Tag Archives: American Airlines

2001-2008 9/11 and Bush’s Wars

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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.

BDL was my starting and ending point.

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.

Four box cutters!

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.

No more crusades, please.

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.

Richard Reid’s shoes.

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.

1993-2012 TSI: AdDept Air Travel Adventures

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Getting to the clients and returning. Continue reading →

I always took the route from our house in Enfield to the airport that Google claimed took 28 minutes. At 5:30 AM I could make it in less than 20.

My routine: I always flew from Bradley International Airport in Windsor Locks, CT, which was usually identified on the departure boards at airports as “Hartford-Springfield” or BDL. We were fortunate in that almost every major airline had a presence at Bradley. The last to arrive was Southwest, which began its service at Bradley in November 1999.

I usually took one of the first flights in the morning, often around 6:00. At first Sue drove me to the airport and picked me up, but this became tiresome for me. I soon elected instead to park at Executive Valet Parking, the only lot that was north of the airport. It was easier on both of us.

The people who worked the early morning shift at Executive came to know me pretty well. The driver was usually an extremely friendly and loquacious guy named Larry. His style was too much for me at that early hour. I mean, it wasn’t even 6:00 yet. I was never in the mood for chitchat. Vacationers probably appreciated his approach more than business travelers.

The lady at the desk knew me well enough that I did not even need to show my frequent-parker card when I checked in. She even knew what I drove.

On every trip I brought exactly one suitcase and one briefcase that was large enough to hold my laptop. For several years my suitcase was a large bright blue fabric one with wheels. It was large enough to hold my pillow. I always had a hard time getting to sleep after a stressful excessively caffeinated day dealing with problems or requests at the client’s office. Having a familiar pillow helped. The suitcase’s bright color also made it easy to spot on the luggage belt, and the design made it light. I only got rid of it when the zipper broke.

When I arrived at the terminal, I checked in at the ticket counter. In the nineties I flew enough that I could use the express lane at Delta or American. Later, of course, the airlines installed kiosks that made the check-in process much easier.

Security was a breeze before 9/11/2001 (described here). Even during the busiest times (early in the morning and around 6 PM), it seldom took more than a minute or two. Since the employees worked (directly or indirectly) for the airlines, they were always courteous and tried to make sure that passengers arrived at their gate expeditiously. After 9/11 it was a good idea to plan for an excruciating period of at least twenty minutes.

In the first few years of my flying days Bradley had two terminals. Terminal B housed American Airlines and a few small carriers that I never used. Later this terminal was demolished and Terminal A was greatly expanded with two long “concourses” that connected to the central area.

In the mornings I usually bought a sausage biscuit with egg sandwich at McDonald’s in the airport. I also purchased a large coffee even though the restaurant at the airport did not participate in the long-standing promotion of “$1 for any size coffee” available at most McD’s in those days. If I was in a hurry I brought the breakfast bag onto the plane.

If I had a lot of time, I would try to find a place to sit near an electric outlet. Most airports were not designed for the electronics age. In the nineties almost no one brought a computer onto an airplane, and cell phones were even rarer. Furthermore most of the devices in those days could not hold a charge for more than a couple of hours. Consequently, as the use of electronics grew, those few seats near electrical outlet were in great demand. I knew the location of most of the outlets at BDL.

An inviolate rule was to use a men’s room in the airport before every flight. The restrooms on airplanes were not pleasant, and waiting in line in the aisle when you had to go was very annoying.

I tried to reserve window seats. I liked to look out and try to identify cities. Of course, no one wanted a middle seat. When I sat on the aisle someone always seemed to hit my elbow. I usually tried to get on the port side. If no one sat in the middle I could stretch out my right leg under the middle seat in front of me.

I always brought my computer, my Bose headphones, my CD player, several magazines, and at least one book. Some flights showed old television shows on a screen; I never watched or got a headset. I played opera music on my CD or the computer while the plane was in flight. I also played music in my hotel room, while I was running, and especially during the periods between flights in noisy airports. On one of my last trips I had been listening to Mozart’s Così fan tutte when it was time to board the plane. I left under my seat in the waiting area the CD player that contained the opera’s third CD. I never got the player back or bought a replacement for the CD.

I almost never slept on the flights out to the client’s location, but I regularly dozed on the return flights even when someone occupied the middle seat. I found the most comfortable position in close quarters was to lean my head against the little pillow that was provided to my seat braced against the window or side of the plane.

I never put anything in the overhead compartments. My briefcase, which had all my electronics and other diversions, was under the seat in front of me. If the plane was crowded, it was sometimes difficult to extract the stuff that I wanted. If I had an overcoat or a jacket, I used it as a lap rug.

I usually took the stairs down to the Baggage Claim area.

Most of the time my return flights landed late, sometimes very later. I tried to get to the baggage area before most of the other passengers in order to occupy a position near the beginning of the belt. I knew which direction all the belts ran. No airline ever failed to deliver my luggage1 on a return trip. Nevertheless, by the time that my bag arrived—no matter how well the trip had gone—I was always angry at everyone and everything. For me air travel for business was inherently stressful.

There were a couple of banks of phones in the baggage area. Each parking lot and hotel had a direct line. I just picked up the phone and read the number on the ticket that I had been given when I checked in at Executive and told them which airline I had been on. Within a few minutes (usually) the shuttle bus would arrive. Executive would almost always have my car warmed up by the time that the bus reached the lot. Executive charged the credit card that I had on file there. The receipt would be on the seat of the car. My drives home were always uneventful.

I recognized quite a few celebrities while I was in airports or on airplanes going to or from AdDept clients. My spottings are documented here.

Weather and other close calls

In the winter I tried to avoid scheduling flights that required stops in Chicago, Detroit, or Minneapolis. Nevertheless, on quite a few occasions I ended up missing my connecting flight back to Hartford. Since my return trips were almost always in the evening, on most occasions there were no other flights that I could take. This was a nuisance, but after a while I came to appreciate that the inconvenience was just part of the aggravation inherent to traveling for business. The airline always found a seat for me on a flight in the morning and put me up at a nearby hotel for the night. I can only remember one bizarre exception. I have described it here.

Once, however, the disruptive weather had subsided in Chicago long before my United flight from Des Moines touched down at O’Hare. Earlier that day the winds in the Windy City had exceeded fifty miles-per-hour, and O’Hare had been closed for a short period. It was about 8:30 PM when my flight effected its landing there, and my next flight was not scheduled to leave until 10:00. So, even though United connections in O’Hare could require very long walks, I was not very worried about arriving at my gate in time to board my flight to Hartford.

Most of my horror stories involved United.

I did not account for what happened next. The plane usually taxied around for a few minutes and then pull into the designated gate. Not this time. The pilot parked it on the tarmac out of the way of the other planes. He then announced that there was no gate available for our flight. He did not explain why; he merely stated that he had been ordered to park where he did. Every few minutes he would make an announcement on the intercom, but fifty minutes elapsed before we finally reached the gate.

My recollection is that I ran from one of the B gates in Terminal 1 to an F gate in Terminal 2.

At that point there was almost no chance that my checked bag would be transported to my connecting flight. That failure had happened to me a few times. The airline just delivered it to my house later in the day. The big question was whether I could make it to the gate before the plane departed. I knew that it would not be easy as soon as I saw that my flight to Hartford was in a different terminal. On the other hand I was in the best shape of my life. Even carrying my quite heaby briefcase I rated that I had a pretty good chance.

I wasn’t as fast as O.J, but I was certainly not about to have a heart attack. They should have just let me board.

In fact, I did reach the gate ten minutes before the scheduled departure time. I was dismayed to see that the door was already closed. I went up to the desk with my ticket to demand that the two female agents let me on the plane. I was, of course, out of breath. One of the ladies told me to calm down. She warned me that I might have a heart attack.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I assured them. “I am a runner. In a minute or two I won’t even be breathing hard.” This was true.

They refused to open the door. That was bad enough, but they then also refused to authorize me to stay overnight at United’s expense. They claimed that it was weather-related and therefore not the company’s fault.

I explained that my flight had landed on time, but it then parked out on the tarmac for almost an hour because United did not have enough gates. The bad weather had ceased long before this happened. The agents were intractable. I have seldom been so angry. I might have said something inappropriate.

They weren’t abandoned that night.

Fortunately for me, United had plenty of customer service desks in O’Hare, and they stayed open very late. I walked over to one and explained the situation to the clerk. He told me that he did not understand why the ladies would not give me vouchers for a hotel room and breakfast.

I understood the reason very well. They were planning to leave ten minutes early, and they were already packed up. Dealing with me might actually have required them to stay another ten or even fifteen minutes.

The customer service guy issued the vouchers without hesitation. I stayed at a hotel and arrived in Hartford the next morning on the same plane that had my luggage.

