2008-2019 Partners at the Hartford Bridge Club Part 1

Posted on December 1, 2021 by Mike

Regular partners at the HBC. Continue reading →

Preparation: For several years I have maintained a spreadsheet that contained one line per bridge partner. I only kept track of ones with whom I had played at least one complete session at a sanctioned game. I also had bookmarked the ACBL’s web page that contained the records of club games. However, when I started working on this entry, I was disappointed to discover that the link no longer worked. So, I have needed to rely on my memory more than I hoped.

This document contains stories about partnered with whom I played several times. Part 2 (posted here) describes the ones that I met through the mentoring program or the High-Low game on Sundays and people that I only played with once or twice.

The HBC: The Hartford Bridge Club (HBC) was founded in 1931. It is the oldest continuously operating bridge club in North America. Its headquarters since October 1995 has been at 19A Andover Drive in West Hartford. I played my first game at the club and became a member on January 1, 2008. My partner that afternoon was Dick Benedict (introduced here), with whom I had been playing on Wednesday evenings at the Simsbury Bridge Club (SBC) for several years. At the time the club was charging $30 for a membership. The table fee was $5 for members and $6 for others. At the time I had only been playing in Simsbury. I joined the HBC because I had been asked to play in the games it ran on Tuesday evenings and Saturday afternoons. So, I figured that if I kept to that schedule all year¹, it would be a good dealT

The person who asked me to play was Tom Gerchman. In preparation for playing with him I taught myself thirteen conventions that I had found in a book by William S. Root and Richard Pavlicek. I also bought Michael Lawrence’s CD about 2/1 (pronounced “two over one”), the set of bidding principles used by most players at the HBC and at tournaments. He had played 2/1 with his previous partner, Mary Witt², and I eventually persuaded him to play it with me as well. At this point I knew enough conventions to be comfortable playing with nearly any new partner.

Tom drove a red BMW convertible. Between 2008 and 2023 he has purchased several new cars. Each one was a red BMW convertible. The license plate was GERCH. On trips he liked to drive, but the back seat was uninhabitable. If we were playing in a team game, the BMW was not big enough to hold four people. He borrowed his mother’s car.

I soon discovered that Tom wanted to play with me because Mary had resigned from their partnership. She wasn’t angry at him; she just did not like sitting across the table from him. I learned this when Tom and I played in a knockout with Mary and Ruth Tucker³ as teammates in the regional tournament in Danbury, CT. We made it to the semifinals of our bracket. After we had been eliminated Tom kept telling Ruth, “I got you gold!”

That evening the four of us went out for supper. I learned at that meal that Ruth had been a small child in Nazi Germany during the Kristallnacht in 1938. She was surprised that I knew quite a bit about the event. I had read about it when I had researched the backgrounds of two popes⁴, Pius XI and Pius XII, who had both been in Germany during Hitler’s rise to power. Tom had never heard of it.

For quite some time I enjoyed playing with Tom for several reasons. The first was that he liked to go to tournaments, and so did I. In addition, he was still working⁵, which meant that he could only play in evening games, and on weekends and holidays. That schedule conformed to mine. However, he was an avid golfer. So, in nicer weather he played less bridge. I also like the fact that he was not averse to learning new conventions. Bidding has always been my favorite aspect of the game.

At the SBC Tom occasionally played with his mother, Sue. He was sometimes pretty hard on her when she made mistakes. Wen she died in 2012 (obituary here) I was still playing regularly with Tom, and I went to her wake. I was the only bridge player who attended, but a number of Tom’s golf buddies were there.

After the evening games Tom and a small group of the other players went to the Corner Pug in West Hartford to discuss the hands and drink. Tom might have eaten a very late supper. I don’t think that he cooked, and he was not married.

It took me a while to realize it, but Tom definitely was obsessive-compulsive in some ways. For example we played together on two separate days at the NABC held in Boston in 2008. I discovered that he had memorized in terms of minutes how long it took to get to the site of the tournament from several spots on the route. Furthermore, on the day that I drove I let him off to register us while I parked the car. He insisted that I must park in precisely the same spot that he had used on the previous day. Just to be peevish I parked in the same spot, but one floor lower.

On that occasion we played in an Open Swiss with a pair from the partnership desk. We won our first round against a team from Connecticut. After that it was one humiliating defeat after another. Our teammates were upset at us. We beat a hasty retreat after the last round.

I heard from Mary Witt that Tom read the Hartford Courant every morning and always started with the obituaries. She also said that he had a huge stack of old newspapers in his house. I never went to his house, and so I cannot verify this.

Tom was much more obsessed with the scores than I was. He was pretty hard on me at club games, but he very seldom talked during rounds at tournaments. He also stayed after club games and audited the scores. He once told me that he loved to check calculations. He confided once that he should have been an auditor.

I was still playing with Tom at the time of my Life Master parties at the HBC and the SBC in early 2010. I remember that he gave a little speech at the HBC in which he talked about my habit of sending him emails about what I thought we could have done to do better in the previous game. In my acceptance speech I thanked every single partner that I had had at that point. I thanked Tom for teaching me “that in a six-team Howell, you don’t play against the pair that you follow and the pair that follows you.”

I don’t have any great memories of playing with Tom. We did not do very well at most tournaments. Eventually, I stopped playing with him. I just could not stand the fact that he said and did the same things over and over and over and over. He also talked about the hands too much in club games while we were still playing. I found myself pounding the steering wheel while driving home after playing with him. Fifteen years later I still react negatively to the sound of his voice.

Actually, I quit twice. After the first time he persuaded me to try again. It took me very little time to realize that he was never going to change. I quit again.

I still teamed up occasionally with him for team games. We had much better results when I did not have to sit across from him.

Tom invited me and Sue to the party that he threw for himself on his sixtieth birthday. It was at a restaurant on the west side of town. He was celebrating the fact that he had survived that long. Apparently both his only brother and his father had died from heart attacks when they were in their fifties.

After my partnership with Tom was dissolved, on most Tuesday evenings I played with Michael Dworetsky. He had been playing for quite a while before I returned to the world of bridge, but he had only occasionally played in tournaments. I never was quite sure why he had avoided tournaments before I began playing as his partner.

I have several vivid memories of playing with Michael. We drove to a sectional in Johnston, RI, and did well enough to finish first in the C Flight in the afternoon session of the Open Pairs. As the director read the results, I said to Michael, “Let’s see how he does with our last names.” He butchered both of them.

The most catastrophic mistake of my bridge career occurred in the penultimate round of the Flight C qualifying tournament for the Grand National Teams (GNT). We were definitely in contention when Michael made a Help Suit Game try by bidding 3♣. I needed to bid 4♠ if I thought that we could take ten of the thirteen tricks or 3♠ if not. I considered all that I knew about the hand and finally decided that we probably did not have enough. Unfortunately, I did not bid 3♠, I mistakenly passed, leaving Michael in a ludicrous club contract.

I played with Michael when he made Life Master in a sectional in Westchester County. He drove us into New York City to a deli to celebrate. I had a Reuben sandwich; he had pastrami. We had a great time, but it cost him a fortune to park the car.

He almost always drove us to tournaments. On one occasion I spilled some coffee on the rug in his car. He did not yell at me, but I knew he was upset. He had a very nice car. It was the first that I had ever been in that had a both a built-in GPS and a hand-free telephone.

One of the best calls that I ever made in bridge was when Michael and I played against two ladies, one of whom needed to win the match in order to make Life Master. I opened 1♠, the lady overcalled 2♥, Michael doubled, indicating that he had a pretty good hand with clubs and diamonds. I had six spades, five hearts that included two honors, a club, and a diamond. I passed. We took the first nine tricks. She was down four for 1100 points. She did not make Life Master that afternoon.

I gave a little speech at Michael’s Life Master party. It might have been the best speech that I ever gave. It was not as effective as Urban II’s call for a crusade in 1096, but mine got more laughs. I began by claiming that Michael was a founding member of the club in 1931. I also mentioned the hole in the sole of one of his shoes.

Michael and I played together at the NABC in the summer of 2013. I posted my recollections of this adventure here. We also flew down to the Gatlinburg Regional Tournament in Tennessee in 2013. I took notes and posted them here. We won a knockout and a lot of masterpoints there.

The house in Bloomfield in which Michael lived with his wife Ellen was struck by lightning. Eventually they moved to Palm Beach Gardens, FL, but I have seen Michael at bridge tournaments in New England a few times. He usually was playing with a teaching pro named Bob Lavin.

The nicest person whom I ever met was Dave Landsberg. When I started playing on Tuesday evenings, Dave was playing regularly with Dan Koepf. I invited them to team up with Jerry Hirsch and me in Flight C of the GNT event one year. They accepted, and we did quite well. I then wrote to both of them to ask if either one wanted to play in a tournament with me. Dave responded positively, and we were partners and good friends right up until his death (obituary here) in 2016. In fact, he was planning on playing with me in the Cape Cod Senior Regional the week that he died. I wrote up my experiences at that tournament, including my thoughts about Dave, and posted them here.

Dave was on the HBC’s Board of Trustees, and I was not. I once asked him what the BoT meetings were like. He told me that at that time there was a big controversy over toilet paper. He said that the women on the board were complaining that the toilet paper in the ladies’ room was too flimsy. Dave informed me that his position was that we should give them better paper, but it was only fair that they should agree to pay higher table fees. I laughed for several minutes.

Dave and I won a couple of events together. The most memorable one was in Cromwell, CT, when Dave played with Kay Hill, and I played with Ginny Iannini (introduced here). I posted a photo⁶ of us on the District 25 website, NEBridge.org, as I did the winners of all events at D25’s regionals. When Dave’s wife Jackie saw the photo of Dave and Ginny side-by-side, she told him that he could not play with her again. When Dave told me this, we both broke out laughing. However, it made me wonder why Sue never complained about me playing with Ginny.

I was playing with Dave and three other people when I set the world standard for captaining a five-person team in a sectional Swiss in Auburn, MA. We were playing with Pat Fliakos,⁷ one of Dave’s regular partners, and a pair that we picked up at the partnership desk, Charlie Curley (introduced here) and Mike Colburn. Since Mike and Charlie were regular partners, I assigned them to play all eight rounds. Pat and Dave would play six rounds, four together and two each with me. I would play the middle four rounds. This would allow me to leave early and mow the lawn, which needed it badly. When I departed, our team’s score was slightly above average, but in my absence my four teammates won both of the last two rounds, defeating the best team in attendance in the last round. We finished third overall and first in B and C.

The accident occurred between Worcester and Springfield.

The grass did not get mowed. On the trip home my 2007 Honda was rear-ended on the Mass Pike by someone driving a rental car. I did not yet have a cellphone, but he did. He did not speak English very well, but I did. So I called 911 on his phone. After about twenty minutes a state trooper appeared. After a few minutes he told me that he had given the other man a ticket for following too closely. I already had his insurance information; he had Progressive. So, I just drove home.

A few days later a Progressive adjuster examined my car and assessed the cost to fix a small dent on one bumper at $1500. I later was contacted by someone from Avis, who had rented the car to the other driver. They said that they would accept Progressive’s assessment and asked me to settle for $2,000. I spelled my name for them, and gave them my address. The check arrived a few weeks later. Four or five years later I traded in the car. I never considered getting it fixed.

