Monthly Archives: July 2021

1992 Cruising Tour of Turkey and Greece: Part 1

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Getting to and touring Istanbul. Continue reading →

I had high hopes of watching some camel wrestling on this trip.

I do not remember how I discovered this cruise from Istanbul to Athens with stops in Lesbos, Kuşadası (Ephesus), Rhodes, and Santorini. The price was so low that I just could not pass it up. My recollection is that it was only $1,000 per person double occupancy, but maybe it was $1,500. It also included three nights at a very nice hotel in Istanbul and two nights in Athens.

How hard could modern Greek be?

Sometimes cruise lines had empty cabins that they would sell at the last minute for a deep discount to people who could travel with little notice. This could not have been one of those situations. I had time to check out a travel guidebook for Turkey from the library. In it I learned about camel wrestling, which I hoped to see in Turkey. I also had enough time to purchase Barron’s Mastering Greek at the local Barnes & Noble. It was a package of books and cassette tapes developed by the U.S. Foreign Service Institute. I entertained the fantasy that because of the ten semesters of classical Greek classes that I had taken in high school and college, I would be able to master modern Greek in a few weeks. I discovered that the grammar had not changed much, but the vocabulary was totally different. Phrases such as “early-born”, “rosy-fingered”, and “cloudgatherer” were not used much in the twentieth century. The worst discovery was that the pronunciation, especially the vowel sounds, was very different from what I was taught.

Sue agreed that we should sign up for the cruise. Our goal was simply to mix a lot of relaxation with a bit of the exotic. Did we check out the cruise line? Of course not. Why would we?

I cannot remember the name of the cruise line or the ship. I am pretty sure that the word “dolphin” was part of one or both of the names.1 I remember that when I checked a few years later the cruise line was out of business.

I also am uncertain of both the year and the month in which we traveled. My best guess is that it was 1992, but I may be wrong. My recollection is that the weather was pretty nice throughout the trip. Sue would have been very uncomfortable if we traveled in the summer. On the other hand, Denise Bessette was working fewer hours at TSI during the spring and fall because of her classes. I would feel much more comfortable knowing that she was in TSI’s office when we were abroad.

This was the plan.

The plan was to fly from Newark to Frankfort on Lufthansa and then change to another Lufthansa flight to Istanbul. Our return flight was non-stop from Athens to JFK in Queens. I made sure that I obtained a frequent flyer number from Delta and for whichever airline Lufthansa was associated with. I think that it was United.

I was a little scared of us being on our own in Turkey. I don’t remember that I ever saw Midnight Express, but I had heard about it. I also learned from the guide book that over 99 percent of the inhabitants of Turkey were Muslim. This did not give me a warm and fuzzy feeling. Sue and I were not experienced international travelers. We had both been to England in 1990, and Sue had been to Amsterdam in the seventies, but neither of us had ever changed planes in a foreign country, and the whole idea of arriving in Istanbul, while thrilling, also provoked a little angst. It was not the third world, but it wasn’t London or Amsterdam either.

We used Erika Travel, our usual agent, to book the flight to Newark. At the time Continental offered a shuttle service from Bradley to Newark. Our plane left Bradley and arrived in Newark on time. We then took the tram to the international terminal. When we reached the front of the line at the Lufthansa ticket counter, it was a little more than an hour before the departure time. The agent told us, however, that it was too late to check in. Our seats had already been assigned to standby passengers. She was, however, able to book us on a British Airways flight to Heathrow with a connection to Istanbul. It would arrive less than an hour after the Lufthansa flight from Frankfort.2

British Airways to the rescue.

There was still one major difficulty. Our luggage was in the Lufthansa section of the secure area. We had to wait for it to arrive at the British Airways ticketing area. The first step was for the bags to be located and placed on a cart. The cart then somehow needed to exit the secure area to a place where trucks were allowed. The truck then needed to circle around from the departure area to the arrival area to drop the bags off to us. It seemed very unlikely to me that all of this would work, but it did. We had just enough time to check our bags and board the British Airways flight.

This was a tremendous relief for me. I do not get stressed out over many things in life, but the idea of having to make connections “on the fly” from Newark, NJ, to Istanbul, Turkey, is the kind of scenario that usually only appears in my nightmares.

I don’t remember anything about the flight to London. We arrived early in the morning. We had no trouble finding our connection to Istanbul, and that flight arrived right on time. As soon as we got off of the plane, however, we knew that we were in a different sort of place. It seemed more like a second- or third-rate airport in the U.S. than a major international hub, and it felt old and unprofessional The most striking thing to me was a man wearing a suit seated at a card table. On the wall behind him was a cardboard sign: “Joker Rent-a-Car”.

Istanbul Atatürk Airport.

All of our luggage arrived, and we had no difficulty with customs. Now came the part that worried me. We exited the baggage claim area into the main terminal. Hundreds of people were amassed behind a cordon. Many were screaming at passengers whom they recognized or thought that they recognized. We endured a minute or two of panic in this chaotic scene, but then we spotted a young man hold a sign emblazoned with the name of our cruise line. We headed his way and introduced ourselves. His list of passengers was sorted by airline and flight number. Since our scheduled flight had arrive earlier, it took him a while to locate our names.

A different person, who had been standing next to him, walked with us for perhaps fifty yards. At that point we were handed off to another person. In all, five or six different escorts accompanied us for short stretches to the bus. The last of these explained that jobs were plentiful in Turkey, but the pay was not very good.

The bus took Sue, me, and perhaps twenty other passengers to our hotel, which was modern and western. I seem to remember that it was a Conrad Hotel, but I may be wrong. We went up to our room and unpacked. Nothing was scheduled for this first day. I went out for a little walk, but the hotel was pretty much isolated from the rest of the city. Immediately upon my return to the room I collapsed on the bed and slept for several hours. I was exhausted from the stress and jet lag. It was the first time that I had experienced jet lag, and this was the worst cast that I can remember.

Sue and I may have eaten supper at the hotel. At the time the exchange rate was approximately 7,000 lira per dollar. So, the prices on the menu were rather startling. The locals, however, were generally more than happy to take dollars from tourists.

The vacation started in earnest the next day. It was never clear who employed the people arranging our tours of Istanbul. The cruise line probably contracted with one or more local touring companies. In general, the approach was to spend a small amount of time at a large number of places.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

Buses took us to various tourist spots accompanied by a guide. Ours was a young woman who spoke perfect English and, unlike nearly all of the local woman whom we saw, wore no head scarf. She informed us about the Janissaries, Christian troops who protected the Sultan and guarded the harem (accent on the second syllable). She also told us about Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the Turkish national hero who defeated the Allies in World War I at Gallipoli and the combined Greek and allied forces in the Turkish Civil War that ended in 1923. She called that later event “the miracle”. I also remember her telling us how proud she was that her country, while predominantly Muslim, had a secular democratic government with the objective of being open to Europe and the west.3 The military, of all things traditionally intervened in favor of democracy and secularism whenever the government tilted toward religious fundamentalism.

