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1981-1988 Life in Rockville: Other Events

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No monumental events occurred during our seven and a half years in Rockville, but I remember all kinds of smaller ones.

Sports

Jogging: I continued to go jogging a couple of times a week, but Rockville was much too hilly for an occasional runner like me. I drove my car a mile or two into Ellington to find a surface that was relatively level. I took Upper Butcher Road, which turned into Middle Butcher Road and then Windemere Ave., up to Pinney Road (Route 286). I parked my car near the intersection.

I ran up Windemere to Abbott Road, where I turned right. I ran north alongside the golf course before turning on either Middle Road or Frog Hollow Road to return to Pinney Road. The only problems that I ever encountered were dogs. A few barked ferociously and came within a few feet of my ankles, but none ever bit me.

Basketball: During the winter of 1987-88 Tom Corcoran invited me to watch a basketball game that included some players that he knew from work. It was held at a high school gym. I can’t remember if Sue came or not. The game itself was not a bit memorable, but at halftime a door prize was awarded. It was a pair of tickets to a Hartford Whalers game, and my ticket had the winning number.

Hockey: You really should listen to “Brass Bonanza”, the Hartford Whalers’ fight song while reading this section. You can find it here. It will open in a new tab.

I had only attended one hockey game in my life, an intramural game at U-M. The tickets that I won were for the last game of the season. It took place in the Civic Center3 in downtown Hartford. The opponents were the Pittsburgh Penguins.

In those days there were nineteen teams in the NHL. Sixteen of them made the playoffs. At the time of the game the Whalers had already clinched one of the last playoff spots4, but the Penguins had been eliminated. So, the game was meaningless for most purposes.

The Whalers were clearly the better team, as even a neophyte like myself could discern. They held a 2-1 lead going into the third period. The home team continued to dominate play, but they could not get the puck past the Penguins’ goalie. At the other end the Penguins only took four shots, but three of them ended up in the net. So, the visitors won 4-2.

Art Slanetz also took Sue and me to a Springfield Indians hockey game. I don’t remember much about it.

Golf: I played a few times with Denise Bessette’s husband Ray and his dad. His dad was even worse at the game than my dad. I just could not afford to play regularly; golf was too expensive.

Television

Spare me Kirstie Alley.

We had cable in Rockville. In the days before bundling it was reasonably priced. I watched a lot of college football, and we watched a few shows in the evening, especially Thursdays. NBC showed Cheers and Frasier. I could not get into Seinfeld.

We also had the Playboy channel for a while. Its productions were awful . One show featured a woman from England. They introduced her with “And now, from across the Pacific …”

In the mornings I sometimes went downstairs to do exercises. I remember two different shows that I watched. One had a different woman leading every day. The other one, Morning Stretch, had only one hostess, Joanie Greggains. One of her favorite sayings was, “Your grew it; you lift it!”

Pets

At some point Puca and Tonto, our tortoise, died. Thereafter the home-made snake cage in the barnboard bookshelves remained empty.

I know that we had guinea pigs in Rockville for at least a couple of years. The last one was an all-white Peruvian that I named Ratso. He loved to be petted, and he whistled whenever I did. Unfortunately, he had a tumor on his belly, and it eventually killed him.

Slippers could win this competition.

Somehow we ended up with a very nice black rabbit named Slippers. That little guy could really leap. He could jump from the floor to the top shelf of the bookshelves, which was more than six feet off of the ground.

Slippers had a bad habit of chewing on electrical cords. I went to a local pet store that had a very knowledgeable proprietor. I waited until she was free. I then approached her to ask what I could use to prevent a bunny from chewing on the cables. She quickly answered, “Nothing.”

Slippers had a stroke, and we brought him to the vet. While we were there he let out a blood-curdling cry—the only sound that we ever heard him make. He was dead. I think that that was the saddest that I had ever felt.

In the summer of 1986 a stray cat that hung around the Elks Club gave birth to a litter of three in the courtyard behind our house. One was mostly white, one was tuxedo-colored, and one was black and white with a black mask like a raccoon’s. The tuxedo-attired one had short hair, perhaps inherited from his father; the other two had long hair. At first we called them Whitey, Blacky, and the Coon Cat. Based on her disposition, we think that Whitey was female; the other two were males. Sue wrote a children’s story about them and read it to Brian and Casey Corcoran.

We did not really plan on having cats as pets, but it did not seem too likely to us that all four of them would be able to survive the winter. We did not want to be responsible for that. So, I embarked on a plan to trap them. I bought some Purina Cat Chow1 and put a bowl of it in the courtyard about ten feet from our kitchen door. Every day I moved the bowl closer to the door. Then I left the door open and put the bowl in the kitchen. The two males came in, but the female was too timid to enter the house.

This photo of Rocky was taken by Sue. It is attached by a magnet to our refrigerator.

