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1991-2012 TSI: AdDept: The Whiffs

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A few notable failures. Continue reading →

We had a very good record of closing AdDept sales. Most of the whiffs fell into one of two categories:

  1. Divisions of Federated Department Stores. Our relationships with various Federated divisions are described in detail here. They are not included in this entry.
  2. Companies that did not advertise enough to justify a high-quality multi-user centralized database. We actually sold the AdDept system to a couple of these anyway.

TSI’s first efforts to market AdDept were concentrated around New York and New England. I figured that there were not very many retailers who could afford the system to keep track of advertising, but, then again, I did not really expect to justify the cost of the system at Macy’s in the very first module that we activated—ad measurement.

The strip mall in which the Enfield store was located was named after Caldor.

Our first attempt was a quintessential whiff. Kate Behart (much more about her here) had been in contact with someone in the advertising department at Caldor, a discount department store based in Norwalk, CT. Kate arranged for me to give a presentation to them at the IBM office in Norwalk. Of course, we had to make sure that the office had the BASIC program, and I had to install both the AdDept programs and some data that I had dummied up from Macy’s real data.

My presentation was flawless. The only problem that I encountered that day was the lack of an audience. No one from Caldor showed up. We never did find out why not. Kate called them repeatedly, but no one returned her calls. It may have had something to do with the fact that in 1989, the year that we installed the first AdDept system at Macy’s, the May Company sold Caldor to a group of investment houses.

Caldor went out of business in 1999.

I also paid a visit to another local retailer, Davidson and Leventhal, commonly known as D&L. Theirs were not exactly department stores, but they had fairly large stores that sold both men’s and women’s clothing. So, they had quite a few departments. The stores had a good reputation locally. The headquarters was in New Britain, CT.

This D&L ad was on the back cover of the issue of Northeast that featured my story (described here).

The advertising department only employed three or four employees. They wanted to know if they could use the computer for both D&L ads and ads for Weathervane, another store that they owned, as well. That seemed vaguely feasible to me, and so I said they could. In fact, we later did this for Stage Stores and for the Tandy Corporation, but both of those companies were much larger, and I had a much better understanding by then of what it entailed.

I didn’t even write up a proposal for D&L. The person with whom I spoke made it clear that what we were offering was way out of their price range.

D&L went out of business in 1994, only a few years after our meeting. Weathervane lasted until 2005.

I have only a vague recollection of doing a demonstration at IBM’s big facility in Waltham, MA, for a chain of auto parts retailers from Phoenix. The name of the chain at the time was Northern Automotive. My recollection is that I spoke with a man and a woman. If they told me how they heard about AdDept, I don’t remember it. After a very short time it was clear that AdDept was much more than the company needed. Although Northern Automotive had a lot of stores with four different logos, it only ran one ad per week. So there was really not much to keep track of. I had the distinct impression that the demo was just an excuse for the couple to take a vacation in New England on the company’s dime.

I don’t remember either of their names, but the experience list on LinkedIn for a guy named Paul Thompson (posted here) makes him a strong candidate. Northern Automotive changed its name to CSK Auto, Inc. not long after our meeting. In 2008 CSK was purchased by O’Reilly Auto Parts.

Won’t Paul be surprised to be busted thirty years later in an obscure blog?

Tom Moran (more details here) set up an appointment with employees of Genovese Drugs at its headquarters in Melville, NY. The two of us drove to Long Island to meet with them.

I probably should have talked to someone there over the phone before we left. The only impression that I remember getting from the meeting was that they were not at all serious about getting a system. We had a great deal of trouble getting them to describe what the advertising department did at the time and what they wanted to do. I was frustrated because I had considered this a relatively cheap opportunity to learn how chains of pharmacies handled their advertising. It was actually a waste of time and energy.

Tom tried to follow up, but he got nowhere. We did not submit a proposal.

J.C. Penney bought the company in 1998 and rebranded all the stores as Eckerd pharmacies.

Woodies’ flagship store in downtown Washington.

While I was working on the software installation at Hecht’s in 1991, Tom Moran coordinated our attempt to land the other big department store in the Washington, DC, area, Woodward & Lothrop, locally known as Woodies. I found a folder that contains references to correspondence with them. Tom worked with an IBM rep named Allison Volpert1. Our contacts at Woodies were Joel Nichols, the Divisional VP, and Ella Kaszubski, the Production Manager.

As I browsed through the file, I detected a few warning signs. The advertising department was reportedly in the process of asking for capital for digital photography, which was in its (very expensive) infancy in 1991. Tom was told that they hoped to “slip in” AdDept as part of the photography project. Furthermore, the fact that we were not dealing with anyone in the financial area did not bode well.

Someone wrote this book about Woodies.

Finally, we had no choice other than to let IBM propose the hardware. Their method of doing this always led to vastly higher hardware and system software costs than we considered necessary. I found a copy of IBM’s configuration. The bottom line was over $147,000 and another $48,600 for IBM software. This dwarfed what Hecht’s had spent. If the cost of AdDept was added in, they probably were facing a purchase price of over a quarter of a million dollars! That is an awful lot to “slip in”.

I don’t recall the details, but I remember having an elegant lunch during this period with someone from Woodies in the restaurant of the main store. It may have been Joel Nichols. It seemed like a very positive experience to me. He seemed eager to automate the department.

We lost contact with Woodies after early 1992. I seriously doubt that the advertising department even purchased the photography equipment that they had coveted. The early nineties were very bad for retailers. By 1994 the owner of Woodies and the John Wanamaker chain based in Philadelphia declared bankruptcy and then sold the stores to JC Penney and the May Company. Many of the stores were rebranded as Hecht’s or Lord and Taylor.

