AxN was an Internet-based product developed and marketed by TSI. It allowed advertisers to send insertion orders (reservations for advertising space) to newspapers. It also managed communication between the two parties that culminated in the newspaper rep confirming the order. The process that Denise Bessette and I employed in designing and creating AxN, including the division of labor, was described here. Details of the system design are posted here.
Part 1 of the marketing of AxN is posted here. The narrative concludes with the signing of a contract by representatives of Belk1, the department store chain based in Charlotte, NC, to purchase AdDept, TSI’s administrative system for advertising departments of large retailers. Part of the plan for the installation was to use AxN for insertion orders. At the time none of the other AdDept retailers were using AxN yet.
In the previous thirty or so AdDept installations the scheduling of newspaper advertising in AdDept had almost never been very difficult. It was always the first part of the project that we got to work smoothly.
I encountered an unexpected problem in that area at Belk. The company had recently consolidated the administration of four of its divisions into the office in Charlotte. Each of the four previous newspaper coordinators was now working in the office there and managed the advertising for the same papers that they had before. Usually, I trained the manager of the coordinators or just the AdDept liaison about how the programs worked. He or she trained the individual coordinators. In this case there was, at least initially, no manager. I was expected to train each of the coordinators separately. Most of them had been scheduling ads manually and ordering them over the phone. Some had never even worked on a computer before. Worst of all, all four soon realized that there was no way that Belk would need four coordinators when AdDept was up and running. There was not much incentive to cooperate.
Eventually these issues were all resolved, but the delays that the process caused meant that the rollout of AxN would be postponed for a month or two. That was a headache, but it actually proved to be something of a blessing for TSI. It gave Denise and me some time to develop a plan for getting the newspapers aboard. Here is a list of the most important items:
TSI’s accounting system would needed to be changed to accommodate the newspapers as customers. Because the client file used a three-digit number as the identifying field, this task involved a significant amount of programming.
Belk would provide TSI with a list of its newspapers. For each we needed the contact name, phone, email, and address. These would be entered into TSI’s accounting system as (potential) customers. The three-character codes organized them by state. We also needed the name and contact information of the advertising rep at the paper.
I wrote a letter to be sent to the newspapers. It would be signed by someone at Belk but mailed by TSI. The purpose was to ask them to participate in a three-month test period of AxN with no charge. Afterwards they would be asked to continue to use the system with a monthly fee roughly equal to the price of one column inch of advertising. One full-page ad in a broadsheet contained over 120 column inches.
Each newspaper would be sent the AxN: Handbook for Newspaper Users, a copy of which is posted here. TSI would also provide telephone support, but we hoped that it would seldom be needed. We knew how to make systems that were easy to use.
At the same time the newspapers would be sent a contract for the test period. It emphasized that there was no charge for three months and that TSI was not acting as an agent for Belk. It also limited TSI’s responsibility to making a good-faith effort to address all reported problems in an expeditious manner.
After a week or so someone representing TSI would need to call the newspapers that had not returned contracts.
As soon as signed contracts were received, a TSI employee would activate the papers on the company’s accounting system and on the AxN database. Then he/she would notify the appropriate coordinator at Belk to change the field on each variation of the newspaper’s record on the pub table in AdDept.
I would carefully monitor the processing of the first batch of orders. The system had never been stress-tested.
A second letter (from me) and a permanent contract would be sent to the paper after two months. It emphasized that either side could cancel the contract at any time with one month’s notice. The language about agency and responsibility was the same as in the contract for the test period. The starting date was at the end of the test period. There was no ending date.
When the contracts were returned the client records in TSI’s accounts receivable system were marked as active, and the newspapers were billed for the first month or quarter (their choice).
After a week or so someone representing TSI would need to call the newspapers that had not yet returned contracts.
This was by and large a good plan, but it had one rather obvious flaw. None of TSI’s current employees was suitable to play the role of “someone representing TSI” in steps 6 and 11. The programmers, including Denise, were far too busy with request for custom work in AdDept. The slot of marketing director at TSI was empty. I did not trust the administrative person to do this. That left only me, and I was notoriously bad at interactions by telephone. I have always hated talking on the phone, and people can often sense my discomfort. Besides, I wrote all of the new code. It was unquestionably a bad idea for the developer and the sales rep to be the same person. The sales person needs to know how to work with the potential customers, not the machine.
Denise devised a great solution to this problem. She informed me that one of her husband Ray’s cousins, Bob Wroblewski, sometimes did similar work for companies on a commission-only basis. She also came up with a sliding scale of commission rates. It was high in the first year and decreased in subsequent years. After three (or maybe five—I am not certain) years, there would be no commission.
We invited Bob, who lived in Rhode Island, to come to TSI’s office in East Windsor to discuss the matter with us. He liked what he heard, and I was favorably impressed with his experience and communication skills. He agreed to take on the job for Belk’s papers. After that we would assess how well the arrangement worked for both parties.
In reality it worked very well indeed for all of us. Bob was able to persuade all of the papers to agree to the test period. On that fateful day that Belk sent its first batch of insertion orders to TSI my recollection is that more than one hundred papers were involved. The AxN programs flawlessly handled the orders and wrote the appropriate records on the data files. Emails were then sent to all of the newspaper reps. Very little time lapsed between the sending of the emails and the reps signing on to look at the orders. That surprised me a little.
Then a terrible thing happened. TSI’s trusty AS/400 locked up! No one—not even TSI employees—could do anything. I signed on to the system console, for which the operating system always reserved the highest priority. I was able to examine several job logs, and I determined that one of the steps that was being executed as soon as a rep looked at an order was performing an unexpectedly high amount of disk processing and using an inordinate amount of memory. I killed the interactive jobs for all of the newspaper and made sure that no one else could start a new session until the problem was addressed.
This was one of the tensest situations that I had faced in my career. I had to fix this problem, and fast. The step that I had determined was jamming the system would not be necessary until the rep decided to print the order or maybe it was the option to download the order as a csv file. I changed the code on the fly so that the onerous step was postponed until it was necessary. I hoped that that would spread out the activity so that the system was not overwhelmed right after a new order was processed.
There was no time to test what I had done. I removed the routine from the initial opening of the order and installed it in the routine that might be executed later. We then sent an email to the papers with an apology and a request that they try to sign in again. This worked much better, and, in fact, AxN never had any notable performance problems again.
After Belk had been running successfully on AxN for a few months, we decided to take our show on the road. Bob and I flew to California to meet with employees from two AdDept clients, Robinsons-May2 and Gottschalks3. We enjoyed a pretty good relationship with both of them, and I wanted them to feel comfortable about working with Bob. I think that we spent only one afternoon at each location.
I don’t remember the details of the travel arrangements. We must have rented a car and driven from the L.A. area to Fresno. I don’t remember where we stayed or what we ate. I only remember that I was limping when I got off the plane, and I explained to Bob that I had tendinitis in my IT band. He said something like, “Don’t we all?”
Robinsons-May was quite interested in what we were doing with AxN, but they did not go crazy over it. When I later asked them to let us approach their papers, however, they quickly agreed, and Bob was eventually able to sign up almost all of their papers, including the L.A. Times and the Los Angeles News Group, which included the Daily News and a group of suburban papers.
Some IT guys attended our demo at Gottschalks. They uniformly thought that our approach was great. However, the newspaper manager in the advertising department, whose name was Stephanie Medlock, had never used the faxing feature, and I never persuaded her to use AxN either.
The trip was worthwhile. The people in both advertising departments had an opportunity to meet Bob, and he had a chance to see what it was like in an advertising department. Bob I got to know each other a little better, and Bob got a better idea about how AxN fit into the process. However, I don’t think that he ever comprehended why it would be very difficult for us to approach advertising departments at places like Home Depot or Walmart—who did not have AdDept—about using AxN.
Jenifer, Ali, Denise, and Bob at L&T’s office in Manhattan. This was the only photo of Bob that I could find.
Bob also accompanied Denise and me on a trip to Lord & Taylor4, the May Company division with headquarters in New York City. We took Amtrak and a taxi. I did not have any recollection of that trip at all until I found the photo that Bob appeared in. I don’t know when we went, but it must have been before 2005, the year in which I purchased my Cascio point-and-shoot camera for our second trip to Italy and stopped purchasing disposable cameras.
We met with Jennifer Hoke and Ali Flack, the two newspaper coordinators. I know this because I wrote their names on the reverse side of the photo that I found.
On the morning of October 14, 2003, I served as a pall bearer at a funeral in Passumpsic, VT, for Phil Graziose, the husband of my wife Sue’s good friend, Diane Robinson. After the funeral I drove to Providence, RI, for the wake of Bob’s wife. I have only attended perhaps a dozen wakes and funerals in my adult life. It was stunning to do it twice in one day.
Bob continued to represent us in dealings with newspapers until we ran out of prospects. From the beginning it was a mutually beneficial relationship. Bob earned a good amount of money in commissions, and the AxN product complemented AdDept very well right to the end.
Over the years Bob and I had very few interactions other than the ones that I have described. Neither Denise nor I ever monitored his conversations with the newspapers. I always suspected that he may have overstated how important AxN was to the retailers who paid for the newspaper ads, but what do you want? He was a salesman.
1. The people and events involved in the installation of AdDept at Belk and TSI’s relationship with the company are described here.
2. Robinsons-May was the May Company division based in North Hollywood, CA. My adventures in Tinsel Town are recounted here.
3. Gottschalks was an independent chain of department stores based in Fresno, CA. The company’s AdDept installation—including one of the worst experiences of my life—is discussed in some detail here.
4. The twenty-year relationship between TSI and L&T is explored in the blog entry posted here.
In the fall of 2002 I received a call from Bob Bowden, the IT Director at Belk, a chain of department stores that was (and still is in 2023) based in Charlotte, NC. He said that the company was closing its four regional divisions and bringing all the administration into Charlotte. He also told me that Belk was an AS/400 shop, and he was very happy to learn that we had developed software on that platform. He asked me to schedule a trip to Charlotte to demonstrate the system and to talk with the people in the advertising department. One of those people was Ellen Horn. I already knew Helen from the time that she was employed at Hecht’s (introduced here), but that was nearly a decade earlier.
A direct flight to Charlotte to 2 hours and 5 minutes.
This call was a godsend for TSI. The pool of prospective AdDept users had shrunk dramatically over the dozen or so years that we had been marketing the product to large retail advertisers. Moreover, our existing clients had at that point curtailed their desires for custom programming. TSI’s programmers were still busy, but the future did not appear as bright as before. Furthermore, we were without a marketing director, and our most recent efforts at mailings had turned up nothing. Best of all, Belk already had AS/400’s. Hardware costs would therefore be minimal, and we did not need to worry about convincing anyone of the critical importance of a relational database or the viability of the AS/400.
The AmeriSuites Airport hotel in Charlotte. I am pretty sure that it is no longer in business.
I immediately made arrangement in late October for a trip to Charlotte, a city with which I was somewhat familiar because of the time that I had spent there working with the Cato Corporation (introduced here). There were several direct flights on US Airways between Hartford and Charlotte.
I stayed—because of Bob’s recommendation—at the AmeriSuites hotel that was directly across the street from the headquarters building. Belk had a discounted rate there. The hotel had a shuttle service to and from the airport, and so I did not need to rent a car. That was fine for the first trip, but after the installation and the contract I rented a car so that I did not feel imprisoned.