We also learned from her that the Turks tended to take vacations as extended families. Many who worked in the European part owned second houses on the Asian coast that were used as vacation dwellings by relatives. We saw some of these houses. I remember being surprised at how many of them had solar panels.

One thing that our guide did not attempt was to teach us a few words of Turkish—not hello, good-bye, please, thank you: nothing. Although a small portion of the residents of Istanbul spoke English, it was a good bet that nearly all of those people were the ones that we would encounter in our short stay.

I don’t remember the order in which we visited the sights. It surprises me that we were able to cram so many into only two days. We did not stay more than a couple of hours at any of them, and I don’t remember needing to wait in line anywhere.

We definitely visited the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, which is better known as the Blue Mosque. It was gigantic. The inside was decorated with tiles and windows and figures, but mostly it was just empty. I knew that because they were considered idolatry, there would be no statues or painting inside, but it still seemed awfully vacant. This approach has worked to inspire people for thirteen centuries; it is definitely not my place to criticize it. I am just saying that it seemed to work much better as a mosque than as a tourist attraction.

The outside of the Blue Mosque, however, was definitely impressive. In fact, the whole array of domes and minarets throughout the city was striking. The calls to prayer were likewise a reminder that we were intruders in an ancient culture. We enjoyed the experience. One of the primary purposes of this cruise was to broaden our horizons.

The luxurious Topkapi Palace was the Ottoman Sultan’s home before 1856. It was then turned into a government office building and subsequently a museum. Our tour did not include the harem (accent on second syllable), but we were told that we could arrange to come back and see it on our own if we wanted to do so.

I do not remember much about the experience. After we entered the building we were on our own without a guide. I have a vague recollection of some armor and weapons, some documents , and some jewelry. Nothing really caught my attention. At that point in my life I was only vaguely familiar with the historical context.

I was hoping that we would get to visit Hagia Sophia, the famous cathedral that was the centerpiece of the Eastern Church for centuries. After the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453 it was turned into a mosque. The day that we were scheduled to go there it was closed for some reason.

Instead the bus let us off at a former Christian church that featured a collection of Byzantine mosaics. I think that it might have been the Chora Church. As I recall, we were all rather tightly jammed into the space at the entrance. The mosaics were on all sides of us, including above us. My neck bothered me for several days after this. At the time I was too much of a philistine to appreciate the artistry, but at least it was more interesting than looking at hundreds of identical tiles. No one knowledgeable was with us to explain the works.

The bus also dropped us off at the Grand Bazaar, an incredibly large covered marketplace. Inside were several thousand stores. Although they were all inside, and there were only a few points of entry,there were lots of actual streets. The stores sold all kinds of stuff, but most catered to tourists. My recollection is that about half of them sold rugs. There might have been price tags on some items, but, in fact, all prices were negotiable.

My recollection is of a place with much less light and much more people.

Sue enjoyed examining the knickknacks at some of the stores. She may have bought something; I don’t remember. I did not go in very far; I tried to keep an exit in sight at all times. It would be extremely easy to get lost there. That would be my idea of hell, being lost in the Grand Bazaar being passed from one rug salesman to another until they finally broke down my resistance. Then a different set of vendors could swoop like hyenas after a kill.

Many of the salesmen in the bazaar sat outside of their stores and aggressively tried to encourage people to stop in their stores. They could identify foreigners from their shoes. Most of our group were obviously Americans.

We visited a location outside of the city walls. I think that it was the Rumelihisan Fortress. I do not remember much about it. Sue stayed down at the ground level and took photos4 while I climbed around and took in the incredible view across the Bosphorus.

We attended a concert of Turkish military music; come to think of it, it might have been inside the fortress. The musicians were in the army, and they all had big mustaches. We were told that this was a tradition among the Turks. For some reason the mustaches were said to terrify their opponents. I guess that they worked sort of like the maize and blue winged helmets.

I don’t remember much about the music itself. It sounded nothing like anything with which I was familiar. I get annoyed by bad music rather easily; this performance did not bother me.

On one of the evenings the cruise line had arranged a private party for our group at a different hotel. Buses took us there, and we all took the elevator up to a room on one of the top floors. There were snacks and drinks and music. The big attraction was some authentic Turkish belly dancing by one of the very few blonde women whom we encountered anywhere in Turkey. We later were informed that she had learned her technique at a belly dancing school in New Jersey. It was a goof, but we had a pleasant time.

A group of us also went to what was apparently a high-end carpet store that was, as I recall, air conditioned. My recollection is that we sat in something that resembled bleachers The salesman was very polished. He provided us all with a beverage. I think that it was the extremely strong Turkish coffee. There may have been something else. Then helper after helper brought out rug after rug that each unrolled with one practiced snap. The salesman then explained the weaving techniques employed the people who had woven the rugs and what the advantages of each method was. The presentation was very professional.

At the end he described the process the store used to send the rugs to the homes of the purchasers regardless of where they lived. Most of the attendees succumbed to the lure of the performance, but Sue and I had no interest in buying a rug. As I recall, the seats and the cool air were the selling points for our attendance.

All the men in Istanbul seemed to smoke cigarettes. My guidebook said that most were chain smokers. They might extinguish their cigarettes while they were pumping gas, but that was about it. We saw advertisements everywhere for Lucky Strike and Camel cigarettes. We were told that many Turks preferred American cigarettes They were considered healthier because the taste was not as strong.

I proudly called to mind the old American commercials that showed actors dressed as doctors endorsing various brands of cigarettes. No product was as profitable as an addictive drug. Tobacco was the best one because it took decades to kill their customers.

We saw countless taxi drivers in the European part of Istanbul. All of them were men, and they all seemed to have mustaches. They held their cigarettes between two fingers on the right hand as it perched perched on the steering wheel.

We were encouraged to venture out into the city on our own. The guide told us that there was very little crime in the city. The method of transportation preferred by the locals was in little vans that were available at designated locations. There did not seem to be a schedule. The van depart only when it was full. I don’t know how one transferred from one van to another. We never tried this.

On one of the mornings Sue and I got adventurous and walked to a little market near the hotel. We bought a loaf or two of bread and some jam or something. The whole thing cost less than a dollar, and we made a nice little breakfast out of it.

The cruise line arranged for all of us to cross the Bosphorus to the Asian side on a ferry. We stayed there only long enough to enjoy a wonderful home-cooked lunch at a restaurant there. I don’t remember exactly what was served. I think that they offered eight or ten dishes, and we were allowed to sample the ones that interested us. It was the first time that Sue and I had ever been in Asia.

On one other occasion our group ate at a restaurant that catered to business people. They were all seated near a large window far from the entrance. The proprietor seated as far away from them as possible because the air in their section was thick with cigarette smoke. As I recall, the food was quite good, but pricey by Turkish standards.

Our most memorable time in Istanbul was the last evening. I decided that we should go out and try a local restaurant on our own that I had noticed near the hotel. It had decals for Visa and MasterCard affixed to the door.

Sue and I walked there, went in, and asked in English supplemented by gestures for a table in the non-smoking section. Someone escorted us upstairs to an area with eight or ten tables. We immediately noticed the white tablecloths that were decorated with small holes—cigarette burns. I seem to remember that the waiter also brought a fan over to blow on us. It must have been warm up there.

