually killed, but not before the two sides discharged roughly two thousand bullets. Twelve police officers and eight civilians were wounded, but no one besides the perpetrators died.
A slightly fictionalized made-for-TV movie about the incident aired in 2003. No one from Rob-May ever mentioned it in my presence. If I had not seen the movie, I probably never would have known about it.
The LAPD Museum has an exhibit that features the perpetrators, their weapons, and their body armor. Because it was not opened until 2007, I never went there. By then Macy’s had taken over the May Co., and Rob-May was no longer a client.
OK, there was a little fire damage.
The most interesting thing that I saw in North Hollywood was an apartment building that had a large sign on it offering “Free Rent”. I took a photo of it from my rental car.
At the time TSI was actively looking for a new site for our office. I sent an email to Denise Bessette, who ran the office when I was out of town, about it. I suggested that we move our operation to North Hollywood in order to take advantage of this opportunity. If we had rented a handful of apartments, we would have had plenty of room to grow our business. For some reason she did not urge me to sign a $0 lease while I was in the vicinity.
One evening I decided to take a drive into Hollywood itself. I arrived at the corner of North Highland Ave. and Hollywood Blvd., where I saw a throng of people around the Ripley’s Believe it or not. The whole neighborhood was incredibly touristy. I did not even park my car. I drove back to my hotel in Studio City as quickly as I could.
For my last few trips to Rob-May I abandoned Beverly Garland and drove a little farther north to stay at a Hampton Inn. I did this for a couple of reasons. I had found that I liked Hampton Inns better than other hotels. I had an American Express card that I used for stays at Hamptons and other Hilton hotels. This paid off in free stays, which I used either for business trips or vacations.
I also was not enamored with the neighborhood in Studio City. I only found one place to run, and it was a little boring. I had to make several circuits of the path in the park, and the scenery no longer interested me. The biggest factor, however, was food. I had not been able to find many places that served tasty and healthy meals and also could be used—takeout or sit down—comfortably by a lone diner. My notes of July 1999 reported:
I had trouble finding affordable edible food in California. I ended up eating twice at Koo Koo Roo15, which has vegetables. The problem is that the only main courses they serve are rotisserie chicken and ¼ pound of turkey. I had the chicken both times.
The closest Hampton Inn was in Santa Clarita. The drive did not bother me much. The inconvenience was more than offset by the free breakfasts and occasional free snack in the evening. It was close to a large suburban shopping center. I don’t remember exactly where I ate, but I had no problem finding what suitable restaurants.
The best aspect of staying in Santa Clarita was that I discovered a really interesting trail in Quigley Canyon, a park that is very close to Gene Autry’s Melody Ranch. I really enjoyed running through the hills in the park. I had to climb a fairly steep incline to reach the trail that ran along a ridge. A sign at the trailhead warned about snakes and mountain lions, but I never encountered any wildlife while I was running.
Departure: I almost always flew back to Connecticut on a red-eye flight. I would leave LAX at 9 p.m. or later, arrive somewhere on the eastern side of the Mississippi at dawn or earlier, change planes, and then catch another flight to Bradley.
I always filled the gas tank before returning the car to Avis. I once made the mistake of stopping at a gas station in south-central L.A., an area that was close enough to LAX that the gas gauge would appear full. It was past sundown, and the place was not well lit. This was one of the very few times in my life that I felt afraid. I had lived for over three years in inner-city Detroit, but this area was fairly notorious because of the Rodney King incident.
What was scary about this gas station was that a few young men were walking around and approaching customers who were pumping gas. One came up to me and asked me something. I made some kind of noncommittal reply. He was annoyed with my response, but he did not do anything. I got back in my car and returned to the highway with deliberate speed.
On another occasion Karen Jones took me and a group of employees to a restaurant that was in either Burbank or Pasadena. I had my car, and after supper someone outlined for me how to get to LAX. Everyone assured me that I had plenty of time to make my flight. I probably did, but I made a wrong turn somewhere, and by the time that I arrived at the Avis counter, I was really pressed for time.
