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

Posted on December 8, 2022 by Mike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2001-2008 9/11 and Bush’s Wars

Posted on September 14, 2021 by Mike

A tragic tale of two millionaire wannabes: the Saudi terrorist, the cowboy president, and what they wrought. Continue reading →

I wrote this entry on September 11, 2001, the twentieth anniversary of the famous terrorist incident. 9/11/01 was a Tuesday. We had a full house at TSI’s office in East Windsor—Sandy Sant’Angelo, Nadine Holmes, Harry Burt, Brian Rolllet, Denise Bessette, and myself. Sandy either was either listening to a radio, or she was surfing the Internet. She told the rest of us. I cannot remember whether everyone stopped working or not.

I was not even a little surprised that something like this had happened. I had followed developments in the Middle East since I debated and gave extemporaneous speeches about foreign policy when I was in high school. Also, there had already been some close calls. In 1993 a member of a group called Al-Qaeda, Ramzi Yusef, had set off a very destructive bomb in a basement parking lot of the World Trade Center.

A country can’t just take another country’s land and colonize it little by little.

For a long time Arabs who were not lucky enough to control oil deposits had been treated very shabbily by the West. The big issue, of course, was the fact that after World War II the Palestinians had been summarily evicted from the land in which they had resided for decades and replaced by Jewish refugees from the Pale and from western countries. At the same time Israel had been assisted by the United States in developing a very strong army with an impressive arsenal that included nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them.

Little by little the Israeli government had limited the rights of non-Jews and, after the Six-Day War in 1967, had authorized hundreds of thousands of settlers to seize property on the West Bank previously owned by the Palestinians. Another factor was the fact that one of Islam’s holiest places had also been seized during the war and access to it was subsequently controlled by the Israelis. On several occasions a peace negotiations between the two sides had been attempted, but nothing much ever happened.

For more than fifty years any attempt to address these issues in the United Nations was thwarted by the U.S. So, it was no surprise to me that a very large number of people in the Middle East felt great animosity toward America.

In 2001 and the previous few years I had been traveling all over the country¹, almost always by airplane (anecdotes recounted here). I was lucky that most major airlines scheduled flights at the local airport, Bradley International, but almost all my itineraries required a layover at a hub. So, I was quite familiar with the security arrangements at airports around the country. At most airports security was run by the airlines themselves or by contractors that they hired. The marketplace for air travel was intensely competitive. The primary objective for the airlines was to make the experience enjoyable.They emphasized how pleasant flying on their planes was. Security was seldom mentioned.

The gates at KCI were walled in, but the walls were only about ten feet high. I envisioned a graceful sky hook.

In the hours that I spent sitting in airports I sometimes tried to imagine ways for getting weapons onto airplanes. The type of security varied greatly from airport to airport, but I thought that a determined person could easily have figured out a way to get a gun on an airplane. In some airports, such as Kansas City’s, it would have been laughably easy.

So, when I heard on 9/11 that a group of people had skyjacked some planes, I assumed that that they had smuggled guns aboard. In fact, however, they did not need guns. Their only weapons were box-cutters, mace, and imaginary bombs. They were able to commandeer the planes because in those days the door to the cockpit was generally open. Flight attendants went in and out all the time. It was also not rare for the captain to meander into the passenger area and chat with people. Kids were sometimes invited to visit the cockpit. The airlines encouraged this rapport between the crew and the customers.

On 9/11 nineteen men divided into four teams. Two teams went to Logan International Airport in Boston, and one each to Newark International and Dulles in Virginia. Each group intended to board a flight,and when it had reached cruising altitude, and take control of the passenger area and then the cockpit. The one member of each group who had some training as a pilot would then fly his plane to a designated targets and crash int it. The four events were designed to occur simultaneously or nearly so.

Fifteen of the men were Saudis, one was Egyptian, two were from the United Arab Emirates, and one was Lebanese. Four had some training as pilots. The others were simply there as “muscle” to keep the passengers and crew under control. The oldest was the Egyptian, Mohamed Atta, who was thirty-three. All the rest were in their twenties.

Two morning flights each were selected on American Airlines and United Airlines. Three of the attempts were successful. At that time the standard procedure in dealing with a hijacker was to accede to the demands. In this case the demands were simply for the crew to get out of the way and for the passengers to remain in their assigned seats.

