Tag Archives: Corcoran, Casey

2023 May 12-December 31

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My activities for the first part of 2023 are chronicled here. On May 13 Neil Montague finally succeeded at using MailChimp to send out an email for the New England Bridge Conference! My travails in trying to turn over my … Continue reading →

My activities for the first part of 2023 are chronicled here.

On May 13 Neil Montague finally succeeded at using MailChimp to send out an email for the New England Bridge Conference! My travails in trying to turn over my responsibilities in these and other matters involving communications are detailed here. This was a great relief for me. Some of the emails that I had sent in the previous few months promoted online events that paid gold masterpoints. Each one made me cringe.

On the same day Dan Jablonski finally sent me an email casting the deciding vote in the Weiss-Bertoni award. You can read the details and discover who won the award in this blog entry.

On the 17th I mowed the lawn for the second time. The high pollen content of some areas of the yard made it somewhat difficult, as it has in every May for the last decade or two, but I completed the task without resting.

June

On June 1 I tried to beat the heat by departing for my 5-mile walk at 8:30AM. I nevertheless found it as much as I could bear,1 and there was precious little shade. I noticed that the SmartFuel gas station on the north side of Hazard Ave. near the South Road intersection had closed after only a few months of operation. It replaced the Shell station that had occupied the location for decades. Signs said that it would become a Big Y Express station.

Raveis Realty, located in a house a little bit to the east of of the station, has also apparently one year. A few years earlier a spectacular display of tulips appeared near the west side of the Raveis building.

Zillow’s photo of 2 Park St.

The corner house on Park St. (the street address is 2) is somewhat mysterious. It had appeared empty with no “For Sale” sign for months. I saw two girls there the previous week. It seemed empty again on this occasion.

In the last quarter-mile I was passed by a female walker. I was pretty sure that that had never happened to me before. I did not like it, but I was too exhausted and hot to try to hold her off. My speed and endurance both decreased noticeably as I got older.

It was still very hot on the 2nd, but then it turned much cooler with a misty rain. I attended both days of the sectional in Johnston, RI, and played with Abhi Dutta. Details have been recorded here.

On June 7 forest fires in Canada were causing in the local area thick haze from the smoke. It was quite eerie and absolutely unprecedented, at least in my lifetime. Two days later the air quality still poor.

I learned that day I should have closed my dad’s IRA account at Country Club Bank in Kansas City earlier. There was not much money in it, but it took weeks to get them to send me a check. .Deidra Tossato finally sent me the form fifteen days after I requested it.

The Hartford Bridge Club (HBC) scheduled an individual game for June 20, the first day of of the regional tournament in Nashua, NH. I played at the HBC, but I did not enjoy myself, and I did not score well. My adventures in Nashua are recorded here.

On June 28 I played with two new partners—Jim Macomber at the HBC in the morning and Barb Gallagher at the Simsbury Bridge Club (SBC) in the evening.

On June 29 and 30 my nose ran all day. Despite this I had no trouble sleeping. I had no fever or any other symptoms of Covid-19.

July

I woke up on July 1 after ten consecutive hours of sleep, close to my all-time record. I experienced a little dizziness when I arose from bed, but it disappeared shortly thereafter. I tested negative for Covid-19 using the rapid antigen test that the federal government supplied for free.

Sue’s cousin from Michigan (on the Locke side) was in town. Sue visited with her, but I did not go. We visited her, her parents, and her sisters on our trip to Michigan in 2008, as described here.

Up to nine inches of rain fell in sections of western Connecticut on July 10, but Enfield received hardly any. The weather definitely seemed more extreme in the twenties, but it is still rather mild in southern New England.

The next morning the temperature dropped to 66° at 4:30. It was the first time that it had been below 70° in weeks. It rose to 90° that day and much hotter on the next. There was no bridge game at the SBC on either the 5th or the 12th.

On July 13 at 5:44AM the bookshelf in my bedroom came crashing down. It missed my head by about two inches. If it had hit me, I would have been seriously injured. The shelf disappeared into the black hole of Sue’s “sewing room”.

On July 14 thunderstorms began at 2:30AM. Flooding wreaked havoc in the northwest part of the state. The Connecticut River was 6′ above the flood level. Damage, however, was minimal.

John Willoughby, the president of the HBC, died on July 14. Both Sue and I had been his occasional bridge partner. I worked with him on the Planning Committee when he was the vice-president.

On the following day I heard Steve Jarmoc, a local farmer and ex-politician, on the radio complaining that the flooding in Enfield had caused him crop damage. The land around our house, which was perhaps two miles from his farm, was absolutely dry. Furthermore, Jarmoc mostly grew tobacco—an addictive drug that caused cancer and other ailments. In the previous few years he had converted much of his land to fields filled with solar panels. I seriously doubt that he suffered much damage, and what if he did? Every business suffered occasional setbacks.

I had a horrible bridge day on July 23. Donna Feir reported that the HBC now had 415 members2. It was 89° and sunny when I left after the conclusion of the Board of Trustees meeting. Up to 91° on I-91. By the time that I reached home it had fallen to 68°, and it was raining buckets. I was very relieved to find that there was no flooding in our basement.

August

On August 3 I discovered a document with my notes about the San Diego vacation that Sue and I took with Sue in March of 2006. In the evening I also found a paper bag with flyers and souvenirs from the same trip. I deleted the 1,000+ words that I had previously written about this adventure and started the entry, which you can read here, anew. It was rather thrilling to relive that week.

On the next day I walked five miles in the Enfield Square Mall. A strange new store, Da Money Pit, had opened. They seemed to sell sneakers, ball caps, and sweatshirts.3 The sneakers on display were wrapped in plastic, for no obvious reason that I could see. My “ghost walks” in the mall have been detailed here.

On the 5th the HBC held a memorial to honor John Willoughby. One dog and lots of people, including a surprising number of children, who were relatives or friends of John’s attended.