Tornado

I cannot remember even one occasion in which weather prevented me from arriving at a client’s office by the scheduled time. The one time that my plane faced really serious weather was when I was flying to Des Moines in the late afternoon. A serious tornado was approaching Des Moines from the southwest at about the same time that my plane was approaching from the east. The plane was forced to land in land in a much smaller airport in Cedar Rapids. Our aircraft and crew were going to spend the night in Cedar Rapids. The flight to Des Moines would resume in the morning. So, the luggage stayed on the plane. There were no flights available to Des Moines on the evening that we arrived.

“Go out the exit. Go south until you hit I-80. Then go west.”

I needed to be at the client’s2 offices at the start of business in the morning. I decided to rent a car and drive to Des Moines. I usually patronized Avis, but Avis had no office in the Cedar Rapids airport. So, I went to the Hertz counter and rented a car. The agent assured me that I could return it at the airport in Des Moines. He also gave me a map and indicated the route. This was Iowa. You can always get from one place to another with only a few turns.

I was not too worried about the tornado. Airplanes cruise at about 30,000 feet. At that altitude a tornado is quite wide. The chances of it engulfing an airplane are good. I was driving at an altitude of five feet or less. The swath of a tornado when it touches down—and many never touch down—is usually not very wide. My chances in the car were much better than ours in the plane.

In fact, I encountered some wind and rain, but not enough to bother me or my vehicle much. I made it to my hotel not much later than I would have if the flight had continued in Des Moines. The problem was that I was wearing shorts, sneakers, and a Bob Dylan tee shirt. I had everything that I needed for work in my briefcase, but all my clothes were still on the airplane in Cedar Rapids.

In the morning I checked the phone book in my hotel room. I discovered a Walmart within a couple of miles of the hotel. I drove there at about 8:00 and purchased a pair of pants and a shirt. They were not exactly elegant, but they would pass for one day. The people would just need to put up with my inappropriate footwear.

The advertising director told me that it would have been fine to come in my tee shirt and shorts, but he was not familiar with the condition of that outfit.

Takeoff or bounce?

The only time that I felt a little frightened on a business trip involved a landing at National Airport in Washington, DC. I had heard that the runways at the airport were shorter3 than those at other major airports, and the pilots did seem to apply the brakes rather hard as soon as they touched the runway. On this one occasion, however, the US Airways pilot did not hit the brakes at all. The plane did not roll on the runway; it bounced. The pilot then immediately placed the aircraft in takeoff mode. The plane cleared the far end of the runway, rose steadily, circled back around, and eventually landed.

The pilot never explained what had happened, and the extra circuit only cost us a few minutes. Maybe we were coming in too “hot’; maybe something was on the runway. Who knows?

Food

Most of my flights occurred before 9/11. The longer flights offered meals in those days; on the shorter ones snacks were served. If the meal had more than one choice, my initial strategy was to take the one that sounded the most appetizing. After several disappointments I reversed course and chose the one that seemed less appetizing. That seemed to work better.

In the morning I ordered tomato juice with ice and black coffee. At other times I chose Diet Cokes (or Pepsi)—with the can if they would let me. I never ordered an alcoholic beverage in coach, but I usually had one Scotch on the rocks if I was in first class and on my way back to Hartford.

If the flight offered only snacks, my choices were—in order—potato chips, peanuts, and Biscoff cookies. I always passed on pretzels and anything that I had never heard of.

I substituted broccoli for the French fries.

I actually liked the food at restaurants at a few airports. I liked the babyback ribs at the Chili’s in Concourse F in Atlanta. The Usinger’s brats at the Milwaukee airport were outstanding. The Italian beef sandwiches in the American Airlines section of O’Hare were delicious. I frequented a Mexican cantina at DFW. The Taco Bell in the Baltimore airport sold beefy burritos for a while.

I found something tolerable at most of the other airports. Chicken wraps of some kind were usually reliable. I avoided fried foods and tried to eat some fruit. I usually enjoyed Chinese food, but I had bad luck with it at airports.

Puddle-jumpers

Most of my flights were at least an hour long, and I usually rode on full-sized jets. I did have a few memorable trips on smaller planes.

I flew on a small plane from Fort Meyers to Naples when I was asked to make a presentation to the Frederick Atkins Group. That flight was uneventful. I also once took the very short flight from Minneapolis to St. Cloud, MN. That flight hardly even seemed to get off of the ground. On subsequent trips to Herberger’s I rented a car in Minneapolis. The short flight was from LA to Fresno provided me with my first view of both LA smog and Bakersfield.

One short trip was momentous, not for me, but for my flying companion, Doug Pease. The Continental flight from Bradley to Newark was pretty choppy. I was gazing out the window the whole time, but out of the corner of my eye I saw Doug reach for the air sickness bag5. After we landed he nonchalantly threw the bag in a trash can. I asked him, “Don’t you want to keep that as a souvenir?”

Miscellaneous: For some strange reason on at least three occasions a woman with a young child waiting to board a flight approached me. Each woman asked if she could entrust the kid to me while she went to the ladies’ room (or maybe to the bar for a quick stiff one). Nothing happened.

On another occasion I sat next to a boy flying alone from Washington. I don’t remember the destination. The weather was terrible when we took off, and we bounced around quite a bit. It dd not seem to bother him at all. He had books and toys with him and was a perfect little gentleman the entire time. I had the impression that he had flown as much as I had.

Once on a trip from Bradley to, if I recall correctly, Chicago I sat in the very last row next to another computer programmer. We both ran small software companies. Although he worked on Macintoshes, and our clients used IBM mini-computers, we discovered that we had experienced similar frustrations in trying to get our businesses off the ground. We were lucky to find a niche market that lasted just long enough.I wonder how his turned out.

I could just imagine the agents at the ticket counter saying, “Oh, God, here’s another one. Put him in the back row with that other geek.”

My trip to Portland OR, on February 21, had several strange features. This is from my notes:

I drove to the airport Sunday evening and discovered that there was no place to park. I went to six parking lots. They were all full. I ended up parking in short-term parking. It costs $20 per day. Although this is outrageous, it will hardly make a dent in the cost of this trip. My plane from Hartford was totally full (most of the passengers appeared to be high school-aged). I assumed that at least some people would miss the plane because they couldn’t find a place to park, but I was wrong. From now on I guess I have to call Executive Valet Parking before I leave. If they don’t have any room, I will just leave my car at 7B and call a cab. It’s bound to be less than $140.

I wonder where all the people parked. Bradley has closed off half of the short-term parking and all of the B lot.

By contrast, the plane to Portland had only about forty or fifty people on it. …

This is a first. The crew on the flight from Cincinnati to Portland also was on the flight from Hartford to Cincinnati. Different plane; different gate; same people.

To get from the airport to the parking lot after a trip I had to call Executive. Someone ordinarily answered on the first ring. One night no one answered the phone. I hung up, waited a few minutes, and called again. The third time that I called it rang ten or fifteen times before a breathless woman answered. She took my information and said that she would be there as soon as she could. About thirty minutes later the bus arrived, and she was driving. She explained that three or four people ordinarily worked the night shift, but the others did not show up that evening. So, she had to answer the phone, go out in the lot to find the cars, drive them to the office area, and then drive the bus to the airport to pick up the customers at three different locations.

Four or five of us were on the bus at the same time. No one gave her any grief. Nothing similar ever happened again. I stuck with Executive, but I imagine that the company lost a few customers that evening.

If I could arrange it, I would work in a visit to my parents on the way to a client. This was often feasible for trips to Texas or California. Direct flights to DFW, Houston, and LA were available from Kansas City’s airport.

Yes, my signature on the back might have been more legible 25 years ago, but …

I arrived at the ticket counter at Bradley for one of those KC trips, and, to my dismay, I could not find my driver’s license. The agent would not give me my ticket without proof that I was the person who had purchased it. They would not accept my many credit cards as proof of identity. In the end they accepted my library card from the Enfield Public Library. They said that it would suffice because it was issued by a government organization. Yes, but it did not have my name on it anywhere! Isn’t the purpose of a piece of identification to show that the name on the card matches the name on the ticket?

Needless to say, I did not object. However, I knew that this acceptance only deferred my day of reckoning for a couple of days. I would certainly need to produce real ID to fly from KC to LA.

Delaying worrying about the problem was a good approach. My driver’s license was actually resting comfortably in my shirt pocket the entire time. I had placed it there that very morning so that I would not need to dig through my wallet to find my license. This was a good example of being “too clever by half.”

Luggage

A different trip that included a stop in Kansas City resulted in the most frantic half hour that I ever spent in an airport. My final destination was Des Moines. Because there were no direct flights to Des Moines from KC, I decided to rent a car in KC and drive to Des Moines. I would arrive sooner than if I flew, and I could set my own schedule. I must have played golf with my dad on that trip. I remember that I had brought my golf clubs with me.

