2013 Bridge: Webmaster for District 25

Posted on June 17, 2023 by Mike

Webmaster, database, email, comm comm, bulletin. Continue reading →

2012 was long before “ACBL Live Results”¹ made it easy for bridge players to find out within an hour or so the results of tournaments.Late in that year I saw a notice on the NEBridge.org² home page that District 25 was looking for someone to post on the website the results from its tournaments. It asked interested players to contact the president of the New England Bridge Conference (NEBC), Ausra Geaski. I did, and after a short training session from Bob Bertoni, who owned and operated Megaherz Computer, the company that designed and implemented the website, I took over the job.

On the evening of each day of the 2013 Knockout Regional in Cromwell I posted the results. The tournament director sent me on text file for each event. I amalgamated them into one large file text file. I made an HTML file that had an index at the top with one line linked to the anchor for each event that I had inserted at the top of the appropriate text. It was HTML 101, not rocket science.

Bob thought that I had done a good job in getting the results posted promptly. He told me that someone who was webmaster at one of the other units had tried to do it at a previous tournament and had made a big mess.

I subsequently told Ausra, whom I occasionally saw at the Hartford Bridge Club³ (HBC). that I was willing and able to do more. Shortly thereafter another notice was posted on NEBridge.org. This one said that the district needed a webmaster. Bill Braucher was resigning from the post that he had held for seven years. I let Ausra know that I thought that I could do it. I also told her about my own website, Wavada.org (which was introduced here), but I don’t think that anyone ever checked it out.

One evening at a tournament Bob spent about an hour with me explaining how the district’s website was structured and how the built-in page editor worked. During this session he discovered that I already knew HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.⁴ He exclaimed, “Oh, you can code! You won’t have any trouble with this.”

A little later we realized that we had something else in common. Bob had attended Boston College on a debate scholarship.⁵ His coach was Tuna Snider, whom I knew fairly well. In the end Bob offered me the webmaster job at the same salary that Bill had earned.⁶ I countered with a demand for a 75% raise, and we settled on 50%.

The bridge world was very different then. The district’s website was its primary method of communicating with its members. It did not publish a newsletter, and it had no program for using email. For the most part postcards and flyers were snail-mailed to the clubs. The district relied on their owner/managers to pass the information on to the players. The method was fairly expensive and totally unreliable.

Furthermore, the webmaster was not allowed to post any material unless the website editor, Allan Clamage⁷, had checked it for style and errors. Allan also taught me about standards that the district had established to govern the decisions. For example, the website never published an obituary or promoted any unit’s tournaments or other events.

The Website Committee (Allan, Bob, District Director Rich DeMartino, and myself) had a strategy meeting during one of the lunch breaks at every tournament. I don’t remember much that transpired at these meeting, but the other members mostly endorsed my ideas for improving the website. After three or four of these meetings Rich declared that we seemed to know what we were doing and disbanded the committee. At about the same time Allan began to review what I posted only after the fact. I considered that show of trust as a great compliment. I only embarrassed him a few times, and he never got angry at me.

My main goal was to attract more eyeballs to the site. Expert players Harold Feldheim and Jay Stiefel allowed me to post articles that they had written for The Kibitzer, the newsletter of the Connecticut Bridge Association (CBA). I also received material from Frank Hacker, Steve Rzewski, Bill Braucher, and a few others. I began writing The View from B-Low under my nom de plume, Single Session Swiss⁸. After each tournament the webpage for The View whimsically recounted my own completely inexpert experiences. Most were true; a few were fish stories. Most of those articles still exist. The index to them is available here.

Database Manager: I remember that during one of my conversations with Allan, I exclaimed, “We don’t know who our players are!” He disagreed. He then showed me how he downloaded csv⁹ files of the entire ACBL roster every month, and he arranged for the ACBL to allow me to do the same. Allan used spreadsheets, but I undertook the major task of designing a MySQL database for use by the district and myself. At the time I wasn’t quite sure what I would do with the information, but I knew that we needed it.

I maintained two copies of the database, one on my local hard drive and one on the Wavada.org website that I had purchased from iPower so that I could share my travel journals with friends, family, and fellow travelers.

The database’s primary table had one record per player. Every table in any database should have a “key”—a field that uniquely identifies the record and cannot be changed. On the player table the key was the seven-digit ACBL number. Using it as the key would be a small problem if I wished to add records for non-ACBL members. Fortunately, if that ever happened, I could assign them a bogus number less than 1000000. The ACBL never used those numbers.

When a new roster was released I updated both the local and remote copies of the players table using scripts that I wrote in php. At first I did this only for currently active players in New England, but after a few months I decided to expand it to cover all of North America. The script that updated the players table also wrote records on a history table that contained each player’s point total at the time that the roster was posted.

One of my jobs as webmaster was to post a list every month of the New England players who had advanced in rank during the month. I decided to maintain a sub-table for these advancements using the file that was sent to me by the ACBL.

I soon realized that what I really wanted to know was who was attending the tournaments in New England. I knew that the results posted on the district’s website as well as on the websites of the units listed all players in attendance. There were two major difficulties: 1) the ACBL numbers were not on the lists; 2) the formats were not consistent. It was a big pain, but I eventually came up with scripts that could handle nearly all of the entries on all of the lists.It wasn’t close to perfect, but it was much better than nothing. I was convinced that it was worth the effort.

I created two sub-tables for attendance: one for players whose ACBL numbers I was able to deduce from the name and town on the list and one for the others. The biggest problem was people with more than one address. The second-biggest problem was people who changed their names. I figured out ways to handle these problems, but they were labor-intensive and introduced the possibility of mistakes.

I also went through the same process for the three NABC tournaments that were run every year. Those files were much larger. It took me a day or more to process each one. It was very important to do them promptly. If even a month elapsed, a lot of addresses changed.

Sending emails: Eventually, I wanted to use the database to send emails promoting the district’s tournaments. The first problem was that the emails on the ACBL’s database were incomplete. I reached out to my acquaintances throughout the district and came up with correct email addresses for at least half of the ones that were missing. I also went through the wooden box containing index cards with member data at the HBC and found a few there. To make sure that my good addresses were not overridden by the ACBL’s blank, confidential, or wrong addresses, I added a field to the player’s table for the source of the email and changed the php script so that it only used the email address on the roster if the previous source was “ACBL”.

The second problem was that I had no authority and no budget for anything like this. At the time District 25’s president, Mark Aquino, had created a “B’s Needs Committee” to address the problems that lower-level players (like myself) confronted when their masterpoints exceeded the 750-point maximum for the “Gold Rush” games. Mark attended some of the meetings. I told the committee about the database that I had created, and I mentioned that I would like to send emails to promote the events sponsored by District 25. I was very pleased when Mark said, “Go for it!”

The great thing about php was that it was—even in those days—thoroughly documented on the Internet. I discovered a way of sending emails through php. My first project was to promote the 2014 Senior Regional/Cape Cod Sectional in Hyannis, MA. The chairperson was one of my partners, Ginny Farber (then Ginny Iannini), who was introduced here.

I sent the emails to all members of District 25 and to anyone who, according to the attendance table on the database, had attended a recent tournament in New England or a national tournament. I knew that I had to be careful about being considered a spammer, and so I stated quite clearly in the email that anyone who wished to be removed from the list should reply to the email with that indication, and I would take care of it. The players table had an “OK to email?” field. I never mailed to anyone who had asked to be removed, and I was scrupulous about keeping this designation up to date..

The emails were very well received, and the attendance at the tournament exceeded expectations. The chairperson of the next event, the Summer Regional in Nashua, NH, was Sarah Widhu. She asked me to promote that event, and I did so. It was also well received, and the attendance was quite good. I was definitely on to something.

Email problems: The php script that I executed on my Wavada.org account was not completely fool-proof. Every so often it would send up to fifteen copies of the email to one person. This was, to put it mildly, quite annoying. I contacted iPower about it. Because I was unable to reproduce the problem for them, they could not solve it.

This problem was completely dwarfed by another issue that raised its ugly head shortly thereafter. None of the emails went out! Once again I contacted iPower. It took several weeks, and they never told me what they did, but the support team somehow fixed this.

