Tag Archives: Birmingham AL

2007 & 2009 Jim and Mike at Funerals in Trenton, MO

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A journey to Trenton, MO. Continue reading →

Aunt Margaret’s funeral: In March of 2007 my dad, Jim Wavada, was living in Enfield near our house. This situation has been explained here. He learned in a telephone call from either his brother Vic or one of Vic’s children that Vic’s wife Margaret had died on Tuesday, March 27. Vic and Margaret had resided in Trenton, MO, for as long as I had known them,. The services were scheduled for Saturday at St. Joseph’s church in Trenton.

Dad could not have undertaken the journey by himself. I retained only the vaguest memory of Aunt Margaret1, but I agreed to accompany him to pay his respects. I have absolutely no recollection of staying in or near Trenton on that occasion. I therefore have deduced that we flew to KCI airport on Friday and stayed overnight at the Hampton Inn near the airport. I have a pretty vivid memory of staying with my dad at that hotel, and I cannot imagine any other occasion on which we might have done so.

Why did we not fly out earlier and spend some time with the family? I can think of two possible reasons. Either I had business commitments that I could not get out of, or my dad wanted to minimize his time there. I strongly suspect that it was the latter. My last trip for the last major installation that I did (Macy’s South, as explained here) was in January of 2007. I don’t have any notes about major trips in March or April. Furthermore, I know from several conversations with him that my dad did not have much respect for his oldest brother.

I am pretty sure that we arrived at KCI on Friday afternoon. I rented a car from Avis. After we checked in at the Hampton, we treated ourselves to fried chicken at the Strouds restaurant near the airport.1

The next morning we ate an early breakfast at the hotel and then drove to Trenton. The drive took about an hour and forty-five minutes. I remember nothing about it.

In Trenton I got to see my Uncle Vic, and my cousins Charlie, Vic Jr., Margaret Anne Deaver, and Cathy. I also got to meet their spouses and children. Some of these people were probably at my mom’s funeral eight years earlier. The others I had not seen for at least thirty-seven years. Many I had never met at all.

St. Joseph church in Trenton.

I have very few memories of this occasion. I remember that my Uncle Vic had recently purchased a car. For some reason this upset my dad, who thought that it was a waste of money. I could not understand why my dad would care about this.

I am pretty sure that we stopped at Uncle Vic’s apartment before going to the church. I can visualize it, but I am not sure that I can trust the details.

The other memory that I have was a disparaging comment that Uncle Vic made about me. It was something to the effect that I thought that I was too good for them.

Since he was eighty-eight years old and did not know me at all, I did not get angry or embarrassed. My only mental reaction was to consider this a very strange thing to say about someone who had just paid to fly halfway across the country for services for someone whom he barely knew. At any rate one of my cousins, Margaret Anne or Cathy, reprimanded him for the comment, and he attempted to make a joke out of it.

In retrospect I surmise that the comment was really directed at my dad. I had not consciously done anything (or, for that matter, failed to do anything) that would provoke enmity with Uncle Vic.

I was happy to establish a little bit of communication with my cousins even though I am almost certain that we left shortly after the funeral and drove back to the Hampton Inn. It must have been during this drive that my dad vented about Uncle Vic’s car.

I surmise that we then flew back to Connecticut on Sunday.

Uncle Vic’s funeral: My dad and I returned to Trenton in October of 2009 for Uncle Vic’s funeral. He was ninety years old, which, unless I have miscalculated, tied him with his mother Hazel for the family’s longevity record. I have much more numerous and vivid memories of the second trip, but it is definitely possible that some of the events that I associate with it actually occurred in 2007.

On the second trip my dad and I shared a room at the luxurious Knights Inn3 just outside of Trenton. We spent at least two nights at the Knights. It made quite an impression on both of us. Our room contained an old light green rag that was covered with stains. A sign near it implored the temporary residents to use this rag to clean their firearms as opposed to the towels or sheets. This admonition was unnecessary for dad and me, as we both carried our own cleaning equipment whenever we brought our rifles on trips.

All of my cousins were again present. I am pretty sure that this time we went to the rosary and wake on Sunday evening. We also ate supper with them and some friends of Uncle Vic’s at what Vic Jr. called “a pizza joint”4 in Trenton. The atmosphere was fairly lively. My cousins lived in St. Louis, KC, and Denver. I had the impression that most of them were happy that they need never come to Trenton again. There was very little reminiscing about good old days with “Pop”.

I remember talking with an optometrist who was, I guess, Uncle Vic’s friend. I told him that I had been taking the PreserVision vitamins to try to stave off macular degeneration. He validated that this was probably a good idea.

I met Charlie’s wife Mary and Vic Jr.’s wife Theresa5. Margaret Anne’s husband was probably there, too, but I do not remember his name. John maybe? I don’t remember anyone asking about my sister Jamie.

On Monday we attended the funeral and burial. Afterwards there was a lunch at the church hosted by the Ladies Club. I sat near some of my cousins. I remember Vic Jr. remarking about his mastery of texting. He said that recently he and his son Matt had texted one another while they were in the same store. Theresa worried that people would become overly dependent on them and stop planning.