Our enduring memory of Istanbul.

We both ordered fish and some side dishes that I don’t remember. The fish came with head and bones. After we had consumed what we could we each took a photo of the other as we held the fish skeleton beside our heads.

When the bill was presented, I gave my credit card to the waiter. He took it and was gone for a few minutes. He returned with the card and stammered for a few seconds before saying, “No sleeps. No sleeps.”

He meant that the restaurant had supposedly exhausted its supply of credit card slips. I suspect that the Visa and MasterCard stickers had not been valid for some time.

So, I paid with dollars. He brought back our change in liras. I explained that we were leaving the next morning, and could not use liras. He took back the liras. He was gone for five or ten minutes before he returned with the change in dollars. I suspect that he had to get it from a friend or relative.

Sue and I enjoyed this experience. There was something joyful about interacting successfully with someone from a totally different culture. They did things differently in Turkey, but in our experience they generally got them done.

The cruise itself, the days on the Greek mainland, and the return trip are described in Part 2, which can be read here.

The Dolphin IV after it was sold to Canaveral Cruise Line.

1. Dolphin Cruise Line, which was sold to Premier Cruise Line in 1997, owned and operated a ship called the Dolphin IV. It was definitely sailing in the early nineties, but I was unable to verify that it sailed the Aegean.

2. This turned out to be a real bonanza. We were not charged anything for transferring our reservations to British Airways. In fact, Lufthansa took down our address and sent us a check for several hundred dollars to cover the inconvenience. Flying was a lot different in those days.

3. I remember thinking about our young guide in 2014 when Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party was elected and began moving the country away from this secular and democratic approach. In 2021 secular Turkey is only a dim memory.

4. I have not been able to locate any of Sue’s photos of this trip. The only photos that I took were with Sue’s camera.

2003-2020 The Enfield Pets: Part 2

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Three black cats. Continue reading →

The story of the pets who shared the house in Enfield with Sue and me begins here. It recounts the first fifteen years of our lives there with, for most of the period, two cats named Rocky and Woodrow. Rocky died in the summer of 2003 after a very full life.

In late 2003 or early 2004 Sue’s sister Betty told us that a friend of hers had a family of cats that were too much for her to manage. Sue went to meet her one evening and chose on the spot to adopt a long-haired black male that was about the same size as Rocky and Woodrow. The woman called him Fluffy, which, of course, would never do. I dubbed him Giacomo after my favorite opera composer, Giacomo Puccini, and Giacomo della Chiesa, better known as Pope Benedict XV.

For a few weeks Giacomo was, to put it mildly, very wary of his new surroundings. We did not keep him cooped up for more than a day or two, and thereafter I personally spent a lot of time looking for him and trying to remove him from various hiding places. I remember that one day he somehow crawled under the dishwasher in the old kitchen. Fortunately, he was just shy, not a bit aggressive or even defensive. As soon as I got a good grip on him he let me pull him out of his hiding spot without much of a struggle.

Giacomo on the chair showing off his thumbs and his anteater tail. Woodrow looks up from the floor.

Finding him when he hid outdoors was even more challenging. He liked to retreat beneath some evergreen bushes on the north side of our house. When I approached him from one side, he slipped over to the other. It took me at least thirty minutes to retrieve him whenever he did this.

Woodrow, who made new friends very easily, took the new kid under his wing. Giacomo followed his lead in nearly everything.

Eventually, Giacomo became comfortable in both our house and our yard. However, he did not seem to comprehend the value of the cat door (described here). It looked like a trap to him.

Finally, one day Sue and I decided to team up to help him understand it. Sue held him on the outside of the cat door and pushed him through. I was in the basement standing on a chair by the cat door. When he appeared on the top shelf of the bookcase, I grabbed him, took him in my arms (which he liked), and walked around the basement enough so that he could figure out where he was. I then returned him to the top shelf by the cat door and pushed him back through it. Sue grabbed him and held him for a minute or two. Then she pushed him back through to the basement again.

All of a sudden I could see the light bulb appear over Giacomo’s head as he emerged into familiar surroundings. The message penetrated through all the fear to his little brain. He finally realized that this little door meant that he could come and go as he pleased. It was no trap; it meant freedom!

Meanwhile, to our surprise, Giacomo continued to grow. After a couple of months he was a good two inches taller than Woodrow and three or more inches longer. He had one broken (or at least shorter) fang that bothered him not even a little. He also had polydactyly on both front paws. Each had an extra toe sticking out on the inside. They looked a lot like thumbs. One other thing was quickly noticeable about Giacomo—he was left-pawed. I called his left front paw “Lefty”. If it came towards you, it generally meant business.

During his first summer in Enfield Giacomo cleaned out the mole colony that had resumed residency when Woodrow retired as master exterminator a few years earlier.

For the most part Giacomo followed Woodrow around the house and the yard. Woodrow habitually came in to the bedroom every morning when my alarm went off at 5 AM. Giacomo began to join us. I was expected to acknowledge both of them, although Woodrow wanted nothing more than a rub or two on his head. Giacomo liked to be rubbed all the way down his spine, but he did not like his belly rubbed.

In the summer the coolest sport for a nap was this sink. Giacomo learned this trick from Woodrow.

From the start Giacomo preferred me over Sue. Whenever I sat down on a chair he jumped onto my lap. If I was seated at my desk (which was really a tabletop astride two file cabinets), he often got bored and went exploring on the table. If I was watching TV, he lay lengthwise on my lap (on a stadium blanket that I always set there) when he was younger and across it when he got older. I don’t know why he changed. Whenever I lay down he walked (he was so long that he hardly needed to jump) up onto the bed and settled himself next to me.

I never teased Giacomo in the way that I tortured Woodrow with that stick and feather. However, I occasionally took advantage of the fact that he allowed me to do almost anything to him. I liked to lift him up over my head and make him pretend to walk on the ceiling.

Woodrow and Giacomo were left “home alone” during our trips to Village Italy in 2005 (described here) and Eastern Europe in 2007 (described here).

Suburban raccoons are too fat for cat doors.

Woodrow was still around for a startling occurrence in May of 2008. The cat door drew the attention of a masked varmint, a raccoon that was too chubby to fit through the opening. Raccoons are known to be very crafty, but this one used brute force to solve the problem. He made short work of my (very) amateurish carpentry by pulling the door out of its wooden frame in the window. Sue and I knew that the rascal had made it all the way into the house when we found the cat bowl empty and water all over the floor. Cats are very meticulous when drinking water; they seldom spill a drop. Raccoons are meticulous in a different way. They wash their food before they eat it; they always spill water, and they never clean up after they are finished eating.

Chick Comparetto let us borrow his Havahart trap, and he showed Sue how to use it. She then put it outside near the cat’s entrance (which we had temporarily closed off) and put some food in it. On the very first night the raccoon got caught in the trap. Sue and Chick then transported the raccoon—still in the cage—in her car across the Connecticut River to Suffield, where they released it in a wooded area.

Sue immortalized the raccoon adventure by recording a video of the release in Suffield. You can watch it here.

