Doug Pease. TSI’s Marketing Director, took the call from Tandy Corporation. I am not sure whom he talked with, but he learned that Tandy had three retail divisions—RadioShack, Computer City, and Incredible Universe. All three were based in Fort Worth, TX, but they placed their advertising independently. They were interested in purchasing three copies of the AdDept system. Doug was salivating at the prospect landing three new prospects at once, especially since Tandy already had AS/400’s with enough capacity to handle all three installations. So, there would be no problems in the IT area, and there would be little or no hardware expense. It was almost too good to be true.
Doug and I flew to Fort Worth to talk with the people about their needs. RadioShack was clearly driving the project. They ran weekly ads in two thousand different newspapers. The responsibility for ordering and paying for the ads was split among four employees: north, south, east, and west. Another lady managed their ads in magazines.
Tandy Center in 20002. The Mall was between the two towers. Computer City was in the tower on the left. I think that this photo was taken after the subway was shut down.
The newspaper schedulers already had two systems, one for scheduling and one for paying. The two systems did not communicate at all. So, each employee had two separate workstations on his/her desk. One of the schedulers, Dolores DeSantiago, showed us how they worked. They had to enter all the ads in each one, and both systems were intolerably slow.
I am pretty sure that I did the demo at the local IBM office. The people who attended were very impressed at how quickly AdDept could build a schedule, and I don’t think that they could believe it when I told them that it could fax insertion orders without any extra data entry.
The subway stop for workers and shoppers.
The primary custom work that they wanted was to devise a way that they could split up the newspapers as they were accustomed to doing. I could think of no good reason why scheduling would require four people using AdDept—they only ran one ROP ad and one insert every week. Most papers got one or the other. I don’t think that we actually talked with anyone from Computer City or Incredible Universe, but we were assured that if it worked for RadioShack, it would work for them.
Dolores and Veronica in Enfield.
I wrote up the proposal and the design document. They liked it. I sent them the contract for all three divisions, and they signed it and sent the deposit.
Four people from RadioShack came to Enfield for training—Dolores, Veronica Anguiano, and a man and woman whose names I don’t remember. He was quite familiar with the Hartford area and asked about some of the girlie bars that were just east of I-91 at exit 33. She had worked at Color Tile (described here) and was an enthusiastic supporter of the AdDept system.
The two people whose names I cannot remember.
We probably went out to eat together, but I don’t remember where. It was December, and so they drove up to Springfield to see the Bright Nights display in Forest Park.
After the training session I and the programmers were working on the custom work specified in the contract. That was when Doug received a disconcerting phone call from Tandy. They no longer wanted to purchase a system for Incredible Universe. Evidently sales were sluggish, and they were closing some stores. In fact, they closed down the entire division in 1997.
So, we had to decide whether to hold Tandy to the signed contract, or to revise it to include only RadioShack and Computer City. If we had done the former, we probably would have had a somewhat bitter client. Maybe we were wimps, but we gave in and rewrote the contract.
Not even one.
The installation was unusual. I went to Tandy’s gigantic data center, where not a single TRS-80 was to be seen. A female employee escorted me to my workstation, where I had access to the AS/400 that would be used for the two systems. She spent the entire day sitting next to me watching what I was doing! Maybe she worked in security. She would not let me take any photos.
When I was finished I went to RadioShack’s offices. They insisted that I spend time with each of the four newspaper schedulers.
RadioShack was famous for being a go-to retailer for new technology. During the early course of its relationship with TSI, its leading cellar was the cellphone. At that time their were many different carriers, and RadioShack had deals to supply phones and technical assistance for many of them. The carriers varied from store to store. So, Veronica asked us to add a field to the pub table to designate the carrier. It was important that the paper got the correct version of each ad.
I don’t have any notes from my work with Tandy, but I do have some vivid memories.
The new RadioShack store in Enfield was less than a quarter of a mile north of the existing store in Enfield Square.
Fort Worth reminded me of a cow town. It was nothing like Dallas, which seemed like a very wealthy oil city. Doug and I found a restaurant downtown. I ordered chicken-fried steak. I asked the waitress if it was low in calories. She admitted that it wasn’t. I said, “Good; I’ll have it.” It was delicious.
On one of my first trips to Fort Worth I was a little late and slipped on some unexpected ice. Because I had my sample case full of program listings in one hand and my laptop bag in the other, I fell flat on my ass. I was not hurt.
Most of the time I parked in a gigantic lot that was near the Tandy Center, a shopping mall that also included the offices. The only privately operated subway in the U.S. transported parkers to station below the mall. It only went underground for a short distance.
The mall had an ice rink, but it did not get a lot of use.
I was in Fort Worth when the temperature exceeded 100 for the fifteenth consecutive day. It was so hot that the asphalt felt spongy. The roads in that area are almost all made of concrete.
On November 27, 1997, I was in Fort Worth and, as I usually did when a college football game was on television, I watched Texas Christian University, which is in Fort Worth and almost universally known now as TCU) play against Southern Methodist University, which is in Dallas and is almost universally known now as SMU. SMU, which entered the game with a 6-4 record, was heavily favored. In fact they had won their previous five games. TCU was 0-10 and considered the worst team in the countries. The game took place in Fort Worth. If I had known about it, I might have gone. The lowly Horned Frogs prevailed over the Mustangs 21-18 and won the Iron Skillet.
One day I saw a list of new stores that were planned. The name “Enfield CT” jumped out at me. Knowing that there already was a RadioShack store in the Enfield Square Mall, I asked for the address. It was a low number on Elm Street. This seemed strange to me because the only strip mall of any size on Elm St. was directly across the street from Enfield Square. Nevertheless, that was where they put the new store, but it was only open for a couple of years.
Veronica had a crush on a singer or actor named Antonio. I assumed that it was Antonio Banderas, but when I said so she looked at me as if I were from another planet. Evidently there was another heartthrob named Antonio.
The attempt of Bruce Dickens to extort money from the Tandy Corporation because the AdDept system used a simple calculation to determine the century was explained here.
Yes, but barely.
Most of my time in Fort Worth was spent in the RadioShack division. Computer City actually went out of business in 1998. Before it did, however, I had several unusual experiences in the CC advertising department.
