2003-? The Papacy Project

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Obsession about papal history. Continue reading →

Scott Simon.

On Saturday, January 25, 2003, a momentous event occurred in my life. I was, as usual, working in my office at TSI in East Windsor. My Bose radio was tuned to the local NPR station. I don’t remember what I was working on, but I do remember Scott Simon’s interview of A. J. Jacobs on Weekend Edition about his quest to become the smartest person in the world by reading the Encyclopedia Britannica from beginning to end. On that show he reported that he had just finished reading the letter H. To my surprise and delight the entire interview has been posted here.

A. J. Jacobs.

Most of the conversation concerned the account that he read in the F volume concerning the corpse of the ninth-century Pope Formosus, which was disinterred and put on trial in January of 897 by a subsequent pope named Stephen1. Jacobs described the occasion as it was depicted in 1870 in a famous painting by Jean-Paul Laurens called The Cadaver Synod. Having been found guilty, Pope F was excommunicated and defrocked. The thumb and forefinger that he used for consecrating the host were broken off. His skeleton was dumped in the Tiber. All of Pope F’s decrees and investitures were declared invalid.

That is all that Jacobs mentioned, but it was not, as I soon discovered, the end of the affair. The rest of the shocking story has been related in Chapter 5 of my book Stupid Pope Tricks, which can be read here.This radio show had a startling impact upon my life. Although I had attended Catholic schools for twelve years, I suddenly realized that I knew embarrassingly little about Church history. I could name all of the popes of my lifetime, and I knew that the first one was St. Peter himself. In between was a large blank slate. I had never heard of Formosus or Stephen, and I wondered if perhaps A. J. Jacobs had not gotten the story quite right.

U-M has many libraries. This one is the largest.

So, I got no more work done that day or the next. I was too busy googling and reading. I soon discovered that an enormous number of entire books had been scanned by Google in a project that defied belief. At the time the company had nearly finished scanning all the books at the University of Michigan’s enormous library2. The ones that were in the public domain were available online in toto and free. Almost every work in which I was interested was available at my fingertips. If I googled “Formosus”, every reference in every one of these books showed up, and, best of all, there were no ads cluttering up the search because no one had named a product or company after the poor fellow.

I started with Pope Formosus and worked backwards and forwards. I eventually realized that all written records of that period were quite suspect, but what Jacobs reported seemed to be pretty accurate, at least as far as anyone knew. One of the first additional things that I discovered was that shortly after the notorious incident Pope Stephen VI was strangled by a mob of the supporters of Pope F. Jacobs did not mention that both of the principals in the story were pontiffs in the first century of the era that lasted for more than a thousand years in which the pope was the ruler of a strip of land in central Italy that stretched from coast to coast. Their conflict was more political than theological.

The catechism that we used in parochial school promulgated the idea that the papacy had been an unbroken chain of successors to St. Peter. That notion did not survive the weekend in my new level of understanding. Duplications—when two or more men claimed to be pope at the same time—and gaps of several years when no one was recognized as pope were evident. The pope is, by definition, the Bishop of Rome, but for seventy years in the fourteenth century no pope ever set foot in Rome. They lived in Avignon in France and were absentee landlords for tens of thousands of Italians. I was also astonished to learn than during the first millennium of the papacy there wasn’t even agreement upon how the successor to a dead pope should be chosen. Some were appointed by kings or emperors.

I had previously assumed that most popes had been saints. The official Church position has always been that the Holy Spirit has inerrantly guided the cardinals (or whoever) who elected or appointed them. The popes at the top of the chronological list (about whom almost nothing is known beyond names and dates because all records were destroyed at the beginning of the fourth century) were considered saints, but at the time that I began my research only three popes3 had been canonized in the last one thousand years! One pope, John XII, was apparently not even a teenager yet when he became Supreme Pontiff, and once he became pope he was, according to all accounts, pretty much out of control.

I discovered so much remarkable material during those first few days that I struggled to make any sense of it. I searched diligently to find a book that put the various anecdotes together in a comprehensive way that explained the evolution of the office in a way that an outsider could understand. Everything that I found was severely lacking. Some simply parroted the “unbroken chain” line or just emphasized what churches were constructed during their reigns. Others were diatribes against specific popes.

Reluctantly I began putting together a timeline of my own and tried to compile the materials so that I could make sense of the big picture.

