2004-2014 TSI: AdDept Client: Dick’s

Posted on December 12, 2022 by Mike

Chain of sporting goods stores in Pittsburgh. Continue reading →

Dick’s Sporting Goods is as old as I am. It started as small store in Binghamton, NY, that sold fishing equipment. In 1994 it was moved to the Pittsburgh area. In 2022 it had over 850 stores with over 50,000 employees.

TSI and Dick’s had a very long courtship. I am sure that I made several trips to Dick’s before we signed the contract. The first time that I visited the company it was still in its previous building, which was much smaller than the complex that it constructed in Coraopolis, PA.

We never gave up on selling them a system even though many of AdDept’s features would never be of much use to them. I knew that Dick’s IT department was committed to the AS/400 architecture. Therefore, the cost to them would not include the cost of additional hardware, which was often a deal-breaker.

I remember one sales trip in which I was asked to talk about the way that our system handled co-op—ads that feature a single vendor who has agreed to pay a portion of the expenses. I was pretty sure that no one would buy the AdDept system just to handle co-op, but I always tried to do what they asked. I have read through pages and pages of notes about the project of installing AdDept at Dick’s, but I found no subsequent mention of co-op

TSI and Dick’s formally tied the knot in a contract dated March 4, 2003. It was signed by Eileen Gabriel¹, who was Dick’s CIO at the time and me. I still have a pdf file of the document. Most of our contracts were far simpler than this one. Their lawyers obviously added quite a bit of language to the one that we submitted. Neither side ever had any difficulty about it during the more than eleven years that it was in force.

At the time that we negotiated the contract I did not understand (or, for that matter have much interest in) why Dick’s, which up until 2003 had always been in the “kicking the tires” column of prospective AdDept users, suddenly was rarin’ to go. I subsequently discovered two factors that probably contributed to the change in attitude: 1) The company went public in 2002. That probably provided a good deal of cash. 2) By then the advertising department had hired several employees who were familiar with what TSI and AdDept could accomplish². There probably were other favorable conditions that were not evident to me.

Planning for the AdDept system: Dick’s already had several large AS/400’s that were used for other aspects of its business. On one of them were PeopleSoft³ applications designed for the accounting and human resources departments. One of TSI’s major challenges would be to implement an interface between AdDept and PeopleSoft’s A/P and G/L systems. When employees in the advertising department entered expense invoices into the AdDept system they would automatically be sent to the PeopleSoft system for payment and posting to the General Ledger.

I found a document created by Paul Marshalek⁴, the first project manager for the AdDept installation. It provided the agenda for a one-day “discovery session” that was held in the Final Four room on April 16, 2004, almost exactly one year after the contract was signed. The scheduled attendees were Krista Fullen⁵ and Adam Sembrat⁶ from advertising, Don Steward⁷ from IT, Joe Oliver⁸ and Jeff Jones⁹ from finance, Paul, and myself.

The agenda includes a dozen items. During my preparation for this entry one caught my attention. I remember spending a lot of time at Dick’s on various aspects of print media from insertion orders (sent via A^xN¹⁰ from the beginning) to payment of bills to allocation of costs to stores. I did not remember much about broadcast. At the time they used an advertising agency called Empower MediaMarketing¹¹ based in Cincinnati. I could not find any evidence that we ever implemented an interface by which the buys from the agency were uploaded to AdDept. TSI provided this for most AdDept users, but it usually required custom programming or at least some fine-tuning.

Getting the AdDept system operational: It was made very clear to me that TSI’s client was the IT department, and the people in advertising and accounting were the IT department’s clients. So, the IT department made all the calls in this installation. In some ways this made things more difficult for me. I was never sure whether the advertising department was satisfied with our progress. On the other hand, we heard very few complaints, probably because everything that the advertising department really wanted was installed in phase 1, as described below.

Dick’s insisted on having two separate AdDept environments, one for testing of new code and one for production. Both of them were named after Greek gods of wind. Aeolus, the developmental system, was named after the keeper of the winds. Boreas, the production system was named after the personification of the north wind. TSI employees had no credentials for signing on to Boreas and no way to reach it from our office in East Windsor.

Aeolus and Boreas actually resided on the same AS/400, but they were in different partitions designed to make accidental intermixing of the two environments impossible. If separate boxes had been purchased, separate licensing agreements would be required for the operating system and IBM system-level programs. This would have made the installation of upgrades a much more difficult and time-consuming process for the IT department.

This installation involved a large number of interfaces and a great deal of custom programming. When we delivered a new batch of program changes—both routine updates and code specifically for Dick’s—we had to install the new code in Aeolus, implement the required changes to the database, and test them there. Advertising employees would then be required to sign on to Aeolus and make sure that both the new and previously installed AdDept programs worked. If the changes were not ones that they requested, it was difficult to get them to take this seriously.

During the testing and approval period a process that “refreshed” the AdDept system in Aeolus with the programs and data from Boreas needed to be suspended. If the timing of the suspension was not perfect, then all of the changes that we had installed during that period could be wiped out. A few times this happened to us, and it was quite upsetting.

When all of the advertising department asserted that the changes were good to go, the Aeolus system was refreshed, and TSI needed to install the changes again. The people in advertising would spot check what we had done. During this second period the AdDept system on Boreas was frozen. When the advertising people validated the changes, the Boreas system was refreshed with the new code and the transformed data on Aeolus. Only at that point could work resume. The primary purpose of all this was, I suspect, to eliminate the possibility that IT people might be blamed for deleterious outcomes.

This approach was much less efficient than our usual method of delivering code. I routinely installed new code to four or five other AdDept installations every weekend. Most of the time the users did not even know that I had done anything. There were occasional problems, but never anything that we could not address in an hour or so.

I don’t blame Dick’s for insisting that we follow their protocols, but we had had great success at over thirty installations with the approach that we had developed, and we would never have been able accomplish so much if we had been tied to Dick’s approach in all of them.

Inevitably, despite all of the precautions, some bugs slipped through the testing process—both TSI’s and the advertising department’s. Dick’s had a method that allowed us to make emergency changes to address them, but I don’t remember the details of how it worked. We only needed it once or twice.

If there was a problem or a request for new code, the users had to go through the IT department. The people who served as TSI’s primary point of contact—the liaisons—were people who worked in the IT department as project managers.

Perhaps the biggest problem with the enforced separation of the users from the developers was that Dick’s insisted that I do all the training after the initial installation in one of their training rooms. I did not like this at all. Often the people who showed up at these training classes were not the people who would be using the programs that we were installing. Sometimes I did not know what roles were played by some of the people. I did the best that I could under the circumstances.

At other installations—even the ones with AS/400s owned and operated by the IT department—I was allowed direct access to the users. I had a thorough understanding of the administration of retail advertising, a claim that could be made by none of our liaisons. Many times I could address their issues on the spot and direct them to programs or techniques that they were previously unfamiliar with.

I am certain that the installation would have proceeded more rapidly and with fewer problems if the IT people had allowed us to use our time-tested methods, but the idea was absolutely anathema to them. The IT department owned the AS/400’s, and they insisted upon their right of ownership. Bypassing this interference from the IT department was the primary reason that we always preferred for the advertising departments to have their own smaller systems that could eventually communicate with the systems running the other aspects of the business.

Our main contact at Dick’s during the installation and for some time afterwards was John Nelko¹², an IT employee whose specialty was the workings of the AS/400’s operating system, OS/400. Under his supervision I installed AdDept on Aeolus and built all the files that they would need to use. I also installed IBM’s BASIC compiler and interpreter. That product was no longer supported by IBM, but TSI was authorized to sell and install it. Most of the other IBM software—SQL, query, FTP, faxing, etc.—that would be needed was already on the box.