The first thing that I noticed was that everyone in the department seemed to keep a large supply of food in one of the desk drawers. Maybe this was a widespread habit elsewhere, but I first noticed it at CC.
One of the ladies with whom I worked casually mentioned that she had fifty-three cats. Sue and I had two at the time, and I had always considered that two was the perfect number. I asked the lady if they were indoor cats, and she said that if any of them went outside, a neighbor of hers would shoot them with a rifle if they approached his property. I remarked that this would have been adjudged as bad form in New England.
One day I noticed the VP of advertising spending time at the copying machine. He spent the entire afternoon engaged in copying something. I could not imagine what he could have been doing. I don’t ever recall seeing a VP at any other company photocopy even one sheet of paper. They all had personal assistants or secretaries.
In 2000 Tandy changed its name to RadioShack Coroporation.
Bob Quaglia.
I remember the name of only one other employee at RadioShack. Bob Quaglia2 was the media director, which made him the boss of both Veronica and the lady who managed the magazine advertising.
In 2007 Veronica called us to say that RadioShack had outsourced the buying of their newspaper ads to to an ad agency or media buying service. Since that was the primary use of AdDept, they stopped using AdDept. A few months later she called me for some reason. She mentioned that they thought that they might have made a mistake.
In February 2015, RadioShack Corporation filed for bankruptcy protection after eleven consecutive quarterly losses. It was purchased by General Wireless, Inc., in May. A very high percentage of the stores have been closed. All the remaining stores are franchises.
1. Much more information can be found about Doug here and in many of the entries for other AdDept clients.
2. In 2023 Bob was still in the advertising business with his own firm called Gonzo Media. Its website is here. He left RadioShack in 1998. Incidentally, the reason that I remembered his name is that quaglia is the Italian word for quail.
We had a very good record of closing AdDept sales. Most of the whiffs fell into one of two categories:
Divisions of Federated Department Stores. Our relationships with various Federated divisions are described in detail here. They are not included in this entry.
Companies that did not advertise enough to justify a high-quality multi-user centralized database. We actually sold the AdDept system to a couple of these anyway.
TSI’s first efforts to market AdDept were concentrated around New York and New England. I figured that there were not very many retailers who could afford the system to keep track of advertising, but, then again, I did not really expect to justify the cost of the system at Macy’s in the very first module that we activated—ad measurement.
The strip mall in which the Enfield store was located was named after Caldor.
Our first attempt was a quintessential whiff. Kate Behart (much more about her here) had been in contact with someone in the advertising department at Caldor, a discount department store based in Norwalk, CT. Kate arranged for me to give a presentation to them at the IBM office in Norwalk. Of course, we had to make sure that the office had the BASIC program, and I had to install both the AdDept programs and some data that I had dummied up from Macy’s real data.
My presentation was flawless. The only problem that I encountered that day was the lack of an audience. No one from Caldor showed up. We never did find out why not. Kate called them repeatedly, but no one returned her calls. It may have had something to do with the fact that in 1989, the year that we installed the first AdDept system at Macy’s, the May Company sold Caldor to a group of investment houses.
Caldor went out of business in 1999.
I also paid a visit to another local retailer, Davidson and Leventhal, commonly known as D&L. Theirs were not exactly department stores, but they had fairly large stores that sold both men’s and women’s clothing. So, they had quite a few departments. The stores had a good reputation locally. The headquarters was in New Britain, CT.
This D&L ad was on the back cover of the issue of Northeast that featured my story (described here).
The advertising department only employed three or four employees. They wanted to know if they could use the computer for both D&L ads and ads for Weathervane, another store that they owned, as well. That seemed vaguely feasible to me, and so I said they could. In fact, we later did this for Stage Stores and for the Tandy Corporation, but both of those companies were much larger, and I had a much better understanding by then of what it entailed.
I didn’t even write up a proposal for D&L. The person with whom I spoke made it clear that what we were offering was way out of their price range.
D&L went out of business in 1994, only a few years after our meeting. Weathervane lasted until 2005.
I have only a vague recollection of doing a demonstration at IBM’s big facility in Waltham, MA, for a chain of auto parts retailers from Phoenix. The name of the chain at the time was Northern Automotive. My recollection is that I spoke with a man and a woman. If they told me how they heard about AdDept, I don’t remember it. After a very short time it was clear that AdDept was much more than the company needed. Although Northern Automotive had a lot of stores with four different logos, it only ran one ad per week. So there was really not much to keep track of. I had the distinct impression that the demo was just an excuse for the couple to take a vacation in New England on the company’s dime.
I don’t remember either of their names, but the experience list on LinkedIn for a guy named Paul Thompson (posted here) makes him a strong candidate. Northern Automotive changed its name to CSK Auto, Inc. not long after our meeting. In 2008 CSK was purchased by O’Reilly Auto Parts.
Won’t Paul be surprised to be busted thirty years later in an obscure blog?
Tom Moran (more details here) set up an appointment with employees of Genovese Drugs at its headquarters in Melville, NY. The two of us drove to Long Island to meet with them.
I probably should have talked to someone there over the phone before we left. The only impression that I remember getting from the meeting was that they were not at all serious about getting a system. We had a great deal of trouble getting them to describe what the advertising department did at the time and what they wanted to do. I was frustrated because I had considered this a relatively cheap opportunity to learn how chains of pharmacies handled their advertising. It was actually a waste of time and energy.
Tom tried to follow up, but he got nowhere. We did not submit a proposal.
J.C. Penney bought the company in 1998 and rebranded all the stores as Eckerd pharmacies.
Woodies’ flagship store in downtown Washington.
While I was working on the software installation at Hecht’s in 1991, Tom Moran coordinated our attempt to land the other big department store in the Washington, DC, area, Woodward & Lothrop, locally known as Woodies. I found a folder that contains references to correspondence with them. Tom worked with an IBM rep named Allison Volpert1. Our contacts at Woodies were Joel Nichols, the Divisional VP, and Ella Kaszubski, the Production Manager.