I recall quite a few kids, a few of whom were a little rambunctious. I can’t say that I tried very hard to assign names to all of them.

The return trip: My dad, who at this point began referring to himself as the last of the Mohicans6 was unusually talkative. He told me about a problem that he had had with Vic Jr.’s son, Matt. I don’t remember the details.

I think that it was either in the car ride or the airplane that he talked about Vic. It may have occurred at another time; I am not certain. He said that his mother, Hazel Wavada, had negotiated a deal with the Benedictines to provide a good high school education for her three sons at Maur Hill in Atchison, KS. One of them had to become a priest. Vic, thee oldest actually took the name Brother Hildebrand, O.S.B., before he quit the order. That, my dad said, was why his other brother, Joe, became a Benedictine priest.

He also told me that Vic had been married before he met Margaret to a woman in Birmingham, AL, of all places.

1. Her very brief obituary, which was posted here, says that “Mrs. Wavada retired from the Jewitt Library in Trenton after 28 years.” This was news to me. I also did not know where my Uncle Vic had been employed. His even briefer obituary, which was posted here, was no help. I have a vague recollection that he worked for a company known as Trenton Foods, which may have been purchased by a conglomerate.

2. My recollection was that the restaurant was near the airport. The closest Strouds that was open in 2023 was located in Oak Ridge Manor, sixteen miles southwest of the Hampton Inn. That is farther than I remembered, but we would have thought nothing about driving such a distance for real fried chicken, which is unknown in New England.

3. The building that housed the Knights Inn still existed in 2023. It was renamed the Cobblestone Inn and Suites. Its website is here. The exterior does not appear changed much, but the photos of the rooms did not seem familiar.

4. I don’t think that the joint survived until 2023. The only pizza places in town in 2023 that Google knew about were Pizza Hut, Godfather’s Pizza Express, and Casey’s, a “convenience store known for fuel and pizza.”

5. Theresa died in 2017. Her obituary has been posted here.

6. He only held this title for two years before passing it on to me. As of 2023 I have now been the most senior of the KC branch of the Wavadas for twelve years, almost 1/6 of my total life.

7. The original Brother Hildebrand of the eleventh century eventually became the famous Pope Gregory VII. I have written an entire chapter about his influence and posted it here. I also included him as a character in the historical novel, Ben 9, that I posted here.

1994-2014 TSI: AdDept Client: Saks Fifth Avenue

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TSI had a long but bumpy association with SFA. Continue reading →

Saks Fifth Avenue (SFA) is more than just a store. For decades it has been a chain of high-end department stores throughout North America as well as numerous smaller affiliated stores. In the early nineties its headquarters was in its famous flagship store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. The first Saks store was opened in 1867, and for decades the enterprise was owned and operated by the Saks family. However, since 1923 Saks has been owned and controlled by outside organizations except for a two-year period beginning in 1996 when it was a public corporation. Even then 50 percent of the stock was retained by its previous owner, the Bahrain-based firm, Investcorp.

I, of course, was blissfully ignorant of most of this when, in the early nineties, TSI began pitching the AdDept system to the advertising department of Saks. In fact, my presentation to Saks may have been the first one that had a fairly serious chance of succeeding. I don’t remember the demo, but I surely gave one at the IBM office on Madison Avenue. I also definitely visited the office of the Saks’ advertising department, which at that time was on one of the upper floors of the store on Fifth Avenue to collect the requirements for the official proposal.

It did not take me long to realize that SFA was very different from Macy’s. The Senior VP at Saks was a woman, and her secretary was a man. I am embarrassed to report that I don’t remember either of their names. Theirs was an unusual setup in the early nineties. More surprising to me was the fact that around his desk were posted large glossy photographs of shirtless male models.

Saks’ advertising department was responsible for more than just the Fifth Avenue store. There were dozens of full-line stores that bore the SFA logo strategically positioned around the continent in locations with the requisite number of rich people. They also managed the little advertising done for even more Off Fifth outlet stores that sold the merchandise that had not been sold at the SFA stores. They also had responsibility for advertising for the Armani Exchange stores. I never quite understood why.

This was the OTS at 700 N. Michigan Ave. in Chicago.

For me the most surprising thing about Saks’ approach to advertising was its focus on New York City. Macy’s focus was somewhat similar, but their primary purpose in purchasing AdDept was to be able to hand additional markets. Saks divided their SFA stores into two groups: New York and OTS, which stood for “out-of-town stores.” Their newspaper advertising was heavily focused on the New York Times. They may have used Newsday for the Long Island store, but I don’t think that they used the other tabloids at all.

Saks also advertised very heavily in fashion magazines. In some ways the system could treat magazines as newspapers that only published one issue per month, but in other ways they were quite different. A fair amount of programming was required to handle Saks’ advertising in Vogue and other such periodicals.

Saks signed a contract with TSI in 1994, which was a banner year for the company. I made sure that all of the users of and prospects for the AdDept system knew that Saks was now on our client list by including the news in an issue of Sound Bytes, TSI’s short-lived newsletter.