I decided to assemble and write what I had learned, starting with a two-thousand-year timeline. It was an extremely long project, but I judged that it would be interesting to others. After all, there were approximately a billion Catholics in the world. Most of them were surely as ignorant of papal history as I had been. The spiritual lives of all of them were ruled by the pope in Rome. It made sense that a significant percentage of these Catholics—not to mention the millions who, like myself, had grown up as Catholics but had “fallen away”—would be interested in learning the many remarkable things that I had discovered.

The original book had nine very long chapters. The emphasis was on how the personalities of the individual popes and the forces of history combined to provide the fascinating story of the survival of the institution, which had property and authority but no standing army, for two thousand years. I don’t remember what the original title was.

When I was nearly finished, I bought a book at Barnes and Noble that had contained a list of names and addresses of literary agents. From that I made a spreadsheet, which I recently found. I sent letters to a dozen or two of the agents. A couple were interested, but I eliminated one who seemed like he might be running a scam. I sent the manuscript to the other one, Daniel Bial4, but he sent it back with a note that he was no longer interested.

I rewrote the whole book with a new approach. I increased the number of chapters to twenty-four and added a lovable fictitious nun named Sr. Mary Immaculata. She provided the Church’s position on puzzling events. The new version emphasized the trickiness of the various pontiffs. It was now called Stupid Pope Tricks: What Sr. Mary Immaculata never revealed about the papacy. I also added a lot of humorous touches such as a list of “bankable bar bets” about strange aspects of papal history.

I sent the new manuscript to Mr. Bial, but he would not read it. I did not blame him. Who was I to be writing about the history of the papacy? I had no credentials either as a writer or as a historian. I also had no “platform”, which is what publishers call the natural audience that politicians, celebrities, and a few others have for their memoirs.

I therefore decided to post it on Wavada.org using a slightly modified version of the code that I had written for my travel journals, as explained here. This would me allow me to add a lot of images and make it more entertaining. I did not promote it, but a few people stumbled onto the site and told me that they liked it. That was somewhat comforting. I don’t know what more that I could have done.

In my opinion the most fascinating pope was Benedict IX of the eleventh century. I could not find a single author that wrote anything good about him, but the source of most of the calumnies against him was a monk named Peter Damian. Yes, he was canonized as a saint, but he was also a cloistered monk who never visited Rome during Benedict’s pontificates. All of his information must have been second- or third-hand. Perry Mason could easily have gotten all the charges dismissed.

The word “pontificates” in the above paragraph was not a misprint. Benedict IX’s name is on the official list of popes three times. His first pontificate ended when a rival family staged a coup, drove him out of Rome, and elected a new pope named Sylvester III. That pontificate lasted 48 days before Benedict regrouped his supporters and reclaimed the throne. A short time later Benedict, who was still a young man, fell in love and resigned in order to get hitched. A new pope (Gregory VI) was elected, but shortly thereafter the new Holy Roman Emperor came to Italy, decided that he was not worthy, and forced the bishops to elect his choice to replace Pope Gregory. When the emperor departed from Italy, Benedict assumed the throne again. No one seemed to know what happened to his wedding plans.

In all, Benedict was the recognized pope for about thirteen years, the longest pontificate in the eleventh century. It was about the same length as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency.

I had a very hard time thinking of any set of scenarios that made sense of the middle of the eleventh century—before Gregory VII, the Great Schism, and the First Crusade. I came up with a few reasonable (to me) assumptions that seemed to explain the whole period. I then wrote a fictional translation of an imaginary autobiography of Benedict IX defending his reputation replete with scholarly footnotes.The result was Ben 9: An Autobiographical Apologia by Theophylact of Tusculum,Thrice Supreme Pontiff of the Christian Church Translated by Edgar Filbert Thomasson. Most of the characters were actual people. The behavior of the most outrageous character in the story, Gerhard Brazutus, was based on accusations leveled by at least one cardinal. I used Occam’s razor to concoct the simplest explanation that I could think of that explained what the cardinal claimed.

My experience with the first book chastened me from attempting to get this one published. As far as I know the only person who has read any version of it is my friend Tom Corcoran.

So, this novel was also posted on the Wavada.org website, along with the text of the story that Northeast Magazine published that has been described here.

Epilogue: I never lost my fascination with the popes. I have not done a lot of research on Benedict XVI and Francis, mostly because they seemed so much more boring than John Paul II. Benedict at least had snazzy shoes and wrote a three-volume history of Jesus Christ. Both Benedict and John Paul did a rather nifty job of tap dancing around the bishops’ approach to the problem of clerical molestation.