As I browsed through the file, I detected a few warning signs. The advertising department was reportedly in the process of asking for capital for digital photography, which was in its (very expensive) infancy in 1991. Tom was told that they hoped to “slip in” AdDept as part of the photography project. Furthermore, the fact that we were not dealing with anyone in the financial area did not bode well.
Someone wrote this book about Woodies.
Finally, we had no choice other than to let IBM propose the hardware. Their method of doing this always led to vastly higher hardware and system software costs than we considered necessary. I found a copy of IBM’s configuration. The bottom line was over $147,000 and another $48,600 for IBM software. This dwarfed what Hecht’s had spent. If the cost of AdDept was added in, they probably were facing a purchase price of over a quarter of a million dollars! That is an awful lot to “slip in”.
I don’t recall the details, but I remember having an elegant lunch during this period with someone from Woodies in the restaurant of the main store. It may have been Joel Nichols. It seemed like a very positive experience to me. He seemed eager to automate the department.
We lost contact with Woodies after early 1992. I seriously doubt that the advertising department even purchased the photography equipment that they had coveted. The early nineties were very bad for retailers. By 1994 the owner of Woodies and the John Wanamaker chain based in Philadelphia declared bankruptcy and then sold the stores to JC Penney and the May Company. Many of the stores were rebranded as Hecht’s or Lord and Taylor.
In some ways Fred Meyer, a chain of department stores based in Portland, OR, seemed like a perfect match for TSI. At the time they were almost unique, and we usually excelled at programming unusual ideas. Their approach to retail included what are now called “hypermarket” (department store plus groceries) stores, although they definitely had some much smaller stores as well. The one in downtown Portland was very small. I really thought that we had a good shot at getting this account, largely due to the fact that the IT department already had one or two AS/400’s. So, the hardware cost would probably be minimal.
She would be lucky to make it in nine hours; there were no direct flights.
I was asked to work with a consultant who, believe it or not, commuted from Buffalo, NY, to Portland, OR. I can’t remember her name. She knew computer systems but virtually nothing about what the advertising department did. She wanted me to tell her what AdDept could do, and she would determine whether the system would work for them. I have always hated it when a “gatekeeper” was placed between me and the users. I understand that they do not trust the users to make a good decision, but advertising is very complicated, and almost no IT consultants know much about it. I would not have minded if the consultant sat in on interviews that I conducted with people in advertising.
If I was allowed to meet with anyone from the scheduling or financial areas of the department, I do not remember it at all. I do remember spending an afternoon with the head of the company’s photography studio. AdDept had a module (that no one used) for managing shoots and another (used by Macy’s East) for managing the merchandise that is loaned to the studio for a shoot.
I remember the photo studio guy mentioning that they also did billable work for outside clients. He mentioned Eddie Bauer by name. He could not believe that I had never heard of it/him.
I probably botched this opportunity. Before agreeing to come out the second time, I should have insisted on meeting with whoever placed their newspaper ads and the person in charge of advertising finance. I did not want to step on the toes of the lady from Buffalo, but I probably should have been more aggressive.
Kate accompanied me on one of these trips. We probably flew on Saturday to save on air fare. On Sunday we drove out to Mt. Hood, where we saw the lodge and the glacier, and visited Multnomah Falls on the way back.
Freddie’s was acquired by Kroger in 1998, but the logos on the stores were maintained. There still is a headquarters in Portland, but I don’t know if ads are still created and/or placed there.
Aside from our dealings with Federated divisions2 TSI had very few whiffs during the period that Doug Pease (described here) worked for us. After one of our mailings Doug received a call from Debra Edwards3, the advertising director at May Ohio, a May Company division that had its headquarters in Cleveland. Doug and I flew Continental non-stop to Cleveland and took the train into downtown. My recollection was that we were able to enter the store from the underground train terminal.
The presentation and the demo went very well. I am quite certain that we would have gotten this account were it not for the fact that in early 1993 the May Company merged the Ohio division with Kaufmann’s in Pittsburgh. Management of the stores was transferred to Pittsburgh. Debra was hired as advertising director at Elder-Beerman Stores.
We stayed overnight in Cleveland and had time to visit the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which was right down the street from the huge May Co. building. I cannot say that I was greatly impressed with the exhibits.
A few years later Doug and I undertook a second trip to Cleveland to visit the headquarters of Sherwin Williams. Doug had talked extensively with the lady who was the advertising director there. He was very enthusiastic about the prospect of making this sale. By that time Doug had already closed a few big deals for us, and so I trusted his judgment. However, I could not understand how a company that really only sold one product could possibly need AdDept. Yes, they have thousands of stores, but how many ads do they run?
I don’t honestly remember anything about our discussion with them. Needless to say, Doug did not close this one, although he never stopped trying to revive it.
I don’t really count it as a whiff, but Doug was unable to close the deal with Liberty House in Honolulu after our epic trip to Hawaii in December of 1995. The details are recounted here.
I drove past two of the stores in Texas, but I never went inside.
Just as Marvin Elbaum had backed out of his contract with TSI for a GrandAd system in 1986 (as described here), so also one company signed an agreement for TSI’s AdDept system and, before we had installed the system, changed its mind. There was one big difference in the two situations. The second company was the Tandy Corporation, which had actually ordered installations of AdDept for all three of its retail divisions. At the last minute the company decided to close down Incredible Universe, one of the three divisions. The other two companies became TSI clients in 1997, as is described here.
It was not a big loss for TSI. IU was one of a kind. Its stores were gigantic multi-story combinations of electronics and theater. There were only seventeen stores, and only six were ever profitable. Those six were sold to Fry’s Electronics. The other eleven were sold to real estate developers at pennies on the dollar.
I did a demo for Mervyn’s California, a department store based in Hayward, CA. I think that I must have done the demo after finishing a training/consulting trip at Macy’s West in San Francisco. I cannot imagine that I would have flown out to the west coast to do a demo without spending a day or two gathering specs.
The IBM office nearest to Hayward was in Oakland. I took BART in the late afternoon from San Francisco to Oakland. There was quite a bit of excitement at the Holiday Inn at which I was staying. Someone had been murdered on the street in front of the hotel the previous night. There was one other very peculiar thing about this stay. I checked into a Holiday Inn with no difficulty, but I checked out of a different hotel (maybe a Ramada?). The hotel had been sold, and its ownership had changed while I was asleep.