However, after a few successful executions, the problem appeared again. After several weeks of interchanges with iPower support, I was finally informed that my account had been black-listed as a spammer by someone. Therefore, the iPower email server did not send out my emails.

I used the one phone call that I was allowed to tell Bob Bertoni that I was in email jail, and I asked if he could bail me out. He did some research and eventually negotiated a contract with MailChimp, a company that specialized in sending mass emails for businesses and non-profits, for the purchase of two million “credits” for emails for only $2500. The Executive Committee approved the appropriation. From that point on I never tried to send emails directly from iPower.

MailChimp: I set up an account on MailChimp with a user ID of Guastafeste, which is the Italian term for party-pooper. I taught myself how to use the software to create the lists and the emails themselves. For the first few years the account was allowed to create as many lists and emails as we wanted. I created a new list for each email until MailChimp prohibited me from creating any additional lists.

I generally sent out the first set of emails five weeks before the event. A second set would be sent two weeks later. Each set would be devoted to a group based on geography, masterpoints, and/or tournament attendance. The content sent to each group would differ, at least a little.

Because I was accustomed to composing my emails in HTML, I always used the “Code your own” template. I always wrote the code for the emails in UltraEdit on my PC and pasted the HTML code into the editing window on MailChimp. Te program would immediately display the way that the email would look in the window on the left side of the screen. This method allowed me to position and size images exactly. It also allowed for the use of tables and almost anything else that could be done on a webpage. An unanticipated benefit was that if someone who needed to promote something had sent me an email that was already formatted, I could extract the HTML code, tweak it a little, and then paste it into the HTML editing window.

I reported one bug that I found in this process. If I tried to change the color (or anything else) for part of a word, MailChimp inserted a space between the two parts. The example was GOLDmother, which MailChimp changed to GOLD mother. MailChimp refused to fix this obvious problem. By the way, it was not easy to get WordPress. which is the product used for these blogs, to produce this effect either.

The oldest HTML file that I found in the MailChimp folder on my PC was dated July of 2015. I suspect that the first tournament promoted on MailChimp was the Individual Regional in 2015. From that time through 2021 I composed, tested, and sent almost all of the emails promoting District 25’s events. They were amazingly successful, and I became known in New England bridge as “the email guy” rather than “the webmaster”. All told, I sent over one million emails.

Other projects: The database also allowed me to undertake posting on NEBridge.org photos of winners of events or strats at regionals (Winners Boards). The first tournament for which I implemented this feature was in the Knockout Regional in Cromwell in 2014. My plan was to ask winners to come to a spot where I could take their pictures with my point-and-shoot Canon. Only one or two complied.

There were several other problems. My friend Bob Derrah volunteered to help me chase winners down, but he could not figure out how to use the camera. Eventually I discovered that the best time was either right after the round or the next day before the start of play. Still, I was lucky if I got photos of half of the winners.

I usually spent the better part of every week assembling the five or six webpages of winners’ photos. I sent emails to every winner whose photo I lacked. A very high percentage of them responded, especially among the newer players. For the others I either pieced together substitutes from photos that I previously took or just put up an empty spot for them. The HTML code for the pages themselves was generated by a php script that ran off of a set of tables that was itself generated from a spreadsheet on my PC.

Was it worth the effort? I don’t know. I strongly believe that the regionals should be special, and the winners boards—and a lot of other things—contributed to making them feel that way to a lot of people. Most of those things disappeared during the pandemic. To me the post-pandemic regional tournaments seemed vacuous whereas before they always excited me.

The ACBL had two annual contests that rewarded the players in each rank that accumulated the most points. One exclusively counted points won at clubs. The other included all points. I decided in 2017 to create an award for each rank for points won in the events sponsored by District 25. That included the NAP and GNT qualifiers as well as the four regional tournaments and the two hybrid events—the Rainbow Weekend and the Senior Regional/Cape Cod Sectional.

My ability to do this without a great deal of effort was due to the access that I had to LZH files from the ACBL. An ACBL employee named Keith Wells provided me with these files that had all the information on the “masterpoint winners” lists that I had been using to populate the attendance files, plus they had both the ACBL numbers and the total number of masterpoints that the players had at the time of the event. They also included players who attended but earned no points.

It was pretty easy to keep the fifteen totals in the database. The only real difficulty I had was when a foreign player was awarded masterpoints for the purpose of eligibility. After each event I sent out emails to everyone in each of the fifteen masterpoint categories that listed the top fifteen players in that category. At the end of the year I created certificates honoring the winners.

I doubt that this effort by itself induced more than a few people to play, but like the Winners’ Boards, they helped to contribute to the special atmosphere of regional events.

Another project from BridgeFinesse.com involved sending of emails to players who had achieved a new rank in the previous month. The emails, which were signed by the appropriate district director encouraged the recipients to respond to the emails with their own ideas. Rich DeMartino was D25’s District Director (DD) when this process began. He asked me to post each comment that he received and to ask each player for whom I did not already have a suitable photo to send one. I did this for Rich and for his successor, Mark Aquino.

When Bob Bertoni became DD, he posted the comments he received on his own website. When he died in 2021, his temporary successor ignored the comments, but when the position was eliminated in favor of a Regional Director, the first one, Mark Aquino, asked me to post the new comments. I retrieved the ones from Bob’s website and posted them on NEBridge.org. I also posted the ones that Mark received.

The disaster: In October 2015 the system that hosted NEBridge.org suffered a catastrophic hardware failure. In the 30+ years that I had spent in the business I occasionally had to face some really bad situations, but I never had to deal with anything like Bob was facing with this one. I told him that if I were he, I would be looking for a tall tree and a short rope.

NEBridge.org was the least of his problems. We were trying to get people to play our favorite card game with us. His other customers’ livelihood depended on their websites.

Nevertheless, Bob got the district’s website back up and running pretty quickly, but most of what I had posted in the first few years was not recoverable, including all of the articles by Frank and Steve. I could have gone back to original sources and salvaged some of it, but all of the new projects that I had started left me no time to attempt more than I did.

Bob temporarily allowed me to use FTP to send files from my PC to the server. That saved me a lot of time. The new version of the website had a slightly different editing editor for the pages. I liked it in some ways and hated it in others.

The Communications Committee: At the last meeting of the B’s Needs Committee Bob, who at that point was president of the NEBC, announced that he wanted to form a marketing committee. He then asked me to be its chairman. I wanted to be on the committee, but I had never been the chairman of a committee. I suggested Allan, but Bob was rather insistent. I eventually agreed, but I wanted it to be called the Communications Committee or, better yet, Comm Comm.

Beginning in 2016 a group of us met at tournaments for several years to talk about all aspects of communication—website, emails, tournament Bulletin, posting of results, guest lecturers at tournaments, signage, microphones, etc. I found the meetings useful, but a subsequent president, Jack Mahoney, decided that they were no longer necessary. I think that the biggest problem was that almost everyone on the committee was also on other committees.

Bulletins: In 2018 I was asked by Lois DeBlois, NEBC president, to begin editing the Bulletin for tournaments. Previously it had been published every day, but Lois wanted to reduce it to one publication that covered the entire tournament. The results that had been printed in the daily editions were by then available online. So, it was not necessary to provide a daily edition. I took on the responsibility of creating it in the new format as well as the setup for online bulletins that were provided by the same service that provided Live Results.

After the pandemic the Executive Committee considered the cost of both bulletins to be excessive. I wrote one last Bulletin for the Optical Regional in Southbridge, MA, in November of 2022.

In November of 2021 I informed the Executive Committee that I intended to resign as webmaster and all of the other things that I had done at the end of 2022. I feared that it would be difficult to find people who were willing and able to keep going many of the things that I started. The story of that process has been recorded here.

1. ACBL stands for American Contract Bridge League, the governing body for competitive bridge in North America. The Live Results program was run by BridgeFinesse.com, a private company in Florida.

2. NEBridge.org is the website of the New England Bridge Conference, the governing body of competitive bridge for District 25 of the ACBL, the New England states.

3. At the time I was still working at TSI and playing bridge only on Tuesday evenings and weekends. Ausra also played in some of those games, but my skill level was far beneath hers.