My obsession with the popes has continued for two decades. Every so often I have come across an article or book that makes reference to “the pope”. I always make the effort to chase down which pope was involved and what was the context. Almost always the person making the comment misunderstood or misstated the actual event. The last such event occurred in Würzburg on the cruise that I took in 2022. It has been documented here. In this case it was actions by two different popes that were conflated into one story.

Additional blog entries about the popes can be found here.

1. Everything concerning the popes—even the numbering—is complicated. There has only been one Pope Formosus (the name means “shapely” or “physically fit”), and so he will never have a number unless some future pope picks that name. The perpetrator of the Cadaver Synod was known as Stephen VII at the time, but later a previous pope named Stephen, who had been Supreme Pontiff for only three days, was removed from the list. All subsequent Stephens had their number reduced by one. So, the prosecutor/judge of the trial has been known as Stephen VI since that time. There are also quite a few numbers that have been skipped. For example, there is no John XX or Benedict X on the list. Furthermore, in the twentieth century two popes, Cletus and Donus II were removed, because historians determined that they never existed. So, Pope Donus I lost his number.

2. A description of the amazing partnership between Google (now known as Alphabet) and U-M can be read here.

3. The canonized pontiffs are Celestine V, a hermit who never entered Rome and was essentially imprisoned in Castel Nuovo during the entirety of his short pontificate, Pius V, who was most famous for excommunicating Queen Elizabeth I of England and thereby causing persecution of English Catholics, and Pius X, who opposed modernism and saxophone music in the early twentieth century. As of 2023 Pope Francis had canonized three recent popes.

4. Mr. Bial’s agency still existed in 2023. The website is here.

1999-2005 Mike’s Visits to Jim Wavada

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Alone in Johnson County. Continue reading →

In one sense my mother’s death in 1998 came as a shock to my dad. In the previous few years her health had deteriorated rapidly. However, for the vast majority of their relationship, she had been the one with the longer life expectancy. She was younger and female, she had never smoked so much as one cigarette, she had very regular habits, she made sure to get plenty of exercise, she ate healthy diet, and she drank very little.

My dad, on the other hand, smoked pretty regularly for nearly fifty years. He was not a drunkard by any measure, but he spent a lot of time with salesmen and advertising people for whom liquor was considered a lubricant. He ate whatever he felt like having (including raw hamburger!), and his only exercise was golf. Furthermore, he had had some kind of incident on a vacation in Arizona that had something to do with his heart.

Throughout their marriage mom was the head of the household. She cooked, cleaned, and did the laundry. She also paid all the bills and managed the cash. If something needed to be fixed or purchased, she took care it. My dad considered it his responsibility to provide enough income for her in the present and the future, and he definitely did that. However, he had never—at least since 1947—given much thought to the little details of daily life until my mom became incapacitated and then died. He confided to me that he always thought that he would die first, and with the insurance, pension, and investments, mom would be all right.

Shortly after mom’s death dad moved into a somewhat smaller apartment that was on the ground floor. Although I can clearly picture both it and its location, I have forgotten the address. My dad had a lot of good friends. I am quite sure that they helped him through the transition. They knew that he had depended on mom, and they gave him good advice about dealing with quotidian matters. They also kept him involved in social activities. At least once a week they had regular breakfasts together, and they invited him to other get-togethers. He also kept up his golf game, such as it was. Needless to say, he kept attending church.

Near the end of this period my dad had one of his hips replaced. I was not involved in the planning or execution, but he told me that the doctor said that the other hip was nearly as bad. His friends must have helped him deal with this as well. I remember that he seemed to be able to walk fairly well after the operation.

One problem that they could not address was his vision. Somehow the retina in his right (I think) eye became detached. He had no vision in it at all. He therefore, had no depth perception. To make matters worse, a cataract was developing in his left eye, which was more than 75 years old.

My dad’s driving ability was definitely suspect. At some point he decided to stop driving on major thoroughfares. This was a good idea. Drivers on heavily used road need good peripheral vision, and his one eye was not enough. Parking was also problematic because of the need to make precise judgments of distance.

He had planned out relatively safe routes to the places that he frequented. If we were going to one of those places—such as the house of one of his friends or a nearby eatery—he drove and I sat nervously in the passenger’s seat. More than once we went to a fairly upscale Italian restaurant in a nearby shopping center. The waiters did not know how to pronounce many items on the menu.