In some ways Fred Meyer, a chain of department stores based in Portland, OR, seemed like a perfect match for TSI. At the time they were almost unique, and we usually excelled at programming unusual ideas. Their approach to retail included what are now called “hypermarket” (department store plus groceries) stores, although they definitely had some much smaller stores as well. The one in downtown Portland was very small. I really thought that we had a good shot at getting this account, largely due to the fact that the IT department already had one or two AS/400’s. So, the hardware cost would probably be minimal.

She would be lucky to make it in nine hours; there were no direct flights.

I was asked to work with a consultant who, believe it or not, commuted from Buffalo, NY, to Portland, OR. I can’t remember her name. She knew computer systems but virtually nothing about what the advertising department did. She wanted me to tell her what AdDept could do, and she would determine whether the system would work for them. I have always hated it when a “gatekeeper” was placed between me and the users. I understand that they do not trust the users to make a good decision, but advertising is very complicated, and almost no IT consultants know much about it. I would not have minded if the consultant sat in on interviews that I conducted with people in advertising.

If I was allowed to meet with anyone from the scheduling or financial areas of the department, I do not remember it at all. I do remember spending an afternoon with the head of the company’s photography studio. AdDept had a module (that no one used) for managing shoots and another (used by Macy’s East) for managing the merchandise that is loaned to the studio for a shoot.

I remember the photo studio guy mentioning that they also did billable work for outside clients. He mentioned Eddie Bauer by name. He could not believe that I had never heard of it/him.

I probably botched this opportunity. Before agreeing to come out the second time, I should have insisted on meeting with whoever placed their newspaper ads and the person in charge of advertising finance. I did not want to step on the toes of the lady from Buffalo, but I probably should have been more aggressive.

Kate accompanied me on one of these trips. We probably flew on Saturday to save on air fare. On Sunday we drove out to Mt. Hood, where we saw the lodge and the glacier, and visited Multnomah Falls on the way back.

Freddie’s was acquired by Kroger in 1998, but the logos on the stores were maintained. There still is a headquarters in Portland, but I don’t know if ads are still created and/or placed there.

Aside from our dealings with Federated divisions2 TSI had very few whiffs during the period that Doug Pease (described here) worked for us. After one of our mailings Doug received a call from Debra Edwards3, the advertising director at May Ohio, a May Company division that had its headquarters in Cleveland. Doug and I flew Continental non-stop to Cleveland and took the train into downtown. My recollection was that we were able to enter the store from the underground train terminal.

The presentation and the demo went very well. I am quite certain that we would have gotten this account were it not for the fact that in early 1993 the May Company merged the Ohio division with Kaufmann’s in Pittsburgh. Management of the stores was transferred to Pittsburgh. Debra was hired as advertising director at Elder-Beerman Stores.

We stayed overnight in Cleveland and had time to visit the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which was right down the street from the huge May Co. building. I cannot say that I was greatly impressed with the exhibits.

A few years later Doug and I undertook a second trip to Cleveland to visit the headquarters of Sherwin Williams. Doug had talked extensively with the lady who was the advertising director there. He was very enthusiastic about the prospect of making this sale. By that time Doug had already closed a few big deals for us, and so I trusted his judgment. However, I could not understand how a company that really only sold one product could possibly need AdDept. Yes, they have thousands of stores, but how many ads do they run?

I don’t honestly remember anything about our discussion with them. Needless to say, Doug did not close this one, although he never stopped trying to revive it.

I don’t really count it as a whiff, but Doug was unable to close the deal with Liberty House in Honolulu after our epic trip to Hawaii in December of 1995. The details are recounted here.

I drove past two of the stores in Texas, but I never went inside.

Just as Marvin Elbaum had backed out of his contract with TSI for a GrandAd system in 1986 (as described here), so also one company signed an agreement for TSI’s AdDept system and, before we had installed the system, changed its mind. There was one big difference in the two situations. The second company was the Tandy Corporation, which had actually ordered installations of AdDept for all three of its retail divisions. At the last minute the company decided to close down Incredible Universe, one of the three divisions. The other two companies became TSI clients in 1997, as is described here.

It was not a big loss for TSI. IU was one of a kind. Its stores were gigantic multi-story combinations of electronics and theater. There were only seventeen stores, and only six were ever profitable. Those six were sold to Fry’s Electronics. The other eleven were sold to real estate developers at pennies on the dollar.

I did a demo for Mervyn’s California, a department store based in Hayward, CA. I think that I must have done the demo after finishing a training/consulting trip at Macy’s West in San Francisco. I cannot imagine that I would have flown out to the west coast to do a demo without spending a day or two gathering specs.

The IBM office nearest to Hayward was in Oakland. I took BART in the late afternoon from San Francisco to Oakland. There was quite a bit of excitement at the Holiday Inn at which I was staying. Someone had been murdered on the street in front of the hotel the previous night. There was one other very peculiar thing about this stay. I checked into a Holiday Inn with no difficulty, but I checked out of a different hotel (maybe a Ramada?). The hotel had been sold, and its ownership had changed while I was asleep.

The demo went fine. The guy who had contacted me—his name was Thiery or something like that—liked what he saw. However, the sale never advanced any further. This was almost always what happened whenever I got talked into doing a demo without taking at least a day to interview the potential users. At the time that I did the demo Mervyn’s was, unbeknownst to me, owned by Target. This might have explained the lack of progress. Target may have been restricting or rejecting any capital purchases at the time.

Mervyn’s was sold to some vulture capitalists in 2004. A much smaller version of the chain went out of business in 2009.

For some reason Doug and I once had a very short meeting with the president of Gottschalks, a chain of department stores based in Fresno, CA. He told Doug and me that he would get all of the other members of the Frederick Atkins Group to install AdDept. This organization (absolutely never abbreviated by its initials) somehow enabled its members to shop for foreign and domestic merchandise as a group. Nearly every department store that was not owned by the May Company or Federated belonged to it.