4. HTML (hypertext markup language) is the language of browsers. JavaScript is an object-oriented language used for screen design. CSS (cascading style sheets) allow for organization of styles.

5. Bob was eight years younger than I was. He probably graduated from BC in or arround 1978. Therefore, he was probably at the party that Don Huprich, Stewart Mandel, and I attended at BC in 1977. That hair-raising adventure was described here. Bob died in 2021. His obituary can be read here.

6. I hate to explain the jokes, but it may not be obvious that neither Bill Braucher nor I was paid anything as webmaster. I did get $100 for each Bulletin. They were always around twenty pages.

7. I later learned that Allan was also a Wolverine, but he was nineteen years older than I was. He was shocked to learn that I had been a math major. He died in 2018. His obituary can be found here.

8. Every tournament that held knockouts also scheduled Single-Session Swiss events. They were team events held in the afternoon for players who were eliminated in the morning session of the knockout. The event was commonly called “Loser Swiss”.

9. A csv (comma-separated values) file was a text file in which each piece of data in a record was separated from the others by commas or other delineators.

2008-2019 Bridge Partners at Tournaments Part 1: Steady

Posted on December 25, 2021 by Mike

Partners at regionals and sectionals. Continue reading →

This entry contains information about the partners with whom I played regularly at tournaments before the Pandemic. Many experiences with those people have already been described elsewhere. Part 2, which is posted here, is about partners with whom I played at tournaments only once or twice.

I enjoyed playing in pairs games at the clubs for the first few years when I was still working a very large number of hours. During this period I read the Bridge Bulletin from cover to cover every month and tried to make sense of the dazzling array of tournaments that were being held around the country. When I started playing at the Simsbury Bridge Club (SBC) with Dick Benedict (introduced here), he had already put together a group of people who played in tournaments together. He asked me to join that group, and I was eager to do so.

Partners from the SBC: I am not positive, but I think that the first tournament in which I played was with Dick as my partner in a 299er (restricted to players with less than 300 masterpoints) game in the Knockout Regional at a hotel in Cromwell, CT. That would probably have been in February of 2008. I remember that it was held in a separate room across from the main ballroom. During a break Dick escorted me across the hall to see what the players there were doing. I found the vista stupefying. The place was huge, and it was full of bridge tables. At each one were seated four people, most of whom had huge heads. I have never heard anyone discuss this aspect of bridge, but it was the first thing that I noticed. I felt that this was where I belonged.

The game in the 299er room was run by Sue Miguel. She reminded me of a grade school teacher. She was very proud of the fact that the candy that she offered to her charges contained more chocolate than could be obtained elsewhere. The 299er games seemed rinkiy-dink to me. On the one hand, the games seemed less challenging than the ones at either the Hartford Bridge Club (HBC) or the SBC; on the other I had a hard time understanding what the opponents’ bids meant. After just a few sessions I determined that although I found the concept of tournaments fascinating, I wanted more than the 299er rooms had to offer. In retrospect I must admit that this was probably hubris.

At first Dick’s preferred partner at tournament was Virginia Labbadia. She was, as I recall a retired salesperson for Xerox. I played on a few teams with them. Dick offered to help her make Life Master if she would help him. He was shocked that she turned him down, and so he asked me.

Eventually Dick and I had great success together playing in bracketed team games (knockouts, compact knockouts, and round robins) with Robert Klopp and Brenda Harvey. Many of our adventures have already been described here. Dick already knew Robert and Brenda when we started playing together. He probably had played against them at tournaments.

One of the regulars at the SBC, Sonja Smith², recommended that her son, Steve Smith,³ try playing with me at the games in Simsbury. Shortly thereafter Dick, who was a Life Master by then, decided he did not want to play with me in Simsbury. Steve and I started playing there and on Tuesday evenings at the HBC. We also attended several memorable tournaments together. Most of those exploits, including our trip to Reno, NV, have already been described here.

One thing that I neglected to mention was that Steve seldom carried any cash with him. More than once I had to pay his table fees for him. Of course he paid me back. Cash to him was an old person’s money.

Steve bought a house in the Forest Park section of Springfield, MA. He rented out his spare bedrooms to other guys. When I drove there to pick him up I never knew what I would encounter. In at least one case I had to wait for him to get dressed.

Nearly all of our car trips to tournaments were interesting. I remember that Steve told me once about an idea that he had for a dating app. He was serious about developing it and marketing it. I thought that he was crazy. I never learned whether anything ever came of it.

Steve and I were both fans of Phil Hendrie, a radio host from Los Angeles, who conducted outrageous and offensive interviews of himself using other voices. After a few minutes he would invite people to call in. Many people did, and the results were hilarious. Phil’s regular listeners never called because they knew that it was a stunt.

Steve and I both occasionally listened to Art Bell on his Coast to Coast AM radio show. Steve once played for me a recording of Phil Hendrie interviewing himself as someone accompanying Art Bell on a mission to find aliens that had landed near Las Vegas.

I also played bridge with Steve’s mother Sonja a few times We were partners once at the SBC and once or twice at the HBC. We also played together for two sessions at the sectional in Orange that was held in June of 2022. That event has been documented here.

I went to quite a few tournaments with Sue Rudd. When we started playing together I was a Life Master and she was not. This was in spite of the fact that she had joined the ACBL seventeen years before I did. I have written extensively about my long relationship with Sue. You can read about many of the experiences here.

Sue stopped paying dues to the ACBL in 2010. She was the only person whom I ever heard complain vociferously about the cost of playing bridge. Then again, she also complained about the cost of gasoline and just about everything else. I suppose that it was difficult for her to manage her expenses on the fixed income that she received as a former employee of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. On the other hand, one of her sons paid for quite a few foreign vacations for her, and she often mentioned how many famous ski resorts on different continents that she had visited over her lifetime.

Sue still played bridge occasionally at the end of 2023, but I don’t know of any sanctioned games in which she was participating other than occasional appearances at the SBC.

My occasional partnerships with Jerry Hirsch were documented pretty thoroughly here. As of November 2023 he still played with Sally Kirtley nearly every Tuesday morning at the HBC and Wednesday evening at the SBC. His smiling face has not been seen at a tournament for some time before Covid-19 arrived.

My last (as of November 2023) regular partner at the SBC was Ken Leopold. I have recounted some of our many adventures together here. Ken was still working as a physician as of late 2023. Since the Pandemic I have not played with him in any tournaments, although he asked me to play in the 2023 Gala Regional in Marlborough. I had to decline because of a previous commitment to another player. Most of the time he has played with his wife, Lori.

In the fall of 2023 Ken started directing the Saturday afternoon pairs game at the HBC. It was sort of an experiment.

Partners from the HBC: The stories about my partners from the HBC that are recounted here include many recollections about tournament play, as well.

I played with Tom Gerchman at quite a few tournaments, including the NABC in Boston in 2008, at which time I had less than fifty masterpoints. That experience and many others have been documented here.

After I had stopped playing with Gerch I was subjected to one more instance in which I had to sit across from him. Both of us were playing in the Individual Regional Tournament in Newton, MA, in January. In individual events players have different partners for each round. So, in a session of twenty-seven boards they would play with nine different partners. By chance one of my seven was Gerch.

On the first hand he opened 3♦, a preemptive bid that indicated a below average hand with seven diamonds. The player on my right passed. I also passed, which told Tom that I had fewer than three diamonds, and I did not think that we could take ten tricks. The player on my left bid 3♥.

Tom’s first bid had limited his hand. That made me the captain. Nevertheless, he channeled his inner Mister Christian and he bid 4♦. The ONLY excuse for doing this would be if he discovered that he had actually had eight diamonds. He didn’t.

After two passes the player on my left reluctantly bid 4♥. This raised the stakes a lot. Now our opponents might potentially get 620 points for a game contract as opposed to 140 or 170 for the three-level bid. Tom did not hesitate. He took the 5♦ card from his bidding box and set it on the table. The next player immediately doubled, of course.

I really felt like calling the director and asking him/her if I could join the opponents in the double. I had played nothing but pass cards. Now I was going to be the dummy. Why must I be punished for my partner’s reckless and totally unilateral bidding?