The demo went fine. The guy who had contacted me—his name was Thiery or something like that—liked what he saw. However, the sale never advanced any further. This was almost always what happened whenever I got talked into doing a demo without taking at least a day to interview the potential users. At the time that I did the demo Mervyn’s was, unbeknownst to me, owned by Target. This might have explained the lack of progress. Target may have been restricting or rejecting any capital purchases at the time.
Mervyn’s was sold to some vulture capitalists in 2004. A much smaller version of the chain went out of business in 2009.
For some reason Doug and I once had a very short meeting with the president of Gottschalks, a chain of department stores based in Fresno, CA. He told Doug and me that he would get all of the other members of the Frederick Atkins Group to install AdDept. This organization (absolutely never abbreviated by its initials) somehow enabled its members to shop for foreign and domestic merchandise as a group. Nearly every department store that was not owned by the May Company or Federated belonged to it.
A few years after he made this promise he (or someone else at Gottschalks) arranged for me to speak before the members at one of their conventions in Naples, FL. I flew to Fort Meyers and rented a car from there. Naples was beautiful and reeked of new money. I gave my little spiel, but I did not have an opportunity to interact with any of the members of the audience. So, I did not get any direct feedback.
We eventually did sign up a few members of the group—notably the Bon-Ton (described here) and Elder-Beerman (described here). I don’t know whether my speech had any effect.
I think that the Frederick Atkins Group is defunct in 2021. The references to it that I could find on the Internet were all from decades past.
In (I think) 1999 Doug Pease and I made an unproductive trip to Columbus, OH, to talk with the IT director of of Value City about the possibility of installing the AdDept system for use by the advertising department. That adventure is described here.
First stop: Norfolk.
TSI got a phone call from a chain of furniture stores in coastal Virginia, Norfolk4, as I recall. As part of my crazy automotive support trip, I stopped by to talk with the advertising director at this company on my journey from Home Quarters Warehouse in Virginia Beach to Hecht’s in Arlington. I spent a couple of hours with him. When I discovered that the company had only three stores, I knew that this was a mistake. I told him that our software could address his problems, but the cost and effort would not be worth it for either of us. I advised him to hire someone who was a wiz with spreadsheets.
I think that I got a free cup of coffee out of it.
I can’t tell you what happened to the company thereafter because I don’t even remember its name.
We had two reasonably hot leads in 2000. I had to handle both of them myself. The first was at Bealls department store, which has its headquarters in Bradenton, FL. This was another situation is which I had to deal with the IT department rather than the advertising department. I am pretty sure that the company already had at least one AS/400. I have a few notes from this trip, but it is not clear whether I intended to do the demo on their system or on one at a nearby IBM office.
In any case I think that there was a technical problem that prevented a successful installation of the software needed for the demo. So, I had to improvise, and I did not get to spend much time with the people who would have benefited from the system. The whole thing made me very depressed.
I had some free time, and so I went to the beach. I stopped at a Jacobson’s store to buy a tee shirt to wear at the beach. The cheapest tee shirts in the store cost $100!
The beach was lovely, and it was unbelievably empty. The weather was pretty nice. A beach in Connecticut would have been packed in this type of weather.
All of these stores are gone.
We did not get the account, but the tale has an interesting coda. Bealls is still in business today. For years Bealls could not expand outside of the state of Florida because a different store with exactly the same name was already using it in other states. These Bealls stores were run by Stage Stores, a long-time AdDept client that was based in Houston. Stage Stores was still using AdDept when TSI went out of business in 2014.
In 2019 Stage announced that it was changing all of its stores into Gordmans, its off-price logo (which did not exist while I was working with them). When the company declared bankruptcy Bealls purchased, among other things, the right to use the Bealls name nationwide.
I remember going to Barneys New York in late 2000 to talk with someone in advertising. I also have discovered three emails that I sent to Christine Carter, who was, I think, either in charge of the advertising department or in charge of the financial side. Barneys only had twenty-two stores, and that included some off-price outlets. I don’t know how much they actually advertised.
Flagship store on 60th Street.
We never heard from them after my last email, which emphasized how easily AdDept could be adapted to differing needs even for companies the size of Barneys. By this time the very affordable AS/400 model 150 had been introduced. It would have been perfect for them.
I think that Barneys is dead or nearly so in 2021. All of the stores in the U.S have been closed, and even the “Barneys New York” brand was sold to Saks Fifth Avenue. However, the company also had a Japan division, which is evidently still operational.
I received a very unexpected phone some time in 2001 or 2002. It came from a man who had formerly worked at Saks Fifth Avenue and had taken a job as a Vice President at Sears. He knew that the advertising department at Saks had been doing things with its AdDept system that Sears’ advertising department seemed utterly incapable of. He invited me to the Sears headquarters in Hoffman Estates, IL, to investigate the possibility of installing AdDept at Sears.
At about the same time I had been in contact with the agency in a nearby town that Sears used for buying newspaper space and negotiating newspaper contracts. They wanted to talk with me about the possibility of working together. The agency’s name was three initials. I think that one was an N, but I am not sure.5
I arranged to spend consecutive days at the two places. It was cold on the day that I visited the agency. I learned that it recruited new clients by claiming that they could negotiate better rates for them because they also represented Sears. I suspected that this was baloney. Sears was a bid dog nationwide, but the amount of newspaper ads that they bought in any individual market was not that impressive. They were just in a lot of markets.
After the people explained the services that they offered to clients, I remarked that about 10 percent of what they did overlapped with about 10 percent of what we did. Privately I could not imagine that any of our clients who would benefit from their services.
I told them about AxN, our Internet product. They informed me that the papers did not want to sign on to their website for insertion orders. Of course, they wouldn’t, and they had nothing to hold over the papers.
We ended the meeting with the usual agreement to stay in touch and look for synergies, but privately I considered them the enemy.
I did not see a parking structure. Maybe I entered on the wrong side of the pond.