The next day I learned that Maria Van Der Ree, who was over ninety, had Covid-19. She recovered within a reasonable period of time.

At the HBC John Calderbank and I had a 54 percent game on August 8. That was by far our best performance up to that time. On the next day I scored 58% at the HBC with Barb Gallagher. There was no game in Simsbury because we only five pairs registered to play.

On August 9 the big news was about the devastating fire on Maui. The most destruction was in my favorite town, Lahaina, where 217 buildings destroyed or damaged. The gigantic tree that was the symbol of the town was badly damaged, but there was hope that it would recover.

Mark Oettinger.

On the same day I learned that Mark Oettinger had “resigned” as vice-president of the New England Bridge Conference. I later learned that Peter Marcus and his friends had pretty much forced him out at a meeting of the Tournament Scheduling Committee that I was unable to attend. This news saddened me greatly. I liked and respected Mark.

On August 12-13 I played in the Western Mass sectional in Great Barrington. That adventure has been described here.

On my birthday I played with the woman whom I had been mentoring. Fran Gurtman (introduced here). We did not do well. Sue bought me three shirts and some shorts from Kohl’s. Sue and I ate supper at Francesco’s in Suffield. I ordered Linguini d’Alessandro, which was chicken, sausage, peppers, mushrooms in wine sauce. I really enjoyed it.

On August 23 Sue brought cake to Eno to celebrate my birthday, but she did not arrive until just after 6:15. We had 4 tables.

On August 24 Fran and I had a 52 percent game, which was an improvement of 18 percentage points in our previous game. I made a costly mistake on the last hand.

On August 26 fifteen pairs came to the HBC for the Saturday afternoon game. We played a Swiss with 7.5 tables. It was the biggest turnout on Saturday by far since the pandemic. Peter Katz and I had a 76.1 percent game, by far my best score ever. More details can be found here.

The Ocean State Regional tournament was held August 29-September 1 in Warwick, RI. My adventures there have been cataloged here.

September

September must have been a boring month. The only notes that I recorded concerned the loss of my Costco Visa card from Citi. The details of this remarkable event have been recorded here.

The University of Michigan football team, one of the favorites for the national championship, started the year with five easy victories. They defeated East Carolina 30-3, the University of Nevada at Las Vegas 35-7, Bowling Green 31-6, Rutgers 31-7, and Nebraska 45-7.

Coach Jim Harbaugh did not participate in the first three games because he had purchased lunch4 for a prospective player. Four interim head coaches were assigned. Jesse Minter coached the first game and Sherrone Moore the second. Jay Harbaugh (Jim’s son) and Mike Hart each coached for one half in the third game. A random co-ed could have coached for all three games, and Michigan would still have won them all easily.

October

On October 3 and 4 I moved all of my programs and data files from my Lenovo desktop that was running Windows 10 to the Asus computer running Windows 11. I documented the experience here.

On October 10 I discovered that Windows did not want me to use Shuffling, the Dutch program that I had downloaded to creates pbn files. I did anyway. However, I also received an error in Dealmaster Pro. I had to reconnect the Lenovo box and run it there. This problem was fixed, but I did not record how.

I decided not to play with Alan Godes at the regional tournament in Marlborough. It turned out that he could not play on the only day that I needed a partner. I asked Ros Abel to play in the sectional in Orange, but she was not available. .

As usual, I started my preparation for lunch by boiling water for ShopRite’s store brand of chicken noodle soup. I was shocked to discover that the package contained no noodles at all. I have opened hundreds of these packages over the years, but this had never happened before.

This box in question bore the ShopRite brand, but at some point in the year the store stopped selling the product. A short time later a new brand called Bowl & Basket appeared. The price of a box containing two envelopes of soup was $.99 before the pandemic. As of October of 2024 the price had not changed, and the quality and quantity of the contents remained the same, at least apparently. I could not name another food item of any description that maintained its pre-pandemic price.

I woke Sue up at 6:30AM on October 11: She was scheduled for jury duty in Hartford. She left the house at 8:08. When she arrived she learned that her service was not needed. That evening Kathie Ferguson returned to the SBC on that same evening after a lengthy illness..

Throughout the last few months my car had repeatedly flashed the message that one of my tires was low on air. In the past this had happened once or twice a year. On those occasions I had just brought my car into Lia (without an appointment), and told them about the message. They checked all four tires, filled whichever one was low, and I drove away. The process took perhaps fifteen minutes.

On October 23 I brought it in to Lia Honda again. Because it had happened several times in the recent past, I asked the mechanic to tell me which tire was low. He reported that one of the tires needed patching and told me to sit in the waiting area. After 2.5 hours the work was completed, but the attendant told me that there was a problem with the brakes. I made an appointment for three days later to address this problem, which necessitated spending another few hours in the waiting area.

On October 27-29 the Connecticut Bridge Association held its fall sectional in Orange, CT. The details are posted here.

After only one day of rest I attended the regional tournament in Marlborough, MA. It ran from October 31-November 4. My thoughts about this event have been recorded here.

The Wolverine juggernaut continued with three more easy victories. They defeated Minnesota 52-10, Indiana 52-7, and Michigan State 49-0.

November

On November 16 I sent a recap of the attendance at the sectional in Orange. I have posted it here. The only person who responded to it was Cindy Lyall, who agreed with my assessment.

From left: Jan, the drummer, Peggy, the bass player, and Patty.

On the next evening my wife Sue talked me into attending a concert by the Patti Tuite band at the public library in Ellington. Although I was not crazy about the music, which was mostly blues, I definitely appreciated the skill of the two main musicians—Jan on the synthesizer, flute, and key-tar and Peggy on the alto sax, violin, and harmonica.The band also had a guy on bass guitar and a female drummer. The one number that I really liked was an instrumental with a complex melody that was unlike anything else that they did. Sue liked the entire performance. Patti announced the name of it, but my notes did not record it.