At Saks Fifth Avenue, the national retailer based in Manhattan, the implementation of the AdDept system is scheduled for May 1. Advertising personnel will be connected to an AS/400 located at the company’s data center in Lawrenceville, NJ, through a Token Ring network. Both Mac and PC users in all areas of the department and the advertising business office will have access to the data. In addition to the wealth of standard features in AdDept, custom programming will provide the department with the ability to produce advertising schedules by store, to track advertising expenses (gross, vendor, and net) by merchandise vendor, and to produce change reports that conform with the way that the department is organized.

Reading this blurb again brought to mind a few unusual aspects concerning the installation.

  • I made at least one trip to Lawrenceville, which is closer to Philadelphia than to Fifth Avenue, probably at the time when the AS/400 was installed in 1994. Almost never did anyone from TSI deal with anyone from that facility, and they had never had a hardware problem. However, several years later we received a very strange phone call from someone there who requested that someone from our office dial into the system over the modem. They said that no one could remember where they had put it; they hoped that the noise produced by the modem—it never answered on the first ring—would lead them to it. Apparently it worked. In 1998 all of Saks’ computers were moved to the Proffitt’s Inc. facility in Jackson, MI. I installed a newer faster machine there.
  • My recollection is that Saks used very little of the custom programming that TSI had coded and implemented at the time of the installation until Tom Caputo arrived eight years later. They mainly used the AdDept system as an easier way to key in expenses for their accounts payable and general ledger systems, which AdDept was designed to feed.
  • The phrase “the way that the department is organized,” brought back memories of the difficulties that I encountered while training at SFA. The ROP (i.e., newspaper ads) manager, in particular, was quite uncooperative in helping me understand how she worked. She evidently considered ROP her own little fiefdom, and suspected that revealing the knowledge of how her area worked might affect her job security. This was by no means the last time that I was faced with this sort of heel-dragging.

I remember a few other details about that initial installation:

SFA on Wilshire Blvd. in Beverly Hills.
  • I heard one interesting story related by an employee at Saks. The person at the headquarters who monitored sales by store had been very concerned because the Beverly Hills store in California had in the previous few months posted much lower sales than expected. A call to the store manager revealed a simple explanation: “The princess died.” Evidently a Saudi princess had been purchasing so much so regularly from the store that her untimely demise had dramatically deflated the the store’s total revenues.
  • Once or twice I spent consecutive days in Manhattan during the installation. Saks arranged for me to stay in a luxurious room at the nearby Sheraton. It was by far the nicest place in which I ever stayed for business.
  • I remember that on one occasion SFA had asked for a day of training, for which TSI charged $1,000. I discovered when I arrived in Manhattan that no one who actually used (or had any intention of using) the AdDept system was available to spend time with me. So, for several hours I “trained” three interns. For all of them English was a second language. One was named Oscar; I don’t remember the other names.

In subsequent years I was not a bit happy with the state of the installation at Saks. It made me realize that the success of our installations was largely dependent upon the strength of our liaison. The person needed to have the ability to grasp the intricacies of the system, a personality adaptable to working with both TSI and the users of the system, and the clout (direct or indirect) to deal with problems once they had been identified.

I very much wanted to use Saks as a reference account, but they used so little of the system that I was reluctant to mention them. I was frankly puzzled as to why it seemed so difficult to get anyone outside of the finance area interested in making the system work for them. The person with whom we worked the most was Jeanette Igesias1. She was conscientious enough, but she had neither the authority nor the inclination to involve any of the other areas more fully.

In 1998 the retail world was shocked to learn that Saks Holdings, Inc., the parent company, had been acquired by Proffitt’s Inc.2, a company that a few years earlier consisted of a set of stores in Tennessee that could have all fit easily inside the Saks store on Fifth Avenue. Almost immediately after the acquisition the parent company’s name was changed to Saks Inc.

Shortly thereafter I was in Birmingham, AL, to work with employees of the advertising department for the Parisian3, a chain of department stores that Proffitt’s Inc. had previously acquired. The corporate headquarters was also located in the same building. I happened to encounter the same Senior VP from Saks’ adverting department whom I had met in the early nineties. She was there to meet with people from what was then still called Proffitt’s Marketing Group (PMG). She knew that I had been frustrated with the pace of the installation at SFA. She even remarked that maybe under the new ownership they could get something done.

At about this time Ava John was hired by Saks. I think that she worked under Jeanette until Jeanette left SFA in 2002. Thereafter Ava was TSI’s principal contact for the part of the system used by the advertising business office, which included recording invoices that were uploaded to the corporate accounts payable system.

In 2008 Ava was arrested and charged with running an embezzlement scheme that netted her and her friends and relatives more than $680,000 over the course of five years. That may seem like a lot, but it was only a little over $10,000 per month, a tiny fraction of what Saks spent on advertising. I discovered a single mistake at another installation that was about as large as this.

At the time I did not hear about any of this, and, to the best of my knowledge, neither did any of TSI’s employees, but the scandal was reported in all three of New York’s major dailies. The Post‘s coverage can be read here. I was unable to discover anything posted on the Internet about the ultimate legal resolution. I also know nothing more about Ava.