A few years after he made this promise he (or someone else at Gottschalks) arranged for me to speak before the members at one of their conventions in Naples, FL. I flew to Fort Meyers and rented a car from there. Naples was beautiful and reeked of new money. I gave my little spiel, but I did not have an opportunity to interact with any of the members of the audience. So, I did not get any direct feedback.

We eventually did sign up a few members of the group—notably the Bon-Ton (described here) and Elder-Beerman (described here). I don’t know whether my speech had any effect.

I think that the Frederick Atkins Group is defunct in 2021. The references to it that I could find on the Internet were all from decades past.

In (I think) 1999 Doug Pease and I made an unproductive trip to Columbus, OH, to talk with the IT director of of Value City about the possibility of installing the AdDept system for use by the advertising department. That adventure is described here.

First stop: Norfolk.

TSI got a phone call from a chain of furniture stores in coastal Virginia, Norfolk4, as I recall. As part of my crazy automotive support trip, I stopped by to talk with the advertising director at this company on my journey from Home Quarters Warehouse in Virginia Beach to Hecht’s in Arlington. I spent a couple of hours with him. When I discovered that the company had only three stores, I knew that this was a mistake. I told him that our software could address his problems, but the cost and effort would not be worth it for either of us. I advised him to hire someone who was a wiz with spreadsheets.

I think that I got a free cup of coffee out of it.

I can’t tell you what happened to the company thereafter because I don’t even remember its name.

We had two reasonably hot leads in 2000. I had to handle both of them myself. The first was at Bealls department store, which has its headquarters in Bradenton, FL. This was another situation is which I had to deal with the IT department rather than the advertising department. I am pretty sure that the company already had at least one AS/400. I have a few notes from this trip, but it is not clear whether I intended to do the demo on their system or on one at a nearby IBM office.

In any case I think that there was a technical problem that prevented a successful installation of the software needed for the demo. So, I had to improvise, and I did not get to spend much time with the people who would have benefited from the system. The whole thing made me very depressed.

I had some free time, and so I went to the beach. I stopped at a Jacobson’s store to buy a tee shirt to wear at the beach. The cheapest tee shirts in the store cost $100!

The beach was lovely, and it was unbelievably empty. The weather was pretty nice. A beach in Connecticut would have been packed in this type of weather.

All of these stores are gone.

We did not get the account, but the tale has an interesting coda. Bealls is still in business today. For years Bealls could not expand outside of the state of Florida because a different store with exactly the same name was already using it in other states. These Bealls stores were run by Stage Stores, a long-time AdDept client that was based in Houston. Stage Stores was still using AdDept when TSI went out of business in 2014.

In 2019 Stage announced that it was changing all of its stores into Gordmans, its off-price logo (which did not exist while I was working with them). When the company declared bankruptcy Bealls purchased, among other things, the right to use the Bealls name nationwide.

I remember going to Barneys New York in late 2000 to talk with someone in advertising. I also have discovered three emails that I sent to Christine Carter, who was, I think, either in charge of the advertising department or in charge of the financial side. Barneys only had twenty-two stores, and that included some off-price outlets. I don’t know how much they actually advertised.

Flagship store on 60th Street.

We never heard from them after my last email, which emphasized how easily AdDept could be adapted to differing needs even for companies the size of Barneys. By this time the very affordable AS/400 model 150 had been introduced. It would have been perfect for them.

I think that Barneys is dead or nearly so in 2021. All of the stores in the U.S have been closed, and even the “Barneys New York” brand was sold to Saks Fifth Avenue. However, the company also had a Japan division, which is evidently still operational.

I received a very unexpected phone some time in 2001 or 2002. It came from a man who had formerly worked at Saks Fifth Avenue and had taken a job as a Vice President at Sears. He knew that the advertising department at Saks had been doing things with its AdDept system that Sears’ advertising department seemed utterly incapable of. He invited me to the Sears headquarters in Hoffman Estates, IL, to investigate the possibility of installing AdDept at Sears.

At about the same time I had been in contact with the agency in a nearby town that Sears used for buying newspaper space and negotiating newspaper contracts. They wanted to talk with me about the possibility of working together. The agency’s name was three initials. I think that one was an N, but I am not sure.5

I arranged to spend consecutive days at the two places. It was cold on the day that I visited the agency. I learned that it recruited new clients by claiming that they could negotiate better rates for them because they also represented Sears. I suspected that this was baloney. Sears was a bid dog nationwide, but the amount of newspaper ads that they bought in any individual market was not that impressive. They were just in a lot of markets.

After the people explained the services that they offered to clients, I remarked that about 10 percent of what they did overlapped with about 10 percent of what we did. Privately I could not imagine that any of our clients who would benefit from their services.

I told them about AxN, our Internet product. They informed me that the papers did not want to sign on to their website for insertion orders. Of course, they wouldn’t, and they had nothing to hold over the papers.

We ended the meeting with the usual agreement to stay in touch and look for synergies, but privately I considered them the enemy.

I did not see a parking structure. Maybe I entered on the wrong side of the pond.

The next day was bitterly cold, and there was a strong wind. I located the sprawling Sears complex and parked my rented car in a lot that was already nearly full. I had to walk a long way to the main building, and I have never felt as cold as I did on that walk.

I could hardly believe it when I walked into the building. The ground floor was billed with retail establishments—a drug store, a coffee shop, a barber shop, and many more. I had to take the escalator up to get to Sears. I was met there by the woman with whom I had been in contact. She was from the IT department.

OK, now I get it. Our problem was that we did not have enough architects.

She took me up to meet the “advertising team”. Six or eight people were assembled in the room, and they all had assigned roles. I remember that one was the “system architect”, and one was the “database manager”. I almost could not suppress my amusement. What did all these people do? There was no system, and there certainly was no database. At TSI I handled essentially all the roles that everyone at the table described.