This was the first and only time that it took a long time to check my car back in at an Avis location. In every other instance no more than five minutes was required. However, this time there was a long line that moved very slowly. By the time that I returned the car and boarded the Avis bus, there was little chance of arriving at the gate in time for my overnight flight on Delta16 to Hartford by way of Atlanta.
When the bus let me off at the terminal I rushed up to the Delta desk with my suitcase. The agent confirmed that I had missed my flight. She then calmly booked me on a different flight that went to Bradley through Cincinnati and was leaving within the hour. I was not charged anything extra for this change, and I arrived in Connecticut less than a half hour later than my scheduled arrival time.
Epilogue: Rob-May used the AdDept system until 2005 or 2006 after the May Co. was purchased by Macy’s. On August 30, 2005, administration of the stores was transferred to another AdDept client, Macy’s West in San Francisco. The history of the installation at Macy’s West is detailed here.
The store in North Hollywood was turned into a Macy’s. It and its oversized parking lot stayed open until October of 2016. The entire acreage is still, six years later, in the process of being transformed into a mixed-use area renamed NoHo West. The retail part of the project evidently suffered from the emergence of the pandemic. A directory map can be found here.
An aerial photo of NoHo West taken in 2019, at which time it was described as “fully framed”.
1. Rusty Hansen does not seem to have an Internet presence in 2022, but I did receive a phone call from him once after he left Rob-May in 2000. Jim Lowe, TSI’s marketing person, and I later talked with him briefly at his new place of employment, Wherehouse Music in Torrance. That experience has been recounted here.
2. Beverly Curtis-Frethy left Rob-May in December of 1999. Her LinkedIn page is here.
3. Beverly Garland was an actress in Hollywood. Among many other roles she was Fred McMurray’s wife in the last few years of My Three Sons. She died in 2008, but her hotel still is thriving in 2022, and it is still a Holiday Inn.
4. I don’t remember reading a book by Ethan Coen. Since my notes did not mention the name or describe the plot, it might have been Gates of Eden, a book of short stories published in 1998.
5. This refers to the trip that Sue, Doug, and I took in 1995 to pitch the AdDept system to Liberty House. The description begins here and continues in two subsequent blog entries.
6. I am almost positive that I have seen every episode of The Rockford Files several times. The only bad one is the first one, the pilot, which had a different Rocky and was too much like Philip Marlow. Rockford lived at 29 Cove Road in Paradise Cove in Malibu. The beach that I went to was approximately twelve miles east of Paradise Cove.
At some point on one of my trips I took a late evening photo of the Los Angeles River. It is posted at the right. The river bed was concrete, and the trickle of water that it contained was laughable.
I could swear that back in the seventies I saw on an episode of The Rockford Files a chase scene that took place in the river itself. However, when I watched all of the episodes again (and again) in the twenty-first century first on MyTV and then on Peacock, I never saw such a scene. The show was recently removed from Peacock. I may never know for certain about that chase scene.
7. There was some kind of hydraulic leak that forced us to leave our scheduled plane and board a different one.
Mary Ng.
8. Mary Ng worked at Rob-May until 2005. Her Linked-In page is here.
9. Steve Ornee was employed at Rob-May until 2006. His Linked-In page is here.
10. CAPS was the mainframe corporate accounting system. It was located in St. Louis.
Kyle.
11. Kyle Levine worked at Rob-May until 2004. His LinkedIn page is here.
Dan.
12. Dan Rothbauer did not leave Rob-May until 2006. His LinkedIn page is here.
13. I still hate cellphones in 2022. While sitting in my right front pants pocket my first “smart phone” ordered pizzas on its own. I did not mourn when it somehow got fried by European current. That story, and a lot more is detailed here. Its replacement has not ordered pizza yet, but it did turn itself on while resting in the right front pocket of my blue jeans. I was playing bridge at the time.
Bobby.
14. Bobby McIntosh stayed at Rob-May until 2006. His LinkedIn page is here.
15. Koo Koo Roo went out of business in 2014.
16. By this time I flew on Delta whenever I could. Delta had the most connections to places that I often visited, and I had a Delta American Express card on which I accumulated thousands of valuable miles that I used for vacations.