On that very first day John and I got the faxing to work. I also was able to send an insertion order through A^xN to TSI’s server. That required that FTP over the Internet was working. It also required that Dick’s be set up on TSI’s system as a valid sender.

TSI was assigned a user ID on Aeolus called TSIDICKS. I was told that the password was set to expire every sixty days. John worked with Denise Bessette in our office to get the SDLC communication working over the telephone lines. In the beginning that was how we accessed the system from TSI’s office.

There was a little time left over in that first visit for extensive training. My notes reported:

We got through the season table, expense classes, ad types, markets, pubs, rates, and print rates in the first training session. Everyone seemed comfortable with everything. In the second training class we went through the more difficult tables pretty thoroughly and entered a couple of ads.
The pub-store master table for inserts was not set up correctly by the program which¹³ I wrote to create the table. I fixed it. I used the Saks programs as the basis for DM220RDX and DM230RDX. Adam wants to show the costs on insertion orders. Most of the programs do not do this. I added a column for the Skid Color to the insertion order. I did this all during a long meeting which everyone in advertising attended on Wednesday afternoon.

I remember that the names of the insertion order programs for ROP and inserts began with DM220 and DM230 respectively. The “Skid Color” refers to the color of the tag that was attached to a “skid” (a pallet with no bottom deckboards) on which the inserts were stacked and packaged for delivery. Each version of an insert was assigned a different color.

These were my last few comments on that momentous trip:

Amanda Sembrat, then known as Amanda Greener.

We had a good luncheon meeting about the rest of the project. Steve Manning, the Budgeting Director, attended. They are considering whether to use AdDept to create real purchase orders for all advertising expenses.
I almost made the mistake of going to a Mexican restaurant on Cinco di Mayo.
I showed Krista how to respond to errors. At this point both Adam and Amanda were involved in other things.
I think that Adam overstepped his authority last time when he decreed that we did not need the broadcast interface. Helen said that we may need to revisit this. We had better be careful with Adam. He sounds like he has more authority than he really does.
Request #1 was approved.
They certainly want me to return for the first insertion order run. They may want me sooner than that.

The fact that Dick’s ran so many inserts in so many markets caused some unique challenges that were also mentioned in the notes:

Adam says that about 15 papers have separate rates for flexis, which are also called minis. We need to come up with some way of handling this.
Most of their events start on Sunday. If the paper does not publish on Sunday, they want it to default to Saturday, Monday, Friday (before), Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday (after) in that order. I set things up to work this way, I think, but I was not able to test every possibility. For Thursday drops, they want it to default to Wednesday, Friday, Saturday.
They want to use the holiday quantities for Thanksgiving. Is there a good way to do this?
They have some “events” which involve sponsorships with sports teams. The costs are spread over several months. I am thinking that we might use Stage’s amortizing programs for this.

The second trip June 14, 2004: Dick’s was one of the few clients for which a one-day trip was at least somewhat reasonable. USAir had many direct flights between Bradley and Pittsburgh. Because Dick’s was so close to the airport, I could easily get to the office at the same time as the employees.

I did encounter one major problem: I discovered that it was not trivially easy to meet with people in the advertising department.

I got there about 9 a.m., but I had to wait about 30 minutes as they tried to figure out what to do with me. Advertising is in the new building, but the reception desk is in the old building. Eventually they managed to contact Adam, and he showed me into the building.

Here is what happened once I got to the advertising area:

I spent most of the morning making sure that all papers were correctly designated as F for faxing or T for AxN. I called Lucia¹⁵ to make sure that we were in agreement concerning every paper.
I met with Adam, Helen, Paul, and Steve about where we stand and what is on the agenda. Steve said that they need to keep track of actuals versus budgets. It took me a while to figure out that he means by category on each book. Right before he left he gave me a list of the categories which they currently use. They also decided that advertising should meet with Jane Walker and the accounting people to make sure that everyone is on the same page.
I helped Adam set up a pub group for all of his insert papers. He also needs one of his main papers. I think that he now knows how to do this.
We put on an ad and printed insertion orders. Adam noticed that only the first 12 characters of the fax number appeared. I fixed this.
The sequence number for the NJS market was incorrect. Adam fixed it.
We discovered that there were no rates for 6-page tabs. They sometimes run 12-page minis (same as flexis) which ordinarily use these rates. I wrote a little program to help Adam key these rates in fast.
I was able to establish an FTP session on TSI270.
Amanda¹⁶, who is engaged to Adam, said that she had looked over the quote for the run list. It looked good to her. They would like to have it by 6/28, although, of course, they have not approved it yet.

They were unable to print. The printer which they formerly used is no longer near them. I called John Nelko. He eventually identified the printer. I need to send him a memo telling him which user profiles need to be changed to use the new printer, which is called Ad_Dept.
I think that DM022 should use the text description from the book size file rather than the dimensions for the size on screen #M22A.
We could not fax because the modem was not available. I will send an e-mail to John to try to reserve the modem one day this week. Adam wanted to wait until Friday, but I told him that I would be out of town on Friday.

The rest of the story: An AdDept Progress Report dated October 15, 2004, and prepared by (I think) Paul Marshalek identified phase 1 of the installation as “print media”, which for Dick’s was primarily in the form of newspaper inserts. Phase 2 was much more detailed. It had the following sections:

Pub-store allocations, which included implementation of an interface with the system that Dick’s used for sales analysis.
Other media: broadcast, magazines, and billboards (which everyone in advertising called “outdoor” even if the signs were in a building).
Another interface to “refresh” AdDept’s vendor table so that its data was consistent with PeopleSoft’s.
Expense invoices, which in AdDept were divided into media (which were entered against the schedule) and non-media (which were entered by job categories or sub-accounts). This project included the expense payables interface.
Media accruals that created the journal entry for the G/L in PeopleSoft. The document notes that the file containing the journal entry for August 2004 was delivered to Jane Walker¹⁴ in the IT department.
Cost accounting, which in their case meant advertising costs (including overhead) in all media per store.
Non-media closing, which included accruals from purchase orders and prepaids.

This list, which resulted from the four-day trip that I made in October of 2004, included some really big programming jobs, but I am pretty sure that they were all eventually implemented.

I met several new people on that trip:

Carol Mazza was a media manager who worked for Helen Burkholder. Krista and Erika Crawford worked for her.
Linda Weiss was tasked with entering broadcast invoices. She reported to Steve Manning.
Dave Derry was an internal auditor.
Todd Schultz worked in Expense Payables.
Jeff March, who worked at Galyans, a company that Dick’s had recently acquired, was scheduled to start work the next Monday as broadcast manager.
Rick Kohout provided me with files that I used to implement the sales interface.¹⁷

Most of my time on the October 2004 visit was spent with Krista. I checked over what she had done for ROP and inserts and helped her set up other types of ads. At the time Dick’s was rapidly expanding. New stores were provided with pre-opening and grand opening advertising support. These ads had their own separate G/L accounts, and we had to devise a way of handling them.

My next trip was in April of 2005. I gave a talk to eleven people to explain how AdDept does accounting. The tone of my notes indicates my frustration. Accounting for advertising is complicated. I could not explain it very well in a few minutes in a classroom setting.

I learned that Jeff Jones accrued to plan. Here is what I reported about the reconciliation process:

Jeff explained that he made his “accrual entry.” He actually closes to plan. He takes the planned expenses, subtracts out the invoices paid, and spreads the difference to markets in a spreadsheet.
We got the February accrual to match. This is not really much of an accomplishment. We just matched one AdDept report to another after eliminating all possible sources of error. We got the March accrual to match within .5%. We ran the report by ad so that Jeff could compare it with the list which he used for his accrual.

Accrual to plan is a bogus concept. The whole idea of accruing is to make the expenses and income occur in the appropriate month so that one can isolate problem areas as soon as they develop. Accruing to plan disguises difficulties because the actuals are forced to match budgets. However, it was not my job to explain this.

