1985-1999 TSI: GrandAd: The Whiffs

Posted on April 15, 2021 by Mike

We struck out at a lot of agencies. Continue reading →

I am no salesman. I could make a pretty good case for the GrandAd system either in a formal presentation or in a meeting, but I was the worst at closing sales. For one thing I have had a lifelong abhorrence of talking on the telephone, especially to strangers. TSII probably could have closed some of these if I had just called people back to find out what they were thinking.

I just noticed that this guy is swinging left-handed with a right-handed club.

I also could have spent more time researching our opponents’ products. I could not think of a way to do that without devoting a lot of time and effort. I had other priorities. Maybe we should have hired one to do it.

My middle game was also poor. I did not know how to ask what a prospect’s budget was. I could tell if I was dealing with a gatekeeper, but I did not know what to do with that information.

Some of our problems were substantive, and there was not much that we could do about them.We wanted to reach agencies that had between five and one hundred employees who did not yet have an administrative system and (before the introduction of the smaller models of the System/36) were within driving distance. During some periods IBM offered no systems with any appeal to our target market. We never seriously considered hooking up with another vendor, but in retrospect it seems incredible that IBM let this happen.

In nearly all cases IBM’s prices for hardware were higher. They should have been. IBM equipment was more reliable and the service was beyond compare. However, the price differentials were often enormous. Purveyors of systems that ran on UNIX or PC’s could claim many of the same advantages that we claimed, charge more for their software, and still show a bottom-line price that was considerably lower than ours.

So, we faced a lot of rejection in our years of dealing with ad agencies. I feel certain that I have repressed the memories of a fairly large number of failures in this arena.

The following are arranged alphabetically. It might make more sense to put them in chronological order, but I have found few records to help me to remember the dates.

The Hartford Area

Probably the most painful failure was the loss of Elbaum & Co., Inc. We had been pitching or negotiating with Marvin Elbaum¹, the owner, for several months. Finally, in early June of 1986 he had signed the contract, which included some custom programming, and put in the hardware order.

I am pretty sure that the phone call came on June 13, 1986. Marvin himself called and said that a new opportunity had suddenly arisen, and he wanted to cancel the order. He said that he had an unexpected opportunity to merge with Lessner Slossberg Gahl and Partners Inc. I advised him that we had already begun work on the custom code that he approved. He told me to bill him for it. He also said that he would plead the case in the new agency for using the GrandAd system. This was pure BS. If it wasn’t, he would have arranged for us to do a presentation for his new partners at LSGE Advertising, Inc.²

This was the worst possible news. I knew that Lessner’s agency already used the system marketed by one of our biggest competitors. Since the merged agency would be located in Lessner’s headquarters in Avon, there was no chance that it would junk the system just because Marvin asked politely, and Marvin also probably realized this. Besides, Marvin was the president of the new agency, but Gary Lessner was the CEO.

I’m not even slightly superstitious. If I were, I probably would have noted that the horrible phone call took place on Friday the 13th. Furthermore, Denise was on vacation, and Sue and I were looking after her cat. Yes, the cat was all black.

On the other hand, I don’t remember walking under any ladders, breaking any mirrors, opening an umbrella indoors, or spilling any salt that day.

Maier Advertising³ (the first syllable is pronounced like the fifth month of the year) was famous. When the lists of the top agencies were printed, Maier was always at or near the top of the rankings of local agencies in terms of billings. Everyone who had anything to do with advertising knew that this was baloney. How? Everyone in the advertising community knew where everyone else in the community worked. Maier did not employ enough people to do all the work to justify those reported billings.

For a while Maier claimed to have branch offices. I am certain that one was announced in Boston, but I think that there were also others. Actually, there were no offices, but they did have a phone number with a local area code and exchange, but it rang in Hartford.

I was invited to meet with Maier’s bookkeeper at the company’s headquarters, which was then in Hartford. My recollection is that only two or three other people were there. Bill Maier was definitely not present. I counted only six or seven desks, and I only saw one office. This did not look or act like a major agency.

I roughed out a tentative proposal, but I could tell that the bookkeeper was in no position to make a decision or to put me in contact with such a person. Actually, I doubt that Bill Maier would have deferred on this subject to anyone.

The Charnas account was not exactly a whiff. It was more like chipping in for a double bogey. It is described here.

There were two other agencies in the Hartford area that I visited, but I do not recall the names of either one. The first one was really a public relations firm in, as I recall, South Windsor. In fact, its strategic approach was the opposite of advertising. Its employees searched for businesses that were spending money on advertising and promised to get the same or better results using press releases. I think that we outlined a stripped-down GrandAd system for them, but we could not strip down the hardware cost enough to make a competitive bid.

My recollection is that the other local agency was in Glastonbury. Sue and I came to meet with the female financial manager. The only thing that I remember about this meeting was that she was the most strikingly attractive woman whom I had ever met. However, I never saw her again. I can’t even visualize her,

Sue was surprised when I told her that I thought that the woman was very attractive.

The Boston Area

Our biggest disappointment of the many whiffs in the Boston area was the involvement with Rizzo Simons Cohn. It is described in detail here.

I met with a woman from Epsilon once. They were a big company then, and they are gigantic now. I tried to explain to her what we did, and she tried to explain to me what they did. At the time I did not understand what she said. I have looked at the company’s current website, which is here, and I still don’t fully understand what it means to be outcome-based. What is the alternative?

I did learn enough from our conversation to realize that our GrandAd system was nothing like what she was looking for.

At the IBM office in Copley Place I did several demos. One that I remember was a morning session for several employees at an ad agency on Tremont St. in Boston. The name escapes me. The demo seemed to go well. They invited me to meet with them in the afternoon at their office. I asked for the address. They gave it to me, but they warned me not to drive. They said that I should take “the T”, which is what people in Boston call the commuter rail system, MBTA.

I was disdainful of their suggestion. I had a map of Boston and plenty of experience driving in Beantown. I knew that the roads were unpredictable and that people made left turns from any lane. I grabbed some lunch and then headed out in my Celica.

It was an adventure, but I made it. Tremont was one-way, of course. I was prepared for that. I was shocked to discover that the streets that paralleled it on both sides were also one-way, and all three ran in the same direction. I had to steer my Celica all the way to Boylston Street to get past their office so that I could turn onto Tremont. Then I was very fortunate to spot the P (public parking sign) forty or fifty yards to my right. I parked and entered the office with seconds to spare.

This meeting seemed to go OK, too. At the end I asked how to get back on the Mass Pike. They told me that it was easy to get there from Copley Place, but the only route from Tremont was very difficult to describe.

Maybe it was a good thing that I never heard from them again.

Gray Rambusch, Inc. is a complete mystery. I know that we billed them for something, but I am almost positive that I never visited them or did a project for them. Doug Pease might have sold them something. The agency is still in business.

The Big Apple

The term “boutique agency” is used a lot in New York City. I knew that the large agencies were beyond our abilities, but to me “boutique” just indicated smaller size. Then I talked with people who worked at a couple.

The first was an agency that specialized in theatrical productions—Broadway and smaller. The lady who worked there explained that, as any fan of The Producers knows, each show is a separate company, and they tend to go out of business very abruptly and disappear without a trace. The most important things for the agency were to get their invoices to each show before it opened and to hound them for payment.

The other boutique agency that I talked with specialized in classified ads. They had hundreds of clients for whom they placed ads in the handful of papers that served the city. I don’t think that there was much chance that this agency would survive the Internet.

Kate Behart³ and I rode Amtrak to New York City on one occasion. I think that it was to talk with an ad agency, but it might have been for some other reason. TSI was watching every penny at the time. I had purchased a book of ten tickets. On the trip to Penn Station I used one, and Kate used one.

On the return trip I gave my ticket and the book to the conductor; he took the ticket. Then I handed the book to Kate, she tore out a ticket, and she handed it and her ticket to the conductor. He refused it. He said that only one person could use the book at a time. I directed his attention to the back where it clearly stated that it entitled “the bearer” of the ticket and booklet to passage to or from Penn Station. I bore the booklet when I paid for myself. Then I handed it to her, and she became the bearer.

He had the gall to tell me that I did not know what “bearer” meant. I said “Bearer: one who bears. ‘To bear’ means ‘to carriy’.” I argued that the term bearer was not ambiguous. It was like a bearer’s bond; anyone that has possession can redeem it. He claimed that it was Amtrak’s policy that tickets from booklets could not be used for more than one person. I said that Amtrak’s policy was actually clearly explicated on the back of the ticket book. Where was his evidence of anything different? He said that a letter had been sent to conductors. When I asked to see it, he threatened to throw both of us off the train at the next stop. I asked to speak to his superior.