Although I was extremely busy during these years, I stopped in to see him whenever I could. Whenever I was scheduled for a trip to the Midwest or the West Coast I tried to add an extra day or two for a stop in Kansas City. I usually took the shuttle to and from KCI airport. We used his Ford Taurus to get around when I was there.

I made one special trip to be with him when he had the procedure to fix his cataract. Since his other eye was worthless, I had been very worried that in the unlikely event that something went wrong, he would be blind. However, when he came out his vision was much improved. He told me that he had always thought that the blue street signs in the area that he lived were green. Also, he could now see the letters clearly.

Pilgrimages: During my visits we almost always went to at least one favored restaurant that could not be reached easily on side streets or had problematic parking arrangements. I drove on those occasions The establishments that I remember very clearly were the Village Inn for huge breakfasts, Dixon’s for chili, and RC’s for fried chicken. These trips were more like pilgrimages that just dining out. Each deserves its own paragraph.

The Village1 Inn was located in Mission, KS. The only reasonable way to get there was to take Metcalf, which was a very busy four-lane road. The restaurant was similar to an IHOP, but they also offered something called a “skillet”. The menu explained, “Each skillet meat is prepared with country potatoes, two eggs, any style and served with a side of made from scratch buttermilk pancakes. Egg whites or low cholesterol egg substitute available.” That may sound like to much to eat, but the “Ultimate Skillet” added all of the following: “Two hickory smoked bacon strips, two sausage links, ham, mushrooms, green peppers, onions, tomatoes and melted cheese”. My dad usually ordered a slightly less ambitious skillet, but I generally settled for an omelette. Coffee cups at the Village Inn did not stay empty long.

Dixon’s2 chili was nothing like any you have tasted. It was Harry Truman’s favorite restaurant both before and after he was president. Their chili had no beans, but you could ask for some. However, if you demand catsup, you might be thrown out. Actually, you would only be “fined” ten cents. The chili is served on a plate. It is not very hot, but hot sauce and ground peppers are on the tables, and most diners make ample use of them. The restaurant that we patronized was on 75th St., a very busy artery. So, I always drove. Dad always ordered his with tamales. I preferred mine dry. The recommended beverage was RC Cola.

My mother made good fried chicken, but when I was growing up there were still several places in the Kansas City area that made exceptionally good fried chicken. When I was growing up our go-to restaurant for this delight was Boots and Coates. Later my dad found another good one in Martin City on 135th St., RC’s3. If I was in KC for more than one day, we drove there for supper.

The computer: My dad wrote a satirical book, Yup the Organization4, that was published in 1986. I am pretty sure that my mom typed the manuscript for him. No one else could read his handwriting, which to me always looked like rain.

He had other ideas for books. He somehow came into possession of a semi-computer made by Brother that could do word processing but nothing else. After mom died, he wanted to buy a computer so that he could send and receive emails, mostly from me. Someone else helped him buy it. It was left to me to describe how to use America Online.

It was hard for him to see the cursor. I adjusted it so that it was larger. Then I set up his account. I created an icon on the desktop for AOL.com. I showed him how he could move the cursor around by making similar movements of the mouse. I did not explain precisely how the mouse was able to cause this. Instead I had him practice double-clicking5 on the AOL icon. He finally got it to work, and the login screen appeared. He entered the user ID and the password that I had previously established. Almost as soon as he pressed Enter, the computer’s speakers greeted him with, “You’ve got mail!”

My dad was excited and justifiably proud of his accomplishments. Although I advised him strongly just to delete the items that appeared in his Inbox, he insisted on opening the first one. When he double-clicked on it the contents appeared on his screen. It was explicit pornography6 in vivid colors.

In shock he lifted the mouse off of its pad and waved it at the screen as one might use a crucifix to ward off a vampire. I despaired at the prospect of talking him through deleting the email. Instead, I wrested the mouse from him and did it myself.

Dad was eventually fairly competent in the use of text-based email. I never attempted to teach him about images or attachments.

I also tried to help my dad with word processing. He could enter and edit the text, and he knew how to save it. I tried to teach him how to copy and paste. He just could not seem to understand the concept at all, and, despite the fact that I had trained hundreds of people to do tasks much more complicated than copying and pasting, I eventually gave up.

So, he used the word processing on the computer in essentially the same manner as he used his old word processor—hunting, pecking, editing, saving, and printing.

He wrote two more books. I read them, but I did not like them. One was an insider’s look at how dad’s insurance company had gotten Senator Bob Dole to rescue them from a tax mess. The other was a fictional story about three brothers.7 Dad tried to get the Dole book published, but it never happened.