In 2001 Tom Caputo, who had been TSI’s primary contact at Lord &Taylor5 for several years, was hired by Saks. He had a number of responsibilities in the advertising department, one of which was to oversee the AdDept installation. Tom’s office was not in the flagship store, but in an office building across the street. I met with him there several times. I cannot remember what projects we did for them, but I remember that Tom seemed frustrated with the situation there, or, more likely with what the world of retail had become in the twenty-first century.

Tom stayed at Saks until 2014, the same year that Denise Bessette and I decided to shut down TSI. I had one further contact with him. He asked me if I knew of any job openings that he would qualify for. I had to reply in the negative. By that time the demand for both people and software that was adept at administering the advertising for large national retailers was negligible. I felt sorry for my many acquaintances who were not able to disassociate themselves from this undertaking as smoothly as we did.

In 2007 Saks was spun off from the other department stores that were part of Saks Inc. The executive who had cobbled together this retail giant, R. Brad Martin, summarily abandoned the leadership of the rest of the stores to someone else and elected to run just SFA. His decision to remove the jewel from the crown was described in this New York Post. article.

In 2013 the company was purchased by the Hudson Bay Company, the oldest corporate enterprise in North America. The company had already purchased Tom Caputo’s previous employer, Lord & Taylor. One of the last projects that I worked on at TSI was helping with the migration of SFA’s AdDept system to the HBC computers located somewhere in Canada.

There are still many Saks Fifth Avenue stores. HBC opened a huge store in Toronto in 2014 and at least two other stores in Canada. Administration of all of the stores seems to be split between Toronto and New York.

1. Jeanette Iglesias’ LinkedIn page can be found here.

2. Much more about TSI’s relationship with Proffitt’s Inc./Saks Inc. is available here.

3. Details about the Parisian installation of the AdDept system are provided here.

4. You can read about this major boo-boo here.

5. The history of the AdDept installation at Lord & Taylor is documented here.

1999-2006 TSI: AdDept Client: Parisian

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Saks Inc. division based in Birmingham, AL. Continue reading →

Parisian, based in Birmingham, AL, was a little different from the other divisions of Proffitt’s Inc.1 (later renamed Saks Inc.). Its stores were somewhat upscale, but they seldom went head-to-head with Saks or Neiman Marcus in major markets. Parisian was acquired by Proffitt’s Inc. in 1996, and the corporate headquarters was immediately moved to the beautiful Parisian building at 750 Lakeshore Parkway on the north side of Birmingham. By that time Proffitt’s Marketing Group (PMG) had already decided to implement the AdDept system at all divisions. Therefore, I never made a presentation or demo for Parisian.

I flew to Birmingham and installed the AdDept system in January of 1999. After that day I never laid eyes on the AS/400 or the system console. They were kept in a closet somewhere in the headquarters building. Parisian’s advertising department was located, if memory serves, on the second floor. PMG was on the ground floor. The AdDept users signed on through the network. TSI had nothing to do with the connectivity.

This was a very strange installation. The personnel in the advertising department were not like those that I encountered anywhere else. Aside from the Senior VP, almost everyone else at every level was female. Moreover, every time that I went there, there seemed to be a large number of new people who needed to learn how to use AdDept. Finally, a very high percentage of these women were strikingly good-looking and blonde, and almost all of them dressed much more stylishly than I had seen at any other location, including Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus.2 At those two locations the executives and the people who dealt with customers dressed to kill, but those standards were not imposed on clerical workers.

From left: Kimberly Weld, Sally Carter and Cheryl Sides. Josh Hill from PMG is behind them.

I have found quite a few photos of the people at Parisian, and the names of the employees are indicated on some of them. I also have some notes beginning in 1999 that included more names. I have very clear memories of only two people, Cheryl Sides1, who was the official liaison for the AdDept system, and Sally Carter, the manager of the business office. Cheryl was there from the time of the installation up to the demise of the chain. Sally was replaced by Barry Cleavelin in 2001.

For the first year or so the Divisional VP was Alan Seitel5. The Senior VP for most of the period in question was Bob Ferguson, who came over from Younkers6. He was succeeded by Gary Yiatchos7.

Renita Lewis on the left with her back to the camera. Next, in order, are Diane Vogel, Cheryl Side, Kim Wolff, Regaye Fulcher, Annissa Kennedy, Kimberly Weld, Josh Hill, and Angela Dawkins.
David Dollar.

The people: I could hardly believe how many names were recorded in my notes or beside my photographs. I have almost no memories of any of these people. If my notes included a description of their role at the Parisian, I have included it in their entry in this list:

Diane (Vogel) Worthington’s LinkedIn photo.
  • It seems incredible that I remember nothing about Diane Vogel, who was the Advertising Director at Parisian from 1996 on. I must have had several meetings with her. Her LinkedIn page can be found here.
  • Kimberly Weld would have won the national title if there had been a Miss ROP Coordinator contest. Her LinkedIn page is here.
  • David Dollar was the Co-op Coordinator. I seem to remember that he kept a lot of food in his desk.
  • I think that Dottie Collins might have handled Co-op advertising before David Dollar. Her LinkedIn page is here, but it contains no useful information.
  • I mostly remember Kim Woolf as the other Kim. She might have been involved with direct mail I found her LinkedIn page here.
  • Regaye Fulcher sat next to Kim Woolf in one photo. She may have worked with or for her. Her LinkedIn page is posted here
  • Ginger Brown worked in direct mail.
  • Colin Mitchell (a woman) was in charge of insertion orders for the newspapers.
  • Karen Kennedy worked in the production side of direct mail.
  • In 2000 Kelley Carter was in charge of co-op.
  • The next year it was taken over by Mollie Donohue. Her LinkedIn page is here.
  • I met two new people on my last trip to Parisian in 2005. The first was named Justin Walker. I wrote, “Justin Walker, whose title is director of eBusiness, is, I think, the resident techy for the Parisian division.” His LinkedIn page is here.
  • The other newcomer in 2005 was Luann Carter who came from Proffitt’s I think that she was in charge of trafficking production jobs. Her LinkedIn page is here.
  • I remember nothing about any of the following people whose name I recorded at some point: Annissa Kennedy, Angela Dawkins, Renita Lewis, and Kelly Denney.
I am completely stumped as to why I do not remember Mollie.

The installation: This was one of TSI’s most frustrating installations. The only difficult thing that they asked for was Bob Ferguson’s calendar. They printed it on a Canon color copier that used Postscript rather than a version of PCL, the Hewlett-Packer language. I said that I would look into it, but I don’t think that we ever even quoted doing it.

This should have been an easy installation, but it wasn’t. They seemed to have difficulty getting even basic programs to work for them. Some of the problems were just bizarre. In 2000 I reported, “CHKFAXSTS doesn’t work on Colin’s Mac. No matter what option you put in, the program interprets it as a 4. This is one of the more bizarre problems that I have encountered.” CHKFAXSTS is an IBM program; no other AdDept user ever had any problem with it.

Renita and Sally.

In April of 2000 I described some of the other difficulties.

Saks Inc. is putting pressure on Sally Carter to use AdDept to do closings. She told Sandy that she doesn’t want to use it because she doesn’t think that it works. We helped her through some problems today with the P.O. accrual program. I should have gone over the closing programs with her in more detail when I was there, but there was just no time. Wednesday I found a bug that threw off the journal entry by $1 million. I fixed it easily, but we looked bad.

This is another face of our usual problem. I have spent an inordinate amount of time at Parisian providing basic 5250 training to people that do not use the system at all and never will. I have also spent a lot of time writing custom programs (mostly their funky advertising schedule) and more than a little time twiddling my thumbs. I have spent no time with Sally to speak of before the last trip. Most of that was spent getting the store allocations to work.

I also reported that in November of 2000 I was asked to train a whole new group of employees in a classroom setting. It did not go well at all:

Barry Cleavelin.

The people in my class on Friday – who seemed reasonably intelligent to me – retained absolutely nothing. Either I am a much worse teacher than I think that I am or people in this type of setting do not think that they are expected to remember anything.

When Barry replaced Sally, I needed to spend several days with him to help him get up to speed on the AdDept processes. During that period we discovered several things that had been handled incorrectly in the past.

Life in Birmingham: I did not hate Birmingham as much as I hated Jackson, MS, the home of McRae’s. Jackson made me feel angry and frustrated. In Birmingham I just felt uncomfortable.

My records indicated that I ate a lot of lunches at Cia’s, which was inside the Parisian building. I have no vivid recollections of any of them

Most evenings I picked up a sandwich at Schlotzsky’s Deli. I remember that I ordered the same thing every time. It might have been a Reuben; that was my most common order at a deli.

I distinctly remember eating at a small Italian restaurant inside a mall. Ordering was done at the counter. I asked for spaghetti and meat sauce. The man at the counter mumbled something that I could not understand. I asked him to say it again. He did, but I still had no idea what he was asking me. I just said, “Yes.” Twenty years later I still have no idea what I agreed to.

At least once Steve VeZain of PMG took me out to his favorite restaurant, Joe’s Crab Shack.

La Quinta.

For most of my visits I stayed in the nearby La Quinta. It seemed to cater mostly to golfers who came to play the courses on the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail. The thing that I noted the most about them was that many of them wore leather shoes with no socks. I had never seen this before, and it struck me as being both uncomfortable and unsanitary.

After work I usually jogged five or six miles on paths up and down the highway that ran between the hotel and Parisian. It was not the greatest place to run. Not only was it a little dangerous, but the noise was also disturbing. I had to wear my Bose headphones while I listened to operatic music or instructional tape.

The La Quinta had a pool and a small hot tub. Both of them were outdoors. The first time that I stayed I was able to use the hot tub after my run undisturbed. On all subsequent occasions the hot tub was occupied by golfers. On my last visit I gave up on La Quinta and stayed at a Hampton Inn.

I wrote the following on November 9, 2000:

When I was in Portland early in the year I had enough time to change my clothes before taking the red-eye back to the east. I changed in an extremely cramped stall in the men’s room. When I got home I realized that I was missing one of my wing-tips. I must have left it in the stall. I never threw the remaining shoe away because I thought that I might be able to find the missing one somewhere. After a while I forgot about it.

I went to the store to buy a new pair of dress shoes. I did not want another pair of wing-tips, but the only reasonable ones I could find were wing-tips, so that is what I bought.