At the end of the training/support/research session in Des Moines I flew back to Hartford on TWA. This meant that I had to stop in St. Louis. By coincidence the flight to St. Louis continued on to Hartford. This was a rare occurrence. I almost always needed to change planes when we reached the hub airport.4

At some point after I boarded the flight to St. Louis I noticed an anomaly on the baggage check that had been stapled to the envelope holding my ticket. Although the destination on the ticket was Hartford, the bags were designated for St. Louis. I pressed the call button for the flight attendant. When she arrived I explained the problem. She conferred with other crew members and then advised me to go to baggage claim in St. Louis (leaving my briefcase on the plan), retrieve my checked luggage, bring them up to the ticket counter, check the bags again, go through security again, walk to the gate, and reboard the plane.

I guess that there was no way to tell them not to unload my luggage.

I did all that, but it was exhausting. I had to drag my suitcase and my golf clubs up the stairs to the ticket counter. Fortunately, I found a short line there, and the trip back through security was not much of an issue before 9/11. I made it to the gate with perhaps five minutes to spare, but I was completely spent. The rest of the trip was blessedly uneventful.

On quite a few flights a crew member attempted to say something humorous over the airplane’s intercom. I only remember one who was really able to pull it off. The flight was on United from Bradley to Chicago. My recollection is that it was in the evening. The head flight attendant was absolutely hilarious. Almost all of the people in the cabin—who usually pay little attention to announcements—were in stitches. I only remember one line. It occurred when she was advising us to fasten our seat belts to prepare for the landing. She began with, “The captain reports that he has found an airport…”

1. On one flight to Pittsburgh, at the time a hub for US Airways. I could not find my big blue bag on the conveyor belt. I went to the agent. She found it for me. She said that it was the only piece of luggage on my flight that was not directed to another flight.

2. The client was Younkers, a chain of department stores based in downtown Des Moines. Much more about the AdDept installation at Younkers is posted here.

3. In fact, the longest runway at National Airport was less than half the length of the runways at the other major airport in the Washington area. It was also much shorter than the runways at Bradley.

4. I can remember only one other time that my flight continued to my final destination after a stop at a hub. It was a Continental flight from Bradley through Cleveland to Houston. I was the only passenger who stayed on the plane, but the crew for the second leg was the same. This was in the days that the airlines served food. The flight attendant apologized to me because the meal on the second leg was the same as she had served me on the flight from Hartford. I ate both meals. I have almost never turned down free food.

5. While I was working at TSI I never got sick on an airplane. However, on our vacation in Tanzania in 2015 I had an absolutely awful experience on the first leg of our journey from Serengeti to Katavi. The tale of woe is told here.

1994-1995 TSI: AdDept Client: Michaels Stores

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This one was pure profit. Continue reading →

In retrospect it is difficult to choose among TSI’s AdDept clients. I enjoyed working with the people at most of them. If I were forced to pick the one that I liked the best, several would contend. However, if the question were changed to “Which of the AdDept accounts was the most profitable?”, the answer is clear. It was Michaels Stores, the national chain of stores selling arts and crafts. What a strange tale!

This is the old logo.

Our first contact with Michaels was a telephone call from the IT Director in, I am pretty sure, 1994. I don’t recall his name. He told me that the people in the advertising department had contacted him about automating the department’s functions. He had in turn asked IBM whether there was a third-party software product for retail advertising departments. Someone at IBM provided TSI’s phone number.

Since I had never even heard of Michaels,1 I had to ask him a few questions. He told me that they were a retailer that specialized in arts and crafts. Their headquarters was in Irving, TX, not too far from DFW Airport. They had no stores in New England yet, but they were almost everywhere else.

The sign at 8000 Bent Branch Drive.

The best news was that Michaels was an AS/400 shop. That meant that there would probably be little or no expense for hardware. It was a lot easier to justify the cost of the AdDept system without additional hardware costs.

The IT director was very impressed with our client list. Foley’s, Neiman Marcus, and even Macy’s were very familiar names in Texas. I felt compelled to tell him that our programs were written in BASIC. He was surprised at this, but not put off. He had actually taught a course in BASIC for the System/36. I told him that the AS/400 version was much more powerful. He invited me down to give a demonstration to the people from advertising.

I told him that I would like to talk with them before the demo. He gave me the name and phone number of the lady who was the assistant to the vice president of advertising. I don’t remember her name either. In my conversation with her I learned that the department had no system at all; everything was done by hand. There were only ten or fifteen people in the department. There was little or no internal structure. The VP had been there for many years, and everyone in the department loved him.

I flew down to DFW, rented a car, and made the short drive to Michaels’ headquarters. I set up the demo data and the AdDept programs on their AS/400. It was not necessary to install BASIC because the compiled versions of the program did not need it. As I suspected, the whole AdDept system was like a fly on their elephant. No expansion would be necessary unless it was for connectivity.

Google street view of Michaels’ headquarters.

The demo seemed to go pretty well. After I returned to Connecticut, I wrote up a proposal. If we included any custom code, I don’t remember it. It definitely was not much by the standards that we were accustomed to.

They accepted our quote immediately and sent TSI the deposit check. Shortly thereafter, I flew back to Irving and installed the system. I then spent an additional day or so showing the employees how to use the AS/400’s—I had booklets to help with this. I also outlined what needed to be done to set up the tables and enter their ads.

I spent time working with nearly all the employees of the department. I cannot say that I was impressed with any of them except for the lady that I spoke with on the phone. I had to do quite a bit of hand-holding, but we reached the point at which they were ready to put in the basic tables so that they could subsequently build their advertising schedules. We also set a tentative date for the second training session.

Bill Dandy.

The atmosphere in the department during this visit was much different from what I experienced before. In the short period of time that had elapsed since my demo the VP of advertising had “retired” and had been replaced with a much younger guy named Bill Dandy2, who lived in Glastonbury, CT, a suburb of Hartford. He had been working at Ames, a chain of discount department stores in Rocky Hill, CT, as, if I remember correctly, advertising director. I knew that Ames had just come through a very rocky period after its disastrous acquisition of and merger with Zayres,

Bill had not yet moved to Texas, but he was there in the advertising department at the same time that I was. We were introduced. He was cordial. He was surprised to learn that I was from Connecticut.

Before I left Michaels I had a short meeting with the IT director. He told me that he was really upset that they had brought in a new VP of advertising just as they were putting in a new system. He was worried that they might never get the system working because Bill Dandy might tell them not to use it.

As it happened, Bill Dandy was on the same American Airlines flight back to Connecticut that I was. I took a few minutes to speak with him even though he was in first class, and I was in steerage. This was well before 9/11; airplanes were much friendlier places back then. He remarked that the people at Michaels “had no idea how to run an advertising department.” I replied that I had noticed that. I emphasized that, on the other hand, I definitely knew how to organize the work, and the employees will learn as they learn the system.

That’s not what happened. The day after I landed back at Bradley I sent the invoice for delivery of the system to the IT director, and he paid it. The lady with whom I had dealt soon quit the advertising department. Bill Dandy brought in one of his employees from Ames, who had developed a set of spreadsheets there.

I never made another trip to Michaels. No one in the advertising department ever called for support, and so I assume that they did not use AdDept. That was OK with me. At the time TSI did not need another reference account in Texas3, and we had a lot of bigger fish to fry.

The Enfield store.

1. There has been a Michaels Store in Enfield for several years now. I bought something there once, but I don’t remember what it was.

2. Years later I crossed paths with Bill Dandy at Dick’s Sporting Goods. He had had several jobs in between, and he has had several more since his stint at Dick’s. His LinkedIn page can be found here.

3. In fact, however, the AdDept system later was installed at Radio Shack, Computer City, Color Tile, and Stage Stores. Stage actually had two a separate installation for its Peebles Stores.

1997-2014 TSI: AdDept Client: Stage Stores

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People and events at SRI/Stage Stores. Continue reading →

Everyone with whom I dealt—and there were a great many people over the course of seventeen years—-called the large retailer based on the south side of Houston “Stage Stores”. Even their LinkedIn pages refer to Stage Stores. However, our contracts1 were definitely with a company named Specialty Retailers, Inc. (SRI). The checks that we received were from SRI. This always seemed strange to me, but I managed to piece together from various sites on the Internet something of an explanation.

I spent many hours at the headquarters building on South Main. The visitors’ parking was perhaps thirty to the right of the palm tree.

SRI was incorporated in 1988. I was unable to discover who the original stockholders were or who ran the corporation. I also have no idea what, if anything, SRI did in its first four years of existence.

In 1992 the company purchased a Colorado-based retail company named Fashion Bar, Inc., which had seventy-one stores. The larger ones were branded as Palais Royal or Bealls2. The rest were known as Stage Stores. In the nineties SRI purchased a large number of other stores. Most of them bore the Stage logo. SRI’s headquarters at 10201 South Main3 in Houston was known locally as Stage Stores, and that name, as you can see in the photo, was displayed prominently over the entrance. The only stores that were actually located in Houston were branded as Palais Royal. I recall actually purchasing a leather belt in one of them. Many people in Houston knew about Palais Royal, but Stage Stores and SRI were probably not on their radar.