I sent them a tape of the AdDept system and the sample data that I would use in the demo. Bob had told me that Belk had a nice theater in which I could make my presentation. People from the IT, Advertising, and Accounting departments would be in attendance. As usual, I spent the first day talking with users. In the morning of the second day I made adjustments to the demo system and tested everything that I planned to show.
Travel to Belk was easy. US Airways had several direct flights daily from Bradley International to Charlotte. Belk’s headquarters was a short drive from the airport.
I have been able to locate copies of fewer of my notes written for TSI’s employees, especially Denise Bessette, TSI’s VP of Application Development than I thought likely. I discovered notes from fifteen trips, as well as many outlines of programming projects. However, there are two big gaps in the notes that I brought back to TSI’s office. There are no reports dated between March of 2003 and December of 2006, and the last set is for February of 2009. I am almost certain that I made trips in 2004 and 2005, and I am absolutely positive that I visited Belk several times after 2009. Unfortunately, I have needed to rely on my memory for both of those periods.
Belk was unlike any other AdDept installation. The spacious and modern headquarters that stood in the midst of dozens of trees was about to be deluged with employees transferred from the other four divisions. It would undoubtedly be true that many of them would be superfluous in the consolidated setting. After all, cutting expenses, especially payroll expenses, was the usual motivation for the move. In the case of the advertising department, at least, the introduction of AdDept was bound to streamline many tasks.
AS/400 model 720.
One thing about the AS/400 setup at Belk really surprised me. Here is what I wrote:
AdDept resides on an AS/400 model 720 running V4R5. The system is also used for the Lawson accounts payable and general ledger systems and J.D. Edwards systems that are used for co-op billing and job costing. They hope to eliminate the J.D. Edwards system. They plan to upgrade the system in 2003. Dean Hajnas, who works for IBM, is the system operator for the AS/400. IBM manages the system for them. All requests for new user profiles and changes to user profiles must go through IBM. Belk employees are not allowed to touch the hardware.
That’s right; the Belk IT employees had absolutely no control over their own hardware. They had outsourced the management of the system to IBM. Quite a few IBM employees worked full-time in the Belk complex.
I met with a large number of people on the first visit, most of whom were new to me.
Ellen Horn’s title is media manager. Greg Case1 and Jennifer Lennon2 are ROP coordinators. I think that Bob Alexander3 is, too, but he was out. Debbie Edwards does broadcast, but I think that she works for Ellen. Steve Kelly4 is the Business Manager. Steve Yeager5, who is responsible for the massive network of spreadsheets, and Jan Adams work for him. I am not sure who is responsible for what. Tim Scott6, Miriam West (print production), Sherry Webb, and Amy Petrone attended the direct mail meeting. The last two run the data base marketing (Harte Hanks) system.
Ellen, Greg, Jennifer, and Steve Yeager have usable user profiles. They use PComm (like the May Company). They have one printer, which is everyone’s default – PRTA209. It was out of toner on Thursday.
The project manager for the AdDept installation worked in the IT department. Her name was Pat Cagle.7 If we needed something fixed in the system specs, the operating system, or the hardware, we dealt with her. She knew next to nothing about advertising.
I am pretty sure that this is Ellen Horn.
I remember that on one of the first visits Pat gave me a form on which I was asked to describe the AdDept system. I tried to get out of it, but she insisted. I composed a few paragraphs and gave them to her. I never heard about it again. What we ended up doing probably bore little resemblance to my essay.
The headquarters building had quite a bit of security. Passage through some doors required an employee badge; others required special badges. When visitors first arrived, the receptionist made a badge for each person who had an appointment, but the visitor’s badge did not allow them to go through the secure doors, and they still had to wait for an employee to come down to the reception area to escort them. Anyone who went out had to go through this again.
The alternative—which I admit that I sometimes employed—was to wait for an employee to come in or out and sneak through before the door closed. I occasionally just stuffed my badge in my pocket. Nobody ever demanded to see it. I always turned the badge in at the security desk before going back to New England.
Mt. Airy.
I learned a little about the company’s history. Belk at the time had more than 200 stores and used 180 newspapers. Their biggest markets were Charlotte and Raleigh. Their stores were also in a large number of small markets, including Mt. Airy, NC, Andy Griffith’s home town and the model for Mayberry. I later learned from Steve Yeager, who kept a copy of a book about the company’s history on his desk, that it was a privately-owned corporation dominated by men named Belk. Over the years they made partnership deals with other retailers, most of whom they eventually bought out. That part of the operation, which began in 1888, had ended, but there were still a sizeable number of high-ranking executives in the building with same four-letter last name. Belk had that, but almost nothing else, in common with the Cato Corporation.
I can find no notes for it, but I must have made another trip to Belk after the one in which I collected specs for the Design Document and the detailed proposal. I remember another meeting in the theater in which I demoed the AdDept system. It was attended by a Vice President in the Accounting Department. Although I no longer recall his name, he made quite an impression on me. When I mentioned that I would not be able to come to Belk on a specified date because I had minor dental surgery scheduled, he said that I could come anyway, and he would do the job in the evening. I asked him if amateur dentistry was one of his hobbies. He only smirked.
Later, when I talked about using a fax card on the AS/400 for insertion orders, he volunteered—with no prompting—a question about whether the Internet could be used for transmission of the orders. That was how the subject of AxN was first mentioned at the first retailer to use it in an operational setting! The design of AxN is described here. The story of its marketing begins here.
I undoubtedly stayed at the AmeriSuites that day as well. It might have been on that occasion that I had my first opportunity to eavesdrop on Italians speaking their native tongue. There were very few people at the hotel. When I went to breakfast, the hotel’s restaurant was empty except for a small group of Italian men. I was not very far along in my study of the Italian language (introduced here), but I was delighted at my success at following a substantial portion of the conversation of my fellow diners. My wife Sue and I by that time had already scheduled our first trip to Italy for May of 2003. That journey has been described here.
The first Belk store was called New York Racket.
I remember trying to train the four ROP ladies from the divisions that had been discontinued. There might have been a fifth person supervising them. I made the long trek from the Advertising Department to the area that had been set aside for them. I have no records of any of their names, but I was required to give personalized training to each of them one at a time.
What is wrong with this picture? No, not the old photo; I mean the scene I depicted in the above paragraph. In the first place it surely would have been more cost-effective to have me conduct an ROP class that included all of them or, if that was not feasible, to train one person and let that person train the others. What kind of business pays an outsider $900 per day plus expenses to provide individual training for inexperienced clerks?
That was not the worst part. All of these ladies had moved to Charlotte so that they could continue doing the jobs to which they were accustomed. My training emphasized how fast ads could be entered and how fast and easy everything else was after that. The unfortunate result was that they all had to be comforted and assured that there would still be a place for them in the Belk organization. Maybe so, but I don’t think that it was in ROP.
I remember that shortly after these training sessions someone, perhaps Steve Kelly, asked me how many employees were required to manage ROP in other AdDept installations. I told him that it was hard to say because some also produced advertising schedules and some also verified charges from newspapers. However, I could think of no installation that had more than a couple of people.
By the time of my trip to Belk in February of 2003, data entry was in full swing, and I needed to make sure that everything was going smoothly.
It was sleeting on the evening that I arrived in Charlotte. I must have rented a car because I remember that the short drive from the airport to the hotel was horrendous. The roads had not been treated at all, and everyone was driving at less than 15 mph (and could not get up hills) or more than 50 mph (and was skidding this way and that). I was one of the few drivers on the Billy Graham Parkway who was doing a safe moderate speed. This kind of weather occurred at least once a year in New England. The temperature was above freezing; if the roads had been treated, they would only have been wet. Even if they weren’t, most New England drivers would compensate in a reasonable manner.
This is what a “state of emergency” looks like in Charlotte, NC.
I made my way around all of the idiotic drivers to the hotel. There I found out that my reservation had been moved to another AmeriSuites hotel several miles away in Arrowood. When I protested, the lady informed me that the entire city was in a state of emergency. I got in my car and drove south to Arrowood.
The next morning I drove to Belk. I reported in my notes what I found: “Belk did not open until 10:30 on Monday because of ice on the roads. Many people came in later than that. Some key players did not make it in on Monday at all.”
I mused to myself that I should have driven down to Charlotte in a truck filled with salt. I could have made a fortune on the black market.
I accomplished very little on that trip. The only good thing about this trip was that I found a better hotel for future trips.
The first priority in 2003, of course, was to get all of the ads entered into the AdDept database for the season that started in February. The people in the Advertising Business Office tried to run parallel financial closings for February and March. I spent a lot of time creating queries for them/ I worked most closely with Russ Taylor8 and the controllers, Karen Pardue9 and Debbie Morris10.
Eventually this installation included many interfaces with other applications, most of which also running on AS/400s. The implementation of the first interface involved the uploading of quantities for their direct mail and insert pieces. There were several disconcerting entries about it in my notes from the March trip:
I wrote a program for handling the direct mail quantities file, a sample of which I did not receive until Tuesday. It is DN172, which is option 1 on BELKDM.
I wrote instructions for uploading the quantities file and sent them to Steve Kelly, Steve Yeager, and Pat Cagle. Steve Yeager forwarded his copy to Tim Scott.
Tim Scott said that it takes six hours to run the query to produce one file for a month which shows direct mail quantities by store by month. Tim and his two employees cannot use the system while the query is running! As of Friday, there were still no quantities.
Belk must come up with a process for getting the store quantities file to the IFS. They do not have Client Access.
One of the early finance meetings at Belk. The short woman at the far end of the table is Karen Pardue. On her left are Steve Yeager and Steve Kelly. I think that the blonde with the big red mug is Debbie Morris. I don’t recognize the others.
Client Access was an IBM program that provided both terminal emulation and the ability to transfer files from or to a PC client. IFS stands for Integrated File System. Version 4 of the AS/400 operating system provided for storage of several types of files, including PC files, on the system. I cannot imagine a query on the native file system of an AS/400 taking hours. This is what the system does best. I wonder what system Tim Scott’s program was on.
I found nine files that contained lengthy outlines of closing issues that were dated April 15 through 17 of 2003. I evidently spent a week at Belk trying to close to close February and March in AdDept. There were still a lot of open issues on both files for Friday.
In May there are five .prn files (probably output files from queries on some system) that are labeled “Your CoQuery Mabelk”. They appear to have one line per store. I have no recollection about any of them, and the formats do not look familiar.
Denise Podavini.
There are no other files of my notes until 2006. I cannot explain the gap, but there was a huge change in attitude when Denise Podavini11 took over management of the Advertising Business Office in December of that year.
My notes from the visit in December of 2006 are fragmentary, but I also found several documents dated in that month in a folder called “Month End” in the Belk folder. Two of them were FAQs. The first, which was less than a page in length, explained the steps involved in setting up store allocation percentages for each pub in every media. The second, which was a little longer, explained how AdDept approached the challenge of allocating costs to stores. I have posted it here.
The others were specific “game plans” for Belk. One was a nine-page document that outlined the procedures for allocating all advertising costs at Belk. It had five “tracks”: I have posted this impressive document, which includes a few action items, here. The other two dealt with the difficult but critically important (but uncomfortably complex) process of making sure that all of the systems and processes involved were in sync. They have been posted here and here.