I came up with a list of eleven things that needed to be changed in the production system. At other installations I would have just fixed them myself, but I was not allowed to touch anything. Denise and I had to come up with ways to circumvent this restriction in each case.

I also listed six or seven small changes that they requested.

I returned to Dick’s on May 31 for one day to look at their pub-store allocation records. I discovered that because someone skipped the step of creating these records, the allocations of costs to stores for 2005 have all been wrong.

I also helped them address the issue of paying bills for ads that ran in 2004. I came up with a Mickey Mouse method that at least got the accounting right at the G/L level.

The notes from my only visit in 2006 are very sketchy. There were a couple of new people whom I do not remember, and someone in advertising asked us to quote a massive database of zip codes to help with ordering insert distributions. Some—but by no means all—newspapers allow specifications of zip codes for insert distribution. Both AdDept and A^xN handled this by special instructions.

I remember quoting creating this database, but I don’t think that we ever did it. The notes make no mention of any other media or any accounting issues.

I made one four-day visit in 2007. I met a lot of new people. Included in that group were Carl Abel and Bob Pecina,¹⁸ who would be our primary contact for the rest of our relationship.

Among other things I learned that the advertising department had begun using AdDept for billboards and magazines.

They expressed considerable interest in copying all ads from one year to another for planning purposes. This was an important but very complicated task for any retailer. TSI had software to do this. If everything was set up perfectly, or at least nearly so, it could save a lot of time and make for more accurate planning. If anything important about the process was ignored, it could make a gigantic mess.

I knew that it would be a nightmare at Dick’s for more reasons than I could name. I am pretty sure that nothing ever came of this.

I learned that their change reports were essentially useless because they included ads that were created in order to estimate costs under a specific scenario and then deleted. There were a lot of these ads. I think that we put in a Y/N field on the selection screens for change reports to allow them to be excluded.

The last major project that we did for Dicks was to create a separate installation for Golf Galaxy, a retail chain that Dick’s had acquired in 2006. The administrative functions were not moved to Coraopolis until 2008. I decided to create a separate blog entry for the Golf Galaxy project. It can be viewed here.

Mike Krall.

When reading my notes for the two trips that I took in 2008 I discovered that I also spent time with Mike Krall¹⁹, a young guy who had been assigned the daunting task of managing the “cost accounting” programs that showed in summary and in detail how expenses were attributable to stores using rules that Dick’s created. The reports depended upon all aspects of the data—media and production costs, sales, store allocations, etc.—being accurate.

Here are some of the notes from the time that I spent with him:

I spent most of the day on Wednesday with Mike Krall. He runs the month end programs in AdDept, but he did not really know what he was doing. He had a detailed set of instructions to follow.
I made some queries in ADVMOQRY for Mike Krall to provide him with net indirect expense (INDNETEXP) and net production expenses for ads in prior months (PRIORMOEXP). I explained that these would only get the data from Dicks. If he wants Golf Galaxy, he should make copies and change the libraries from TSIDATA to TSIDATAG.
Does DX112 expense the indirects? Mike Krall said that he does not create a journal entry for indirects.

The white areas are buildings. The main entrance was in the middle of the top set. The bottom building and most of the parking (grey) areas did not exist when I visited last.

The atmosphere at Dick’s headquarters: Working at Dick’s was unlike anything that I experienced at any other retailer. For the most part the administrative departments of the department store chains that dominated the list of AdDept clients were located on the highest floors of large downtown stores. The ambience in the lower floors was designed to generate excitement. The upper floors were at best boring and sometimes even dingy. Even the offices of retailers that housed their administrative functions elsewhere were mundane.

The gigantic lobby at Dick’s headquarters.

Arrival at Dick’s was not an overwhelmingly pleasant experience. Despite the massive size of the complex—and it is much larger in 2022 than it was in my last visit of 2008—the offices in Coraopolis were not trivially easy to find within the industrial park. The parking was not a bit convenient. In those days there was only one lot, and by the time that I arrived with my rental car only spots that were a long way from the main entrance were available.

I don’t think that I was ever in this room.

From the front door one entered a huge waiting area. No one without an employee badge could get past it without being escorted. My memory may be faulty, but I don’t recall that they ever gave me a temporary badge.

Incidentally, it would not have been a good idea to arrive early to try to claim a better parking space. I would not have been allowed past the lobby until the person or people with whom I was meeting were there.

Surrounding the lobby were eight or ten conference rooms. Each was named after famous sporting events—Super Bowl, the Masters, World Series, etc. They were extremely elegant. A few of our early meetings were held in one of them.

Dick’s also had a very nice cafeteria, which was called the Court Street Café. I am pretty sure that I ate there every day—except the time that lunch was delivered to our meeting—on every visit. It’s a good thing, too. There were no restaurant in or near the industrial park in which the headquarters resided.

I remember feeling quite short on one of my first visits there. I was at least six feet tall, but almost everyone I met was quite a bit taller. Later I heard about a volleyball tournament held somewhere inside the facility during the lunch break or maybe right after work. They already had an indoor basketball court when I visited. Now they have that (with a track around it), tennis courts, and a huge workout room.

Epilogue: Alone among TSI’s clients, Dick’s still seemed to be thriving in 2022. They even have a store in Enfield next to Costco. A very large percentage of the people with whom I worked in the early twenty-first centuries are still employed there in Coraopolis.

A decision made by Dick’s in late 2013 was the cause of the decision to close down TSI. At the time the income from maintenance fees was not enough to keep the company running. The income from custom programming had also dwindled, and there were no real prospects for sales of new AdDept systems.

We therefore depended on the steady stream of checks from the newspapers that subscribed to the A^xN service. Because several of our other largest A^xN users had outsourced the buying of their newspaper space to third parties, Dick’s many newspapers accounted for a large percentage of the remaining income. I knew immediately that the decision by Dick’s management to let an advertising agency order its newspaper space was the death knell for TSI. The details are described here.

The people at Dick’s were quite surprised by TSI’s decision. Someone called us and told us that they still wanted to use AdDept. They evidently thought that we had misinterpreted their communication about the agency. We had to explain that the A^xN contracts generated a considerable amount of income for us.

Denise Bessette may have made a private arrangement to provide some support for the AdDept system at Dick’s. I was 65 years old when we made the decision to close, and I was not interested in such a venture.

1. I am not sure that I ever met Eileen. If I did, I don’t remember the occasion. Her LinkedIn page is here.

2. Two people who may have played significant roles behind the scene were Helen Burkholder, an executive in Dick’s advertising department, and Bill Dandy, her boss. I did not spend a lot of time with either of them in this installation, but they were both certainly influential.

I had worked closely with Helen when she was a media manager at Kaufmann’s. The blog entry about the Kaufmann’s installation is posted here. I am not sure what Bill Dandy’s title was. I met him when he took over that job at Michael’s in Irving, TX. That very profitable installation has been chronicled here. Helen’s LinkedIn page is here. Bill’s can be viewed here.

3. In December 2014 PeopleSoft was acquired by Oracle. I am not sure what effect this had on Dick’s. It did not seem to affect the design of the interface.

4. Paul worked in the IT department, not advertising. His LinkedIn page can be viewed here.

5. Krista Gianantonio (née Fullen) was our day-to-day contact in advertising. Her LinkedIn page is here. She was familiar with AdDept and TSI from her previous jobs at Hecht’s (described here) and Kaufmann’s (described here).

6. Adam Sembrat’s LinkedIn page can be found here.

7. I don’t remember Don Steward at all. I don’t think that we had any subsequent dealings with him. He might have been Paul’s boss. His LinkedIn page is here.

8. I don’t remember Joe Oliver. His LinkedIn page is here.

9. Jeff Jones actually worked with the financial side of AdDept. His LinkedIn page is here.

10. Dick’s had stores all over the country, and they advertised in hundreds of newspapers. The fact that the advertising department was excited about electronic delivery of insertion orders gave a big boost to TSI’s efforts to expand the use of the A^xN product.