The passengers on United Flight #93 revolted. What happened after that is unclear, but the plane crashed in Pennsylvania.

The event was merely a murderous stunt, not an attempted coup. Al-Qaeda claimed credit for the attack, and intelligence briefings had actually predicted something like what had occurred. Most of the 2,997 casualties were associated with the attacks on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.

My representative, Nancy Johnson, immediately declared that “9/11 changed everything.” Most people probably agreed with her, but to me the only thing that 9/11 changed was to remove the blinders concerning airport security. The other potential lesson, that U.S. foreign policy was bitterly hated by a large swath of the world’s population, was not learned. In fact, anyone who acknowledged it was reviled. Instead, the clarion call was “United we stand!” Criticism was not tolerated.

The Bush administration’s reaction was very strange in one way. The entire country’s airspace was essentially closed to commercial traffic for several days. That was probably prudent. However, during this period the government allowed the evacuation from the U.S. of 140 or more Saudi nationals despite confirmed intelligence that the vast majority of the of the perpetrators were Saudis. The funding also mostly came from other Saudis.

The attack was described by everyone as a terrorist act, which, of course, it was. Colin Powell said that we were “fighting a war against terrorists of global reach.” He therefore excluded Hamas, Hezbollah, and domestic terrorists. Almost immediately, however, the “of global reach” limitation was dropped, and anyone who in any way supported terrorism (except for the right-wing American version) was added to the list of enemies. Later the president the target as evil itself, as embodied in the “Axis of Evil’: Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. Bush even used the word “Crusade” to describe the new Bush Doctrine of boundless preemptive military actions. No word was more offensive to Muslims.

To his credit, W. stopped short of offering indulgences to everyone who fought in this war on terror.

The testosterone-laden approach was very popular. Support for the president jumped to an astounding 90 percent. Nobody asked me.

Paul Wolfowitz and the Neo-Cons demanded blood.

This is indisputable; None of these countries had in any way participated in the attacks. Iraq’s biggest crime was probably the $25,000 that Saddam Hussein had been paying families of Palestinian suicide bombers. There was something personal, too. Iraq had allegedly been behind an assassination attempt on W.’s father in Kuwait. Iran was allied with Hezbollah. The Israeli lobby and the Neo-Cons who advised Bush pressed for aggressive action against both.

Nobody in North Korea ever crossed any borders. Who knows what the justification was for including them in this unholy crusade? It has been reported that President Bush informed Bob Woodward that he loathed Kim Jong Il.

So, who was a terrorist? Terrorism is a tactic, not a country or organization. Terrorists didn’t wear uniforms or work on behalf of governments. Some didn’t work for anyone. Their common traits were strict secrecy and lack of access to advanced weapons.

So, how do you identify them before they commit a heinous act? The answer was simple: “Don’t worry. We know some of them³, and we have ways of finding the rest. Trust us.”

Noun: exaggerated pride or self-confidence.

Meanwhile, the first stage was to attack the Taliban, a band of religious fanatics who ran Afghanistan and gave refuge to Osama Bin Laden, the leader of Al-Qaeda. After a few weeks of heavy bombing the Taliban offered to hand Bin Laden over, but the Bush people were unwilling to negotiate. They expected a quick unconditional surrender, which, of course, never happened. If you look up “hubris” in the dictionary, you might see a picture of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.

In 2003 the U.S. attacked Iraq. The administration had made a comical attempt to gather allies for the vengeful invasion of the country that was the most secular of any in the Muslim world. An attempt was even made to convince the United Nations to back the attack.That was thwarted by Pope (Saint) John Paul II. My dad was very upset by the fact the country that he loved and for which he had fought in World War II, would commit such an act of naked and illegal aggression.⁵

I remember watching a video recording of Colin Powell’s presentation to the U.N. I had read a transcript and had been somewhat impressed. However, when I saw the video I realized that what I had assumed were photos presented in evidence were actually drawings. He was trying to sell an unprovoked invasion based on an artist’s conception of what the Iraqis might have been doing. These were just cartoons! Although many Americans swooned, the rest of the world was unimpressed.

Most of the American public bought all or at least most of the lies. I knew from reading Juan Coles’ blog, Informed Comment, that the case presented was full of holes.