This was not a big train. It was unlikely that there were more than two conductors. So, I was fortunate that there was anyone on the train who was senior to the fellow who threatened to evict us. The other conductor took Kate’s ticket, and he asked me politely not to do this again.

I never needed to do it again. If the occasion had come up, … I don’t know.

We pursued another New York agency during a period in the early nineties when we had no salesman. I took the train to New York and gave a presentation at IBM’s office on Madison Avenue. Terri Provost⁵ accompanied me. We then took a cab to the agency’s office. The discussions there seemed to go pretty well.

This agency was much more like what we were accustomed to dealing with than the boutique agencies. I thought that we could do a good job for them. On the train ride back I first consumed my fried chicken supper from Roy Rogers. Then I talked with Terri about the potential client and emphasized how I thought that we should proceed.

The next day at the office I asked her to compose a letter to send to the agency’s president. The letter was friendly and polite, but it did absolutely nothing to advance the sale. I don’t know why I thought that she would know how to do this, but I was wrong. I had to pretty much dictate the whole letter to her. It also made it clear to me that I could not depend upon her to follow up on it, and I did not have the time to do it myself. We whiffed again.

Others Within Driving Distance

Sue and I drove down to Englewood, NJ, to visit an ad agency called Sommer Inc. It was a small business-to-business agency run by a couple who were older than we were. I don’t remember too much about the experience, but I thought that we would be a great fit for them.

My clearest memory of the trip is that I was very hungry by the time that we reached the Garden State, and Sue stopped at Popeye’s so that I could wolf down a few pieces of chicken before we met with them.

We did not get the account. I think that they might have been put off by the price and instead purchased a cheaper PC system.

Somehow we got a tip about an advertising agency in Vermont that was looking for an administrative software system. It might have been in Burlington. I talked to the proprietor on the telephone, and he seemed serious. I think that this might have been in 1987 or 1988 when we were desperate for business.

Our marketing director, who at the time was, I think, Michael Symolon⁷, accompanied me on the trip to the north country. We left Enfield fairly early in the morning. The weather was cold enough that I wore an overcoat. When we arrived at the agency I realized that I had put on the pants that went with my suit, but I had mistakenly donned my blue blazer instead of the suit coat. The combination looked ridiculous.

It was pretty warm in the agency’s office. So, when I took off my overcoat, I also took off the blazer. I still probably looked strange in shirtsleeves when Michael was wearing a suit, but I did not feel like a clown.

The presentation went OK. Michael may have followed up on the visit, but it was probably another case of sticker shock.

The only other ad agency that I remember driving to was in Schenectady, NY, northwest of Albany. The building in which the agency was housed had obviously been repurposed. The ceiling was crisscrossed with large and small pipes or air ducts. Each had been painted in bright primary colors. The effect was quite striking.

The agency had been using the AdMan software system on PC’s for a couple of years. It seemed to me that there must have been something about the system that the users did not like. Otherwise, why was he looking for new system? I tried to talk with the office manager about it. He was, however, very reluctant to discuss what they were currently doing or what they would like to do. Instead he wanted me to describe the advantages or our approach. Of course, he also wanted to know the cost.

I hated it when prospects did this. A major strength of our system was that we could adapt it to meet the needs of almost any user. This was difficult to present. I much preferred to tell people how we would address their problems. Then I could introduce ideas that they did not expect.

During the drive back to Rockville I did not feel good about this call. I suspected that I had been used to gather information for some sort of hidden agenda of the office manager. I had no concrete evidence to go on, but the whole situation did not feel right.

Distant Prospects

Touchdown Jesus could not have made a sale in South Bend.

I had flown to Chicago in late 1988 to meet with some IBM representatives who specialized in retail about the AdDept system that we had just installed at Macy’s. I rented a car afterwards and drove to South Bend, IN, for a presentation at the IBM office for people from local advertising agencies. We had sent letters to all of the agencies in the area, and four or five had expressed interest in the GrandAd system.

Three little old ladies attended the demo, and they all sat together. No IBMers showed up. It reminded me of the debate in which I performed at Expo ’67, which is described here. I talked with the ladies, or rather one of them; they were all from the same agency. They told me that their agency currently used a system marketed by one of our competitors. They told me that the system had actually been installed by someone who lived in South Bend. When I asked who supported the system they claimed not to know.

.The whole trip was a complete waste of time. We got nothing from any of the people that I met in Chicago, and the South Bend agency later told us that they were not interested.

In February of 1989 we were pitching two important prospects in the Milwaukee area. Both the journey to Milwaukee and the return trip were memorable. They are described here.

It is a safe bet that I had Usinger’s brats on any trip to Milwaukee.

I took a cab to the ad agency first. I do not remember the name of the agency, but I recall that they seemed to be very interested in our approach. I had to sell a bit of blue sky concerning the hardware. I pitched running the System/36 ad agency system on an AS/400. They would be the guinea pig for this, but the alternative was to try to sell an approach that IBM had publicly abandoned.

I thought that the meeting went very well. I gauged that we had a very good chance of getting this account. I was not able to follow up immediately, however, because Sue and I took our first vacation ever immediately following this trip to Milwaukee.

In the end we did not get the account. After returning from the vacation we soon became so busy that our failure might have been a blessing in disguise.

In 1990 (I think) I received a telephone call from Ernie Capobianco, whom I knew from RGS&H (described here). He said that he now was working for an ad agency in Kansas City, Valentine-Radford. They already had a System/36, but they were not satisfied with what they were getting out of it.

I arranged to stay with my parents while I pitched the account. My dad told me the agency was one of the largest and most respected in KC.

I met with the systems manager in the morning. They had been using standard accounting packages and were trying to use their general ledger for client profitability analysis. It did not work. It would never work. There were a lot of other problems, too.

Two or three officers of the company took me to lunch at Putsch’s 210 on the Country Club Plaza, the swankest restaurant in the Kansas City area. They wanted to know what it would take for them to get the kind of information from their S/36 that Ernie got at RGS&H.

I informed them that their software system was not designed for a business as complex as an ad agency. They were trying to eat soup with a knife. If we were going to do the project, we would do it right. We could probably convert some of the data for them, but we wouldn’t be able to patch their software. We would want to install our system.

It was not what they wanted to hear.

Our last pitch to an ad agency was, I think, in May of 1994.⁸ Sue and I drove to Pennsylvania to talk with people from Blattner/Brunner, Inc.⁹ We also met with Kaufmann’s, the May Co. division, on the same trip. We spent a day at the Pittsburgh zoo before we returned.

The people at B/B were definitely serious about getting a system They asked all the right questions. They even questioned whether the AS/400 was really a relational data base. Their doubt was understandable. Every other database (Oracle, Sybase, Informix, etc.) had a name, but at that point IBM had not yet begun calling the AS/400’s database DB2/400 even though the design of the system had been fully relational since the introduction of its predecessor, the System/38, back in 1978!

The agency was rapidly growing, and it was famous in the area for its “Killer B’s” billboard, which was nominated as one of the best ads in Pittsburgh’s history. Winning this account might have really launched ADB, which is what we called the AS/400 version of GrandAd.

I left the follow-up on this account in Sue’s hands. I had my hands full with Kaufmann’s, which gave us a huge notebook of reports that they wanted us to include in their system. Sue definitely fumbled the ball. She could have handled this; she just chose not to. This was one of the main reasons that I became very upset with her in 1994. The details of this “second crisis” are described here.

1. Marvin Elbaum has had several careers since the merged agency folded in 1992. I think that in 2021 he is a realtor for William Raveis in southeastern Connecticut. His LinkedIn page is here.

2. The Hartford Courant declared LSGE, Inc. defunct in 1992.

3. By the time of the pandemic Maier Advertising had “evolved” into a business-to-business agency named Blue Star Communications Group. Its website is here.

4. A write-up of Kate Behart’s career at TSI can be found here.

5. Much more about Terri Provost’s stint at TSI can be found here.

6. Sommer Inc. was acquired by Greenstone Rabasca Roberts of Melville, NY, in 1989.

7. Michael Symolon’s time as TSI’s marketing guy is discussed here.

8. Ernie’s ad agency in Dallas, Square One, bought Valentine-Radford in 2003.

9. I am pretty sure of the date because there was an annular solar eclipse. The only solar eclipse in the nineties that was visible from Pennsylvania was on May 20, 1994.

10. Joe Blattner has departed, but in 2021 the agency is still active as M.J. Brunner, Inc. The agency’s website is here. Joe Blattner’s web page is here.