I bought a new sturdier cat door and affixed it to the board blocking the window a little more securely.

In the late summer of 2008 Woodrow died. He was eighteen years old, the same age that Rocky was at his death. Woodrow was weak and very ragged looking the last week or so. I stayed home with him on his last day.

Despite my closeness to him, I wasn’t overcome with grief when Woodrow died. The Woodrow that I wanted to remember was the devious rascal and hunter, not the decrepit bag of bones of his last few days. I still retain so many vivid memories of him. He was an immediate friend to everyone whom we let in through a human-sized door, but I think that, at least in his younger years, he would have fought to the death to defend against an intruder trying to get through the cat door.

I buried Woody under the burning bush, his favorite outdoor napping spot. I don’t honestly know whether Giacomo missed him as much as I did. He could not have missed him more.

Franklin.

For about a year Giacomo was our only pet. Then Sue learned that Betty’s friend, who was absolutely thrilled to find out how much we liked Giacomo, told Sue that she could have Giacomo’s litter-mate, whom she had named Frankie. I insisted on elongating his name to Franklin.

Franklin was black, like Giacomo, but he had short hair, and he was not as long and lean as his brother. I thought of them as the anteater and the aardvark. Giacomo was the bigger anteater with his luxurious fur coat. Franklin was the much less attractive aardvark.

  • Giacomo on the futon.
  • Giant Anteater
  • Aardvark
Pretty good analogy, no?

Franklin did not share Giacomo’s pleasant disposition and love of human companionship. He never fought with his brother, which we recognized as a big plus. However, Franklin did not especially like either Sue or me. He would only occasionally let us pet him. mostly when he was outside. Once or twice, however, I actually found him up on the bed with Giacomo, but after a couple of strokes he became antsy and departed.

This sturdier version of the cat door was installed with the new addition in 2013.

The aspect of living with us that Franklin hated the most was the monthly application of flea drops. I suspect that he had never been allowed outdoors at his previous residence. He discovered the cat door in the basement without our assistance, and he seemed to appreciate the freedom that it provided. However, he had never learned the fundamental lesson of civics class: with all freedom comes responsibility. In this case, the monthly flea drops were the price civilization exacted for his liberty.

This is the basement side, with a ramp down to the floor.

When the weather was warm Franklin put me through a frustrating and exhausting ritual every month. When I was sure that Franklin was in the house, I shut the door to the basement so that he could not retreat there. I then chased him from room to room trying to corner him. Sometimes he hid under one of the barnboard shelves in the library. When he did, I had to wait for him to move. Eventually I always trapped in the bedroom, where he would take refuge under the bed. I had to remove the mattress and box springs to get at him. I always eventually managed to apply the treatment, but the experience was a gigantic pain in the coondingy1.

In contrast, I merely waited for Giacomo to jump in my lap. He did not mind getting the drops at all. He trusted me completely.

Giacomo and Franklin stayed home together while Sue, I, and our friends the Corcorans toured Paris and the South of France in 2009 (described here). We also took a Russian River Cruise in 2010 (described here) and an ill-fated tour of South Italy the following year (described here). I learned of no untoward incidents either caused by or inflicted on either cat.

Franklin on the futon.

For some reason Franklin insisted on exploring our neighbor’s3 property. The gentleman who lived there called me aside while I was trimming the forsythia bush near his property one day and informed me that he had a problem with our cats. They made his dog bark too much. I told him that I would see what I could do.

I thought of responding, “Oh, you have a dog problem. I thought that you said that you had a cat problem.” After all, in Enfield, although dogs must be fenced in or kept on a leash, there is no law against cats roaming free.

I was pretty certain that Franklin was the instigator. Whenever I saw him near the neighbor’s property, I chased him back to our yard. However, I worked all day, and I slept at night. Franklin had ample opportunities to roam. One day, when I was not home, the dog owner accosted Sue and told her that if he caught one of our cats on his property, he would kill it. I won’t repeat Sue’s precise response, but it was not neighborly.

The situation did not escalate any further. I wrote a letter to the neighbors that explained the situation with our cats and offered to pay if they did any damage. Shortly thereafter the family got rid of its noisy dog, and eventually the man of the house departed as well.

In 2012 Franklin got hit by a car on North Street. I did not dig a grave for him, the only domestic animal that I have ever really disliked.

After Franklin’s death Giacomo was our only pet3 for quite a few years. He went through a period in which he spent a lot of time on Allen Street, a dead-end street that was directly across North Street (the site of Franklin’s untimely demise) from our house. Quite a few outdoor cats lived in the neighborhood and congregated informally. The situation reminded me of the old Top Cat cartoons.

I did not like this new lifestyle, but there was not much that I could do about it without turning Giacomo into an indoor cat. Sue was equally concerned. She came to see me when I was in my easy chair wearing my cardigan sweater and reading a magazine. She said, “Ward, I ‘m worried about Giacomo.”

Giacomo on the bed.

Although I don’t remember attributing his injury to the evil influence of the other gang members, one day Giacomo came home with a wound that had formed an abscess. The vet who examined him told me that if this happened again, we might need to keep him inside. That was something that we really wanted to avoid. She also told me that he definitely had a heart murmur, but she did not recommend doing anything about it. It made me think, however, that Giacomo would probably not match the longevity records of Rocky and Woodrow.

Bob in 2017.

Eventually Giacomo’s wanderlust subsided. By 2016 he almost never left the property. That was the year that another black cat decided that he wanted to take up resident at the Slanetz house, home of Sue’s siblings, Don and Betty, and their father, Art. Betty and Art were quite fond of the newcomer, a very stocky fellow with an inflexible tail that measured only four or five inches. Betty named him Bob in honor of his tail—bobcats are sometimes seen in the area. The tail reminded me more of a crank or handle.

A good view of the crank.

Unfortunately, Betty’s own cat had a fiercely hostile reaction to Bob’s presence. Betty therefore asked Sue to adopt him, and, needless to say, Sue agreed. Bob moved into our house on December 8, 2016, and for about two or three weeks Bob and Giacomo hissed at each other. They eventually became tolerant and, in time, quite friendly.

Giacomo held down the fort in Enfield by himself on several of our tours and cruises. Bob and Giacomo stayed in the house by themselves while we took the bridge trip/vacation in Hawaii in 2018 (details here).

  • Giacomo was much longer.
  • Not to mention his tail.
Bob exploring in the back yard.

Bob developed one very peculiar tendency. From the beginning his joints were not very flexible, especially by cats’ standards. Something also seemed to itch him on his spine, and he tried desperately to get at it with his teeth. To do this he rested his weight on one shoulder and used a back leg to spin around furiously. It reminded me of someone breakdancing.

After a while some tufts appeared on Bob’s spine. They looked like matted clumps of fur, but he would not let us touch them at all. They kept getting bigger, and eventually it became clear that they were growths of some kind. Maybe we should have taken him to the vet, but at the time Bob would not let me touch him under any conditions. Sue decided to let him be. Every so often she would say to him, “Oh, Bob, what am I going to do with you?”