The administration was not impeded by this snub. Condoleezza Rice and others appeared on radio and television programs to promulgate a new catchphrase. Even if Iraq did not currently harbor terrorists, it certainly had “weapons of mass destruction” and if the country ever did start welcoming terrorists, we did not “want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

In point of fact, no one (except perhaps Cheney in his yellowcake fantasy) thought that Iraq had nuclear weapons. Some people just assumed that Saddam Hussein had been lying when he declared that his government had destroyed all of Iraq’s chemical weapons. The WMD justification was totally bogus.

No one except Harry Shearer seemed to notice that the one Islamic country that definitely possessed weapons of mass destruction and definitely had harbored terrorists, Pakistan, was never mentioned in this propaganda blitz.

There is no doubt whatever that the Republicans (joined by a few turncoats like my senator, Joe Lieberman) knew exactly what they were doing. Bush informed a stunned Tony Blair on September 14, 2001, that they planned to attack Iraq.

What really made me see red was the indefinite imprisonment of foreigners on the military base in Guantánamo Bay for the sole purpose of circumventing the American system of justice. Some were never even charged with a crime.

The interrogators even tortured civilians—some captured by very sketchy foreigners—to force them to provide evidence of Iraqi misdeeds. Even worse was the disgraceful use of “extraordinary rendition” to send captured individuals to countries with less rigorous legal systems in order to extract information from them—whether or not it was true. This was perhaps the most disgraceful period in U.S. history that I have witnessed. In my opinion all of the participants should have been tried for war crimes. I cannot imagine what their defense would have been.

The reaction to 9/11 that affected my lifestyle the most was the creation of the Homeland Security Department and, especially, its Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Security at airports and on airplanes definitely needed improvement. Armed passengers needed to be prevented from boarding airplanes. If someone with a weapon somehow got aboard, they must be prevented from gaining access to the cockpit.

However, one does not use a double-barreled shotgun when threatened by a mosquito. The new security procedures were a grotesque overreaction. For example, solely because one incompetent idiot named Richard Reid once tried to light his sneakers on fire on an airplane, every adult was required to remove both shoes before boarding an airplane! The TSA transformed air travel from a boring expediency into an outrageously annoying exercise in frustration. I ended every trip in a very foul mood.

European countries had already implemented a much more reasonable and equally effective program. We should have sought counsel from them as to how they had successfully dealt with a very active terrorist group, the Red Brigades. The Bushies were too busy making and selling their plans to ask anyone for advice.

The most sensible moves that the administration undertook were to require the crew in the cockpit to stay there and to require the door to the cockpit to be locked. Thank goodness the government did not accede to the demands from some gung-ho pilots to carry sidearms.

The most frightening experience that I ever had in an airport or an airplane was in the Intercontinental Airport in Houston shortly after 9/11. Some genius had decided that it would be cool to have soldiers with automatic weapons in U.S. airports. I saw in the Houston airport a young guy in U.S. Army camos⁴ eating his supper alone at a restaurant. His M16 was leaning against the back of his chair.

The M16 was a weapon that I (and thousands of others) knew very well. I could consistently hit a human-sized target with one at distances up to three hundred meters. I could take one apart and reassemble it. Most importantly, I knew the location of the little lever that activated the fully automatic mode. As I watched the young man eat his burger, I suddenly realized that I was carrying a potential weapon—my laptop in its very sturdy metal case—with which I could easily disable this soldier, thereby enabling me to seize his rifle. I wondered how many other travelers there had similar thoughts.

Anyway, the U.S. forces quickly brushed aside the Iraqi troops. Our draft-dodging president got to land a jet on an aircraft carrier where a huge “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED” banner was displayed.

We tried to install a Hartford Native, Paul Bremer, as imperial governor. That did not go over too well. The fighting continued in whack-a-mole fashion at a reduced level. Then the situation deteriorated. We dropped a lot of bombs, and hired a lot of mercenaries. When things began to look really bad again our military presence in Iraq even “surged” just before the 2004 election in America. Some called it “the splurge” because a whole lot of money was spent assuring the support of local power brokers. This tactic was effective, but the loyalty only lasted as long as the payments kept coming.

After the first election, Iraqi men and women showed their purple fingers to cameramen.