Now that I have had time to think about it, I should have redoubled. We were going to get a zero anyway. Why not make Gerch sweat a little more.

In fact, Tom and I ended up getting zeroes on all three hands. This was an astounding result. Of all the pairs playing these three hands—probably at least ten—we did worse than all of them all three times. I am happy to say that that was the last time that I ever had to play across from Gerch.

My first team event was at a regional tournament at the Hilton Hotel in Danbury, CT,⁴ in the autumn of 2008. Dick and I played together. Our teammates were Virginia and Inge Schuele (ING uh SHOO luh), one of Dick’s regular partners at the club. Our team had a total of less than 600 masterpoints. Our opponents had at least ten times that amount. We got pasted.⁵

The match lasted all morning. Afterwards the four of us ate lunch in the hotel’s restaurant and discussed what to do in the afternoon. There was a 199er pairs game in the afternoon. Both Inge and I had less than 200 points, and so we could play in it. The fact that we had not played together was not of great import. We used the card that Inge played with Dick, and I adjusted. I seem to remember that Dick and Virginia played in the pairs games for seniors, which at that time was anyone over 60.

After lunch I insisted on finding a quiet place at the hotel so that I could take a short nap. In my working days I always did this.

Our opposition in the 199er event was several steps below the level of our opponents in the knockout. They made many mistakes. When all was said and done Inge and I had a score well over 60 percent, and we were first overall. We were presented with small trophies, and out photos were taken. Our pictures appeared in the next day’s Bulletin for the tournament. This was the only trophy that I ever won in bridge, and it was the only time that my photo appeared in print until the time that my image appeared on the cover of a bridge book written by a Canadian.⁶

Although I don’t think that I ever paired up with Inge at the HBC, I am positive that we played together at several tournaments. I learned that Inge spoke Italian and in days gone by had conducted tours of parts of Italy. Her husband, Werner (VAIR nair), was a retired airline pilot who flew for Lufthansa.

I vividly remember one hand that Inge and I played together in Sturbridge, MA. It might have been at the qualifier of the North American Pairs that was held there every year. Inge had opened 1♣. I had four clubs, but my primary responsibility was to bid a four-card major (hearts or spades). She rebid her clubs, and the opponents then entered the auction. I used the principles of Losing Trick Count⁷ (LTC) to determine that we could probably make 5♣, and that was what I bid. Sure enough, she was able to win the requisite eleven tricks, and there was no chance for a twelfth.

LTC does not always work, but it is a good tool for estimating the total number of tricks you probably can take in a suit contract. Inge had never heard of this technique, but she later told me that Werner, who also played bridge, had heard of it and used it.

Inge has not played in a tournament since 2018, and she stopped paying dues to the ACBL in 2022, at which time she had reached the rank of Bronze Life Master. I have not seen her at the HBC since the reopening in 2021, but she might still play elsewhere.

I must close this section with a startling fact. My wife Sue told me more than once that she had been jealous of Inge and had worried that I would run off to Italy with her.

Shortly after I stopped playing with Tom Gerchman I asked Michael Dworetsky to be my partner on Tuesday evenings at the HBC. After that he sometimes worked me in when his regular partner was not available. However, we did play quite a bit in tournaments. The most memorable of those occasions have been documented here.

I recently discovered that Michael won the Barb Shaw trophy in 2011. It was annually awarded to the Flight C player who earned the most masterpoints at a designated sectional in Connecticut. The CTBridge.org website misspelled his last name, capitalizing the W and leaving off the D. I told the webmaster about the mistake a month ago, but a month or so has now passed, and it had not been rectified.

The tournament took place from March 4 through March 11 in 2011. I played with Michael all three days. We had a terrific tournament. On Friday afternoon we finished second in C in the open pairs. On Saturday morning we finished second in C in the B/C pairs. In the afternoon we won the B/C pairs, outscoring the other twenty-five teams. In the B/C Sunday Swiss we teamed up with Tom Gerchman and Linda Starr and finished first in a field of eighteen teams. All told, we won 11.49 points, which was more than all but eleven players at the tournament. All of them had a lot more experience and masterpoints than I did. I was not eligible for the trophy because I was already a Life Master, and so Michael got to keep it for a year.

The most dramatic moment that I ever experienced in bridge was when I was playing in a Swiss event with Michael as my partner. Our opponents were Jade Barrett, a professional from South Dakota, and a female client. Our teammates were Bob and Shirley Derrah, who in that match were playing against two experts from Connecticut.

The match was fairly tight until the last hand, which had remarkable distribution. Michael and I had a lot of hearts. Our opponents had spades. We bid to 4♥. The client bid 4♠.. Eventually Michael bid 6♥., and she bid 6♠.. Michael passed. I had a void in a side suit that I had not mentioned and the ♠A. I was pretty sure that, if all of the suits were distributed as seemed apparent from the bidding, that our side could take thirteen tricks as long as hearts were trumps. So, I bid 7♥., and she doubled.

Michael had to play it very carefully, but every suit was as I expected. He managed to get all thirteen tricks. At the other table our counterparts stopped at 6♥., and the Derrahs did not double. The swing was large enough for us to claim a victory in the match. It was a huge upset. What made this very special was the fact that it was not a fluke. I used what I knew from the bidding and rightly determined that we could take all the tricks.

While researching the 2016 NABC I discovered that Michael and I had played together in that tournament in two bracketed Round Robins. In the first one we teamed up with a couple from New Jersey and won our bracket. In the second one we played with the Derrahs and finished third.

Michael and his wife Ellen moved to Palm Beach Gardens, FL. Michael still seems to play a lot of bridge. He even made it back to New England for the Granite State Regional in Nashua in 2023. I also saw him at an event in Auburn, MA, shortly before the Pandemic.

Dave Landsberg was not my best partner, but he was my favorite. I liked him a lot, and I admired him. Our adventures together have been chronicled here. Included there are the few times that I played with Pat Fliakos. I met both of them in the Tuesday evening games at the HBC.

On the last day of the Fall NABC in Providence in 2014 I played with Dave in bracket #7 of the RIBA Bracketed B teams event. The previous day the team that we were both on had narrowly won a similar event that is described here. On that occasion we were just teammates. On the last day we played as partners; our teammates were Felix Springer and Ken Leopold. This event was not nearly as close. What I remember most about it was that Felix and Ken filed two protests of director’s decisions, and both were rejected. That score of 114 is astoundingly high, much higher than the scores of winners of any of the other brackets.

I played with Felix Springer at many tournaments. Most often he was a teammate, but we also were partners quite a few times, especially at NABC events. Felix had played at high-level events when he was at Columbia, and he developed the same taste for national competition that I had. Our most successful pairing was for the 0-1500 Mini-Spingold in Washington that is described in the Paul Burnham section.

In the autumn of 2019 we played in the NABC in San Francisco. For some reason I did not keep notes for this tournament. So, I must rely on my memory.

Our primary objective was to do well in the Super Seniors pairs and the Mini-Blue Ribbon pairs. We came very close to making it to the second day in each, but we fell just short of both of those goals. However, we did finish fifth in the Saturday BC pairs and the Thursday BC pairs. We also teamed up with Bob Sagor and Judy Hyde to finish a very close second in bracket #1 of the Wednesday bracketed teams. All told, we won 26.23 gold points together.

When I arrived at the airport it was late in the evening, and I was very sleepy. I was tricked into using a credit card skimmer that was attached to the machine that sold BART tickets. I had to cancel the card, but I did not lose any money.

The tournament was the last NABC in which NABC events like the two that we played in were scheduled for afternoon and evening as opposed to morning and afternoon. I had great difficulty maintaining my concentration in the evening sessions. I consumed a lot of coffee. There were no concessions in the basement in the evenings. When I needed a coffee I had to race up the escalators to the first floor.

I remember several ancillary details about the tournament. The games were in the basement of one of the two Marriott hotels. One morning while I was taking the escalator down to the playing area my Goodwill Committee pin fell off and landed pin-side down between two metal bars on the step in front of me. I had a coffee cup in one hand and papers in the other. I tried to reach down to save it, but I was unable to grasp it before it disappeared into the bottom of the escalator. Felix and I walked both stayed in the Marriott across from Union Square. At the time I was still bothered by foot pain after a half mile or so.