1967-1969 Part 2: U-M Debate

Posted on September 29, 2020 by Mike

Debate in the middle years. Continue reading →

A primer explaining the format and other details of intercollegiate debate can be found here.

Fall 1967: When I returned to school after the summer of 1967, I discovered some very important changes in the debate program at U-M. Dr. Colburn was still the Director of Forensics, and Jeff Sampson was still coaching. Juddi (pronounced “Judy”) Tappan, a high school coach from Belleville, had been added to the staff. My recollection is that in her last year at Belleville two girls from her team had won the state championship.

Juddi’s assignment at U-M that year was to coach the novices. She had a very good crop. I think that both of those girls from Belleville came to U-M. One might have participated in debate for a short while, but by the time that the tournament season started, neither was involved. The four principal players were Bill Davey, an exceptionally smart guy¹ from Albion, MI, Ann Stueve from Kentucky, Jim Fellows, whom I never got to know very well, and Alexa Canady from Lansing. All four of them were almost certainly better debaters than I was when I first set foot in the Frieze Building a year earlier. They all definitely had more experience than I did.

I think that there was one other coach, but he spent little time with any debaters and none with me.

For me the debate season began bizarrely. Jeff Sampson escorted me and either Bob Hirshon or Lee Hess to Expo ’67 in Montreal to debate against two guys from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh about abortion. The whole debate only lasted for a little over thirty minutes and was attended by the coach/escorts of both teams and three ladies who had years earlier passed the age for which family planning is much of an issue. The guys from Duquesne had done quite a bit of research and presented a lot of serious arguments. We mostly told jokes.

Surely this was an appropriate metaphor for the age: four young guys debating about the circumstances in which women should be allowed to have abortions. Moreover, two of us were not even taking it seriously.

I don’t remember that we took an airplane to Montreal, but neither do I recall a long car trip with a border crossing. I retain a rather vivid memory of a rude cab driver who pretended that he did not understand English. If we had a car, why would we take a cab? Maybe parking was an issue.

This trip was undeniably a waste of time and money; perhaps some other organization paid for it. The plus side was that we did have time to wander around the Expo for a day or so. My strongest memory of the fair itself is eating a reindeer sandwich at one of the Scandinavian pavilions. It tasted a little funny, but it was not awful.

I also remember that we attended a performance of Laterna Magika, a multi-media theater troop from Prague, which at the time was on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Jeff chided me for trying to figure out what message was being conveyed.

Years later my wife Sue told me that she was also in Montreal during that period, had heard about the debate in which we participated, and almost went to it. This was five years before I even met her. So, this was almost a great story.

I considered the national debate resolution for that year, “that the federal government should guarantee a minimum annual cash income to all citizens”, uninspired. I cannot remember much about the individual arguments. Of course, debaters argued whether the states were “closer to the people” or whether in-kind payments were better than cash, but I cannot imagine that there would be enough meat there for a year’s worth of debates.

I think that I had three partners during the year:

I remember debating with Larry Rogers, a junior, at the tournament at the University of Illinois Chicago Circle (UICC). I remember that he performed brilliantly in one debate, but overall we did not do well together, and I did not enjoy the experience at all. I also remember that one morning he took what he called “a Polish shower” with Right Guard before he dressed for the debates that day. By the way, all the male debaters wore suits Larry quit the team before the end of the year.
I am sure that I debated in at least one tournament with Lee Hess, another junior, who was my partner during the whirlwind spring 1967 season. I have a vague recollection that we debated together at Ohio State, but details have escaped from my memory. Lee had a motorcycle. I think that he might have had an accident with it that semester.
My third partner was Gary Black, a senior. I think that we did well together at one tournament, but I don’t remember the details. The main thing that sticks out in my mind is that I did “outsides” on the affirmative, which meant that I delivered the first affirmative constructive and the second affirmative rebuttal. Usually, this is only done when one debater is much better than the other, but my speaker ratings were generally equal to or better than Gary’s. He designed the affirmative case; I could not have defended it with much enthusiasm.

I might have debated with Bob Hirshon at one unmemorable tournament.

Spring 1988: Just before finals for the fall semester Jeff took me, Lee, and Gary aside, and had us write down on a sheet of paper the name of the other member of the trio that we would prefer to debate with. They both chose me. Although I chose Lee, Jeff decided to pair me with Gary for the important tournaments in the second semester (January-March 1968).

Here is what I remember of that time.

Both Lee and Bob quit debating before the semester began.
Gary and I had a practice debate against Bill and Ann in which we performed badly. Juddi remarked that it was a classic case of the novices showing up the varsity. I was too arrogant to get upset by this.
Gary and I made the elimination rounds at a few tournaments, but we did not have any exceptionally good performances.
We went 2-6 at Northwestern, which was an improvement over what I had done as a freshman.
Gary and I flew unaccompanied to a tournament at Loyola of Baltimore. The field was weak. I think that we qualified for the elim rounds, but then we lost. I lost my overcoat on this trip. Another passenger evidently took mine from the overhead rack by mistake when the plane stopped in Pittsburgh.

Throughout the year ballots from several judges remarked that I should tone it down. I would start out at a reasonable volume, but after a while I got excited and started shouting. I worked on this.
Jeff did not work with Gary and me as much as he had helped Lee and me the previous year.
At the District 5 qualifying tournament for the NDT Gary and I were 4-4 with twelve ballots out of twenty-four, exactly average and exactly the same as Lee and I did the previous year.
Both freshman teams did quite well throughout the year. I don’t remember the details.

I think that this is a recent picture of Gary Black.

Jim Fellows decided that he did not want to debate any more.

My roommate in Allen Rumsey House, Charlie Delos, remarked that if he looked like Gary, he would kill himself.

The summer of 1968 was definitely unique. Assassinations led to destructive and bloody riots. The suburbs of KC, where I was, were not affected, but Detroit, one of the centers of the protest, is less than an hour from Ann Arbor. The police also rioted outside of the Democratic Party’s national convention in Chicago. Then Nixon disclosed the existence of his secret plan to end the War in Vietnam.

I had my first real job in the actuarial department of the insurance company that my dad worked for. My summer adventures are described here.

Fall 1968: Jeff Sampson moved on. Juddi made all the decisions about partnerships. She also did whatever coaching was done.

The team had one very talented freshman, Mike Hartmann. He had a pretty good partner, Dean Mellor.

After the election the "executive" was this guy. — After the election the “executive” was this guy.

The resolution was “that executive control of United States foreign policy should be significantly curtailed.”

I was paired with Alexa. We ran a case that banned deployment of troops to fight without a congressional declaration of war. I was first negative and second affirmative. Bill and Ann were the other varsity team.

Here is what I remember of the first semester.

I enjoyed debating with Alexa. I had never had a female partner before. She was a talented debater and a good partner, but the thing that really impressed me was that she carried her own evidence boxes.
A small percentage of varsity debaters were female. Black debaters were very rare. Alexa was the only Black female debater whom I ever saw at a varsity tournament in my four years as an undergraduate debater. This could not have been easy for her.

In one round we faced a good team that presented a a plan to use American food to feed starving people around the world. I had heard of this and done a little research, but I had never discussed it with Alexa. I decided to argue topicality and to present a counterplan that included all aspects of the affirmative plan, but no reduction in executive control. Alexa did not know what to argue in the second negative, but she soldiered on and did not complain, even when we ended up losing the round.
Our best tournament was Ohio State. We made it to the semifinals, which qualified us for the Tournament of Champions. We might have been the first U-M team ever to accomplish this.
For some reason Juddi drove us to Oshkosh, WI, to a second-rate six-round tournament at the state university there. In the first round we debated a really obnoxious team from Ripon College on our affirmative. The second round was allegedly power-matched, but we were scheduled to meet the same team on the same side! I immediately complained to the staff. I was told that we should just switch sides. I really did not want to debate that team again, but we had no choice. The teams that we faced after that were a little better, but I was depressed after the last round. Then they announced the results. I was astounded when they announced that Alexa was the second-place speaker. I never had lower points than she did, and, sure enough, I won the award for top speaker, which, as I recall was a hearty handclasp. Alexa and I had won all six debates and qualified for the quarterfinals, where we were quickly eliminated on a 2-1 decision that no one in the audience could believe.
Juddi smoked. She expected one of the males to light her cigarettes for her.
We stopped for gas once when Juddi was driving her own car. She purchased $.50 worth of regular.
Juddi wore a LOT of makeup. Alexa, who roomed with her on trips, said that it was frightening to see her when she first got out of bed. One of the other grad students said that Juddi always looked like a million dollars, but you had to suspect that at least half of it was counterfeit.
Before final exams both Ann and Alexa quit the team. So, Bill and I were the only varsity debaters left.