The U.S. eventually imposed on the Iraqis an Italian-style parliamentary democracy. We may have expected the Iraqis to form parties that resembled liberals and conservatives, but, in fact, Saddam Hussein had probably been the most liberal leader in the Muslim world. He tolerated all religions, but the new parties were formed primarily along religious lines, and, guess what, the most popular party was the Shiite faction that was friendliest to Iran, a card-carrying member of the Axis of Evil. The main thing that all parties agreed upon was that all Americans and practitioners of non-Muslim religions—including the rather vibrant Christian communities—were not welcome in democratic Iraq.

Eventually, we did go, in a manner of speaking. But what a cost this adventure exacted—hundreds of thousands of lives lost, millions of lives of innocent Iraqis disrupted, trillions of dollars wasted, and a treasure trove of international good will squandered.

Then the Islamic State (or ISIS or ISIL) developed, and we allied with Iran, of all people. Then we had to fight them in Syria, too, and …

I don’t want to write any more about this. I am not an expert on the Middle East, but Juan Cole is.

I have been following Juan Cole’s blog, Informed Comment since it began in 2002. You can find it at juancole.com. Cole was (and still is in 2021) a professor in the history department at my Alma Mater, the University of Michigan. His writings presented an impartial and very well researched description of affairs in the Middle East and other countries dominated by Muslims. He had lived for a period in the area and he could read and understand Arabic and a few other languages used in that area.

I have read his blog every morning no matter where I was since he started posting it in 2002.

Professor Cole wrote a long article in 2006 for Foreign Policy magazine explaining the politics of the situation. Although he was pilloried by jingoistic Americans and Zionists at the time, he has proven right about nearly everything. The article was republished on his website on September 10, 2021. You can read it here.

1. In those years I spent considerable amounts of time in airports in all of the following states: Alabama, California, Colorado, Connecticut, DC, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Utah, Washington, and Wisconsin.

2. Nancy Johnson served in Congress for twenty-four years. She was defeated by twelve percentage points in 2006 by Democrat Chris Murphy despite outspending him by a large margin. Since then she has worked as a lobbyist.

3. To help identify the “bad guys”, a deck of cards was created. Saddam was the ace of spades. During this period rumors abounded about potential terrorists who looked like ordinary God-fearing law-abiding citizens. However, on notification by someone (George Soros?) they and the other members of their “sleeper cell” were ready to spring into action to attack a predetermined target.

Some patriots took the “better safe than sorry” approach. On September 15, 2001, Frank Roque murdered a Sikh man and fired on a Lebanese man and an Afghan family in Arizona.

4. My dad asserted at the time that it was the first unprovoked attack by the U.S. This was clearly false, but I never challenged it.

5. Don’t get me started on the current custom of military personnel wearing camouflaged fatigues for day-to-day activities in the U.S.

1988-2014 TSI: The Programmers

Posted on May 24, 2021 by Mike

Supporters and coders. Continue reading →

TSI’s first, last, and best programmer was Denise Bessette. For three decades she was one of the most important people in my life. More details about her relationships with TSI, me, and the rest of the crew can be found here.

During the years that Denise worked only part-time most of the programming burden fell on my extremely narrow shoulders. By 1987 it had become too much. We needed to hire a full-time programmer. I placed ads in the Hartford Courant and the Journal-Inquirer. It was not a good time to be hiring. The state’s unemployment rate was heading toward a record low of 2.8 percent, and the demand for programmers far exceeded the supply. I understood that a small firm like TSI would be at a disadvantage when competing with giants like the insurance companies. Besides, our office was in a converted barn, and we were not able to offer any benefits to speak of.

Sandy in the kitchen in TSI’s East Windsor Office.

A few people responded to our ad. The only one that I had any interest in hiring was Sandy Sant’Angelo, whose name was Sandy Scarfe when she started at TSI. She had taken a few programming classes. She worked for the Springfield (MA) Public Library system. A major part of her job there was helping to set up the new computerized system for keeping track of the books. This was not very close to anything that we did, but at this point my choices were to hire her or start the recruiting process over. I chose the former.

Sandy turned out not to be a great coder, but she had other traits that I valued highly. She learned how to use the computer systems rather quickly, and if a project was well-defined, and I provided her with a somewhat similar program to use as a model, she was eventually able to save me a little time. What I liked the most about her were her dependability and her attitude.

Harry Burt, Lucia Hagan, Chris Bessette, Sandy, and Denise at the summer outing in Old Saybrook.