The next day was bitterly cold, and there was a strong wind. I located the sprawling Sears complex and parked my rented car in a lot that was already nearly full. I had to walk a long way to the main building, and I have never felt as cold as I did on that walk.
I could hardly believe it when I walked into the building. The ground floor was billed with retail establishments—a drug store, a coffee shop, a barber shop, and many more. I had to take the escalator up to get to Sears. I was met there by the woman with whom I had been in contact. She was from the IT department.
OK, now I get it. Our problem was that we did not have enough architects.
She took me up to meet the “advertising team”. Six or eight people were assembled in the room, and they all had assigned roles. I remember that one was the “system architect”, and one was the “database manager”. I almost could not suppress my amusement. What did all these people do? There was no system, and there certainly was no database. At TSI I handled essentially all the roles that everyone at the table described.
They asked me some questions about the AdDept system. When I told them that it ran on the AS/400, the system architect asked me if that system was not considered obsolete. I scoffed at this notion and explained that IBM had introduced in the AS/400 64-bit RISC processors that were state-of-the-art. I also said that, as far as I knew, the AS/400 was the only system that was build on top of a relational database. That made it perfect for what AdDept did.
I wonder how many “OS/2 shops” there were in the world.
They informed me that Sears was an OS/26 shop. I did not know that there was such a thing. In the real world Windows had already left OS/2 in its dust by that time. In all my time dealing with retailers I never heard anyone else even mention OS/2. It might have been a great idea, but IBM never did a good job of positioning it against Windows.
Besides, just because the corporation endorsed OS/2 should not eliminate consideration of multi-user relational databases where appropriate. The devices with OS/2 could serve as clients.
They explained to me that Sears’ advertising department had hundreds of employees, most of whom served as liaisons with the merchandise managers. Most of the ads were placed by agencies. I presume that the newspaper ads were produced in-house. No one whom I talked with seemed to know. The people on the committee did not seem to know anything about how the department did budgeting or planning.
The competition.
Someone talked about Sears’ competitors. The example cited was Home Depot. I don’t know why this surprised me. I must have been taken in by the “softer side of Sears” campaign a few years earlier.
After the meeting my escort took me to a remarkable room that was dedicated to the advertising project. It was a small theater that had ten or so posters on the wall with big Roman numerals at the top: I, II, III, IV, etc. There were no statues, but otherwise I was immediately struck by the resemblance to the Stations of the Cross that can be found in almost any Catholic church in the world. I asked what the posters represented. The answer was that they were the “phases of the project”. I was stunned by the assumption that the project required “a team” and that it was or indefinite duration. No one ever allowed us more than a month or two to have at least portions of the system up and running.
At some point I was allowed to give my presentation. The man who had worked at Saks attended along with a fairly large number of people. Maybe some were from advertising. I was never allowed to speak with them individually.
I never got to read the advertising department’s Wish Book.
My talk explained that AdDept was a relational database that was specifically designed for retail advertising departments. I described a few of the things for which it had been used by other retailers. I could not do much more than that. I had not been able to talk with any of the people in the department, and the IT people were clearly clueless.
When I returned to Connecticut I wrote to both my escort and the man from Saks. I told both of them that I did not know what the next step might be. I had not been given enough access to the advertising department to make a proposal. The whole experience was surreal. If someone had asked me to return, I would only have done it if I were granted unfettered access to potential users.
No one ever contacted us. I told Doug not to bother following up.
One puzzling whiff occurred during the very short period in which Jim Lowe worked for us. The strange case of Wherehouse Music is explored here.
Perhaps the strangest telephone call from a genuine prospect that I ever received was from Albertsons, a very large retailer with is its headquarters in Boise Idaho. The person who called was (or at least claimed to be) the advertising director there.
I had heard of Albertsons, but I did not know very much about the company. All I knew was that they were a chain of grocery stores in the west. Since advertising for grocery stores is basically limited to one insert/polybag7 per week, they had never seemed to be great prospects for AdDept. However, I never hung up on someone who expressed interest in the system.
The problem was that this lady insisted that I fly out to Boise to meet with her and her crew the next day. I tried to get her to explain what the situation was, but she said that she had no time to talk. She needed to know if I would make the trip. It was a little tempting for a peculiar reason. Idaho was one of the few states8 that I had never visited. Still, this sounded awfully fishy. I passed.
The incredibly bumpy road that Albertsons has traveled is documented on its Wikipedia page, which is available here. I don’t remember when the call from the advertising director came. I therefore have no way of knowing whether she was in charge of advertising for a region, a division, all of the grocery stores, or none of those. I might well have passed up an opportunity that might have extended the life of the company. Who knows? It looked like a goose, and it honked like a goose, but maybe going to Boise would not have been a wild goose chase.
Jeff Netzer, with whom I had worked in the nineties at Neiman Marcus (recounted here), called me one day in 2010. He asked me if I remembered him. I said that I did; he was the Aggie who worked at Neiman’s.
He informed me that he was now working at Sewell Automotive, the largest Cadillac dealership in the Dallas area. He said that they were looking for help in automating their marketing. I was not sure how well AdDept would work in that environment, but I agreed to visit them. His boss promised to buy me a steak dinner.
I flew Southwest to Dallas, and for the first time my plane landed at Love Field. It was much closer to Sewell than DFW would have been.
I found a great deal out about their operation. I doubted that we could do much for the agency for a reasonable amount of money. On my computer I recently found a three-page document dated September 23, 2010, in which I had listed all of the issues that I learned about at Sewell. A woman named Tucker Pressly entered all of their expense invoices into a SQL Server database. It was inefficient, and there were no programs to help them compare with budgets.
The main objective of the marketing department was to make sure that they were taking advantage of all available co-op dollars from Cadillac and other vendors. We could not help with this unless we wrote a new module. I described my reactions to their issues in a letter to Jeff.
I never heard back from Jeff, who left Sewell in 2012. Nobody ever bought me a steak dinner.
Sewell Automotive is still thriving in 2021.
In 2011 or 2012 I received a phone call from a lady from the advertising department at Shopko, a chain of department stores based in Green Bay, WI. I don’t recall her name. She said that she worked for Jack Mullen, whom I knew very well from both Elder-Beerman and Kaufmann’s. Before Doug Pease came to TSI, he had worked for Jack at G. Fox in Hartford.