When the bowl was well inside the kitchen, and I knew that both male cats had come in to eat, I snuck out the other courtyard door and shut the kitchen door from the outside, thereby trapping them in the kitchen. The Coon Cat, whom we renamed Rocky shortly thereafter, threw himself at the door over and over while Blacky (later named Jake) sat in the corner and calmly assessed the situation.

I bought a litter box and some litter. As soon as they had grown accustomed to being with humans, we took the boys to the vet for their shots and to get them fixed. We kept our two new feline friends in the house all winter. In the spring we saw their mother hanging around the Elks Club, but there was no sign of their sister.

Rocky and Sue in the snow.

In the spring and summer we let Rocky and Jake roam wherever they wanted. When they wanted back in, they would wait patiently in the courtyard for someone to open the door.

In early October of 1987 Rocky did not come home for a couple of days. When he finally came to the door, his face and chest were covered with blood. We took him to the vet. He had a broken jaw. The vet wired it, and they kept him for a few days because we had a weekend planned in Washington (described above). All the staff loved him.

We brought Rocky home. Within twenty-four hours he broke the wire on his jaw. With his eight remaining lives he never looked back and lived for another seventeen years. He was incredibly athletic. I once saw him vault/climb the nine foot stone wall in our front yard in one smooth motion.

Jake was much less sociable than Rocky, but he was nearly as good an athlete. One afternoon while I was napping in the bedroom, I heard a very strange noise just outside of the window. It was the sound of Jake climbing the drain pipe for the rain gutter in hot pursuit of a squirrel that was taunting him from the ledge of the bedroom window. I don’t think that he got that squirrel, but he did figure out how to get down on his own.

Games

D&D: In the first few years after we arrived back in Connecticut, I staged a few dungeons. The best was when the debaters from Wayne State came to visit us as described above.

After that Tom Corcoran was always eager to play. Sue could usually be talked into it. Sue’s sister Betty and some of her friends could occasionally be coerced. We tried to talk a few clients into trying it, but there were no takers.

Patti Corcoran’s favorite game.

Board Games: We played a lot of board games with the Corcorans. We also played fairly often with Sue’s sister Betty. Her favorites were The Farming Game and Broadway. Sue and I occasionally played Backgammon together.

Murder Mysteries: It was easier to get people together for a Murder Mystery party, which became fairly popular in the eighties, than it was to arrange for a D&D adventure. We bought several of these games, which were sold in toy stores. The idea was that everyone was assigned a character and given secret information about the character. Only the murderer was allowed to lie. Then everyone guessed at the end.

We only played a few of these games. The quality was very uneven, as it was with the board games2. In one of them the most important clue was in the very first paragraph of the description of the setting that was read aloud. When we played it, the player who had that character (Ken Owen, introduced here) did a vivid portrayal of his role in that setting. The game was ruined. It was not his fault; he was expected to get into his character; the game was just poorly designed. Another problem was that you could only play each one once.

Camping

I have always loved camping, and when I say camping I mean sleeping on the ground in a tent that one set up for oneself, not sleeping in an RV that has more electrical doodads than a hotel. Sue liked camping, too, but the sleeping on the ground part proved to be too much for her. She bought a fold-up cot with a mattress that was about 2″ thick. That proved to be a pretty good compromise, and that mattress got considerable use after our camping days ended.

On a few occasions we spent a couple of days on our own at Mineral Springs Campground in Stafford Springs, CT. This place had spaces for a lot of trailers. Some people spent every summer there for years. We always stayed in the “primitive” areas, which were just plots set aside for people who eschewed electrical and plumbing hookups in the woods. We set up the tent and scoured the woods for firewood. On some occasions we needed to supplement what we could find with wood purchased from the campground’s store.

This is the headquarters building. There were arcade games and a ballroom inside, as well as a store..

The campground had a headquarters building in and around which all kinds of activities were scheduled. There were also several areas designated for volleyball and other sports. The small swimming pool did not interest me, but I think that Sue took a dip at least once.

Many kids were forced to spend time here, and the operators did their best to give them something entertaining to do while the adults sat around the campfire and drank beer.

I would have preferred something more rustic, but, after all, this was Connecticut. It had been civilized for more than three centuries.

I relished the challenge of creating a hot supper over an open fire. I was quite proud when the result actually tasted like a well-cooked meal. Sue’s favorite part of camping was making s’mores. I can’t say that I ever developed a taste for them. I preferred my graham crackers without the gooey stuff.

In the late eighties Sue talked her nephew, Travis LaPlante, and Brian Corcoran into joining us on camping trips. If she hadn’t, I doubt that either one of them would have ever slept outside.

This is the box that our tent came in. I found it in the basement. I don’t know where the tent itself is.