Dave’s Life Master party at the HBC was shared with Sue Rudd (introduced here). I told the above story (minus the car crash and insurance). I balanced it with the tale of the first sectional in Hamden, CT, in which Dave and I competed as partners. We finished dead last in both the morning and afternoon session. I have never heard of anyone who could match that performance.

The best time that I spent with Dave was when the two of us dined at an Italian restaurant in Hyannis, MA. I recall that I ordered the Bolognese and a glass of wine. The food was good, and the conversation was better. For some reason it was very easy to talk to and to listen to Dave. By the time that we left, we had solved the most serious of the world’s problems.

I went to Dave’s wake and the ceremony for him at Wesleyan, where he had worked. When I met Jackie, I told her that Dave really loved her. I was certain of this because he never rolled his eyes when he talked about her. I really miss him.

A photo of Dave is in the Felix Springer section of this entry.

Peter Katz and I started playing together on Saturdays and Tuesday evenings after I stopped playing with Tom Gerchman. In 2023 I still played with him whenever the HBC had a game on Saturday. We had one great showing in August of 2023, which I have documented here.

Earlier in our partnership Peter and I played together in a few sectionals that were held in the Hartford area. At one of them we happened to have the last sitout in the afternoon session, which meant that we could go home early. Before we left we picked up hand records for that session. It did not take us long to realize that some of the hands that we played did not correspond to the ones on the printout. We reported this to the director, Tim Hill. He did not tear his hair out, but I am pretty sure that I saw his bow tie spinning around.

How could this have happened? Some directors like to play “web movements” when an awkward number of pairs are playing. If, for example, thirty-eight pairs are playing, the standard way to play it would be to have two sections, one with ten tables and one with nine. Both sections would be playing nine three-board matches. Each pair would only play against nine of the other thirty-seven pairs. A web movement would allow for one very large section playing fourteen two-board rounds. This requires two identical sets of boards, and they must be handled precisely correctly, but the directors who do this are very reliable about setting them up correctly.

In this case, however, the directors were not at fault. The two sets of boards were NOT identical. I don’t know how they were able to score this, but they eventually did. The directors definitely earned their salary that day.

When I first began playing with Peter he was something of a local celebrity. He and his wife (whom I never met) attended all of the home games of the Hartford University men’s and women’s basketball teams. Peter wore outrageous wigs to the games. I never met his wife, and I only saw photos of him in his super-fan getup.

At some point in the teens the couple got divorced, and Peter stopped attending the games. The marriage must have been stressful on him. He mellowed out quite a bit after the divorce.

At first Peter and I played a version of 2/1 that was not much different from what I had played with Tom Gerchman. At some point Peter began playing on Tuesdays with one of the best players at the club, Tom Joyce. They played a version of the Kaplan-Sheinwold weak 1NT system. I agreed to learn this and play it on Saturdays with Peter. That was what we employed in our big game.

Peter served as webmaster for the HBC. In 2023 I began working with him on posting the club’s monthly calendars.

Before the Pandemic I played regularly with Felix Springer. In fact we played together (and won!) in the very last game on March 15, 2020, before the HBC closed its doors for over a year. We also played together at a few tournaments, including a week at the Fall NABC in San Francisco in 2019. We also played together on a large number of very successful teams, but I usually paired with someone else.

Felix shared his Life Master party with Ken Leopold (introduced here). They asked Dave Landsberg and me to be their teammates. Before the play started, Dave turned to me and said, “Did you read their background stories? Why are they playing with us?”

I don’t know, but it was a good idea. We won our first four rounds. In the fifth round, we faced the other unbeaten team. They had at least five times as many points as we did. It was a very close match that turned on one hand. Laurie Robbins, an excellent bridge player, and I were both West holding the same cards. We each had to make a decision similar to the catastrophic one that I had made in the GNT with Michael Dworetsky. Laurie chose to try for game and went down. I settled for the partial.

Donna Feir, the longtime club manager, said that it was the only time that she could remember that the honorees won such a game, and also the only time that they were undefeated.

Felix, as president of the HBC, guided the club through the perilous times of the Pandemic. The club had almost no income, and it still had considerable expenses. He kept everyone involved with periodic newsletter, analysis of playing bridge with robots, and walks in the park. Donna confided to me that without Felix the club probably would not have survived.

In 2022 Felix did something that I never would have expected him to do, and it hurt me deeply. The story is related here.

Ann Hudson lived across the river form Enfield in Suffield, CT, with her husband, Randy Johnson. I thoroughly enjoyed playing with both of them. The card that they played was very sophisticated. I must admit that I had a difficult time to remember the modified Manfield responses to an opponents takeout double.

For a few years Ann and I were rather regular partners for the half of the year that Ann and Randy spent in New England. The other half of the year they lived in South Carolina. In 2022 they moved from Suffield to Hadley, MA.

The only times that I got to play at the HBC with Randy were when Ann had to cancel at the last minute. It only happened a few times. He was an exceptionally good player. We played together in the open pairs in the sectional in Great Barrington, MA, one year and won the afternoon session.

I met Ann while I was working at the partnership desk at the NABC in Providence in 2014. After that we played together pretty regularly at sectional, regional, and NABC tournaments and occasionally at the HBC if she could get away from her chores on their mini-farm.

I usually stopped at the McDonald’s on the south side of Hazard Ave. on the way to either their house in Suffield or at the Hampton Inn that was about halfway between us. On one occasion I was sitting in my blue 2007 Honda in the parking lot while I ate my sausage biscuit with egg. I had turned off the Honda’s engine while I ate. I could not get the car to start, and I did not have a cellphone yet. I had to go in to McDonald’s to use someone’s phone to call Sue, and I had to cancel my game with Ann. If was embarrassing. The best thing about Hondas is their reliability. Mine was telling me that it was time for a trade-in, and I listened.

Ann had actually been born in China. Both of her parents were university professors. They brought her to the U.S. when Ann was very young.

In 2015 my wife Sue and I decided to fly to Denver to play in the Fall NABC. Randy and Ann also planned to attend. Ann and I decided to play in two NABC events: the 0-10,000 Swiss and the 5K Blue Ribbon Pairs.

Before those events started I picked up a partner for the evening side game, Kathy Rolfe. I had met her at a previous NABC when we were both playing in the lowest level of the Life Masters Event. When we came to her table she asked me if I was related to Vic Wavada in Kansas City, and—get this—she pronounced my name correctly. It turned out that Kathy knew Vic’s wife Theresa very well, and she had mentioned that I played bridge.

Kathy and I finished near the middle in the side game. We probably should have done a little better.

I had arranged to play in the 10,000 Swiss with a woman from Arkansas named Ti Davis.⁸ I told her that I was 6-feet tall, grey-haired, and skinny, and I would have on my red and blue Barça hat. She was playing with an Asian woman whom she met at the partnership desk. Unfortunately, we were overmatched in the event and only won one or two rounds.

On the next day Ann and I teamed up with Randy and one of his regular partners to play in an Open Swiss event. In the second round we played against Leonardo Cima and Valerio Giubilo, famous players from Rome. We had a little time to talk with them before the match. They told me that they were both from Roma. I told them that it was “la mia città preferita in Italia.”

In the match Giubilo made an incorrect bid on an important hand causing them to miss a slam. Cima gave him a severe dressing-down. During the rest of the match they both spoke impeccable English, but during this post mortem Cima filled the air with Italian curse words.

We won the match, but we did not do well in the event. Giubilo and Cima won over 100 points in the tournament.

In the Mini-Blue Ribbon Pairs Ann and I played as well as we have ever played. I was very excited when we made it to the second day. We played pretty well then as well, but not quite well enough.

I was too intense for Ann in the Super Senior Pairs and Mini-Blue Ribbon Pairs at the NABC in Honolulu, as described here. She was not angry at me; I think that she felt sorry for me more than anything. After the tournament she drove to the airport and drove Sue and me to Enfield. Ann and I have played together in less stressful situations a few times since then.

I played with Michael Varhalamas a few times at the Saturday game at the HBC. I also played with him at least once in a Swiss in a sectional somewhere in Westchester County. I remember that he drove us there in his truck. Our teammates were two women from, I think, New Jersey. I don’t remember their names. Michael made the arrangements.

Twice during the game he bid dicey grand slams that I had to play. I made the first one without too much difficulty. The second one, however, was in the last round and required a squeeze—not my specialty. However, I pulled it off, and we ended up with a very good score.

Michael and his wife eventually moved to Saint Petersburg. Sue and I went to a bridge game there, and my partner, Chris Person, and I played against him in the first round of a pairs game at the local club. On one hand Chris opened 1[Suit x=”C”]. I passed with three or four points and only one or two clubs. Chris had only three clubs; it was a bloodbath. Michael recommended bidding in that situation, but only over 1[Suit x=”C”], not over any other opening bid.

Before the Pandemic I played fairly regularly at the HBC with Connie Dube ( pronounced DOO bee). I met her when she and Myrna Butler agreed to be teammates with Ken Leopold and me at a regional tournament. They were late for the first round. Helen Pawlowski and Sally Kirtley sat in for them for one or two hands. In case you are wondering, this was definitely not legal. Since Helen told me that Myrna was always late, I did not hold it against Connie.

Connie and I played at a few sectional tournaments. Her availability was quite limited because her husband was suffering from severe chronic illnesses. As of 2023 she has not resumed playing after the Pandemic.

At the HBC I have played with Joan Brault quite a few times when one of her regular partners, Mike (really Michele) Raviele or Aldona Siuta, could not play. We have never set the world on fire, but we have played together a few times in 2023.

Paul Pearson and I teamed up with Mike and Joan at a sectional Swiss in the Hartford area. I think that we did pretty well.

She was a very talented artist. She also had a grandson who was a pitcher/outfielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Over the years I have played with Mary Eisenberg both at the HBC and at a few tournaments. She asked her to help her to get her Life Master designation at an upcoming regional tournament in Danbury, CT. We played together in club games at least twice so that we could accustom ourselves to each other’s styles. One of those was a STaC (Sectional Tournament at Clubs) game that we somehow won. We earned a lot of silver points for that, but Mary still needed a small fraction of a gold point.

Mary asked me to drive us to the tournament. She had apparently been in an automotive accident a few months earlier, and she was still shaky about driving, especially at night. I picked her up at a parking lot at a supermarket near her home. I never did understand why this arrangement was necessary, but I did not question it.

We played in the Golden Opportunity Pairs at the tournament. It was a two-session event limited to players with less than 750 masterpoints. At the time I was within a few points of the limit. So, I was not afraid of any of our competitors. It was safe to say that I had more tournament experience than any of them. Gold points were awarded to players who had a good combined score (known as “overalls”) for the two sessions, but a smaller amount of gold was also awarded to the pairs that finished first (both North-South and East-West) out of the ten in each section of ten tables for each session.

We did very badly in the morning. I remember interfering against a team playing Precision. The player with the strong hand doubled my bid, and it resulted in a four-digit score in the minus column. Mary did not play very well either. Our score was bad enough that we had very little chance of getting one of the overall awards. Mary was very disappointed. She asked me if I wanted to go home. Go home? I hadn’t driven all this way when there was still a chance of achieving the objective. I said that we just had to win our section in the afternoon session, and that was (at least from my perspective) a reasonable goal. If we played as well as well as we had in the STaC game, we would prevail easily.