In late 1996 or early 1997 Doug Pease, TSI’s Director of Marketing, received a call from Brenda Suire4, the Director of Finance for Stage’s Marketing Department. Doug and I flew on Continental Airlines to Intercontinental Airport in Houston to meet with Brenda and some other employees. We were somewhat surprised by the length of the drive from the airport to Stage’s headquarters.

The blue route on the map at left suggests driving through downtown Houston. That route would only be considered if the trip was in the middle of the night. We always took the western loop on I-610.

On the second day in Houston I demonstrated the functionality and design of the AdDept system at the local IBM office. It went over very well.

I recently found in my notes from January of 2001 some of the items that were included in the contract that resulted from that presentation and subsequent negotiations.

I was surprised to discover that in 1997 Stage paid us over $8,000 for the expense payables, sales, MM Plus, and AdSEND (!) interfaces. No wonder we made so much money in those days. We have no choice but to give them the assistance they need to get the first three working. They don’t use AdSEND any more, thank goodness, and I am pretty certain that no one remembers that they paid for this. I don’t remember coding an expense interface for Stage, but we clearly did it in 1998.

As part of that initial contract the programmers at TSI wrote a great deal of new code. Stage Stores had more stores and fewer merchandise departments than the first few AdDept customers. In most of their markets they operated only one store. They were therefore much more interested in the ratios of media dollars spent on each store to the amount of sales that the store generated than in sales and expenses by department. To provide this information we wrote code to accept sales by store from the corporate systems. We also wrote a set of reports that showed the ratio of advertising expenses to sales for each store.

No one at Stage Stores had previously examined the broadcast (i.e., radio and television) advertising too carefully. The buys and audits were done by a lady (I don’t recall her name) from Reynolds Communications. She used SmartPlus5 software to make the schedule and audit the spots that each station ran. Stage soon discovered that she had been spending much too much money on television buys, especially in one-store markets in Louisiana. She knew that the company had a store in those markets, but she had no access to sales data.

As often seemed to happen in AdDept installations, this unexpected revelation allowed Stage Stores to save enough money on an inefficient use of funds to justify most of the cost of the entire system.

Brenda, Floyd, and Denise Bessette at TSI’s office.

Training and installation: In 1997 Stage sent three employees to TSI’s office in Enfield for several days of intensive training: Brenda, Floyd Smith6, and Hugo DuBois7. The emphasis of the training was on how to get the most out of the AdDept software in their environment.

Floyd was Brenda’s right-hand man in the business office. For the first few years—which (for reasons unrelated to the system) were rather chaotic—Floyd was the liaison between TSI and Stage. Hugo, a native of Belgium, managed the department’s local area network. He mainly worked with the production and creative people. I am not sure why he came to Enfield. Hugo’s only role in the project was to connect the network to the AS/400 and to install and configure the software on individual PC’s and Macs so that the department’s employees could access the AdDept system.

After the AS/400 had been delivered, and the network was connected to it, I flew to Houston to install the AdDept software and configure the database. Over the next few months I returned to help them deal with problems, to show them how to use new features, and to gather ideas about further development. I soon discovered that there was a better way to get from Connecticut to Stage. On most trips I flew on Delta or American and landed at Houston’s smaller airport, Hobby. Not only was it much closer to Stage, but there was usually a better choice of flight times.

Denise, Floyd, Hugo, the top of Brenda’s head, and Steve Shaw at TSI’s office.

Within a year or so the system was running fairly smoothly. Then in 1998 Brenda left Stage Stores, and for a while Floyd ran the advertising business office. His primary assistant was Toni Young8. One of the primary AdDept users was Renee Mottu9, who managed the expense invoices.

Fortunately for TSI, for the next year our involvement with Stage was reduced to answering phone calls and resolving mundane issues. I say “fortunately” because even though Stage Stores declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1999, the effect on TSI’s bottom line was minimal. The effect on daily life in Stage’s advertising department was for a considerable period much more severe. My notes after a visit to their headquarters in January of 2000 stressed that “Those poor people spend half of their time trying to persuade newspapers to run their ads.”

Karen is in the red jacket. The man who is obscuring Floyd is, I think, the Advertising Director.

Brenda was replaced by Karen Peltz, who had held a similar position at Foley’s10, the chain of department stores owned by the May Company that was also based in Houston. At the time Foley’s had been using AdDept to solve various problems in its advertising department for five years. I had worked with Karen at Foley’s, but only a little. Eventually Floyd moved to another position at Stage Stores, and Toni Young managed the day-to-day operations of the marketing business office thereafter.

Joanne’s LinkedIn photo.

I had only a few interactions with Joanne Swartz11, the Senior VP of Marketing, and the guy who was Advertising Director. I do not remember his name. I think that Karen reported directly to Joanne.

I dealt with two people in the media area. The woman’s name was Deidre Prince11. I do not remember the guy’s name, and it is not in the notes. I also remember Sandra Green, who used AdDept for buying newspaper space. She seemed to have a lot more difficulty using the system than anyone else did.

My notes: I discovered quite a few email messages that I sent back to TSI’s office from Stage. They are dated between October 1999 and January 2001. I’ll start withe the earliest one

The New Skin bottle and the shaving/ medical kit that I kept it in.

Not a great start today. I woke up at 6 AM. I got up and stumbled around the hotel room for a few minutes. I ironed some shirts and pants. At 6:55 I shaved. I looked in the mirror and saw Dracula. The blood was pouring from my lip. It took over 40 minutes for it to stop bleeding. I painted the New Skin on it. I got dressed and went to Stage. The New Skin held until almost 5 PM. Then I bled all over my shirt and pants, but this time I got it to stop in only about five minutes. Life on the road is so glamorous.

Renee Mottu is looking for suggestions as to how to remove two possums that have taken up residence beneath her mobile home. She rejected my idea of sending in a dachshund. She said that the possums would eat a dog.

I didn’t get to run tonight. Toni Young told me about a good trail. I put on my running duds, followed her directions, and drove around for about 25 minutes looking for the place. I never found it. I drove back to the hotel, got some food, and settled into my room to watch “Norm” and “The Drew Carey” show.

I am pretty sure that the woman with the big hair to the right of Floyd is Renee Mottu. I don’t remember the names of the other two ladies.

The first paragraph refers to a blue-black circle that appeared on my left lower lip in the nineties. It has never caused any pain, and it has not bled in the last decade or so. The story of Renee and her possum continued for a few visits. Before reading the above I had totally forgotten that for a while Norm McDonald had a network television show.

The following are from the subsequent two days on the same trip.

Toni and Floyd.

It was in the 80’s here yesterday, but it felt cooler. There was almost no humidity, which is rare for Houston. Floyd’s office was freezing. He has an electric heater in his office. We had it running most of the day even though we had six people crowded around his PC all day long. I brought sweaters, and I will wear one today.

Stage has network printers. We sent a 40-page report to Floyd’s printer about noon. It was still in SND status when I left at 6 PM. Floyd said it will sometimes not print until the next morning. Have they ever complained about this? I think the culprit may be the faxing. They were faxing all day yesterday.

I noticed at Stage that their floors must not be very level. The pieces of their desk units come together at angles. I also noticed that some units were raised off the floor as much as an inch on one side.

I don’t think that I could possibly in good conscience approve more than five months for the palm tree research project at this time.

How much do you think is the monthly fee that Reynolds Communications charges Stage to handle (including auditing and approving invoices from stations) their broadcast advertising?

I don’t remember the precise answer to the last question, but I am pretty sure that there were two digits to the left of the comma. The next set of emails came from the trip that began on January 11, 2000.

This Silver Medallion card expired many years ago.

I was dreading the flight to Atlanta. I envisioned myself standing in line with the common people now that my silver medallion card has expired. I was delighted to discover that my ticket still says “Silver Medallion.” Half of the flight got on with the medallion status group.

The phone on my seat on the flight from Hartford to Atlanta has a little LCD display. It discloses the NASDAQ closing price every few minutes along with advertisements for various ways to spend your money on the phone.

A lady on the Atlanta flight has striped hair. Not streaks, stripes. She has brown hair intermixed with ½” blonde stripes. I guess it is a look.

The flight from Atlanta to Houston sat in the gate for about 20 minutes. Then we got in the usual long line to take off. It must have been over 100 degrees in the cabin by the time we hit the skies. The guy in the seat in front of me pushed his seat all the way back. I have therefore had to turn 45 degrees and put my laptop on my lap. Even so it is uncomfortable to type. Thankfully there is no one next to me.