I flew out to Packer Land to meet with her. They had a very small advertising department. They basically ran circulars in local newspapers on a weekly basis. As I remember, she and one other person ran the business office.
I worked up a proposal for the most minimal AdDept system that I could come up with and sent it to her. When I had not heard from her after a few weeks I called her. She said that the company was downsizing and, in fact, her position was being eliminated.
Jack also left the company in July of 2012. His LinkedIn page is here. Shopko went out of business in 2019.
1. Allison Volpert apparently still works for IBM in 2021. Her LinkedIn page is here.
2. As I write this I can easily visualize Doug stabbing a box with a pencil after a frustrating telephone conversation with someone from a Federated division.
3. I worked fairly closely with Debra Edwards when I installed the AdDept system at Elder-Beerman stores in Dayton, OH. That installation is described here. She was the Advertising Director there. Her LinkedIn page is here.
4. The “l” in Norfolk is silent, and the “ol” sounds much more like a short u.
5. I later learned that there were actually two affiliated agencies across the street from one another. I encountered the other one, SPM, in my dealings with Proffitt’s Inc./Saks Inc., which are detailed here. The agency was still around in 2023. Its webpage is here.
6. In fact IBM stopped updating OS/2 in 2001 and stopped supporting the operating system in 2006. I cannot imagine how Sears dealt with this. I pity their employees with nothing OS/2 experience at Sears on their résumés.
7. Polybags are the plastic bags that hold a group of flyers from diverse retailers. they are ordinarily distributed to people willy-nilly.
8. The others are Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, and Alaska. I am not certain of Arkansas. I might have gone there with my grandparents when I was a youngster. The only place that I have been in Utah is the Salt Lake City airport.
Buses transported the entire group from the hotel to the ship, which was considerably smaller than the Song of Norway. This was actually a good thing. It was easier to get around on this ship, and almost all of our time on it would during the hours of darkness.
The Dolphin IV may have been our ship.
I think that we must have left Istanbul fairly late in the day. I don’t remember that we had any days at sea. In fact, I do not remember much about being on the ship at all. The schedule was pretty much the same every day. We were always in port when we woke up. We ate breakfast on the ship. Then we disembarked from the ship and did something. Then we returned to the ship. After we left the port we had supper. There was usually some kind of entertainment in the evening.
I remember absolutely nothing about the food. It must have been passable and fairly plentiful. In those days I was probably more interested in quantity than quality. The cost of the cruise was quite low. We did not expect to be treated the way that we were on our two Royal Caribbean cruises (described here).
Our room was OK, and the service at supper was, too. There were no assigned seats, and I don’t ever remember us sharing a table with anyone. I don’t remember our cabin boy, but we must have had one.
If we had had a day at sea, it might have been tiresome. The ship had none of the amenities that the Song of Norway boasted. There was definitely no casino. I don’t think that there was even a game room or an exercise room or anything like that. We did not miss these things; we came to see the sights. If we wanted a drink on the ship, we could get it.
Magicians who specialize in productions need a good tailor.
After supper there was entertainment in a small theater. I remember three of the shows.
A magician performed one evening. I was still quite interested in magic in 1992 even though more than a decade had passed since I had devoted a lot of time to it in Detroit (as described here). The magician came on stage wearing a flashy sport jacket and did at least six or seven “productions”—making things appear out of nowhere: flowers, a cane, a dove, a bunny, etc. Then he took off his jacket for the rest of the performance. I wonder how many other people thought, “Well, I guess that that jacket is empty now.”
I seem to remember that there was a small orchestra/band on the ship. One night they played while some female dancers performed. Ordinarily I would have no interest whatever in such a show. However, Sue and I were within ten feet of one of the dancers when her left breast popped out of her costume. I paid attention after that.
On the last night of the cruise as our ship was en route from Santorini to Piraeus, the orchestra played Greek music, and a gourp of the crew members got up on the stage and showed how to dance to Greek music. One fellow really got into it and tried to coax passengers into joining him for the finale. Only a few did. I think that this fellow may have hit the ouzo a little early that evening.
Our first port of call was Mytilene (mee tee LEE nee), the port city and capital of the Greek island of Lesbos (LEZ voss). Although Mytilene is only 184 miles from Istanbul by air, it was quite a bit farther by sea, perhaps 300 miles. The first phase of our voyage took us down to the base of the Bosphorus, across the entire width of the Sea of Marmara, through the Dardanelles, past the site of ancient Troy, down the western coast of Turkey, then an abrupt turn back to the east, and then south to the western side of Lesbos, where we were actually less than seven miles from Turkey and very far indeed from the Greek mainland.
Sue and I took a guided tour that included at least two stops on the island. About ten or twelve of us were in the group, as I recall. We traveled in a small bus. Our guide was a young lady who was very well spoken and enthusiastic about her home island and Greek heritage. She told us about the historic conflict between Greece, of which Lesbos is one of the most distant islands, and “Asia Minor”, which is how she always referred to Turkey. She also spoke about the Turkish Revolution that ended in 1923 and resulted in the Greeks being expelled from modern Turkey. She called this event “the Catastrophe”. How strange it must be to live in such an otherwise isolated area only a few miles away from your country’s ancestral enemy. I don’t know for certain, but I suspect that the families of most or the residents have been in Lesbos for centuries.
Theophilos is on the right.
Our first stop was at the Theophilos Museum in the village of Vareia, just outside of Mytilene. Our guide explained that Theophilos Hatzimihail was an eccentric artist who was born in Vareia. She said that he was one of the few people who dared to wear the ancient historical garb, including a kilt and a curved sword. He also was a fanboy of Alexander the Great.
Theophilos’s works were generally very colorful and patriotic. He also often painted the locals of Lesbos engaged in mundane tasks. The guide said that they were like “cartoons”. Clearly she did not mean to disparage them. Instead, she was emphasizing that they told stories and were not necessarily realistic. Also, he also sometimes hand-wrote dialogue next to his characters, but he never used “balloons”.
Many more of Theophilos’s paintings can be viewed on the Internet.