They asked me some questions about the AdDept system. When I told them that it ran on the AS/400, the system architect asked me if that system was not considered obsolete. I scoffed at this notion and explained that IBM had introduced in the AS/400 64-bit RISC processors that were state-of-the-art. I also said that, as far as I knew, the AS/400 was the only system that was build on top of a relational database. That made it perfect for what AdDept did.

I wonder how many “OS/2 shops” there were in the world.

They informed me that Sears was an OS/26 shop. I did not know that there was such a thing. In the real world Windows had already left OS/2 in its dust by that time. In all my time dealing with retailers I never heard anyone else even mention OS/2. It might have been a great idea, but IBM never did a good job of positioning it against Windows.

Besides, just because the corporation endorsed OS/2 should not eliminate consideration of multi-user relational databases where appropriate. The devices with OS/2 could serve as clients.

They explained to me that Sears’ advertising department had hundreds of employees, most of whom served as liaisons with the merchandise managers. Most of the ads were placed by agencies. I presume that the newspaper ads were produced in-house. No one whom I talked with seemed to know. The people on the committee did not seem to know anything about how the department did budgeting or planning.

The competition.

Someone talked about Sears’ competitors. The example cited was Home Depot. I don’t know why this surprised me. I must have been taken in by the “softer side of Sears” campaign a few years earlier.

After the meeting my escort took me to a remarkable room that was dedicated to the advertising project. It was a small theater that had ten or so posters on the wall with big Roman numerals at the top: I, II, III, IV, etc. There were no statues, but otherwise I was immediately struck by the resemblance to the Stations of the Cross that can be found in almost any Catholic church in the world. I asked what the posters represented. The answer was that they were the “phases of the project”. I was stunned by the assumption that the project required “a team” and that it was or indefinite duration. No one ever allowed us more than a month or two to have at least portions of the system up and running.

At some point I was allowed to give my presentation. The man who had worked at Saks attended along with a fairly large number of people. Maybe some were from advertising. I was never allowed to speak with them individually.

I never got to read the advertising department’s Wish Book.

My talk explained that AdDept was a relational database that was specifically designed for retail advertising departments. I described a few of the things for which it had been used by other retailers. I could not do much more than that. I had not been able to talk with any of the people in the department, and the IT people were clearly clueless.

When I returned to Connecticut I wrote to both my escort and the man from Saks. I told both of them that I did not know what the next step might be. I had not been given enough access to the advertising department to make a proposal. The whole experience was surreal. If someone had asked me to return, I would only have done it if I were granted unfettered access to potential users.

No one ever contacted us. I told Doug not to bother following up.

One puzzling whiff occurred during the very short period in which Jim Lowe worked for us. The strange case of Wherehouse Music is explored here.

Perhaps the strangest telephone call from a genuine prospect that I ever received was from Albertsons, a very large retailer with is its headquarters in Boise Idaho. The person who called was (or at least claimed to be) the advertising director there.

I had heard of Albertsons, but I did not know very much about the company. All I knew was that they were a chain of grocery stores in the west. Since advertising for grocery stores is basically limited to one insert/polybag7 per week, they had never seemed to be great prospects for AdDept. However, I never hung up on someone who expressed interest in the system.

The problem was that this lady insisted that I fly out to Boise to meet with her and her crew the next day. I tried to get her to explain what the situation was, but she said that she had no time to talk. She needed to know if I would make the trip. It was a little tempting for a peculiar reason. Idaho was one of the few states8 that I had never visited. Still, this sounded awfully fishy. I passed.

The incredibly bumpy road that Albertsons has traveled is documented on its Wikipedia page, which is available here. I don’t remember when the call from the advertising director came. I therefore have no way of knowing whether she was in charge of advertising for a region, a division, all of the grocery stores, or none of those. I might well have passed up an opportunity that might have extended the life of the company. Who knows? It looked like a goose, and it honked like a goose, but maybe going to Boise would not have been a wild goose chase.

Jeff Netzer, with whom I had worked in the nineties at Neiman Marcus (recounted here), called me one day in 2010. He asked me if I remembered him. I said that I did; he was the Aggie who worked at Neiman’s.

He informed me that he was now working at Sewell Automotive, the largest Cadillac dealership in the Dallas area. He said that they were looking for help in automating their marketing. I was not sure how well AdDept would work in that environment, but I agreed to visit them. His boss promised to buy me a steak dinner.

I flew Southwest to Dallas, and for the first time my plane landed at Love Field. It was much closer to Sewell than DFW would have been.

I found a great deal out about their operation. I doubted that we could do much for the agency for a reasonable amount of money. On my computer I recently found a three-page document dated September 23, 2010, in which I had listed all of the issues that I learned about at Sewell. A woman named Tucker Pressly entered all of their expense invoices into a SQL Server database. It was inefficient, and there were no programs to help them compare with budgets.

The main objective of the marketing department was to make sure that they were taking advantage of all available co-op dollars from Cadillac and other vendors. We could not help with this unless we wrote a new module. I described my reactions to their issues in a letter to Jeff.

I never heard back from Jeff, who left Sewell in 2012. Nobody ever bought me a steak dinner.

Sewell Automotive is still thriving in 2021.

In 2011 or 2012 I received a phone call from a lady from the advertising department at Shopko, a chain of department stores based in Green Bay, WI. I don’t recall her name. She said that she worked for Jack Mullen, whom I knew very well from both Elder-Beerman and Kaufmann’s. Before Doug Pease came to TSI, he had worked for Jack at G. Fox in Hartford.

I flew out to Packer Land to meet with her. They had a very small advertising department. They basically ran circulars in local newspapers on a weekly basis. As I remember, she and one other person ran the business office.