Unfortunately, the great bulk of our work in the nineties was quite complicated, and it became more and more difficult for me to find appropriate projects for her. One thing that I had noticed was that she was good at talking to the users at our clients’ installations. She had a cheerful demeanor, and she was pretty good at getting to the bottom of problems.

At the time TSI’s office had two telephone lines¹, a generic number that we published in our promotional materials and a support line that we provided to our clients. I decided that Sandy’s primary responsibility should be answering calls on the support line. If they were simple questions, she could deal with them immediately. Otherwise, she recorded them. At first we kept track of the problems on paper, but soon we devised a simple system for recording them in a database available to all the programmers.

Denise, Sue, me, Sandy, Lucia, and Harry. Chris or a restaurant employee must have taken this photo.

This system worked pretty well. The key question that we asked was whether the problem was holding up the client’s work. If it was, the problem was automatically escalated. In nearly all cases these problems were addressed the same day.

I did not often work closely with Sandy. Actually, no one did. Her telephone voice sounded fine on the other end, but for some reason it really carried inside the office. I had to move her desk away from the programmers’ area.

Although I had hired Sandy, when Denise took over application development, she became the boss of all of the programmers. After a few years, Denise, who knew Sandy’s limitations, decided to eliminate her position. The meeting in which she was the terminated was very hard for me to witness. Sandy broke down and cried. I understood that Denise had made a business decision, but I doubt that I could have done it. By then I thought of Sandy as part of the TSI family. Nevertheless, I never considered overruling Denise’s decision.

Sandy, me, and Harry at the door to the TSI office in East Windsor after a blizzard.

I don’t have a lot of vivid memories of Sandy. She got married after she came to work with us, and she seemed happy. Her attendance record over the years was nearly spotless. She also attended all of TSI’s summer outings and Christmas parties.

I only recall her expressing a strong opinion about one thing. She loved the Harry Potter books. Her endorsement, however, was not sufficient to prompt me to dip my literary beak there.

Sandy was the person who alerted the rest of the office about the attacks on 9/11/2001. Everyone else in the office was shocked at this, but I had spent more time in airports than the rest of them put together. The airport security by that time was unbelievably lax. I had concocted in my mind at least three ways of sneaking a gun aboard a plane. It was also no surprise to me that plenty of people in the world who despised the United States for its arrogant and interventionist foreign policy and its unquestioning endorsement of anything done or said by Israel.

I find it personally embarrassing that I know so little about Sandy, a person with whom I worked for more than a decade. I just let her live her life as she wanted to and expected her to come in every morning. I can never remember her asking for anything.

After assigning Sandy to answering support calls, I reckoned that we needed another programmer. The Internet was still in its infancy, and so the process again involved expensive want ads in the local papers. Before finding someone who fit the bill I hired two different people, neither of whose names I remember.

The first was a woman in her twenties or maybe early thirties who already had programmed in BASIC at another company. I hired her. I was pretty excited about the prospect of working with her. It seemed likely that she might be able to get up to speed in record time. On the first day she appeared in the office at 8:30, TSI’s starting time. I immediately put everything aside to help her understand how we programmed and to go over some of the peculiarities of the hardware and operating systems.

If I had a sick pet, I would also ask permission to go home, but I don’t think that I would quit my job.

At some point she must have received a phone call. It only lasted a couple of minutes; I thought nothing of it. However, just before lunch she told me, “I’m sorry, but this won’t work. My dog is sick, and I need to be with him.” I don’t remember what I replied, maybe nothing.

I immediately initiated another job search. This time I hired a guy in his twenties who claimed to have done some programming for a previous employer. I spent a couple of weeks training him, and he seemed to be making little or no progress. I began to doubt that he had ever written a program, or at least one that did approximately what was required.

I have only a vague recollection of what he looked like or anything about his personality. I do remember that he was into the martial arts and worked out. He was in very good shape.

I probably would have worked with him for another week or two before deciding, but we had a twinax connectivity problem. As is explained here, the individual terminals and PC’s were connected to the server via twinax cabling. Each station was dependent upon the cabling, pigtails, and settings of the other devices on the line. Some of our cables were very long. We ordered these custom-made from a company in New Britain. They were expensive. Moreover, the company needed a little time to make them, and it was located forty or so miles from TSI’s office.