I should emphasize two things. 1) The processes described in these documents required that all ads in all media and all expenses and credits be recorded in AdDept. 2) All of the interfaces between AdDept and the other systems must have already been designed, constructed, and at least to some extent tested. Therefore, a great deal of interaction between Belk and TSI must have occurred in the years between 2003 and 2006.
At any rate the pace definitely picked up speed under Denise’s leadership. The January 2007 meeting involved a new project called the Printer-Shipper Report. Vee Hefney12 and Kari Bates13 produced this report in order to indicate to the printers and/or shippers the quantity of copies of each direct mail or insert piece to be produced and delivered. TSI had already delivered AdDept’s version of this report, but on this trip I gathered specs for changes to it, for a method of automating delivery of the information to the advertising records area, and for several related projects.
Special events was usually the last area of an advertising department that I dealt with. The people there managed unique in-store promotions like celebrity appearances and trunk sales by vendors. During the July visit to Belk I met with Leigh Ann Lyle, Rochelle Franklin15, and Bridgett Barbee15, who were involved with this area. Sixteen years later I can summon forth only a dim recollection of these meetings.
I also spent a lot of time with Denise Podavini on this and every other visit. I returned to the office with a fairly long list of requests. By this time we had produced forty-two programming quotations for Belk in addition to those listed in the Design Document and initial proposal. Most of the quotes had been accepted, delivered, billed, and paid for.
The October trip was notable for two things. It was the first mention of the application that someone had developed for managing vendor contracts in Lotus Notes17. Sanjay Singh18, an IT employee, said that he would provide the layout of a file that we could import into AdDept. The other notable item was that the top item on the to-do list was Belk’s fifty-ninth request for custom programming.
My visit in May of 2008 centered on co-op. The fact that I still needed to do setup work in this area five years after the installation puzzled me when I researched it. Perhaps the use of the Lotus Notes program for co-op contracts affected the progress. Although several problems were uncovered, we must have dealt with them. The last line on my update report is “Everyone was very appreciative of the work. They can definitely see the value of this project.”
We did not receive requests like the following every day:
The Lotus Notes database will at some point in the not too distant future be replaced with something. So, they would like the BELKLNI menu to be called BELKCOOPI, and they would like all references to Lotus Notes to be changed to co-op contract database or something like that.
By this time Belk had acquired most of the Parisian (introduced here) stores. TSI had to deal with several problems involving the transition.
I made two trips in June. The first one dealt mostly with issues in the interface with the co-op contract database. I also spent a fair amount of time cleaning up the co-op transactions and reconciling the co-op accrual entry for May. Denise P. and I had to make several changes to the .csv file for the journal entry to be uploaded to Lawson. The last entry in the notes for this trip had very good news.
I ran the actual cost accounting by store for February through May in order to check the results of DACAJOBST. I could not find any problems. In all cases the total media and production costs seem to match and the store breakdowns seemed reasonable.
I came back later in the month to help with the reconciliation of co-op for June. The list of open issues after that visit contained only five items, and three of them were requests for new programming.
The topic for the first visit in September was the merchandise cost accounting system, which required another interface with the sales system. This one was for sales by department by month. It was very challenging to try to reconcile the results of the merchandise allocation program with the results of the program that allocated costs to stores. I don’t think that I ever attempted this at any other installation. Nevertheless, after quite a number of adjustments, I reported that “July matched the store cost accounting in media, production, and co-op.”
The last entry on the Issues page of my notes was short but powerful: “I got the specs for a gigantic use tax/sales tax18 project.” My write-up of the project’s specs can be found here.
I came back the next week to help finish the cost accounting reconciliations and discuss the details of the use tax project. Denise P. needed something to address the immediate problem of calculating the use tax liability in each jurisdiction.
I wrote five queries in ADVQRY for Denise P. so that she could estimate their use tax liability for this season.
BOOKS092 creates a file with all direct mail and insert ads that have printing costs. It must be run first.
BKMED092, BKPOST092, and BKOTH092 calculate the costs for media, postage and other for all the ads in the file created by BOOKS092. The results are stored in files.
BKALL092 ties the four files together to print the report.
I think that this was the first time since the Amtrak rides to Macy’s East back in the eighties that I visited an AdDept client on two consecutive weeks.
The use tax project was installed in January of 2009. It seemed to go pretty well. One issue that was reported exemplifies how complicated this project was.
Request #9519 stated: “At month end, if the ad ran in that month or a previous month, the sales tax amount will be moved to the (liability) account specified on the sub-account. Thus, sales tax will be treated like every other sub-account.” This is not quite correct. They will have one sales tax sub-account, but there are sales tax liability accounts for each store. One store’s account will be associated with the state. The amount should NOT be allocated to stores when the month end program is run. Instead, a store should be specified on the sub-account, and 100% should go to that state.
I also spent more time reconciling the store and departmental cost accounting. At this point they were using both of them extensively.
Of course, they needed to project the cost of use tax when they were planning. The last entry for the visit was this question to Denise B.: “Denise P. needs the projected use tax for her reports. Is that ready? She hopes to have the projected costs by store the first week of February.”
The last file of notes that I have is dated at the end of February, 2009. I am almost positive that I returned to Belk several times after that, but I have no record of any of those trips.
At some point after this Denise P. told me that Belk planned to outsource the buying of newspaper space. I told her that this would have a dire, perhaps even catastrophic, effect on TSI’s financial position because most of their papers subscribed to AxN, and very few of them were used by any other AdDept client. She asked me how much money we would be losing. I told her. I was shocked when she promised to make up the difference. Evidently they expected to save a lot of money—most presumably in payroll—by outsourcing.
I didn’t think of it at the time, but this demonstrated quite a different point of view from when Belk promised to keep all five of its ROP coordinators back in 2003 and gave each of them personalized training in how to use AdDept to schedule newspaper ads.
Life in Charlotte: I happened upon a restaurant that I really liked called Skyland Family Restaurant. It was near one of the major north-south streets, South Blvd., but it was facing a side street. I drove past it once or twice even after I knew where I was going. After I discovered Skyland, I went there at least once on each trip. I am happy to report that it still seemed to be open for business in 2023.
The restaurant was owned by a Greek family. Everything that I ever ordered there was abundant, good, and inexpensive. My favorite was the pork chop meal. They also provided free refills on iced tea.
Several interior walls of the restaurant contained large water-color paintings that depicted unusual things. I am sure that I took some photos with my Canon point-and-shoot camera. However, I could not find them. The photo at the left is from the Internet.
I always ate by myself, and it was never very crowded. I suspect that they did more business at lunch time than in the evening. While waiting for my order I usually read something, usually the latest issue of Acquerello Italiano.
One occasion in 2008 stands out among my memories. A group of men were meeting in the back room, which was to the left of the area visible in the above photo. They were discussing in a serious and energetic manner what they could do to help Congressman Ron Paul of Kentucky win the Republican nomination for president. I had heard of Ron Paul, of course, but I did not take him seriously. Subsequently, I came to understand that he was a heroic figure to many Libertarians.
I went to several other restaurants. I have no complaints about any of them, but for me the experience at Skyland was both unique and very enjoyable.
After the first trip I always rented a car. I stayed at the AmeriSuites a couple of times and at Hyatt Place—also within walking distance of Belk’s headquarters—at least once. I went for a run almost every evening that I was in Charlotte. On the occasions that I was near Belk’s headquarters I ran around the park-like complex in which Belk was located and along the major road to the southeast of it, West Tyvola.
For most of my later visits the Hampton Inn in Arrowood, a neighborhood about five miles south of Belk, was my base. Even if it had not offered both free breakfasts and Hilton Honors points, I would have preferred it. The rooms were nicer, the service was better, and fairly often they had some free food in the evenings. It only took me ten or fifteen minutes to get to Belk, and there were some good places to eat in the vicinity.
I ran around a business park that was less than a block from the Hampton Inn. It wasn’t as nice an experience as running in a real park, but it sufficed for my purposes.
The only other type of recreation in which I participated was bridge. On one evening I played with Denise’s father20 at the Charlotte Bridge Club. I am pretty sure that it was in 2010 because I remember that I had just become a Live Master. We had a mediocre result. I made a few mistakes.
He told me that Denise never had any interest in the game, but he was teaching her daughter how to play. He also mentioned that he knew Simon Kantor, whom I had once played against back in New England.
The Work Environment: The headquarters building was spectacular. The most annoying thing, as I described above, was dealing with security. The parking lot was huge. I usually got there early enough to take one of the slots reserved for visitors, but if they were full, I might need to walk quite a distance from my car to the front door.
It was also a pretty good hike from the advertising area to the cafeteria and the IT area, but I did not need to make those trips more than once per day. The cafeteria was worth the trek. The food was quite good, as was the selection. The prices were quite reasonable.
The Dragon Buffet
Once on nearly every trip Denise P. and I would go out for lunch. I always paid and billed it back to Belk. Her two favorite places were O’Charley’s and a Chinese restaurant called Dragon Buffet.
O’C’s was OK, but DB was my favorite because they allowed diners to serve themselves and take as much as they wanted. I generally had consumed two bowls of Won Ton soup and then some ginger chicken wings. I think that there were also free refills on iced tea.
These were all legitimate business lunches. There was no booze, and Denise and I talked about almost nothing except business. As soon as we had finished eating we returned to the office.
Back in 2003 I cannot say that I had a lot of respect for the people with whom I worked at Belk. However, after Denise P. was brought in, my opinion improved a lot. It may be that she sheltered me from some people who might frustrate me.
One peculiar thing that I remember about the advertising department was the fact that Ellen Horn always had a Golden Retriever in her office. Evidently she was training them to be emotional support dogs.
There also seemed to be a paucity of printers. I remember that on quite a few occasions I walked a considerable distance to pick up a report and then had to wait for someone else’s job to finish. When I was doing reconciliations, I often needed small reports fast. This was frustrating.
The beautiful headquarters building is vacant in 2023.
Epilogue: Belk survived intact longer than almost all of the regional department store chains with whom TSI dealt. However, in 2016, a few years after my last trip to Charlotte, the company had redesigned its headquarters. Because I always thought of Belk’s digs as better than any of the other department stores, this news surprised me. Imagine my shock when I read that in 2021 Belk decided to close this location entirely. Evidently they expect most people to work remotely and some to be stashed away in stores. I don’t understand how this could possibly work. Where, for example, are the computers?
That last decision was not made by the Belk family. In 2015 the company was acquired by Sycamore Partners. For the first time ever it would be run by someone not named Belk. The new CEO was not even a man!
On January 20, 2021, Belk declared bankruptcy, but the next day it emerged with an approved plan. This website claimed that in May of 2023 Belk still had 294 stores. That seems incredible to me. I wonder how many of those are “outlets”.
Greg Case.
1. According to LinkedIn Greg Case still was working for Belk in 2023, as were quite a few of the people whom I could locate on LinkedIn. His profile page is posted here.
5. For the first part of the installation I worked with Steve Yeager a lot. I remember that he said that he was originally from somewhere in Massachusetts. I am not sure how he ended up in Charlotte. I also remember that he had a fancy car of some sort (as opposed to my ten-year-old Saturn). He told me that he liked the way that he looked in it. I found Steve’s LinkedIn page here.
8. I had not encountered anyone like Russ Taylor. Someone once asked him if he had graduated from the University of South Caroling. He answered solemnly, “Yes, I am a cock!” He also used to sneak out every so often for a cigarette break. His LinkedIn page is here.