I worked up a proposal for the most minimal AdDept system that I could come up with and sent it to her. When I had not heard from her after a few weeks I called her. She said that the company was downsizing and, in fact, her position was being eliminated.

Jack also left the company in July of 2012. His LinkedIn page is here. Shopko went out of business in 2019.

1. Allison Volpert apparently still works for IBM in 2021. Her LinkedIn page is here.

2. As I write this I can easily visualize Doug stabbing a box with a pencil after a frustrating telephone conversation with someone from a Federated division.

3. I worked fairly closely with Debra Edwards when I installed the AdDept system at Elder-Beerman stores in Dayton, OH. That installation is described here. She was the Advertising Director there. Her LinkedIn page is here.

4. The “l” in Norfolk is silent, and the “ol” sounds much more like a short u.

5. I later learned that there were actually two affiliated agencies across the street from one another. I encountered the other one, SPM, in my dealings with Proffitt’s Inc./Saks Inc., which are detailed here. The agency was still around in 2023. Its webpage is here.

6. In fact IBM stopped updating OS/2 in 2001 and stopped supporting the operating system in 2006. I cannot imagine how Sears dealt with this. I pity their employees with nothing OS/2 experience at Sears on their résumés.

7. Polybags are the plastic bags that hold a group of flyers from diverse retailers. they are ordinarily distributed to people willy-nilly.

8. The others are Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, and Alaska. I am not certain of Arkansas. I might have gone there with my grandparents when I was a youngster. The only place that I have been in Utah is the Salt Lake City airport.

1996-2006 TSI: AdDept Client: Robinsons-May

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May Co. department stores based in North Hollywood, CA. Continue reading →

Robinsons-May was a chain of departments stores owned by the May Company. Its headquarters was in North Hollywood, CA. Most of its stores were in southern California, but eventually the advertising department in NoHo bought space and time for stores with various logos throughout the western states.

Rob-May’s headquarters was in the upper floors of this department store. It had the largest parking lot I had ever seen for one store, much more than needed.

TSI never pitched the AdDept system to the store’s advertising department. In 1996 the May Company decided to install AdDept in the department store divisions that were not already using it—Robinsons-May, Meier & Frank, Kaufmann’s, and Filene’s.These installations were quite different from the other systems that TSI had installed at May Co. divisions. They began with three days of rather intense sessions in TSI’s office in Enfield while the hardware was on order from IBM. We were teaching them about the system design of AdDept, and they were informing us about their policies and expectations for the system.

I later learned that the Northridge earthquake of 1994 had demolished the rest of the 25-acre Laurel Plaza, but Rob-May’s headquarters survived.

Previous May Co. installations had begun with a site visit in which I had learned about each department’s business procedures and priorities. TSI then presented a formal proposal for the base system and any custom code that I thought was needed. Only after the system had been delivered and installed did we provide training, and it always took place at the company’s location.

At some point in 1998 a group of people from Rob-May visited TSI’s office for orientation and training. Those sessions were also attended by people who would be involved with the installation at Meier & Frank (described here). Robert Myers, with whom we worked in the AdDept installation in the advertising department of the Foley’s division (described here), also was there to provide the perspective of a user of the system.

I found several photos that I snapped on the occasion of their visit as well as a dozen or so that I took in California. I also found text files containing notes from 1999-2003 that helped me remember some of the details of the installation and other happenings in my trips to southern California.

Rob-May’s training visit at TSI: The training sessions were held in what was ordinarily my office. All of my stuff was moved out. Everyone sat around tables, one of which I ordinarily used for a desk. Training booklets were provided for everyone. The photo to the lett was of one of the first sessions, in which Sandy Sant’Angelo (pink shirt on the right) showed the visitors how to sign on to the AS/400 and how the AdDept screens basically worked. Yes, we were still using “green screens”. We occasionally fielded complaints about them, but seldom from the people who actually used them.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is MF_Table-1024x679.jpg

The photo on the right was taken after one of the training days in Enfield. On the last evening we all went to the Mill on the River restaurant, but I think that this photo might have been taken at a different place.

Robert Myers was seated next to me. In the photo he is on the far right. The other two people on his side of the table were Rusty Hansen1, the Planning Manager in the Rob-May advertising department and Beverly Curtis-Frethy2, the Controller. Across from Rusty was Doug Pease, TSI’s VP of Marketing. I don’t recall the name of the fellow across from Beverly. He might have been in charge of the department’s network. The other three people in the photo were from M&F.

Rusty Hansen was our primary liaison with Rob-May in the critical first few years.

The installation trip: The first of many enjoyable trips to Rob-May occurred a few weeks after the training session in Enfield. Doug and I flew to Los Angeles. from Hartford. We probably changed planes in Chicago. In those days I liked to fly on American Airlines because I could get frequent flyer miles both from the airline and from Avis for rental cars.

On those early trips I usually stayed at the Beverly Garland Holiday Inn3 in the Studio City neighborhood of North Hollywood, but I am pretty certain that Doug and I were advised to stay at the Sheraton in Studio City on the first trip to set up the AdDept system. I found a photo that I took of its entrnce

Robert was also present for at least part of this to provide another user’s perspective and to assist where he could. .

Rob-May treated us to meals with key employees more than once on that first trip and at least once on every subsequent trip. The smiling guy on the right across from Beverly (red coat) was Mario, the Direct Mail Manager. His last name was nowhere in my notes.

The main purpose of the visit was to install the AdDept software in the AS/400 that IBM had delivered. I did all of that myself. The secondary purpose was to make sure that a regimen had been set up whereby the tables that the system needed—newspapers and other vendors, selling departments, the organizational structure for the merchandise, employees, etc. I also needed to show Rusty how to set up user profiles both for the AS/400 and for AdDept and how to deal with the printers and errors reported by the system. Finally Doug and I needed to talk to the managers of the various areas of the advertising department to try to discover special needs and any procedures that were unique to Rob-May. For example, invoices from the Los Angeles Times were recorded in a general ledger account that was different from the one used for all of the other newspapers.