They were very different kids, but we all had a pretty good time. We played some board or card games together. I don’t remember the specifics, but the two boys enjoyed them. They also enjoyed tramping through the woods looking for firewood. Travis liked playing with the fire itself.

We tried a few other campgrounds after we left Rockville in 1988. Those adventures are detailed here.

Health

Not Jake, but similar.

My health, with one exception, was fine throughout our stay in Rockville. During the winter of 1987-88 we kept our two little buddies, Rocky and Jake inside the house. Therefore, we put out a litter box for them, and they used it.

One day Jake scratched me on the back of my left hand. I took care of the wound, but it would not heal. I ran a very slight fever, and eventually a bubo appeared under my left armpit. I continued working, but I could only concentrate for a couple of hours at a time before I needed to take a nap.

We did not have health insurance, and I had not seen a doctor since my knee healed. However, I knew that I needed medical help. I made an appointment with a doctor whose office was within easy walking distance. He asked me if my vision had been affected, which would have been an indication of toxoplasmosis. I answered that it might have been, but I was not sure. It was not significant. He told me to come to the emergency room at Rockville General Hospital at 9 a.m.

He met me when I arrived, and we skipped the usual ER routine. He lanced my bubo and gave me a week’s worth of antibiotics. As soon as he lanced the bubo I felt much better, but the antibiotics did not solve the problem. A week later he lanced again and gave me a different antibiotic. This was repeated one more time.

As soon as the third antibiotic circulated in my system, the wound healed rapidly, the bubo never formed again, and my fever disappeared. In short, I was cured.

I don’t remember what the doctor billed me for this treatment, but it was extremely reasonable.

Sue’s health problems were more chronic than mine. She had put on some weight in the time that we had been together. By the mid eighties she was having real problems sleeping.

She snored fairly heavily when she did get to sleep, and she would often wake up every few minutes with a start to catch her breath. She went to a doctor. He arranged a sleep study, after which he informed her that she had sleep apnea. I am not exactly sure what the difficulty was, but she got into a dispute with the doctor about something. I told Sue not to worry about the cost, but my efforts did not help the situation. She could be stubborn that way.

A good deal of time passed, and she only got worse. She finally got a CPAP3 machine that was connected to a mask that she wore in bed. She found it uncomfortable, but it did seem to help her sleep.

Unfortunately, I could tell that her mental acuity had deteriorated during this period. Evidently she just was not getting enough oxygen to her brain.

In late 1981 I received a phone call from Vince Follert. I knew him as a friend and fellow coach and teacher at Wayne State, as described here. I also knew that he had been diagnosed with colorectal cancer and had a difficult time with the treatment.

He told me that he had waited to call until he had some good news. This was not the fast-talking, wise-cracking guy that I knew from Detroit. He had obviously been through the wringer. I don’t even remember what the new was. It did not sound that good to me.

He insisted that the cancer had nothing to do with the Diet Pepsi that he chain drank. I did not mention the cigarettes. He seemed to be invested now in the power of positive thinking.

The next call that I got was a few months later. It was from Gerry Cox, not Vince. He told me that Vince had died. I was not surprised.

Effy Slanetz, Sue’s mother, contracted some kind of illness at approximately the same time in 1987 of 1988 that I got scratched by Jake. Her symptoms were similar to mine, and the treatments seemed similar. However, she did not make the instant recovery that I did. Instead, her disease dragged on for years. She never got over it.

Gardening

I got interested in vegetable gardening by watching two television shows on Saturdays. The one that I enjoyed the most was The Joy of Gardening with Dick Raymond. It was sponsored by Garden Way, makers of Troy-Bilt products. The other was Square Foot Gardening, hosted by Mel Bartholomew. He was a little preachier and more disdainful of other approaches.

Both hosts had books promoting their approaches, and I acquired both of them. Dick’s book was filled with lovely color photos. He had fairly instructions about the best way of dealing with each type of vegetable. The production values in Mel’s book were not as high, but he also knew his stuff. Both men argued that vegetables could be planted much more closely to one another than was done by most gardeners.

I did not have much space in the courtyard, and so I used their advice to maximize my yield. The open end of the courtyard was on the south, but the walls on the east and west sides limited the morning and evening sunlight. There was not much I could do about that. I imagined mounting huge mirrors, but I was never that fanatical. Besides, I was cheap

I grew a fairly diverse array of vegetables. I tried to do without pesticides. I used bacillus thuringiensis to thwart cabbage worms. I just picked the horn worms off of the tomatoes. The only insect species for which I resorted to chemical treatments to counter was Mexican bean beetle. These little monsters arrived en masse in early July and they attached so many larvae to the undersides of the beans that I could not keep up with them.

I had the most success with cherry tomatoes and sunflowers. My three cherry tomato plants produced over 250 tomatoes, and the vines were over twelve feet long. The secret for my success, I am convinced, is that I fertilized them with Slippers’ poops.