It was an “all hands on deck” situation until we got the situation resolved. Everyone was checking connections. I asked the new programmer to connect one of the cables to one of the devices. I showed him how their were two holes on the “pigtail” and two pins on the end of the cable. The pins, of course, fitted into the holes. Once the connection was made, a cap on the end of the cable could be turned so that it was impossible for the cable to come loose. I honestly thought that it was impossible for anything to go wrong. I had done this many times, and nothing had ever gone amiss.

Those two pins are not supposed to lie flat next to each other.

We spent an hour or so trying to get the line to work, but we had no success. I eventually examined the connection that this new fellow had made. The pigtail was tightly attached to the cable. I unfastened it and looked inside the head of the cable. Both pins were bent at a 90° angle, one to the right and one to the left. They resembled a pair of arms stubbornly crossed on someone’s chest. I would have bet that no one was strong enough to do this. To this day I had no idea how he accomplished this feat.

I was so angry that I had to retreat into Denise’s office for a few minutes so that no one could see me. I decided on the spot to fire him, but I waited until the end of the day to do it.

I thought at first that we would need to order another custom cable. However, we found a spare cable, and with a few adjustments to our wiring scheme, we were able to get the connectivity resumed within a half hour.

Casual Corner’s headquarters as viewed from South Rd. The pond was usually full of geese.

Twice when I advertised for a programmer, I received applications that I could not believe. One was from the lady who was IT director at Casual Corner³, a large retail chain. Their home office was in Enfield. My customary jogging route took me right past their complex. The IT department even had an AS/400! Casual Corner did not advertise much, but with and “in” we might even get an AdDept installation out of it. I tried to contact her, but she never scheduled an interview.

The other guy was retired. He had been an IT director at a large company. He came in and talked with me. He said that he would work cheap. He just wanted to write code. I don’t know whether he would have been a good programmer or not, but my primary interest was elsewhere. At the time we were just beginning to try to work with IT departments, and the process always left me frustrated. I thought that having this guy on TSI’s team might help me learn how managers of IT departments made decisions.

It was a close call, but I decided not to make him an offer.

I think that Steve might be setting up TSI’s F10.

Instead I hired a much younger guy, Steve Shaw. He had been an RPG programmer at Riverside Park⁴ in Agawam, MA. He picked up BASIC pretty quickly, and I was able to give him reasonably challenging projects. I really liked working with him. When he started his coding was a little sloppy, but the quality improved quickly. When I told him this, he seemed slightly insulted.

While he was working at TSI Steve acquired a multi-unit property in Massachusetts. I could not understand why he wanted to be a part-time landlord. To each his own.

Steve was something of a daredevil. He purchased a jet ski while he worked for us. At some point he disclosed that he had been in a motor cycle accident in which he lost a number of teeth. I wrote a little song to cheer him up. My sister Jamie and I performed it for him in the office. It was a smash hit.

I found a copy of the lyrics:

Home, brain, nerve, heart (teeth not in photo).

On corn cobs I’d be gnawin’.
I could graze upon your law-n.
It is my firm belief.
My dentitions would be so neat.
I’d devour piles of roast beef,
If I only had some teeth.
Oh, I could eat a pie.
I’d chew up all the steaks that you could buy.
I’d masticate on pork chops bye the bye.
If you object,
I’ll bite your thigh.
From ear to ear I’d be grinnin’.
Young girls’ hearts I’d be winnin’.
I’d steal them like a thief.
I would floss away my tartar,
and stop actin’ like a martyr,
If I only had some teeth.
Music by Harold Arlen; Words by Mike Wavada

TSI’s Christmas party with the Edward Owen Company at the Nutmeg House: Jamie Lisella, Steve, Doug Pease, Ken Owen, Denise, Sandy, someone, me, someone else.

Steve only worked with us for about four years. I appreciated that he might see it as a dead-end job. However, the work was, I think, potentially very exciting. We were solving problems that no one had addressed before for large corporations that everyone has heard of. I tried to talk him into staying, but there was no way for me to argue that he could ever climb the corporate ladder at TSI. We did not have a ladder.

The next programming hire was Harry Burt², who was almost exactly my age, forty-something. He had a degree in math, and he had programmed in BASIC. He had been a vice president at a bank in Simsbury (I think) that had had closed under fairly suspicious circumstances that did not involve Harry. I hired him and terminated the job search at the end of my interview with him.