Beverly, Karen, and Robert at Karen’s favorite restaurant in Beverly Hills. Where was Doug?

Finally, and perhaps, most importantly, we got to meet Karen Jones, the Advertising Director. She provided us with insight as to the department’s highest priorities. Karen and I hit it off very well right from the start. She was (unduly) impressed by an analogy that I made: “Memory is to disk as electricity is to magnetism. If you lose power, the system loses what is in memory but retains what is stored magnetically on the disk.”

In retrospect this does not seem like a great pickup line to me, but she definitely became enamored of me and treated me royally whenever I visited Rob-May. I once casually mentioned to some employees at Rob-May that “Karen Jones loves me.” Everyone agreed. I did not think that we made good headway in the first year or two, but Karen always seemed to think that I could do anything.

Sonia.

My goal from the first trip was for the software for one of the media (newspaper, direct mail, or broadcast) produce something useful. It was very important that the system not be regarded as on that they fed a lot of information but got little in return.

As I usually did, I concentrated on printing a schedule for their newspaper advertising and the faxing to some papers of a set of insertion orders. To that end I worked closely with Sonia Ban. I think that there was still work needed on the schedule when I left, but we did manage to send some faxed insertion orders to newspapers, and they were impressed by that.

My home for the week.
View from the courtyard of the BG Hotel.

The new system: For various reasons the people in the IT Department of the May Co. decided that Rob-May’s system should be upgraded in 1999. The original system had been purchased from and installed by IBM. The new system was a model 270, and it was purchased from Savoir Technology Group, a company that was authorized to sell IBM midrange systems. I flew out to Robinsons-May to complete the process by installing the AdDept software on the 270 and migrating the data.

I still have the notes that I sent back to TSI about this trip. At the time American Airlines had a direct flight from Bradley International to LAX. I flew out on a Sunday morning and arrived early enough (gaining three hours) that I could pick up my rental car at Avis, drive to Malibu, the home of my icon, Jim Rockford, and spend some time at the beach.

I went to Topanga State Beach, which is in Malibu. It was pretty nice but cool. I don’t think that it even reached 80 degrees today, and there was a fairly strong breeze from the north. I made a little camp. I lay on my beach towel, listened to my CD’s, finished my Ethan Coen book4, and watched the surfers and the rest of the California scenery. I took a long walk all the way up and down the beach. I got a lot of sun. I think I am as dark now as my last day in Hawaii5. If I had stayed any longer, I would have been sunburned.

I think this was the first time since Hawaii that I have just goofed off during the day for more than an hour.

Incidentally, Malibu is where Jim Rockford parked his trailer on the beach. The Rockford Files is by far my favorite TV show ever. I looked for the trailer, but I didn’t find it6.

Valley Village Park is the green area in the middle. NoHo West is the new name of Laurel Plaza. I usually drove on the 101. The exit went right into Rob-May’s parking lot.

What I discovered on Monday did not meet my expectations. I had started the day at dawn by driving my rental car from the Beverly Garland Hotel to the park that was halfway to Rob-May to get my five mile run in. Then I returned to the hotel, showered, got dressed, ate breakfast, and drove to Rob-May. The following excerpt provides a glimpse into what it was like to be a cowboy coder at the turn of the century.

I expected the system to be set up and the TCP/IP connection established. I figured that I would install AdDept and BASIC. I would also migrate the user profiles and the data libraries from the old box. Instead, I found that the system was still in the box. I had to set it up using the instructions in the box. This went OK. However, when I got to the point at which I had to do a system save, it balked and said that QGPL and QUSRSYS were not installed. I had Rusty look through his boxes to see if he had system software. He did. I spent many hours installing the operating system and PTF’s. I kicked off the system save just before I left.

I don’t suppose there is any great harm. Everyone will have to use the old system tomorrow. Their connectivity consultant is coming in tomorrow. I hope he will be able to tell me how to do the TCP/IP connection.

Keep in mind that I was not (and am not) an engineer. Far from it. I am not good at this type of thing. I am good at designing systems and writing code. Things were still FUBB on Wednesday evening, when I wrote the following.

The problems we had here were cabling. They decided to run the new system on Ethernet rather than Token Ring, which meant that they had to change the hub into which they were plugged. The IT guy had no empty sockets. He unplugged something he thought was unimportant. It brought down the e-mail system. Before he found this out he was out putting out a fire somewhere else. People had a hard time chasing him down.

I don’t know if I got blamed by anyone for the company’s lack of email that day, but it would not surprise me. The dispatch I sent on Friday at least contained some good news.

Yesterday went much better. Their new system is now almost completely functional. I still spent most of the time putting out small fires. I ran CMPPFM last night for every member of QBASSRC to see if I can find any more changes that the black box was missing. Robinson’s new system is incredibly fast. Reports that took over half an hour run in one minute.

I figured out how to copy the system directory entries over to the new box. I had to copy a bunch of files from QUSRSYS that start with QAOKP.

I copied ADDEPT, QGPL, and QUSRSYS from the old machine to the new one and named them ADDEPTOLD, OLDQGPL, and OLDQUSRSYS. Last night I ran the source comparison program on QBASSRC in ADDEPT. I printed out the differences and was surprised at how many there were. I then realized that the old box was a week ahead of the 150 at TSI. I thought for sure that I checked this. I created a change library but there was no time to install it. I will have to do it after hours. This cut down on the number of differences, but there is still be a pretty good number. There must be a flaw in my updating routine.