Prior to Bob’s arrival Giacomo almost never made a sound unless I rolled over his tail with my office chair. Bob was quite talkative, and he had a pleasant voice. Giacomo began to vocalize, too, but he almost always squawked at a high volume. He sounded just like a blue jay. This was his only bad habit. We just had to put up with it.

Giacomo and Sue sometimes napped together.

Meanwhile, Giacomo was definitely beginning to show his age. Whereas he formerly sprang up to my lap or to his favorite perch on the back of the sofa, by 2019 he didn’t jump at all. He had to climb. He had also lost the ability (or at least the inclination) to retract his claws. When he walked on a bare floor, he always made click-click sounds. His right front paw also definitely bothered him. He never ran, and he walked with a noticeable limp.

This is a rare shot. B0b was seldom allowed in Giacomo’s main napping spot atop the couch. Bob always stuck out his right rear leg when resting.

I spent the week after Thanksgiving in 2019 in San Francisco at the NABC4 tournament (described here). Between and after the rounds my thoughts often turned to Giacomo. I really feared that he might die while I was gone. I would not have been too surprised if Bob had died as well.

I was wrong on both counts. Both Bob and Giacomo were still reasonably healthy and active when the Pandemic changed all of our lives in March of 2020.

1. I learned this word while I was in the army. I think that it is derived from a Korean word that sounds similar.

2. Because of the location of our house, we really had only one next-door neighbor, the residents of 1 Hamilton Court. I think that the person with whom I conversed was named Chris Simons. He no longer lives there in 2022, but I think that his wife still does.

3. I am not counting our third rabbit. At some point before, during, or after Franklin’s stay with us at 41 North Street, Sue accepted (without consulting me) another rabbit from a relative or a friend of a relative. She explained that it could live outdoors, and she promised that she would care for it. She neglected it, and it died within a month or two.

4. Prior to the Pandemic three North American Bridge Championships were held every year at rotating sites by the American Contract Bridge League.

1992-2014 TSI: AdDept Client: Neiman Marcus

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The store with only two sales per year. Continue reading →

My recollection is that the first inquiry from Neiman Marcus came in early 1992 On the other end of the phone line was the manager of the advertising business office. Although I worked with her pretty closely for a fairly extensive period of time, I don’t remember her name.

She must have responded to a mass mailing that I sent after the installation at Hecht’s was under control. I addressed those letters to advertising directors. So, the advertising director must have given it to her. In our telephone conversation she explained to me how they did things at Neiman’s. I told her that I thought that our system could help her with some of their problems. I then sent her materials about how AdDept worked and tried to relate aspects of AdDept to Neiman’s situation.

She asked us to pay them a visit. I arranged for Sue Comparetto and me fly to Dallas to meet with the potential users and to do a demonstration for them at IBM’s local office. The business office of Neiman’s advertising department was on one of the upper floors of the company’s flagship store on Main Street.

When we arrived there I was surprised to find that the rest of the advertising department would not be involved in the discussion. Although Neiman Marcus was still using the system in 2014, I never spoke with anyone from the rest of the department. They used an advertising agency for most of their advertising, including newspaper ads. In fact, the lady that we were dealing with did not even want the rest of the department to have access to the system. She really just wanted a system to keep track of expenses and co-op.

The stores only had two sales per year— First Call in February and Last Call in August, or maybe the other way around. They used the traditional 4-5-4 retail calendar (described here) with which we were already familiar, but Neiman’s first month was August, not February.

My AdDept demo needed a major change of emphasis. I usually emphasized that the main reason for a centralized database was for everyone to take advantage of work done by others. She did not want the others involved at all. Also, the most impressive part of the demo was how quickly a newspaper ad could be scheduled. She had little interest in that task, which was the agency’s responsibility. Nevertheless, the reaction to what I showed was quite positive.

After the demo Sue and I rented a car and drove to Austin for a little R&R with Marlene Soul, one of her friends from high school. She was, if you can believe it, a consultant in feng shui, which she claimed was mostly about being organized.

Marlene took us to a comedy club in downtown Austin, which was definitely a swinging place. I also remember sitting around at her house while she tortured her cat with a long flexible semi-rigid wire that ended with a feather. The slightest twitch made the feather jump and fly.

I made a note to myself to buy one of these when I arrived back in New England so that I could use it to drive my cantankerous cat Woodrow crazy. I did, and it did. He had to hide under the couch so that he could not see it.

The following morning we went birding with Marlene and a group that met every Saturday morning. I was exceptionally bad at it. I have had poor vision since the third grate, and I have always been notoriously bad at finding things anywhere. However, this gathering did spark enough interest in me to become a little more knowledgeable in ornithology.

Upon returning to the office I spent a couple of days putting together a detailed proposal for Neiman Marcus. It did not include as much custom programming as usual. The main objective was for the AS/400 to be able to generate a file to be used by the expense payable system on the mainframe.

The business office manager accepted the proposal a short time after receiving it. I sent her a software contract, which she signed. I then ordered the hardware and system software from IBM and we received an installation date. I knew that we would not have the interface done by then, but we would need some data to test the interface anyway, and there would be no data on day one.

From our perspective this was by far the easiest sale that we had ever had, and the installation, which took place in August of 1992, also went rather smoothly. I had to spend quite a bit of time fine-tuning the coding for the incredibly complicated interface with their corporate financial system. I did not care. I loved to do that kind of work because, once it was in place, the chances of them scrapping the system were minuscule1.

People in the IT department2, however, were furious that the lady from the advertising business office had signed a contract with TSI without consulting them. They were nice enough to me, and they were quite cooperative about establishing the interface between the two systems. However, her career at Neiman Marcus did not last long after AdDept was installed and working smoothly.

The key to the success of the installation was effecting the financial interface. It involved a considerable amount of two-way communication between AdDept and the corporate mainframe. Gary Beberman, who had been TSI’s liaison for the first AdDept installation at Macy’s East (described here), was extremely effective as the go-between for TSI and the mainframe programmers.

I found this list of the steps involved in a document written in 2000:

1. A list of general ledger accounts is downloaded. AdDept’s general ledger account table is updated.
2.A list of departments with the accompanying hierarchy is downloaded. The department table and the rest of the hierarchy is updated.
3. Expenses are uploaded to the accounts payable system. The accounts payable system feeds the general ledger.
4. Co-op transactions are also uploaded to the accounts payable system. The accounts payable system feeds the general ledger.
5. General ledger transactions in the advertising accounts are downloaded at the end of the month. An AdDept program compares the downloaded transactions with the uploaded transactions. A list of exceptions is printed. Additional transactions are placed in a batch file, which can be converted to real AdDept transactions.

The walk down to Dealey Plaza is an easy one.

I made a fairly large number of visits to Dallas during the installation period. Thereafter, a few years would sometime go by between requests for visits. Here are a few memories that I have maintained of those trips.