Listening to Kiri Te Kanawa sure beats listening to salesmen. On my last few flights the planes were full of families and college students. The passengers on both of Tuesday night’s flights have been mostly middle-aged men.

I still have a 45 minute drive ahead of me after this flight, which won’t get in until about 11:00 central time. I need some caffeine.

I used the air conditioner in the car all the way from the airport to the motel.

… Renee Mottu asked me to hire her. I told her that we needed experienced, or at least trained, programmers. She pressed me on this. She said that she was sure she could learn programming and that Floyd would give her a good reference. By the way, she said all of this in front of Floyd.

I’ll take a dachshund any day.

I remembered to ask Renee what happened to the possums living under her trailer. She said they were still there. I repeated my recommendation about the dog. She said she didn’t have one. I said she should borrow one. She asked me (!) if I knew anyone who had a dog she could use. Later I heard her walking around intoning “Does anyone have a dog I can borrow?”

I think that by 2001 Stage Stores must have been emerging from bankruptcy and resuming their strategy of expansion by purchasing other chains. The biggest of those was the acquisition of Peebles, a chain of 125 department stores based in South Hill, VA.

For some reason the management at Stage wanted to keep track of all expenses and co-op income of the Peebles stores separately. This was the first, but not the last, time that I installed a second AdDept database on the same AS/400. There was still only one set of programs, but each user had two AS/400 user ID’s. Their profiles determined which database would be used.

Here are some of my notes from January of 2001:

Leaping Lanny Poppo became one late in his wrestling career

The meeting in the afternoon went well. Joanne, the advertising VP introduced me as “the resident genius.” The project has been scaled down. We need to be able to do accruals at the store level for media and production at the store level. We also need to be able to do prepaid to expense. One unusual wrinkle is that they do not want to allocate creative costs to stores. They want to be able to get ratios of advertising expense to sales from AdDept, but we must be able to reconcile this with what is in the G/L.

I was glad that I was an outsider at this meeting. The politics was just barely below the surface. Chuck, who I think is the CFO, put Joanne on the spot about something that was not even on the agenda. Their explanations were not at all impressive. The experience had the happy effect of reminding why I did not like working at a larger company.

Toni Young says that she thinks that Renee Mottu never got rid of her possums.

It turns out that what Stage really wants to do most is to start using what they have and what we have previously proposed—SmartPlus interface, sales interface, and expense payables interface. They spoke of the SmartPlus interface as if it were a done deal. I don’t recall them purchasing this module. I brought back the file layout for the expense interface. I did not come back with a lot of specs for new projects. Believe it or not, they want another week of my time. Both Karen and Joanne (the Senior VP) seriously asked me to stay over the weekend and spend next week in Houston. I didn’t tell them this, but I don’t think that I could have lasted for 24 days.

01/07/01: I was surprised to discover that in 1997 Stage paid us over $8,000 for the expense payables, sales, MM Plus, and AdSEND (!) interfaces. No wonder we made so much money in those days. We have no choice but to give them the assistance they need to get the first three working. They don’t use AdSEND any more, thank goodness, and I am pretty certain that no one remembers that they paid for this. I don’t remember coding an expense interface for Stage, but we clearly did it in 1998. I will write up a quote to change it to work the way that the new documentation states.

Toni Young said that she thinks that Renee Mottu had not solved her possum problem.

I saw a sign at Stage Stores offering a $3,000 bonus to any employee that refers someone hired as a senior analyst in IS. The candidate must have five years of COBOL or Oracle experience.

Evidently I had already scheduled most of the rest of the month of January 2001 to travel to other clients so that if I had agreed to stay in Houston over the weekend and the following week, I would have been on the road for twenty-four days in a row! In those days we were charging $1,000 per day for my time. If Stage had still been in Chapter 11, I doubt that they would have proposed spending another $7,000 for another week of my presence. The bankruptcy court would have needed to approve the expense.

AdSend was a service offered by the Associated Press for sending the images of ad layouts to the newspapers. Hugo once told me that the company had twelve T-1 lines (TSI had one), and, according to him it was not nearly enough.

The neighborhood: Stage seemed to be a nice place to work. The headquarters was a fairly nice building located on the south side of Houston. They always provided me with a comfortable place to work, and there was ample parking in spaces reserved for vendors. The building also had a cafeteria that offered good food at very reasonable prices. I always ate lunch there, usually by myself. Many employees arrived at work early and ate breakfast there.

I took this photo of Enron Field under construction. It is now called Minute Maid Park.

It was not too easy to reach by a car driven from the south. Just north of the building Main Street became a divided highway with restricted access. Since I always stayed in a hotel north of the building, I had to drive my rental car to the first exit, drive under the highway, and then take the access road back to Stage’s driveway.

Most of Houston’s explosive growth had been in other directions. There was not much south of Stage’s location. However, just north of the building were the medical centers for which Houston was famous and Enron Field, which is where the Houston Astros played after the Astrodome was abandoned in 1999. I got to see (and photograph) the construction of the new stadium.

According to Yelp Marco’s is closed, but it still has a website.

I usually stayed in a Hampton Inn a few blocks from the stadium. My favorite restaurant was a Mexican place called Marco’s. Located in a hard-to-reach strip mall near my hotel, it was where I first became acquainted with tacos al carbon, one of my favorite dishes. Marco’s had ridiculously low prices. I often told the manager that they should open restaurants in the northeast. They could have doubled their prices and still filled the place every night.

During a couple of multi-day trips to Stage I met up with Sue’s cousin, Mark Davis, for supper. He worked for Exxon Mobil. We usually at an Olive Garden. The conversation was better than the food.

I jogged on the streets near the hotel nearly every evening when I visited Stage. I worked out a route that kept me on streets that had very little traffic.

Eventually I discovered a delightful dirt track that surrounded a golf course in Memorial Park. I drove there every chance that I got. A loop around the track was a little less than three miles. I usually did two loops. There is no chance that I would ever move to Texas. However, if I did, it would be to Houston, and the primary motive would be to gain access to this track every day.

The people: I was quite surprised by the LinkedIn pages of the people with whom I worked at Stage. We had not done much work for the company after 2008 or so. Consequently, I really had no idea who was still working there after that. I discovered that many of them remained at Stage Stores quite a long time after I last saw them or talked with them.

Brenda on Facebook.

TSI’s initial contact, Brenda, departed in 1998. I don’t know why she left Stage so soon after we did the installation. There might be a story there. I don’t recall ever hearing her name mentioned again.

I have many memories of Floyd. He was definitely a family man. He was always cheerful and business-minded. He always ate lunch at his desk. His office was not very large, but it had two doors, which he kept open. Some people used his office as a shortcut to get from one part of the marketing department to another. I was surprised when he and Toni seemed to switch jobs after Karen arrived. That was never explained to me. Floyd was employed by Stage Stores until 2011.

I was acquainted with Karen from her days at Foley’s. When she arrived at Stage, she made it clear to me that one of her top priorities was for the department to make better use of AdDept. A Republican, she assured all of us in January of 2001 that George W. Bush “will not be that bad.” After his two incredibly stupid wars and an economy that totally tanked while he and his cronies watched helplessly, most historian vehemently disagree.

Karen was, to my amazement, an avid biker—not mountain bikes, Harleys. She and her husband rode up to the big gathering in Sturgis, SD, at least once. I have always told people that if you saw me on a motorcycle, you can be certain that I will also be smoking a cigarette and showing off my piercings and tattoos.

Karen worked at Stage until 2013, twice as long as her stint at Foley’s. Her LinkedIn page lists no jobs after she left Stage Stores.

I remember that Hugo drove a Saturn—as did I during that period. His, however, was a coupe. If I had known that Saturn sold two-door cars, I would have bought one. Hugo stayed until 2017.

Toni and Floyd.

I did not really have much personal contact with Joanne, aside from that one meeting that they asked me to attend in 2001. I do remember that on one occasion I overheard Renee accosting her in the hallway. Renee said, quite loudly, “Joanne, I need a raise!” If Joanne replied, I did not hear the answer. Joanne left Stage Stores in 2012.

Toni apparently never left Stage Stores. The more that I worked with her the more that I respected her.

Somebody, Floyd, and Deidre.

When I met Deidre I asked her if she was related to Diana Prince. She did not know whom I was talking about. I guess not everyone was a fan of Wonder Woman on TV and in the comic books.

I think that Deidre was our main contact when I showed the AxN12 system to the department in 2003 or 2004. They enthusiastically endorsed it and used it until they outsourced the buying of newspaper space to an outside company. Deidre left Stage in 2011.

Epilogue: I think that our last major dealings with Stage were the implementation of AxN and the Peebles project. Nevertheless, they were still using AdDept when TSI went out of business in 2014.

Unlike most retailers Stage Stores continued to expand in the twenty-teens by acquiring other chains. In 2017 Stage acquired the assets of the Gordman’s chain of department stores and quickly converted all of them to sell off-priced items. This worked so well that they began to convert most of their other stores to the same format. In the November 2019-February 2020 quarter sales were up 19 percent14.