By Thursday evening Rob-May had successfully used the system for one full day. I left fairly confident that the people in TSI’s office could deal with any remaining glitches. However, one of the last notes that I sent back to the office was prescient.

These guys need a lot of training. Most of them do not know what an error is and what to do about it. Rusty just kind of lets them go on their own, even the ones that he works with.

I flew back on Friday. It was an excruciating experience. Seven and a half hours after I left the hotel I was still in LAX! I wrote the following when we had finally boarded.

LAX, which is my least favorite airport in the country, was playing some kind of shrieking sound over the intercom the last 20 minutes that we were there. I was afraid I would miss an announcement, so I had put my CD player and headphones away. A couple to my left has not one but two babies. They paid for two tickets, but were using two rows! After they made us get off7, the situation became so ridiculous that I took it easier. This lasted until about ten minutes ago when the stewardess whacked my elbow, which was not sticking out at all. At the time it was about 40 degrees in the cabin. After takeoff it went up to about 90. Now it is dropping again.

The new team: The turn of the century brought a lot of changeover among the employees at Rob-May with whom TSI dealt. My notes said that when I came to install the new box, Karen Elmo had been replaced by Heidi Houghton. I have a vague recollection of Karen Elmo, but none of Heidi. The notes also report that I worked with the Co-op Coordinator, Doyle O’Dell, who asked for a report of committed co-op v. actual. I was able to show report #DM594 to him. I took a photo of him; he evidently was happy with the report.

Mary Ng at Rob-May.

The biggest changes happened in 2000. Rusty Hansen was replaced by Mary Ng8, and Beverly Curtis Fethy’s replacement was Steve Ornee9. Mary was the new liaison with TSI, and we worked closely together for several years. Chad Sesser’s title was Newspaper Analyst. He reported to Karen Jones.

The notes that I have from the three-day trip in October of 2000 show that Mary was very direct about what she wanted from AdDept.

Direct mail was on the menu for lunch in the Rob-May cafeteria with (I think) Kyle Levine11, Mary, and Dan Rothbauer12, the Direct Mail Manager.

Mary said that their objectives are to do all of direct mail on AdDept, to pay all invoices on AdDept and to upload them to CAPS10, to use AdDept for closing, and to use AdDept for planning. This was way too much to cover in three days. Even with three days I was barely able to gather enough information to put together a game plan.

They wanted to know which division they should visit if they wanted to see how to use AdDept for direct mail. I recommended Kaufmann’s. Lord & Taylor uses AdDept extensively for direct mail, but they do not use our cost accounting for closing of direct mail.

Chad is on the left. I don’t remember the fellow with whom he was talking.

I also spent quite a bit of time with Chad Sesser. He told us that he had already downloaded sales from the mainframe at least once. He did not remember how he had done it, but he knew the name of the person in their Information Services department who had helped him.

On the last evening Karen Jones again sprang for supper at the restaurant in Beverly Hills. I might have gotten lost crossing the hills; I distinctly remember that I did on one occasion.

At the restaurant I noticed a blonde woman who was much more buxom than Ellie Mae Clampett. She was sitting with some other people a few tables away from the group from Rob-May. The most astounding thing to me was that for all of the time that we were there—which must have been at least ninety minutes—she was talking on her cellphone while paying scant attention to anyone at her table.

I should mention that I did not have a cellphone in 2003, and the people who talked on them loudly in airports bothered me a lot. I could not imagine anyone answering a phone in a restaurant, much less talking for an extended period. It seemed unimaginably rude to me, but I realized that I was partaking of a totally different culture in Milburn Drysdale’s town.

The projects: TSI did quite a bit of custom coding for Robinsons-May. We also helped them to integrate the data from M&F when the responsibility for managing the stores previously in that division was transferred to North Hollywood. Fortunately, their 270 was easily up to this task. I did not need to travel to California to install another upgrade.

Rob-May had two types of ads that I had never heard of: TMC’s and PWP’s. TMC stands for “total market coverage”. On certain days of the week or on special occasions some newspapers delivered a greatly reduced version of their paper to all households in an area that did not subscribe to the paper. If the same ad (ROP or insert) was run in the regular edition and this reduced edition, it had a higher rate because more eyeballs would see it.

I don’t remember what a PWP was, but I think that the concept was similar. Newspapers were desperate to retain the same level of revenue even as their circulations shrank in the twenty-first century.

My first visit to Rob-May after Mary Ng’s arrival triggered a very large number of fixes (changed for free) and requests for changes (quoted). This was definitely good news in that they were finally interested in taking full advantage of the system. On the other hand, it meant more pressure on the programming staff to produce what Rob-May—and other clients—needed in a reasonable amount of time.

The programming that was most valuable from TSI’s perspective was constructing an interface with another system. In some cases AdDept was the sending system; in others it was the receiver. Our expense invoice entry and claims system had the ability to feed the corresponding corporate accounting system (CAPS). Several changes had to be made to this module to accommodate peculiarities at Rob-May.

Our sales analysis and productivity programs used tables that were fed by the corporate sales system. Most of the May Co. divisions used the same ad agency (Doner) for broadcast. The agency sent a file to Rob-May. The departmental employees ran a program that TSI provided to update the broadcast section of the schedule in AdDept.

The last item on my notes from the trip in April of 2003 reported:

I spent ten minutes talking with Chad, Bobby McIntosh14, and the QPS programmer about the interface that they want to create. Nothing came of it.

Chad said that he will write up the details of what they would like the QPS interface to do. We can then quote it. The problem that he could not handle with query is how to treat sections. QPS has a job for each page, but the media schedule is on the book.

Bobby McIntosh was the Manager of Advertising Systems. The advertising production area used the Quark Publishing System (QPS) to manage the workflow of some of their direct mail catalogs and newspaper ads. I do not remember this meeting described above at all. If we were to undertake an interface like this, it would have been a massive job that would have taken at least several months. Therefore, I don’t think that we ever got to the point quoting construction of the interface.