11. In 2022 the company is just called Empower. Its Wikipedia page can be found here.

12. John Nelko’s LinkedIn page can be found here.

13. When researching the notes I definitely realized that I had not yet learned when to use “that” and when to use “which”. This “which” should be a “that”. So should the “which” in the last sentence.

14. Like many of the other people listed in this entry Jane Walker is still employed at Dick’s in 2022. Her LinkedIn page is here.

15. Lucia Hagan was the administrative person at TSI during this period. Her history at TSI is described here.

16. My notes say that Amanda Greener was not actually employed by Dick’s; she actually worked for Dick’s printer. She evidently married Adam. Her LinkedIn page is here.

17. I have only the vaguest recollections of any of these people, but I found LinkedIn pages for several of them: Carol Mazza’s is here. Todd Schultz’s is here. Jeff March’s is here. Rick Kohout’s is here.

18. Bob Pecina’s LinkedIn page is here.

19. Mike Krall left Dick’s in 2011. His LinkedIn page is here.

2014-2020 Learning Italian Part 3: Mary’s Classes

Posted on December 9, 2022 by Mike

The second set of classes Continue reading →

Classes at Fermi: I am pretty sure that my return to Italian classes occurred in January or February, but I am less certain about the year. 2014 was the year that we wound down our business at TSI. So that might have given me time to play a little bridge during the week and therefore abandon the Tuesday evening games in favor of Italian classes. However, I could easily be off by a year in either direction. I cannot think of any way to gain certainty.

I am a little more certain that all three levels of classes were still being offered in the semiannual booklet that we received in the mail—beginners, intermediate, and advanced. I am quite sure that the classes were held at Enrico Fermi High School, which was within a mile of our house in Enfield.

On the evening of that first class I turned right at the drive on North Maple St. and parked across from the main entrance. The classroom designated in the booklet was room #220, which was actually on the north side of the building. That first evening I walked through the corridors of the school. Subsequently I parked in the lot on the north side of the building, entered there, and climbed up one flight of stairs..

The booklet that contained the information about the course identified the teacher as “Mrs. Trichilo”. However, I am pretty sure that the person who ran the class that evening was actually her husband, Tony.¹

He began the class by checking attendance. About ten or twelve people were there. Only one of them was familiar to me—the lady who had been taking Lydia Cherlong’s classes² for several decades. The students all knew one another, and they all knew Tony. I was the only outsider.

When he arrived at my name on the roster he asked me if I had taken the class before. I told him that I had, but it had been a few years earlier. He seemed skeptical that I would be able to keep up with the class, but I assured him that I had studied on my own in the interim.

Tony, who was born in Calabria, had been in the United States for several decades. Over the time of my attendance he substituted for his wife Mary Trichilo (TREE kee lo) on the average about one class per semester. His approach was a good balance to Mary’s because he was more familiar how Italians spoke and wrote, and she was more familiar with the material in the texts.

Although I don’t remember all of their names, I can picture most of the students³ in my mind. There was one husband and wife pair; I think that his name was Mike; I don’t recall hers. I had previously met Carol Greenfield,⁴ who was part-owner of the Powder Mill Barn. One guy was, I think, a minister and a jogger. He actually read some of my journals after I gave him one of my calling cards. Another guy knew Italian pretty well, but he left after that first semester. The three people who lasted the longest were Gary, who visited Calabria regularly, Audrey, a French teacher, and Mary, who was pretty quiet and was startled when she discovered that I played tournament bridge.

I remember a few people who joined the class for a semester or two. Two had been students in the beginners class. Since the intermediate class had by then been eliminated, their only option for continuing their learning was the advanced class. However, despite Mary’s best efforts they were totally intimidated and lasted a semester or less.

Two other new students had lived in Italy. One guy had been stationed there for a couple of years while in the armed forces. He seemed quite interested, but for some reason he stopped attending after five or six weeks. A woman named Gina had worked in Italy for a few years. She was with us for two or three semesters.

The format of the classes was not much different from that used by Lydia. Most of the talking was done in English. Mary sometimes provided a handout that featured a multi-part story with grammatical lessons intermingled. We would take turns reading the Italian aloud and then translate what we had read. Mary would make corrections. Some people confused the sounds of the letter “c” after dozens of corrections

Many of the stories were very bad mysteries, but they were sort of fun to read even if sometimes the solution that was posited in the last chapter was not physically possible.

I liked the ones that were not mysteries better. My favorite one was an extremely off-beat tale by a famous female writer. It probably is in the three-inch tall stack of handouts that I discovered while preparing this entry, but I was too lazy to search for it. This story featured role-reversal in which the wife had a second family in another location. She had children in both of them, and she was the bread-winner for both families.

I liked this story for the irony. I deduced that the author was outlining a situation that she knew was impossible in order to emphasize that the roles men play in society are much less restricted than the ones that women play. To my amazement no one else in the class seemed to think that the arrangement was unusual but not incomprehensible.

Could I have this wrong? A man’s contribution to the growth of a family takes only a few seconds. The woman’s takes nine months. Could any woman leave her children, have a secret conception and birth, and then return? Maybe once, but this woman repeated the process over and over.

As in Lydia’s class we never learned the passato remoto, and we barely mentioned the conditional and subjunctive moods. I guess people who learn Italian in the United States just are not allowed to use these forms. Unfortunately Italian authors and speakers evidently don’t care that their works will be very difficult to understand by statunitensi.

Mary told us that she had been to Italy several times, but she had seen none of the most famous places. That was because she always stayed with relatives—either Tony’s or her own. She had never been to Rome, Florence, or Venice! Her Italy was pretty much limited to Calabria and Genoa. If I were in her position, I would have tacked a week or two onto the end of one of those trips and visited at least a few well-chosen destinations. It was easy to reach any metropolitan area by train in Italy.

Unfortunately, I don’t think that she ever will get to enjoy a real Italian vacation. This was the email that she sent to me on December 11, 2022, after I asked her for more information about Lydia and the class rosters.

Mike, I just found this. So sorry to hear about Sue’s ailments. Getting older can be tough. I’ve been in New Orleans area for the past 6 months living with my eldest daughter, her husband and my infant grandson, Antonio. He’s a beautiful boy and I’m his caregiver until he is admitted to a daycare. His parents work from home and Nonna cares for her “bambino favorito”. I’m afraid I barely have time to read a magazine, although I hope to read your blogs sometime in the future. Nevertheless, I’m sure you could find some material if you Google high school level Italian literature ( simpler). I will try to think of what you can find. Lydia Cherlong was your former teacher. At least that’s the name I knew and she lived in Windsor Locks I think. Good luck and my best to you both.

I don’t thing that we had a class in the fall of 2019 because Mary was on medical leave. The last class that we held was in the March of 2020. Because of COVID-19 we never got to have the tenth class of that semester.

The fall class of 2020 was scheduled to be held online. I was the only person who signed up for the advanced class, and so it was cancelled. The last few issues of the adult education booklet have not included any classes in any foreign language.

Class suppers: Several times the members of the class ate supper together at the Trichilos’ favorite restaurant in Suffield, Tony usually came, too. Sue accompanied me, and some of the other students also brought their spouses.

We usually sat at the back to the right of the door.

These were the only occasion on which I got to socialize with any of these people, and I really enjoyed them. I noticed that Gary’s wife paid for the two of them, which I found unusual even in the twenty-first century. If I relied on Sue to pay for us at restaurant, I would have often been stuck in uncomfortable situations.

I remember that at the first such event I made the mistake of ordering a calzone with anchovies. It was huge and not very tasty. I took home the leftovers. After that I stuck to the same thing that the Trichilos always ordered

Translation: In July of 2019 I undertook the massive project of translating one of my travel journals into Italian. I asked Mary to correct it for me. Here was my email.