Then the pandemic struck and Stage Stores was stuck with a lot of debt and 738 stores that could not be expected to generate any revenue in the immediate future. The price of the company’s stock plummeted. In May of 2020 Stage entered Chapter 11 again, and in August it announced that it was liquidating all of its holdings.

1. For some reason SRI insisted on a new contract every year. We had contracts with all of our AdDept clients, but all of the others were open-ended.

2. There is also an unrelated chain of department stores with the Bealls moniker that is based in Florida. My unsuccessful pitch to that company is detailed here.

3. Years after TSI was closed SRI moved to an office building at 2425 West Loop South. I tried to use Google Maps to find the Main Street building with which I was so familiar, but I failed. I think that it must have been demolished.

4. Brenda’s LinkedIn page is here. I had trouble remember her last name. I sent an email to Floyd Smith asking if he knew it. He replied, “Sure. She is also on Facebook..” Confused, I asked again. Floyd wrote, “Suire is her last name.  Sorry about that spell check changed it last time.”

5. The Media Management Plus product was renamed SmartPlus. I think that this may have happened when the company was purchased by Arbitron, the rating service. On the Internet I found a very detailed description of what SmartPlus did. It is posted here.

Floyd’s LinkedIn photo.

6. Floyd’s LinkedIn page is here.

Hugo’s LinkedIn Photo.

7. Hugo’s LinkedIn page can be viewed here.

8. In 1997 I was only 49. I was shocked that year to learn that Toni Young, who was younger than I was, had a grandchild who was by no means an infant. Her LinkedIn page is here.

Toni’s LinkedIn Photo.

9. I found no LinkedIn page for Renee Mottu. Her Facebook page is here. I was surprised to discover that it contained even less than mine does.

10. A great deal more has been written about the AdDept installation at Foley’s. The account is posted here.

11. Joanne Swartz’s LinkedIn page can be viewed here.

12. Deidre Prince’s LinkedIn page is here.

13. AxN was the name that I gave to TSI’s Internet program for management of insertion orders that AdDept users sent to newspapers. Its system design is explicated here. The marketing history is described here. Stage’s use of the system was one of the main reason that the number of subscribing newspapers grew so large—at one point over four hundred!

14. The Philadelphia Inquirer picked up this story from the Washington Post and posted it here.

1996-2006 TSI: AdDept Client: Robinsons-May

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May Co. department stores based in North Hollywood, CA. Continue reading →

Robinsons-May was a chain of departments stores owned by the May Company. Its headquarters was in North Hollywood, CA. Most of its stores were in southern California, but eventually the advertising department in NoHo bought space and time for stores with various logos throughout the western states.

Rob-May’s headquarters was in the upper floors of this department store. It had the largest parking lot I had ever seen for one store, much more than needed.

TSI never pitched the AdDept system to the store’s advertising department. In 1996 the May Company decided to install AdDept in the department store divisions that were not already using it—Robinsons-May, Meier & Frank, Kaufmann’s, and Filene’s.These installations were quite different from the other systems that TSI had installed at May Co. divisions. They began with three days of rather intense sessions in TSI’s office in Enfield while the hardware was on order from IBM. We were teaching them about the system design of AdDept, and they were informing us about their policies and expectations for the system.

I later learned that the Northridge earthquake of 1994 had demolished the rest of the 25-acre Laurel Plaza, but Rob-May’s headquarters survived.

Previous May Co. installations had begun with a site visit in which I had learned about each department’s business procedures and priorities. TSI then presented a formal proposal for the base system and any custom code that I thought was needed. Only after the system had been delivered and installed did we provide training, and it always took place at the company’s location.

At some point in 1998 a group of people from Rob-May visited TSI’s office for orientation and training. Those sessions were also attended by people who would be involved with the installation at Meier & Frank (described here). Robert Myers, with whom we worked in the AdDept installation in the advertising department of the Foley’s division (described here), also was there to provide the perspective of a user of the system.

I found several photos that I snapped on the occasion of their visit as well as a dozen or so that I took in California. I also found text files containing notes from 1999-2003 that helped me remember some of the details of the installation and other happenings in my trips to southern California.

Rob-May’s training visit at TSI: The training sessions were held in what was ordinarily my office. All of my stuff was moved out. Everyone sat around tables, one of which I ordinarily used for a desk. Training booklets were provided for everyone. The photo to the lett was of one of the first sessions, in which Sandy Sant’Angelo (pink shirt on the right) showed the visitors how to sign on to the AS/400 and how the AdDept screens basically worked. Yes, we were still using “green screens”. We occasionally fielded complaints about them, but seldom from the people who actually used them.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is MF_Table-1024x679.jpg

The photo on the right was taken after one of the training days in Enfield. On the last evening we all went to the Mill on the River restaurant, but I think that this photo might have been taken at a different place.

Robert Myers was seated next to me. In the photo he is on the far right. The other two people on his side of the table were Rusty Hansen1, the Planning Manager in the Rob-May advertising department and Beverly Curtis-Frethy2, the Controller. Across from Rusty was Doug Pease, TSI’s VP of Marketing. I don’t recall the name of the fellow across from Beverly. He might have been in charge of the department’s network. The other three people in the photo were from M&F.

Rusty Hansen was our primary liaison with Rob-May in the critical first few years.

The installation trip: The first of many enjoyable trips to Rob-May occurred a few weeks after the training session in Enfield. Doug and I flew to Los Angeles. from Hartford. We probably changed planes in Chicago. In those days I liked to fly on American Airlines because I could get frequent flyer miles both from the airline and from Avis for rental cars.

On those early trips I usually stayed at the Beverly Garland Holiday Inn3 in the Studio City neighborhood of North Hollywood, but I am pretty certain that Doug and I were advised to stay at the Sheraton in Studio City on the first trip to set up the AdDept system. I found a photo that I took of its entrnce

Robert was also present for at least part of this to provide another user’s perspective and to assist where he could. .

Rob-May treated us to meals with key employees more than once on that first trip and at least once on every subsequent trip. The smiling guy on the right across from Beverly (red coat) was Mario, the Direct Mail Manager. His last name was nowhere in my notes.

The main purpose of the visit was to install the AdDept software in the AS/400 that IBM had delivered. I did all of that myself. The secondary purpose was to make sure that a regimen had been set up whereby the tables that the system needed—newspapers and other vendors, selling departments, the organizational structure for the merchandise, employees, etc. I also needed to show Rusty how to set up user profiles both for the AS/400 and for AdDept and how to deal with the printers and errors reported by the system. Finally Doug and I needed to talk to the managers of the various areas of the advertising department to try to discover special needs and any procedures that were unique to Rob-May. For example, invoices from the Los Angeles Times were recorded in a general ledger account that was different from the one used for all of the other newspapers.

Beverly, Karen, and Robert at Karen’s favorite restaurant in Beverly Hills. Where was Doug?

Finally, and perhaps, most importantly, we got to meet Karen Jones, the Advertising Director. She provided us with insight as to the department’s highest priorities. Karen and I hit it off very well right from the start. She was (unduly) impressed by an analogy that I made: “Memory is to disk as electricity is to magnetism. If you lose power, the system loses what is in memory but retains what is stored magnetically on the disk.”

In retrospect this does not seem like a great pickup line to me, but she definitely became enamored of me and treated me royally whenever I visited Rob-May. I once casually mentioned to some employees at Rob-May that “Karen Jones loves me.” Everyone agreed. I did not think that we made good headway in the first year or two, but Karen always seemed to think that I could do anything.

Sonia.

My goal from the first trip was for the software for one of the media (newspaper, direct mail, or broadcast) produce something useful. It was very important that the system not be regarded as on that they fed a lot of information but got little in return.

As I usually did, I concentrated on printing a schedule for their newspaper advertising and the faxing to some papers of a set of insertion orders. To that end I worked closely with Sonia Ban. I think that there was still work needed on the schedule when I left, but we did manage to send some faxed insertion orders to newspapers, and they were impressed by that.

My home for the week.
View from the courtyard of the BG Hotel.

The new system: For various reasons the people in the IT Department of the May Co. decided that Rob-May’s system should be upgraded in 1999. The original system had been purchased from and installed by IBM. The new system was a model 270, and it was purchased from Savoir Technology Group, a company that was authorized to sell IBM midrange systems. I flew out to Robinsons-May to complete the process by installing the AdDept software on the 270 and migrating the data.

I still have the notes that I sent back to TSI about this trip. At the time American Airlines had a direct flight from Bradley International to LAX. I flew out on a Sunday morning and arrived early enough (gaining three hours) that I could pick up my rental car at Avis, drive to Malibu, the home of my icon, Jim Rockford, and spend some time at the beach.