9. I worked with Karen Pardue on virtually every trip until she moved to another position. Her LinkedIn page is here.
10. Debbie Morris assisted Karen Pardue. In 2008 she assumed management of co-op. Her LinkedIn page is here.
11. TSI had a long and productive relationship with Denise Podavini, who was born and raised in New England. I found her LinkedIn page here. It still lists her as directing the financial aspects of the advertising department, but I wonder if, given the drastic changes at the company, that is still accurate.
12. I remember Vee quite well. I briefly met with her on several trips. Her LinkedIn page is here.
Kari Bates.
13. Kari Bates eventually took over Vee Heffney’s job. Her LinkedIn page is here.
14. Rochelle Franklin’s LinkedIn page can be found here.
Bridgett Barbee.
15. Bridgett Barbee’s LinkedIn page is available here.
16. I was mildly amused to hear at one of the later meetings that the IT people, or more likely employees of an ambitious software vendor, were investigating the feasibility of replicating in Lotus Notes what AdDept did. IBM had purchased Lotus Development Corporation in 1995, primarily to get its hands on Lotus Notes, a product designed to make it easier for workers to collaborate. I had done a little research on that software. I could have told them that they would be crazy to try to use it as a comprehensive multi-user database. They would be sending a boy to do a man’s job. After a few months they came to the same conclusion.
18. According to Denise P., nearly every jurisdiction expected Belk to pay use tax on certain aspects of the cost of creating a direct mail catalog or an insert. The rates and what portion was taxable varied by jurisdiction. It seems incredible to me in retrospect that this had never been an issue in the previous six and a half years of the installation at Belk, and—even more mind-boggling—no other AdDept client had ever mentioned this issue. I have no idea how this could be possible. Almost all of the AdDept clients were in precisely the same business as Belk, and most used direct mail as much as Belk did.
19. I am pretty sure that we quoted and delivered more programming requests for Belk than for any other client. The request numbers were well into three digits when we closed TSI in 2014.
20. I think that Denise P.’s father’s name is David Wroblewski. I searched the American Contract Bridge League roster for players in Charlotte with lots of masterpoints and a Polish name. His was the only one.
Over the course of my years at TSI I probably took Amtrak trains to and from New York City over one hundred times. The easiest way to get from Enfield to New York was by Amtrak. It was not the cheapest, but it was the most comfortable. I actually got a fair amount of work done on Amtrak trains.
During this period there was no Amtrak stop in Enfield. The closest ones were in Springfield, MA, and Windsor Locks, CT. Both places offered free parking. The Springfield station was a slightly longer drive, but it boasted an actual station with modern conveniences such as toilets and heat. Also, there was a ticket counter where one could buy a round-trip ticket. If I boarded in Windsor Locks, I had to stand in line in Penn Station to buy a ticket for the return trip. Nevertheless, because of the thirty additional minutes that I needed to spend on the train if I left from and returned to Springfield, I almost always chose Windsor Locks.
The Windsor Locks train platform was (and still is) almost certainly the least glamorous of all Amtrak stops in the entire nation. At one time there was a train station in Enfield, and an unused station in Windsor Locks still existed in 2020. You can read about the town’s plans for the site here.
My sample case.
Clothing and equipment: In the 1990’s all the males who worked at department stores in New York City wore suits or sport coats with white shirts and ties. I complied with these norms. By the time of my last few trips I may have downgraded to “business casual”.
As soon as IBM finally marketed a true laptop, I bought one. I kept it and all my other materials in a large leather sample case that was extremely durable. It was later supplanted by a large briefcase that Sue bought me.
In 1995 I bought a Thinkpad 701C, the one with a “butterfly keyboard”. You always had to fight the temptation to pick it up by the edges of the keyboard, but I loved it because it was easy to use on a train or airplane. However, I hated the tiny red ball that everyone was expected to use to place the cursor. I always brought a mouse with me. My last laptop was, I think, a Dell. I used it both on the road and as my workstation in the office, where I mounted it into a “docking station” for all of its cabling. It had a big screen, large enough to keep two windows open side-by-side. It had also a “bay” for a second battery or a CD drive. It also was very heavy.
After I bought my Bose headphones, I also brought them, my opera albums, and a CD player with me. Having them on these trips was not as important as it was for dealing with airports, but after some training sessions or vituperative meetings I needed a little Mozart.
Wi-fi was introduced near the end of my train-riding years. I tried to use it, but it was unreliable.
An interesting view of the Windsor Locks platform. Whoever took this photo was rather brave. The grating in the foreground is on a rather short and steep slope that leads directly to the Connecticut River.
The platform: Absolutely no one liked the train stop in Windsor Locks. Its only redeeming features were that the property was evidently not valuable for anything else, and its parking lot doubled as a small park-and-ride area.
The stop had two facilities. One was very important—a pay telephone. On cold winter nights only a few people disembarked at this stop. In the days before cell phones that telephone could serve as a lifeline for for those expecting to be met there and for people whose cars would not start or were absent without leave. I always made sure that I had change, but I never had to use the phone. I suspect that this one will be the last pay telephone in America if it is not already.
The other facility, the shelter, was essentially useless. It only had room for about three people, and it provided little protection for them. Furthermore, the seasoned travelers never stood on the platform in inclement weather. They stayed in their cars until the train’s light was visible under the bridge at the top of the photo. The engineers knew this, and stopped here even if no one was visible on the platform.
No masks in my era.
For some reason the platform in Windsor Locks was built lower than most. Only one door on the train was ever opened for this stop. One of the conductors had to lower the stairs so that people could enter. He/she (it was almost always a he) would then announce, “Amtrak to New Haven and Penn Station” and then assist people who had luggage or might find the climbing difficult.
After everyone was aboard, the conductors collected tickets. Because there was nowhere to buy tickets in Windsor Locks, most of us who boarded there did not have one. The conductor had to sell each of us a one-way fare. In theory they took credit cards, but often the little machine for processing them on the train did not work. In that case the conductor would need to go inside at one of the subsequent stations so that an agent there could effect the transaction. This was annoying to the conductors and to the passengers who could not understand the delay. I usually paid cash, and I tried to have exact change.
Maybe three at Christmas time.
There were usually only two cars on the train that went from New Haven to Springfield. The conductor would announce which door was opening for Windsor Locks as we pulled away from the Windsor station. We all gather up our stuff and moved toward the designated door. Sometimes I was the only person exiting.
As the train slowed down, the conductor opened the door and let down the stairs. He/she helped everyone on the last step.
On one memorable occasion there was a hitch. It was bitterly cold that night, and the door was frozen shut. We were all required to exit on the other side. At any other stop this would have been a minor inconvenience. However, the east side of the tracks in Windsor Locks was covered with gravel, and that gravel was covered with ice that night. It was also on a steep slope toward the frigid Connecticut River, which was only a few yards away. To make matters worse, it was pitch dark on that side. We all descended onto the gravel,. The conductor went aboard, drew up the steps, and closed the door. After the train had departed, we all managed to clamber up over the tracks to the parking lot.
No harm; no foul, I guess.
The conductors: The conductors on Amtrak seemed to me to be both professional and competent. I made a genuine effort to avoid making their life more difficult. On one occasion I did get into an argument1 with one of them, but his partner resolved the situation in a friendly and reasonable manner.
The seating: The seats were all reasonably comfortable, and there was always room aplenty in the overhead racks. I always tried to sit on the starboard side of the car on the way to the city and on the port side on the return trip. The sun was thereby always on the opposite side, and there was much less glare on my computer screen.
Four seats in every car had electrical outlets. Since Windsor Locks was the morning train’s first stop, it was usually rather easy to grab one of those seats for the first leg. It was much more difficult in the evening and if we had to change trains in New Haven. However, the cars all had the same layout, and I knew which seats had them. As soon as one became available, I would grab my ticket from the luggage rack and moved there.
The stop in New Haven: After we arrived in New Haven in the morning, we usually had to await the arrival of a train from Boston. It would usually park across the platform from our train, and our passengers were ordered to move to the other train. This was necessary because the engines on the Hew Haven-Springfield line were diesel powered. The tracks along the shore used electricity.
In the evening as we approached New Haven the conductors would move those of us going on towards Springfield (as opposed to Boston) to the last two cars, which would then be decoupled from the remainder of the train. The train to Boston would then leave, and a diesel engine would be brought in to transport us the rest of the way. This process took about twenty minutes, during which the train had no heat or light.
The passengers: When I first started to ride to Macy’s a group of eight or ten buyers from Casual Corner, which then had headquarters on South Road in Enfield, rode to New York on the first train every Tuesday. Most of them got on with me at Windsor Locks. Others boarded in Windsor or Hartford. Most people on that train said nary a word. These people, who were mostly women, were very talkative.
For some reason their bosses evidently put a stop to this practice while I was still going to Macy’s on a regular basis. The trips were less lively after that.
For many years a man who was about my age commuted from Windsor to the city. I never talked with him, but whenever I rode Amtrak in the morning I saw him get on at the station in Windsor every day. He often was also on the same train that I took home in the evening. I wondered to myself how he could bear that schedule. In his place I would have been very tempted to move closer to my place of work. If he could cut his commute down to an hour, it would free up twenty hours per week!
This is similar to what Amtrak had in the nineties, but there was always a line.
Train food: No food or drink was available between Springfield and New Haven. There was almost always a “café car” between New Haven and Penn Station. It contained four tables, two at either end. They were usually occupied by conductors or no one.
In the middle of the car was a small bar or, if you like, counter. There was always a line at the bar. For sale were coffee, soft drinks, snacks, beer, hot dogs, pastries in the morning, and a few other things. I would usually buy a cup of coffee and a muffin or a pastry in the morning. The coffee always tasted very bad, but it was hot, wet, and full of caffeine.
In the evening I always tried to buy food before I boarded. A deli and a Roy Rogers with tolerable fried chicken were right across the street from Penn Station. I also found the mini-pizzas at the Pizza Hut inside Penn Station to be edible. If I was unable to get any food before boarding, I might by some chips and hope that leftovers were available at home. After a rough trip I might buy a beer if the person at the counter guaranteed it was cold.
Tracks: There is only one set of tracks on the New Haven-Springfield line. There were so few trains that this was almost never a problem. Once, however, we encountered another train. We didn’t collide, but it took about thirty minutes to resolve the conflict and back up one of the trains to a side-track.
The track from New Haven to the city was owned by Metro North. The track around Bridgeport was banked so steeply that the engineer had to slow down to about ten miles per hour to keep the train on the track. This was still not fixed by the last time that I rode.
The bigger problem was that the Metro North trains had right of way. In the morning the Amtrak train usually had to pull over to a side-track to allow a Metro North express train zoom past. One or two of these could easily cause me to be late for an appointment, and there were no cell phones.
Joe D.
Celebritiess: The closest that I came to seeing a celebrity on Amtrak was when I was in the same car as Joe D’Ambrosio, the voice of the UConn Huskies. I first became familiar with him in the seventies when he was on WPOP. I knew his face from TV, but I would have recognized his voice anywhere. He told sports stories to his travel companions all the way to New York.
T.C. Boyle.