Felix gave me a bottle of wine that he had won by winning a section in an evening side game. I saved the bottle as a souvenir. He also let me share his Uber ride back to the airport. Our driver was from Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Tournament partners from outside of the Hartford area: I played a lot more tournament bridge than most of of my partners at the HBC and SBC. Listed in this section are the people with whom I had more than a passing relationship. That is, I played with them for more than one or two sessions, and we spent some time making sure that we agreed on our methods.

I met Ginny Iannini in 2013. At the time she was playing with her wheelchair-bound husband, Bill King, in some of the same events in which I participated. They won the Gold Rush Swiss in the Knockout Regional in Cromwell, CT, in February of 2014. This was the first tournament at which I launched my program of taking photos of the winners of events and posting them on the NEBridge.org website. I dutifully took the photo⁸ of their team with my point-and-shoot Canon camera.

Only one other winning team came to see me for a photo in that entire tournament. It made me realize that I would need to hunt down the winning pairs and teams and beg them to let me snap a photo of them. That meant that this project would entail much more work than anticipated, but I was committed to do it, and I committed to doing it for eight years.

I enjoyed working and playing with Ginny. After her husband’s death she became pretty devoted to bridge. She lived in Brewster, MA, which is on Cape Cod. She took bridge lessons there from a very fine player, Steve Rzewski.^.9 I learned the Blooman convention from her, as well as Spiral (which we called Q&Q, short for quantity and quality).

At one point Ginny asked me in an email if I was married. I pointed her to an abbreviated form of the journal that I had kept of one of our Larry Cohen cruises, entitled “Honeymoon for One.” The whole journal is posted here. She occasionally talked about her problems with her first husband, a doctor as I remember. She made it clear that she took him to the cleaners when they got divorced. She also told me about a dentist whom she had been dating while we were playing together.

In those early years Ginny was pretty active in the administration of bridge in New England. She was elected to the Board of Directors for the Eastern Massachusetts Bridge Association (EMBA), she was a member of the Tournament Scheduling Committee, and she was the tournament chairman of the Senior Regional on Cape Cod at least once. The very first email that I sent out in support of a regional tournament was that one.

Ginny and I did pretty well together. We won numerous events, including one at the NABC in Providence in 2014. My original write-up of the most exciting and nerve-wracking event of my bridge career was lost in the catastrophic computer crash of 2015. I will need to try to recreate it from memory. We were playing in bracket #6 of the Mary Carter Bracket B Swiss on Saturday, December 6, 2014. Our teammates were Dave Landsberg and Pat Fliakos. We were doing well throughout the event, but a team of players from the Montreal area was only a little behind us when we played against them in the last round.

Ginny and I were playing against two ladies. Dave and Pat faced two men. The match seemed to come down to one critical hand. Ginny opened the bidding and then reversed, showing a strong hand with at least seventeen high-card points. She had that, but barely, and some of her holdings were a little shaky. She had no aces. We ended up a slam that I had to play, and I was unable to find a way to make it. When the last hand had been played, we were crestfallen as we walked to the other table to compare scores with Dave and Pat.

It was as we feared. Our counterparts had stopped in game and easily made their contract. That swing offset some small positives that we amassed on other hands. We clearly lost the match. However, because of the lead we had coming into the match, we still would be ahead by two victory points. The captain of the Quebecois team brought the tabulation card to our table for confirmation, but he claimed a significantly larger margin of victory than we had calculated. I walked with him back to their table and discovered that the ladies had made a mistake, and we did indeed win by two victory points. To put that in perspective, the two teams that tied for third were 29 points behind the Canadians. Furthermore, their score would have won any other bracket.

I always enjoyed playing with Ginny. I think that I might have been too intense or too ambitious for her. She never officially dumped me, but she stopped accepting my invitations, and eventually I got the message. Another factor was that after she remarried, she played a lot less bridge. She still seemed to be playing somewhere in 2023, but she has not attended any tournaments since 2019.

I did receive an email from her when I solicited nominations for the Weiss-Bertoni award (described here). She was the first person to nominate Joe Brouillard, the eventual winner.

We enjoyed several suppers together during tournaments. I remember a few distinctly. The first was at Siena, a very nice restaurant in East Greenwich, RI. Bob Bertoni, who was the D25 president at the time, was in attendance, as well as several people from the Boston area. Two of them were quite drunk. Ginny found it curious, but I found it unpleasant.

We also ate at a restaurant called Il Forno in Providence with people from the Cape whom Ginny knew and had arranged to be our teammates. The woman was named Ginny O’Toole. I have forgotten the guy’s name. That was another rather strange occasion.

We ate at least twice at Cafe Fiore, a restaurant in Cromwell, CT, near the hotel that hosted the regional tournament there for many years. On the last of those occasions I disclosed my idea for a novel about Pope Benedict IX (posted here). She had a strange and disturbing reaction: “You want to be the pope!”

I once made the mistake of admitting that when I first met Ginny I had considered her likely to be “high maintenance.” However, after I got to know her I judged that my initial judgment had been wrong. I considered this admission as a compliment to her, but I think that she was at least slightly offended.

Ginny was very active in fundraising for the preservation and/or restoration of a historical piece of property on Cape Cod. I think that it was a captain’s residence or something like that. I never learned what happened to that project.

Ginny was tall and thin. Opponents often thought that we were married. Her fingers were preternaturally long. Her span was almost a match for mine, and the span of my left hand is eleven inches.

I was astounded to learn that Ginny was ten months older than I was. She certainly did not look it. She kept in shape by doing yoga. The last thing that I remembered her saying to me was that from that point on she would always wear yoga pants to tournaments. I haven’t seen her in several years, and I definitely miss her.

Paul Burnham was a lawyer who lived and worked in the town of Wilton, CT, a long way from Hartford. Nevertheless, he has recently been a member in good standing of the HBC. He hardly ever makes the drive to play in anything except special games. I know that our first time as teammates was in the 0-1500 Mini-Spingold in Washington, DC, in the summer of 2016. I somehow set Paul up to play with Charlie Curley from the Boston area while I played with Felix Springer. We made it to the semifinals of this event. The last match was the first and only time that I played with screens. It made me quite nervous because my handwriting had already deteriorated somewhat, and my notes to my screenmate were difficult to read.

At some point Paul and I committed to play as partners in a tournament. In preparation I drove to a town in southeastern Connecticut where there was a club game that Paul frequented. The competition was tough, and we were not used to each other’s styles. We did not win any points.

I also played in an open pairs game with Paul either at that tournament or at a subsequent NABC tournament in Toronto. I used the Flannery convention, but Paul was unaware that it was on our card.

I also played with Paul for three days at the summer NABC in Providence in 2022. For some reason we were not able to click on that occasion either. The story of that experience begins here.

I am not sure why Paul and I have had so little success as a partnership. It would seem to me that are styles are compatible. I like to play with him, and I hope to get another chance to do so.

I don’t remember how I met Jeanne Martin, who lived in the Worcester area. Her husband was an expert player who died several years before I met her.

Perhaps we were set up by the partnership desk at some tournament in the late teens. We played together at several tournaments. I remember that we were in a team event in Mansfield, MA, and she finally appeared about ten minutes after the first round was scheduled to start. She said that her car’s GPS gave her instructions that sent her in circles. In the age of Google Maps it astounded me that she used a built-in GPS in her car rather than the one that comes free with every cellphone and is supported and maintained by Google.

We did not win any events together, but we both seemed to enjoy playing together. I drove up to Auburn, MA, which was the site of the sectionals and unit-wide games for the Central Massachusetts Bridge Association (CMBA). Our results seemed to get worse over time.

Jeanne once appeared in a cameo role in a feature-length move. She was in an ice cream parlor. She sent me a file that contained a video of the scene.

Before the Pandemic Jeanne was on the board of directors for unit 113 (CMBA). She told me that she did not get along with some of the other board members and wanted to resign.