I went to Topanga State Beach, which is in Malibu. It was pretty nice but cool. I don’t think that it even reached 80 degrees today, and there was a fairly strong breeze from the north. I made a little camp. I lay on my beach towel, listened to my CD’s, finished my Ethan Coen book4, and watched the surfers and the rest of the California scenery. I took a long walk all the way up and down the beach. I got a lot of sun. I think I am as dark now as my last day in Hawaii5. If I had stayed any longer, I would have been sunburned.

I think this was the first time since Hawaii that I have just goofed off during the day for more than an hour.

Incidentally, Malibu is where Jim Rockford parked his trailer on the beach. The Rockford Files is by far my favorite TV show ever. I looked for the trailer, but I didn’t find it6.

Valley Village Park is the green area in the middle. NoHo West is the new name of Laurel Plaza. I usually drove on the 101. The exit went right into Rob-May’s parking lot.

What I discovered on Monday did not meet my expectations. I had started the day at dawn by driving my rental car from the Beverly Garland Hotel to the park that was halfway to Rob-May to get my five mile run in. Then I returned to the hotel, showered, got dressed, ate breakfast, and drove to Rob-May. The following excerpt provides a glimpse into what it was like to be a cowboy coder at the turn of the century.

I expected the system to be set up and the TCP/IP connection established. I figured that I would install AdDept and BASIC. I would also migrate the user profiles and the data libraries from the old box. Instead, I found that the system was still in the box. I had to set it up using the instructions in the box. This went OK. However, when I got to the point at which I had to do a system save, it balked and said that QGPL and QUSRSYS were not installed. I had Rusty look through his boxes to see if he had system software. He did. I spent many hours installing the operating system and PTF’s. I kicked off the system save just before I left.

I don’t suppose there is any great harm. Everyone will have to use the old system tomorrow. Their connectivity consultant is coming in tomorrow. I hope he will be able to tell me how to do the TCP/IP connection.

Keep in mind that I was not (and am not) an engineer. Far from it. I am not good at this type of thing. I am good at designing systems and writing code. Things were still FUBB on Wednesday evening, when I wrote the following.

The problems we had here were cabling. They decided to run the new system on Ethernet rather than Token Ring, which meant that they had to change the hub into which they were plugged. The IT guy had no empty sockets. He unplugged something he thought was unimportant. It brought down the e-mail system. Before he found this out he was out putting out a fire somewhere else. People had a hard time chasing him down.

I don’t know if I got blamed by anyone for the company’s lack of email that day, but it would not surprise me. The dispatch I sent on Friday at least contained some good news.

Yesterday went much better. Their new system is now almost completely functional. I still spent most of the time putting out small fires. I ran CMPPFM last night for every member of QBASSRC to see if I can find any more changes that the black box was missing. Robinson’s new system is incredibly fast. Reports that took over half an hour run in one minute.

I figured out how to copy the system directory entries over to the new box. I had to copy a bunch of files from QUSRSYS that start with QAOKP.

I copied ADDEPT, QGPL, and QUSRSYS from the old machine to the new one and named them ADDEPTOLD, OLDQGPL, and OLDQUSRSYS. Last night I ran the source comparison program on QBASSRC in ADDEPT. I printed out the differences and was surprised at how many there were. I then realized that the old box was a week ahead of the 150 at TSI. I thought for sure that I checked this. I created a change library but there was no time to install it. I will have to do it after hours. This cut down on the number of differences, but there is still be a pretty good number. There must be a flaw in my updating routine.

By Thursday evening Rob-May had successfully used the system for one full day. I left fairly confident that the people in TSI’s office could deal with any remaining glitches. However, one of the last notes that I sent back to the office was prescient.

These guys need a lot of training. Most of them do not know what an error is and what to do about it. Rusty just kind of lets them go on their own, even the ones that he works with.

I flew back on Friday. It was an excruciating experience. Seven and a half hours after I left the hotel I was still in LAX! I wrote the following when we had finally boarded.

LAX, which is my least favorite airport in the country, was playing some kind of shrieking sound over the intercom the last 20 minutes that we were there. I was afraid I would miss an announcement, so I had put my CD player and headphones away. A couple to my left has not one but two babies. They paid for two tickets, but were using two rows! After they made us get off7, the situation became so ridiculous that I took it easier. This lasted until about ten minutes ago when the stewardess whacked my elbow, which was not sticking out at all. At the time it was about 40 degrees in the cabin. After takeoff it went up to about 90. Now it is dropping again.

The new team: The turn of the century brought a lot of changeover among the employees at Rob-May with whom TSI dealt. My notes said that when I came to install the new box, Karen Elmo had been replaced by Heidi Houghton. I have a vague recollection of Karen Elmo, but none of Heidi. The notes also report that I worked with the Co-op Coordinator, Doyle O’Dell, who asked for a report of committed co-op v. actual. I was able to show report #DM594 to him. I took a photo of him; he evidently was happy with the report.

Mary Ng at Rob-May.

The biggest changes happened in 2000. Rusty Hansen was replaced by Mary Ng8, and Beverly Curtis Fethy’s replacement was Steve Ornee9. Mary was the new liaison with TSI, and we worked closely together for several years. Chad Sesser’s title was Newspaper Analyst. He reported to Karen Jones.

The notes that I have from the three-day trip in October of 2000 show that Mary was very direct about what she wanted from AdDept.

Direct mail was on the menu for lunch in the Rob-May cafeteria with (I think) Kyle Levine11, Mary, and Dan Rothbauer12, the Direct Mail Manager.

Mary said that their objectives are to do all of direct mail on AdDept, to pay all invoices on AdDept and to upload them to CAPS10, to use AdDept for closing, and to use AdDept for planning. This was way too much to cover in three days. Even with three days I was barely able to gather enough information to put together a game plan.

They wanted to know which division they should visit if they wanted to see how to use AdDept for direct mail. I recommended Kaufmann’s. Lord & Taylor uses AdDept extensively for direct mail, but they do not use our cost accounting for closing of direct mail.

Chad is on the left. I don’t remember the fellow with whom he was talking.

I also spent quite a bit of time with Chad Sesser. He told us that he had already downloaded sales from the mainframe at least once. He did not remember how he had done it, but he knew the name of the person in their Information Services department who had helped him.

On the last evening Karen Jones again sprang for supper at the restaurant in Beverly Hills. I might have gotten lost crossing the hills; I distinctly remember that I did on one occasion.

At the restaurant I noticed a blonde woman who was much more buxom than Ellie Mae Clampett. She was sitting with some other people a few tables away from the group from Rob-May. The most astounding thing to me was that for all of the time that we were there—which must have been at least ninety minutes—she was talking on her cellphone while paying scant attention to anyone at her table.

I should mention that I did not have a cellphone in 2003, and the people who talked on them loudly in airports bothered me a lot. I could not imagine anyone answering a phone in a restaurant, much less talking for an extended period. It seemed unimaginably rude to me, but I realized that I was partaking of a totally different culture in Milburn Drysdale’s town.

The projects: TSI did quite a bit of custom coding for Robinsons-May. We also helped them to integrate the data from M&F when the responsibility for managing the stores previously in that division was transferred to North Hollywood. Fortunately, their 270 was easily up to this task. I did not need to travel to California to install another upgrade.

Rob-May had two types of ads that I had never heard of: TMC’s and PWP’s. TMC stands for “total market coverage”. On certain days of the week or on special occasions some newspapers delivered a greatly reduced version of their paper to all households in an area that did not subscribe to the paper. If the same ad (ROP or insert) was run in the regular edition and this reduced edition, it had a higher rate because more eyeballs would see it.

I don’t remember what a PWP was, but I think that the concept was similar. Newspapers were desperate to retain the same level of revenue even as their circulations shrank in the twenty-first century.

My first visit to Rob-May after Mary Ng’s arrival triggered a very large number of fixes (changed for free) and requests for changes (quoted). This was definitely good news in that they were finally interested in taking full advantage of the system. On the other hand, it meant more pressure on the programming staff to produce what Rob-May—and other clients—needed in a reasonable amount of time.

The programming that was most valuable from TSI’s perspective was constructing an interface with another system. In some cases AdDept was the sending system; in others it was the receiver. Our expense invoice entry and claims system had the ability to feed the corresponding corporate accounting system (CAPS). Several changes had to be made to this module to accommodate peculiarities at Rob-May.

Our sales analysis and productivity programs used tables that were fed by the corporate sales system. Most of the May Co. divisions used the same ad agency (Doner) for broadcast. The agency sent a file to Rob-May. The departmental employees ran a program that TSI provided to update the broadcast section of the schedule in AdDept.

The last item on my notes from the trip in April of 2003 reported:

I spent ten minutes talking with Chad, Bobby McIntosh14, and the QPS programmer about the interface that they want to create. Nothing came of it.