We could not take the shortcut through Ontario because of the stop in Oberlin.

Spring 1969: The first tournaments that Bill and I attended together were at Harvard and Dartmouth in January. Juddi made the arrangements. We drove to Oberlin College in Ohio to pick up their team, Roger Conner² and Mark Arnold, and their coach, Dan Rohrer. We then proceeded to Buffalo to pick up a team from Canisius College. I never heard of teams car-pooling to debate tournaments, and this was uncomfortable, at least for me. Mark Arnold disliked me intensely. Also, the Oberlin and Canisius teams had much better records than we did.

We definitely attended the tournament at Northwestern. I think that we were 4-4, which continued my trend of improvement over the previous year with three different partners.

The only other tournament that semester that I clearly recall was the very long drive to Minneapolis to attend a tournament at St. Thomas College, now known as St. Thomas University. I think that this was the first time that Jimmie Trent, a famous debate coach and a professor in the speech department at Wayne State, accompanied us. We attended a peculiar set of tournaments for the next year and a half. It was not until considerably later that I began to suspect that Juddi tried to schedule tournaments that she was reasonably certain that she and Jimmie would not run into anyone from Wayne State.

Jimmie definitely was very knowledgeable about debate, and he was also great fun to be with on tournaments. He specialized in my favorite kind of humor, the shaggy dog story, which was ideal for a long drive. His presence almost counterbalanced having to deal with Juddi. At some point they got married, but, as far as I could tell, that did not change the political implications of a Wayne State speech professor helping U-M debaters.

The tournament at St. Tom’s was at best second-rate. It did not even supply standard ballots for the judges. They had to fill in these yellow cards that rated speakers on a twenty-point scale instead of the thirty point version. There was also very little space for the judge to express the reasoning, if any, behind the decision.

When we were on the St. Tom's campus, all this was covered with several feet of snow. — When we were on the St. Tom’s campus, all this was covered with several feet of snow.

The three feet of snow on the ground made traipsing between buildings carrying our evidence a real pain and led everyone to question the motivation for the trip.

Bill and I went 7-1 in the prelims. That made us the top seed in the elimination rounds, which, as I recall, began with quarterfinals. Almost all tournaments used seeded brackets for the elimination rounds, but not this one. Instead, for some reason, they drew the pairings at random. In the quarterfinals we ended up debating against a team from Augustana College in Illinois that we had already defeated on our negative. We were “locked in” on the affirmative because tournaments generally guarantee that no team will debate another team twice on the same side.

This was the worst possible draw for us. I had a much better record on the negative throughout my career, especially with Bill. It was a tough round. I will always think that I won this round with a joke. I started my last affirmative rebuttal with this remark: “I have been wondering why Mr. ______ (the second negative) wore galoshes to the debate. Now that I see all the snow that they tried to bury the plan under, I understand. Let’s start digging.”

Everybody in the audience laughed. We won the room and two of the three judges.

In the semifinals we faced the team that gave us our only loss in the prelims. However, this time we were locked in on the negative and won easily.

In the finals we faced two guys from Iowa whom I had debated several times over the years. We were locked in on the affirmative. As it turned out, in the elimination rounds we faced the second, third, and fourth seeds, in that order. All were teams that we had already debated.

At this point in the year we had a pretty strong non-intervention case, but we also had a food case that we had pulled out (successfully) a few times that year. The northern plains was a very conservative part of the debate world, and so we decided to stick with the non-intervention case.

Just before the debate started, they introduced the five judges. Two were debate coaches with whom both teams knew pretty well. Three of them were local luminaries. Of course, we did not get to interview them, and so we had no way of know how familiar they were with debates at this level.

Debate coaches have a lot of practice at following arguments. The best tactics for dealing with inexperienced judges are not at all as clear as they are for dealing with debate coaches. The thought occurred to me that we should perhaps run the food case. Any yokel can relate to starving millions. However, it was only a flickering thought; we went with our original plan.

The trip back to Ann Arbor seemed longer.

We won both debate coaches, but lost the three civilians. I will always think that if we had used the food case, we would have won the outsiders and maybe lost the coaches. I had plenty of time to think about this on the long drive home. Winning this (or any) tournament would have been a feather in our cap. Finishing second in such a sorry gathering made us just an “also ran”.

Bill and I went 4-4 at the district qualifier in March. We only won eleven ballots. So, I appeared to be regressing a little.

During the summer I worked in a the actuarial department of Kansas City Life, not my dad’s employer. Two other guys, Todd and Tom worked there. One day someone asked if they had gone to lunch, and I was able to use a line I had been saving for weeks: “Tom and Todd wait for no man.”

Man also landed on the moon.

Fall 1969: I learned that two strong additions had been made to the debate staff, Roger Conner1, who had an exemplary record debating at Oberlin, and Cheryn Heinen, a very good debater from another strong debate school, Butler. Roger and Cheryn could probably have been a big help, but they were seldom allowed to go to big tournaments, and neither planned a career as a debate coach. Because the program had very few debaters, we hardly ever had practice rounds, and when we did, Juddi ran them.

Since Bill and I were the only debaters on the team with experience at the varsity level, I had assumed that we would be paired up from day 1. Partner-switching is uncommon at most schools.

I was therefore unpleasantly surprised and disgruntled to find myself paired with Dean Mellor at the beginning of the year. Bill and Mike must have also been debating together.

Cheryn did not work with us much. Still, the most memorable event of the semester occurred when she was driving us in a car from the university’s motor pool westbound on I-94. There were three other debaters in the car. One was certainly Bill. The other two must have been Dean and Mike.

The car was proceeding at the speed limit when all of a sudden the front hood came unlatched and was flung backwards by air pressure into the windshield. It also made a dent of at least six inches in the roof of the passenger compartment, but it remained attached to the hinges. The glass on the windshield shattered, but it stayed together. This video is what it felt like from the inside. However, we were going much faster, and both the windshield and hood were obviously beyond repair.

Cheryn screamed in terror, but she quickly regained composure. We were very fortunate to be quite close to an exit. Bill and I rolled down windows and gave Cheryn driving instructions to get the car onto the exit ramp and then into a service station.

Cheryn called the university and reported the problem. The people at the motor pool insisted that one of us had opened the hood for some reason and failed to latch it. We all insisted that no such event had occurred. After a few hours someone brought us a different car to use, and we continued on to the tournament without further incident.

The resolution for 1969-70 was that the federal government should grant annually a specific percentage of its income tax revenue to the state governments. I think that we ran the same case all year. It called for granting 50 percent of the income tax revenue to the states through existing grant-in-aid programs. We claimed that Congress would never finance the programs to that extent because of the power of the Military-Industrial Complex.

I do not remember details from too many tournament. I remember attending the Ohio State with Dean. We had been doing pretty well for the first seven rounds. In the eighth round, however, Dean got all flustered in the 1AR, and totally made a mess of things. His speech was so bad that there was no chance of winning after that. It was too bad, because we would have qualified for the elimination rounds if we had won.

I am not sure where we were, but at one tournament Juddi arranged for us to eat supper with the debaters from Emory University in Atlanta. She liked their southern charm. At dinner she ordered a steak well done. The waiter brought it. Juddi cut it and sent it back for more cooking. She judged that the substitute was sufficiently dead. She smothered it in red sauce. Before she could take a bite one of the Emory debaters asked her very politely why she didn’t just order a piece of bread and cover it with ketchup.

By the middle of November Juddi had changed the pairings so that I was again with Bill. On Thursday November 22 we drove to Chicago for a tournament at UICC. It was a fairly important tournament for us, but it meant that we would miss the last game of the football season.

Students at U-M were allotted one reduced-price season ticket on the south and west sides of Michigan stadium. I had a superb ticket on the 50-yard line. How I managed to get such a good seat is described here. On this occasion I gave my seat away to someone. I don’t remember who received it.

We missed the best game in the storied history of Michigan football. Ohio State was rated #1 in both polls. Michigan was 7-2. OSU had never been behind at any point in any of their previous games. Nevertheless, Michigan prevailed 24-12 that Saturday and won a ticket to the Rose Bowl for the only time in my undergraduate career.

Meanwhile, Bill and I had our worst tournament ever. For me the worst aspect was our loss to my old friend and high school debate partner, John Williams, who represented UMKC. I was more depressed about this than about any previous result. Still, I only had one semester left, and I resolved to make the most of it.

Where are my U-M debate partners in 2020?

On Twitter I follow Bill Black, who is rather famous for finding fraudulent activity in corporate and political America. He currently teaches law and economics at UMKC. His Wikipedia page is here.