On November 18 I emailed to members of the Executive Committee my attendance analysis for the tournament in Marlborough. It has been posted here. Both of these reports required quite a bit of work because I no longer had access to the ACBL’s files that provided attendance information in a comprehensive fashion.

On the next day Sue and I decided not to drive up to Burlington, VT, to visit with the Corcorans on Thanksgiving. They had invited us much earlier. However, their house would be full of relatives, and we would probably be “fifth wheels.” We felt our of place the last time that we joined them.

On November 22 my Honda warned me that the battery on the fob was low. Over the next two days Sue located a suitable batter. I managed to replace the old one without much difficulty.

November 23 was Thanksgiving. Sue cooked a turkey. We ate our meals on TV trays and tried to think of something that we should be thankful for. I did not record that anything occurred to us.

A very strange thing happened in the last round of the game at the HBC on November 29: Eric Vogel and I were playing against Tom Gerchman and Lea Selig. After the bidding Tom announced that his integrity was intact because his partner Lea Selig bid 6♥, not he. He then disclosed that he had previously overheard Mike Carmiggelt talking about the hand.

I put my cards in the carrier, said “I quit”, got in my car, and drove home. Tom later sent me an email in apology. I replied, “No harm, no foul.”

That same night Ken made many strange bids at the SBC game. He invited to game knowing that we had a maximum of 24 points and only 8 trumps. I recorded that I did not see how the SBC would be able to hold any games in December. I was right. All of the games for the month were canceled.

Michigan finished its Big 10 season with four more victories to finish the regular season undefeated and ranked #3. They defeated Purdue 41-13, Penn State 24-15, Maryland 31-24, and Ohio State 30-24. Sherrone Moore was the head coach on the sidelines for the last three games because Harbaugh was suspended because of a ludicrous sign-stealing incident engineered by a rogue staff member named Connor Stalions.

December

The new month was welcomed by the first flower on the larger Christmas cactus that had been in Denise Bessette’s office. The other one displayed its first flower on the 18th.

On December 2 Michigan shut out Iowa 26-0 in the Big 10 Championship game. It was U-M’s third consecutive win in that game, and the tenth consecutive win for the team representing the East Division. Michigan, now seeded #1, was scheduled to play Alabama in the College Football Playoff semifinals in the Rose Bowl on January 1. There was some controversy because Alabama was chosen to play over undefeated Florida State despite the fact that the Tide had lost to Texas in September.

The temperature on December 15 and 16 reached the fifties. I walked five miles outside on both afternoons.

I learned on December 17 that Eric Vogel had contracted Covid. I wore a mask at bridge all week.

On December 20 the electrical connection for my cellphone’s charger stopped working. I had to plug the cable into a USB port on Asus. This was only a minor inconvenience; Asus has many ports, four of which are in front. I was astounded to learn that Sue had no recollection of my previous phone dying while I was on the 2022 cruise that has been described in detail here. We went to the Verizon store together, and the salesman showed me that the Pixel 2 I had been using was swollen in the middle. He said that it was probably dead. A little later Sue bought me a refurbished Sony Galaxy. I found this lapse of memory quite concerning.

On December 29 I received an mail from someone named Frank Wilson5 asking about downloading a zip or pdf file of Stupid Pope Tricks. I tried to reply to his reply address, fdmw@gmail.com, but it was blocked because the address was not valid. I had no idea what that was about.

On the next day I (and many others) received a shocking email from Peter Marcus that indicated that he was resigning from all his posts in the New England Bridge Conference. This reportedly had something to do with scheduling conflicts with another district”s tournament.

1. At least once in the nineties I ran more than five miles when it was over 100°. When I was in my twenties I considered no temperature to be too hot for any athletic endeavor. Boy, has that changed!

2. It was incredible to me that the HBC did not actually know how many people were officially members. Eventually, I wrote a set of programs that would allow the club to keep track of the membership—dues, contact information, and other things. The story of that system is documented here. The number of members exceeded 500 in 2019, the last pre-pandemic year.

3. The store is still open in October of 2024, but in all my trips to the mall I had seen fewer than a handful of customers.

4. This infraction was widely ridiculed by Michigan fans and called Hamburgergate. It was common knowledge that many large programs arranged for players to be paid under the table. By 2023 the NCAA had ceded the rights to the names, images, and likenesses (called NIL) of the players to the players themselves. By the next year some of them were earning upwards of $1 million to play their favorite sport for a few months out of the year.

5. Of course, I immediately thought that this might be J. Frank Wilson, who, with support from the Cavaliers, in 1964 recorded the remake of Wayne Cochran’s “Last Kiss”. It made it to #2 on Billboard.

2023 January-May 11: What Pandemic?

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2023 journal. Continue reading →

By the end of 2022 Americans were still contracting Covid-19, but very few died or became seriously ill. Most people had either contracted the virus already at least once or had been immunized with boosters. I still wore an N95 mask outside of the house for the first few months, but by the end of that period few people joined me.

January

For decades I have been an avid college football fan. New Years Day was ordinarily one of my favorite days. In 2023, however, it fell on a Sunday. The semifinals of the four-team College Football Playoff had occurred on December 31 Only pro games, in which I had little interest, were held on January 1. I was in my office in Enfield for most of the day.

On Monday, January 2, I played with Nancy Calderbank as part of the mentoring program at the Hartford Bridge Club (HBC). She had asked me to coach her through the transition from Standard American to Two-Over-One (2/1). Our results were not very good that day, but there was one memorable hand, which is shown at the right.

I had the dubious privilege of holding the cards in the East hand. When I received a miserable collection like that one, I like to add up the number of pips that are on my cards. In this case the total was 59, the second-lowest that I have ever seen.1 What made it really amazing was that more than half of the pips were clubs. Also, if deuces were aces, threes kings, etc., this hand would be worth 30 high card points. West’s monstrosity has only 70 percent of that number.