Other adventures: My dad loved to play golf. His vision limited his ability to do it. For a while a friend of his walked with him and spotted his ball for him. I don’t know how dad could have gauged the distance on putts. In all the time that I played with him, I never saw him measure a distance in number of strides, and doing such a calculation would have been foreign to the nature of someone who could not balance his checkbook.

I did not play any rounds of golf with him during this period, but we did go to a driving range together a few times. I had to describe to him how much slice he had imparted to each shot. He always said something like, “I’m not coming through the ball enough.” I had no idea what this meant.

I attended two or three of the all-male breakfast gatherings of my dad’s friends. At one of them someone asked me about my business. I explained how we installed AdDept systems to administer the advertising departments of large retailers such as Macy’s and Saks and how TSI was in the process of developing and marketing a service called AxN to process insertion orders from the retailers to their newspapers. Some of the guys were quite interested in the latter project.

I often ran a few miles in the morning. Once, on a fairly warm day, I did ten miles, and it wore me out. When I got to the apartment I lay motionless on the carpet. Dad nearly freaked out. I had overdone it a bit, but within ten minutes I was functional again. That’s what it is like to be a runner. You recover much faster than people think.

On September 18, 2004, dad and I watched the football game between Michigan and San Diego State, then coached by Brady Hoke. It was a terrible game. SDSU was ahead 21-17 at the half. As the teams left at halftime, the field announcer asked Lloyd Carr what he expected in the second half. He tersely said, “I expect a comeback.” U-M scored a touchdown early in third quarter. After that it was an excruciating duel between the two punters.

The big move: In 2005 my dad was diagnosed with macular degeneration in his left eye. He was given treatments to arrest it. They seemed to work, but he was still legally blind. He could not drive.

The area of KC that he lived in had no public transportation to speak of. I proposed that he sell his car and move closer to me and Sue.8 He wanted to give me his car, but I did not want it. I liked my car, and when I stopped liking it, I wanted to pick out my own model and color.

I expected that after he came to the area he would live in an apartment for a little while. Meanwhile Sue and I would erect an addition to the north side of our house tin Enfield to provide him with a place to stay. We did eventually add on to the house, but by then I had come to realize that the idea of him moving in with us would not work for a large number of reasons. It hurt me that I did not keep my promise, but I don’t know how I could have.

So, he lived by himself in apartments in Enfield for six years. That story is related here.

1. In 2023 The Village Inn in Mission appeared to be thriving. Sue and I also frequented the one in Clearwater, FL.

2. Dixon’s was renamed Fritz’s Chili at some point. However, no changes were made when the restaurant in Overland Park was purchased in 1967. It closed in 2018, one day before my dad’s 96th birthday, which he celebrated in another realm.

3. In 2023 RC’s was sold to a couple who announced their plan to leave fried chicken on the menu but also serve Thai food!

4. In 2023 dad’s book was still available on the Internet. He let me read the manuscript that he had submitted. It was pretty good. There was one vignette about a meeting that I particularly enjoyed. Unfortunately, the editor made him remove that item because he (or maybe she) found something potentially offensive. The end result was a work that could not decide whether it was satirical of a self-help book. The nonsensical title was also the editor’s idea; the book made no mention of Yuppies.

5. This took some time. My dad was extremely left-handed, but he used his right hand for the mouse. So, his right forefinger was challenged to perform an activity that his left hand had not yet mastered. Furthermore, to my knowledge he had never performed any kind of fine movement with his right hand. He had never learned the basics of any musical instrument. His typing was strictly hunt-and-peck, and he generally did more hunting than pecking.

6. This might have been the only pornography that my dad ever witnessed. Although he was a contemporary of Roger Sterling, he had a very different set of values. Foul language and off-color jokes or stories were not tolerated in our house. There was no mention of sex at all in my family.

7. Yes, my dad had two brothers and no sisters. He read almost fiction. The only fictional book that he read while I knew him was The Godfather by Mario Puzo, which he read on someone else’s recommendation. He could not get past the language. His own novel had no setting. He left every aspect of the background story vague. I found it almost impossible to read. In fact, I could not get through it.