I have not been in touch with Gary Black. I was quite surprised to find this web page on the Internet. I am not positive that this is the Gary Black that I knew, but the age and colleges match. I wonder what Charlie Delos would think of Gary’s new career.

Alexa Canady is a famous neurosurgeon who is now retired and living in Pensacola, FL. I emailed her because I noticed that she was a member of the American Contract Bridge League (ACBL). She responded to the email, but we have not had any further correspondence. Her Wikipedia page is here.

I have seen Bill Davey twice since I graduated in 1970. When I came to Ann Arbor after being discharged from the army, he let me crash in his apartment for a week or so. I also saw him at a debate tournament at Georgetown in the mid-seventies. He was then clerking for Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart. Later Bill was a big player in the development of the World Trade Organization. He is now retired from his teaching position at the University of Illinois. His biographical information is here.

Mike Hartmann is an attorney at the international law firm, Miller-Canfield. He was the CEO from 2007 to 2013. His bio page is here. I have been in touch with him by email.

Lee Hess is the Chairman of Cairngorm Capital and lives in Columbus, OH. I have communicated with him by email a few times. His bio page at his company is here.

Bob Hirshon is a professor at the U-M Law School.

I have not been in touch with Dean Mellor. Apparently he is doing something in sales in the L.A. area. His LinkedIn profile is here.

I have not been in touch with Larry Rogers.

1. Bill was a Presidential Scholar in his senior year of high school (1967), which indicates that he had one of the two highest scores in the state of Michigan on the National Merit exams.

2. I asked Roger why Mark Arnold hated me. He told me that I was right about that, but he did not know why. Roger was an interesting guy. He sold bibles in his youth. He tried to teach us to yodel, which he insisted was the best way to prepare for debates. He spent thirty years as lobbyist, mostly on immigration issues. I almost went to see him when he was leading a seminar in Hartford. In 2020 he is an adjunct professor at Vanderbilt.

1966 U-M Fall Semester

Posted on September 17, 2020 by Mike

September-December 1966 Continue reading →

Classes: I took four classes. Each was memorable in its own way.

The math department had three sequences that math majors could take. Two were for students in the honors program. I took the higher honors sequence—six classes over three years with the same classmates.

Our teacher was Professor D.J. Lewis¹. The class consisted of about twenty guys and one girl. I don’t remember any names. Dr. Lewis began by saying that there were two ways to teach math. One was to go through the proofs at a fairly brisk pace. The other was to make sure that most people were comfortable with each concept before moving on to another. He said that as a student he much preferred the latter, but when he looked back on it, he learned more from the former method. So, all through the class he filled the blackboard with formulas. I went to every class, or at least nearly every class, and I did get quite a bit out of them.

The Russian teacher was Mrs. Rado. I had the advantage over the other students of knowing the Greek alphabet, which is similar to the Cyrillic alphabet. My primary disadvantages was that all my language experience was in dead languages. In high school we learned how to translate Latin and Greek, but not how to speak or understand them. I had to spend quite a bit of time memorizing and rehearsing the conversations. Fortunately, I had the time and inclination to do it. By the end of the semester she referred to me as the “отличник“, which was a little embarrassing, especially since most of the other students were older.

I also remember one class in which I was repeatedly asked by Mrs. Rado to pronounce the Russian word for five (пять). I never did it to her satisfaction.

The class that I was worried about was chemistry. I was enrolled in Chemistry 103, which, according to the catalog, was for students who did not take chemistry in high school. When I found out that the vast majority of my classmates had indeed already taken chemistry, I was ready to panic. However, it turned out that the subject matter was very easy—basically just a lot of permutations of Boyle’s law, PV=nRT.

I was lucky to have a lab partner who knew his stuff. I don’t remember his name, but he taught me, among other things, the use of the MIT Fudge Factor, which is .9677. He explained that if you were unable or unwilling to complete an experiment, begin by calculating the correct answer. Then, multiply or divide by the MFF. That is what you report. If you multiplied last time, divide this time.

We only needed this technique once, when he decided to augment the assigned experiment with some creative glassblowing over the Bunsen burner. Unfortunately, he accidentally bumped the beaker containing our unweighed sample with his still white-hot objet d’art. We needed the weight of the sample in the beaker to be accurate to a fraction of a gram. We successfully detached the two pieces of glass, but the weight of the beaker had certainly changed. So, we worked backwards using the MFF.

The first Latin class had a strong effect on me. Mrs. Sorenson, a somewhat elderly lady, handed out a three-page single-space text of one of Cicero’s orations. She explained that this was our assignment.

Marcus Tullius Cicero — Pronounced Kikero.

In that first session I was asked to read aloud a short section. The other students giggled at my pronunciation. They had all taken four semesters of Latin at U-M. In my eight semesters at Rockhurst High School we used the Church’s pronunciation. At U-M (and, I presume, at other heathen institutions) they used a different pronunciation in which v’s sound like w’s in English, and c’s sound like k’s. There were a few other differences as well. It took me a while to get used to this.

The three pages of translation was a lot more than I expected as an assignment. However, the first class was on Thursday, and the next class was not until the next Tuesday. I knuckled down over the weekend, and I felt pretty comfortable about being able to translate the whole speech on demand.

The next Tuesday I was not called on, and the class only got through the second paragraph on the first page. It turned out that when the teacher had said that this was our assignment, she meant the assignment for the entire semester!

So, I had a lot more free time than I had calculated.

I did very well in all four classes. I was not a bit surprised that I received four A’s. Only one other guy in Allen Rumsey matched my GPA. We both won the Branstrom Freshman Prize, which was a copy of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.

Everyone was required to take two semesters of phys ed as a freshman. I took golf during the first semester. I learned nothing. The teacher was a coach in some other sport. Most of the time we just hit golf balls into nets in the old Waterman Gymnasium, which was torn down in 1977.

One of our classes was held at a driving range well south of campus. I walked to class; it was the only time all year that I broke a sweat. We got to see our instructor hit a golf ball. He never whiffed, but he had an enormous slice. There is no way that he could break 90 with that swing, but he taught a course in golf at the best university in the state.

Debate: If you need a primer about intercollegiate debate in this era, you can find it here.

My partner, Bob Hirshon, who lived in East Quad, and I occasionally met to prepare for the Michigan Intercollegiate Speech League tournament. Since we were only scheduled to debate on the negative we did not need to coordinate our approaches too much. I researched the good things about our treaty obligations to NATO, SEATO, OAS, and the UN and prepared some disadvantages to leaving each. I think that Bob and I also talked about what we would do on the affirmative when we had to debate both sides, but I don’t remember what kind of case we decided on.

The symbol of NATO and flags of member nations.

I have reason to think that the MISL tournament was held at Wayne State. U-M brought a handful of novice pairs. There were only three rounds. All three affirmative teams that we faced argued that the U.S. should pull out of NATO. I gave virtually the same constructive speech three times. It claimed that the pullout would be damaging economically, politically, and socially. None of their answers to these arguments seemed very good to me. The teams that we faced would have been considered mediocre to bad on the Missouri high school debate circuit.

The judge voted for us in all three debates, and I was was awarded more speaker points than anyone else. I don’t remember that I actually won a prize, but they might have given me a certificate or something like that.

I think that Bob was also one of the top speakers. After they had announced the second-place speaker, Bob nudged me and said, “It’s going to be you.” Having no comparable experience in high school, I was still quite surprised. The other U-M teams had mediocre records or worse.

It seems as if we must have gone to at least one other tournament during the first semester, but I have no recollection of it. I don’t even remember any practice debates, but we may have had a few.

They did send Bob and me to some exhibition debates, at least three. I remember one vividly. We went to one of the Ann Arbor high schools and debated against each other in front of an assembly. We wore our suits and told lots of jokes, and the kids loved us.

What I remember most vividly was how young and small the high school students looked. In the movies college kids come back to their old high school and seem to fit right in. In contrast, after I had spent only a month or so at college, these kids looked like grade-schoolers to me.

I eventually met most of the other people on the debate team. The top team was Lee Hess and his partner, a red-haired guy named Rosenberg or something like that. They had represented U-M last March at the district’s qualifying tournament for the National Debate Tournament. Their record was 0-8. At the time there were many good teams in the district, but I feel certain that there were also some that I would consider horrible.

Jeff Sampson worked with the varsity teams a lot. I don’t remember anyone working much with Bob and me. In early December I was therefore very surprised when Dr. Colburn asked me to meet with him, Jeff, and Lee Hess. I learned that Lee’s partner had quit the team, and they wanted me to debate varsity with Lee in the second semester. This would require me to go to quite a few top-quality tournaments, which would mean missing classes.