I assigned myself the project of translating into Italian the journal that I wrote about our Village Italy tour in 2005. I have finally finished day 0, which ends on the overnight flight to Rome. If you get a chance, please take a look at it.
English version: http://wavada.org/VI00.php
Italian version: http://wavada.org/I_VI00.php
Thanks.
Mike Wavada
P.S. There are sixteen more days, most much longer than this one.

She graciously helped me with this project for a little while. However, it was interrupted when Tony died on July 15.

I took the project up again the next summer when everyone had more time on their hands because of the pandemic.

I have been working on the translation into Italian of my journal from 2005. I have finished through Day 7. If you find some time, you can look at it at http://wavada.org/I_VIMenu.php. I will add more pages as I finish them. The English version is at http://wavada.org/VIMenu.php.
I would appreciate it if you could let me know about any mistakes, malapropisms, or awkward constructs that you come across.
Stay safe.

This time I got all the way through the journal, and she made useful remarks about every page. What a nice thing to do! I think that she got some enjoyment about traveling to Il Bel Paese, if only vicariously.

By chance I discovered two websites that helped me finish the project rather quickly: Reverso.net and LanguageTool.org. The former provided instant translations with lots of examples. The latter would analyze all the spelling and grammatical mistake in a paragraph that was pasted in.

Epilogue: I would dearly love to return to Italy at least one more time and exercise my command of the language. However, I no longer have anyone to study with or for. Furthermore, I doubt that Sue will ever be able to travel again. So, it is now—in 2022—very difficult to become motivated about keeping my Italian sharp or to prevent it from becoming even duller than it is.

For example, I have no desire to read another long Italian novel. I even picked up—at the Hartford Bridge Club of all places—a copy of Dante’s Purgatorio with a translation. It was as if someone offered me a special present, and yet I have scarcely looked at it.

1. Antonio Trichilo died on July 15, 2019. I went to his wake, which gave me the opportunity to meet the couple’s two daughters, Rosie and Isa. His obituary, which contains a vivid description of his life and a long list of his relatives, has been posted here.

2. The classes that I took from Lydia Cherlong are described here.

3. I sent an email to the registrar asking if rosters were available, but I did not receive a reply.

4. Carol sat in front of me, but she only attended for one or two semesters after I started. She died in September of 2020. Her obituary can be read here.

2006-2014 Learning Italian Part 2: On My Own

Posted on December 9, 2022 by Mike

Books and tapes. Continue reading →

Some of the events and activities described in this entry began before I stopped taking classes in 2006 (described here). Some of them continued after I resumed taking the advanced Italian classes in 2014. Also, I might be wrong about either or both of those dates. I can’t think of any good way to check either one. Nevertheless, it seemed appropriate to group all of the extracurricular efforts that I have undertaken to increase my mastery of Italian in one place regardless of whether I was also attending one of the classes when I performed them.

Boxed lessons: I had purchased the introductory Ultimate Italian set after the last session of the beginning Italian class in May of 2002. Almost as soon as I finished its last lesson I returned to Barnes & Noble and purchased the advanced set of Ultimate Italian. I was not under severe time pressure this time, but I used the same strategy as I had before. I read through the textbook in the order presented, and I did all of the exercises. I had a better attitude than I had when I was doing just enough in school to get by. I studied each lesson thoroughly. I planned to go to Italy more than once, and I did not want to sound foolish when I tried to converse with the locals.

Both Ultimate Italian packages contained eight one-hour tapes and a book of grammar lessons and dialogues. The tapes mostly consisted of Italian speakers reading the dialogues in the book. They left time for the listener to repeat the sentence out loud.

I listened to these tapes every time that I was in my car. My trusty Saturn came with a cassette player, and, when I bought my blue Honda in 2007, I insisted—to the amusement of the sales rep—that it too should have one. Cassettes were superior to CDs (or anything else) for this purpose because rewinding the tape back a sentence or two was very easy. I did this often, and I am happy to report that I never had an accident or even a close call while doing so.

Acquerello Italiano: I don’t remember how or when I heard of Acquerello Italiano, a subscription that released—originally every two months but near the end only occasionally—a small magazine accompanied by a cassette tape or CD. The left side of each pair of facing pages in the magazine contained Italian text with numbered endnotes and, in bold typeface, difficult phrases. On the right side were detailed explanations in English of the difficult or idiomatic phrases. At the end were the notes explaining—in English—historical or sociological background for the text. Each issue contained a pleasant diversity of materials. Since the subject of every article was Italy and/or Italians, almost every issue featured some music samples and something about food, often including recipes.

The tapes contained everything on the left-side pages as well as the music. The articles were read by actors, but there were also some real interviews.

I really enjoyed Acquerello Italiano, and I was very disappointed when the company went out of business. I could find almost nothing about the magazines on the Internet. The only thing that I know is that the name of the publisher was Champs Elyssées, Inc., which was a small business that also published similar educational material in German, French, and Spanish. The company’s home base was Nashville, TN. Someone in Italy must have provided them with the material, but I never determined who was responsible on the Italian side.

I saved nineteen issues of those magazines. The oldest one had a copyright of 2004. The last date is 2009. I did not save any of the tapes. I had played each one countless times by the time that I bought a new Honda in 2018. Most of the tapes had eventually been damaged beyond repair because of the playing and rewinding. At any rate Honda no longer offered the option of a cassette player in their new vehicles.

Magazines: I was still doing quite a bit of travel for business in the early part of the “on my own” period of my Italian education. I discovered that one of the bookstores in Penn Station sold a few magazines in foreign languages. My favorites were Panorama and Oggi (which means “today”). Whenever I found one I purchased it and read it from cover to cover. Whenever I found new words I marked them in my Italian dictionary². I also added them to my flash cards³.

I also found at least one bookstore in a strip mall that sold a few such magazines as well. I have a vague memory that it was in Pittsburgh. I went there to install and train the people in the advertising department at Dick’s Sporting Goods. Those adventures are described here.

Books of short stories: For quite some time Barnes and Noble stocked books of short stories that were written in Italian. I bought three of these books and read all of the stories. They all had similar formats: Italian on even-numbered pages (left) and English translation on odd-numbered pages (right).

Whenever I encountered new words, I added them to my flash cards and marked them in the dictionary.

I read every story and have even returned to ones that were written by people whom I had seen mentioned in other books or magazines.

Miscellaneous learning aids:I purchased quite a few books that addressed things that were not covered thoroughly by the books and magazines that I had read. For the most part these contained lists of words that were important for tourists. Since the need for food necessitated communication with someone more than once per day, many contained items one might find on menus.

The item displayed on the right only looks like a book. It is actually a set of two tapes designed strictly to help the listener converse with Italians about food and to order from an Italian menu. I am sure that there are many restaurants in Italy that have menus that do not also contain English descriptions and hire only waiters that do not understand a word of English. However, in the sixty or seventy days that I have spent in Italy I do not think that I ever encountered one.

I think that someone bought the tapes for me. I thought that The Savvy Traveler was the name of Rudy Maxa’s series on PBS, but apparently it was actually the name of his radio show for Minnesota Public Radio. I used to watch his television programs, but I don’t think that I ever heard him and Diana Nyad on National Public Radio.

Books: The first book that I read that was completely in Italian was L’Italia e i suoi invasori by Girolamo Arnaldi, a medieval scholar who studied at both the University of Bologna and La Sapienza in Rome. I found the book in a bookstore in Assisi on our second visit there in 2005. I was determined to find something that I could take home with me, and this volume was perfect. Parts of it were difficult for me, but I managed to get through the entire book. It broadened my understanding of how the fact that the Italian peninsula had been repeatedly invaded changed everything. Subsequently that has colored my understanding of every aspect of Italian history.