8. Jamie moved to Birmingham AL in 1999, as is explained here.

1982 Jim Wavada’s Retirement from BMA

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I found an album with my dad’s name engraved in gold on the inside front cover. It contained thirty-five snapshots of celebrations at my dad’s employer, Business Men’s Assurance (BMA), an insurance company based in Kansas City1. This brought to … Continue reading →

I found an album with my dad’s name engraved in gold on the inside front cover. It contained thirty-five snapshots of celebrations at my dad’s employer, Business Men’s Assurance (BMA), an insurance company based in Kansas City1. This brought to mind the fact that I had written very little about my dad’s business career.

The original BMA Building was across the street from Union Station.

At some point in 1982 I received a very surprising telephone call from my dad. He had decided to retire—at the age of 58! His employer for over thirty years1 was downsizing by offering attractive severance packages to its employees. He helped to design the program, and when the president of the company learned that he was on the list of people taking early retirement, he protested, “But Jim, this wasn’t designed for people like you.”

My dad told me that he replied, “True, but it didn’t exclude me either.”

In March of 1951 my dad presented a birthday greeting to the president of the company.

When did my dad start working at BMA? I remember thinking at the time of his death in 2011 that his life was perfectly divisible into three units of twenty-nine years each. However, that would mean that he started work in 1953. That cannot be true. I have recently discovered proof that he was employed there in 1950. Furthermore, I know that I spent a lot of the time in the hospital in my first year of life. If he had not had a good insurance policy—and BMA employees had excellent policies—I doubt that my parents could have afforded the hospital bills. Finally, I doubt that John Cernech would have allowed his only daughter to marry a guy without a job. So, I think that Jim probably started working at BMA before September of 1947.

What did you do for a year and a half, Sergeant Wavada?

I have no idea what he did between the time of his discharge from the army as a sergeant in the 300th Infantry Regiment on February 18, 1946, and his wedding on December 1, 1947. He hinted to me once that my mom and her mom, Clara Cernech, saved him from going down a really bad path during this period.

What did my dad do at BMA? I have never been too certain. He probably started at the bottom. He finished high school in 1942, but, despite the fact that he certainly qualified for veterans’ benefits, to my knowledge he never took a college course.

In 1951 he was the president of the KEO (“Know Each Other”) Club at BMA. A photo of him presenting a birthday greeting to the president of the company appeared in the company’s newspaper in March. I think that he also told me that he played for one summer on the company’s baseball or soccer team. He had a first baseman’s mitt that he picked up somewhere.

In 1963 the company moved to the BMA Tower. No, it was never known as Grant’s Tomb.

Maybe he joined BMA’s Sales Department in 1953, and he told me that he had spent 29 years there. That would make more sense. The Sales Department managed the company’s salesmen. I think that what my dad mostly did was write materials used by the company. I know that at one time his title was Vice-president of Public Relations. I also know that during the last few years he spent most of his time writing speeches for the president of the company, Bill Grant. He hated this assignment. Mr. Grant often spoke against Medicare, and my dad understood what a good program it was.

I remember the quite a few names mentioned by my dad. Some of these people I probably met once or twice, but I have seen none of them since high school. Here is the list: John Saylor (his boss) and his son Bill, Bernie Johnson, C.R. Moreland, Lyle Hopkins, Kenny Higdon, Bill Purinton, Roy Uto. I remember that dad’s secretary—or at least one of his secretaries—was named Jeanette. I also remember a woman who attended his wake in 2011 and appeared in some of the photos below. I think that her name was Mary Jean or something like that. If I ever knew her last name, I have forgotten it.2

Here are the photos in the same order that they were in the album. There are two sets of photos. The first fifteen were taken at a banquet at a huge round table at BMA Tower. The second set of twenty were evidently shot on a different occasion in and around my dad’s office. I have added captions when I knew anything about them.

My mom is in white. My dad is to her right. His vision was almost as bad as mine, but he almost never wore glasses except to read and drive. He considered them effeminate.
The woman seated at the window came to Jim’s wake. The only other person whom I recognize is my dad in the foreground. No sign of his bald spot yet, and not a single grey hair. Bill Grant, the company’s president collected art depicting western scenes.
My mother was either convulsed in laughter or she spotted a huge spider on the ceiling. The man shown in profile is Bill Saylor.
I think that this was either Bill Grant of John Saylor.
No idea.

I think that this was either Bill Grant of John Saylor.