I was shocked that they had chosen me over all the other more experienced debaters. The most amazing aspect was that they wanted me to do second affirmative. Generally, the stronger debater does the 2A. The first affirmative constructive is actually written out ahead of time. How well it is delivered is not really considered very important by most judges. The debater just reads it. So the 1A’s only responsibility is the five-minute rebuttal. It consisted of presenting arguments rapidly, not selling them.

I also was asked to be 1N, which was fine with me. The 1NC usually presents a lot of arguments, and I could “spread” better than Lee could. His job would be to analyze the affirmative’s plan and come up with reasons why it was a bad idea. Experience pays off in that role.

I decided to give it a try. I had had so little difficulty with classes in the first semester that I had gained a great deal of confidence about classes. Also, of course, I absolutely loved going to tournaments—win, lose, or … uh, there are no draws in debate. You can go 4-4, however.

Jeff and Lee and I worked together through the end of finals. We decided to run a “squirrel” case on the affirmative—ending the commitment to be the first country to put a man on the moon. At the very least this approach would mean that more experienced teams would not be able to use most of their tried-and-true “canned” arguments against us. I was definitely up for that.

In those days debaters kept evidence—short quotes from books and magazine articles fully cited on 4″x6″ index cards.² By the end of the year top debaters amassed thousands of them carried them in steel cases or briefcases. Walking from one classroom to another at a tournament was sometimes a real workout.

The best schools had systems for making sure that all debaters on the team had access to all the evidence recorded by al debaters on the team. Some even traded with other teams. U-M had no such system. I was fortunate to inherit the evidence amassed by Lee’s former partner.

Everyone organized his/her own evidence. Tabbed dividers were required. It seemed obvious to me that the tabs should be numbered like an outline: IA1a, etc., but not everyone did this. I don’t know how they managed. I pulled at least fifty cards per debate, and it was crucial to place them back in the right section. Also, at least twice in my career a drawer of cards fell off a desk and spilled all over the floor. It never took me more than five minutes to put the cards back in order.

The Hatcher Graduate Library has five basements. A second building is behind this one. The campus has many specialty libraries, as well.

In those days my handwriting was still good enough that my partner and others could read it. Later I typed all the cards.

I also purchased a large artist’s pad to use for taking notes in debates, a process called “flowing”. Most people in those days used legal pads, but I could never get an entire debate on one sheet of legal paper, and I wanted to be able to see the debate at a glance.

One advantage that U-M debaters cherished was the amazing network of libraries on the campus. If it had been published, we could almost certainly lay our hands on it.

Allen Rumsey House: For all four years I enjoyed living in Allen Rumsey House immensely. It was conveniently located, and I got along fine with almost all of the guys. It was a little difficult to get used to having only two showers and three toilets available for thirty residents, but many guys were elsewhere much of the time.

There was usually a card game going on our floor—hearts, spades, or euchre. We also played another trick-taking game called “Oh, hell.” I came up with a revised scoring method that everyone adopted. One day in the first week of class Gritty introduced me to Charlie Delos from Bloomfield, who know how to play bridge. We played pretty often against Gritty and Andy. Eventually, a more or less permanent bridge game arose in the lounge. I was a frequent but not constant participant.

Charlie Delos had a date on October 22 for the Homecoming Concert that featured the Beach Boys. She canceled at the last minute. I bought her ticket from Charlie. The opening act was the Standells, a glorified garage band from Boston. All of their songs were forgettable except for the finale, which they called a “medley of our hit”, “Dirty Water.”

It was homecoming, but they did sing a song called "Graduation Day". — It was actually a homecoming concert, but they did sing a song called “Graduation Day”.

The Beach Boys recorded the concert as a live performance. They began with “Help Me, Rhonda”, which started suddenly while it appeared that they were still tuning their instruments. The highlight was “Good Vibrations”, a big hit for them that no one in the audience had ever heard before. Despite all the special effects it was just as good in person as on the record. All of the original Beach Boys (the Wilson Brothers, Al Jardine, and Mike Love) plus Bruce Johnston played and sang. It was a great day. We got to see the Wolverines beat Minnesota 49-0, and then saw a great concert. I suspect that Charlie would have preferred the date.

One of the few people who got under my skin was my roommate, Ed Agnew. He had a very strange schedule. I got up early, showered, dressed, and left by seven or so. He slept late every single morning. I never saw him in the afternoon or evening. He would roll in some time between three and four in the morning, turn on the light, and (loudly) wash his face in the sink with a lotion that he kept in a squeeze bottle. The sink was on my side of the room, and the light woke me up every time. It was very annoying.

I never saw the Ag take a shower or brush his teeth in the entire semester. Neither had anyone else on the floor. He might have taken showers at phys ed classes, but still.

The Ag spent most of his time at the undergraduate library, which everyone at Michigan calls the UGLI. There are many good places to study at Michigan. The worst is the UGLI. The selection of books is both weak and obscure. Concentration is virtually impossible because of all of the activity. In short it is primarily a pickup spot, but I never saw any evidence that the Ag had any luck in that department.

The one thing that he had going for him was his stereo. However, his taste ran to big band music. His favorite album was Victory at Sea. If he turned on the stereo in my presence, I had to leave.

Ed’s parents moved to California. He dropped out after the first semester. I knew that his grades were awful; he may have flunked out.

Charlie also did not like his roommate very much. He moved into Ed’s bed in 315 for the second semester. I liked Charlie a lot, and he even had a stereo. It was not quite as nice as Ed’s, but it would do.

The two guys across the hall, Dave Zuk and Paul Stoner became pretty good friends. Both were in the engineering school, which was easier to get into in those days than Literature, Science, and the Arts. Dave knew a lot about electricity and electronics. Paul struggled in the classes, but at least he made it to the second semester, which is more than the Ag could claim. We played a lot of hearts. Paul was a master of what we called the “Stoner Run,” in which, having already lost a heart, he would try to see how close he could come to taking all of them. He usually collected the other twelve twelve.

Stoner had a home-town honey (HTH) who was still in high school in Adrian, MI. This astounded me. I had participated in some exhibition debates in high schools. They seemed to be full of midgets! At any rate, Paul invited me to Adrian (only 20 minutes away) one weekend day. It was nothing to speak of.

In November or December Paul’s girlfriend dumped him. Paul was incredibly distressed. This was the first time I ever encountered this phenomenon.

AR had a house council that met every week on Wednesday evenings. The secretary took minutes, typed them up, mimeographed 50 copies, and slid a copy under every door. I don’t remember his name, but I really liked his style. Halfway through the semester he resigned. Gritty asked me to take his place. It seemed easy enough, and so I did it. Thus, I became embroiled in dorm politics almost as soon as I arrived.

AR had a few traditions that I was not expecting. One was the inter-floor water fights. They usually pitted the third four residents against the fourth floor. One would start with an unexpected dowsing with a water balloon or a waste basket full of water. Soon water was several inches deep in the hallways, and it became critical to dam up the bottom of the doors to the rooms with towels and whatever else was available. The most epic of these battles led to waterfalls cascading down the stairs all the way to the basement.

I am not sure when it started, but some guys on the third and fourth floors also threw water balloons. The house president, Ken Nelson, had a great arm. He could throw one from the fourth floor all the way across the street to the front door of South Quad. The hapless victims never suspected that the missile had come from such a distance.

Balloons were launched from room 415 (L in the lower right). T1 and T2 (top) are the target areas. The trees were much smaller then.

The guys in 415, right above us, invented a water balloon launcher that defied belief. It consisted of surgical tubing that was affixed to each side of a window and to a kneepad that held the ammunition. two guy would then pull back the kneepad across the room, through the door, the hall, and into room 414, where they carefully set the kneepad down on the floor and simultaneously released it. Mishaps were common, but if they were careful, the balloon came out with absolutely incredible force. It would clear both the center and the northern section of West Quad across the street and over the trees (smaller than shown in the image) into the plaza between the LS&A building and the Administrative Building. Spotters from AR were stationed there to document the bombings. No one could ever have suspected where they came from. They called the device the “Chee ho tay”. I don’t know how they spelled it.

I personally saw them operate the device, and once I saw a balloon speed over the top of the north side of West Quad.

Nobody called me “Wave” in Ann Arbor. In Allen Rumsey house most people called me KC or Case. Elsewhere, I was just Mike.

Sports: Despite the fact that a super-talented future All-American basketball player lived a few feet to the west of Allen Rumsey House, everyone was most interested in football. All the freshmen pooled all of their ID’s together, and someone purchased a block of tickets for us in the corner of the end zone.