Quasi-independent department store division of the May Co. Continue reading →
TSI enjoyed a good relationship for nearly all of the two decades in which the chain of department stores known as Lord and Taylor used AdDept to manage its advertising department. The headquarters was in one of the upper floors of the flagship stores on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
L&T’s Fifth Avenue store.
I don’t remember the details leading to the contract back in December of 1993. I am not sure that we even did a demo for them at the IBM office. L&T may well have been the first sale for TSI’s marketing director, Doug Pease (introduced here).
We had two very important things going for us. The Senior VP of Advertising at L&T was Howard Adler, who had seen what we could do at Macy’s East, the first AdDept installation (described here). Moreover, L&T was owned by the May Company, and two other May Company divisions had been using AdDept successfully for a few years.
In the April 1994 issue if the newsletter, Sound Bytes, TSI announced the fact that L&T had purchased the AdDept system and an AS/4001 on which to run it:
Lord & Taylor, the third May Co. division to use the AdDept system, is currently in the process of finalizing the specifications for its system. Their system will reside in the company’s Manhattan headquarters. All areas of the department will be connected through a PC network.
Although L&T was definitely owned by the May Company, it did not play by the same rules enforced on the other department store divisions. L&T’s advertising department was not required to produce the same monthly reports that bedeviled the other divisions. Its merchandise was different—I actually saw elbow-length gloves for ladies for sale there. It was much more autonomous in many ways.
The flagship store was more elegant than that of any of the other May Company stores. The nearest men’s room to the advertising department was between elevators on a selling floors. It was by far the most spacious, sparkling, and elegant restroom that I encountered at any office, department store, or anywhere else.
I always took Amtrak to Penn Station when I visited L&T. I usually walked to the store on Fifth Avenue unless the weather was really foul, in which case I stood in line at the taxi stand on 34th St. to get the next available cab.
I entered L&T through the employee entrance, which I think was on 38th St., and descended stairs to the security area. Someone would come down to escort me to the advertising department, which was on one of the upper floors. When I left in the evening, I had to get a note from someone verifying that the laptop in my briefcase belonged to me and had not been purloined from L&T.
An amusing set of incidents in Penn Station that occurred on one of my last visits to L&T in 2007 has been recounted here.
Lord & Taylor used direct mail more than regional department stores. Notes that I compiled in 2000 state:
A very large number of reports were done for them. Unfortunately they are almost all too involved to be used by anyone else. They are the only client that uses AdDept to keep track of bill inserts – the little things included in the monthly statements.
They set up production schedules for direct mail. At one time they used AdDept for estimating direct mail, but they abandoned it. They have job jacket programs for both ROP and direct mail.
L&T also did more magazine advertising than the other divisions. AdDept did not seem to help much in that area.
We developed as part of the original design document an elaborate system for them of managing their magazine advertising (“The Projection Book”) and comparing it with competitors’, but they do not use it.
I think that this was the Greek feast. Norm is at the lower left. The guy sitting between two women with his tie in his shirt is Charles. Behind him is Chris.
I vaguely recall that at the very beginning the liaison between TSI and L&T was Norm Vlahos2. I have only a couple of distinct memories about him. The first is that whoever chose him for that role also assigned him and another fellow to act as “security officers” for the AS/400. Norm thought that they should be issued badges or at least arm bands to designate their authority. I also remember that Norm was responsible for ordering the food for the Greek-themed feast in which most of the department participated during one of my visits.
This is Charles’s old office. From left: Jennifer, Denise, Jennifer’s reflection, Ali’s reflection, Denise’s reflection, Bob’s reflection, my reflection (flash).
The other person whom I remember from those early days was named Charles. I am pretty sure that he was the finance director of the advertising department. Charles had a very unusual office. One of the walls was a gigantic mirror. I am not sure what its function was, but it made me very uneasy when I was required to sit in there to talk with him.
Same room; different feast. Tom is in the foreground to the left. The bald spot belongs to Howard.
I later learned that Charles owned a string of karate (or something similar) studios in New Jersey. Maybe he used the mirror when he practiced his moves.
Charles ordered the food from the 2nd Ave Deli for the luncheon with a Jewish theme that the department held on one of my visits. It was the best deli food that I ever tasted.
Tom had an office.