This morning I was congratulating myself on forgetting nothing more important than a t-shirt to wear running. I started to put on my shoes. Both of them were right shoes. I evidently picked up the extra shoe by mistake.

I had to make an emergency run to Walmart. It was an unpleasant experience, but I managed to find one pair of shoes that are reasonably dressy (i.e., not hiking boots) in my size. They were on sale for $12.97.

They would not take my new American Express card at Walmart for some reason. I have used it twice.

This store in Pensacola was formerly a Parisian.

Epilogue: In August of 2006 Belk8 purchased the Parisian stores. The management of the advertising was immediately moved to Belk’s headquarters in Charlotte, NC. The five northern stores were sold by Belk to Bon Ton. Some southern stores were closed immediately. The signage on the remaining ones was changed to the Belk nameplate in 2007. Three northern stores continued to operate under their original name until 2013.

1. My experiences working with Proffitt’s Inc. and PMG are detailed here.

2. Most of my trips to Parisian were after the holding company had changed its name to Saks Inc. in 1998. My theory is that the women who applied for jobs in that building, which was the corporate headquarters for Saks Inc., thought that they were applying for a job at Saks Fifth Avenue. Thus, many of those attracted might have envisioned a career at the famous luxury store. After they learned about the other divisions and the pedestrian jobs involved in managing retail, they moved on. This is all just speculation, but I know that the guys in PMG spent as much time upstairs as they could.

3. Cheryl’s last name was, according to the designations on the photos, Sides. However, I also found Sipes and Sykes in the notes. I am not sure what Cheryl did at Parisian beside act as liaison with TSI; she definitely was good at that. I searched the Internet using all three last names but found nothing.

4. I found nothing on the Internet about Sally Carter, Barry Cleavelin’s LinkedIn page can be found here.

5. Alan Seitel’s LinkedIn page is here.

6. The history of the AdDept installation at Younkers is posted here.

7. I met Gary Yiatchos when I flew to Seattle for the presentation of the AdDept system to the advertising department of the Bon Marché. That adventure is described here.

8. The history of the AdDept installation at Belk is posted here.

1998-1999 TSI: AdDept Client: Herberger’s

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Proffitt’s Inc. division in St. Cloud, MN. Continue reading →

Herberger’s (known locally as Herbie’s) was a chain of department stores arrayed across the northern tier of the Midwest. It was the last Saks Inc. division to employ the AdDept system to manage its advertising. Prior to 1997 it was apparently an employee-owned company and, at least according to an article posted here, a wonderful place to work. The writer speculated that Herberger’s went downhill rapidly after it was acquired by the company then known as Proffitt’s Inc.

The Herberger’s on St. Germain St. in St. Cloud was still unoccupied in 2023.

One of the moves that occurred shortly after the acquisition was the direction by Proffitt’s Marketing Group (PMG) to install TSI’s AdDept system in the advertising department on an upper floor (there were only three floors) of the flagship store in St. Cloud, MN.

I visited St. Cloud a total of three times in 1998 and 1999. I found only a few notes and two photographs to help me remember the experience. Furthermore, I cannot recall the names of most of the people with whom I worked, and I was unable to find any references on the Internet. So, this account will mostly depend upon my increasingly unreliable memory.

The purposes of my first trip to St. Cloud were to install the AdDept system on the AS/400 that had been purchased from and installed by IBM and to train the people who would be responsible for setting up the tables and entering the ads. St. Cloud is north of the Twin Cities, just far enough away to be considered an independent city. On that first occasion I flew Northwest Airlines from Bradley to the very nice Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport. I then took a long hike to my connecting flight, At the time1 a regional company flying with a Northwest flight number made the trip back and forth several times a day. I described it in one of my emails to Denise Bessette:

We boarded for St. Cloud at 8:20. We rode on a seatless bus to the plane. Then we sat on the plane for a while. Then we taxied for a while. We left at 9:05. We arrived at St. Cloud at 9:22. 45 minutes on the ground; 17 in the air.

On the subsequent trips I just rented a car at the airport in Minneapolis and drove to St. Cloud.

On all of my visits I stayed at a hotel2 that was only a couple of blocks from Herbie’s. I walked there and used the employees’ entrance from the parking lot behind the store.

Anne Hof.

I think that Josh Hill from PMG was present for all of my visits. PMG owned the system and insisted that there would be no custom programming. This made it extremely difficult for the president of a company with “Tailored” in its name. It came at a time when our programming staff was up to its armpits in alligators; that was good. However, for the first time in my life I knew that I sometimes could not provide what the client wanted or, sometimes, even what they needed.

Al DeCamillis and Christie Vierzba in the training room.

The people: I have pictures of three Herbie’s employees: Al DeCamillis3, the Business Office Manager, Christie Vierzba3, the Direct Mail Manager, and Anne Hof. I remember little or nothing about Christie, Ann, and the other workers in the department.

I think that Al was hired between my first and second trip. He was eager to use AdDept for all of the accounting, but he could not use it for his closing. The method he used was “closing to plan,” which meant that the expenses and income that he reported to corporate accounting always matched the planned amount to the penny. The offsetting entry was to a slush account. Evidently this was what he had always done. It meant that the monthly figures in every advertising account were, for purposes of analysis, worthless. No one could ever determine from the general ledger where too much or too little was spent.