I remember that just a few days after school started one of the assistant football coaches visited A-R and put on a short presentation about the U-M football team. A large group of the house’s residents crammed into the rec room to watch a film that he showed about the team. It featured footage of some of the underclassmen on the 1965 team who would be playing in the first game that was just around the corner. The coach that year was Bump Elliott³, and my favorite player was Dick Vidmer⁴, the quarterback. By the end of the season I judged that the former did not take full advantage of the latter’s abilities.

A fairly strict ritual was followed on the Saturdays of home games. After breakfast a group of us would watch cartoons⁵ downstairs. Depending on the starting time for the game, we would then try to grab an early lunch before following the band for the one-mile walk to Michigan Stadium⁶. This would get us there in plenty of time before kickoff.

The stadium was surprisingly unimpressive from the outside. I knew that it held 100,000 people, but it did not seem possible. To me it looked smaller than Municipal Stadium in KC. When I entered the stadium, it became clear. Fully half of the stadium is below street-level. When you entered, half or more of the stadium was below you.

If the team was on the road, we would listen to Bob Ufer’s completely unbiased accounts of the action on the radio. More than a few fans brought transistor radios to the games and listened during home games, too.

Even then, Michigan Stadium was gigantic. The team was mediocre during my first two years at U-M. Nearly all undergraduate students attended the games, but the graduate students represented approximately half the student body. They and the alumni did not attend in numbers nearly as great as in 1968 and every following year.

There were no back support or arm rests in Michigan Stadium until "premium seats" were added. — There were no back support or arm rests in Michigan Stadium until a relatively small number of “premium seats” were added decades later.

This is not to say that there were empty seats those first two years. Michigan Stadium did not have seats. It had very hard metal benches with numbers painted on them. You sat on the number corresponding to your ticket.

An obvious problem developed if people were wider than the distance between numbers. Very heavy students were a lot less prevalent then, but for the Ohio State game with everyone in parkas in late November, a few late arrivals ended up sitting on the steps.

Rudy T. probably could have been and All-American in volleyball. — Rudy T. probably could have been an All-American in volleyball.

Very few students regularly attended basketball games, even when Rudy Tomjanovich was scoring 30+ points per game. I remember watching one game in the Crisler Center in my sophomore year. All of the fans were making fun of the way that the coach, Dave Strack, clapped his hands when the team huddled during a timeout.

Intramural sports were big in Allen Rumsey, especially volleyball and ping pong. I remember John Dalby, the fourth floor RA, started recruiting volleyball players during the first week of school. When I arrived, AR had never won the overall IM dorm championsip, but we were defending champs in volleyball.

I did not play on any of AR’s intramural teams as a freshman. In the first semester I was concerned with classes and other matters. In the second semester I was much too busy debating.

Many pickup football games were played that first semester. There were several fields that were in walking distance of AR. I made many good friends in these games.

I attended a few of the house’s intramural contests, including the two epic struggles in the finals of ping pong and volleyball, both against Wenley House. We lost in ping pong when our best player, Gritty, was defeated by a guy who overcame the handicap of a cast on one leg with reflexes of a cat. However, we won the volleyball championship by keeping the ball away from Rudy T. at all costs.

1. Among many other accomplishments, Dr. Donald J. Lewis became chairman of the U-M math department. He died in 2015. His Wikipedia page is here

2. At some point in the twenty-first century index cards and everything else on paper was replaced by laptops.

3. “George of the Jungle”, which began in 1967, was definitely our favorite. I don’t remember what, if anything, we watched in 1966.

4. After he left Michigan Bump Elliott became the Athletic Director at Iowa. He died in 2019.

5. Dick Vidmer got a bachelors, a masters, and a PhD at U-M. He studied economics as an undergrad and Soviet politics and government as a grad student. He developed multiple sclerosis in 1983, which forced him to retire in 1999. He died in 2022

6. I never heard anyone in Ann Arbor call Michigan Stadium “the Big House”.

1966 Summer Between High School & College

Posted on September 12, 2020 by Mike

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In June of 1996 my dad and I made our first and only road trip together. The primary purpose was to help me decide between the University of Iowa and the University of Michigan.

Our first stop was in Detroit, where my dad introduced me to Howard Finsilver¹, a sales agent for my dad’s employer, BMA, and his son, Sandy, who was my age and planned to attend U-M in the fall. I spent some time with Sandy and a group of his friends from (I think) Mumford High. At least one of them was also going to U-M. Then (as now) most good students in the state hoped to attend U-M. In some parts of the country many top students disparage state schools, but not in Michigan. Sandy and all of his friends were quite impressed that I had been admitted as an out-of-state student.

We shot some pool in the basement of the house of one of the friends. Someone then drove Sandy and me around Detroit to show me some of its highlights. I don’t remember details, but I doubt that the Chamber of Commerce would have agreed with the sites that they chose.

The diag and the bell tower at U-M. — The view from the steps of U-M’s graduate library: the diag and the bell tower.

On the next day dad and I drove the thirty-seven miles to Ann Arbor to talk with a professor from the math department. I don’t remember the specifics of the conversation, but I absolutely fell in love with the town, the campus, the entire atmosphere. And that was before I ever set foot in the football stadium. Just about everyone who visits the town in the spring or summer has this reaction.

On the way to Iowa, we stopped somewhere in Indiana to play some golf. I don’t think that either of us enjoyed the round much.

The last hundred or so miles before we got to Iowa City we saw almost nothing but corn on either side of the road. The professor we talked to at the university made a pretty good case, but I had already decided that I wanted to attend the University of Michigan.

My dad was fairly often involved in providing entertainment for some of the company’s salesmen and regional sales managers when they came to the home office in KC. In the middle of July one of the salesmen had brought two of his sons with him on such a visit. One was close to my age and the other, who also worked as a BMA salesman, was in his twenties. I think that their last name was Roberson. BMA bought three primo tickets for me and the two sons for the Starlight Theater, an outdoor venue in Swope Park that showed musicals in the summer. The show was Bye-Bye Birdie, and it starred the rock group Gary Lewis² and the Playboys. This occurred at the height of the group’s popularity. The group had one big hit, “This Diamond Ring”, and a number of other songs that did well on the charts.

I am sure that the newspaper’s caption was useful to those who thought that J.L. was a government figure. If the wife bent forward just a little or wore her hair down, I would be in this photo.

Gary Lewis’s father was the comic actor, Jerry Lewis. On Monday, July 11, Jerry and his wife and entourage were in KC for their son’s opening night. Believe it or not we were in the fifth row right in the middle. Jerry Lewis was seated in the fourth row between his wife, who did not utter a word all night, and another woman who must have been an agent or something. Jerry Lewis himself sat a few inches from my right knee.

As soon as Jerry Lewis arrived, he consulted privately with another staff member who was seated on the other side of Lewis’s wife. The staffer left for a few minutes and then returned with a large paper cup that was quite different from the kind available at the concession stand. Lewis sipped from it until intermission. Before the play started a few young people came up to ask for his autograph. No dice. The staffer who brought the drink did not let them get close to the star.

During the first few minutes of the performance J.L. tried to record the sound. He had great difficulty operating the recording device. The results of his efforts were a snake’s nest of tape around his feet and a torrent of blue language, the likes of which I would not hear again until I took part in basic training at Fort Polk in 1970. He abandoned the recording project somewhere before intermission.

At intermission J.L. and the staffer exited through a door that was not accessible to the public. They returned just before the play resumed. J.L. was fidgety and generally disruptive throughout the rest of the show. He downed another large paper cup of the mystery beverage during the second half. The Robersons told me that they could smell alcohol.

The play itself was OK. The rest of the actors were fine. I am not a big fan of musical comedy, but I had really liked the story when I saw the movie with Ann-Margret³. Gary Lewis was not believable as a teen dreamboat, and his rendition of “One Last Kiss” was almost laughable, IMHO. The group then played “This Diamond Ring”. They might have also played one or two other songs. There was no screaming from teenage girls in the audience.

I enjoyed Cinderfella, mostly because I was captivated by Anna Maria Alberghetti

At the end the Robersons asked the staff lady politely for autographs, but Jerry Lewis wanted only to get out of the theater immediately. He was in a very bad mood.

My opinion of Jerry Lewis did not change much. I thought that he was a self-centered obnoxious jerk both before and after this occasion. He pretty much ruined the event for everyone within fifteen feet of him.

I don’t remember what I did for the rest of the summer other than mow lawns and play golf. I don’t recall a job.

In late August my parents drove me and some of my belongings to Ann Arbor. Jamie probably came with us. I don’t remember much about the trip except my eagerness to get on with the next phase of my life. Of course, I was also a little nervous.