After the initial period in which the tables and historical data were into AdDept and the users had become somewhat familiar with the system, Tom Caputo3 was assigned primary responsibility for the AdDept installation. This was a big break for TSI because we got to deal with a person who had both the authority and the expertise to make good decisions about prioritizing what the system should be used for. He made our lives much easier because we seldom needed to deal directly with the users. He was good at finding out exactly what they wanted or needed and conveying the information clearly to us. Over the years he sent us a very large number of custom programming requests—so many that he asked us to combine the billing for the $75 quote fees onto one monthly bill. We were happy to do that.
Tom worked with us at L&T until 2001. He then took a job at Saks Fifth Avenue, where we again had the pleasure of working with him.
Chris only had a cubicle.
After a while L&T provided Tom with an assistant, Chris Pease4, who was employed by L&T from 1996 through 2001. We often worked closely with Chris as well.
I have a lot of very vivid memories of Tom and Chris. I remember almost nothing about the innumerable small projects that we discussed. However I distinctly remember one episode. You can see from the photos that nearly all the men in the advertising department wore suits, white shirts, and ties. One morning Tom spilled coffee or something on his shirt. He dispatched Chris down to the men’s wear department to buy a substitute for him. I was pretty impressed.
Somehow, my visits to L&T became associated with big departmental lunches in the advertising department. Trust me; no one was celebrating my presence or the wonderfulness of the code and support that TSI provided. It was just that I showed up every two or three months, and that also was deemed a reasonable interval between departmental lunches.
There was always a theme for the lunch and an employee in charge of the choice of menu and restaurant. In addition to the Greek lunch ordered by Norm and the Jewish one managed by Charles, I seem to remember an Italian pranzo and a Mexican fiesta. There may have been more. I don’t remember too many specifics, but the meals were all both authentic and delicious.
I have no idea who these guys are. Tom asked them if they were hungry and then told them to dig in.
If no departmental lunch was scheduled, Tom nearly always took Chris and me to a restaurant for lunch. We usually walked to a Chinese restaurant near L&T. On one of the last occasions we ate delicious lamb chops at a chop house. This was really the life.
After Tom and Chris departed, the installation entered a holding pattern. TSI’s primary contact for several years was Esther Roman5. I am pretty sure that she was in charge of the financial area of the advertising department. AdDept was just one of the tools that she used in her job.
Jennifer, Denise, and Ali.
Denise Bessette, Bob Wroblewski (who helped TSI with marketing of AxN to newspapers), and I made a trip to Manhattan in 2004 to meet with the newspaper coordinators, Jennifer Hoke6 and Ali Flack7. The purpose of the trip was to show them how TSI’s new Internet product, AxN (described here), could work for them. The ladies were rather enthusiastic about it, and L&T used the product for quite a few years.
In 2005 Federated Department Stores merged with and took over management of the May Company stores. L&T did not fit into Federated’s plans. Seven stores were sold or rebranded as Macy’s. The rest of the stores, including the flagship store and the headquarters in New York City, were sold to NRDC Equity Partners in 2006. In the following years NRDC also negotiated the purchase of Fortunoff, which was a chain of jewelry stores that was somehow linked with a group of stores that sold outdoor furniture. The intent was to use the L&T staff to manage these stores.
NRDC wanted to keep a separate set of books for the Fortunoff stores. L&T therefore asked TSI to create a separate instance of AdDept on the same AS/400. We figured out a way to do this (some tables and even data files needed to be shared) and installed it in late 2007 so that it could be tested for a couple of months and then used live in 2008.
Our main contact at L&T during this period was Esther. I also dealt with Dan Marrero, who worked for her, in 2007 and 2008. My notes for that period also mention someone named Rachel, but I don’t remember her.
The Fortunoff scheme was a fiasco. In February of 2009 Fortunoff declared bankruptcy after a lackluster holiday season during the Great Recession. NRDC tried to sell the chain, but there were no takers. By May of 2009 all of the Fortunoff stores had been shuttered.
HBC started in the fur trade.
Meanwhile, NRDC had purchased the Hudson Bay Company, the oldest corporation in North America. It decided that the HBC staff could manage the remaining L&T stores from Ontario. The last work that TSI did for L&T was to help with the migration of the programs and data to an AS/400 somewhere in Canada.