Neiman’s flagship store at Christmas time.
  • In the nineties I spent a lot of time in the American Airlines section of the DFW airport. My favorite restaurant there was a Mexican cantina.
  • I also spent a lot of in autos driving between the airport and either Dallas or Fort Worth, where TSI had several clients. Sometimes I took a cab; usually I rented a car from Avis.
  • On my first solo trip to Neiman’s I was a little late and a little lost. I crossed Main Street in the middle of the street. A cop stopped me with every intention of giving me a ticket for jaywalking. I was polite, however, and he let me go with only a warning.
  • One of my early visits was in December during the running of the Dallas Marathon. I went out for a jog and watched some of the real runners near the finish line. This must have been on a Saturday or a Sunday.
  • The temperature on that day was around 30. I was wearing stretch leggings, shorts, a tee shirt, and a nylon jacket. Most of the real runners were wearing shorts and singlets. At Neiman’s on Monday the business manager, who was a originally from Pittsburgh, confided to me that she and her husband were concerned about whether the cold weather might harm their child if they let her play outside. She admitted that no one in Pittsburgh would have thought twice about their kids being out for hours in such weather.
  • On another occasion I walked to the State Fair grounds on a Friday evening. I was surprised to discover thousands of people celebrating Juneteenth. I had never heard of this event before.
  • One summer evening after working at Neiman’s I took a stroll down to Dealey Plaza, which is the the location of the ramp to I-35. I wanted to conduct a personal investigation of the interchange, the “grassy knoll”, the Texas Book Depository (which had been converted into a museum), and the other locations associated with the assassination. A few minutes earlier the fatal presidential motorcade had passed right by Neiman’s flagship store, which is .6 miles from the plaza.
  • One day after the system was operational the business office manager drove me to lunch for some authentic Texas barbecue. I cannot say that I was very impressed. I have never understood the idea of cooking all of the flavor out of meat just so it could be coated with barbecue sauce.
  • Neiman’s made a big deal out of Christmas. Not only did they publish their famous catalog with one outrageous gift idea, but they also sponsored an evening in which their VIP clients could shop without dealing with the riffraff. The store open that evening only to those who were sent an invitation. Each was assigned an employee to tour the store with them. I am not sure what the employees were expected to do. I looked for members of the Ewing family, but I did not see any.
  • On my visit on September 9, 2000, the temperature reached 109°. It was also the thirty-fifth day in a row with no rain. That was the day that I understood why the streets in Texas are almost all concrete, as opposed to asphalt. Anything that was paved with asphalt turned gooey when the temperature got that high.

I did not actually work with most of the subsequent Neiman’s employees enough to burn in lasting memories. I did find some notes that provided me with some information on some of them;

Jeff Netzer.
  • I was surprised to discover that many of the successors to the female business office manager mentioned above were Aggies, that is, graduates of Texas A&M. The first was Jeff Netzer3, who worked at Neiman’s from 1996-1999. He called TSI a few years later when he was employed at Sewell Automotive Company. I saw Jeff there when they invited me to assess the possibility of us designing a system for this company. This experience is described here.
  • The second Aggie was named Brian Harvey4. He worked in the advertising department from 1998-2000. I met him in 2000, but I don’t remember him.
  • After Brian’s departure the advertising business office was run by Alea Montez. I remember that she called the office for support several times. I don’t think that I ever met her.
  • The last Aggie was Brian Davis5, whose title at Neiman’s was Media Analyst. I don’t remember him at all. I don’t think that I ever met him in person.
  • A striking omission in this list is everyone in any other area of advertising. I never succeeded in interesting anyone in even considering what TSI had done for so many others in similar positions.
  • I had quite a bit of contact with a number of IT people at Neiman’s. I met a few in person, but I don’t remember any names.
  • In the 2000’s Neiman’s hired an AS/400 consultant to help them with connectivity and to upgrade their system. We had a good relationship with him, but I don’t remember his name.

1. In fact, the AdDept installation at Neiman’s lasted longer than that of any other client. Part of the explanation for that was that Neiman’s was one of the few AdDept clients that was not bought out by another company. When we closed TSI’s doors for the last time in 2014, Neiman’s was still using AdDept. For all that I know, it may have continued after that.

2 The IT people worked in a building in Las Colinas, a few miles from the flagship store in downtown Dallas. I went there a couple of times and met a few people there.

3. Jeff Netzer’s LinkedIn page is here.

4. Brian Harvey’s LinkedIn page is here.

5. Brian Davis’s LinkedIn page is here.

1993-1996 TSI: AdDept-Burdines Interface

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The proverbial brass ring? Continue reading →

Even before I became a professional software developer, my friends and acquaintances often approached me with their ideas for computer programs. It started in the Army with Doc Malloy’s idea for a tennis game, continued through graduate school, and was nearly ever-present in my business life. It seemed peculiar to me that so many people seemed to imagine that I had a skill that they lacked but no idea how best to employ it.

I have a great idea for a software project!

In point of fact, the limiting factor in software development was almost always money. A new software system required a substantial investment to cover development and testing costs, as well as marketing expenses. Very seldom did the people who propose these project give any thought to helping to finance them. At least they never volunteered information about having a secret source of funds. They evidently thought that they should share in the imaginary profits because they provided the original idea. I sometimes told them, “ideas are a dime a dozen. Implementation is everything, and marketing brings it home.”

I had plenty of ideas of my own. A few of them, such as the idea of running several simultaneous “threads” for the cost accounting programs generated a bit of revenue for TSI. One of my ideas, the use of a butterfly-shaped website for insertion orders and emails for notifications, resulted in a very profitable product for TSI, AxN. The genesis of its design and the marketing concept that turned it into a financial winner is described here.

TSI’s clients also had a large number of ideas for programming, but they seldom expected us to work pro bono. I spent many hours researching and writing quotes for changes to our systems requested by our clients. I doubt that a month went by in which I failed to produce produce ten or twenty of them. I considered my most important responsibility at TSI to be providing a clear description of each requested project and assigning an appropriate cost figure.

Gilbert’s LinkedIn Photo.

Very seldom did someone approach me with a project that included funding. I can think of three times in forty years. Only one of these concerned software that we had already designed and coded. The person making the proposal was Gilbert Lorenzo1, who was one of the top bosses in the advertising department at Burdines, the Florida division of Federated Department Stores.

Gilbert telephoned TSI’s office in the early nineties. He had received one of our first mailings about AdDept, our administrative system for large retail advertising departments. He said that he would be in New England to meet with some people at Camex2, the company based in Boston that marketed a system for digitally producing page layouts for newspapers and large advertisers. He requested us to show him a demonstration of the AdDept system.

Most of this huge structure served IBM’s business partners.

We reserved some time in a demonstration room at the elegant IBM office in Waltham, MA. We had a relationship with this office, but we had never done an AdDept demo there before. I arrived there as early as I could to get the system set up for my presentation. It was a very nice facility that always impressed potential clients.

The AdDept system in those days was fundamentally sound, but many “bells and whistles” were added on in the subsequent decade. In almost every case they were suggested by and paid for by one AdDept client or another.

The most impressive thing about the demos in the early years was the speed with which the programs moved from one screen to the next. Once the tables were set up, a user could define all aspects of a new ad to run in dozens of papers in just a minute or so. This always generated the biggest “Wow!”