Harry mostly did programming projects for us. However, I also assigned him to monitor the work of Fred Pease in the huge Y2K project, which is described here. Fred was a college student who had never had a job before. The plan was for him to work part-time at TSI for the summer. He wanted to set his own schedule. By his own omission he tended to stay up late playing video games. Sometimes he stayed up all night.

That much was OK, but Fred constantly changed his schedule without telling Harry or anyone else. Harry had to ask him every morning how long he was going to work. He usually said “Until 11:30” or “Until 12:30”. The last straw was when he said “Until something-thirty”.

Fred’s work was also slipshod. I decided that I needed to take the project more seriously. If I was going to need to check every program anyway, I decided to do it all myself. Frankly, I did not want to assign such a tedious and unrewarding task to any of my good programmers. I did not want risk losing them. I took it on as a sort of penance; I should have seen it coming back in the eighties.

Sandy and Harry are on the left. Myself (hat), Denise and Chris are on the right. This photo is from our cruise on the Connecticut River.

Harry (who was NOT hairy—I thought of the Fuzzy Wuzzy rhyme whenever I saw or heard his name) was a great fit for TSI for at least a decade. After a couple of years I began to worry that Harry might realize that there was no path for advancement at TSI and decide to look for work elsewhere. After all, he was definitely overqualified for his job.

I decided to give Harry a small percentage commission on our software sales every month. I think that this was probably a good idea. He could see that he was profiting from our delivery of new software.

While he worked for us he also taught college-level math classes in the evenings. At some point in the twenty-first century Harry quit in order to become a full-time teacher . He told Denise, who was his boss, that he was having trouble dealing with the pressure at TSI. The environment did not seem pressure-packed to me, but from my office — even with the door open — I could not hear any conversations.

I liked Harry a lot. For a time we were the only two males in the office, and it was very nice having someone with whom I could discuss a football game. Also, since we were almost exactly the same age, we had many of the same cultural landmarks.

Harry is between Doug Pease and Denise. A little bit of Sandy is visible on the right. I think that this was the day of our Christmas dinner after the trip to Hawaii.

Harry’s best friend was Vinny, his barber. Harry often told amusing stories about Vinnie or recited humorous quotes. I devoted a fair amount of effort to buying appropriate (and usually light-hearted) Christmas cards for the employees. One year I actually found one that featured a barber named Vinny.

Harry had a 24/7 tan. I assume that he went to a tanning studio. He did not seem like the kind of person who would do that, but you never know. One of my proudest achievements was to compare tans with him on my return from Hawaii. For the first and only time, my arm was darker than his.

Denise recruited and hired all of the new programmers who worked in our office in the twenty-first century. By this time we were using Monster.com for hiring. It was cheaper and better than newspaper ads, but it was still a time-consuming practice that tied up TSI’s most productive employee.

Brian Rollet was the first person that Denise hired. I remembered that he started while I was in Hawaii for the sales/vacation in December of 1975 (described here). I brought everyone back souvenirs for the employees. For Brian, whom I had never met yet, I purchased a hula-dancing bobble-head doll.

Brian was an Army vet. In fact, he was Airborne. Had I been doing the hiring, this would have given me pause in two different areas. 1) Why would anyone with a marketable skill like programming ability volunteer for three years in the Army? 2) Why would anyone jump out of a perfectly good airplane?

He also had a pretty long commute. He lived in Ware or Belchertown — one of those towns near the Mass Pike. There is no way to get to East Windsor from that area without driving through Springfield.

Denise was most upset about one of Brian’s most unprofessional traits — dozing off in the afternoon. She asked me what I would recommend. I told her that the obvious solution was caffeine. Who ever heard of a programmer anywhere who did not consume immense amounts of caffeine at work?

Brian, Harry, Denise, and Sandy at Mystic Seaport.

My second choice was to advise Brian to work something out with Harry, who was in the adjoining cubicle. If I were in Brian’s situation, I would have asked Harry to throw an eraser at me whenever he saw me nodding off. That would have worked, wouldn’t it?

When Denise called him on the carpet about it, Brian’s solution was to eat only salads at lunch. That might have helped a little, but Denise finally had to let him go. I don’t think that she was too satisfied with what he produced while he was awake anyway.

She confided to me that she would never again hire anyone who had been in the military.