Jeanne attended the 2022 Gala Regional in Marlborough, MA, but she did not win any points. She still seemed to be playing bridge online or somewhere in 2023.

The team of Trevor Reeves, Bob Weld, me, and Bob Sagor, won Bracket 2 of the Thursday-Friday knockout in Nashua in 2019.

I played with Bob Sagor at tournaments in Nashua, NH. He lived in Greenfield, MA, which is on I-91 near the Vermont state. His principal partner was Judy Hyde. They often played together at events sponsored by the Northampton Bridge Club and at tournaments. He sometimes played with me when Judy was not available.

I do not have many specific memories of the bridge games that I played with Bob. Since I had also played with Judy, it was rather easy for us to agree on a card. I vividly remember that on one occasion I was complaining something stupid that one of my partners (maybe my wife Sue) had done. Bob asked me wryly, “Am I better of worse than them?” I said that I needed more time to think about it.

Like nearly all bridge players Bob had an interesting backstory. He was a couple of years older than I was, which meant that the draft was a big factor when he finished college. He and his wife Claire moved to Nova Scotia to avoid it, and they only returned when its avoidance was no longer considered a crime. In real life he was a veterinarian.

During the Pandemic Bob was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. When the bridge world reopened in 2021 he was unable to participate in live events. However, he still was very active in online play, especially with the Noho Club. An article about Bob’s involvement with bridge in western Massachusetts that was printed in the Greenfield Recorder in June of 2023 has been posted here.

I was assigned by the partnership desk to play with Sohail Hasan in the open pairs game on Thursday, November 7, 2019, at the Harvest Regional in Mansfield, MA. We hit it off pretty well. We finished eleventh overall out of fifty pairs and fifth in the B strat. The conventions that we played were quite similar. His approach to 2NT responses was much more sophisticated than what I was accustomed to. Unfortunately, we later came to understand that we had substantial disagreements about what some of the entries on our convention card meant.

I learned that Sohail had graduated from the University of Wisconsin and had been employed at a Wall Street firm (LinkedIn page here). He had a house on Cape Cod and another in New York or New Jersey. Most of his acquaintances in the bridge world seemed to come from NYC or New Jersey.

During the Pandemic Sohail asked me if I wanted to play in the NABC in the summer of 2022 in Providence, RI. I agreed to play with him in two team games in which we did pretty well. Unfortunately, our teammates in that last event contracted Covid-19 and had to drive home early. So, on the last day we played in the fast pairs, and I had a miserable time. The details of these adventures have been recounted here.

The Ocean State Regional has been held at the Crowne Plaza Hotel for many years.

Over the rest of the summer Sohail and I maintained email communications. We committed to play together in the Ocean State Regional in Warwick, RI. I have explored here the miserable time that I had at what had always been my favorite tournament. I encountered several problems with Sohail. He has a fiery temper, and he unleashed it several times at me and once in even greater fury at a pro that he knew from the New York area. He insisted that the XYZ convention did not apply when the participants bid 1x-1y-1NT. I found this preposterous. He pointed me to an article by Larry Cohen that advocated playing New Minor Forcing in that situation. I replied that LC was an outlier in this regard. Furthermore, the name of the convention was derived from the fact that it could be used in any sequence of three calls that ended with a bid at the one level: most commonly 1x-1y-1z.

The biggest problems began with the fact that he played BOSTON (Bottom Of Something ; Top of Nothing) leads, but he refused to mark them on his convention card, and if anyone asked what he played, he always answered “Standard”, which was not true. He also showed up at the very last minute (or later) for every. This bothered me a lot because I wanted to make sure that we were on the same page about everything, and we played some conventions that were new to me. Finally, he had a peculiar overhand style to playing his cards, which resulted in him sometimes slamming them on the table. When others objected to this technique, he sometimes responded with unnecessary aggression.

In short, I decided after the Warwick debacle not to play with Sohail again. He has attended two NABC events since then, but no D25 tournaments.

The adventures at tournaments that involved partners with whom I played only once or twice are posted here. The new partners with whom I have played since the renaissance of bridge after the Pandemic are described here.

1. Virginia Labbadia is not in my database of ACBL members, which means that she stopped paying dues before I started downloading rosters in 2014. She definitely played at the HBC rather regularly before the Pandemic. I have no way of discovering if she ever made Life Master.

2. Sonja Smith and her husband Chris moved to Chapel Hill, NC, in 2022.

3. Steve was still a member of the ACBL in late 2023, but he only had 122 masterpoints, most of which he won with me more than ten years earlier.

4. Although Danbury is definitely part of New England and therefore in District 25, the tournament there was sponsored by District 3 (northern New Jersey and eastern New York). D25 had reportedly tried to use the site for a regional at least once, but the attendance was not good. Before the Pandemic D3 paid D25 a small sum for the right to use the site. I think that the hotel is now called Zero Degrees. D3 has not used it since the reopening.

5. What I most remember from this match was the fact that the opposition used the 2♦ bid to show a hand with 11-15 masterpoints, a singleton or void, and at least four cards in the other three suits. This hand is difficult to bid with standard methods. I remember spending hours going over hand records that I had collected and projected how I would bid hands with that distribution with or without the Mini-Roman convention. I intended to collect enough evidence to convince Dick to use it. However, my research did not disclose that it had much, if any, value. One of the best defenses is just to pass. The players who used Mini-Roman often ended up one level two high.

6. The book is called Winning at Matchpoints, and the author is named Bill Treble. I use the photo (which was taken at the NABC in Honolulu in 2017) to demonstrate my game face at the bridge table.

7. Losing Trick Count is explained here and elsewhere on the Internet and in print.

8. The photo that I took, which had an embarrassing smudge on it, has apparently been lost forever. I think that the original was on an external hard drive for which I have no power cord. The photo that was posted was lost in the catastrophic computer event on NEBridge.org in 2015.

9. Steve Rzewski won the Larry Weiss award in 2010. I also dealt with Steve when I asked the experts in the district if they could supply articles for the NEBridge.org. He was a regular contributor.

1988-2008 TSI: AdDept: Amtrak Adventures

Posted on June 23, 2021 by Mike

All aboard! Continue reading →

Over the course of my years at TSI I probably took Amtrak trains to and from New York City over one hundred times. The easiest way to get from Enfield to New York was by Amtrak. It was not the cheapest, but it was the most comfortable. I actually got a fair amount of work done on Amtrak trains.

During this period there was no Amtrak stop in Enfield. The closest ones were in Springfield, MA, and Windsor Locks, CT. Both places offered free parking. The Springfield station was a slightly longer drive, but it boasted an actual station with modern conveniences such as toilets and heat. Also, there was a ticket counter where one could buy a round-trip ticket. If I boarded in Windsor Locks, I had to stand in line in Penn Station to buy a ticket for the return trip. Nevertheless, because of the thirty additional minutes that I needed to spend on the train if I left from and returned to Springfield, I almost always chose Windsor Locks.

The Windsor Locks train platform was (and still is) almost certainly the least glamorous of all Amtrak stops in the entire nation. At one time there was a train station in Enfield, and an unused station in Windsor Locks still existed in 2020. You can read about the town’s plans for the site here.

Clothing and equipment: In the 1990’s all the males who worked at department stores in New York City wore suits or sport coats with white shirts and ties. I complied with these norms. By the time of my last few trips I may have downgraded to “business casual”.

As soon as IBM finally marketed a true laptop, I bought one. I kept it and all my other materials in a large leather sample case that was extremely durable. It was later supplanted by a large briefcase that Sue bought me.

In 1995 I bought a Thinkpad 701C, the one with a “butterfly keyboard”. You always had to fight the temptation to pick it up by the edges of the keyboard, but I loved it because it was easy to use on a train or airplane. However, I hated the tiny red ball that everyone was expected to use to place the cursor. I always brought a mouse with me. My last laptop was, I think, a Dell. I used it both on the road and as my workstation in the office, where I mounted it into a “docking station” for all of its cabling. It had a big screen, large enough to keep two windows open side-by-side. It had also a “bay” for a second battery or a CD drive. It also was very heavy.