In our discussion after the meeting Gilbert said that he liked what he saw. He might have even said that he wanted to buy the system. However, I did not hear from him again for several years. This was consistent with what always seemed to happen with Federated’s divisions, a phenomenon that is explored in more detail here.

Meanwhile Burdines was—unbeknownst to me—experiencing explosive growth. In 1991 alone the number of stores increased from twenty-seven to fifty-eight through the assimilation of two Federated divisions— the Maas Brothers and Jordan Marsh stores in Florida. More stores were added throughout the rest of the nineties. By the end of the decade Burdines dominated the department store market throughout the entire state.

The purpose of Gilbert’s second contact with TSI was to invite me to Huntsville, AL, the home of a software company with which he was working at the time. I don’t remember the name of the company. I do recall that two of the team assigned to this project formerly worked as software developers at Camex before DuPont purchased the company and changed its focus. One of them was Mike Rafferty3, whom I had met at Camex’s headquarters when our common customers had requested that an interface should be constructed between the two systems, a project that was described here.

The software company in Huntsville had a very impressive headquarters. As I understood it, the company’s primary customers were NASA and companies that worked with NASA. That was de rigueur in Huntsville.

Gilbert explained that he was working with Mike and the others to develop a comprehensive software system for the advertising department at Burdines, and he hoped and expected that the other Federated divisions would also use it. He wanted TSI (or at least me) to participate in the project, and he insisted that he had the funding for it.

Mike described their approach to the project. They intended to use a home-grown database that resided on a server, but most of the programs would reside on the individual “clients”—PC’s or Macs. When I told him that TSI’s programs were written in BASIC, he suggested that we consider converting them to use Microsoft’s Visual Basic.

Most of the discussion concerned the scope of the project. They were interested in integrating something like AdDept into the unitary structure that they envisioned. No one addressed how TSI would be integrated into the development process. Maybe they expected me to fill in some of the details or to volunteer to research how difficult it would be. Maybe they knew that we seldom backed down from a project just because it was difficult.

The atmosphere was cordial and positive. I remember that we all went out to lunch together, and I ordered a Monte Cristo sandwich. Nevertheless, this meeting made me very uncomfortable. On the one hand, the prospect of installing a version of the AdDept system into all the remaining Federated divisions was way beyond tantalizing. It would be a dream come true. What they suggested would undoubtedly a big job, but TSI had a talented group of programmers who were quite familiar with both the subject matter, and the way that I liked to approach big challenges.

On the other hand, from my perspective the way that this project was described was adorned with “red flags”.

  • I had already researched the possibility of using Visual Basic. It might have been possible to convert some of the programs, but there were no tools designed to help. It would certainly have taken TSI several years to produce a workable system. We would be discarding all of the tools that we used in favor or ones that we had never used and, to my knowledge, had never been used by anyone in a data-intensive situation. TSI’s programmers would certainly need a lot of training. We would probably need to hire skilled employees or at least consultants to achieve any degree of efficiency.
  • Their whole architecture was different from what we used. In the AdDept system the data and all the programs resided on the AS/400 server. The “client-server” approach that they proposed located the data on a server, but the program were all distributed to the PC and Mac clients. To me this sounded like an administrative nightmare. All changes—including emergency fixes—must be installed on all of the clients.
  • I considered the AS/400 integral to AdDept’s success, and so did our customers. The operating system code was built on the database rather than the other way around. That meant that the system itself could never be used for programs with the the huge requirements for memory, disk, and processing speed that design and creation of advertising layouts required. The AS/400 was definitely not designed for that. However, it was ideal for administrative systems like AdDept. It competently handled so many problems with which all-purpose operating systems constantly struggled.
  • I trusted IBM and the AS/400’s database. I knew how to get the latter to function efficiently, and IBM’s support was unmatched in the industry. The idea of converting to a home-grown database seemed just preposterous.
  • By the time of the meeting in Huntsville TSI had finally turned the corner. The AdDept product had a solid client base and a good number of prospects outside of Federated. How could we continue to pursue AdDept development for those companies—which was relatively certain to generate revenue and good will—while devoting a great deal of time and attention to the massive Federated project? It did not seem possible to me.
  • Gilbert had said that he had funding, but he never provided any details about who, how, or how much.

Something about the project sounded fishy to me. They were interested in my participation, but they never specified how. Did they want to buy TSI? No one mentioned anything like that. Did they want to hire some or all of us? Did they just want me to consult with them as to the system design? Or was there something else?

At the end of the meeting, Mike asked me what format TSI preferred for exchange of information. Both of the programmers were very surprised when I told them that our offices were connected to all of the clients’ AS/400s via phone lines. We used the AS/400’s built-in messaging and word processing. No one had ever asked us to communicate outside of that.4 I told them that TSI’s employees had PC’s, and the company had a few modems, but we mostly used the PC’s as terminals to the AS/400.

The group did not come to any agreement about how the project was to proceed. I had an impression that they thought that I (who was well into my fifth decade on the planet) was a fossil. I, on the other hand, thought that they, who had dealt almost exclusively with production of ads for newspapers, dramatically underestimated the difficulty of designing a single multi-user database that was capable of handling all aspects of scheduling and managing the financial aspects of all media. The planning and cost accounting modules were even more challenging.

After the meeting I had a little bit of private time with one of the principals of the software company. He asked me what I thought about the project. I told him that it was interesting, but I did not see the ROI (return on investment) for combining the two systems. I remember his exact words. “ROI. Oh, yeah, where’s the ROI?”

I did not hear from any of them again, and I did not press for inclusion in their project. In all honesty I had too many other things demanding my attention. After a year or two I sometimes wondered whether Gilbert had abandoned the project or had gone ahead with it. The answer, it turned out, was somewhere in between. I spent no time searching for information about the project, but little hints turned up occasionally.

Our liaison at Lord & Taylor, Tom Caputo, described to me his experience interviewing for a job in the advertising department at Bloomingdale’s, a Federated division in New York City. He asked the people there about their computer system. They showed him boxes that contained the software for the FedAd system, which Federated had sent them and told them to use. The people at Bloomies had never unsealed the boxes.

When I installed the AdDept system at Macy’s South5 in December of 2005, TSI’s liaison there was Amy Diehl. Her official title was “FedAd Coordinator.” By then I knew that FedAd was the culmination of the project begun by Gilbert Lorenzo more than a decade earlier.

I soon learned that the advertising department at Macy’s South was not actually using the FedAd system at all because the programmers had admitted that it could not handle the department’s planning process. Instead they had been using parts of a previous version called Assets for a few tasks. I was astounded to learn that the Assets system used a Microsoft Access database. They had sent a boy to do a man’s job! Federated Systems Group no longer supported it.

Later we heard that Macy’s East was using the FedAd system, which by then had been given a different name. At the time its advertising department was still using the Loan Room system that TSI had written and implemented for them in the early nineties. That meant that for years the details of every ad were being entered into at least two separate systems.

I even quoted a bizarre request from Macy’s systems people to write an interface between their system and AxN. I provided them with a quote, but nothing came of it.