Denise’s second hire, Michael Davis, worked out much better. He got up to speed very rapidly, and Denise really enjoyed working with him, and she definitely got to depend on him. Unfortunately, he did not stay at TSI very long. He moved to Pittsburgh, where he had family or a girlfriend or something.

The good news was that he liked the work at TSI well enough to work for us remotely for a period after he moved away. So, the transition was not too difficult. Of course, he could not answer the support line from Pittsburgh.

My most vivid memory of Michael was on our summer outing at (I think) Rocky Neck State Park. He took me out on his small sailboat. People from Kansas do not often get opportunities like this. Of course, he did all the sailing. My only job was to duck my head down by my knees when he decided to swing the sail around.

I remember that after Michael had been at TSI for a year or so he decided to buy a new car. Well, not a NEW car, but a NEWER car. He chose a Volkswagen; I don’t remember the model. The few times that I shopped for a car I never considered buying a used one. I would be too afraid that I was just buying someone else’s problems. Nevertheless, Michael seemed satisfied with his purchase.

I don’t remember much about Sean Finnegan⁷. In fact, I had to ask Denise about him. He worked for TSI for two months in 2010. He was apparently a pretty good programmer, but he had difficulty talking with clients on support calls.

Jason Dean⁸ lived in the Springfield area. Before coming to TSI he had worked in Friendly’s IT department. He joined us in October 2007 and was still employed when we closed down the company in 2014.

Denise got along with Jason nearly as well as she did with Michael. She was very satisfied with his attitude and performance.

I did not really get to know Jason too well until Denise started working remotely in 2013. One thing that I quickly learned was that he was a terrific bowler. He had bowled at least three 300 games, which blew my mind. He had quite a few bowling balls. He told me that getting the ball to spin correctly depended on both the surface of the ball and the surface of the lane. So, different balls were needed depending on the condition of the lanes..

I was very surprised to learn that Jason’s bowling balls had only two holes. He did not have a hole for his thumb.

Jason knew my bridge friends Bob and Shirley Derrah from bowling in Springfield.

Jason and his wife were, in my opinion, fanatical about coupons, Groupons, and all other ways of obtaining discounts. They were always shopping for bargains. They switched their cell service from Verizon to T-Mobile to save on phone charges. However, the T-Mobile phones got no signal in their apartment. They got their money back, but it was a big hassle.

Jason had a son when he started working at TSI. His second son was born quite prematurely, and it was touch-and-go for a while, but he pulled through and was quite healthy the last that I knew. The family also had three rescue cats who were too eccentric for my tastes.

In his middle school in Springfield Jason had twice been a spelling champion. He was the only other person whom I have ever met who competed in the national spelling bee.

Jason and his family loved Disney World. They spent every vacation there, and they always stayed in the same Disney hotel. They monitored the situation very closely and always made reservations on the first day that the discounted fares were offered.

Jason had an older brother who lived at home with his parents. He spent most of his time in the basement playing Worlds of Warcraft. Although he had never worked, Jason insisted that he was a brilliant guy. He urged Denise to consider hiring him. I don’t remember the details, but he never came to the office. I am not sure that he could drive.

Jason actually contacted the Dr. Phil show to try to get them do do an intervention to help his brother get out of his shell. His parents vetoed the idea.

Jason and his parents were very conservative. He could not believe that Obama had defeated Romney in 2012. He told me that he suspected that there had been voting fraud, but he readily admitted that he had no evidence.

1. By the time that we moved the office to East Windsor, CT, in 1999 TSI had eight phone lines.

2. In 2021 Harry Burt is teaching math at Naugatuck Community College. His LinkedIn page is here.

3. Casual Corner closed all of its stores in 2005. Since then the headquarter building in Enfieldhas been used by Brooks Brothers, which also is now in bankruptcy.

4. Riverside Park was acquired by Premier Parks in 1996, a couple of years after Steve started at TSI. The name was changed to Six Flags New England.

5. Steve Shaw sent me emails a couple of times. In the one in February of 2000 he reported that he was working at the Phoenix, and they had sent him to classes on Websphere and Java. However, we never got together. Because he has such a common name, It was difficult to locate him, but I finally found his LinkedIn page. You can see it here.

6. I think that Brian Rollet lives in the Ware, MA, area in 2021.

7. Sean Finnegan’s LinkeIn page is here.

8. Since TSI closed in 2014 Jason Dean has worked at ESPN as Application Support Analyst III. His LinkedIn page is here.

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