We did much better in the afternoon. I have always had a pretty good feel for anticipating results. I reckoned that there was a pretty good chance that we might have won. You never knew for certain; someone may have received a lot of “gifts” from their opponents.

During the last round they posted the standings after the penultimate round. We checked it when we finished playing the last round. We were in first in our section, but only by one point. I thought back on the last round. On the first hand one of our opponents had made a grievous error that should have given us a good score. On the second hand we bid to the best contract, but Mary made some mistakes in the play. The third hand was mediocre, but we did avoid possible errors.

It took the directors nearly half an hour to post the final scores. Mary was beside herself with worry. They finally posted the scores. We tied for first place, and so we had to split the gold award with the other pair. Fortunately, that was just enough for Mary to become a Life Master.

On a good day the drive the hotel to Hartford took an hour.

The trip back to Hartford was in a downpour. However, my Honda had good tires, and so I was not much concerned with the water, and I still had pretty good vision for night driving. So, I was going the speed limit. I nonchalantly passed trucks that were going slower. Mary had to hide her face for most of the ride. She was terrified of another accident.

When we got to Hartford Mary could not remember how to get to the parking lot when coming from the west. We drove around for five or ten minutes before she got her bearings. Since I still had a half-hour drive to Enfield, I was annoyed by this.

Some months later the club sponsored a Life Master party for Mary. I gave a short speech that highlighted two aspects of her activities. At the time she often brought baked goods or other goodies to the club. She also cooked professionally. She even cooked for the Archbishop of Hartford for a while!

The other aspect was her fear of driving. I claimed that she had taken up racing on the Formula 1 circuit, and I held up a large picture of her alleged Ferrari. This reference went right over (or maybe under) Mary’s head, but a few people in the audience understood what I was talking about.

I may have played with Eric Vogel at the HBC more often than any other player. He started playing a few years after I did, and he amassed a terrific record. After I played with him a while I realized that he shared my interest in conventions. Together we put together a good card.

We also have played together in tournaments. We won one session of the open pairs at a sectional in Connecticut. That story has been told here. At the Presidential Regional in Southbridge, MA, in 2023 we played in Bracket 2 of the knockout. We won the qualifying Swiss very easily but only finished a very disappointing fourth. That tale of woe can be read here.

Eric is another talented artist. He also became the club’s treasurer in 2022. He has not had an easy time with accrual accounting.

Eric unobtrusively became a vegetarian at some point during our partnership. He certainly was one in 2023, but I remember that he complimented me on my chili at one of the pot-luck lunches at the HBC.

Eric’s daughter died in 2022. I went to the service at his church. His wife gave a very nice tribute.

Prior to the Pandemic I was playing at the HBC nearly every Tuesday with Partab Makhijani. I expected to resume playing with him when the club reopened, but he did not return to play. I think that he, like many others, might have health issues.

His LinkedIn page (here) said that he was on the adjunct faculty at the University of Hartford.

I met Buz Kohn (LinkedIn page here) when he was playing with his mother Joan occasionally on Tuesday evenings. We have played together several times at the HBC both before and after the club closed for the Pandemic.

Although Buz was as good at playing the cards as anyone he was not very tolerant of conventions. I had trouble getting him to even use a convention card.

Buz was still playing at the HBC in 2023, but I think that he also had a house in Florida.

Sonja Smith was Steve’s mother, and she also had triplet girls. When I began playing at the SBC in 2004, Sonja played there regularly with a partner who subsequently moved away.

We played together at the HBC several time before the Pandemic and once or twice afterwards—including one of the sectionals in 2022—before she and her family moved to the South.

Sonja attended the 2018 NABC in Honolulu. Afterwards she and her husband Chris spent a few days in Maui, as did my wife Sue and I. Sonja, who was staying at a resort hotel a few miles north of our base of Lahaina, invited us to join them on Monday, December 3, for an expensive sunset cruise of Maui’s west coast. I described it in detail here. It turned out to be a booze cruise with very loud music. I did not enjoy it at all.

Jeanne Striefler and her husband Fred invited Sue and me to their house in West Simsbury several times before the Pandemic. Jeanne and I also played together at the HBC several times and played at teams events at nearby sectionals and regionals. She was part of our ill-fated team at the Presidential Regional described in Eric Vogel’s section. She served as the club’s secretary for many years.

Jeanne also played regularly at the SBC both before and after the closure for the Pandemic.

Jeanne was from Omaha, Nebraska. She grew up closer to my old stomping grounds than anyone else in the HBC.

Ron Talbot, who attended Notre Dame, was the president of the HBC for two years. Before the Pandemic I played with him fairly often at the HBC as well as at a few sectionals in Rhode Island. If his partner was male. he wore a baseball cap while he was playing. If female, he was bareheaded.

Ron told me that he walked three miles every morning. I much preferred to do my walking in the evening. He also walked fifty miles in three days on the Appalachian Trail with his children and/or grandchildren. I don’t know if I could have done that.

Ron moved to Naples, FL, before the Pandemic. He has returned to the HBC once or twice.

Trevor Reeves served as president and then treasurer of the HBC. He implemented the budgeting system that was instrumental in helping to get the HBC through the Pandemic.

I played with him a few times at the club and at tournaments, including an open pairs game at the Summer NABC in Toronto in 2017 in which we were first in our section in the evening session.

Trevor was involved in the GNT difficulty that I described at the end of Felix Springer’s section.

The player with whom I have played for the longest time is my wife Sue. W have played together at the SBC, the HBC, at tournaments, on cruises, and clubs while we were traveling.

Sue had never played bridge when we met in 1972, but she had played a lot of setback, a much simpler trick-taking game, with friends and family members. She had no trouble learning the rules of bridge, but she had a difficult time understanding even the basics of the strategic principles concerning bidding and play.

I vividly remember one of the first times that we played as partners. It was at the house in Wethersfield of friends of ours, Jim and Ann Cochran, who were introduced here. I may have had a gin and tonic or two. It was a friendly game of rubber bridge. Nothing was at stake.

Sue and I got the bid in a suit contract, and Sue had to play it. The hand was not very challenging; all she had to do was to lead a few rounds of trump and then take her winners. Unfortunately, she neglected to take out the trumps before taking her high cards. So, the Cochrans were able to ruff several of her winners, and the contract went down.

Ann helpfully provided Sue with a way of remembering the importance of drawing trumps before attacking side suits. She taught her the old adage, “Get the children off the street!”

A few hands later Sue played another suit contract. She once again forgot about her opponents’ children, and they once again made enough mischief to set the contract.

On the third hand that I witnessed from across the table in my role of dummy, Sue’s failure to draw trumps led to another failed contract, I lost my temper, slammed my fist down, and broke the card table. I would have offered to buy them a new one, but at the time we were, as the British say, skint.

Nearly forty years passed before Sue and I played together at a sanctioned game. She joined the ACBL in 2011, seven years after I did. By the time that she started to play, I was already a Life Master. She blamed me for not warning her that the ACBL had changed the requirements for that rank on January 1 of 2011. The organization increased the number of required points, but they also made available new opportunities for obtaining them.

Over the years Sue and I played together at a few NABC tournaments, two bridge cruises, and at a few clubs in New England and Florida. At first I tried to get her to go over the hands with me after a session of bridge, but she really hated to do so. Our games together did not improve much over the years.

Sue has a lot of trouble with time, and in competitive bridge only seven minutes are ordinarily allotted for each hand. Contributing to this difficult are the facts that she plays—and does every other thing—rather slowly, keeps a very detailed score, and insists on playing North, the position that maintains the official results.

I remember one Sunday in which we played in the High-Low game at the HBC. By chance I declared more than my usual share of contracts. We finished first! I cannot remember any other occasion on which we enjoyed even a modicum of success.

Sue would like to do better, but she does not have the drive that I have always had to improve one’s game. In short, she never reads books or bridge articles. She sometimes goes over a result sheet, but never with a critical eye.

She participated in the mentoring program once. Her mentor, an experienced player named Mary Petit, offered her some tips. Later Mary asked me why Sue did not use any of them. I knew the answer, but I could not explain it in a way that anyone else could understand. So, I just said, “That’s the way that Sue is.”

Document here are more of my partnerships at North America’s oldest bridge club before it closed for the Pandemic . Partnerships after the reopening are described here.

1. I naturally thought that I had twelve months of play. In fact, however, the year started on October 1 at the HBC. So, I needed to play 25 times in nine months, which I did.

2. I never got a chance to play with Mary Witt before she moved to Cary, NC. I have occasionally communicated with her by email.

3. Several years later Ruth asked me to play with her at the HBC. I remember that I made a mistake of some kind on one hand that prevented us from getting any points. She mentioned that she knew that I was going to do that. Ruth was a good player, but she never made Life Master because she did not like tournaments. She died in 2020 at the age of 86. Here obituary can be found here. Her parents brought her to the United States in 1940.

4. An abbreviated recounting of my long obsession with papal history has been posted here. The chapter of my book about papal history that makes reference to Nazi Germany is posted here.

5. Tom was an actuary, but he never made FSA. In 2023 he was still working part-time at a pension consulting firm called PCI.

6. This photo was unfortunately lost when the server on which NEBridge.org ran had a catastrophic system failure in 2015. I also had a copy of the photo, but I cannot find it.

7. Pat still plays bridge, but she moved to Charlottesville, VA.

8. As it happened, we played against Ti’s team in the semifinals of the Summer NABC in Washington in 2016. Her team won the match and the event. I did not play against her. She and her partner played the same direction as Felix and me.

2004 Getting Back into Bridge

Posted on December 1, 2021 by Mike

Paul Pearson led me back tp the world’s greatest card game. Continue reading →

Between 1970—-when I left college—and 2003 the game of bridge was not really part of my life. However, every so often I thought about it and wondered how the game might have evolved. At the same time I was frustrated with my lack of friends locally. In fact, I really only had one, Tom Corcoran, and he was quite busy with his job and family. I wanted the opportunity to be around people with whom I could have intelligent conversations. The people at TSI sort of qualified, but I was the boss; it was difficult to become true friends with the employees.

I had already been taking classes in Italian at Enfield High School. These classes were sponsored by the town’s Continuing Education department. I enjoyed that experience, which is described here.

Twice a year the Enfield school systems mailed to its residents a flyer that described the offerings for the upcoming term. In the one for the classes beginning in January of 2004 I noticed that two bridge classes were being offered—one for beginners and one for those who had already taken the beginning class. Of course, I had not taken the beginning class yet, but I signed up for the latter one anyway. Unlike the Italian classes, this one was at Enfield’s newer and more convenient high school, Enrico Fermi¹, less than a mile from my house and right on my usual jogging route.

I found this old photo of Paul giving the class at Fermi. I don’t recognize the seated lady.

At the first class I met the instructor, Paul Pearson, who at the time was, I seem to remember, a Bronze Life Master. There were six or eight others in the class—all couples. None was as serious as I was at getting back into the game. Paul was surprised to learn that I had played a little duplicate bridge² thirty or so years earlier. I think that I may have played in one team match in the dorm at Michigan, too. The other students in Paul’s class wanted to be able to play with their friends or relatives once or twice a year. One couple even remarked that they did not need to learn how to keep score because their friends always kept score.