This marriage did not work very well either. In 2019 L&T was again sold, this time to Le Tote, a company that rents women’s clothing (!). The flagship store on Fifth Avenue was closed in 2019 along with some of the other stores. The Covid-19 pandemic rendered the recovery of the remaining stores unfeasible. All the remaining stores were closed by the end of 2020.
The Lord and Taylor name remains in 2021, but only as an online retailer. I tried to find out if they still sell those long gloves. There was no search feature on the website, and there was no category that formal gloves would fit in. So, I don’t think so.
Most of my trips to L&T were one-day excursions. I rode an Amtrak train to Penn Station in the morning and caught a northbound train back home in the evening.
The approach to Lincoln Center is breathtaking.
On Thursday, March 6, 2008, however, I stayed overnight at a hotel. When the dates for the trip had been set, I checked to see what was being staged at the Metropolitan Opera that evening. When I discovered that Verdi’s La Traviata, one of my very favorite operas, was on the bill, I resolved to attend. I had seen this opera twice at the Bushnell in Hartford, and I owned a fantastic CD that featured Luciano Pavarotti and Joan Sutherland. I had listened to that recording dozens of times.
After work on the 6th I walked the 1.7 miles from L&T (or maybe the nearby hotel) to Lincoln Center. The theater was nearly full. My seat was near the front but way to the left. I had a terrible view of the stage, but the sound in the theater was so good that the awkward viewpoint did not affect my enjoyment much. I adapted.
The building was, of course, extremely impressive both on the inside and the outside. It was hard to believe that such a huge auditorium had such outstanding acoustics.
The curtain rose on the ballroom scene. I expected for my eye to be drawn to Violetta as the life of the party, but I was wrong. Even after she started singing I was slow to identify the shortest and chubbiest woman on the stage as the legendary lady of the camellias. Ruth Ann Swenson was in excellent voice, but it was impossible to suspend disbelief about her being either an irresistible Parisian courtesan or a woman in the last stages of consumption.
The other two leads, Matthew Polenzani and Dwayne Croft, were fine, but for me the real star was Franco Zeffirelli’s classic production. I especially enjoyed the last act, which employed the Met’s stage elevators and a staircase to transport the Germonds from Violetta’s parlor to her bedroom. Operas are seldom even slightly realistic, but I don’t see how this approach could be topped.
Swenson & Kaufmann.
I discovered when researching this section of the blog that the first few performances of this opera back in the beginning of the season had featured Renée Fleming. That would have been something to see, but, then again, I probably would not have been able to scare up a ticket on short notice. Furthermore, if I had waited a week, I might have been able to see Jonas Kaufmann as Alfredo. I did not know who he was in 2008, but within a few years he became the most revered tenor in the world.
The 2007-2008 season was the last that Ruth Ann Swenson performed at the Met. Peter Gelb did not offer her any more contracts, although he insisted that it was not because of her weight.
1. A detailed description of the AdDept system design can be found here. Unique features of the AS/400 are described here.
7. I could not find a LinkedIn page for Ali Flack. However, there are strong indications that she continued to work for L&T after the management of the chain was turned over to HBC.
8. A detailed description of the AxN system can be found here.
I remember getting two phone calls from Beverly Ingraham1, the Advertising Director at the May Company division based in Houston, Foley’s. The first one came in early 1993 before we had hired Doug Pease to handle our marketing. I spoke with Beverly about AdDept, TSI’s administrative system for large retail advertisers. She had learned of it from one of our mailings.
Foley’s flagship store at 1110 Main St. was demolished in 2013. I am not sure what replaced it.
I informed her that we had installed the system at a “sister division”, Hecht’s. I emphasized that it had been helping the employees at Hecht’s with their monthly May Company reports as well as many quotidian administrative tasks. She asked me to fly to Houston and show the system to them. Although I don’t remember the occasion, I must have spent a day or two talking with potential users, primarily Richard Roark2 in the business office at Foley’s off in one of the top floors of the flagship store on Main Street. The demo must have been at an IBM office. Sue might have come with me to Houston, but neither of us remembers the trip. We met Beverly and Linda Knight, the Senior VP of Advertising3. The people at Foley’s all seemed enthusiastic and exceptionally nice, as they did every time that I visited there.