Bill Saylor.
Note the tie bar. By the time that I spent much time with him as an adult both of my dad’s eyebrows were white, but he still had no trace of grey hair. I was the opposite. He stopped smoking in the late eighties.
My mom would be upset that this photo showed the very slight bump on her nose.
This was the lady who came to the wake, Mary Jean.
Kenny Higdon?
I was surprised to see my dad reaching with his right hand. He was left-handed. The only thing that he did right-handed was playing golf. Maybe he had a cigarette in his left hand.
This is the last photo of the first set.
This is the first photo of the second set. The gag gift of the white paint might be a reference to a project that I worked on the summer before I went into the army. I was supposed to paint the house, but I did not finish. It is possible that they never got anyone else to finish it.
I think that this cake was for my dad’s retirement. If the golfer was meant to be my dad, his aim was to the right of the hole (with the red flag in it) because he was playing the horrendous slice that accompanied each of his swings. He learned to play golf (and smoke) in high school at Maur Hill. There were no left-handed clubs available.
No idea.
I think that my dad is holding some golf balls. I think that it is totally unfair that I had more grey hairs before I started working at TSI than he had when he retired from BMA.
No idea.
One wood and one iron?
I think that the big guy in the back with the plaid jacket might be John Bolin. I knew his son in the Boy Scouts.
My dad and Mary Jean.
A black guy?
Mom and somebody.
“So, a priest, a rabbi, and an insurance guy go into a bar …”

1. The insurance operations of BMA (the A originally stood for Accident Insurance), which included my dad’s pension and health insurance, was sold to Assicurazioni Generali in 1990. AG sold it to the Royal Bank of Canada in 2009;

2. I spent several hours on the Internet trying to discover what became of the people on this list, but I was unsuccessful.

1983? Jim and Dolores Visit New England

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First retirement vacation. Continue reading →

My mom and dad never visited Sue and me while we were living in Plymouth, MI. They visited us only once after we moved to Detroit. That uncomfortable experience was described here. We did not visit them in Kansas City much either. Our excuses were that we had very little money, and we were busy trying to build a company. Their excuse was that my dad was working.

If they were smart they flew, but my dad was not averse to long drives.

In 1982 my dad retired. What little I know about that event has been chronicled here. At some point in or around 1983 my parents decided to visit New England. Both of these pieces of new disconcerted me. “Lucy, let me ‘splain.”

My parents treated me exceptionally well. It would be absurd for me to complain. They provided me with everything that I needed to survive and in fact thrive. I never have understood exactly how they did it. They had next to nothing when I was born.

Driving would be much easier than it was in 1959. Practically the entire route would be on Interstates.

Nevertheless, being around them made me more and more uncomfortable as I got older. They very seldom got angry at me or disciplined me, but they were both devout Catholics who never ate meat on Friday and never missed mass on Sunday or a holy day “of obligation”. Although they never mentioned anything about it to me, they certainly must have disapproved of the fact that Sue and I were living together. They may also have been cognizant of the fact that I had become a skeptic almost overnight in the late seventies. They probably had had several “where did we go wrong?” conversations about me. However, I did not worry much about that aspect of our relationship. I expected them to avoid these subjects while they were in New England, and I certainly would as well.

The thing that bothered me was below the surface. I called it “The Curse”1. My parents had taught me an eleventh commandment: “Thou shalt be the best.” They repeatedly insisted that they did not care what I did with my life, but they wanted me to be the best. Not the best that I could be, the best period. The only good thing about The Curse was that it had no time limit.

So, at this point I was thirty-four or thirty-five. My dad had already retired, and my parents were traveling around the country doing who-knows-what. The business that Sue and I were running was still a shoestring affair. Our income was low, and our prospects were at best mediocre. I was light years away from being the best at anything.

When I was on my own, I could easily postpone the assessment of my progress towards the superlative. When my parents were around I wasn’t sad or angry, I was just uneasy. They never said anything about it. They were just there.

Old Sturbridge Village.

In point of fact I remember very little about their trip. They definitely had a car, but I cannot remember whether they drove up from Kansas City in a reprise of the great eastern vacation that was described here. They might have flown to Connecticut and rented a car. Sue’s memory was no better than mine in this regard.

The four of us definitely spent a day at Old Sturbridge Village, which is a recreation of a New England village from the 1830s. Sue and I still had the Plymouth Duster, which could easily hold four. Either Sue or I probably drove. I remember that it was rather chilly. So, it was probably spring or fall. I was uncomfortably cold, but my parents seemed to enjoy the experience.

I am pretty sure that the four of us ate at the Bullard Tavern that was located on the grounds of OSV. My parents thought that the meal was great. I did not like what I ordered, but I don’t remember the specifics. I just know that I never went back.