On the day after this bridge game I learned that one of my regular partners, Peter Katz, and an occasional partner of both Sue and me, Fred Gagnon, had contracted Covid-19 over the holidays. Neither became seriously ill, and both were back at the tables within a week or two.

On January 5 I sent the first email to the committee for the Weiss-Bertoni Award. The details of this project have been chronicled here.

The garbage disposal in the new kitchen had been stopped up. Apparently it was my fault. Sue said that all fat and grease must be removed with a paper towel before scraping the garbage from plates and cooking utensils into the sink. A plumber came out and fixed it on the 14th. He returned three days later to address a leak under the sink in the old kitchen. Tennessee Ernie Ford came to mind.

On the 15th I started work on a third-person autobiography entitle Cowboy Coder from Kansas. When the blog entry for this project is completed, I will link it here.

My wife Sue informed me that someone had told her years ago that we could get a break on our real estate tax because I am a veteran. That program exists, and we might have been able to use it in the first few years that we lived in Enfield, but our income, which is primarily from social security, seemed much too high.

On January 18 Sue was in a funk all day.. She played at the Simsbury Bridge Club (SBC) with Maria Van Der Ree in the evening game. Even though they came in last out of eight pairs, Sue seemed chipper at the end. She needs to be out with people much more than I do.

The infamous Tonto email went out on the 19th. The tale is told here.

Bob: Several early entries in the 2023 notes for the pandemic concern the demise of Sue’s cat, Bob, our last surviving pet. The notes for January 3 reported: “Bob drools a lot and smells bad. Sue gave him a bath of some kind, but his saliva is rancid. He sleeps most of the time, but he bothers Sue when he is awake.”

The litter box in the basement. The grey items near the box are pieces of litter that absorbed water when the basement flooded. The water later evaporated.

We had cats in Enfield from the time that they moved there. Throughout this period all of them were able to use the cat door installed in a basement window to go outside when they felt like it. They could be relied on to make use of it whenever they needed to relieve themselves. However, in 2022 it became necessary to make a litter box available to them. At first it was in the basement. By the beginning of 2023 I had to move it upstairs because Bob was no longer able to negotiate the stairs.

Bob finally died on January 28. In some ways it was a sad occasion, but neither Sue nor I thought that he enjoyed the last few months of his life the way that our other cats seemed to.

Sue and I get a reminder about Bob every evening at 8:55. Her phone announces “Eight fifty-five Meds Slash Bob”. We call this announcement “Slash Bob.”

February

The coldest day of the year, by far was February 4. It approached 0 in Connecticut, but it was much colder on Mt. Washington in New Hampshire. The temperature was 8 below but the windchill index was an incredible -109° Fahrenheit.

February 7 was the first day of the regional bridge tournament in Southbridge, MA. Sue played with Mark Aquino in the Open Pairs. They did not do well. My adventures in the tournament have been described here.

In Sue’s absence I took my car in for the emissions test at Mad Hatter Auto Repair. Afterwards I calculated that we would owed $500 in income tax for 2022. The biggest reason for this was the cost of the cruise (described here) that necessitated a fairly large distribution from my 401K.

On February 10, only six days after that extremely cold day, the temperature reached a balmy 62°.

March

The first post-pandemic limited sectional was held at the HBC on March 26. It drew an incredible fifty-seven tables. The whole story is revealed here.

“Donald, my book will be coming out soon.”

On March 30 Donald Trump was indicted by the state of New York on 31 counts of business fraud! The indictments were in regard to Trump, through his fixer at the time, Michael Cohen, paid Stormy Daniels $150,000 to Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about their affair during the run-up to the election. Trump misused corporate funds to reimburse Cohen. That is what made it a crime in New York, which was, at that time, the official location of the companies. It was being filed as a felony because it was an illegal attempt to influence an election, which was a felony in New York.

An important Zoom meeting was held for replacement of the relational database that I had designed and implemented for the district. Details of that meeting have been posted here.

April

The income tax situation worked out better than my preliminary calculation had indicated. I had to pay the IRS $181. However, we received a refund from CT of $1996 I used one of the free filing services, but I had to pay $15 to file electronically in CT.

For the 2023 National Debate Tournament, U-M’s top team of Rafael Pierry and Kelly Phil won the Copeland award and were seeded #1 in the tournament. I could hardly believe that seven assistant coaches were going to attend the tournament in Chantilly, VA. Pierry and Giorgio Rabbini had also won the Copeland award in 2022 and were second in 2021.

Pierry and Phil.

Pierry and Phil were 7-1 in the preliminary rounds with 21 out of a possible 24 ballots. The U-M second team of Rabbini and Joshua Harrington also was 7-1 with only one fewer ballot. Pierry and Phil made it to the final round, but they lost to Wake Forest. Pierry attained the final round in three consecutive years, an achievement that will probably not be duplicated in my lifetime. I was nearly as disappointed with this result as I was with my own failure to qualify for the NDT in 1970, as described here.

There was quite a bit of activity about the Weiss-Bertoni award.

On Saturday, April 8, we went to see Tom, Casey, and Brian Corcoran in Tom’s house in Wethersfield. When we came back I found a dead mouse in the toilet of the bathroom in the older part of the house. I set traps the next day, but I caught nothing. Some mysteries are never solved.

On April 13 the temperature reached 90°. I walked five miles, but I had to stop, rest in the shade, and cool off three times. The next day it reached an incredible 96°, breaking the previous record by fourteen degrees. That temperature was never exceeded in the summer months.

The first CBA sectional was held in Orange on the 21st through the 23rd. I played all three days. Descriptions of my adventures were posted here. My most memorable achievement was the 512 miles that my Honda logged on a tank of gas. It took over 13 gallons when I filled it, but it claimed that it could have gone another fifteen miles. .

May

It was about this time that I discovered Bosch on Freevee. Sue and I watched it nearly every evening, and it didn’t cost us a penny. This and other ventures into the land of streaming are cataloged here. We could not believe that Amazon, which purchased the service from IMDB, was allowing people to view this high-quality police dram for free.