After I bought my Bose headphones, I also brought them, my opera albums, and a CD player with me. Having them on these trips was not as important as it was for dealing with airports, but after some training sessions or vituperative meetings I needed a little Mozart.

Wi-fi was introduced near the end of my train-riding years. I tried to use it, but it was unreliable.

An interesting view of the Windsor Locks platform. Whoever took this photo was rather brave. The grating in the foreground is on a rather short and steep slope that leads directly to the Connecticut River.

The platform: Absolutely no one liked the train stop in Windsor Locks. Its only redeeming features were that the property was evidently not valuable for anything else, and its parking lot doubled as a small park-and-ride area.

The stop had two facilities. One was very important—a pay telephone. On cold winter nights only a few people disembarked at this stop. In the days before cell phones that telephone could serve as a lifeline for for those expecting to be met there and for people whose cars would not start or were absent without leave. I always made sure that I had change, but I never had to use the phone. I suspect that this one will be the last pay telephone in America if it is not already.

The other facility, the shelter, was essentially useless. It only had room for about three people, and it provided little protection for them. Furthermore, the seasoned travelers never stood on the platform in inclement weather. They stayed in their cars until the train’s light was visible under the bridge at the top of the photo. The engineers knew this, and stopped here even if no one was visible on the platform.

For some reason the platform in Windsor Locks was built lower than most. Only one door on the train was ever opened for this stop. One of the conductors had to lower the stairs so that people could enter. He/she (it was almost always a he) would then announce, “Amtrak to New Haven and Penn Station” and then assist people who had luggage or might find the climbing difficult.

After everyone was aboard, the conductors collected tickets. Because there was nowhere to buy tickets in Windsor Locks, most of us who boarded there did not have one. The conductor had to sell each of us a one-way fare. In theory they took credit cards, but often the little machine for processing them on the train did not work. In that case the conductor would need to go inside at one of the subsequent stations so that an agent there could effect the transaction. This was annoying to the conductors and to the passengers who could not understand the delay. I usually paid cash, and I tried to have exact change.

There were usually only two cars on the train that went from New Haven to Springfield. The conductor would announce which door was opening for Windsor Locks as we pulled away from the Windsor station. We all gather up our stuff and moved toward the designated door. Sometimes I was the only person exiting.

As the train slowed down, the conductor opened the door and let down the stairs. He/she helped everyone on the last step.

On one memorable occasion there was a hitch. It was bitterly cold that night, and the door was frozen shut. We were all required to exit on the other side. At any other stop this would have been a minor inconvenience. However, the east side of the tracks in Windsor Locks was covered with gravel, and that gravel was covered with ice that night. It was also on a steep slope toward the frigid Connecticut River, which was only a few yards away. To make matters worse, it was pitch dark on that side. We all descended onto the gravel,. The conductor went aboard, drew up the steps, and closed the door. After the train had departed, we all managed to clamber up over the tracks to the parking lot.

No harm; no foul, I guess.

The conductors: The conductors on Amtrak seemed to me to be both professional and competent. I made a genuine effort to avoid making their life more difficult. On one occasion I did get into an argument¹ with one of them, but his partner resolved the situation in a friendly and reasonable manner.

The seating: The seats were all reasonably comfortable, and there was always room aplenty in the overhead racks. I always tried to sit on the starboard side of the car on the way to the city and on the port side on the return trip. The sun was thereby always on the opposite side, and there was much less glare on my computer screen.

Four seats in every car had electrical outlets. Since Windsor Locks was the morning train’s first stop, it was usually rather easy to grab one of those seats for the first leg. It was much more difficult in the evening and if we had to change trains in New Haven. However, the cars all had the same layout, and I knew which seats had them. As soon as one became available, I would grab my ticket from the luggage rack and moved there.

The stop in New Haven: After we arrived in New Haven in the morning, we usually had to await the arrival of a train from Boston. It would usually park across the platform from our train, and our passengers were ordered to move to the other train. This was necessary because the engines on the Hew Haven-Springfield line were diesel powered. The tracks along the shore used electricity.

In the evening as we approached New Haven the conductors would move those of us going on towards Springfield (as opposed to Boston) to the last two cars, which would then be decoupled from the remainder of the train. The train to Boston would then leave, and a diesel engine would be brought in to transport us the rest of the way. This process took about twenty minutes, during which the train had no heat or light.

The passengers: When I first started to ride to Macy’s a group of eight or ten buyers from Casual Corner, which then had headquarters on South Road in Enfield, rode to New York on the first train every Tuesday. Most of them got on with me at Windsor Locks. Others boarded in Windsor or Hartford. Most people on that train said nary a word. These people, who were mostly women, were very talkative.

For some reason their bosses evidently put a stop to this practice while I was still going to Macy’s on a regular basis. The trips were less lively after that.

For many years a man who was about my age commuted from Windsor to the city. I never talked with him, but whenever I rode Amtrak in the morning I saw him get on at the station in Windsor every day. He often was also on the same train that I took home in the evening. I wondered to myself how he could bear that schedule. In his place I would have been very tempted to move closer to my place of work. If he could cut his commute down to an hour, it would free up twenty hours per week!

This is similar to what Amtrak had in the nineties, but there was always a line.

Train food: No food or drink was available between Springfield and New Haven. There was almost always a “café car” between New Haven and Penn Station. It contained four tables, two at either end. They were usually occupied by conductors or no one.

In the middle of the car was a small bar or, if you like, counter. There was always a line at the bar. For sale were coffee, soft drinks, snacks, beer, hot dogs, pastries in the morning, and a few other things. I would usually buy a cup of coffee and a muffin or a pastry in the morning. The coffee always tasted very bad, but it was hot, wet, and full of caffeine.

In the evening I always tried to buy food before I boarded. A deli and a Roy Rogers with tolerable fried chicken were right across the street from Penn Station. I also found the mini-pizzas at the Pizza Hut inside Penn Station to be edible. If I was unable to get any food before boarding, I might by some chips and hope that leftovers were available at home. After a rough trip I might buy a beer if the person at the counter guaranteed it was cold.

Tracks: There is only one set of tracks on the New Haven-Springfield line. There were so few trains that this was almost never a problem. Once, however, we encountered another train. We didn’t collide, but it took about thirty minutes to resolve the conflict and back up one of the trains to a side-track.

The track from New Haven to the city was owned by Metro North. The track around Bridgeport was banked so steeply that the engineer had to slow down to about ten miles per hour to keep the train on the track. This was still not fixed by the last time that I rode.

The bigger problem was that the Metro North trains had right of way. In the morning the Amtrak train usually had to pull over to a side-track to allow a Metro North express train zoom past. One or two of these could easily cause me to be late for an appointment, and there were no cell phones.

Celebritiess: The closest that I came to seeing a celebrity on Amtrak was when I was in the same car as Joe D’Ambrosio, the voice of the UConn Huskies. I first became familiar with him in the seventies when he was on WPOP. I knew his face from TV, but I would have recognized his voice anywhere. He told sports stories to his travel companions all the way to New York.

I didn’t talk to Joe. All right; I didn’t really talk to anyone. It is difficult for me to recall a single conversation that went beyond “Is that seat taken?” I do recall that on one return trip from New York someone who was probably two decades younger than I was asked me about The Tortilla Curtain a novel by T. Coraghesson Boyle, that I was reading. I told him that the first half was so-so, but it seemed to be improving. Actually, I did not end up liking it very much.

Penn Station: If I did not already have one, my first responsibility upon entering the station in the evening was to buy a one-way ticket to Windsor Locks. There was no way to jump the line.

No, no, no. Check the ARRIVALS board first.

The next step was to check the Arrivals board in the gate area to determine the number of the train and its status. The worst possible news was to see the word DELAYED. That meant that the train was still a long way from New York City or there were known problems on the track.

If I had enough time, and I had not already purchased food for supper, I stopped in at one of the fast food places in the station—usually Pizza Hut, Nathan’s, or an establishment that sold sandwiches. I also always bought a large Diet Coke. The fountain drinks were a much better deal than anything on the train. I would then usually find a relatively secluded seat in the waiting area and read and/or eat.