I read three other outstanding books. The first was Il Nome della Rosa by Umberto Eco. I had read the English version back in the eighties, and I had read quite a few of Eco’s other works. I had a good time becoming reacquainted with the plot, which was more meaningful since this time I was familiar with Pope John XXII and the two competing branches of Franciscans. I also was well aware of the power that the monasteries in the fourteenth centuries wielded. However, I was a little disappointed that very little was lost in translation.

That definitely could not be said for Il Gattopardo, the wonderful story of the Risorgimento in Sicily and southern Italy written by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. The story itself is extremely compelling. The birth of the Italian Republic is very difficult to comprehend, and this insider view was very useful in helping me get a grasp on it.

It was made into a movie called The Leopard that starred Burt Lancaster TCM allegedly owns this movie. However, my wife Sue watches TCM almost every day, and she has told me that they never show it, not even when Burt Lancaster is the star of the month.

I slightly cheated on both of these books. I owned English translations of both of them—what we called in college “ponies”. Only occasionally did I need to consult the English translation to decipher the original text

I had heard about I promessi sposi, the classic novel of the Church, the nobility, the Italian side of the Thirty Years War, starvation, and the plague, from an article in Acquerello Italiano. Apparently all Italian children were required to read it, and almost all of them hated it. I decided that I had to try it. I don’t remember every having a printed copy, and so I must have purchased it on Kindle or downloaded it from somewhere. I am pretty sure that it was in the public domain.

The book was written by Alessandro Manzoni in the 1840’s. Reading it was a powerful experience for me! I would recommend it to anyone who wants to gain an understanding of the evolution of Italy. If it is not the greatest Italian work since Dante, all discussions of that designation must begin with it.

I also read a handful of recent popular novels. One was an Italian translation of a historical novel written originally in English. I no longer have a copy, and I remember little about it. I also read a couple of the Commisario Montalbano novels by Andrea Camilleri on Kindle. They were highly recommended by Susanna Perrucchini, the guide on our tour of Sicily in 2016.⁴ I have seen all thirty-seven of the made-for-television Montalbano movies on the streaming service MHz Choice. I liked the first thirty-six a lot. The last one was very disappointing.

Camilleri’s novels are written half in Italian and half in Sicilian dialect. This frustrated me because most of the dialogue is in dialect. I often could not understand it, and I did not know where to find out what was going on. I guess that I could have also purchased an English version.

I bought one other massive tome, I papi; storia e segreti by Claudio Rendina. I cannot claim that I read all 864 pages, but I did consult his treatment—which was pretty thorough—of several popes in different eras of papal history. Knowing that the papacy was held in very low esteem in Italy in the nineteenth century, I suspected that Rendina might have access to some sources outside of the Church’s official party line. In the entries that I read, however, I did not find that to be the case.

CDs and DVDs: Over the year I collected a few CDs and DVDs that were supposed to help with conversational Italian. I found them lying around in my bookcase. I have only a vague recollection of most of them.

The “Who is Oscar Lake?” DVD in the lower right was an interactive story. It was a mystery about the a mysterious person named Oscar Lake. It was my introduction to the word “commisario”. I don’t remember much else. Maybe I should try it again when I get done with The 1948 Project.

Videos: For a year or two we were able to receive transmissions from RAI Uno, the primary Italian station owned and operated by the government, with our Cox subscription. After a year or two we abandon it in order to save $10 per month. Up until then I watched some news shows and a few other programs on RAI, but I did not get a lot out of it.

Shortly thereafter I discovered that some of the same shows were available for free on the Internet. This was far superior. If you missed something, you could back up the video and repeat a section.

Much later I began watching European television shows on MHz Choice. Thecaptions in English that they provided were ordinarily quite good. In addition to the Commissario Montalbano movies I have watched the prequel series Giovane Montalbano, I bastardi di Pizzofalcone, Nebbie e delitti, Barlume, Commissario Vivaldi, Commissario De Luca, and Imma Tataranni. I liked all of these except Vivaldi. In my opinion Imma was the best, and it is still in production. The action is set in, of all places, Matera. I only pay $8 per month for MHz Choice, and I have literally watched hundreds of good shows.

For me one of the most enjoyable activities when I heard what the character said, and the person who created the captions made a mistake. It did not happen often with MHz Choice.

Drills while exercising: When I was jogging in the evenings or on weekends I would sometimes spend the time counting (often out loud) in Italian from one to one hundred, first with the cardinal numbers: uno, due, tre, ecc. Then I would do the ordinal numbers: primo, secondo, terzo.

When TSI began to close down in 2014 I had time to rejoin the adult ed Italian classes. The semi-annual booklet listed the teacher at all three levels as Mrs. Trichilo. That period is described here.

1. Acquerello is the Italian word for watercolor. It always struck me as a strange choice for the title of a magazine.

2. In 2022 I am on my third Italian dictionary, Webster’s New World Italian Dictionary Concise Edition. The first one that I bought was from a different publisher. The second one was the same Webster’s edition as the third. I needed to buy new dictionaries because the previous ones were so worn out that they were unusable—covers missing, spines broken, pages falling out. I brought them with me on both vacations and business trips.

3. The flash cards were home-made. One side contained a single English word or phrase. The other side listed Italian words or phrases. The cards were sorted alphabetically by the English word or phrase. I created over ten thousand of these cards, which were split into dozens of decks, and I drilled myself on them at every opportunity—at home, on the road, and at lunch when at the office. When I stopped this process I threw away the cards.

4. You can read my journal of that entire memorable trip here.

2002-2005 Learning Italian Part 1: Lydia’s Classes

Posted on December 8, 2022 by Mike

When I was young I was obsessed with France and French, not Italy and Italian. I was barely in grade school when I nagged my parents into buying phonograph records that were designed to help people learn French. I learned to say “Bonjour, Monsieur Lenoir” but nothing else. So far I have never met anyone named Lenoir. So, the effort has not yet generated great benefits.

I think that I must have become interested in Italian because of operas. By the late nineties I had season tickets to the Connecticut Opera, which performed three or four operas per year at the Bushnell Auditorium in Hartford. I had purchased a Sony Walkman on which I listened to tapes while I was running. I bought several sets of tapes from the Teaching Company that helped me to learn about operas and composers. My car also had a tape player that allowed me to listen virtually any time that I was not working or eating. I purchased recordings of Italian operas and selections of operas on tapes and CDs.

The beginners class: In late 2001 we received a booklet¹ mailed to us by the Enfield Adult and Continuing Education department. We had received these twice a year for several years, but I had little interest in them because I was so busy with work. On this occasion, however, I noticed that they were offering courses in several languages. In Italian they offered three courses that had prerequisites: beginning (continued), intermediate, and advanced, all taught by Mrs. Cherlong. They also offered an additional first course for beginners. I signed up for that one. It met for a few hours one evening per week for ten weeks starting in late January 2002. The sessions were held in a classroom on the ground floor of Enfield High, the Alma Mater of my wife Sue .

My expectation was that Italian would be similar to Latin. How could it not be? I soon discovered that English actually contains more words of Latin origin than Italian does. Furthermore, the Italian grammar is obviously based on Latin, but it has had many centuries to evolve deviations and exceptions. What I had not taken into account was that Italy had been invaded many times since the heyday of the Romans, and each of those invading groups contributed to what is now called Italian. I soon learned that the Tuscan dialect used by Dante had become the standard Italian used for nationwide communications such as newspapers, magazines, radio, and television. However, many local dialects still prevailed in daily life..

Enfield High before its expansion and remodeling. I entered through the door with the canopy. Lydia’s room was to the left near the end of the hall.

Our class consisted of between fifteen and twenty people. Most of them were empty-nesters, but a pair of girls who attended (or maybe recently graduated from) Enfield High also attended. They both had taken a few years of Spanish, and, it goes without saying, their memories still worked.