It was very hot on May 1 when I mowed the portions of the lawn that face either North Street or Hamilton Court. I was not able to mow the rest until three days later.

On May 8 I volunteered to send out the HBC’s emails for the summer through MailChimp. Lori Leopold had been doing it, but she had a lot of travel scheduled for the upcoming months. I somehow also was saddled with creating the official calendar from Donna’s handwritten version.

On May 11 the national health emergency for the pandemic officially ended. For several months I continued wearing my mask wherever I was likely to be in fairly close contact with others.

The day-by-day blog entry for the rest of 2023 has been posted here.

1. The lowest total that I have ever seen was an incredible 53 at the Simsbury Bridge Club fairly early in my bridge career. Unfortunately, although I often had my camera with me in those days, I did not record this event, and no hand record was available because the SBC was not yet using a dealing machine.

1981-1988 Life in Rockville: Trips and Visits

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We didn’t work every day. Continue reading →

The years that we spent in Rockville were mostly happy ones, but we had neither the time nor the money to take much in the way of vacations. The two that we took were for only a week each in 1985 and 1986. They are documented here.

We also made very few exciting or life-enhancing purchases. As in the other blogs about non-business events, the timeline is shaky. I am only certain of the dates of a few events.

The most exciting news of our first year in Rockville came in a phone call in the spring of 1981 from Gerry Cox. He announced that he and a group of Wayne State debaters wanted to pay us a visit in the summer. We looked at our schedules and told him that that would be fine, as long as they could come in June, July, or August. We quickly agreed upon a set of dates. The debaters were Nancy Legge, Al Acitelli, and Mark Buczko.

They drove from Detroit to Rockville. We gave them directions to our house. I think that we advised them to get off of I-91 and take Route 83. We told them that when they could smell the cows they would be in Ellington, the town just north of Rockville. At that point they needed to watch out for the turn. We told them that they should turn uphill (left) onto Upper Butcher Road and then downhill (right) onto Park St. Both of these hills are short, but quite steep.

They found the house. They parked in back, as we directed. We helped them move in. The guys stayed in the bedroom at the top of the stairs, where we had set up bunk beds. Their room was directly above the office. Nancy slept in the waterbed in the spare bedroom, which had not yet been converted into an office for Sue.

They stayed with us for a few days. Everyone had a splendid time throughout the visit. I remember three activities.

  • We all spent one day at Rocky Neck State Park. I don’ recall any specifics.
  • We devoted one day to Dungeons and Dragons. I am pretty sure that my friend from my insurance days, Tom Corcoran, joined us for that occasion. He played a dwarf fighter. I don’t remember what the other characters were, and, even though I designed it, I don’t remember the dungeon. I also have a vague recollection of creating an adventure for Mark’s assassin character, Cnir Edrum.
  • We enjoyed a communal supper, presumably after the D&D game. Al insisted on making pasta from scratch for us. It was definitely good, but I don’t think that he convinced anyone that it was worth all of the effort. He did not insist on making the sauce from scratch. It came from a jar.
Canada Post truck.

Nancy stayed with us for another week or two. We put her to work stuffing envelopes for one of our mailings. This is when I bestowed on her the title of Executive Vice President for International Marketing. We must have included one Canadian addressee.

Gerry came back to visit us a year or two later with a friend of his. I remember much less about that occasion. They stayed with us for a night or two. They probably made additional stops in the Northeast.

I also remember that Craig Kolbitz, a good friend from my army days in Albuquerque in 1971, evidently somehow found my telephone number and address. He called and then came over and visited us one evening. I don’t remember much about the occasion. I don’t think that he revealed much about what he had been doing in the interim. I have not heard from him again in the subsequent decades.

Sue’s sister Betty and her husband Shawn (or maybe Shaun or Sean) Arrowsmith came over for supper at least once. At the time he was a sous chef at the restaurant at Bradley International Airport. That restaurant, which has been closed for decades, was outside of the secured area in the old terminal. It had quite a good reputation.

Their visit to Rockville must have been in late fall or winter. Shawn and I went searching for firewood in the nearby woods. He was a big guy; he brought back a lot more than I did. I started a fire in the fireplace.

They invited us over to their place, too. Their house was surrounded by maple trees. I have a strong recollection of hearing the sounds of the droppings of gypsy moth caterpillars on the roof.

Shawn and Betty did not stay together very long. I don’t know what happened.

The Corcorans—Tom, Patti, Brian and Casey—also came over at least once. I fixed country-style ribs and sauerkraut for them. The meal was a big hit, especially for Brian who had understandably low expectations for such a foreign-sounding meal.

We might have had other visitors, but I don’t remember them.

We made the drive from Rockville to the Corcorans’ house many times. We usually came over for supper and then played games until well after midnight. We were especially appreciative of the suppers. Throughout this period we seldom had, in my dad’s words, “two nickles to rub together”. We almost never went to restaurants. The Corcorans almost always had a special meal for us, often steak. Of course, there was plenty of beer.

This is the good version.

Among the games Trivial Pursuit was a definite favorite. We played many different editions. Careers was also a favorite, but we soon discovered that the original version, which had uranium prospecting, Hollywood, expedition to the moon, and at sea as possible careers, was a much better game than the more recent versions. Clue (regular and its expanded versions) were pretty good. When everyone got tired we played Yahtzee.

I also remember enjoying a murder mystery game based on Clue that required playing a scene on a VHS tape. We tried dozens of other games as well. Our basement is full of games, and the Corcorans had more than we did.

We also often celebrated New Year’s and several other holidays with the Corcorans. We watched Brian and Casey grow up. Casey was an acrobat, and Brian excelled at taking things apart and putting them back together. He loved to play with go-bots and transformers.

I also remember showing Brian how to do both types of Indian wrestling—standing up and lying down, the way that Andy Burnett did on Walt Disney.