I sometimes visited the stores that sold books and magazines. I was surprised to find copies of Oggi and Panorama. In my trips after 2002 I always carried my Italian dictionary with me. I purchased a few issues of these magazines and did my best to translate the articles in them. Fortunately there was always an abundance of photos.

The northbound trains in the evening were often late. Some started the day in Florida. I frequently had to kill time in the station, which sometimes led to situations that annoyed me then but amuse me now. I found the following account in my notes for a trip to Lord and Taylor in November of 2007:

Penn station encounters: As I was waiting for my train and holding a Roy Rogers bag, a woman asked me for a piece of chicken. A little later a guy asked me for a cigarette, then two dollars, then one dollar, then a quarter. On Tuesday morning a guy tried to sell me a tourist guide to New York, which he said cost $11, for $10. I was wearing a dress shirt, tie, sweater vest, and dress overcoat and was consulting my laptop at the time. Evidently the guy’s tourist radar was on the blink. He asked me where I was going. I said, “work,” which was the only word other than “no” in any of these conversations.

One evening I heard over the loudspeaker a request for someone who spoke Italian to come to the information desk. I considered volunteering my very questionable services, but then it occurred to me that this was the Big Apple, not Dubuque. There must be at least a dozen people here who could really speak Italian. Besides, my hand gestures were not advanced enough for conversing with a real Italian.

One of my favorite things about Penn Station was the man who made the announcements over the loudspeaker, Danny Simmons². He had an unmatched style. I can still here in my mind his incantation ringing in my ears: “… with station stops of Wallingford, Meriden, Berlin, Hartford, Windsor, Windsor Locks, and Springfield is now boarding on track …” You can listen to some of his calls here.

Someone should certainly have told him that in Connecticut the city “Berlin” is accented on the first syllable.

Train tips: The goal for the return trip was to snag the best seat possible.The priorities were:

On the port side;
Window;
Both seats unoccupied;
With electricity;
Near the café car.

I almost always succeeded at finding a seat that met the first three criteria. I strove to be one of the first ten or so people in line at the departure gate, which was identified by a number and E or W. This was relatively easy. I always monitored the ARRIVALS board. Most people were assembled under the DEPARTURES board. They seemed unaware of two rather obvious facts about through trains: 1) They must have arrived before they could depart. 2) They always departed on the track on which they arrived.

So, if the ARRIVALS board listed the gate as 7, I went and stood by the escalator down to 7E. This pretty much assured me a good position in line no matter how many people eventually congregated there.

It was equally important to find the right car. The trains always went from west to east. I always walked toward the rear of the train until I found a car that met most of my criteria. I then entered and selected the seat by the port-side window. If the aisle seat was unoccupied, I placed my sample case or briefcase on it, opened it up, took out a book or a folder, and lay it beside the case.

I then pulled down both tray tables. If I had food with me, I lay it on the tray table in front of me and took a bite out of something. I inserted the straw into my large Diet Coke, and placed my drink on the tray table for the aisle seat. My objective for all of this was to make the aisle seat seem as undesirable as possible. It would have worked even better if I sat in the aisle seat and put my stuff in the window seat, but I found that that was not really necessary. I almost always was left to myself.

There was no reason to worry about people entering at subsequent stops. On the eastbound evening trains at each stop after Penn Station far more people exited the train than boarded it.

If I wanted to purchase something from the café car, it was necessary to do it before the train reached Bridgeport. The café car closed down well before the stop in New Haven, and there was always a line. In fact, it was usually a good idea to make any purchases before the first stop in New Rochelle. The selection in the café car got worse fairly rapidly.

Distressing events: Uneventful train rides were delightful. Any disruption of the routine was, at best, annoying.

One day the line behind me at the gate was unusually long, and the people in it were mostly college-aged. It was a Friday. Perhaps it was spring break, or the end of a term. In any case, every seat on the train was filled, even the aisle seat next to mine. Furthermore, a dozen or more people sat on the floor in my car. I presume that the situation was similar in all the other cars.

This could not have been legal, could it? It was the only time that I saw this happen. Evidently Amtrak had no way of determining that more tickets had been sold than there were seats.

I can only imagine what the café car was like. I did not dare to abandon my seat just to buy a can of Diet Coke for $2.

A more distressing event occurred on one of my last trips in 2006. I was returning from Macy’s, and I evidently left my Cascio point-and-shoot camera³ on the train. It must have fallen on the floor at some point. I had used that camera on the glorious Village Italy tour that we took in 2005. It is documented here.

In my notes from trips to Lord and Taylor in 2007 and 2008 I twice reported that I had almost lost the small Canon camera that I had purchased as a replacement for the Cascio.

The nightmarish return trip: On many of the trips home I arrived late, sometimes very late. One of them, an extremely hot evening in the summer, I will never forget.

The Hell Gate bridge, which connected the Astoria section of Queens with Randalls and Wards Islands, was only used by freight trains and the “Northeast Corridor” Amtrak trains on which I rode. One summer evening the bridge had reportedly caught on fire (!) and was unusable, at least for the nonce.

So, on the DEPARTURE board appeared the dreaded phrase: SEE AGENT. The good people at Amtrak addressed our group, which by then included everyone who had already been on the train. They divided us up into groups that were determined by our destinations. I was in the group that included all of the stops north of New Haven.

Amtrak, we were informed, had chartered tourist-type buses in Europe) to transport us to our destinations. After about a two-hour delay in which all these arrangements were made, our group was herded onto our bus. The first thing that we noticed was that it did not have air conditioning. The second was that our bus was very crowded. A foul mood prevailed.

Our bus driver cheerfully announced that he had information that the usual route north through Manhattan was experiencing heavy traffic. He had exercised his initiative to plot a route through the Lincoln Tunnel to I-95 in New Jersey. We would then cruise across the George Washington Bridge toward Connecticut.

This news elicited some smiles and giggles of schadenfreude among the passengers. We would get home very late, but we would avoid that horrible Manhattan traffic that would probably drive the other passengers crazy.

And we did indeed drive through the tunnel at a reasonable pace. Similarly, our passage through the Garden State proceeded at a good clip. We could not actually see the poor saps on the other buses inching their way north on the other side of the Hudson, but we could easily imagine their frustrating situation.

However, our collective optimism crashed when we encountered traffic on our own highway just before we reached the George Washington Bridge. In fact, we were not moving at all. Our driver announced that there had been an oil spill on the highway on the New York side of the bridge. It took us more than an hour to cross the bridge. Everyone—including myself–was suffering from the heat. It was surely over 100° inside our conveyance.

After the bus finally crossed the bridge we were required to exit the highway in the northern part of Manhattan. It was dark by then as the bus driver piloted us through hostile-looking side streets of the worst parts of Gotham. I don’t know what the other passengers were thinking about, but I could not keep the first few chapters of Bonfire of the Vanities out of my mind.

At long last we got back onto the interstate. Imagine our relief to see the “Welcome to Connecticut” sign. We passed by our usual stops at New Rochelle, Stamford, and Bridgeport stations and turned north onto I-91. I was familiar with the drive from there to Windsor Locks. it could easily be completed in an hour.

We might have made it that quickly, too, but we had to exit the highway to stop at each of the five Amtrak stations—Wallingford, Meriden, Berlin, Hartford, and Windsor. All of these stations were conveniently located near the railroad tracks. None, however, was easily accessible from I-91 especially by an oversized vehicle like our bus. Of course we also had to wait for the passengers to get all of their gear together. Of course, they had to wait for the bus to stop. Then the exiting passengers had to fight their way up the narrow aisle to the door and climb down.

I did not leave that wretched bus until 3AM, and I still had to make the bleary-eyed drive to Enfield. Of course, the people who went all the way to Springfield had it even worse. I thought with glee of one of them discovering that someone might have broken into his—no, make it her—car while we were on this forlorn journey from hell.

1. The story about the run-in that I had with an Amtrak conductor concerning my book of discounted train tickets has been recounted here.

2. Danny Simmons retired in 1994.

3. I replaced the Cascio with a Canon that was much easier to use. When I upgraded for our Africa trip, I gave the Canon point-and-shoot to Sue, but I don’s think that she ever used it.

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