I really enjoyed the visit to the museum. Theophilos was no Caravaggio, but I remember having a really good time looking at his paintings. and I had never felt that way before around art. Maybe it was just because the guide provided some context for me. It had a profound effect on me. It definitely affected the way that I approached subsequent trips.
After we left the museum the bus transported us into the interior of the island to another village. This one was, our guide assured us, locally famous for its beautiful church. I don’t remember the name of the village or the church. The church did not seem that special to me. It certainly was not as ornate as St. Bede’s church in Kelly, KS. The most memorable feature was the pair of nuns who cared for the church. I estimated that they were both about four feet tall.
After the visit to the church we may have stopped for lunch (I don’t remember) before returning to the ship. When I gave the guide her tip, I described the experience as “θαυμάσια”, which means “wonderful”.2 She was very surprised by this and smiled widely.
By the way, Sue did not share my enthusiasm about the excursion. Maybe I just had a slight crush on the guide.
Mytilene is in the top center; Kuşadası is in the lower right.
During the night we sailed from Mytilene to Kuşadası, a port city on the Turkish mainland. The primary reason for this stop was to allow passengers to view the remains of the ancient city of Ephesus. Almost all the passengers elected to take the excursion.
Ephesus was for centuries one of the major cities in Asia Minor. It figured prominently in the early years of Christianity. There is even a letter to the Ephesians attributed to St. Paul.
I think that we had a guide for this visit, but I don’t remember him at all. Someone official certainly accompanied us on the bus trip to the site, which is about twenty miles from Kuşadası.
Layout of Ephesus.
I remember that we were told that the city was a port in its heyday. However, the river and coastline silted up over time. The ruins are now about two miles away from the sea. By the fifteenth century the former city had been completely abandoned.
The ruins, however, were in pretty good condition. Perhaps the best aspect was that it felt like a real city, not just a group of isolated structures.
The one thing that both Sue and I remember the most clearly was the place where a footprint and a drawing in the paving stone have been interpreted as an advertisement for a local brothel. Our guide claimed that it was the oldest advertisement in the world.
The worst aspect was the fact that the site was guarded by soldiers with semi-automatic rifles. In 1992 this was a stunning sight. We were told that there might be a problem with Kurdish groups.
The building that impressed us the most at the time was the huge theater that could seat as many as 25,000. It was extremely well preserved. It took no effort at all to imagine a performance taking place there.
The other really impressive structure was the Library of Celsus. I remembered that the four virtues were celebrated in the facade, but the only one that I remembered was Sophia (wisdom). The other three—bravery, knowledge, and thought— I had to look up online.
Library of Celsus.
The guide did not tell us about Jesus’s mother Mary being escorted to Ephesus by John the Apostle. Supposedly she lived in or near the city up until her last days on earth. However, no Catholic believes that she was buried in the vicinity—or anywhere else. One of the very few statements ever made by any pope under the terms of infallibility was that Mary was assumed into heaven body and soul at the time of her demise. Pope Pius XII made this declaration in 1950 in the Apostolic Constitution, Munificentissimus Deus.
Of course, I was quite familiar with the doctrine of the Assumption when we were in Ephesus in 1992, but I did not know about the papal declaration. What is surprising to me now is that it was not declared earlier. The Assumption has been a part of Christian (but not biblical) tradition for a very long time.
Kuşadası is at the top, Rhodes at the bottom.
The next morning we landed in Rhodes, which is the name of both the port city/capital and the island on which it resides. The only thing that I previously knew about Rhodes was that it was the home of the Colossus of Rhodes, a huge statue that straddled the harbor. The statue disappeared many centuries earlier, but as our ship docked in that same harbor, and it was not difficult to visualize what the statue—one of the seven Wonders of the World—might have looked like in ancient times.
Part of the wall in the old town.
Rhodes was a very interesting place. A medieval wall circumscribed the Old Town. I walked the entire circuit by myself. It affoded great views both of the city on one side and the rest of the island, the harbor, and the sea on the other.
I was even able to read a few of the street signs. I recall that one of the streets was named ίππος, a common word from Homer’s time that is still used. It means horse. If he had ever written it, Homer would have placed a rough breathing mark at the beginning to indicate an /h/ sound. Modern Greek has dispensed with that character and that sound.
The Staircase of the Propylaea was pretty steep, but …
For centuries Rhodes was home base for the Knights of St. John, often called the Hospitalers. Several castles and palaces that they used remained on the island. I think that there were excursions available to visit some of them, but we did not take advantage of them.
Instead, we went to the nearby town of Lindos, which is pronounced like “LEAN those”, except that the last consonant sound is an /s/, not a /z/. It has a nice beach, but it is most famous for its Acropolis. One of the most stunning events of my life was climbing the very wide Staircase of the Propylaea there. Sue recalls ladies who sat on the steps selling home-made lace products.
Nothing but sky was visible at the top as one ascended the stairs. It was a surreal experience. However, when the top was finally reached, the view in every direction was absolutely stunning—ruins of the church of St. John, the sea, the village, the beach. It was almost too much for the senses to handle.
… the view from the top was spectacular in every direction.
Rhodes is in the upper right. Santorini is in the upper left. The big island at the bottom is Crete.
During the night we sailed west toward our final island, the picturesque Santorini. We knew nothing about it until we arrived there.
The small island is a long way north of Crete, but an event there had a large effect on the Minoan civilization that was based on its much larger neighbor to the south. That is because circa 1600 BC the volcano on Santorini (which was then one single island called Thera) erupted massively3 and buried the settlement at Akrotiri on the southern part of the island. It also caused tidal waves and earthquakes that wiped out the Minoan civilizations on Crete and other islands.
… but Sue insisted on the cable car.
I was game for riding a donkey up to Fira, …
The caldera of the volcano, which has became the harbor after the eruption is surrounded by very steep cliffs. The capital city of Fira and, from there, the rest of the towns and villages, can be reached by road. One way to get to the top is to ride a donkey. A faster way is to take the cable car. Both Sue and I remember exploring Fira and having lunch at a restaurant there, but neither of us remember how we got up and down. We definitely did not ride donkeys. We must have taken a cable car.