Paul used a pamphlet-sized book that explained how to bid using five-card major suits (hearts and spades). When I was learning to play the game people began the process of bidding by selecting their “best” suit, a somewhat amorphous way of combining length (number of cards in the suit), strength (Ace=4; King=3; Queen=2; Jack-1), and shortness (singletons, doubletons, and voids). In the modern approach bidding a major suit guaranteed—with almost no exceptions—at least five of the suit that was named in the opening bid. A-K-Q-J was no good; 6-5-4-3-2 was fine. The strength of the hand was measured separately. Minor suits and notrump had different rules.

In the sixties this rock-crusher might have been opened 2♦. The standard approach in 2021 recommends 2♣.

When I had learned to play bridge back in the sixties two-level bids were reserved for very strong hands. By 2000 most players in North America used all of these bids (except 2♣) to describe hands that were too weak to open at the one-level, but featured six cards in the bid suit.

By the time that I graduated from college in 1970 I had learned a different system, the Big Club promulgated by Howard Schenken. In this system all strong hands were opened with the lowest possible bid, 1♣. I considered this approach vastly superior to what everyone else was playing, and I felt certain that by the twenty-first century everyone would be using something similar. I was wrong. The only major changes to the basic requirements for standard bidding were the two that Paul taught us—five-card majors and weak two bids.

I later came to understand that most of the other holes in the standard bidding system that I had recognized when I was in college had been addressed by specific conventions. Whereas in the sixties most players thrived with only a couple of conventions, in the twenty-first century there were dozens of widely used conventions to choose from and several hundred exotic ones.

I cannot remember too many details of what Paul actually taught us in class. He recognized that it was unrealistic to expect any of us to be competent at the game after only a few hours of lessons. My most vivid memory of the classes occurred once when Paul was not even present in the room. For some reason we had gathered at the Enfield Senior Center that week to play a few hands. My partner was Paul’s wife, Sue, who was also a Life Master. I don’t remember the opponents. Four of us played at card table in a small elegant room that had a functioning fireplace.

Paul had set up a few hands for the class to play that evening. On one of them I was the declarer. I remember exclaiming to anyone who would listen, “There’s an Endplay³ here, and it looks like it will work!” Sure enough, I deliberately allowed one of the opponents to capture a trick and thereby won two in return.

If North opened 1♣, East could use 2NT to show diamonds and hearts.

Paul encouraged us to read the Courant‘s daily bridge column. I recall that one of the answers to a bidding question that I encountered there was a 2NT bid that I did not understand at all. I asked about it in class. Paul explained that it was a convention known as the Unusual Notrump that allowed the player to show two five-card suits with just one bid. I was delighted to learn that there was such a marvelous invention. I remember telling Paul that I did not think that I could stop myself from using it.

I recalled that I had practiced back in the sixties using a contraption called Autobridge, which was endorsed and marketed by Charles Goren himself. I still had it when I took the class. However, it did not age well. The play of the hands was still instructive, but even someone who knew as little as I did could tell that the recommended bidding was not optimal.

Paul knew about Autobridge. He had used it himself back in the sixties. He said that there were now computerized systems that allowed the user to specify which set of conventions were being used—both by the player and his computerized partner and by the robotics opponents.

Several of these computer games were available for purchase. The one that Paul recommended, Bridge Baron, included literally thousands of hands that had been played at actual tournaments. You could compare your performance with that of the rest of the field. What a great idea!

I promptly purchased a copy of Bridge Baron 15 and installed it on my laptop. I used it to improve both my bidding and my play. I played every hand from every tournament—some of them multiple times. I also practiced the use of many new conventions in a special set of programs in BB 15 designed for that purpose. The best part was that I could use it in in the otherwise wasted hours that I spent in airports and on airplanes.

After classes I usually stayed around to talk with Paul for a few minutes. After our very last session I informed him that I felt that I needed to play some hands on a regular basis. He asked me if I just “wanted to pitch cards”? If so, there was a weekly game at the Senior Center. I said that I really wanted to play in a serious duplicate game even though I knew that I would be overmatched at first.

Paul said that the best games were at the Hartford Bridge Club, but that might not be a feasible option until I had a regular partner. He recommended the weekly Wednesday evening game in Simsbury, CT, which was about a thirty minute drive from Enfield. He said that the club’s director, Paula Beauchamp, guaranteed a partner for everyone who attended. If an odd number of people showed up, she would participate as partner of one of the attendees. Paul provided me with contact information for her.

He also informed me that most of the best players in the Hartford area were either actuaries or computer programmers. I told him that I had worked as an actuary for two years, and I had been a software developer for more than twenty. He told me that he had been a programmer, too, but he had learned to program using Assembler, which, as I understood it, was only one step above programming with a soldering iron.

I eagerly got in touch with Paula via email. I told her that I would like to play in her game at the SBC, but I needed a partner. I also noted that I was at that time taking Italian classes on Wednesday evenings. That spurred her curiosity. My last class would be in early May, a few weeks away. She sent me directions to Eno Hall and advice about where to park. A description of my experience that first night is posted here.

For several years I wrote to Paul whenever I encountered a puzzling bridge situation. That often happened when I began playing in the much tougher Tuesday evening games at the HBC and even more often when I began attending tournaments. Paul always answered my emails, and he always gave me good advice. He also warned me about some players at the HBC whose advice should definitely not be heeded.

Paul told me about a few approaches to bidding that I did not know from my earlier encounters with the game. He introduced me to the difficult (but absolutely critical) concept of the LAW of total tricks⁴. I later dug up the details on my own. I also learned that the Rule of 20 had more or less supplanted simple point counts for evaluating hands for the purpose of opening the bidding.

Over the years I played a few times with Paul Pearson both at the SBC and at tournaments. I remember that we played together in a Swiss at a Connecticut Sectional. Our teammates were Michele Raviele and Joan Brault.

The last time that I played with Paul was—by far—the best. We played together in the Open Pairs game at the Fiesta Regional in Warwick, RI, on Friday, September 4, 2015. The event had three strats, labeled A, B, and C. We were a C team, which meant that our total masterpoints placed us roughly in the bottom third of the participants. Fifty-eight teams participated. We finished fifth overall and ahead of all of the players in both the B strat and the C strat. The pairs that finished ahead of us had at least ten times as many masterpoints as we did.

We earned 13.39 masterpoints for one day’s work! I remember only two of the hands. They were against very good players who had doubled our contract. I had to declare both of them, and I made the bid both times. I can’t say that I made any brilliant or heroic plays, but I did not choke either.

My wife Sue took this photo of Paul and me after our epic game.

Paul invited me to play with him in the equivalent pairs game in 2016, but I had already committed to play in a team event on the same day. Paul died later that year. His obituary is here. My wife Sue and I attended his funeral at the Congregational Church at the corner of South Road and Route 5 in Enfield.

While I was still taking Paul’s classes or shortly thereafter I went to Barnes and Noble looking for books to help me try to catch up. The selection wasn’t great, which surprised me. The first three books that I bought were 100 Winning Duplicate Tips by Ron Klinger, an expert from Australia and two books by William S. Root—one on bidding conventions and the other on declarer play. I bought many more books over the years. The ones that I liked the best are listed here.

A few years after Paul died I received a telephone call from Sue Pearson. She told me that she wanted to donate Paul’s collection of bridge books. She said that someone at the HBC claimed that they did not have any room for more books. I assured her that I would find a good home for them.

I drove over to Sue’s house and picked up a duffel bag full of books. Ones that interested me that I had not read I put in my own library. A few I gave to my wife. The books that I already had in my own collection I brought to the HBC and placed on the shelves without asking permission. There was plenty of room for them.

1. In 2010 Enfield decided to consolidate its two high schools into one. This may have saved the town money. However, what never made sense to me was why the surviving school was Enfield High. Fermi was much newer, much nicer, and much more centrally located.It also had plenty of land available for expansion. Enfield High, on the other hand, was right next to the river, rather dumpy, and very close to the worst part of town. The explanation may be contained in a report of toxic chemicals found on the land surrounding the building, as is detailed here.

2. There are many varieties of bridge. The form that swept the world in the twentieth century and caused many people to flunk out of college was rubber bridge. The North-South pair plays against the East-West pair. The cards are shuffled, dealt, and played. The same deck is used for many hands. Usually, two decks are used so that one can be shuffled (“made” in bridge lingo) while the other is dealt. The details are described here. Duplicate bridge attempts to remove as much of the chance elements. The North-South team’s results are compared with other North-South teams playing the same cards. More details can be read here.

3. The Endplay derives its name from the fact that it usually occurs near the end of the hand. A better name is Throw-in Play. The Wikipedia write-up of the technique is here.

4. A man named Jean-René Vernes determined by researching a large number of hands that when both sides have approximately equal strength the total number of tricks available when each side plays in its longest suit is roughly equal to the number of trumps in those two suits. So, if one side’s longest suit contains eight hearts, and the opposing side’s longest suit has nine spades, the LAW predicts that there are seventeen tricks in the hand. If the first side can make nine tricks with hearts as trump, the other side can expect to take eight tricks with spades as trump.

Of course the law does not always work. Larry Cohen’s seminal work, To Bid or Not to Bid, lists three negative adjustments and three positive adjustments that encompass most exceptions.

A commonly used corollary to the LAW asserts that in a competitive auction each side should bid to the combined number of trumps held by both partners. So, if North-South suspect that they have eight spades, they should bid to at least 2♠ as quickly as possible. Many people thing that the corollary is the LAW. However, unlike the LAW, the corollary is an artifact of the way that duplicate bridge is scored. It is much more successful when the side using it is not vulnerable.

2005-2011 Jim Wavada’s Time in Enfield

Posted on November 19, 2021 by Mike

Jim Wavada living in New England? Continue reading →

Documentation: I found very few notes about the events described in this entry. Sue supplied a few details as well as a book of photos that she had made for my dad. I know from a note on the back of one photo that the move occurred in October of 2005, when my dad was eighty-one years old. It just occurred to me that the transition occurred around what would have been my mom’s eightieth birthday on October 2. That probably also weighed on dad’s mind as he contemplated his future. Most of the following is therefore based on my memory, which may, of course, be faulty.

I should mention in passing that during the entire period our house in Enfield was such a gigantic mess that we never invited any friends over for any purpose.

The problem: In 2005 my dad was diagnosed with macular degeneration. Since he had already lost the vision in one eye to a detached retina, his vision was quite poor at this time. He still had a car and a driver’s license, but there was no way that he could drive. His doctor had prescribe the recently authorized periodic injections that arrested but did not usually reverse the degeneration. He also certified that dad was legally blind, which was useful for tax purposes. There was virtually no public transportation in the area in which he lived, suburban Johnson County, KS. If he stayed there, he would need to depend on his friends or expensive taxis.

Six years earlier my sister Jamie had cut off contact with my dad, or maybe vice-versa. I could see no reason to involve her in the problems.

I discussed the situation with my wife Sue. She agreed that he should come to Connecticut and live near us. He could live in an apartment for a while. If and when we added on to the house (that project was described here), he could come live with us. I talked with dad on the phone about moving to Connecticut. He was surprised but pleased.