I didn’t talk to Joe. All right; I didn’t really talk to anyone. It is difficult for me to recall a single conversation that went beyond “Is that seat taken?” I do recall that on one return trip from New York someone who was probably two decades younger than I was asked me about The Tortilla Curtain a novel by T. Coraghesson Boyle, that I was reading. I told him that the first half was so-so, but it seemed to be improving. Actually, I did not end up liking it very much.
Penn Station: If I did not already have one, my first responsibility upon entering the station in the evening was to buy a one-way ticket to Windsor Locks. There was no way to jump the line.
No, no, no. Check the ARRIVALS board first.
The next step was to check the Arrivals board in the gate area to determine the number of the train and its status. The worst possible news was to see the word DELAYED. That meant that the train was still a long way from New York City or there were known problems on the track.
If I had enough time, and I had not already purchased food for supper, I stopped in at one of the fast food places in the station—usually Pizza Hut, Nathan’s, or an establishment that sold sandwiches. I also always bought a large Diet Coke. The fountain drinks were a much better deal than anything on the train. I would then usually find a relatively secluded seat in the waiting area and read and/or eat.
I sometimes visited the stores that sold books and magazines. I was surprised to find copies of Oggi and Panorama. In my trips after 2002 I always carried my Italian dictionary with me. I purchased a few issues of these magazines and did my best to translate the articles in them. Fortunately there was always an abundance of photos.
The northbound trains in the evening were often late. Some started the day in Florida. I frequently had to kill time in the station, which sometimes led to situations that annoyed me then but amuse me now. I found the following account in my notes for a trip to Lord and Taylor in November of 2007:
Penn station encounters: As I was waiting for my train and holding a Roy Rogers bag, a woman asked me for a piece of chicken. A little later a guy asked me for a cigarette, then two dollars, then one dollar, then a quarter. On Tuesday morning a guy tried to sell me a tourist guide to New York, which he said cost $11, for $10. I was wearing a dress shirt, tie, sweater vest, and dress overcoat and was consulting my laptop at the time. Evidently the guy’s tourist radar was on the blink. He asked me where I was going. I said, “work,” which was the only word other than “no” in any of these conversations.
One evening I heard over the loudspeaker a request for someone who spoke Italian to come to the information desk. I considered volunteering my very questionable services, but then it occurred to me that this was the Big Apple, not Dubuque. There must be at least a dozen people here who could really speak Italian. Besides, my hand gestures were not advanced enough for conversing with a real Italian.
One of my favorite things about Penn Station was the man who made the announcements over the loudspeaker, Danny Simmons2. He had an unmatched style. I can still here in my mind his incantation ringing in my ears: “… with station stops of Wallingford, Meriden, Berlin, Hartford, Windsor, Windsor Locks, and Springfield is now boarding on track …” You can listen to some of his calls here.
Someone should certainly have told him that in Connecticut the city “Berlin” is accented on the first syllable.
Train tips: The goal for the return trip was to snag the best seat possible.The priorities were:
On the port side;
Window;
Both seats unoccupied;
With electricity;
Near the café car.
I almost always succeeded at finding a seat that met the first three criteria. I strove to be one of the first ten or so people in line at the departure gate, which was identified by a number and E or W. This was relatively easy. I always monitored the ARRIVALS board. Most people were assembled under the DEPARTURES board. They seemed unaware of two rather obvious facts about through trains: 1) They must have arrived before they could depart. 2) They always departed on the track on which they arrived.
So, if the ARRIVALS board listed the gate as 7, I went and stood by the escalator down to 7E. This pretty much assured me a good position in line no matter how many people eventually congregated there.
It was equally important to find the right car. The trains always went from west to east. I always walked toward the rear of the train until I found a car that met most of my criteria. I then entered and selected the seat by the port-side window. If the aisle seat was unoccupied, I placed my sample case or briefcase on it, opened it up, took out a book or a folder, and lay it beside the case.
I then pulled down both tray tables. If I had food with me, I lay it on the tray table in front of me and took a bite out of something. I inserted the straw into my large Diet Coke, and placed my drink on the tray table for the aisle seat. My objective for all of this was to make the aisle seat seem as undesirable as possible. It would have worked even better if I sat in the aisle seat and put my stuff in the window seat, but I found that that was not really necessary. I almost always was left to myself.
There was no reason to worry about people entering at subsequent stops. On the eastbound evening trains at each stop after Penn Station far more people exited the train than boarded it.
If I wanted to purchase something from the café car, it was necessary to do it before the train reached Bridgeport. The café car closed down well before the stop in New Haven, and there was always a line. In fact, it was usually a good idea to make any purchases before the first stop in New Rochelle. The selection in the café car got worse fairly rapidly.
Distressing events: Uneventful train rides were delightful. Any disruption of the routine was, at best, annoying.
One day the line behind me at the gate was unusually long, and the people in it were mostly college-aged. It was a Friday. Perhaps it was spring break, or the end of a term. In any case, every seat on the train was filled, even the aisle seat next to mine. Furthermore, a dozen or more people sat on the floor in my car. I presume that the situation was similar in all the other cars.
This could not have been legal, could it? It was the only time that I saw this happen. Evidently Amtrak had no way of determining that more tickets had been sold than there were seats.
I can only imagine what the café car was like. I did not dare to abandon my seat just to buy a can of Diet Coke for $2.
A more distressing event occurred on one of my last trips in 2006. I was returning from Macy’s, and I evidently left my Cascio point-and-shoot camera3 on the train. It must have fallen on the floor at some point. I had used that camera on the glorious Village Italy tour that we took in 2005. It is documented here.
In my notes from trips to Lord and Taylor in 2007 and 2008 I twice reported that I had almost lost the small Canon camera that I had purchased as a replacement for the Cascio.
The nightmarish return trip: On many of the trips home I arrived late, sometimes very late. One of them, an extremely hot evening in the summer, I will never forget.
The Hell Gate Bridge.
The Hell Gate bridge, which connected the Astoria section of Queens with Randalls and Wards Islands, was only used by freight trains and the “Northeast Corridor” Amtrak trains on which I rode. One summer evening the bridge had reportedly caught on fire (!) and was unusable, at least for the nonce.
So, on the DEPARTURE board appeared the dreaded phrase: SEE AGENT. The good people at Amtrak addressed our group, which by then included everyone who had already been on the train. They divided us up into groups that were determined by our destinations. I was in the group that included all of the stops north of New Haven.
A/C would have been extra.
Amtrak, we were informed, had chartered tourist-type buses in Europe) to transport us to our destinations. After about a two-hour delay in which all these arrangements were made, our group was herded onto our bus. The first thing that we noticed was that it did not have air conditioning. The second was that our bus was very crowded. A foul mood prevailed.
The usual route.
Our bus driver cheerfully announced that he had information that the usual route north through Manhattan was experiencing heavy traffic. He had exercised his initiative to plot a route through the Lincoln Tunnel to I-95 in New Jersey. We would then cruise across the George Washington Bridge toward Connecticut.
Our driver’s route.
This news elicited some smiles and giggles of schadenfreude among the passengers. We would get home very late, but we would avoid that horrible Manhattan traffic that would probably drive the other passengers crazy.
And we did indeed drive through the tunnel at a reasonable pace. Similarly, our passage through the Garden State proceeded at a good clip. We could not actually see the poor saps on the other buses inching their way north on the other side of the Hudson, but we could easily imagine their frustrating situation.
However, our collective optimism crashed when we encountered traffic on our own highway just before we reached the George Washington Bridge. In fact, we were not moving at all. Our driver announced that there had been an oil spill on the highway on the New York side of the bridge. It took us more than an hour to cross the bridge. Everyone—including myself–was suffering from the heat. It was surely over 100° inside our conveyance.
After the bus finally crossed the bridge we were required to exit the highway in the northern part of Manhattan. It was dark by then as the bus driver piloted us through hostile-looking side streets of the worst parts of Gotham. I don’t know what the other passengers were thinking about, but I could not keep the first few chapters of Bonfire of the Vanities out of my mind.
Five stops.
No stops.
At long last we got back onto the interstate. Imagine our relief to see the “Welcome to Connecticut” sign. We passed by our usual stops at New Rochelle, Stamford, and Bridgeport stations and turned north onto I-91. I was familiar with the drive from there to Windsor Locks. it could easily be completed in an hour.
We might have made it that quickly, too, but we had to exit the highway to stop at each of the five Amtrak stations—Wallingford, Meriden, Berlin, Hartford, and Windsor. All of these stations were conveniently located near the railroad tracks. None, however, was easily accessible from I-91 especially by an oversized vehicle like our bus. Of course we also had to wait for the passengers to get all of their gear together. Of course, they had to wait for the bus to stop. Then the exiting passengers had to fight their way up the narrow aisle to the door and climb down.
I did not leave that wretched bus until 3AM, and I still had to make the bleary-eyed drive to Enfield. Of course, the people who went all the way to Springfield had it even worse. I thought with glee of one of them discovering that someone might have broken into his—no, make it her—car while we were on this forlorn journey from hell.
1. The story about the run-in that I had with an Amtrak conductor concerning my book of discounted train tickets has been recounted here.
2. Danny Simmons retired in 1994.
3. I replaced the Cascio with a Canon that was much easier to use. When I upgraded for our Africa trip, I gave the Canon point-and-shoot to Sue, but I don’s think that she ever used it.
It would have been folly to do so, but I certainly wish that I had kept my notes from our second Manhattan adventure. In a strange way it was an important milestone for TSI, but my recollection of the details are now very spotty, and the only aspect that I could verify from research on the Internet was that the year was almost certainly 1990. It may have actually begun in late 1989. Sue remembers nothing about this whole escapade.
In 1989 Gulf and Western changed its name to Paramount Communications, Inc.
The prospect was Paramount Communications Incorporated, which was based in New York City. I am not sure how the people conducting the software search heard about TSI. The Manhattan IBM office with which we sometimes dealt may have recommended us. We had a pretty good relationship with them. If the word “advertising” was mentioned in a conversation, they probably would have thought of TSI.
Of course, Sue and I had heard of Paramount studios. We had both seen the company’s logo on lots of movies. I am not sure whether we were contacted by phone or by a letter. In any case, we had only one face-to-face meeting in New York City with the person who was looking for a company to develop a system for them. She sent us a Request for Proposal (RFP) with fairly detailed specifications.
I generally hated RFP’s because they seldom allowed us to emphasize what we did best—come up with imaginative solutions to database problems that were difficult to implement. Instead they were designed to be easy to score and to prevent the vendor from distracting attention away from the most important issues. Each vendor’s answers were awarded numerical values. The software companies with the highest scores were asked to write up a detailed proposal, perhaps after an interview.
Madison Square Garden is actually close to round.
We were learned that Paramount owned a set of radio and television stations and some small cable networks. It needed a system to manage the advertising on these outlets. Of course, it also owned production companies as well as other things such as Madison Square Garden and its two permanent residents, the Knicks and Rangers. So, in some cases Paramount owned both ends of the transaction. This complicated matters, but we always liked complications. If nothing else, this helped explain why the company did not just use a software package designed for broadcast stations. Surely by 1990 there must have been some.
The RFP had set of a dozen or so numbered areas that required (or at least allowed) fairly extensive explanations.It also contained something that I had never seen before. At the end or perhaps in the cover letter it indicated that the submission should “be indexed” according to the required areas.
