I am pretty sure that Younkers contacted TSI about AdDept before the company was absorbed into Proffitt’s Inc. I have a rather vivid memory—not to mention a photograph—of a presentation that I did for them at the IBM office in Des Moines. Since Proffitt’s purchased the company in December of 1996, the starting date in the title is probably accurate. It might have been in late 1995.

Doug Pease accompanied me on the first trip to Des Moines for the demo. We stayed at a Holiday Inn that was just north of the downtown area near Mercy Hospital.

I remember that we went to a basketball game at the Knapp Center on the evening of January 27, 1996. The Drake Bulldogs came into the game with a 6-2 record in the Missouri Valley Conference. However, they were defeated by the Tulsa Golden Hurricane¹ 79-73. Drake seemed to be a little better overall, but they had only one guy who could dribble through a press, and in the second half when the starter had to be benched because of foul trouble. The freshman (Cory Petzenhauser) whom they inserted at point guard was just humiliated. It was painful to watch.

That defeat started a tailspin for Drake, which ended up with a 12-15 record. The coach resigned in March

Des Moines is legendary as a sleepy town, but I remember that Doug and I actually discovered a bit of night life in an assortment of restaurants and bars that were in a redeveloped area between the river and Younkers’ downtown store at 713 Walnut Street.

The system was not actually installed at Younkers until April of 1998.

The primary players in the AdDept installation at Younkers were the Advertising Director, whose name I think was Joe, and Roger Wolf, who was in charge of the advertising business office.

My recollections of the details of the installation are few. The headquarters was on an upper floor of the flagship store. The Senior VP of Advertising treated us to lunch in the store’s famous tea room. It was quite elegant.

I think that Younkers bought the AS/400 directly from IBM. I don’t remember where it was kept, and I don’t think that I was required to install it. TSI wasn’t involved in connecting the various devices either.

Roger and Joe came to Enfield for training. I remember that practically everyone in the department except for Roger’s group used Macs. We had to research the availability of terminal emulation software for them. Joe had some very specific ideas about tracking the progress of production jobs. TSI was asked to do quite a bit of customizing of the trafficking programs to realize them.

Long after I posted this entry I discovered this photo of a meeting at PMG in Birmingham. Roger is the second from the left in the shirt with vertical stripes. Steve VeZain of PMG is waving on the right. Beside him is someone named Chris from Younkers. He must have been in charge of the Mac network.

Roger’s group of four or five accounting people was tucked away in a small area that was like a mezzanine up some stairs from the rest of the department. The ceiling was low. Everyone sat in a single row facing the wall. It was very cramped and felt rickety.

Roger was as almost as skinny as I was, but two enormous women also worked up there. I could not help wondering if the support beams for their floor were up to the task. For me it was a hellish place to work. Two people had radios on all day long. One played heavy metal rock; the other was tuned to the rantings of Rush Limbaugh.

My notes from 1999 indicated a peculiarity in the way that Younkers did its accounting:

They have implemented a great many things that have the result of increasing the budget for storewide ads. Some of this is at the expense of merchants, some at the expense of vendors. Roger understands this, but he is not good at articulating it.

Some of these “great many things” were quite difficult to program. Several years after the beginning of the installation Roger’s group was still not using the system to the satisfaction of the corporate people at Saks Inc.²

The rest of Saks Inc. thinks that Roger is a fuddy-duddy and an obstructionist. The PMG³ approach to solving problems is to put pressure on people to solve their own problems. I think this is why Joe quit. They have put a lot of pressure on Roger to give up his overly intricate accounting procedures and get with the program.

At first I too thought Roger was an obstructionist. The last two trips he has made a strong effort to use AdDept. However, he won’t give up his calendar until he is confident that every single number in AdDept’s calendar can be defended. They now have the worst of both worlds. Roger does the calendar in AdDept. He checks every number by hand. Then he gets frustrated and goes back to his manual calendar.

Steve’s⁴ idea was to send Ivy⁵ to show Roger how McRae’s does thing. Roger, who is at least as intelligent as Ivy, understands how McRae’s does things. Ivy has no clue how Younkers does things. Another problem is that Ivy is even less articulate than Roger.

I don’t know what the solution is, but it has to come from someone above Roger. Most people think that they are going to fire him. This won’t solve the problem.

They did not fire Roger, but they did try to make him quit. Liz Ewing⁶ replaced him as manager of the business office, and Roger was demoted to accounting clerk.

On most of my visits I stayed at a hotel that was within walking distance of the Younkers building. My recollection is that it was a Radisson.⁷ It was very nice, and Younkers had a discount rate. The thing that I liked best about it was that it had a Jacuzzi that was seldom used by the other guests. I found a good park in which to run, and afterwards twenty minutes in the Jacuzzi felt fantastic.

I had several adventures traveling to and from Des Moines. On one afternoon I was flying from Chicago to Des Moines on United. A tornado that was passing through the area forced us to land in Cedar Rapids. The entire story is recounted here.

I made it to the scheduled meetings on time and worked with the users according to the original schedule. Just another day at the office.

The other adventure involved a stop in Kansas City to play golf with my dad. The details have been posted here.

I have two startling memories from Des Moines. The first came when I was working up in the advertising business office. One of the overweight ladies was regaling the rest of us with a tale of an acquaintance of hers who had a foot fetish. He offered to pay her to allow him to suck her toes.

The other one came from Joe, the original Advertising Director who resigned and then was replaced in 2000 by Kristen Gray⁸. A group of us was having lunch at a restaurant. The topic of conversation was the difficulty of handling teen-aged offspring. I, of course, offered nothing. Joe mentioned that he had once received a telephone call from the police when his daughter had driven a car into a mall. Evidently no one was hurt.

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In 2003 Saks Inc. made Younkers part of its Northern division. The offices in Des Moines were closed, and all administrative functions were transferred to Milwaukee. The stores continued to operate with the Younkers name. In March of 2006 the entire division was sold to the Bon Ton.

The downtown Des Moines store was closed in 2005. In 2014 a huge fire consumed the empty building that I knew as the downtown Younkers store.

Any remaining Younkers stores were closed as part of the Bon Ton’s liquidation in 2018.

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1. Evidently the coach in 1922 wanted to name the team the Golden Tornadoes, but he discovered that it was already taken by Georgia Tech. So, he changed it to Hurricanes. At lest that’s what it says here. Of course, hurricanes seldom, if ever, bother Tulsa. I don’t know why or when it was made singular.

2. As is explained here, after Proffitt’s Inc. purchased Saks Fifth Avenue, it changed its name to Saks Inc.

3. PMG stands for Proffitt’s Marketing Group, the people at the corporate headquarters in Birmingham who oversaw the advertising departments.

4. Steve VeZain was the person at PMG charged with monitoring the progress of the installations in the various advertising departments.

5. Ivy Klaras worked at McRae’s in the business office. The AdDept installation at McRae’s is described here.

6. Liz Ewing’s puzzling LinkedIn page can be viewed here.

7. There are no Radissons in downtown Des Moines in 2023, The hotel that I stayed in was either sold or destroyed.

8. Kristen Gray’s LinkedIn page is posted here.