In all of that time—more than two decades—I never heard anyone say anything good about FedAd. As far as I know it generated a great deal of expense and not a penny of revenue for the company. I only knew of one department that used it. TSI, in contrast, sold and installed thirty-five AdDept systems, each of which was customized to the needs of the individual departments.

On the other hand, I might have been able to carve out a career as the guru for Macy’s concerning administrative software for advertising. That would have certainly been something to crow about. After all, when the game was finally ended, Macy’s had all the marbles.

I doubt that they would have let me—and whatever portion of TSI was involved—participate from Enfield or East Windsor, and I doubt that they would have let us continue to perform or oversee work for their competitors. They might have allowed me to program for the AS/400—I saw several of them at the FSG data center in the Atlanta area. However, it was more likely the Gilbert would have required everyone in the process to use the same database. He seemed to be calling all the shots.

So, I probably would have had to sell my soul to Macy’s. I might have made a lot of money, but I think that I would have been miserable. Almost everyone in my acquaintance who had worked for one of our clients and then worked for Macy’s or a Federated division quit in the first few years and was openly bitter about the experience.

Finally, I must add that I suspect that there was a good possibility that the invitation to Huntsville was just a ruse to get me to expose the totality of the AdDept system to people who might be able to replicate it.

Epilogue: While researching the blog entry for TSI’s relationship with Federated Department Stores (posted here), I discovered that Val Walser’s LinkedIn page prominently features how she “directed development of a sophisticated, integrated software product” in the division run from Seattle. It must be referring to the system that Gilbert and Mike envisioned so many years earlier. I never heard anyone mention any other such system.

1. For some reason Gilbert Lorenzo has two LinkedIn pages. They are available here and here.

2. The Camex system was used by both of the first two AdDept users, Macy’s East, and the P.A. Bergner Co.

3. Mike Rafferty’s LinkedIn page is here. It did not provide much information about him when I discovered it in 2022.

4. Keep in mind that the Internet was in its infancy. At that time Microsoft had not yet completed its domination of the word processing and spreadsheet markets. Technical people used “message boards”, not email, for communication. AOL did not hit the web until 1997.

5. The installation at Macy’s South is described in detail here.

1989-1993 TSI: AdDept-Camex Interface

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An exciting new feature. Continue reading →

The first time that I ever heard the word “Camex” was when I was researching the requirements for the first installation of TSI’s AdDept system1 at Macy’s East2. One of the job titles that Macy’s used for employees assigned to production of a newspaper ad was “Camex operator”. I asked Alan Spett, a vice president at Macy’s who was our principal contact during this period, what a Camex was. Alan told me that Camex was a company in Boston that had designed and implemented software and networking for workstations from Sun Microsystems. The workstations were used by many newspapers and some of the largest newspaper advertisers to help with the design of pages to appear in newspapers.

I later did a little research on the company. It was founded in 1974 by George White and a partner whose name I never discovered. The first customer was the Boston Globe. Once that installation stabilized, the company grew dramatically by selling expensive systems (roughly $2 million each) to newspapers around the country and then to large retailers.

In 1989 the company was sold to DuPont, the chemical giant. George White stayed with the company until 1993.

Camex had a booth near TSI’s at the Retail Advertising Conference in Chicago that Tom Moran3 and I attended in 1991 or 1992. Our booth was the smallest allowed. Camex’s booth, which was near ours, was perhaps ten times larger. They must have brought twenty salesmen and lots of workstations and network servers.

Alan may have voiced an interest in creating an interface between AdDept and Camex in those early days. However, it was included in neither the original installation nor the first set of enhancements.

Dan Stroman, TSI’s contact for the AdDept installation at P.A. Bergner & Co.4, told me that Bergner’s wanted to implement an interface between AdDept and Burgner’s Camex computers. I told Dan that Macy’s might also be interested in such an interface, and I gave him Alan’s telephone number. The two of them agreed to make a joint project of the interface.

My recollection of the details is fuzzy. I think that AdDept was supposed to create a file that contained all relevant production job information for jobs in specified ad types that had not yet been released. Camex would create files for AdDept that indicated job steps had been completed on those jobs.

There were many issues to resolve.

  • What was the naming convention for jobs on Camex? That field would need to be added to the AdDept database.
  • Should AdDept require that each Camex job name be unique? If not, will uniqueness be enforced at the time of the interface? If not, how will Camex handle two jobs with the same name?
  • Should the source for the interface file from AdDept be the live database or the history records?
  • Are history records for the interface itself necessary?
  • How should AdDept tell Camex about jobs that have been killed?
  • What if the size or shape of the ad had changed?
  • And so on.

There were also technical details about the nature of the interface files. IBM’s PC Support program for the AS/400 could be used to transfer data to and from a PC, but it probably would not work with a Sun workstation. So, a PC would probably be necessary between the Sun Workstation and the AS/400.

My recollection is that two meetings were held at Camex’s headquarters at 75 Kneeland St. in Boston. The first was mostly just to get acquainted and set an agenda. I have no notes from these meetings, and I don’t remember anyone’s name. I seem to remember that Alan may have attended. Sue Comparetto and I drove up to Boston. Camex’s office was very close to Chinatown, and the Camex people treated us to lunch at one of the nearby Chinese restaurants. My other vivid recollection is of my wonder at what Camex had accomplished in a fairly short time.

I am pretty sure that Dan attended the second meeting. Sue and I definitely drove up from Enfield. This meeting was disrupted by a fire alarm. Everyone was asked to abandon the building and stand around in a nearby parking lot. It does not take much for me to be cold, and I was absolutely freezing. I am sure that we were outside for at least an hour. We finally did get to go inside for an hour or two. My recollection is that we made a little progress, but at the end I still did not know what data Camex was planning to send to AdDept. This was because the people with whom we were talking knew very little about the database portion of their system, and the database programmer was not available.

I wrote up a programming quotation for the portion of the interface that AdDept would initiate. I submitted the quote to Dan and Alan. They both approved it. I even started work on it.

Then a very strange thing happened. The person who served as the client liaison at Camex called Dan and told him that Camex had decided not to participate in the interface. They also volunteered to refund deposits that Bergner’s had made for additional equipment.

We got paid for the work that we did—luckily avoiding the bankruptcies of both Macy’s and Bergner’s. Shortly thereafter DuPont split Camex up into pieces and spun them off as separate companies. Camex did not last long after that.

I cannot remember where this happened, but I overheard someone at a large retailer talking with their rep from Camex. The rep said that Camex no longer recommended the Sun workstations. Instead they recommended that advertisers just buy Macintoshes and off-the-shelf software. I was both dumbstruck and disappointed. I had envisioned our relationship with Camex as a possible entrée to many excellent AdDept prospects. Sic transit gloria mundi.

The episode has an epilogue. A few years later I had a meeting in in Mobile AL with some programmers who previously worked at Camex and Gilbert Lorenzo, the advertising director at Burdines department store. That meeting is described here.

1. The design of the AdDept system is described in some detail here.

2. The AdDept installation at Macy’s East is described here.

3. Tom’s time at TSI, including our time at the RAC, is described here.

4. The ups and downs of the AdDept installation at Bergner’s are detailed here.