The roof in this photo of the Akrotiri site collapsed in 2005.
In the afternoon we took a bus to the archeological site of Akrotiri. This was the most informative and interesting excursion of the entire trip. When we arrived, the excavation was in its twenty-fifth year. These are probably the best preserved ruins ever discovered, and large portions of them were open for public viewing.
Our guide told us about some of the artifacts that were found here. It is indisputable that the merchants of Akrotiri traded with people from all over the Mediterranean. A large amount of written material was also discovered. It is in a language called Linear A. Unfortunately, we were told that no one has been able to decipher it.4
During our last night at sea the ship sailed northwest from Santorini (which Google Maps sometimes still calls Thera) to Piraeus, the port for Athens. We were then taken by bus to the hotel. During the drive we passed the Panathenaic Stadium in which some of the events of the first modern Olympics were held in 1896. We also were surprised to see a statue of Harry Truman, who was honored there because of the Marshall Plan that was implemented during his administration.
Most of the group took the excursion to the Acropolis. How could you visit Athens without seeing the Acropolis? Actually, I was a little disappointed by the Parthenon. It definitely was impressive to see from anywhere in Athens5, but when we finally arrived there, we discovered that a good bit of it was covered by scaffolding. So, for me at least, this was mostly just a matter of “ticking the box” on the bucket list. I did learn one new word that actually stuck in my memory: Caryatid.
The only social interchange with any of the other tour members that I can remember occurred while we were standing around on the Acropolis. As we looked down on Athens sprawling beneath us, we got into a conversation with two young ladies from the West Coast. They were interested that we owned a business, which we accurately described as “struggling”. One of the women astutely pointed out that we could not be doing too badly if we could afford to take a nice vacation like the one that we had both experienced. It was a nice thing for her to say, and it improved my mood.
After we had wandered around the Acropolis for the allotted period of time the bus drove us down to the National Archeological Museum in the center of Athens. Although I am absolutely positive that we visited it, I don’t honestly remember anything about it at all. If you want to know what is in it, I recommend that you watch the nine-minute video that is posted here.
At the hotel we had picked up a pretty good street map of Athens. I talked Sue into walking back from the museum to the hotel. If we became too tired or sore at some point, we could probably flag down a taxi. Incidentally, the taxi drivers in Athens were almost indistinguishable from the ones in Istanbul—same gender, same mustaches, same cigarettes held at all times in the right hand.
I wanted to stop at a clothing store or sports store in Athens to try to buy soccer jerseys with team names in Greek for my nieces. We stopped in a few places, but I don’t think that we found anything of that nature that was very appealing. The retailers in the center of Athens were mostly oriented toward selling souvenirs or very expensive stuff to tourists. It may be that the fad of wearing fake jerseys had not yet reached Greece in 1992.
At one point in the journey back to the hotel we stopped for a rest. Sue and I were resting on a low wall. An elderly woman approached us and addressed us—in Greek, of course. As quickly as I could, I tried to form the most useful short sentence that I could think of: “Δεν καταλαβαίνω,” which means “I don’t understand.” Before I could get the first word out, she correctly diagnosed our ignorance of her native language, turned her back and walked away. By the way, that first word, “Δεν”, is pronounced almost exactly like the English word “then”.
We happened to pass the home of the Prime Minister of Greece just as they were performing the ceremony of the changing of the guards. The soldiers wore absolutely absurd costumes, and their marching style would certainly have qualified them for the Ministry of Silly Walks. If the Turks frightened their enemies with their mustaches, the shoes of the Greek soldiers must have disabled their foes with uncontrollable laughter.
Sue and I had a good time at supper describing these guys to some of the other members of our tour group who had gone to the same restaurant. The atmosphere was festive, but the food was at best mediocre.
On our last day we took a bus to Delphi, the home of the famous oracles. The highlight of the trip occurred just as we made the turn to the west. I saw a sign for Marathon. It was fun to imagine the messenger making his fatal run from Marathon back to Athens along the same route that we had driven. I could visulaize him prostrate near the stadium as he called out in a strained voice, “Νίκη!”
Delphi itself was another disappointment to me. We got to hear the story of the oracles, and we saw the ruins along the side of a hill from a distance, but we were not allowed to get very close to them.
In point of fact, at this point in the trip we had seen about as many ruins as we needed to see. We had viewed a large number of broken columns and ruined buildings. At this point we would rather have dealt with something alive or at least intact.
Sue and I enjoyed this trip immensely. It seemed regretable that the only really disappointing day was the last one. I think that the trip would have worked better if it had been in the opposite direction—starting in Athens and ending in Istanbul. That would have put the most impressive ruins at Ephesus closer to the end and the one island with no ruins at all, Lesbos, just before Istanbul.
We flew back to JFK Airport on Long Island. The trip was completely uneventful; at least I don’t remember any problems. My recollection is that a limousine service brought us back to Enfield. In those days a company called CT Limo6 specialized in driving between the Hartford area and the international airports around New York City. Their prices were competitive; if not, I would never have agreed to such an extravagance.
1. Her attitude to me seems strange in retrospect. The Ottomans conquered Turkey in the fifteenth century. A few Christians still lived there, but the Turks were dominant until the end of World War I. At that point the allies and Greeks tried to impose a government on the area, but the Turks revolted and won their autonomy. So, she was really pining for a time that had been erased from history more than five hundred years earlier.
2. The word is pronounced, believe it or not, “thahf MAHS ee ah”. The alpha-upsilon diphthong in modern Greek is pronounced “ahf” or “ahv”, depending on the next letter. Upsilon is still a vowel when used alone, but when used with another vowel it has developed a consonant sound.
3. The volcano is still considered active. It last erupted in 1950. The ones in the 1920’s were more serious and caused some damage.
3. Volcano
4. Little progress has been made in the subsequent years. When I heard about this my first thought was that I would love to work on this project.
5. Mark Twain’s stealthy visit to the Parthenon is described beautifully in The Innocents Abroad. He was quarantined on the ship, but a group of men snuck ashore, made their way to the Acropolis and visited it by starlight.
6. CT Limo still exists and still offers this service.