Planning the move: In 2005 I was extremely busy with several monstrous projects at TSI. At the time Sue was no longer working at TSI’s office (explained here). She spent quite a bit of time with her father-in-law, Chick Comparetto. Sue helped dad pick out an apartment. I cannot remember whether he came out to Connecticut. She might have just described the choices to him over the phone. At the time Enfield had a few rather large apartment complexes and a greater number of smaller ones. If the search was expanded to the neighboring towns of Suffield, Longmeadow, Somers, and East Windsor, the selection would be much larger.

Fox Hill was an easy drive from our house.

I was not involved in this process. I am pretty sure that dad ruled out Bigelow Commons because he could not abide the notion of living in what was formerly a carpet factory. Instead he chose Fox Hill, which was near the corner of Elm St. and Elm St.¹

My dad wanted me to come to Kansas City and drive his Ford Taurus back to Connecticut. He knew that my Saturn was pretty old, and he wanted to give me the Taurus, but I did not want it. At the time the Saturn suited my purposes. When I eventually abandoned the Saturn I wanted to pick out my own car. Furthermore, I could not afford to spend several days getting the car to Enfield. So, on my advice he sold it. I don’t know the details.

In addition to his vision problems, my dad also had mobility issues. He had had one hip replaced, and the doctor advised him that the other hip was nearly as bad. After the surgery and therapy he could walk well enough. He could even ascend and descend stairs, but he went slowly and he need a railing.

I certainly don’t remember the chandelier.

Living at Fox Hill: Someone helped my dad pack up his belongings at his apartment. He engaged movers to take them to Connecticut. He flew to Bradley by himself. Sue picked him up at the airport.

The movers did not arrive on time. So, my dad and Sue spent an entire day sitting in an empty apartment. I am not sure where he stayed that night. There are several hotels in Enfield.

My dad’s apartment was on the first floor. Since there were no elevators, he would not accept a second-floor unit.

The apartment was not fancy. It had a bedroom, a living room, and a small kitchen. I seem to remember a picture window, too. It was at least two or three steps down from his place in Overland Park.

Sue took these two photos on the day that dad’s furnishings were due to arrive.

I had not considered it beforehand, but my dad would obviously need to do laundry. He occasionally brought a load over to our house, and one of use ran them through our washer and dryer. Most of the time he did his own laundry. He mixed everything together in one laundry bag. The closest laundry room was in the basement of another building. He had to walk there, throw his bag down to the bottom of the staircase, walk down the stairs, open the door, and go inside. The hard part was returning. He had to drag his laundry bag up the stairs.

What did he do with the pants and shirts that needed to be hung? He had them dry-cleaned. Either Sue or I took him to the cleaners, probably E-Jay’s on Hazard Ave. It was about the same distance from Fox Hill as our house was, and we drove by it almost no matter where we were going.

The machines in the laundry room at Fox Hill did not accept coins. They accepted only debit cards issued by the office at Fox Hill, which was quite a distance from my dad’s apartment. So, Sue and I would often stop by the office so that he could pay his rent or boost the balance in his laundry account.

Dad stayed at Fox Hill for more than a year, but a little later he felt that the place was becoming dangerous, and he was no longer comfortable living there. He witnessed some mild violence, and he told me that he was sure that there were drug transactions going on. I don’t know if he was right, but he definitely wanted out. I remember that he wrote a letter complaining about an incident that he witnessed and posted it on a website set up for that purpose. Soon after it was posted, several letters praising Fox Hill appeared. It appeared to me that they had all been written by the same person.

Sue once again helped dad find an apartment. I know that they drove to a house in Suffield that was renting a few rooms. He did not like it, but he did like Bigelow Commons when he finally visited it. I took him there to see it before he signed the lease. He asked me what I thought of it. I told him that if this was the same price as Fox Hill, I could not believe that he ever chose Fox Hill. He assured me that it was the same price.

I don’t know what was involved in transporting his belongings to his new apartment.

Living at Bigelow Commons: Dad’s apartment was on the second floor of the southernmost building at Bigelow Commons. There was an elevator just inside the door, and his room was close to both the elevator and the laundry room. He bought a small cart that he could put his laundry in. This was a far superior approach to what he went through at Fox Hill. He also located a dry cleaner that was within a few blocks of Bigelow.

The main reason that Bigelow was not able to charge more was probably because of its location in the middle of Thompsonville. The surrounding neighborhood could be a little rough, but the compound itself seemed plenty safe. If I lived there, I would be worried about my car being broken into or stolen. The parking lot was much more easily accessible than at Fox Hill. That was not a concern for my dad, of course. He did not have a car.

The biggest problem that my dad had at Bigelow was dealing with the windows, which were old and heavy. I could push them up and pull them down without much problem, but that was fifteen years ago. I wonder if I could still deal with them as easily in 2023 at the age of seventy-five..

Dad much preferred the atmosphere and the people at Bigelow. I don’t remember him complaining about anyone there, even the management..

Getting around Enfield: My dad was reasonably independent. I visited him once or twice a week when I was in town. We sometimes ate breakfast at his favorite place, the Farmer’s Daughter Cafe on Mountain Road in West Suffield. It was located in a small strip mall more than twenty minutes from our house. Sue sometimes joined us or took him there when I was out of town.

On most Wednesdays we would eat lunch together at Friendly’s near the Enfield Square mall. We both always ordered the same thing. He had the Senior Turkey Club Super-Melt and coffee. I had the Reuben Super-Melt and a glass of Diet Coke. The waitresses all knew us and treated us like royalty. They especially loved my dad, who insisted on paying and was a big tipper.

I always drove both of us from Friendly’s to Bigelow, but sometimes when I went to pick him up he was already at the mall. He had gone there to walk from one end to the other. He was very proud of being able to do this. He often told me that he thought that he “had a stride.”

How did he get to the mall? Enfield had a free bus service for seniors called Dial-a-Ride. He would call in to make an appointment. The bus would pick him up at the parking lot near his door and take him to the doctor’s office or any other location in Enfield.

It was a terrific service for seniors, and my dad definitely appreciated it. When you called for an appointment, you could specify the time and destination, but you could not specify the driver. My dad did not appreciate one of the bus drivers, who insisted on proselytizing his right-wing political views willy nilly to all the passengers. My dad complained about this guy almost every time that we were together.

Trying to read: After he retired my dad enjoyed four pastimes above others—golf, travel, reading, and writing. He played a lot of golf in the early years with my mom or with some friends. His hip and vision problems eliminated his favorite form of exercise, and I could not name what was second.

When mom was alive they traveled some together, but after her condition deteriorated it was difficult. After she died my dad took two big trips, one to France with a group of strangers who were part of a Catholic group and one to Ireland with Cadie Mapes, his granddaughter. I don’t know how much he enjoyed either trip. What he could get out of them was severely limited by his poor vision and his mobility issues. I know only that he loved the side trip to Normandy and had trouble getting along with Cadie in Ireland. The only trips that he made when he was living in Enfield were when dad and I attended two funerals in Trenton, MO. They have been described here.

He was able to write three books after he retired, and he was a voracious reader while he still had one good eye. The one thing that he really wanted while he was in Enfield was to be able to read books, magazines, newspapers, and the labels on items at stores. A fair amount of the time that we were together were attempts to help in this regard.

I had heard somewhere about machines that helped people with poor vision by projecting on a computer screen a greatly magnified version of something printed using closed-circuit television. We made an appointment to see one of these machines at a store in, if I remember correctly, Cheshire, CT, which was a drive of over an hour from Enfield.

For some reason we had to wait for fifteen or twenty minutes before someone could help us. There was little to do while we waited. The store had some magnifying glasses and a hand-held electronic magnifier, but that was all except for the CCTV machines.

Finally someone was available to demonstrate how the system worked to my dad. He (or maybe it was a she) sat my dad in front of the machine and asked him to look at the screen. Meanwhile he had to manipulate the magazine, which was a few inches under the camera. My dad had been trying to do this for less than five minutes when he became physically ill. The combination of the reading and the maneuvering of the text for some reason made him nauseous.

The salesperson and I had to help him to another chair away from the machine. It took him more than fifteen minutes to regain his equilibrium. The salesperson insisted that he would get used to it, but there was no sale on that day. Dad later purchased one of those hand-held magnifiers. He brought it with him to stores

On the way back to Enfield my dad confided to me that he had never vomited in his life. What? He was in the army in the Pacific. He must have gotten some bad food or bad hooch, right? And he worked in advertising for decades. He must have had one too many at least once, right?

No, I believe him. He was a unique person. He also told me that he had never had a dream, or at least he had never awakened remembering his dream. That may have been true when he told me, but I am almost certain that he had a real doozy later.

I knew how important newspapers and magazines were to my dad. I contacted an agency that provided special radios that had someone reading articles and stories from newspapers all day long. I got one for him, and he used it for a while. I also purchased some audio books for him and kindle books that he played on his computer. I remember that I came up with a trick on Kindle that worked until they upgraded the software. I complained about it, but whoever I dealt with insisted that the feature that I employed was unintentional and would not be added back. I don’t remember the details.

Writing was another story. He had never learned to type. So, even when his vision was not too bad, he struggled with typing on a computer. I adjusted the font size of his screen so that when he wrote something it was very large. However, he was also not adept at moving the cursor around on the screen. There really was no way for him to write much or to edit what he had written on the computer. Mostly he just sent me emails. He was definitely frustrated by this.

Errands: I don’t think that I ever took my dad to see any of his doctors. He generally took the Dial-a-Ride bus or asked Sue to take him. However, I often brought him to other places. Our first stop was usually the ATM at Webster Bank to withdraw cash. This was the only use that he made of his debit card. He had plenty of spending money. He had a good pension from BMA in addition to Social Security and interest on bonds. His expenses were low, and he had excellent health insurance to supplement Medicare. When he died in 2011 I discovered that his financial situation was better than I had guessed.

If I came to see him in the morning, which I did every Sunday, I stopped at McDonald’s and picked up a sausage biscuit with egg sandwich and a senior coffee for him.

We almost always stopped at Stop and Shop. He liked the salad bar there. Although he seldom consumed anything that was green besides string beans, he filled up a large container with fruit. He always paid cash, and he never bothered with coins. When he got back to the apartment he put all the change in a big bowl.

Another common stop was CVS to pick up extra-strength Tylenol for his arthritis. I tried to convince him that Tylenol had only one active ingredient, acetaminophen, which could be purchased much more cheaply under the store’s label. He would have none of it. He was loyal to brands that worked for him. I am like that to some extent, but when it comes to drugs that must list all of the active ingredients, I go for the cheap ones that do not waste money on advertising. Especially if there is only one ingredient.

My dad printed out emails that were sent to him because it was too difficult for him to read them on the screen. I set it up for them to be printed using a very large font. Consequently he went through quite a bit of ink for his HP inkjet printer. The ink cartridges for these printers were nearly as expensive as the computers themselves. I discovered a place on the Internet where one could purchase ink for the cartridges. It was possible—but not easy—to refill empty cartridges. I did this for him for a few months. Eventually it upset him to see me spending time doing this, and he asked me to just buy him new cartridges.

After his Kansas driver’s license expired he needed to obtain an official Connecticut ID. I think that Sue helped him with this. It involved as much rigamarole as obtaining a driver’s license, maybe more.

I took dad to church every Sunday. When he lived at Fox Hill, although other churches were closer, he went to Holy Family church² on the south side of town.