The University had notified me that I had been assigned to 315 Allen Rumsey⁴ House in West Quad. We drove there and met the third-floor RA, Jim Krogsrud, whom everyone called Gritty. Because classes did not begin until the following week, almost no one had moved in yet. Nearly all incoming freshmen had attended the week-long orientation period during the summer. I was allowed to stay in room 315 while I attended the orientation.

Gritty explained that all the rooms were doubles, but three people had been assigned temporarily to room 315. He said that he was sure that this would be promptly resolved. The family helped me carry my stuff up to the room. Then I said good-bye to them, and they drove off into the sunset.

Gritty asked me a few questions, one of which was whether I played bridge. He was very happy to hear that I did. He and Andy, the house’s RD, liked to play, and they were looking for opponents. He also explained how the laundry and other aspects of life in the dorm worked.

They must have served meals in the West Quad dining room for the few of us who were there that week. I don’t remember having to find restaurants or walk to another dorm.

After breakfast on the day after my parents left I met with my orientation group. Our group leader was a guy. I don’t remember his name. The members of our group were all enrolled in the college of Literature, Science, and the Arts. One of the first orders of business was taking language placement tests. LS&A had a two-year language requirement. I was preparing myself mentally for the Latin test when the group leader told me that he had received a note stating that I did not need to take the test. He said that he had never heard of such a thing. He advised me to take the test anyway.

I showed up for the Latin test. It consisted of a multiple choice grammar test and a sight translation of some lines from Vergil. It seemed pretty easy to me; I was the first person to leave the test room.

I later learned that my 790 on the SAT’s Latin achievement test was the reason why I did not need to take the test. However, I did not get any academic credits for skipping the four semesters of introductory Latin. I did, however get three credits for Advanced Placement English and eight for AP math.

A few days later I got to consult with my academic advisor, who was, of all things, a biology professor. I only met with him for a few minutes once per semester; I don’t recall his name. He told me that I should have been invited to the honors program. He made a few phone calls, after which he told me that I was now in it. He then penciled in a schedule of four classes for me:

Math 195. There were three math sequences, two for honors and one for others. 195 was the first class for the higher ranking of the two introductory honors math sequences.
Great Books, an honors class in the English department.
Chemistry 103, the introductory class for students who did not take chemistry in high school.
Russian 101, which would meet a requirement for math majors—two semesters of Russian or German.
Two semesters of phys ed were also required for freshmen. I picked the course in golf for the first semester.

However, when I got to the actual registration, I discovered that all sections of Great Books were closed. So, I added a 300-level Latin class that focused on Cicero’s orations. It was only a two-hour class, but I already had eleven credits under my belt from the AP tests.

I felt pretty good about this schedule. The subject that worried me the most was chemistry. I figured that I would need to work harder than I did in high school, but that was not really saying much.

While at registration I came across a girl distributing flyers for the U-M debate program. On Tuesday, the day before classes began, the team was holding an open house for anyone who was interested in debate. Based on my lackluster high school career, I had little expectation of debating at U-M, but I took the flyer anyway.

I was on my own in Ann Arbor. I knew almost no one. Only a handful of guys⁵ had moved into Allen Rumsey House yet. The only other person on the third floor of AR was Gritty. I probably should have made an effort to meet people in my orientation group—in all likelihood most were from other states with no friends in Ann Arbor. It never occurred to me. That’s the way I am.

I spent a great deal of time in my room that first week playing one-at-a-time, once-through-the-deck Klondike solitaire. I recorded all of my scores. I also read quite a bit. I had an AM-FM radio, but no other electronics.

In 1966 all freshman students were required to live in dorms. The residence halls were called “houses.” The men’s houses were in three groups. The houses in East Quad and West Quad had only males. South Quad had men’s houses and women’s houses. The remainder of the houses for girls were on the northeast side of central campus in the area known as “The Hill”.

Having been constructed in the thirties, Allen Rumsey House (#1 in the above photo) was the oldest dorm on campus. Little had been done to modernize it in the ensuing decades. With approximately one hundred guys, it was also the smallest house.

On the east side was a corridor between AR and the International House (#3). Wenley House (2), which was almost as old as AR, shared a wall on the west. South Quad was to the south, on the other side of East Madison St. On the north side was a courtyard. Two doors on the other side of led to the central section of West Quad, which contained the cafeteria and a lounge area. A third door led to the bowling alley (#4) and a shortcut to the Michigan Union (#5) and the rest of the central campus, the site of all my classes.

I quickly found the lounge on the first floor of Allen Rumsey House. It had comfortable chairs, a trophy case, a rug, and a piano. The house subscribed to the Michigan Daily, the Ann Arbor News, and a few magazines, including, I later learned, Playboy.

Downstairs was a game room with a small pool table, a ping pong table, and a free juke box! A section of this room and a separate room had televisions and chairs. Both TVs were 19″ black and whites. Next to the small TV room was a study hall that AR shared with Wenley House.

I eventually got up the nerve to shoot pool with another lonely guy named Dan Schuman. He had no hair anywhere on his body, and he was very cynical. We got along great. We played eight-ball. Although he was a better shot than I was, he was unaccustomed to an opponent who always left the cue ball pinned to a rail. The games were long and, for him, frustrating. I usually won.

Used books for every class could be purchased at the two big bookstores, Ulrich’s and Follett’s. Ulrich’s was on South University; Follett’s was on State St. I bought the textbooks for Russian, Math, and Chemistry at one of them. The Latin class had no textbook.

I think that classes started on the Wednesday after Labor Day, September 7. By Tuesday I knew that my roommates in 315 were Ed Agnew from Bloomfield, MI, and Paul Stoner from Adrian. Across the hall in 314 was Dave Zuk. His assigned roommate did not show up. So, Gritty had us draw straws or something to decide who would move across the hall. Paul was selected.

This was good news and bad news. I did not like Ed very much, but I did like his stereo. His taste in music did not accord with mine or anyone else’s that I have ever met. He loved “big band” music, and his all-time favorite recording was the soundtrack from Victory at Sea. However, he did let me use his stereo when he was not around, which, I soon discovered, was essentially every afternoon and evening.

I did not bring any of my records, but 1966 was an exceptional year for popular music. I spent most of my savings on albums. That is to say, I bought three or four records.

I didn't have any, but this is what they looked like. — I didn’t have any, but this is what razor blades looked like in the sixties.

Our room was on the north (courtyard) side. I claimed the bed on the west side, leaving the one on the east side for Ed. Two big windows on the north side were fronted by a large double desk with two chairs. The east wall was an external wall, but there were no windows. We each had a dresser. Maybe we shared a closet. There was a sink with a mirror over it on my side. There was also a slot over the sink for disposal of dull razor blades. I have never seen anything like it anywhere else. I wonder how many blades were inside the wall. I used an electric razor in college. Each room had a plain wall phone. I don’t remember whether they allowed us to make calls on it or not. To get mail you had to walk to the center part of West Quad next to the cafeteria.

I always just walked up State St. to the Frieze Bldg. I don't know why google maps advises avoiding it. — I always just walked up State St. to the Frieze Bldg. I don’t know why google maps advises avoiding it.

I attended the debate meeting in a room on the second floor of the Frieze Building, the headquarters of the speech department. About twenty people attended. We got to meet Dr. Bill Colburn and a couple of grad student coaches, including Jeff Sampson, who debated at Northwestern, a national power. Evidently there was no individual events program.

All of the new people filled out a form outlining our experience and interests, and then we watched a debate between two of the varsity teams. I thought that they were both horrible, and I was shocked to learn that they were U-M’s best teams.

I was paired with a fellow from Portland, ME, named Bob Hirshon. They told us that the topic was “Resolved that the United States should substantially reduce its foreign policy commitments.” Bill and Jeff privately made it clear that they were excited that Bob and I were interested in debate, and they wanted us to represent U-M at the Michigan Intercollegiate Speech League (MISL) novice tournament in October. We would be debating only on the negative. I was second negative.

I was shocked to be on the receiving end of all of this attention. I was uncertain whether I would be able to handle it, but I agreed to try. So did Bob.

1. Howard Finsilver died in 2005.

2. According to Wikipedia Gary Lewis was a better drummer than a singer. His voice was overdubbed on the recordings of his hits. I was surprised to learn that he was drafted the following January and served in Vietnam and Korea. After his hitch in the army he stayed on the fringes of show business with new incarnations of his band. In 2020 he was still performing at age 74.

3. Just to be clear, Ann-Margret appeared in the movie; she wasn’t my date.

4. Ann Arbor is named after Ann Allen and Ann Rumsey, early settlers of the town.

5. In 1966 there were no coed dorms at U-M. In fact, female students were not even allowed to enter Allen Rumsey House except under special circumstances.

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