After we returned to Connecticut, I wrote up a proposal to run the AdDept system on the F10 model that had recently been introduced by IBM. There is little doubt that I also included quotes for some custom programming—I forget the details.
I was very excited about this. I knew that Foley’s advertising must have had money because the May Company had recently merged the D&F division, which had been based in Denver, with Foley’s. The combined operation would be run from Houston. That gave them stores in Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado. The May Co.’s purse strings were bound to be a little looser than usual.
I was also excited because I was quite certain that most of the work that we had done for Hecht’s would be usable for Foley’s with only minor adjustments. For once we seemed to be on familiar ground.
Over the next week or two I talked with Richard Roark about some of the items in the proposal. When I finally got the second call from Beverly, she did not immediately say that the project had been approved. I had to ask her. She said, “Oh, yeah. Sure.” She then corrected my assumption that Richard Roark would be the liaison. She assured me that she would tell me who it was, and she did a little later.
I remember very well my first visit to Foley’s in May of 1993 to install the system. I flew on Continental Airlines from Bradley to Intercontinental Airport4, which was twenty-three miles north of the city center. I took a shuttle bus to the Hyatt Regency Hotel, which was only a couple of blocks from Foley’s headquarters.
The Hyatt featured a lobby that was both luxurious and sometimes very noisy. A bar was right in the middle of it, and the area above was open all the way up to the roof, thirty stories up. It was like an echo chamber or a natural amplifier. So, half of the rooms had windows that viewed the lobby. After my first stay there I always requested a room with an outside window.
That’s the Hyatt’s bar way down there in the middle of the lobby.
The elevators all had glass walls on the lobby side. I am not ordinarily affected by heights or tight locations, but the rapid descent in these glass cages made me quite uneasy.
I distinctly remember my first stroll to Foley’s from the Hyatt. It was March. I knew that I would not need the overcoat that I had worn to the airport in Connecticut, but I did have on a wool suit. The lobby of the Hyatt was very cool. I went through the revolving door and I was smashed in the face by the heat and humidity. It was like walking into a sauna.
By the time that I swam walked the few blocks to Foley’s big brick building, I had grown tolerant of the humidity. However, I was not expecting to see ten or so mendicants sitting on the sidewalk near the employees’ entrance. This crew was not the aggressive kind I had encountered in my life in Detroit and visits to New York. They just seemed hopeless. I don’t know why, but I was shocked to see this in Texas.
I don’t actually remember too much else about that day. That is a good thing. In TSI’s thirty-five year history we only had a few near-disasters or crises, and I distinctly remember each one.
I recall that one of our first big assignments for Foley’s was when the Houston Chronicle bought out the Houston Post and its assets in 1995. Foley’s was by far the largest advertiser in both papers. They ran dozens of ads every week, and the newspaper coordinators had already recorded the schedules for both papers for several months ahead.
Their first requirement was a list of all ads that were scheduled to run in the Post but not the Chronicle. That was not difficult; I wrote a query to produce the list. They would need to decide what to do with those ads and adjust the schedules for the Chronicle where necessary.
Next, they needed to delete all of the ads scheduled for the Post. This was was a little more difficult. I had to replicate exactly the process that would have occurred if they canceled them individually. That meant that I had to write history records for each deletion, and all subsidiary files and summary records needed to be updated as if the deletions were being done one at a time.
Finally, they needed me to find all the ads in the Chronicle that were full depth (the longer dimension), which, if memory serves, was twenty-one inches. All of these ads would be one-half inch deeper because the Post’s presses, which the Chronicle planned to use going forward, cut the paper to that size. That meant that the costs (Foley’s kept track of actual costs billed by the papers and costs marked up to reflect production expenses that they showed the merchants) had to be recalculated.
Since any paper could change its size (and many subsequently did), I made this one into a program that could be attached to a menu available to the users. Since AdDept’s rate calculations had been externalized into separate callable modules, this was also not too difficult. History records and updates of subsidiary files and summaries were required for this step, too.