After he moved to Bigelow Commons he went to St. Adalbert’s, which was just a few blocks away from his apartment. Quite a few steps led from the sidewalk to the church. After a while he needed to use the elevator.

I would let him off, do something for a half hour or so, and then drive back to the church to pick him up. He never tried to persuade me to join him.

Every so often my dad sent me a list of groceries to order for delivery to his apartment. At first we used Pea Pod to order from Stop and Shop. When Geissler’s expanded its delivery area to Enfield, we switched to them.

Finances and taxes: Dad wrote his own checks, but he was utterly incapable of balancing his checkbook. I had to take over that responsibility before he even moved to Connecticut. I don’t remember how he provided the information to me. Maybe I did it on his computer.

I also did his taxes. They were very easy except for the first year in which he had to file in both Connecticut and Kansas. He always paid on time. I remember that for some reason he had a dispute with the IRS about his pension, which had been passed from one insurance company to another after he retired. He was upset at the insurance company more than the IRS. He was greatly relieved when the whole mess was straightened out in his favor.

I don’t know if he worked with a lawyer on this, but his personal affairs were in excellent condition at the time of his second fall.

Visits to the Lisellas: My dad naturally wanted to visit his grandchildren, all of whom were living in nearby West Springfield, MA, as much as possible. My sister Jamie was living elsewhere (explained here), but her ex husband Joe Lisella and his new wife Jenna (who was thirteen years younger than Jamie), seemed happy to involve dad, as well as Sue and me, in holidays and other events.

I don’t know if my dad enjoyed these occasions or not. He was much more sociable than I ever was, but the whole thing was awkward for him. Divorce was unheard of in his family, he did not know any of the other adults in attendance, he could hear but not see what was going on, and once he parked himself in an easy chair, it was hard for him to get up. The kids, especially Gina, treated him well, but he was obviously uncomfortable. I was, too.

I don’t remember any of them visiting my dad until his last days after the second fall.

Miscellaneous memories: My dad and I sometimes watched college football games together on his plasma-screen television³. He actually listened more than watched. I remember that he used the television for several months before we realized that it was not set to show high-density programs. A simple adjustment greatly improved the viewing, at least for me.

Sue tried to involve dad in the senior social life in Enfield as she had for Chick Comparetto. Dad did not think much of Chick, but he liked some of the other people.

My dad was not much of a cook, but he used his George Foreman grill to cook steaks and chicken fillets. He loved it when we took him to a restaurant for supper. He could not read the menu, and so he usually ordered Chicken Alfredo.

Dad and I had a long-standing argument about who was the worst president of all time, Richard Nixon or George W. Bush. He said that it was Bush because he had attacked Iraq even though Iraq had done nothing to the U.S. I claimed that it was Nixon because of his needless extension of the Vietnam War, his secret war in Laos, and his overthrow of the democratically elected government in Chile.

I may have been prejudiced because Nixon was president when I was drafted. I always suspected that dad had voted for Tricky Dick in 1972 and was therefore sheepish about criticizing Nixon’s presidency. I admit that I had no direct evidence, but I remembered how vociferous he was about Nixon’s deviousness when he ran in 1960, and I know that dad supported the War in Vietnam until the publication of the Pentagon Papers,

The first fall: I think that the first fall happened in late 2010 or early 2011. My dad was in his bedroom. He might have been going from his bed to the bathroom, a distance of a couple of yards, when he fell. The lights must have been off because he was not able to get to his feet and he was disoriented enough that he ended up in the closet.

At some point on the following day the delivery man from Geissler’s knocked on the door. When no one answered, he contacted someone at the office. They did a wellness check and found my dad in some sort of pitiable position. An ambulance took him to Johnson Memorial Hospital on the far west side of Stafford. They called me to tell me what happened.

I visited him in the hospital several times. I never was certain what exactly was wrong with him. He could not walk, but when I asked the doctor what was preventing him from walking, he just said that that was a good question.

The doctor was most concerned about dad’s mental state. My dad had told him that he had been in Milwaukee with some friends of his. The doctor, of course, thought that he was hallucinating. I told him that a more likely explanation was that he had dreamt about being in Milwaukee, he remembered the dream, and he was unable to disassociate it from real experiences because he no practice at doing so. I do it almost every morning, but he claimed that he had never had a dream.

The doctor also asked if he was reckless. He was afraid of releasing a man with poor vision and mobility to live by himself. I assured him that he was the most careful person whom I knew, and, if anything, he was paranoid about fire, getting mugged, and other potential hazards.

After a few days he was walking behind a walker. He never did regain the ability to walk without one. The doctor told me that he would release him, but they wanted him to go to a nursing home for a while. They asked me to select the one that they would release him to. I picked Blair Manor⁴ on Hazard Ave., a few miles from our house. I knew nothing about nursing homes. I just picked the one that was closest to our house.

My dad’s stay at Blair Manor was not a happy one. On my first visit he was having paranoid hallucinations. He informed me that the nurses were trying to kill him, and instructions to them were being broadcast over the television. At the time Meet the Press was on someone’s set within earshot. I tried to calm him down, but he just got frustrated that I—of all people—would leave him in this perilous situation.

I talked to the nurse about this episode. She said that he had been taking some drugs that could cause such symptoms. She said that she would report it to the doctor. She did, and he altered the dosage, and dad was all right after that. It shook me up pretty thoroughly.

Dad later asked me if he had made a fool out of himself. I said, “No, powerful drugs prescribed by your doctor made you act like that. The nurse said that it happened frequently.” Even so, he hated the place and wanted to depart as soon as possible. They finally let him depart. I brought him to his apartment. The people at Bigelow Commons were very happy when he was able to return.

I don’t know how long the period was during which he needed his walker to get around. I remember going to Friendly’s quite a few times.

The second fall took place in August of 2011. It was shortly before his 87th birthday, which was on August 25. On this occasion he fell down in the laundry room. He used his wheeled laundry cart as a walker when he did his laundry. Someone found him there unconscious. An ambulance took him to Hartford Hospital.

Early the next Sunday morning I got a phone call that we should hurry to the hospital. Sue and I rushed there. The nurse said that she did not know why the doctor had ordered that such a notice be sent. Dad was still unconscious, but the nurse said that there was no imminent danger of him dying.

A few days later the doctor in charge told me that his systems were “just worn out”, and he should receive palliative care. It could be at the hospital, at a nursing home, or at a house. I told them that we would not be able to do it, and I could see no reason to move him to a nursing home. So, he stayed at Hartford Hospital. I visited him every day, but he never communicated.

Some of the Lisellas came by on September 12. They were shocked and saddened by his appearance. He died on September 13, 2011.

The story of his funeral and other arrangements has been posted here.

1. This looks like a typo, but it isn’t. Westbound Elm St., a major four-lane road (CT 220) north of Enfield Square Mall, makes not one, but two right turns at intersections where the road itself continues onward. It then strangely transforms itself into North St. where the latter appears on its left.

2. In 2017 St. Bernard’s and Holy Family merged to form one parish called St. Jeanne Jugan Parish. In 2022 St. Martha’s and St. A’s also joined. I guess that the administrative offices are at Holy Family. The schools are at St. Bernard’s. There was also a church in Thompsonville called St. Patrick’s. It had previously merged with St. A’s. I think that all five churches are still open in 2023.

3. We still have that television in 2023. Sue watches it in bed when I have gone to sleep.

4. Blair Manor was closed in 2017. It was subsequently converted to “assisted living” apartments.

2008 Road Trip to Michigan

Posted on November 18, 2021 by Mike

Driving through Canada to the Wolverine state. Continue reading →

In 1975-76, my last year of coaching at U-M, the debate team was in shambles. I described the situation here. During the three years that I spent at Wayne State in downtown Detroit I heard virtually nothing about the U-M team. I do not recall hearing that they attended any tournaments. I figured that the team had been abolished or reduced to obscurity.

I discovered at some point in the 2007-2008 school year that, unbeknownst to me, they program had at some point risen from the ashes and was competing strongly at the national level. I don’t remember how I learned about this, but as soon as I did, I composed and sent an email to Josh Hoe¹, the director of the debate program. In it I described my lackluster career as a debater and my much more successful efforts at coaching. I also described the hardships that the U-M debaters and coaches had to overcome when it was funded by the speech department.

Josh really appreciated my email a lot. He forwarded it to all of the alumni of the debate program. This precipitated an outburst of “reply all” responses from old-timers. Josh needed to ask them to take their communications off-line. It was great for me. I was able to find out what had become of most of my charges.

At some point over the summer Josh and his assistant Aaron Kall² decided to host a mostly informal gathering for debate alums on the weekend of U-M’s first home game against Miami U. (OH) on September 7, 2008. As it happened it was also the debut in Michigan Stadium of newly hired coach Rich Rodriguez. The team had lost its opener, 25-23 to Utah.

By 2008 I was no long working as constantly as I had in the nineties. My wife Sue and I also had amassed enough money at this point to pay for trips. As soon as I heard of the debate/football event, I made arrangements with Josh for us to attend. We decided to make a mini-vacation of it and to drive across Michigan to visit Sue’s aunt and uncle, Boband Carol Locke³, and their daughters, Deb, Wendy, and Sandy. They all lived in the Grand Rapids area. Our destination was Bob and Carol’s home in Hudsonville.

Sue was really looking forward to that part of the trip. Sue liked everyone in that part of her family a lot. I suspected that part of the attraction was that Bob was the only member of his family to move away from Enfield. His three brothers and his sister (Sue’s mother Effy) all lived within a couple of miles of one another.

Documentation: I don’t think that I took any notes on this trips. I had a small Canon point-and-shoot camera in those days. If I brought it, I either did not take any photos, or I lost them. I think that for some reason I left it home.

I found a folder on my computer about this trip, but its contents were of no help. Inside it are two identical html files that contain MapQuest directions from 1275 Huron St. in Ypsilanti to our house in Enfield. That address in Ypsi in 2023 was associated with the Marriott Eagle Crest resort and hotel. I have absolutely no memory of staying there. Aside from that it only contains an image of the Hampton Inn logo and a small map of the area around the Hampton Inn in Ann Arbor.

When I first asked Sue about the trip, she had no recollection at all. She could not even remember being in Michigan Stadium. Later, after a little prompting, she recalled a few details that I have included.

In short, I am relying almost exclusively on my memory for the account below.

Enfield to Ann Arbor: The town of Ann Arbor had a population of only about 112,000 in 2023. However, on football Saturdays almost that many people would be crammed into Michigan Stadium. Lodging would be in high demand. My first order of business was to find a place for us to stay for Friday and Saturday night. I booked us rooms at the Hampton Inn that was just south of the U-M golf course. I probably used the points from my credit card to pay for at least part of the bill.

I think that we must have left on Thursday morning. We took the Canadian route through Ontario, and I remember that I was very upset that there was a long delay when we entered near Buffalo. When we got to the front, the border guy asked me what my license plate was. I knew that it was three digits followed by FAU, but I was not sure of the number. I guessed, and he said that that was close enough.

The 10+ hour drive time that Google Maps sited, and I am pretty sure that we did not leave at the crack of dawn, and we stopped for food twice. We might have stopped in Plymouth to check out the house on Sheldon Rd., too. Also, I have a vague recollection that we crossed over north of Lake St. Clair to avoid rush hour traffic in Detroit. The Ambassador Bridge was closed for construction. The lines at the tunnel must have been outrageous.