The proposal that I wrote was organized so as to emphasize our company’s strengths, namely our ability to deliver very large projects on time, our willingness to write custom code, and our strong relationship with IBM. I also sang the praises of the AS/4002. Needless to say, I did not emphasize TSI’s lack of experience in scheduling advertising from the media outlet’s perspective. In point of fact, I was convinced that we would be writing most of this code from scratch. At the end I included an index that listed the page number for the answer to each numbered area.
Individual 1 purchase the G+W building and made it a hotel.
A few weeks after we mailed the response to the RFP we were invited to come to New York to discuss the document. The company’s office was in the Gulf and Western Building at 1 Central Park West on Columbus Circle. Sue and I took Amtrak to the city and then the subway to Columbus Circle. Columbus Circle was thrilling. Neither of us had ever been there before; ascending from the subway elicited a “Wow!” from both of us. We had never seen a section of Manhattan that was not rectangular!
The meeting was less inspiring. I distinctly remember two aspects of it:
The lady conducting the search (whose name I don’t recall) seemed annoyed that I had not organized our responses in the same order as the numbered areas. I explained that the RFP had not specified an order for presenting the responses. It said that they should be indexed, which is exactly what I did. She paused for a few seconds with an icy look on her face. She then asked my why I had organized it the way that I did. I told her that I was simply trying to make a case. The rest of the meeting went a little better. I don’t think that she had realized that the RFP had used the word “indexed” instead of “ordered”.
She provided us with a little more information about the project, including the news that they favored a UNIX-based solution. The only other thing that I specifically remember came from Sue, who at one point remarked, “I am not sure that we even want this job.” I am not sure how this struck the lady making the decision, but it certainly shocked me. For the first time in the decade that we had been working together Sue and I apparently did not agree on the direction in which TSI should be heading.
Frankly I was not certain that it would be a good idea to undertake this project. In point of fact the situation at Paramount changed dramatically only a few years after our meeting. The whole company was purchased and then split in two with all the media outlets going to an independent company. If we had committed to a large investment in time and resources for Paramount’s project, we probably would have found ourselves out of luck at that point. As it was, we devoted the time and effort to the AdDept system3. At just about the same time that Paramount was acquired and then split up, the marketing of AdDept was really gaining traction.
If we somehow survived that crisis, we would have had to learn how to deal with show business people. Can you imagine?
In any case, I never begrudged Sue the right to her judgment. I wished, however, that she had told me about her misgivings earlier and in private.
We did not get the Paramount job, but we had one more memorable meeting about it. It was a flea on the world’s greatest (true) shaggy dog story, which is recounted here.
1. Prior to 1989 the parent company was known as Gulf and Western. In 1994 Viacom acquired a controlling interest in it. When that company split into two entities, Viacom and CBS, most of the stations went to CBS, and the film studio went to Viacom. Some other properties were sold. Wikipedia’s account of this period is here.
2. Much more about the hardware and operating system that were the focus of TSI’s activities from 1988 until the company closed in 2014 can be found here.
3. The design of the AdDept system is explicated here.
If I had read TheInnocents Abroad, I might have brought a notebook on the trip to London. I definitely brought at least one to Milwaukee.
In December of 1989 I had won a story contest (described here) held by the Hartford Courant. The prize was a two-week trip for two to England!
I should mention at the outset that neither Sue nor I took any notes on the trip to England. I think that Sue must have brought her camera, but I have not located any of her photos. I definitely took no photos. So, all of the following content was based on our memories, and the photos that are include, with the sole exceptions of the tattered notebook on the right, the shot of Rocky perched on the toilet, and our souvenir coaster, were all taken by others.
I might have made a mistake in the dates, but the schedule worked out so perfectly that my confidence level is rather high, especially considering that the events happened more than thirty-one years ago.
My preparation for my first trip across the Atlantic was, by necessity, greatly inferior to my efforts for our twenty-first century vacations. Research was much more difficult in 1990. The Internet sort of existed, but there was no Google or Wikipedia. We had Cox cable in our house, but Cox did not offer Internet services until the last half of the nineties. Even AOL dial-up was still three years in the future.
Moreover, I had no time to research. The installation of TSI’s AdDept system at Macy’s in New York was entering phase two (as described here), and, at the same time, we were desperate to sign up a second large retailer to use the system that we had worked so hard to develop for Macy’s. TSI was in a rough spot. We no longer had a dedicated marketing person, and we were also quite short on cash.
The Enfield Public Library.
We obtained a guidebook somehow, probably from the library. Sue and I decided that we wanted to see as many famous sights as possible, but, despite what I had said to Lary Bloom at the Courant, on the way we would also try to investigate some places that were related to the Arthurian legends.
Sue worked with the Jameson Travel people that the Courant had hired to handle the details of trip. The newspaper provided enough money to cover all transportation costs (including auto rental) and lodging. We had to pay for food and anything else that we wanted. Our basic plan was to eat big breakfasts at the hotels and either lunch or supper at a restaurant. The other meal would be snacks that we picked up at whatever store we chanced upon.
We had a pretty good plan with four bases of operation:
London for three nights. Starting with our arrival early in the morning on Thursday, February 22, 1990, and ending with a car rental on Sunday the 25th.
Wells for three nights with side trips to Glastonbury Tor, Stonehenge, Wookey Hole, and Cadbury Castle. We drove through, or at least very near to, Bath (BAHTH) on the way.
Plymouth for two nights with a side trip to Tintagel (tin TAH gehl) and a stop in Bristol on the way to York to enable Sue to shop for miniatures on her thirty-ninth birthday.
York for three nights with a drive through the Dales and, on the return trip to London, a short stop in Barnsley so that Sue could see Locke Park as well as an afternoon stop in Warwick Castle.
Back to London for two nights. Since we gained five hours flying west, we would arrive in Boston at lunch time or even earlier.
The story of my trip actually begins on a February flight from Bradley not to London but to Chicago. It was an early morning United flight on Monday the 19th. For some reason most of my airplane horror stories have involved flights on United airlines. The one to Chicago, however, was quite uneventful.
One IBM Plaza.
From O’Hare I took a cab into town for a meeting at One IBM Plaza with some IBM sales reps who specialized in the retail sector. Some really big retailers had headquarters in Chicago. Sears and Walgreens came to mind. Marshall Fields still had its headquarters in Chicago at that point, too. I tried to explain AdDept to them, but they had trouble understanding it. I am not sure that they even realized that retailers had advertising departments.
From IBM regional headquarters I took a cab to the train station, where I bought a ticket on the next Amtrak train to Milwaukee. The schedule said that it was a ninety-minute journey. Unbeknownst to me, this train happened to be the famous Empire Builder, which went from Chicago all the way to Seattle and Portland. Union Station in Milwaukee was its first stop.
When I boarded my car, it was rather empty. I found a seat by a window, lifted my suitcase up to the overhead rack, and sat down to read.
To my surprise, a man who may have been in his sixties approached me and asked if he could sit next to me. Here was my chance. All that I had to do was to utter the word “No.” I, however, chose politeness. This would be a better story if I had introduced myself and asked the gentleman his name, but I was not that polite.
I didn’t say that it was an express train.
My unexpected companion explained that he and his wife were traveling together to Oakland, CA, to visit their daughter. They liked to take trains, but on long trips like this one they soon tired of each other’s company. So, they each sought out other people to sit with and engage in conversation.
The gentleman was certainly friendly. He asked me where I was getting off and, after I responded, what I was going to do in Milwaukee. Nobody could explain TSI’s unique business in just a few minutes, and my activities that day would seem confusing to anyone. I did my best, and he listened politely.
The cars were a little sleeker, but this was still the Milwaukee Amtrak Station in 1990.
Then, without being asked, he told me that he was from a small town south of Chicago. He may have also worked the price of corn into the conversation at some point as I glanced longingly at the mystery novel balanced on my lap.
Somehow the topic worked its way around to his daughter’s marital status, which was evidently “divorced”. She had moved to the west coast and was living by herself “because, you see, he turned out to be one of them gay fellows.”
Fortunately, this revelation came just as the train was pulling into Milwaukee’s Union Station. Some other passenger would undoubtedly get to hear the rest of the story. Actually, probably several unsuspecting people would be subjected to it. In the cab from the station to my first appointment it occurred to me that the idea of sitting with strangers on the train was probably the wife’s.
My destination in Milwaukee was the office of an ad agency, the name of which I don’t remember. I met there with some people to discuss the possibility of the agency purchasing an AS/400 and running ADB, the version of TSI’s ad agency system designed for that computer, on it. The employees at the agency treated me very nicely and seemed quite interested in what the system had to offer.
The Mark Plaza is now a Hilton.
At the close of the business day I took another cab to the Mark Plaza Hotel in downtown Milwaukee, which was within walking distance of the Boston Store. P.A. Bergner and Company owned that store and a large number of other department stores in the north-central states. The advertising department for the entire chain was located on one of the top floors of the store.
Before going to bed I called Sue and told her about the two meetings as well as my encounter with the long-distance rail traveler.
At Bergner’s I met with the production manager, Dan Stroman, and the loan room manager, Sheree Marlow Wicklund. Their loan room was much simpler than Macy’s. The merchandise seldom was sent to outside photo studios. One person could really run it without a computer.
We had not written a system for keeping track (called “trafficking”) of the status of the various aspects (copy, layout, art, photography, etc.) of production jobs yet. So, what Dan was interested in was a new area for me. I also met with the finance and newspaper people. More details are here.
In 1990 a small restaurant in the Milwaukee Airport sold these delicious brats.
After an entire day gathering system requirements, I left with a lot of notes in my spiral notebook, a folder full of sample reports, and my suitcase. I took a cab to the airport. I bought two Usinger’s brats for supper, spent a few minutes in the airport’s used book store, which, as I recall, had a set of Goethe’s complete works that was short a couple of volumes.
Nobody made this drive in an hour in the evening on February 13, 1990.
It was snowing lightly when I boarded the plane. My journey home went through Chicago. That first leg was always so short that the seat belt light was never turned off.
We had barely taken off when the pilot announced on the intercom that O’Hare Airport had just closed because of an ice storm. So, the plane was being diverted to the nearest available airport, General Mitchell International Airport, the same one from which we had just departed.
When we had landed, an agent proudly informed us that United had hired buses to transport all the passengers to O’Hare. So, evidently the airport itself was still open, even if all of the runways were closed. I was a little fearful of a bus ride in a storm that was ferocious enough to frighten the airport that was a hub for two of the nation’s largest carriers, but I really needed to get back to Enfield to attend a meeting scheduled for the next day.
The rest of the trip went as smoothly as could be expected. The bus that I was on made it to O’Hare. I had to wait in line to speak with a United agent, but I was then booked on a flight to Hartford that was scheduled to depart early the next morning.
Since the cancellation was due to the airport’s decision, United did not offer to put me up at a hotel. I had no credit cards and too little cash remaining from all of those cab rides to pay for a room on my own. So, I snatched as much sleep as I could in one of the seats that were specifically designed to prevent people from nodding off and missing their flights. I had a lot of company.
For the next two decades I was a regular at Executive Valet Parking.
The flight the next morning left on time and arrived in Hartford on time. I took the shuttle to the airport parking lot, ransomed my car, and then drove back to Enfield.
I arrived at our house a little before noon. I called the office and told them that I would take a shower, grab an hour or so of sleep, eat lunch, and then come into work. I did not sleep much, but otherwise I followed that plan.