My life in St. Cloud: My first visit to Herbie’s was an eye-opener. By that time I had visited the headquarters of twenty or more retailers. Each was either a free-standing structure or the upper floors of a huge store. Herbie’s was indeed in an upper story of a store, but although the building occupied the entire 600 block on St. Germain Street, it was only two or three stories high. It would never have been considered as a setting for a movie about a department store. It was just a store with departments. It even had a good-sized parking lot. The town itself had a much more Midwestern feel than any that I had been in.

I have remarkably few memories of my time in St. Cloud. I cannot remember any restaurants. My only recollection of the hotel was that there was definitely an iron and an ironing board in my room.

Not much of great note or interest actually happened either in the store or in the town while I was there. By far the most memorable event for me was the stress that I underwent while worrying about what was happening back in Enfield. That tale has been related here.

The location for one very unusual event involving Herbie’s occurred during one of my visits to Birmingham. It has been described here.

The logo that was used after the move to Milwaukee.

Epilogue: The installation at Herberger’s was not a happy one for anyone. In 2000 Saks Inc. decided to transfer the administration of the stores to Carson’s in Milwaukee. The jobs for 260 administrative employees in St. Cloud were eliminated. The stores retained the Herberger’s name but they also replaced the flower with a circle of red hexagons that Carson’s displayed on all of its stores. Eventually Carson’s was renamed the Northern Division. It was then sold to the Bon Ton in 2005. By 2017 all of the Herberger’s stores were closed. In 2023 there were still rumors that the brand might be resuscitated, but I found no evidence that any Herberger’s stores had been reopened.

1. In 2023 the only flights to and from the St. Cloud Regional Airport connected the town with Mesa AZ, Punta Garda FL, and Laughlin NV.

2. It was not part of a chain then. I think that it might be a Marriott Courtyard in 2023.

1993-2012 TSI: AdDept Celebrity Sightings

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All of the famous people that I can remember spotting on my trips were on airplanes or in airports. I probably saw others that I either did not recognize or have forgotten about. After all I spent a lot of … Continue reading →

All of the famous people that I can remember spotting on my trips were on airplanes or in airports. I probably saw others that I either did not recognize or have forgotten about. After all I spent a lot of time in New York City, and I went to Robinsons-May in North Hollywood at least half a dozen times.

Sports celebrities: Once in a while I would recognize a famous person in an airport or on a plane. I only talked to two of them, and both conversations were very brief. Most of the celebrities were from the world of sports, or at least “sports entertainment”. Three of them were from ESPN, which is based in Bristol, CT. ESPN’s announcers flew out of Bradley International, the airport in Windsor Locks that I always used.

Jackie Joyner-Kersee was a passenger on one of my flights back to Hartford. She sat in coach. A few people recognized her. She had won three gold, one silver, and two bronze medals at four separate Olympic Games. Her events were the heptathlon and the long jump. Sports Illustrated for Women magazine voted her the Greatest Female Athlete of All-Time.

She was also a star basketball player at UCLA. In 2001 she was voted the greatest female collegiate athlete of the previous twenty-five years.

My recollection is that JJK was in the Hartford area for a charity event. I read about it in the Hartford Courant the next day.

On one of my trips (I think that it might have been on a side trip to visit my parents in Kansas City), I rode on the same plane twice in a row with the same person. That is, my first flight was from BDL to an airline’s hub airport and then from there to my destination. The person who was also on both flights was Chris “Boomer” Berman, a long-time studio host on ESPN.

I had seen Boomer on television many times. My favorite bit was when he adopted his “Swami” persona to give his predictions for NFL games.

I only saw Boomer getting on and off of the airplane. On both legs of our common journey he sat in first class while I was relegated to coach.

My all-time greatest thrill in sports viewing was when Desmond made this spectacular catch against Notre Dame.

I never purchased first class tickets, but because I flew so much, I occasionally was was upgraded. I almost never recognized anyone else in the comfortable seats. Once, however, I sat in first class with a famous sports personality. In fact, I sat right next to Desmond Howard, who was working at ESPN at the time, on a flight that terminated at Bradley. I was in the window seat; he had the aisle seat.

It took me a couple of minutes to recognize him. He did not look like a football player at all. He was only 5’10” and weighed much less than 200 pounds. His most recognizable feature was his broad smile. He had a portable DVD player with him. I was engrossed in a crossword puzzle or a magazine article or something. I had a strong feeling that I was sitting beside someone whom I had seen on television somewhere, but it was not until Desmond smiled at the flight attendant that I recognized him as the 1991 Heisman Trophy winner from my alma mater, the University of Michigan.

When we landed, Desmond quickly rose to exit. I noticed that he had left his DVD player in the magazine storage area on the rear of the seat in front of him. I retrieved it and gave it to him as he was waiting for the exit door to open. He gave me a big smile and thanked me.

The other ESPN personality whom I recognized was Jim Donnan1, the former head football coach at the University of Georgia. I enjoyed his commentary on college football teams before the games were televised. He was always seated behind a desk.