They needed all of this in just a couple of days. There was no test environment. No one helped me, and no one tested the code that I produced. On TSI’s developmental system I simulated a few ads of each type and tested the code on them. When I felt satisfied with it, I sent the code to Foley’s over the phone lines, crossed my fingers, and ran the programs.
I must have done a pretty good job. No one complained.
Visits to Foley’s were frequent during the nineties. Sometimes they wanted training, but usually they wanted to describe enhancements that they desired. Two of the trips had a comical aspect. The first one was when I asked Sue to take one of the early trips for me. I cannot remember what the objective for the trip was. She did not have a credit card in those days, and she forgot to bring any cash. Fortunately, someone at Foley’s cashed a check for her, or she might have needed to join the beggars clustered by the employees’ entrance.
On another occasion I wore my running shoes on the flight to Houston. When I had arrived in Houston, as usual I took the shuttle to the Hyatt. When I opened my suitcase at the Hyatt, I was aghast to discover that I had brought only one leather shoe. How could my valet have been so careless?
I recalled that I had seen a Payless Shoe Source, at one time a division of the May Company, between the hotel and Foley’s. I bought a pair of black leather shoes at Payless for $20. They were so uncomfortable that I threw them away as soon as I arrived home after the trip. However, they saved me from embarrassment during the three days of that visit. I figured that my misbegotten purchase was the equivalent of a bargain-priced rental for less than $7 per day.
One of Robert’s most important jobs was to keep the printers clean and full of paper.
Our first liaison at Foley’s was Robert Myers5. I think that he must have come from the IT department. He helped to set up a system whereby the store managers could view the contents of their ads on systems in their stores before the ads were run. He tried to get me (of all people) to market the arrangement to other retailers. I suppose that he meant that we should try to offer it as an enhancement to AdDept, but the guts of what he had done involved infrastructure that was unique to Foley’s. I didn’t understand most of it, and I was too busy with things that I understood a lot better to devote time to learning it.
Robert attended nearly all of the training sessions when I came to Houston, and he did a good job of writing up software requests when I was not around. He was one of our best liaisons.
That is Robert talking and facing the camera. The bearded guy in the foreground is Doug Pease6. This picture was not taken at Foley’s. I don’t recognize the other three.
Robert once expressed the opinion to me that XML would become the solution to all of the interoperability problems of software systems. I had read a little about it, but I did not understand it. He did not do a good job of explaining it. He may have been right, but to my knowledge XML never entered the main stream among software developers. TSI implemented a lot of interfaces with software from other companies. Sometimes we sent them files, and sometimes AdDept received and processed files. We never considered using XML.
One day Robert took me on a road trip. This must have been over a weekend, probably the one in which I oversaw the migration from the F10 that Foley’s initially purchased in 1993 to a faster model with more capacity, the 270.
We drove down7 to the Johnson Space Center (now called Space Center Houston). We spent some time at the exhibits that they have about manned space flight. It was OK, but ever since I was required in 1967 as a member of the varsity debate team at the University of Michigan (explained here) to argue against the concept of putting an American on the moon, it has always seemed to me that it was an expensive and dangerous idea with very little payoff. So, I was not as gung-ho as most of the visitors to the center.
I found notes that indicated that I went out to dinner with Robert Myers and his wife in 2000. I have no clear recollection of the occasion.
The May Company determined that AdDept should be installed in all of its department store divisions. The process of reaching this decision is described here. Robert was assigned by the May Company to help with the installations at several other divisions. On a few occasions we crossed paths at other divisions.
Left to right are Charisse Cossey, who was the TSI liaison after Robert, Sharon Mullins (the second-in-command), Beverly Ingraham, Ralph Annunziato, and Angela Hurry. That’s my big blue mug in the foreground. This room was called “The Wall Room” because the ads for the current week were always displayed on the wall.
Beverly Ingraham had a nameplate on her desk that said “Bevo”. I don’t know whether she was an alumna of UT8, or if it was a play on her name. Maybe both.
I remember doing one project that Beverly was especially interested in. The IT department was able to provide us with sales by department by store by day. I wrote a program to convert this file into a usable format for AdDept programs. We then used the information in reports and screens for each merchant that showed them in each market the total costs of their ads (or parts of ads) and the associated sales.