In the afternoon a couple from New Jersey appeared at our office. I don’t remember the details of this meeting. I seem to recall that it had something to do with our pitch for Paramount, which is described here. These people had experience with UNIX, the operating system preferred by Paramount. “UNIX” had always been sort of a dirty word in our office.
After they left I formalized my notes from my three meetings in Chicago and Milwaukee and sent letters to the people with whom I had met. That is what you had to do in the days before email. Because we were scheduled to depart for London the next evening, I left it up to Kate Behart to follow up on the phone with them.
I did not feel hopeful about the meeting in Chicago and the meeting at Bergner’s. The last meeting in our office was just a flyer. On the other hand, my hopes for the ad agency in Milwaukee were pretty high. If someone from the agency called our references, I thought that we could get it. Our clients loved us, and they always praised our work.
After supper I packed. I remember bringing along several books by Jack Vance. Chick Comparetto1 had volunteered to take care of our cats, Rocky and Woodrow, while we were absent. It was not a weighty responsibility. They had their own door. I had purchased plenty of Cat Chow. If Chick forgot to give them water, they were not shy about helping themselves to the toilet. If they got hungry, Woodrow was adept at ripping open the bag of food. They probably also had two or three survival tricks that I had not yet discovered.
We must have brought either travelers’ checks or a lot of cash on the trip. I am quite sure that we had no credit cards.
Someone drove us to Logan. I have a vague recollection that it might have been Sue’s sister Betty.
I remember nothing about the experience in the airport in Boston. Our plane did not leave until late in the evening. We must have eaten something in the airport, but it was not memorable.
We lost five hours in the flight across the Atlantic, and so it was rather early in the morning when we landed at Heathrow. We had no trouble with our luggage or with customs. That aspect of travel was much easier in those days.
We also had no difficulty finding the driver who had been hired to meet us. I don’t remember his name or what he looked like, but I recall him being very welcoming in a reserved, British manner. He asked about the contest, and he recommended that we invest £5 each in the double-decker bus tour of London.
I am pretty sure that the Camelot was somewhere on this map.
He drove us right to the Camelot Hotel2, our home for the next three nights. It was located on or near Sussex Place quite near Hyde Park. As soon as we entered the hotel, Sue and I had the same thought: “We are staying at Fawlty Towers!” Manuel was missing, and the details were all different, but the feel was remarkably similar. I suppose that at one time there were small urban hotels run by amateurish entrepreneurs in the United States, but by 1990 they were pretty much extinct.
We had to sign the guest registry, which was a huge book lying open on a desk, not a counter. A television was on behind the desk, and—I am not making this up—an episode of Fawlty Towers was playing.
My recollection is that the hotel comprised eight or ten nondescript rooms.We found ours and unpacked. We were both tired, but adrenaline overpowered the jet lag.
The person at the desk told us where we could catch a double-decker bus. We left our oversized key at the desk, walked to the location described to us, mounted to the second level of a bus, and took the tour. It was, as our driver had promised, a good way to get a feel for the city.
I don’t remember where we ate lunch, but afterwards we took a stroll in Hyde Park. It was very relaxing. I was surprised to see that people still used the Speaker’s Corner as a public pulpit. At some point an interesting thought popped into my head. I looked at my watch and then remarked to Sue, “Do you remember that guy on the train to Milwaukee that I told you about? I just realized that he is still on that same train.”3
That evening we walked a few blocks over to Baker St. I don’t remember what our motivation was originally, but when we arrived there we naturally tried to locate 221B. It didn’t exist. Moreover, there was no 221 at all.
We did find a steakhouse near that location, and, although we knew that the English were not famous for their cuisine, we gave it a try. The restaurant had a sound system that played pop tunes. The one that was playing as we walked through the door was “Baker Street” by Gerry Rafferty, which had been released twelve years earlier. The coincidences on that day were truly unbelievable. The food was OK, and Sue and I had fun trying to name the other songs. “Baker Street” never came up on the sound system again.
I only remember one other restaurant that we patronized in London. It was a Greek restaurant4 that was a block or two from the hotel. My recollection is that it was in the basement of some building, but I may be wrong. I distinctly remember that the food was absolutely delicious, by far the best of any of the food that we ate in England. I also remember that there were only two other people in the restaurant. They were seated at a table as far from us as was possible. They seemed to be just chain-smoking, drinking coffee (or something in coffee cups), and speaking in Greek. I struggled to hear a familiar word or phrase, but since the only Greek I knew then was thousands of years out of date, the task was hopeless.
In London we walked and/or took the tube everywhere. I thought that London’s Underground system was wonderful. It was so easy to figure out. I was used to the mass transit systems in New York and Boston. They were both haphazard and uncomfortable by comparison. I even bought a tee shirt advertising the London Underground. Here are things that I remember Sue and me doing in London:
We definitely went to the British museum. I was thrilled to see the real Rosetta Stone there. It was right out where you could touch it. They had lots of other stuff, of course, but the most memorable for me were handwritten lyrics by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Those were definitely kept in cases where no one could touch them. I also remember the pigeons on the steps. There must have been a thousand of them.
We spent the better part of a day at the Tower of London. I was very impressed by the armory and the Yeoman Warders in their fancy dress. I had no use for the massive collection of shiny rocks, but others stood in line for a chance to adore them. One of the few souvenirs that we bought on the entire trip was the coaster shown on the right.
We walked to Buckingham Palace, but we did not watch the changing of the guard. It was chilly that day. While we were in the vicinity, we went to Westminster Abbey and were a little grossed out that so many people were entombed there. I guess that they have to put the cadavers somewhere. We also saw Parliament, #10 Downing Street, Big Ben, and the Thames.
Sue wanted to visit St. Catherine’s House in London to look up information about some of her ancestors on her mother’s side, the Lockes and Kings. I didn’t go in with her. I don’t remember what I did, but just looking in windows is quite entertaining in London. I think that I might have found a bookstore.
We were very impressed with the retail on Oxford St., which I found much more exciting and dynamic than the stores on Fifth Avenue in New York.
The ducks in the ponds in Hyde Park were very striking. They had complicated and beautiful markings. Neither of us had seen the like, not even in zoos. I also really liked the coots. Their oversized feet impressed me.
From Hyde Park we could see both Kensington Palace, which at the time was the home of the Prince and Princess of Wales, and Royal Albert Hall. We didn’t visit either one. It probably would not be cool for someone from the Colonies just to drop in on Chuck and Di, and we already knew how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.
We did not find that being a pedestrian in London was too difficult. At the enormous intersections there were usually pedestrian subways. The hardest part for us was remembering to look to our right first when attempting to cross a side street.
On our very last night in England we went to see Agatha Christie’s play, The Mousetrap, at St. Martins Theater. It was very enjoyable. Maybe we should have tried something a little more daring, but I am very happy to say that I viewed this play when it was only in the thirty-eighth year of its record run.
The worst part of our entire trip began when we picked up the rental car. I think that the travel agency provided us with transportation to the car rental agency. It was only then that Sue revealed that she had specified a standard transmission car, and she was afraid to try to drive it. So, I needed to learn how to shift with my left hand on a perilous journey from the very heart of London to the M4 during the morning rush hour.
I made many mistakes. Other motorists even honked at us a few times, probably the only horns that I heard while we were in the U,K. The British seemed more reluctant than their American counterparts to draw attention to bad driving. Embarrassed and frustrated, I did manage to get the car onto the freeway without causing any accidents.
A little west of Reading Sue suddenly announced, “There he is! I just saw a bear!”
Intent on my driving, I dared not gawk. I took a quick peek in the direction that she pointed. I saw nothing. At the time I did not know that bears had been extinct in England for fifteen hundred years. It probably was just an ordinary Bigfoot.
We took the M4 almost all the way to Bristol. Driving on the M roads in England was no more challenging than driving on interstates in the U.S. However, when we exited from the M4, the rest of the drive was on the A roads, which were very narrow by American standards. I remember that when we drove through the outskirts of Bath I was fearful of scraping against the stone walls that formed the border of the road. Fortunately, we encountered very few cars coming in the opposite direction. When we finally reached our destination in Wells, I was happy that the trip was over and more than a little anxious about the next nine days on the road.
In Wells we stayed at the Red Lion Hotel, which is described here. I think that the building at some point was converted to other uses. I remember that our room had a four-poster bed. I had seen them in movies, but I don’t think that I had ever slept in one.
We spent the rest of that first day in Wells exploring the town. The focus of attention was definitely the huge Gothic cathedral that is dedicated to St. Andrew the apostle. Although it is now the see of the Anglican Bishop of Bath and Wells, it was constructed in the late middle ages when England was a Catholic country. It seemed totally out of place. Wells is little more than a village, and the cathedral is actually set apart from the town. I would have expected the town to have grown up around it.
The Bishop’s Palace was equally awesome or perhaps even more so. His Lordship George Carey5 evidently was not apprised of the arrival of the esteemed visitors from across the pond. We saw his home from a distance, and we were even treated to the sight of some episcopal long-johns hanging out to dry. However, we were not invited into the palace grounds where, according to Wikipedia, croquet games are rather common. I would have loved to hear someone explain the rules of the English version of the game.
Rand’s jump.
A word about the weather: Although all of England is well north of New England, the weather in late February and early March was much nicer than what New Englanders would expect. It seemed more like mid-April. Flowers were out, and the grass was green. We wore jackets every day, but we were seldom cold. We also were lucky not to encounter much rain.
For me the most interesting feature in the town of Wells was the memorial on the sidewalk to Mary Rand, a resident of Wells who won the gold medal in the women’s long jump in the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo. The plaque measured out the exact distance that she jumped.
What I remember most about those days was the driving. No matter which of us was at the wheel, both of us became irritable. For some reason the roundabouts gave us the most difficulty. It was bad enough to have to remember to go clockwise. The big problem, however, was the signage. The highway numbers were seldom provided at the exits. Instead a sign displayed the name a town that was somewhere on that section of road. This was, I am sure, useful for people who knew where all of those towns were, but they did not help us at all. Furthermore, it seemed as if at least half the time the name on the sign was “Taunton”, and visiting Taunton was not on our agenda
I am not sure where we went on which days, but I am sure that we went to all of the following places:
Our guidebook described a place called “Cadbury Castle”. It was supposedly someone’s idea of where Camelot (or maybe Camalet) was. We had a lot of trouble finding it. Finally we came upon the village of North Cadbury. We asked someone at a pub where Cadbury Castle was, and they directed us down a one-lane road that was actually just two tracks. Those were the last humans that we encountered on this adventure.
We went as far as we could by car. We stopped the vehicle, locked it, and set off on foot.
Ahead of us were two troughs, a lot of thick underbrush, and a formidable grassy mound. We made our way through the underbrush for thirty or forty yards. Sue got attacked by stinging nettles and was forced to retreat in agony.
In those days if there was a hill in front of me, I climbed it. I made it to the top of this so-called “hillfort”, but I saw no trace of a fort. On the top of the hill a dozen or so cows were peacefully grazing. They ignored me. I could also see Glastonbury Tor in the distance. That was something, I guess.
Nettle.
To be fair, I should add that the sun was out. The legend is that on a misty day you can see the Once and Future King and his famous knights.
Dock.
When we arrived back at the hotel, Sue asked someone what to take for stinging nettles. They informed us that the best treatment was a plant called “dock”, which always grew near the nettles. That was not in our guidebook.