In any case, I think that we arrived at the Hampton Inn after dark on Thursday, September 5. We probably ate the free breakfast at the hotel the next morning.

I remember that we spent most of a day walking around the U-M campus and assessing how much had changed in the twenty-eight years since we had last been there. That must have been on Friday. I remember that Allen Rumsey House did not appear to have changed much at all. I am pretty sure that I ducked into the Intramural Building to assure myself that the overall championship won by A-R in 1969-70 was still recognized on the banner.

I also remember showing to Sue the spot behind the administration building where the water balloons launched from the fourth floor of A-R landed. I am pretty sure that we ate lunch at a restaurant on S. University near the engineering buildings.

We also had an appointment with Linda (Calo) Martini, who was working, I think, at the Michigan Debate Institute or maybe the Michigan Intercollegiate Speech League. We were hoping to see Kent (introduced here) as well, but he was not present. Linda said that he had taken it very hard when his mother died. It all seemed a little mysterious.

We were supposed to meet Josh and some other debate alums at a bar in Ann Arbor on Friday evening. Several of those in attendance wore Michigan Debate tee shirts that closely resembled the one that I once had. However, none of theirs had the letter C (for captain) on the front and “Prof. Wavada” on the back. My tee shirt had not survived the decades since the debaters gave it to me in 1970.

I am pretty sure that Bill Colburn, who had been Director of Forensics back in the sixties and seventies was there, too. I could hardly recognize him.

I learned that the debate team had been divorced from the speech department, which had at some point been combined with the journalism department. Somehow the debate team had taken control over the summer institute and turned a locally successful gathering run mostly by Wayne State people into the #1 such event in the entire nation. The benefits to the U-M debate program were enormous. It generated a lot of cash for the team. It provided summer employment and recognition for the coaching staff. Most importantly, top-flight high school debaters flocked to the institute every summer, and some inevitably fell in love with Ann Arbor and the U-M campus, enrolled, and joined the team.

The program also received funding from the University and had begun to receive significant contributions from its growing alumni base, most of whom were lawyers. I was astounded to learn that one of the recently graduated debaters, Dylan Keenan, had attended one of the Shawnee Mission schools and had majored in math⁴.

On Saturday we ate breakfast at the Hampton Inn and then drove to the game. Parking was always scarce, but we found a spot that was not too far from the stadium. We somehow eventually found the area where the debaters tail-gated. I think that we met up with Wayne Miller there. He was with some of his friends from the seventies.

Another short walk brought us to the stadium. Almost everyone wore blue and/or maize, but someone in the large group of fans crossing the street was wearing a red hat with a white M on it. The guy directing traffic called to him and said, “Well, you got the letter right, but whoever sold you that hat must have been color-blind.” Sue told me that someone also gave her a hard time because she was carrying a red handbag.

We sat in the upper reaches to the left of the scoreboard. The student section begins in the middle of the block M and stretches to the far end zone.

There are no bad seats in Michigan Stadium, but almost everyone had a better view of the action than we did. We were near the top in one of the corners of the end zone. It was more comfortable than being crammed together in the student section. It was also much more pleasant than UConn games because no liquor was allowed in the stadium.

I think that this was the big play near the end of the game.

The game, however, was painful to watch. U-M started well. The score was 10-0 at the end of the first quarter, and people in the stands were happy for a time with the team’s new approach to offense. However, after that the winningest team in college football stalled. By the fourth quarter it was 10-6. Brandon Minor scored a late touchdown to make the score a little more acceptable. Michigan had never lost to any team from the Mid-American Conference. For a while it appeared that we might be watching something historic.

Afterwards we drove with Wayne to Krazy Jim’s Blimpy Burgers. Wayne was surprised that I knew about it. I informed him that I had gone there more than once a month for the four years that I lived at A-R.

Inside a blowhard who was a little ahead of us in line started telling stories about how he had worked with the legendary Krazy Ray. Everyone was impressed when I said that I came here all the time when Krazy Ray ran the grill, and I sure didn’t remember this guy. I then explained how upset Ray would get if someone tried to order the whole meal from him. He strictly grilled and assembled the burgers. You were expected to give the rest of your order to the next person behind the counter.

The burgers were still very tasty, and the atmosphere was magical. I had a great time.

Ann Arbor to Hudsonville: One other very important event occurred in Ann Arbor, but the details are shrouded. Sue somehow arranged for a new custom-designed tee shirt for me that was nearly identical to the one that the guys had gotten me in 1976. I remember that she ordered me to stop at a location on the outskirts of town (I think) on the way to Hudsonville. She went inside for a while and returned with a bag that she presented to me. I can’t say that I was surprised—Sue is notoriously bad at keeping secrets—but it was a very nice gesture.⁵

I don’t remember anything about the drive to Hudsonville. We probably arrived there at about lunch time. I think that we only stayed one night and that Bob and Carol put us up for the night in a cottage that was on their property.

An overhead view of the Locke property. Those trees had leaves on them when we were there.

Their home was in a secluded area surrounded by woods and wildlife. I remember that there was a pond nearby and that Carol was interested in birds, especially cardinals.

We saw at least some of the daughters, their husbands, and their children. Sue reportedly brought a game with her that she had used in her work with the Enfield after-school program. It was involved with traveling from state to state. I vaguely remember it. She said that she left it with them.

Hudsonville to Enfield: Our route home was quite different fromour route to Hudsonville. We took I-96 and I-69 across Michigan and crossed to Canada at Sarnia. We then took 402 and 403 across Ontario. I remember nothing about this journey.

1. In 2010 Josh was convicted of soliciting a minor for sex and went to prison for a few years. The article in the Ann Arbor News about the incident is posted here. In 2023 his LinkedIn page (posted here) listed his jobs as Criminal Justice Policy Manager at Dream.Org and host of the Decarceration Nation podcast.

2. Aaron took over the program after Josh was fired. In 2023 he was still the coach of perhaps the most successful program in the country. However first place at the National Debate Tournament has still evaded the Wolverines.

3. Carol died in 2018. Her obituary has been posted here. Bob outlived all of his siblings. He died in 2022. His obituary is posted here.

4. That last part may not be right. Dylan, whose LinkedIn page is posted here, evidently majored in economics. Dylan and his partner, Adam Farra, had made it to the semifinals of the NDT in 2008.

5. I still have the tee shirt in 2023.

2021 The Rebirth of the Simsbury Bridge Club: Part 2

Posted on November 8, 2021 by Mike

SBC 2.1. Continue reading →

Wednesday evening, March 11, 2020, was the date of the last game of the Simsbury Bridge Club at Eno Hall before the shutdown necessitated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Fred Gagnon played with my wife Sue. He regaled us with the story of how the week before he had played an event in Colorado Springs¹ that Colorado’s “patient zero” also attended. He said, quite correctly, that he was very lucky that he had not played against her or in any other way associated with her. In those very early days the treatment methodologies were mostly guesswork. Dozens of other bridge players were not as fortunate as Fred.

At the time my wife Sue and I were scheduled to start a riverboat cruise on the Danube River² the next week. We had heard that a few people had already canceled, and we half-jokingly asked Fred if he wanted to sign up.

The club’s usual director, Ken Leopold, could not attend on March 11. Margie Garilli substituted for him. As a result I ended up with all of the club’s bridge equipment during the pandemic.

Unless you were lucky enough to be stuck in New Zealand, you probably did not give much thought to face-to-face bridge for the next year or so. A few clubs in Florida reopened rather quickly, but some of them had to close because of transmission of the virus.

The Hartford Bridge Club resumed play on June 15, 2021. Several people asked me when the SBC was going to reopen. I told them that it was up to Ken, who was the director and proprietor. This was his response:

I’d like to see how live playing goes at HBC for a while. When we restart (probably sometime in July), I’m going to ask people to sign up on Mondays to see if we have enough people for a game. I think people should be vaccinated to play.

July was a bad month for Ken, and so I was not too surprised to receive on August 3 this email from Sally Kirtley, who had been the director before Ken took over in Simsbury and who had directed regularly for the Hartford Bridge Club before and during the pandemic:

I got an email from Eno that they are accepting reservations starting in the fall. I forwarded it to Ken, who responded that he is not going to be able to run it this fall. I don’t know if that means that he won’t be playing at all either. Just wondering if you think that it makes any sense for me to try to start it up again? Do you think that we will get enough players? Will you play if we start up again?

I replied that I definitely would play, but I thought that we should try to gauge how much interest people had in the game. I brought my mailing list (described in Part 1, which is posted here) up to date, and sent an email indicating that Sally and I were hoping to get the game going again in September. I asked people to respond if they thought that they would play, and I received over forty positive responses. Quite a few players indicated that they would play often.

The next email that I received from Sally on August 14 included the following:

I will see how quickly we can get into the space, and will definitely ask if we can require vaccinations – it being a public building, I don’t know. As a private club, we certainly could, but I will make sure.
As to masks, I think that we need to listen to the experts at the time. I am personally okay with people not masking if they are vaccinated, but I do think that they are probably a good idea.
I am also planning a vacation in October and will be gone 10/13.

Jeanne Striefler, a long-time member of the Simsbury Club reported to me that masks were definitely required in public buildings in Simsbury with or without vaccinations. Moreover, other groups that used public facilities had had problems with attempting to require vaccinations. I did not want to be involved in something that caused even one person to get Covid-19. I was therefore adamant that we require vaccinations.

The missive from Sally dated August 23 contained great news.

The town has reserved the room for us starting September 9. As of right now, masks are required in town buildings. We can require vaccinations.

I wasn’t exactly sure how we could check for vaccinations, but I thought that we should agree on a schedule and publish it as soon as possible. We had pretty much decided on starting play on September 15 when I received this email from Sally on August 27:

Eno Hall says we can’t require vaccinations on town property. I think that means a no-go for us – unless we just ignore them and request proof of vaccinations anyway?

So, I was forced to send out an email to everyone on my list that we would not start in September. Here was the text:

I wrote in the last email: “I am assuming that Eno Hall will allow us to verify that all players have been fully vaccinated. I, for one, will not play in a game that does not do this.”
Unfortunately, my assumption was wrong. The people who run Eno Hall will NOT permit us to check that all players have been vaccinated. Under those circumstances Sally and I are not willing to run the game. The current form of the disease is extremely contagious; one person could easily ruin it for many. We will review this decision in a few months. Perhaps things will have changed.

I received a lot of sympathetic responses to this. The one from Med Colket, who had played at Eno with his wife Kathy for several years, included an idea that caught my attention. I relayed it to Sally.

Med Colket had an intriguing suggestion. He recommended that we request that players submit proof of vaccination to me voluntarily. Then we only invite the people who have submitted valid proof. I would send out invitations every week, and people would RSVP. This will have the advantage of giving us a better estimate of table count.

A little later Jeanne learned that because we were a private entity we could require vaccinations if we wanted. The previous information that Sally received from Eno Hall had been erroneous. I decided to implement Med’s approach anyway. Our first game would be on October 20. I sent an email to everyone on my list:

We have used a suggestion from Med Colket to devise a way to reopen the Simsbury Bridge Club. We need a little time to get everything set up. Here is our schedule of games for the rest of the year:
October 20 and 27
November 3 and 10
December 8, 22, and 29. I am aware that some bridge players must cater to the wishes of burdensome family and friends during the holidays. However, I am optimistic about the last two dates because Christmas and New Years are on Saturdays this year.