The closest thing that we had to a vacation during the “anything for a buck” days was a Murder Mystery Weekend near Lancaster, PA. It was staged by some actors in and around a fairly nice hotel in the countryside. The theme was a set of killings in a mob family. My character was one of the family members. He was named Dominic (called “Nicky”), and he was newly married.

I picked up a white fedora somewhere and rented a realistic stage pistol with a shoulder holster from a costume shop in Hartford. I was really ready to get into it. After all, even by that time I had read at least a hundred murder mysteries.

The organizers made me stow the pistol away. Didn’t they know that the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun? I should have quoted Charlton Heston to them: “I’ll give you my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.” I still wore the shoulder holster.

Could you stab him in the heart with a pocketknife?

The first murder occurred pretty much in full sight of everyone at the first gathering. A fairly large Italian guy wearing a three-piece suit was found dead. He had been stabbed in the heart with a pocketknife.

It is a thoroughly documented fact that all Italian mobsters wear sleeveless undershirts.So, the knife, even if it missed the broad lapels would have needed to penetrate the suit coat, the vest, the shirt, the undershirt, the skin, and the rib cage. Maybe Andre the Giant could kill someone who was wearing all this armor with one casual blow with a pocketknife, but I didn’t see anyone in our group who looked capable of such a feat. Even if sufficient thrust was employed, I would bet on the blade breaking or sliding to one side before it penetrated all of those layers of protection..

Several scenes that involved some or all of the actors were staged. One took place on the Strasburg Rail Road. I don’t remember the details.

We were allowed to submit written questions. Mine was about some flowers that a character had reportedly ordered for some reason. I was told that the answer, which I don’t remember at all, had important information, which I should share with the other guests. I dutifully disclosed it to everyone with whom I conversed.

At the end everyone was supposed to write up a solution. The best one, as judged by the organizers, won a prize. No one got the solution right. The person to whom the prize was awarded missed out on most of the clues entirely. She had spent most of her time shopping in Lancaster.

Deadly in the hand of a small woman.

The revealed murderer was the smallest member of the cast, perhaps 5’2″ and 100 pounds. She was absolutely incapable of committing the first murder. In fact, I don’t think she could have killed him with a pocket knife if he was already unconscious and wearing nothing but his sleeveless undershirt.

In addition, she had no motive for the other crimes attributed to her. That is, the personality that we knew had no motive. She supposedly had multiple personality disorder1, and the diminutive body that she shared with two other personalities committed the other two murders. Give me a break.

For Halloween of 1981 or 1982 Sue and I drove to Brooklyn for a costume party thrown for her friend Eddie Lancaster from Brothers Specifications in Detroit. Sue dressed as Peter Pan. I came disguised as a college professor who never got tenure. It was a long drive, but no drive was too long for Sue if friends were at the other end. She loved to sit and talk with old friends, and she made new ones very easily.

We also drove up to Vermont to see Sue’s friend Diane Robinson at least once or twice. I met her husband Phil Graziose, one of the Air Force guys from the Alaska adventure. He seemed like a nice guy. He set up a small business in the St. Johnsbury area as a locksmith. They lived in a trailer park, a new experience for me. There were things that I could talk about with Phil, even football! I had nothing in common with Diane and her myriad relatives, almost all of whom stayed close to home. Sue absolutely adored this family. I have never quite understood this. Maybe she appreciated the way that they all got along.

In 1981 or 1982 we were invited to Dave Tine’s house. His television had a huge rear-projection screen. It was the first “home entertainment center” we had ever seen. His sister (whose name I don’t remember) owned and operated a retail store name Video Land. It sold hardware as well as videos. We watched Nine to Five together. This was something of a real treat for us. We almost never went to movies. They were too expensive.

Sue’s family in Enfield held get-togethers pretty often. I usually accompanied her. I really struggled at these affairs. I had a hard time talking with most of her Enfield relations. The big exception was her youngest sister, Betty. She hosted a large party at her parents’ house most summers. She set up areas for volleyball and croquet. Also, Betty’s mother had a swimming pool. Tom Corcoran also attended most of these affairs.

Jack and his wife.

I think that it was at one of these parties that I met Jack LaPlante, the brother-in-law of Sue’s sister Karen. He worked and coached at Hartford Public High School, which over the years became a rough place. He has been inducted into the school’s Hall of Fame.

I always enjoyed talking with Jack. He was fascinated by the fact that we still played board games with other adults.

Jeffrey Campbell and our guide Jackson in Lake Manyara National Park in 2015.

Betty’s friends were much more approachable for me than the relatives on the Locke side. The lives of the latter seemed to center around trucks and cars. I liked all of Betty’s friends. Karen Shapiro, who worked with disadvantaged kids, ended up marrying Paul Locke, and so I saw her occasionally. Jeffrey Campbell, a pharmacist whom Betty has always called Pancho, was around from time to time. In 2015 he came with us on our epic trip to Tanzania, which is described in great detail here.

I also remember a friend of Betty’s named Harriet, but I don’t remember much about her.

I remember that we drove to Rhode Island once to visit Victor Barrett, with whom Sue worked at F.H. Chase, and his wife, Mary Codd2. They ran a small business called Coddbarrett Associates that developed computer-generated graphics for companies.

It was interesting to talk to another couple who were struggling as pioneers in an infant industry. Their work needed a lot more processing power than ours, and so their financial commitment was greater. On the other hand, they also had better credentials. Actually, everyone had better credentials than we did.

One thing that I remember vividly is that Victor and Mary almost never cooked. They either ate frozen dinners or something from a restaurant. Sue and I never did the first and almost never did the second.

Sue had an annual tradition of visiting her land in Monson, MA, on the weekend of Columbus Day when the foliage was at its peak, and the weather was to her liking. I accompanied her a few times. She actually built an outhouse and a tree platform up there. The outhouse was trashed by someone and the tools that she left up there were stolen.