We also drove to Glastonbury Tor, another ancient hill in Somerset. A lot of people think that this is a magical place. it certainly has an unusual shape. Evidently in the middle ages a monastery was there. Legends abound about it being associated with King Arthur, but there is a dearth of evidence.
A paved path now leads to the tower atop the tor. I don’t think that it existed in 1990.
I don’t remember a lot about our visit here. I don’t clearly recall the tower at the top of the hill at all. Therefore, I was skeptical as to whether I climbed to the top. Sue, however, has told me that I did. Evidently I don’t remember the tower because no one was allowed to enter it. Therefore, its distinguishing feature—no roof!—was not visible to me.
Sue also reported that a dozen or so New Agers were busy absorbing Glastonbury’s vibes.
The good thing about it was that the town of Glastonbury was actually fairly easy to find. I can’t say that about most of the other sights in Somerset. We had a devil of a time finding Stonehenge. Surely, there must have been a lot of tourists who wanted to see these big old rocks. Nevertheless, there was precious little signage to indicate their location.
We were not allowed as close to the stones as the people in this photo are.
We did find it, but it was probably the biggest disappointment of the entire trip. At the time no one was allowed to approach, much less touch the stones. I don’t recall that we ever were within one hundred feet of them. I honestly think that we would have gotten more out of a film about the place.
By this time we were getting rather tired of driving around Somerset searching for legendary hills and ancient inanimate objects.
Our last stop in Somerset, however, was delightful. Wookey Hole is a set of caves that are located just a few miles to the northwest of Wells. We knew about the caves from the guidebook, but we were surprised by the fact that there were actually other really enjoyable things to see and do nearby.
The caves were quite interesting. We took a little tour with a local guide. The best part of it was the way that she pronounced Wookey Hole. The first syllable was at least a fifth higher than the rest of the name. Since we had heard no human speech anywhere near any of the other attractions in Somerset, it was nice to have someone explain the geology of the caves.
In addition to the natural formations, someone had constructed a small museum6 that emphasized a few diverse elements of the culture in and around Wookey Hole.
Cheddar Gorge.
The paper-making demonstration was the most educational. Until then I had absolutely no idea how trees and rags were turned into paper. The penny arcade machines were also something that I had never seen before. Visitors could even play the games using old-school pennies that they could buy there. The carousel section had complete carousels (going clockwise, of course), as well as stunning individual statues. I remember seeing a beautiful lion, but I was unable to find a picture of it on the Internet.
Sue and I found our visit to Wookey Hole both fun and relaxing. We then undertook the drive up to Cheddar Gorge. I am not sure why we did not stop here. Sue absolutely loves cheese. In retrospect I have trouble understanding how she could have resisted the temptation to stop and sample one of her favorite cheeses.
Our next destination was Plymouth, which is a genuine city on the south coast. On the way there we took a slight detour to drive through Exmoor, which includes some really diverse and beautiful areas.
Our hotel in Plymouth was not as memorable as the first two. I have a vague recollection that it also had a restaurant. We took a short pedestrian tour of the city, mostly so we could say that we had seen the spot from which the Pilgrims departed.
I remember that at the restaurant I was served some Devon Cream. I had never had this before and remarked about it to Sue. My face must have registered disgust because the waiter rushed over to ask me if there was something wrong. This, by the way, never happens to me in the U.S.
The main reason that Sue and I bothered to come this far west was to have somewhere to stay while we ventured to Tintagel, the ruins of a real castle in Cornwall on the Atlantic coast.
Tintagel ruins.
A different angle.
Merlin’s Cave.
Tintagel7 was definitely worth visiting. However, it was a difficult drive from any direction. Furthermore, a fairly long walk was (and evidently still is) required to reach the ruins from the parking lot. We went there in February, and a very cold wind was blowing in off the Atlantic. We did not get as much out of this experience as we might have if the weather had been nicer or we (i.e., Sue) had been in better condition. We did get a look at the castle ruins and Merlin’s cave. The view of the ocean was stunning.
I am not sure about this, but I think that we decided not to drive directly back to Plymouth. Instead we headed to Barnstaple, a city with which we were familiar from playing the British Rails game. All of the cities in this section are at the base of a very high cliff. This accounts for the peculiar fact that all of the rivers flow to the south.
On Sue’s birthday we left from Plymouth with the intention of reaching York by supper time. I asked Sue what she wanted for her birthday. She said that she wanted to shop for miniatures at a store she knew about in Bristol. So, that is what we decided to do.
Somehow we came up with an unusual plan. We drove to a location on the outskirts of Bristol, which in 1990 had about 400,000 inhabitants. We parked the car and took a city bus downtown. Sue somehow knew which bus to take and the stop at which we needed to exit. When we got off of the bus, Sue looked around but could not see any familiar buildings or street names.
She did find a Dr. Who-type phone box (not booth in England). Somehow she figured out how to make it work. She called the store. The woman who answered asked her what she could see from the phone box. Sue told her. The woman merely said two words: “Turn around.”
Sure enough, Sue found herself looking at the miniatures store. She went in; I did not. I had enough trouble—even at that age—dealing with full-sized objects. While Sue was shopping for tiny things, I walked around and looked in windows. If I discovered a store that sold books or games, I probably went inside. I don’t think that I bought anything, but Sue definitely did. Good! It was her birthday.
We somehow caught another bus that brought us back to the car park. We fired up our vehicle and easily found our way back to the M5. Sue received one more present. We got off of the throughway at Cheltenham and drove through the Cotswold country to Bourton-on-the-Water the home of the Model Village. It took about half an hour.
I think that this is the model, not the real village.
I probably would not have made this side trip if I had been by myself. However, Sue has always felt a special attachment to the Cotswolds and particularly its thatched roofs. The Model Village itself is definitely worth seeing once. It was a nearly exact replica of the real Bourton-on-the-Water within which it resides. What I found the most interesting was that the model itself is indeed modeled at the same one-ninth scale. I naturally wondered if that model included a one-eighty-first model of the model and so on. I mean, some people write on grains of rice; what is the limit?
My attitude might help explain why, although everyone likes working with me, nobody ever asks me to go anywhere with them.
Royal York Hotel.
The remainder of the trip to York was uneventful. We stayed for three nights at the Royal York Hotel, a huge very old hotel near the train station. In one way I was glad that we did not go any further north. The people in the north spoke perfect English, of course, but the accent was so strong that it was difficult to understand.
National Railway Museum.
The other memorable supper that we ate might have been our first night in York. I don’t remember the rest of my order, but the vegetable was broccoli. It had been cooked so long that it had turned grey. The waiter, who had emigrated from Greece, noticed my horror. He told me that the English always overcooked the vegetables. I conversed with him a little. I told him that I had taken ten semesters of Homeric and Attic Greek in high school and college. He did not seem too impressed. He probably knew that these classes would not have helped me understand him. I later learned that while modern Greek grammar has not changed much through the millennia, the vocabulary and pronunciation had evolved drastically.
The view from the central tower.
I think that Sue let me do most of my exploring of York on my own. While I was out walking around the city I think that she visited the Railway Museum, which was very near the hotel.
I never pass up a chance to walk the walls of a city. York’s were probably the best.
I remember visiting the stunning York Minster, which was awesome both inside and out. It must surely be the most impressive church in England. I am quite certain that I climbed as high as they allowed in the ancient cathedral. The view of the city and the countryside was breathtaking.
I also walked around atop the ancient stone walls of the city. I cannot remember whether I made it all the way around, but I recall thoroughly enjoying this experience.
York was such a delightful old city. It was very pleasant to experience it both from street-level and from above.
Sue and I definitely visited the Jorvik Viking Center8 together. This museum emphasized the history of the area before the arrival of the Normans in the eleventh century. Many lifelike displays depicted the lifestyles of the Vikings who inhabited the area. The details were based on archeological excavations that produced thousands of objects.
We watched ACG&S the first time around.
We also went for a drive in the Yorkshire Dales that we knew from the television series All Creatures Great and Small. We stopped at a house or store for some reason. We talked with a lady there who used the word “fortnight”. I told her that no one in America ever used the word. She asked me what Americans said instead. She seemed mildly surprised when I replied “two weeks”.
Joseph Locke’s statue.
After we left York we made two stops on our way back to the Camelot Hotel in London. The first was in Barnsley, where we searched for Locke Park, named after one of Sue’s relatives, a railroad magnate named Joseph Locke. We stopped to ask for directions. We were told that it was at the corner of Locke and Park. Where else? Sue is not a direct descendant, however. Joseph and his wife Phoebe had only one child, whom they adopted.
Our second stop was at the fabulous Warwick Castle. This stop was recommended by one of TSI’s clients, Mary Lee Pointe at Avon Old Farms School. I had mentioned to her that we were going to England and wanted to see at least one castle. She said that sh had visited several of them, and Warwick Castle was the most interesting.
The castle and its grounds made a fitting end to our motoring excursions. I cannot imagine a more awe-inspiring setting that was matched by the opulent displays in the interior. As I recall, we had a picnic lunch together on the grounds.
We made a memorable pit stop on the way to London. The facilities themselves were mediocre at best. What got my attention was a sign at the entrance demanding “NO FOOTBALL COACHES.” A “coach” to Brits was a tour bus. “Football” referred to the game called soccer in the states. So, the rest area actually prohibited busloads of soccer hooligans.
We managed to locate the car rental agency in London. I don’t remember how we got ourselves and our luggage to the hotel for the last two nights.
I don’t remember which of the activities that I listed in the first London section were actually performed on our last full day in London. I am pretty sure, however, that, as I mentioned, Sue and I attended the theater on our very last evening.
“Memorable” is definitely the right word for this”‘fortnight” in England. I can hardly believe how many things we did and how vividly they have remained in my memory and Sue’s—with no notes at all. How times have changed! It is now a titanic struggle for both Sue and me to recall what we did the day before yesterday.
One thing that I cannot remember clearly is what we did about the business. In the course of the two weeks, we must have called the office at least four or five times. I cannot recall needing to deal with any pressing problems.
1, Chick Comparetto was the father of Sue’s first husband. He lived less than a mile from us. He died in 2020. His obituary is here.
2. Alas, there is no longer a Camelot Hotel in London, and I was not able to identify any hotels that might be successors. Perhaps the building was converted to some other use.
3. This is my favorite shaggy-dog story of all time, and it is 100 percent true.
4. I think that this restaurant might still be in business in 2021. A restaurant called Halepi seems to be in the right location, and everything mentioned on its website, which can be visited here, rings true.
5. His Lordship George Carey became Archbishop of Canterbury, England’s ranking clergyman, in the following year. He retired in 2002. Like most bishops everywhere he got entangled in scandals about reporting clerical sexual abuse. In 2017 he resigned his last formal relationship with the church, which meant that he was no longer allowed to officiated at services.
6. Not many people were at Wookey Hole when we visited. I remember thinking in 1990 that this place needed some good old American marketing. Maybe Ambrose could have helped. Subsequently it has been Disneyfied into a real touristy place. Check out its website here.
7. Tintagel has changed in the three decades since we were there. A visitors’ center has been added, a footbridge has been constructed, and someone was allowed to carve a gigantic image of Merlin’s face on the side of the cliff.
8. The Jorvik Viking Center is still in operation. Its website is here.