Anyone can register as a vaccinated member of the SBC by sending an email or text to me, or leaving a message on my voice mail. You can register as either a player or a pair.
1) Designate the names of the player(s).
2) Provide proof of vaccination—either a photo of the card(s) or the date and time of a game played at the Hartford Bridge Club in 2021.
3) Pairs should designate whether they wish to be considered “recurring”.
On the Friday before every game I will send to all who have registered as vaccinated an email announcing the next week’s game. The deadline for responses will be the following Monday. People should notify me (by email, text, or voice mail) if:
1) They are a “recurring” pair that will not be playing the following Wednesday;
2) They are a registered pair that is not “recurring” but plans to play.
3) They want to provide proof of vaccination for a partner who was not previously registered.
4) They would like to play but lack a partner.
If fewer than twelve people (three tables) commit to play, the game will be canceled. I will send an email announcing the cancellation on the Tuesday before the game. I will also post a notice to that effect on the club’s website, which is at http://wavada.org/SimsburyBC/.

It was not overly difficult to implement this system. First I needed to add a field on the “audience” file for the SBC on the free version of MailChimp. I called the new field Registration. That part was easy, and I was familiar with how to do it. I then used a feature on MailChimp to designate two segments, one with a blank in this field and the other for players with a letter. I put an H in this field for those whom I had seen play at the Hartford Bridge Club and a C for people who had sent me copies of their vaccination cards.

The time-consuming part came next. I had to enter these by hand one at a time. I had to sort the file, find the player I wanted, select them for editing, scroll down to the field, enter the character, scroll to the bottom, and save it. The most annoying thing was that when I returned to the list of players, not only had my place on the list been lost. The records were also no longer sorted. So, I had to repeat the same process. After a while I had to add another step—skipping to the next page after sorting.

The good thing was that I could easily see a list of all the registered players and another list of the players who were on the master list but had not provided me with proof of vaccination. By the time of the first game seventy-two players were registered.

It has been well established that Ken and Lori Leopold had done a great job in 2019 of establishing a new standard for a small duplicate bridge club. One of the biggest attractions of the game—especially for those who often ate alone—was the wonderful spread of food and drink that Lori and some others helped prepare every week. Sally and I would have been happy if we could somehow have emulated them, but it was not really feasible for either of us, and the persistence of the Delta variant of the pandemic made it even a little dangerous.

Another thing that would be missing in this new version of the club—at least in the beginning—would be the lessons that I had presented. They had begun at 6PM or as close to that time as I could manage. Because I was still afraid of catching Covid-19, I intended to wear a mask, at least at first. I was fairly certain that one senior citizen struggling to speak through a mask to a group of senior citizens would not be very attractive. Also, the rest of the preparations would probably take up a good bit of my time, and I was quite busy with other projects, including these blog entries.

So, we would be relying on the wonderful game of face-to-face bridge to attract people to Eno Hall. We would also try to promote the same uniquely cheerful and supportive attitude among the players that the SBC previously boasted. We had strong hopes that those two elements would suffice.

As I mentioned, I had all the equipment, including the computer, at my house. Linda Starr, who had helped me in 2020 to use the Hartford Bridge Club’s Dealer4 machine to create the boards for SBC games, agreed to set up files for our first game and to give me a refresher course in how to create the boards. Actually, I had only the vaguest memory of how to use the the software that ran the dealing machine. She had to show me everything again. I took careful notes and promised not to lose them this time.

I was able to create a set of boards and to photocopy the hand records. I remembered how to load the dealing machine with cards, but I warned Linda that the fine coordination in my fingers was terrible. I then proved my point. When I withdrew the very first hand from the very first board three or four cards slipped out of my hand and came to res behind the shelves on which the Dealer4 was positioned.

Left to right: printer; display, keyboard, mouse, & computer; Dealer4 on shelf.

This had happened to me at least once back in 2020. I just removed a box of who knows what from the bottom shelf and told Linda “At least I also have long arms and fingers.” I then skillfully retrieved all the missing cards. I counted them to make certain.

From that point on I created the boards and printed the hand records with almost no difficulty. I did not interpret this unexpected feat³ as an ill omen, but I probably should have.

Linda also created PBN files (needed to submit results) for all the rest of the games scheduled for 2021. She copied them to a USB drive that I had brought with me, and she showed me how to find them on the computer that ran the dealing machine. I should be all set for all of 2021.

By this time I had commitments from ten pairs. We were all set to have a real face-to-face bridge game!

On Tuesday, October 9—the day before the game—I received this depressing email from Sally:

We have a problem! Eno Hall is telling me that they can’t accommodate us tomorrow. We can start back next week. I’m sure we could use HBC for one week if you want to tell people to meet there one time? Or just tell them that we will start next week?

So, I had to send out an email announcing the cancellation of the first week. It frustrated and humiliated me to have to do it.

We later found out that the reason that they could not accommodate us was because they had not scheduled a janitor for that evening. That was what I had speculated was the source of the problem, but most people thought it must be something less mundane.

We had an even better turnout for the rescheduled first week—eleven pairs with a remarkably diverse level of experience. I came in early to the Hartford Bridge Club on Wednesday morning before the game. I planned to use the boards made for 10/20. I could see no reason not to use them. The only problem was that Linda had not copied that one file on the USB drive. So, I asked Donna Feir, the club manager and the director for that morning’s game, if I could copy that one file. My other alternative was to make new boards from the file for 10/27 that was already on the computer. That would take me about a half hour even if all went well, and then I would need another ten minutes or so to print the hand records.

I let Donna talk me into a third alternative—using the boards and the hand records created for the previous night’s game at the HBC. They were available because too few players had signed up. So, all that I had to do was to copy the PBN file from the computer used by the directors. I located the file without difficulty, put my USB drive in the port, and copied. I then put all of the gear in my car. Now I was ready.

I had arranged to take Sue Rudd and Maria Van Der Ree In my Honda to Wednesday evening’s game. I was supposed to pick Sue up at 5:30. The Honda and I arrived in Sue’s driveway fashionably late at 5:32. I honked my horn and waited a few minutes. Her house appeared dark. I honked the horn again. Then I took out my cell phone and dialed her number. It rang five or six times. Then a bizarre masculine voice identified itself as the “backup voice mail” for Sue Rudd. It then advised me not to leave a message because Sue does not usually check it!

So, I called Maria’s number to see if she knew what was going on. It rang five or six times and then went to voice mail. I left a message and could think of nothing better to do than to drive to Maria’s home. I found her outside waiting for me. I tried to tell her that she couldn’t play because I could not rouse Sue, but she got in the car anyway.

At that point, I called Sue Rudd again. Three phone calls in one day was a personal record for me; the previous record was one. Sue answered this time. She was upset at me for not picking her up on time. I told her that I had been in her driveway at 5:32, and I would be there again in ten minutes. I was. Sue got in my Honda, and we took off.

I was not stopped by any policemen on the way to Simsbury, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. I pulled into Eno’s parking lot at 6:45, fifteen minutes late. Jerry Hirsch was standing there waiting to help me with the gear.

Everyone was playing by 6:50. The game itself went fairly smoothly. We were done by our mandated finishing time of 10 o’clock. Everyone seemed to have had a good time. “And the evening and the morning were the first day.”

The crowded room that greeted me when I finally entered the playing area made everything worthwhile. The two people whom I had never met—David Marks and Ann Sagalyn—introduced themselves to me while Sally, Jerry, and a few others set up the six-table Howell.

When, after the scores had been announced, I tried to transfer the PBN file from the USB drive onto the SBC computer, I discovered that I had copied the wrong file at the HBC. So, I had to promise Sally that, when I obtained a copy of the right file, I would send it to her by email.

I then copied the file containing the text version of the results so that I could insert it into the email to the registered members scheduled for Friday.

I brought all of the gear home except the very heavy laptop and its power supply. Sally took those with her so that she could send the results to the ACBL.

I have driven from Simsbury to Enfield hundreds of times. I may have even bragged that I could do it blindfolded. On this evening, however, I was very tired. The adrenaline high had worn off. As I exited the parking lot, I turned the wrong way onto Station Street, which is one-way. This totally disrupted my perspective. I took Iron Horse Blvd. up to Route 10 without any difficulty, but then I missed my turn onto Wolcott Road. I could have salvaged a little dignity by turning onto Floydville Road, but I did not see a sign for it. Instead I drove all the way up to Route 20 in Granby. This little detour added perhaps ten miles to the trip.

I did not realize until the next morning that I had never eaten supper the previous evening.

I was still exhausted on Thursday, but I took the time to write up a Hand of the Week. It took me much longer than before because I had never precisely documented the php programs that I had written in 2019 to produce it. I eventually figured out how they worked, keyed in the hand and my ideas, and sent out an email to invite everyone to the game on November 3. This email included a copy of the summary of the results from the 10/27 game.

The file that I needed was stored on the HBC director’s computer, which is barely visible through the left armrest.

I obtained a copy of the correct PBN file and emailed it to Sally. However, I never received the email from the ACBL with a link to the Live for Clubs web page for the game. It turned out that Sally had never used the procedure for submitting results established in 2020 for submitting the results in the format required for the Live for Clubs software. She promised to figure it out.

The preparation for the second game went smoothly. The trip from Enfield to Simsbury was blissfully uneventful. Both Sue and Maria were ready on time. We arrived at Eno at 6:15, and we were ready to play by 6:25.

Unfortunately, Route 44 was closed because of an accident somewhere on or near Avon Mountain. The alternate routes were jammed with traffic. Two people from West Hartford—Felix Springer and Kathie Ferguson—arrived late.

When Felix arrived at about 6:45 we started the game. Al Gee and Kathie were assigned a sitout for the first round.

It was a near thing, but we got all twenty-four boards completed and scored so that we could leave by 10 o’clock. Some people had apparently doffed their masks at some point, and someone noticed them. Sally received an email on Thursday from Karen Haberlin at Eno Hall:

Hi Sally,
This is just a reminder that masks are still required in town buildings unless people are eating or drinking.
Thank you,
Karen

Meanwhile, Sally must have figured out how to attach the files; I received the emails for both games. I thought that something was still amiss. I noticed that the links to download the hand record files were missing from both the selection page and the results pages. I later determined that they were also missing on the HBC results. The software must have been changed during the pandemic.

I adjusted the emails in which I invite players to the next game so that the instructions for taking advantage of the feature for printing a hand record was removed.

1. On May 1, 2020 the New York Times ran a long article about this event and the popularity of bridge in general. It is posted here.

2. Our experiences regarding the First-Ever Regional at Sea on a Riverboat is described here.

3. The trickiest part of using the dealing machine is withdrawing the completed board from the machine. Cards sometimes get stuck. If you pull the board out a little and then push it back to adjust the cards, Dealer4 might start dealing the next deck. Then you have a mess to deal with.

Wavablog

Memoirs, bridge, popes, travel, and other stuff

Author Archives: Mike

2008-2019 Partners at the Hartford Bridge Club Part 1

2004 Getting Back into Bridge

2008 Road Trip to Michigan

2021 The Rebirth of the Simsbury Bridge Club: Part 2