The ability to provide this kind of information was a big feather in Beverly’s cap. This was the first of several TSI projects aimed at evaluating the productivity of the advertising. The concept was actually more useful as a sales tool to show the power and reach of the AdDept system than as a practical tool for the advertisers. If more than one media was employed for a sales event, it was impossible to attribute which of the ads produced the results.
I don’t have distinct memories of most of the projects that we undertook for Foley’s. For the ones after Denise Bessette became VP of Software Development (as explained here) I only wrote up the requests. I don’t have an excuse for forgetting the ones between 1993 and 1997 I probably did most of the coding myself.
This is Robert at a buffet lunch at the department. I don’t remember the reason for it.
I unearthed some notes for a visit in 2000 about insertion orders for newspapers. Foley’s two newspaper coordinators were Hedy Wolpa9 and a lady named Leila, whose last name I don’t remember. I was shocked when they told me that they had not been faxing insertion orders to the papers directly from the AS/400 because they could only order by date, not by publication. They thought that this made it difficult for them to specify positioning (such as “Back page of main section”) while ordering. I also learned that they also did not realize that they could specify much longer special instructions as well.
This would never do. They had paid us to provide insertion orders in the precise format that Foley’s had specified, and they had paid IBM for the faxing hardware and software. We might have even gotten a commission on that. Furthermore, TSI needed for them to be ordering in AdDept so that we could switch them to using the product that we were about to release, AxN (described here).
I think that this picture was taken at Filene’s. Robert is seated with two fingers raised. I don’t recognize the other people. That’s definitely my yellow spiral binder on the table.
While I was at Foley’s I wrote a new front end program for the insertion orders. It allowed them to order for one paper at a time. They were very happy; it was just what they wanted.
Denise hated for me to do things like this on the road. She did not want me to modify any code on the fly. I understood that. In this case, however, I thought that it was better to beg forgiveness rather that to ask permission from Denise. The top priority of this trip was to get Foley’s on board for insertion orders. They became an enthusiastic users, and all their papers subscribed to AxN10 a soon as we made it available.
Foley’s was, by most measures, our best client. They used almost every aspect of the system. They even used the SmartPlus interface for broadcast that was originally designed for the GrandAd system for ad agencies. Their agency, which was in Dallas, sent them files with schedules and audit data.
Several Foley’s users also became very adept at using Query/400 to design some of their own reports. They used this product as much as or more than any other client. They sometimes used their queries and a product called ShowCase Strategy without any assistance from TSI.
As of 2000 TSI had delivered and installed approximately 200 custom programming projects to Foley’s.
1. Beverly Ingraham was promoted to Senior Vice President of Advertising at Foley’s in January of 2000. She held that position until the division was dissolved after Macy’s acquired the May Company in 2006. I am pretty sure that she went to the Macy’s Central division in Atlanta and headed the advertising department there for several years. I think that in 2021 she lives in Spring, TX, twelve miles north of the airport. If I am correct, then she is my age and therefore probably retired.
3. In 2000 Linda, who was by then known as Linda Knight Quick, resigned as Senior VP of Foley’s to take a job at Penney’s. Foley’s sued to prevent this because of a non-compete clause in her contract. I was unable to determine how the situation was resolved.
41, not 43.
4. In 1997 it was renamed George Bush Intercontinental Airport.
5. I have a note from January of 2000 that indicated that he was doing Internet development for Foley’s IT department using Cold Fusion, but I do not know what he has been up to in the last two decades.He helped me identify some of the people in photos of employees from Foley’s and other May Co. divisions. He also said that his association with TSI changed his life, but he did not explain how.
6. Doug Pease was TSI’s most successful marketing director. Much more can be read about him here. I think that Doug and I must have stopped at Foley’s as part of a marketing trip to Stage Stores, also in Houston. That installation is described here.
7. I wonder if I had a rental car for that trip. Robert lived a long way from downtown Houston. He generally took the bus to work!
8 The mascot of the University of Texas Longhorns is a steer named Bevo. The current one in 2021 is Bevo XV.
9. Hedy Wolpa’s LinkedIn page can be viewed here. She worked at Foley’s for thirty-one years!
10. The design of AxN is described in some detail here.