Our textbook reminded me of a coloring book. It was replete with line drawings with no shading.

Mostly we learned vocabulary that might be useful in describing things in a home, school, or office. We communicated only in English, which really surprised me. The teacher, whom everyone called Lydia², tried very hard to make sure that no one was intimidated. This was a stark contrast to the Russian and ancient Greek classes that I had taken at the University of Michigan (described here). The former aimed at rapidly getting the students to the point where they could communicate with native Russian speakers. The goal of the latter was to enable the students to read the classics as soon as possible.

So, it was going to be difficult or impossible to learn to speak or even read Italian from the classes in Enfield. I enjoyed the time in the classroom, but I soon realized that I would almost certainly be dead before I could really speak Italian if I relied on these classes.

In the last of the ten sessions Lydia delivered the bad news. The class for the continuing beginners—that is, the second half of the beginners class—would not be offered in the fall. If we wanted to continue, we had three choices. 1) We could wait until next January for the next continuation class. 2) We could join the beginners class in September and repeat what we had studied in the last nine weeks. 3) We could work on our own to finish our workbooks and join the intermediate class.

For me this was an easy choice. I was easily able to finish the workbook on my own before the end of the summer. I also went to Barnes & Noble and bought the Ultimate Italian box set that contained a textbook and tapes that moved at a much more rapid pace than the class did. By the end of the summer I was quite confident that I could keep up with the students in the intermediate class.

Subsequent semesters: My first class with the intermediate group was a big disappointment. They were still using the workbook that I called the coloring book as their basic text. I later learned that some of those people—they were almost all women—had been in the intermediate class for years!

After four or five of these classes I approached Lydia and told her that I thought that this class was too slow for me. She said that she definitely agreed. She said that the advanced class had just been translating some text from Dante. She asked me if I would find that more interesting. I said that I definitely would. She told me that the class met on Tuesdays in the same classroom, and she invited me to attend the next week. I was quite excited.

According to the booklet that announced the classes, the participants in the advanced class communicated only in Italian. I had hardly ever composed even one sentence in Italian—written or spoken. It would definitely be a challenge for me to do so in extemporaneously in a group of people that had presumably been doing it for years.

It turned out that the information in the mailing was erroneous. Lydia taught in English (she had been in America for forty years), and people asked questions in English. We spent about half of the time on grammar and half on translating a few paragraphs from a handout that she provided. I never saw anything written by Dante, but it was much more fun and educational than the intermediate class.

This class was smaller—ten or fewer—than either of the other classes. Most of the students had attended for years, but none of them could really speak or even read Italian. From my first evening in the class my knowledge of Italian grammar was as good as or better than any of them.

This is actually my third dictionary. Despite my efforts to protect it, the cover is gone.

The one area in which I was way behind was vocabulary. I went back to B&N and bought a good dictionary and a book of short stories written in Italian. I also purchased hundreds of index cards. I cut them into quarters to use as flash cards—English on one side, Italian on the other. Every time I encountered a new word I looked it up, marked it in the dictionary, and either added it to an existing card or made a new one. I kept the cards in alphabetical order by the English word or phrase. During lunch or leisure time I went through my decks³ of flash cards to burn the words into my memory.

I remember a few students from those classes, but almost no names⁴. Most of them, but not all, were of Italian descent. One guy’s first name was Arnold. I remember that he said that his goal was to have a conversation in Italian with one of his relatives on a trip to Italy. He was a long way from that goal when I stopped attending Lydia’s classes. I remember that he was shocked that I could read Italian passages aloud with pretty good pronunciation without hesitation or verbal stops. Arnold only came to about half of the classes.

I remember only one other male in the class, and he missed more than half of the classes.

I don’t remember any names of any of the other students, and I know of no way to locate them. One lady was a librarian in Windsor, CT. She spoke to us once about a trip that she had taken to Italy. She stayed in a convent and reported seeing conical stone houses in Puglia⁵ in southeast Italy. She also said that there were towns nearby in which the people spoke classical Greek in the twenty-first century. Frankly, I doubted that Aristotle or Homer would understand a word that they said,⁶ but it may well have been that their dialect was closer to classical than to modern..

One lady, who was a few years older than I was, had been taking the class for more than a decade. It is hard to believe, but she was still in the class when I returned after an absence of several years. She had been to Italy several times.

The red balloon is where TSI’s office was. The lady’s apartment was, I think, at the end of Riverview Dr.

One lady lived in an apartment that was within a half mile of TSI’s office in East Windsor. I don’t remember much else about her.

On one occasion I saw one of the ladies at a gas station. We talked for a minute or two. She asked me if I really owned a company. I affirmed that I did, but I assured her that it was a small company, and I had partners. I had met quite a few people who owned companies; I never understood why this surprised her. It does not take much to get a DBA and even less to inherit a business.

I found these photos after I wrote this section. Lydia is handing a piece of paper to someone I don’t recognize in the first photo. In the second photo the woman in red is the lady who had been taking the class for years. The woman opening the book lived in East Windsor near TSI’s office. Sue on the left in the third photo. Across from her is the woman from East Windsor. On her right is the librarian. I recognize no one else.

At the end of the fall semester of 2002 Lydia hosted a Christmas party for all of her students in the cafeteria of Enfield High. I knew almost none of the thirty or forty attendees, and I have always been a guastafeste, especially when most of the partygoers were strangers. Lydia ordered pizzas. Each of us was supposed to bring a gift that cost less than $5. I brought a tape of Italian songs. Some people brought bottles of wine that cost much more than the limit.

Lydia made everyone form a circle. We each had to stand holding our gift. She then read a story that had the words “right” and “left” in it numerous times. When one of the magic words appeared we had to hand the gift we were holding to the person on that side of us. As I recall, the end result was that each gift ended up two people to the right. I don’t remember what I ended up with. It might have been wine.

At one point I tried to interest the other students into taking the train to New York, as I had often done, one Saturday. We could have brunch together, watch the performance at the matinee, and return on an evening train. The idea went over like a lead balloon.

At the end of at least two semesters we all went out to eat supper together. Once we dined at Figaro’s near the Enfield Square Mall. The other time we ate at a much less expensive place called Astro’s near the East Windsor line. Sue joined us on that occasion.

A few things about Lydia’s classes annoyed me. The first was the emphasis on Italian prepositions. I expected this subject to be easy. For the most part the Italian prepositions line up with the Latin ones with which I was familiar. Sometimes the spelling was the same (per, in); sometimes it was a little different (“con” instead of “cum”, “senza” instead of “sine”). However the prepositions that started with a and d did not line up with the Latin ones at all. In fact there did not seem to be any coherent rule as to when to use “a” and when to use “di”. You just had to memorize which preposition went with which verb. We spent a lot of classroom hours on this.

I later found a program on the Internet that I could use to drill myself until it seemed natural. That was much more efficient than wasting classroom time on it.

The other thing that I found strange was that Lydia avoided that the passato remoto tense, which was equivalent to the perfect tense in Latin, did not exist. She probably took this approach because the conjugations are difficult to remember, and there are many exceptions. However, almost any book of history or fiction will have dozens if not hundreds of uses of that form. So, it is critically important to learn it. Once again, her priority was not to intimidate any of the students.

On the first trip that Sue and I vacationed in Italy in 2003. I kept a journal.⁷ It had one chapter for each of the twenty-five days of the trip. I translated a few of the chapters into Italian and asked Lydia to check my work. I went over to her house in Windsor Locks a couple of times to go over the many mistakes that I had made. That was a very valuable experience.

At her house I met Lydia’s husband Neal⁸. He was also in the Russian language adult ed class that I took for one semester at Windsor Locks High School. I remember that he took at least one train ride all the way across Russia to the Pacific coast.