Chad said that he will write up the details of what they would like the QPS interface to do. We can then quote it. The problem that he could not handle with query is how to treat sections. QPS has a job for each page, but the media schedule is on the book.

Bobby McIntosh was the Manager of Advertising Systems. The advertising production area used the Quark Publishing System (QPS) to manage the workflow of some of their direct mail catalogs and newspaper ads. I do not remember this meeting described above at all. If we were to undertake an interface like this, it would have been a massive job that would have taken at least several months. Therefore, I don’t think that we ever got to the point quoting construction of the interface.

My adventures in southern California: North Hollywood is best known for the unbelievable attempted bank robbery in 1997 at a Bank of America branch that was only a mile or so north of the Rob-May headquarters. The two robbers wore home-made body armor and bore much better weapons than the police. Foiled in their escape, they shot it out with the lawmen for an extended period of time. They were eventually killed, but not before the two sides discharged roughly two thousand bullets. Twelve police officers and eight civilians were wounded, but no one besides the perpetrators died.

A slightly fictionalized made-for-TV movie about the incident aired in 2003. No one from Rob-May ever mentioned it in my presence. If I had not seen the movie, I probably never would have known about it.

The LAPD Museum has an exhibit that features the perpetrators, their weapons, and their body armor. Because it was not opened until 2007, I never went there. By then Macy’s had taken over the May Co., and Rob-May was no longer a client.

OK, there was a little fire damage.

The most interesting thing that I saw in North Hollywood was an apartment building that had a large sign on it offering “Free Rent”. I took a photo of it from my rental car.

At the time TSI was actively looking for a new site for our office. I sent an email to Denise Bessette, who ran the office when I was out of town, about it. I suggested that we move our operation to North Hollywood in order to take advantage of this opportunity. If we had rented a handful of apartments, we would have had plenty of room to grow our business. For some reason she did not urge me to sign a $0 lease while I was in the vicinity.

One evening I decided to take a drive into Hollywood itself. I arrived at the corner of North Highland Ave. and Hollywood Blvd., where I saw a throng of people around the Ripley’s Believe it or not. The whole neighborhood was incredibly touristy. I did not even park my car. I drove back to my hotel in Studio City as quickly as I could.

For my last few trips to Rob-May I abandoned Beverly Garland and drove a little farther north to stay at a Hampton Inn. I did this for a couple of reasons. I had found that I liked Hampton Inns better than other hotels. I had an American Express card that I used for stays at Hamptons and other Hilton hotels. This paid off in free stays, which I used either for business trips or vacations.

I also was not enamored with the neighborhood in Studio City. I only found one place to run, and it was a little boring. I had to make several circuits of the path in the park, and the scenery no longer interested me. The biggest factor, however, was food. I had not been able to find many places that served tasty and healthy meals and also could be used—takeout or sit down—comfortably by a lone diner. My notes of July 1999 reported:

I had trouble finding affordable edible food in California. I ended up eating twice at Koo Koo Roo15, which has vegetables. The problem is that the only main courses they serve are rotisserie chicken and ¼ pound of turkey. I had the chicken both times.

The closest Hampton Inn was in Santa Clarita. The drive did not bother me much. The inconvenience was more than offset by the free breakfasts and occasional free snack in the evening. It was close to a large suburban shopping center. I don’t remember exactly where I ate, but I had no problem finding what suitable restaurants.

The best aspect of staying in Santa Clarita was that I discovered a really interesting trail in Quigley Canyon, a park that is very close to Gene Autry’s Melody Ranch. I really enjoyed running through the hills in the park. I had to climb a fairly steep incline to reach the trail that ran along a ridge. A sign at the trailhead warned about snakes and mountain lions, but I never encountered any wildlife while I was running.

Departure: I almost always flew back to Connecticut on a red-eye flight. I would leave LAX at 9 p.m. or later, arrive somewhere on the eastern side of the Mississippi at dawn or earlier, change planes, and then catch another flight to Bradley.

I always filled the gas tank before returning the car to Avis. I once made the mistake of stopping at a gas station in south-central L.A., an area that was close enough to LAX that the gas gauge would appear full. It was past sundown, and the place was not well lit. This was one of the very few times in my life that I felt afraid. I had lived for over three years in inner-city Detroit, but this area was fairly notorious because of the Rodney King incident.

What was scary about this gas station was that a few young men were walking around and approaching customers who were pumping gas. One came up to me and asked me something. I made some kind of noncommittal reply. He was annoyed with my response, but he did not do anything. I got back in my car and returned to the highway with deliberate speed.

On another occasion Karen Jones took me and a group of employees to a restaurant that was in either Burbank or Pasadena. I had my car, and after supper someone outlined for me how to get to LAX. Everyone assured me that I had plenty of time to make my flight. I probably did, but I made a wrong turn somewhere, and by the time that I arrived at the Avis counter, I was really pressed for time.

This was the first and only time that it took a long time to check my car back in at an Avis location. In every other instance no more than five minutes was required. However, this time there was a long line that moved very slowly. By the time that I returned the car and boarded the Avis bus, there was little chance of arriving at the gate in time for my overnight flight on Delta16 to Hartford by way of Atlanta.

When the bus let me off at the terminal I rushed up to the Delta desk with my suitcase. The agent confirmed that I had missed my flight. She then calmly booked me on a different flight that went to Bradley through Cincinnati and was leaving within the hour. I was not charged anything extra for this change, and I arrived in Connecticut less than a half hour later than my scheduled arrival time.

Epilogue: Rob-May used the AdDept system until 2005 or 2006 after the May Co. was purchased by Macy’s. On August 30, 2005, administration of the stores was transferred to another AdDept client, Macy’s West in San Francisco. The history of the installation at Macy’s West is detailed here.

The store in North Hollywood was turned into a Macy’s. It and its oversized parking lot stayed open until October of 2016. The entire acreage is still, six years later, in the process of being transformed into a mixed-use area renamed NoHo West. The retail part of the project evidently suffered from the emergence of the pandemic. A directory map can be found here.

An aerial photo of NoHo West taken in 2019, at which time it was described as “fully framed”.

1. Rusty Hansen does not seem to have an Internet presence in 2022, but I did receive a phone call from him once after he left Rob-May in 2000. Jim Lowe, TSI’s marketing person, and I later talked with him briefly at his new place of employment, Wherehouse Music in Torrance. That experience has been recounted here.

2. Beverly Curtis-Frethy left Rob-May in December of 1999. Her LinkedIn page is here.

3. Beverly Garland was an actress in Hollywood. Among many other roles she was Fred McMurray’s wife in the last few years of My Three Sons. She died in 2008, but her hotel still is thriving in 2022, and it is still a Holiday Inn.

4. I don’t remember reading a book by Ethan Coen. Since my notes did not mention the name or describe the plot, it might have been Gates of Eden, a book of short stories published in 1998.

5. This refers to the trip that Sue, Doug, and I took in 1995 to pitch the AdDept system to Liberty House. The description begins here and continues in two subsequent blog entries.

6. I am almost positive that I have seen every episode of The Rockford Files several times. The only bad one is the first one, the pilot, which had a different Rocky and was too much like Philip Marlow. Rockford lived at 29 Cove Road in Paradise Cove in Malibu. The beach that I went to was approximately twelve miles east of Paradise Cove.

At some point on one of my trips I took a late evening photo of the Los Angeles River. It is posted at the right. The river bed was concrete, and the trickle of water that it contained was laughable.

I could swear that back in the seventies I saw on an episode of The Rockford Files a chase scene that took place in the river itself. However, when I watched all of the episodes again (and again) in the twenty-first century first on MyTV and then on Peacock, I never saw such a scene. The show was recently removed from Peacock. I may never know for certain about that chase scene.

7. There was some kind of hydraulic leak that forced us to leave our scheduled plane and board a different one.

Mary Ng.

8. Mary Ng worked at Rob-May until 2005. Her Linked-In page is here.

9. Steve Ornee was employed at Rob-May until 2006. His Linked-In page is here.

10. CAPS was the mainframe corporate accounting system. It was located in St. Louis.

Kyle.

11. Kyle Levine worked at Rob-May until 2004. His LinkedIn page is here.

Dan.

12. Dan Rothbauer did not leave Rob-May until 2006. His LinkedIn page is here.

13. I still hate cellphones in 2022. While sitting in my right front pants pocket my first “smart phone” ordered pizzas on its own. I did not mourn when it somehow got fried by European current. That story, and a lot more is detailed here. Its replacement has not ordered pizza yet, but it did turn itself on while resting in the right front pocket of my blue jeans. I was playing bridge at the time.

Bobby.

14. Bobby McIntosh stayed at Rob-May until 2006. His LinkedIn page is here.

15. Koo Koo Roo went out of business in 2014.

16. By this time I flew on Delta whenever I could. Delta had the most connections to places that I often visited, and I had a Delta American Express card on which I accumulated thousands of valuable miles that I used for vacations.