I also grew one plant indoors over the winter. It was not as big as the ones in the garden, but it produced a reasonably good output until white flies found it. My sunflowers were well over eight feet high, but the birds always harvested them before I did. I didn’t really care.

My onions were pitiful. The bulbs that I harvested were hardly bigger than the sets that I planted in the spring. Mel claimed that you only needed a 4’x4′ patch to grow corn, but I never had much luck. Corn really needs unrestricted access to both the sun and the wind.

Food

We ate at home most of the time. I usually skipped breakfast. I ate a piece of fruit if one was around For lunch I usually ate leftovers or, even sometimes in the summer, some kind of chicken noodle soup. I preferred the Lipton’s version that had “diced white chicken meat”, but I was not picky.

For outdoor grilling we used the hibachi that we brought back from Michigan for a while. Then we upgraded to an inexpensive barbecue grill with wheels from, I think, Caldor’s. It provided a means of regulating the distance between the fire and the grill. I did not understand how anyone could grill successfully without this feature.

We patronized a few local restaurants. Tasty Chick was a very good fried chicken takeout place on Regan Road just off of Route 83. The owners, Michael and Marie McGuire5, often were behind the counter. Michael would sometimes claim that they were almost sold out. All that remained, he explained, were “beaks and toes.”

We also liked to go to the Golden Lucky6 for Chinese food. The ginger chicken wing appetizers were to die for. Once in a while we thought that we could afford to go to J. Copperfield7 for a more elegant dinner and a drink.

Live Performances

Sue and I did not attend many concerts, but in October of 1981 we were among the 40,000+ in attendance at the performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida at the Hartford Civic Center. In some ways it was not really an opera. The singers were all wearing cordless microphones, which is absolutely prohibited in most opera houses. Because of the Civic Center’s poor acoustics, they had to allow this.

The emphasis in this production was on spectacle. “The Grand March” scene included not just dancers, but elephants, camels, and, if I remember correctly, snakes.

Although it has, in my opinion, the best final scene in all of opera, Aida has never been one of my favorites. The producers of this extravaganza spent a half million dollars on the production. There was nothing left to hire top-notch singers. Even so, I think that everyone had a pretty good time. The New York Times sent a reviewer, Theodore W. Libby, Jr. He had a similar opinion, which can be read (for free) here.

The next year they tried to repeat the experience with a production of Turandot, an outstanding opera of imperial China by Giacomo Puccini (finished by Franco Alfano). We didn’t go, and nearly everyone else stayed away, as well. I am embarrassed to report that I had never heard of this opera at the time. If I had been familiar with it, I might have gone. In the ensuing years I have probably listened to it fifty times or more.

Sue and I also attended a few second- or third-tier concerts. I can remember three of them:

Garnet Rogers.
  • Sue and I went to see Livingston Taylor, James Taylor’s brother, perform at a coffee house in Hartford. It was a guy’s name followed by “‘s”, but I cannot remember it. I enjoyed it, but … My friend from U-M Raz (John LaPrelle) went to high school with James Taylor in North Carolina. He never mentioned Livingston, I presume.
  • We also saw Garnet Rogers, the brother of Stan Rogers. Stan’s album Northwest Passage, was one of the very few that I bought during this period. I heard Stan’s music on a show on WWUH radio that featured acoustic music. I still listen to the album on an mp3 player when I go walking.
  • Sue and I went up to the Iron Horse Cafe to hear Donovan. He was one of Sue’s idols when she was a teeny bopper.

In truth I was slightly disappointed by all of these concerts. They weren’t bad, but there was no thrill. By the way, I think that all three of these guys are still alive and performing.

Sue loved (and loves) every type of live music. She probably attended additional concerts with friends or by herself.

1. In the subsequent thirty-five years I have never fed our cats any product other than Purina Cat Chow. None of them has ever had an illness more serious than a hairball. When people tell me that their cats will not eat dried cat food, I always reply, “Maybe not in the first week, but they will eat it.”

2. The quality of some games was so bad that I could not believe that anyone had ever tried to play them before they were marketed. Others were clearly ripoffs of other games that took advantage of a popular movie or television show.

3. Stafford Springs is the least “Yankee” of all New England’s towns. Its principal claim to fame is its speedway. The main street of town is often filled with motorcycles. It feels much more like Kentucky or Tennessee.

4. CPAP stands for continuous positive airways pressure. Sue eventually found a much less intrusive model.

5. The McGuires ran Tasty Chick from 1975-89. It stayed open under separate management until the early twenty-first century. Michael McGuire died in 2021. His obituary is here.

6. The Golden Lucky opened in 1983 and closed in 1988. The sad story is documented here. We never had a bad meal there.

7. J. Copperfield was in business from 1982 to 1996.

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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Back in the Land of Steady Habits. Continue reading →

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.