I don’t think that my parents stayed with us in Rockville or ate any other meals with us, but I might be wrong. I am pretty sure that they drove to Maine and perhaps a few other spots in New England before heading home.

1. The Curse is described in a little more detail in my analysis of the “First Crisis”, which is posted here.

1994 August: Jim Wavada’s 70th Birthday

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Fun and crisis. Continue reading →

My dad was born on August 25, 1924. His seventieth birthday was therefore in 1994. It was a Thursday. 1994 was a pivotal year for TSI and for my relationship with Sue, as explained here. I was up to my armpits in alligators. By then Jamie had five children. By my calculation Cadie was 16, Kelly was 14, Gina was 6, Anne was 5, and Joey was 3. I could be off by a year for any of them.

Although it was torn down decades earlier, the company that designed this building still featured it on its webpage in 2023.

A decision was made that my parents would come to New England to celebrate my dad’s epic birthday with his grandchildren. Jamie probably negotiated this with our mother. Her conversations with my dad seldom ended pleasantly, and I am pretty sure that neither Sue nor I had any input. The plan was for them to stay at a hotel that was near the Lisella’s house in West Springfield. I think that they stayed at Howard Johnson’s, but they might have chosen the Hampton Inn if it was open yet. I don’t think that they rented a car.

The party: Jamie reserved a large room at the Simsbury 1820 House for the gathering. My recollection is that on the big day Sue and I picked up mom and dad at HoJo’s and met the Lisellas at the restaurant. A total of eleven of us attended—three couples and Jamie’s five children.

The party did not get off to a great start. The chair reserved for the guest of honor, who certainly weighed less than 170 pounds, collapsed beneath him and left him on the floor. Fortunately, he was not seriously injured, and the event proceeded more or less as planned.1 I had prepared an interactive presentation. I think that I took the floor for it after the meal. I hoped to involve Gina and Anne by asking each of them a question that I was pretty sure they could answer. They both let me down. Gina remonstrated me, “Uncle Mike, we are only children.”

I struggled through the rest of my little talk as well as I could. I think that I rescued the evening, however, by leading everyone in a non-traditional rendition of what all of us called the family song, “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” It was my dad’s favorite song of all time. So, we sang it all together, each of us singing the same words but using different melodies, keys, and tempos. My dad, who was completely tone-deaf2, thought that it was great. That was all that I can recall about the evening.

The name was changed to Baystate Noble Hospital.

The basketball game:I am not positive that the following event occurred on this same trip. I did not keep track of when my parents came to New England for visits. They only did so on a few occasions.

Every meal that we consumed at the Lisella’s was a cook-out. Joe fired up the Weber and cooked hamburgers and/or hot dogs. The grill was placed near the garage, which was at the end of the driveway. On the side of the driveway was a basketball goal set at precisely the regulation height of ten feet.

Before and after every meal there was a basketball game of some sort. On the occasion in question some of Joe’s brothers competed. I had played with them a couple of times in the eighties, but by 1994 I was not in nearly good enough condition to compete. Instead I kicked a soccer ball around with the kids.

At that point I had known my dad for seven and a half decades. For a few of those years we had a basketball goal at the end of our driveway. I used it extensively. I have no recollection of him ever taking a basketball shot, much less playing one-on-one with me. On this occasion, however, some demonic spirit overcame his reason, and my dad decided to play.

I did not see how it happened, but my dad fell down and broke his arm. Joe had to drive him to the emergency room at Noble Hospital. He was admitted and stayed for a few days.

I am unfamiliar with the details concerning the next few days. I may have had to take a business trip. By 1994 my mom’s mental condition was not good, and she depended greatly on my dad. She was almost certainly under a great deal of stress.

Other memories: I am pretty sure that it was on this trip that the following exclamation burst forth from Gina, “Uncle Mike, you have the same hair as Grandma!” She was right. Our hair matched in color (both before and after aging), texture, and waviness. I don’t think that she previously had put two and two together to realize that her grandmother was her uncle’s mother.

One time my mom mentioned that the Lisella house did not have many books. I had noticed that myself. Joe’s reading was mostly confined to World War II. I don’t know what Jamie read. She might not have had time.

1. Jamie talked with me later about this incident. I understood her to say that she had refused to pay the bill provided to her by the Simsbury 1820 House. I may be wrong about this. I have remembered quite a few events incorrectly.

2. His favorite musical genre was Gregorian Chant. That was also the only kind of music that met the approval of Pope Pius X, who was also tone-deaf.