She could sometimes talk her nephew, Travis LaPlante, and/or Brian Corcoran into making the pilgrimage with her.

Sue planned a weekend outing for us in Mt. Washington, NH. We stayed at the famous hotel5 in Bretton Woods. We took the cog railroad up to the top of the mountain, which is one of the windiest places on earth.

Sue planned on me playing golf on the links course that is adjacent to the hotel, but I did not feel like it.

I think that Tom and Patti Corcoran joined us for one day. I seem to recall that Sue and Patti played Tennis. Well, Patti played, and they both chased Sue’s errant shots.

I remember that the hotel hosted a Trivial Pursuit game in the evening. Sue and I played as a team. We really cleaned up. One of the other guests asked us if we had memorized all the answers.

Sandy Bailey, whom we knew from our installation at Harland-Tine, invited us to her house in Manchester, CT, for an evening of games. We were, as usual, late. A group of people were playing Dark Tower, the game advertised on TV by Orson Wells. It seemed like a very interesting game, but I never got around to playing it. I later tried to purchase a copy, but I could not find one.

We met Sandy’s housemate, a guy who worked for the Digital Equipment Corporation. Of course, he tried to convince me that we should convert our ad agency software to run on DEC machines. He even gave me a handbook for DEC’s version of the BASIC language.

In the fall of 1987 Sue and I decided to drive to Washington, DC, for the weekend. We left on Friday afternoon, October 9, and got as far as New Jersey. We stopped at a motel off of the Interstate. The person at the desk seemed surprised that we wanted to stay the whole night. When Sue asked for more towels, he went across the street to a store and bought some.

We laughed about it; it was not that sleazy-looking from the outside.

When we arrived in Washington we spent the day at the National Zoo. We got to see the baby pandas. A male orangutan effortlessly hurled his poop over the fence at the tourists. Overall it was a very pleasant experience, even though I was never able to spot the kiwi in its dark cage.

We stayed overnight at Howard Johnson’s. When we went to supper, the other people in the restaurant seemed somehow different. It wasn’t until later that we realized that we had chosen to come to Washington on the same day as about 200,000 gay people who were in town for “The Great March”.

On Sunday the parking was a nightmare, but the Smithsonian’s museums were not crowded at all.

In late 1985 my sister Jamie surprisingly reentered our lives She had recently married Joe Lisella. Joe, Jamie, and her daughters moved to Simsbury, CT. For the next fourteen years I spent as much time as I could with her and her family, which grew fairly rapidly after she came to New England. Those visits and trips are documented here.

1. This phenomenon is now known as dissociative identity disorder, which is a better name because of the vague nature of the word personality. I personally suspect that the kind postulated in this story occurs more often in the movies than in real life.

2. Mary Codd’s story can be read at her website, which is marycodd.com.

3. The Whalers’ last season was 1997. The Civic Center underwent drastic remodeling in 2004 and in 2021 it is called the XL Center.

4. My recollection of the event was faulty. When I have told this story to people I have claimed that neither of the teams made the playoffs that year. I apologize for the unintentional misinformation. The Whalers lost to Montreal in the first round of the playoffs.

5. Since 2015 it has been called the Omni Mt. Washington Resort.

1980-1981 Transition to Rockville

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By the fall of 1980 my dream of a life as a debate coach seemed unattainable. I enjoyed coaching as much as ever, but I could not visualize how I could make an enjoyable career of it. A few colleges hired someone just to coach debate, but these highly prized positions seldom turned over. Although I had a good record, I had no strong connections. Moreover, I had no idea how to find and obtain such a job.

There was not an abundance of potential coaching positions, and the vast majority of them were for someone with a PhD who would act as Director of Forensics and would also perform other roles in the speech department. This path did not appeal to me for at least four reasons:

  1. I would need to finish my PhD, which meant doing my dissertation. This did not appeal to me at all, for reasons that are described here.
  2. I could not see myself as a faculty member of a speech department. I had little or no respect for any of the speech professors that I had met, and I dreaded the prospect of dealing with departmental politics.
  3. I would be expected to research and publish. Nothing about the field of speech communication interested me enough to research.
  4. I would be expected to teach and serve on committees of MA and PhD candidates. I would almost certainly get stuck teaching the statistics class that every grad student hated. I probably also would be the guy on the committee who forced students to deal all of the problems with the design of their studies. I cannot seeing myself approving any approach that misused statistics or drew only patently obvious conclusions. I would not mind much if some people didn’t like me, but I did not want to be the ogre of the department.

There was one other factor. Sue and I had very little money by the end of 1980. I needed to start bringing in some bacon pretty quickly. I knew that I had a real talent for computer programming, and I really enjoyed bringing an idea to life. So, I determined that I should try to help Sue turn TSI into a real business.

But not in Detroit. The neighborhood that we lived in had deteriorated markedly. The third break-in at our house (described here) convinced us that we had to move. Following the rest of the Caucasians to the suburbs would be expensive and would only address one problem. The other was that the entire Detroit area was in the throes of a severe auto recession. Finding customers there would be difficult for the next few years. Most of the rest of the country was doing better. Sue wanted to return to New England, and I concurred.

The third break-in was, in one way, a blessing in disguise. The thieves took the television and the stereo. They did not take the 5120 computer, which weighed ninety-nine pounds, or the printer. We didn’t have any valuables, drugs, or guns, but they certainly looked for them. Between the second break-in and the third we had bought renter’s insurance. So, we had fewer things to move, and the claim gave us enough money to hire movers.

I think that Sue made a short trip back to Connecticut in the fall of 1980 to look for a place for us to rent. Somehow her dad helped her find a wonderful house in Rockville. The rent was $300 per month. That was more than twice what we paid in Detroit, but it was still an incredible bargain, and it was a perfect place for a small business.