Donnan was the only “personality” whom I approached in an airport. He was dressed in a suit, but he also wore white sneakers. I asked him if he changed his shoes when he went on camera. He said that he wore the sneakers because dress shoes made his feet hurt, and they never showed his feet on camera.

In my experience celebrities generally flew in first class. It was therefore extremely surprising for me to sit across the aisle from Vin Baker2 on a flight back to Hartford. It was not a shock that he was going to Hartford. After all, he was by far the most famous person who ever played basketball at the University of Hartford. What was surprising was that he and his entourage were seated in the coach section. I had trouble finding a place to put my legs, and Vin Baker was 6’11” tall!

I don’t recall whether Baker was still playing in the NBA when he made this trip. His last year was 2006. So, I suspect that he was still playing.

On another occasion I sat next to another large man. This guy I did not immediately recognize, but I could tell from the papers that he was reading and annotating that he was on a recruiting trip as a coach for the University of Oklahoma football team. When I got home I used google to retrieve a list of the Sooners’ coaches. I quickly recognized Kevin Sumlin as the person whom I had sat beside. At the time he was the tight ends coach for Bob Stoops at OU.

In 2008 Sumlin was named the head coach at the University of Houston. He led the team to a 12-1 record and an appearance in a bowl game in 2011. Before that game he accepted the top job at Texas A&M.

In his first year at A&M the Aggies, with Johnny Manziel at quarterback, went 11-2 and beat Oklahoma in the Cotton Bowl. After that his teams, first at A&M and then at Arizona, seemed to get worse every year. His last game as a head coach was an ignominious 70-7 loss to Arizona State in 2020.

The other sports figure whom I recognized on an airplane was more famous than any of the others so far listed. I saved him for last because I only saw him for a few seconds. Also, he was only a “sports entertainment” star.

Many people know of two characters named Steve Austin—the Six Million Dollar Man and Stone Cold. I saw the second one on a flight from Birmingham, AL, to Atlanta. He was sitting in seat 1B, and he had a very large bandage on one of his knees. He apparently boarded early, which meant that absolutely everyone on the plane walked by him. I recognized him immediately, but I didn’t say anything. I assumed that he had received medical attention at one of the sports medicine centers in Birmingham.

I was quite familiar with a third Steve Austin, Stunning Steve Austin, a lithe young wrestler whom I had seen many times on televised WCW performances from Texas. At the time Stunning Steve had long blonde hair, was skinny for a wrestler, and was usually cast as a good guy. His finishing move was called the stunner. Unlike Stone Cold, he was well known for his speed and agility. Also, he never wore armor on his knees or crushed beer cans.

It was hard to fathom, but he was the same guy who later grew into the legendary Stone Cold Steve Austin.

Other celebrities: I saw two fairly famous political figures on airplanes. The first was my congresswoman, Nancy Johnson. One evening we were on the same flight from Washington National to Bradley. I was somewhat surprised by how short she was.

I don’t remember the other person’s name or even what his position was. My recollection was that he was head of the EPA, but I cannot find him on the list of administrators. I can picture him very clearly in my mind and even hear his voice.

Isn’t Joey’s cap dreamy?

On another trip to Hartford in 1999 or 2000 the first class section was largely populated by vivacious young men who were obviously neither salesmen nor investment bankers. They were, in fact, the boy band NSYNC, and at the time they were extremely popular with the teeny bopper set.

Halfway through the flight one of them, Joey Fatone, came back to the coach section and got down on one knee to talk with an elderly couple that was seated right behind me. They were evidently his grandparents.

My recollection is that NSYNC was going to some venue in the Hartford area to give a surprise performance. I don’t think that this gig was part of one of their tours. It might have even been a private gathering. There were no screaming girls waiting for them at the airport.

I did not see many people in wheelchairs in airports, and of that small number only one (to the best of my recollection) was traveling alone. I recognized him immediately as John Hockenberry. He has been on many shows on public TV. I saw him shopping at one of the stores at the Kansas City airport (KCI).

Seeing him made me wonder what he would do if he got hungry. The food concessions at KCI are on the second floor above the stores. Maybe there was an elevator he could use, but I don’t remember seeing one.

The other person of note whom I saw in my travels was not famous in her own right. The woman sitting next to me on a flight told me that her husband, Bill Haast, had held the record for being bit by a poisonous snake the most times. He was often flown to donate blood to bite victims because he had developed immunity to many varieties of snakes.

I had never heard of Bill Haast. When I looked him up I discovered that he was even more amazing than his wife’s depiction of him. His Wikipedia page is here.

He died in 2011 at the age of 100.

1. Jim Donnan seemed to disappear from ESPN early in the teens. I recently learned that in 2011 a Ponzi scheme in which he was a partner collapsed. His partner pleaded guilty, but Donnan was acquitted on all 41 counts in 2014. The government apparently could not prove that he knew about the fraud. Donnan took a job at the American Sports Network in 2014.

2. In 2021 Vin Baker is an assistant coach with the Milwaukee Bucks. His path has been a rocky one. A Los Angeles Times article with the details has been posted here.