Lydia told the class one very interesting story. Her father was a diplomat for the Italian government. So, the place of birth on her passport was actually Alexandria, Egypt. One time she had visited some of her relatives in Italy. They had some children who were playing with some tools. For some reason one of them put a very long screwdriver into the carry-on bag that she brought back to the U.S. Fortunately, the screwdriver went undetected at the airport. She did not find it until she unpacked at her house.

Was there a big screwdriver in Mohamed’s carry-on?

This was shortly after the 9/11 panic. Can you imagine the reaction from authorities if they had discovered that a woman born in the same country as Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of the attack on the World Trade Center, was trying to sneak that potentially lethal screwdriver onto an international flight?

Lydia actually tried out for a job with the TSA. She did not last a day. I don’t remember the details, but she hated the job.

Lydia often asked me to wait after class. It was completely dark by the time that the class ended, and the school was in the Thompsonville section of Enfield. There were rough neighborhoods nearby. So, she asked me, the only male member of the class, to walk her to her car.

I remember that on more than one occasion she complained that her feet always hurt. I guess that she had tried several different types of shoes without success.

I also remember that she said that “ashtray” was the hardest word for her to pronounce in English. The notion of four consecutive consonants is anathema to Italians. The hardest word for me (and any other American) to pronounce in Italian was “ripercorrerebbero”, which has four trilled r’s surrounding one rolled double-r.

Lydia said several times that a good way to learn a language is to learn some songs in that language. One evening she led us in a rendition of “Santa Lucia“. That was the first time that I realized that the title character was a Neapolitan harbor, not a holy person.

I stopped going to Lydia’s classes when I started playing bridge on Tuesday evenings. I think that this was in 2006. During the entire period that I attended Lydia’s advanced class I think that no other new student joined the group, and we lost at least one or two.

I was not too disappointed to be leaving Lydia’s class. The format was a real drag. I would have continued attending if not for the conflict. My resolve to be at least somewhat fluent in Italian did not abate. If anything I studied harder during those years in which I was on my own. They are documented here.

1. The booklets were still being mailed to us twice a year in 2022, but all of the Italian classes have been dropped. In the last semester in which advanced Italian was offered, I was the only person who registered. In 2022 no foreign language classes were offered at all.

2. I was sad to learn that Lydia Cherlong died in October of 2019, one and a half months after her husband, Neal. Her obituary, which noted that she taught Italian for more than twenty years, is posted here.

3. By the time that I abandoned this activity I had amassed over 10,000 flash cards, and I had been through the decks cramming the words into my brain at least a dozen times.

4. In preparation for this entry I sent an email to the registrar of the adult ed program asking if the rosters for these classes still existed, but I did not receive a reply. I also sent an email to Mary Trichilo to see if she had any rosters. She at least responded.

5. I saw some of these houses, known as trulli, in Alborobello in 2011. That experience is recounted here.

6. I once recited the first two lines of the Iliad to Cris Tsiartas, who grew up in Cyprus speaking Greek. He did not understand any of it and did not believe that it was Greek.

7. The English version of the journal is posted here.

8. Neal Cherlong died in September 2019. At that time Lydia was still alive. Neal’s obituary can be read here.

2019-2020 Trump’s First Impeachment

Posted on December 1, 2022 by Mike

It seemed outrageous at the time. Continue reading →

Viktor Yanukoych was still in Russia in 2024.

In November of 2013 Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych rejected the agreement for a political association and trade agreement with the European Union that had been overwhelmingly passed by the Ukrainian parliament. Instead he opted for closer ties with Russia. Many Ukrainians were also upset with the lopsided favoring of the eastern provinces and the widespread corruption attributed to the “Yanukovych Families” that raided thousands of companies and extorted payments.A huge protest centered in Kyiv against the Azarov (prime minister) government.

On February 22 of 2014 the Ukrainian parliament, including Azarov himself voted to remove Yanukovich on the grounds that he had neglected his constitutional duties. At the time Barack Obama was President, and Hilary Clinton was Secretary of State. Two days later a warrant was issued for Yanukovich’s arrest. He fled to Russia. A provisional government was formed and elections were eventually held. Russia did not recognize any of these governments.

In late February Russia seized Crimea, which had been ceded to Ukraine in 1994, and surreptitiously sent troops in plain uniforms to fight in the eastern provinces.A low-scale war continued in that area until Ukrainian troops withdrew in February 2015. The situation was more or less “frozen” from that time until Russia launched an invasion on February 24. 2022.

Wolodymyr Zelensky was still president in 2024.

Meanwhile, Volodymyr Zelensky, a big star on Ukrainian television and something of a media mogul, became the sixth president of Ukraine on May 20, 2019, with 73.23 percent of the vote in the second round. For the next year or so he was learning the ropes of the job that he had only pretended to hold on a television show.

Rudy Giuliani had used up all of his good will by 2024.

Meanwhile Trump had dispatched “operatives” to go to Ukraine dig up dirt on, of all people, the surviving son of his opponent in the 2020 election, Hunter.¹ Congress had appropriated $400 million in military aid for Ukraine, but it was not immediately sent. On July 25 Trump had a phone call with Zelensky². Trump asked for a “favor”. He wanted assurance that Zelensky would help Rudy Giuliani and Bill Barr in their investigations in Ukraine. Zelensky described how he intended to reform his company’s prosecutorial functions. A couple of hours after the call the Pentagon was told ny the budget office not to release the aid.

The administration’s activities were not widely known until September, when an anonymous “whistleblower” complained that Trump was using his executive powers to coerce a foreign country into intervening in the election. Several administration officials said that Trump had expressly asked them to use the aid money to persuade Zelensky to announce an official investigation into Biden’s role and the hacking of the servers of the Democratic National Committee.

Mick Mulvaney took a job at CBS om 2022.

The House of Representative launched investigations of whether Trump had abused his authority. The administration did not cooperate, but on October 17, Trump’s chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said in response to a reporter’s allegation of quid pro quo, “We do that all the time with foreign policy. Get over it.” Several current and former administration officials likewise testified that a great deal of effort was being directed toward foreign countries with the apparent goal of denigrating Biden or the evidence that Russia had tried to influence the election in Trump’s favor.

Two charges were leveled: abuse of power (including bribery and wire fraud) and obstruction of Congress. The votes in the committees and the House as a whole were almost completely along party lines.

Mitch McConnell froze up a few times in 2024.

The Senate at the time was controlled by the Republicans. Mitch McConnell said that the trial of the president was a political event, and he would not act as an impartial juror. He also would not allow any testimony or presentation of documentary evidence. Mitt Romney voted in favor of the abuse of power charge. Otherwise, voting was along party lines. Trump was acquitted.

1. I don’t think like a Republican, and so I cannot explain what they hoped to find. It mystifies me that they thought that something that the 50-year-old Hunter did would be so heinous that Biden’s supporters would abandon him and turn to Trump, not exactly the patron saint of family relations. Hunter was convicted in 2024 of—get this!—lying on an application for a pistol that he kept for eleven days. Biden had another son, Beau, who died of brain cancer in 2015.

2. CNN has posted a “transcript” of this conversation here. It is not the “perfect” call that Trump described, but neither is there an obvious “quid pro quo” unless you remember what “favor” really means from Don Corleone’s use of the word. Although Zelensky has said that he did not feel pressured, he surely knew about the $400 million that Congress had passed but the Pentagon had never delivered.

Wavablog

Memoirs, bridge, popes, travel, and other stuff

Monthly Archives: December 2022

2004-2014 TSI: AdDept Client: Dick’s

2014-2020 Learning Italian Part 3: Mary’s Classes

2006-2014 Learning Italian Part 2: On My Own

2002-2005 Learning Italian Part 1: Lydia’s Classes

2019-2020 Trump’s First Impeachment