Rockville, a “village” in the town of Vernon, was less than a half-hour drive from downtown Hartford, even in rush hour. The prosperous part of the Hartford area was mainly on the west side of the Connecticut River. However, we would not have been likely to find anything comparable in the wealthy suburbs. If we did, our rent would probably have been a four-digit number.

Rockville at the turn of the century (i.e., around 1900) was a very prosperous mill town. Eight decades later it was still the location of many mansions that were once owned by the people who owned or managed the mills. One of the most impressive of the mansions was (and is) owned by the Rockville Lodge of Elks1. We rented the mansion’s Carriage House from the Elks. The address was 9 North Park St. North Park has one of the steepest slopes without switchbacks of any straight street that I have ever seen. I never tried to jog up it.

The Carriage House was a split-level dwelling. The stairway was in the middle. To the left of the front door pictured at left were levels 1L and 2L and the attic. To the right were the half cellar and levels 1R and 2R. The front door was on level 1R. Two rear doors were on level 1L.

  • Behind the house was a courtyard that was approximately twenty feet deep and twice that in width. The left side of the courtyard was open. The other two sides were brick covered with ivy. I eventually planted a vegetable garden here.
  • Level 1L contained the living room (which contained a fireplace), a dining area, pantry, and a kitchen on the far left. We used the massive barnboard shelves to serve as a divider between the dining area and the living area. A door led from the kitchen to a courtyard. A second door to the courtyard was on a landing at the foot of the stairs in the middle of the house. The only shower in the house was on that landing.
  • The half-cellar was across from the back door in the middle of the house. It had a sink as well as the oil burner, water heater, and fuse box. Above it was level 1R. The only use we had for the cellar was during my abortive sauerkraut experiment several years later.
  • Level 1R contained the main office. We placed the 5120 computer and printer and Sue’s credenza here. Eventually the office acquired additional equipment and furniture. There were windows on the front side and on the right. There were no windows on the courtyard side.
  • The master bedroom took up the front half of Level 2L. The spare bedroom housed the waterbed and later became Sue’s office. That room and the bathroom (tub but no shower) were on the courtyard side.
  • Level 2R was another bedroom with a sloped ceiling. We only used it for overnight visitors.
  • Level 3L was an attic that could be reached from the bedroom on 2R by a door at the top of three or four stairs. It contained possessions of a previous resident. We did not use it.
Key: H=Carriage House; C=Courtyard; E=Entrance Driveway; X=Exit Driveway; G=Garage; K/B=Elks’ Kitchen and Banquet Hall; B=Bar; M=Main House; W=Woods.

One-way driveways leading to the main house and the Elks Club bar were on either side of the Carriage House. The entrance could be seen from the main office on 1R and the exit from the kitchen on 1L.

The club had garage space for three cars. We were allowed to use one of them. The garage was forty or fifty feet from the kitchen door.

The grounds of the Elks club contained a fairly large wooded area. In the winter we scoured it for firewood. We could not afford to buy it at a store. We were quite poor throughout our first few years in Rockville. I think of these as the macaroni years.

The placement of the shower was inconvenient, but the only thing that I really hated about the Carriage House was the oil heat. It was horribly obsolete in 19812. I can hardly believe that I am still living in a residence with such an outmoded heating system forty years later.

When we moved in we only had one phone line. Eventually we bought a multi-line system.

Most of our friends from 1972-1975 were no longer in the Hartford area. We reconnected with Tom and Patti Corcoran, who were living in Wethersfield, the city just south of Hartford. By this time they had two kids, a boy named Brian and a girl named Casey.

I think that this photo of Casey and Brian is from 1983 or 1984.

We spent a lot of time with the Corcorans. They often fed us much better than we would have otherwise eaten. They came to visit us occasionally as well. I remember that I fixed country-style ribs and sauerkraut for them once. I don’t think that Casey tried any; in her early years she consumed only nectar, ambrosia, and the dew from daffodils. However, Brian was shocked when he took the first bite. “This is good!” he exclaimed with as much enthusiasm as he ever exhibited.

Sue registered TSI as a partnership at the town hall in Rockville. She was the president; I had no title. We never sat down and decided who was responsible for what part of the business. She arranged for her dad’s accounting firm to help her set up our books. Dan Marra3 of Mass and Hensley worked with her.

We hoped to be able to establish a relationship as the go-to programmers for IBM’s small business clients, but that did not work out too well at first. IBM went through periods when they loved the third-party programmers who specialized in IBM systems and periods when they were not eager to work with us. Early 1981 was one of the latter periods.

I tried to come up with ways to market Sue’s experience with IBM’s construction payroll system. Unfortunately, we had no access to any lists of IBM’s installations. Sue did some custom work for FH Chase Inc., a construction company south of Boston, and another firm in Boston. At FH Chase she worked with Victor Barrett4 and Mary Brassard. I also recently came upon an invoice from 1981 that Sue sent to Scott & Duncan, Inc. in Roxbury, MA, for a change to its payroll system. It was sent to the attention of Paul Williamson. I don’t remember anything about that company.

Sue sold one copy of Amanuensis, the word-processing program that I wrote, to Brown Insulation in Detroit, and I developed the retail inventory control and sales analysis system for Diamond Showcase. Sue also did some work for clients that she had contacted when we were in Detroit. They included CEI, based in Howell, MI, which owned a number of companies in various locations,

We were not making it. Sue and I were very frugal, but we were not reaching our “nut”. For one thing, the price of oil, which was at an all-time high, was killing us. I was just about at the point of throwing in the towel and looking for a job doing … I don’t know what. However, in July of 1981 IBM made an announcement that had a big effect on both our business and our personal lives. It was not the IBM PC; that came later. It was the System/23, also known as the Datamaster. At some IBM offices it was called the Databurger.

1. The Elks still own it in 2021.

2. I am embarrassed to say that forty years later we are still living in a house that is heated by oil. It makes me feel like a caveman.

3. Dan Marra lives in Colchester in 2021.

4. I am pretty sure that Victor Barrett works and lives in St. Charles, MO.