My adventures in southern California: North Hollywood is best known for the unbelievable attempted bank robbery in 1997 at a Bank of America branch that was only a mile or so north of the Rob-May headquarters. The two robbers wore home-made body armor and bore much better weapons than the police. Foiled in their escape, they shot it out with the lawmen for an extended period of time. They were eventually killed, but not before the two sides discharged roughly two thousand bullets. Twelve police officers and eight civilians were wounded, but no one besides the perpetrators died.

A slightly fictionalized made-for-TV movie about the incident aired in 2003. No one from Rob-May ever mentioned it in my presence. If I had not seen the movie, I probably never would have known about it.

The LAPD Museum has an exhibit that features the perpetrators, their weapons, and their body armor. Because it was not opened until 2007, I never went there. By then Macy’s had taken over the May Co., and Rob-May was no longer a client.

OK, there was a little fire damage.

The most interesting thing that I saw in North Hollywood was an apartment building that had a large sign on it offering “Free Rent”. I took a photo of it from my rental car.

At the time TSI was actively looking for a new site for our office. I sent an email to Denise Bessette, who ran the office when I was out of town, about it. I suggested that we move our operation to North Hollywood in order to take advantage of this opportunity. If we had rented a handful of apartments, we would have had plenty of room to grow our business. For some reason she did not urge me to sign a $0 lease while I was in the vicinity.

One evening I decided to take a drive into Hollywood itself. I arrived at the corner of North Highland Ave. and Hollywood Blvd., where I saw a throng of people around the Ripley’s Believe it or not. The whole neighborhood was incredibly touristy. I did not even park my car. I drove back to my hotel in Studio City as quickly as I could.

For my last few trips to Rob-May I abandoned Beverly Garland and drove a little farther north to stay at a Hampton Inn. I did this for a couple of reasons. I had found that I liked Hampton Inns better than other hotels. I had an American Express card that I used for stays at Hamptons and other Hilton hotels. This paid off in free stays, which I used either for business trips or vacations.

I also was not enamored with the neighborhood in Studio City. I only found one place to run, and it was a little boring. I had to make several circuits of the path in the park, and the scenery no longer interested me. The biggest factor, however, was food. I had not been able to find many places that served tasty and healthy meals and also could be used—takeout or sit down—comfortably by a lone diner. My notes of July 1999 reported:

I had trouble finding affordable edible food in California. I ended up eating twice at Koo Koo Roo15, which has vegetables. The problem is that the only main courses they serve are rotisserie chicken and ¼ pound of turkey. I had the chicken both times.

The closest Hampton Inn was in Santa Clarita. The drive did not bother me much. The inconvenience was more than offset by the free breakfasts and occasional free snack in the evening. It was close to a large suburban shopping center. I don’t remember exactly where I ate, but I had no problem finding what suitable restaurants.

The best aspect of staying in Santa Clarita was that I discovered a really interesting trail in Quigley Canyon, a park that is very close to Gene Autry’s Melody Ranch. I really enjoyed running through the hills in the park. I had to climb a fairly steep incline to reach the trail that ran along a ridge. A sign at the trailhead warned about snakes and mountain lions, but I never encountered any wildlife while I was running.

Departure: I almost always flew back to Connecticut on a red-eye flight. I would leave LAX at 9 p.m. or later, arrive somewhere on the eastern side of the Mississippi at dawn or earlier, change planes, and then catch another flight to Bradley.

I always filled the gas tank before returning the car to Avis. I once made the mistake of stopping at a gas station in south-central L.A., an area that was close enough to LAX that the gas gauge would appear full. It was past sundown, and the place was not well lit. This was one of the very few times in my life that I felt afraid. I had lived for over three years in inner-city Detroit, but this area was fairly notorious because of the Rodney King incident.

What was scary about this gas station was that a few young men were walking around and approaching customers who were pumping gas. One came up to me and asked me something. I made some kind of noncommittal reply. He was annoyed with my response, but he did not do anything. I got back in my car and returned to the highway with deliberate speed.

On another occasion Karen Jones took me and a group of employees to a restaurant that was in either Burbank or Pasadena. I had my car, and after supper someone outlined for me how to get to LAX. Everyone assured me that I had plenty of time to make my flight. I probably did, but I made a wrong turn somewhere, and by the time that I arrived at the Avis counter, I was really pressed for time.

This was the first and only time that it took a long time to check my car back in at an Avis location. In every other instance no more than five minutes was required. However, this time there was a long line that moved very slowly. By the time that I returned the car and boarded the Avis bus, there was little chance of arriving at the gate in time for my overnight flight on Delta16 to Hartford by way of Atlanta.

When the bus let me off at the terminal I rushed up to the Delta desk with my suitcase. The agent confirmed that I had missed my flight. She then calmly booked me on a different flight that went to Bradley through Cincinnati and was leaving within the hour. I was not charged anything extra for this change, and I arrived in Connecticut less than a half hour later than my scheduled arrival time.

Epilogue: Rob-May used the AdDept system until 2005 or 2006 after the May Co. was purchased by Macy’s. On August 30, 2005, administration of the stores was transferred to another AdDept client, Macy’s West in San Francisco. The history of the installation at Macy’s West is detailed here.

The store in North Hollywood was turned into a Macy’s. It and its oversized parking lot stayed open until October of 2016. The entire acreage is still, six years later, in the process of being transformed into a mixed-use area renamed NoHo West. The retail part of the project evidently suffered from the emergence of the pandemic. A directory map can be found here.

An aerial photo of NoHo West taken in 2019, at which time it was described as “fully framed”.

1. Rusty Hansen does not seem to have an Internet presence in 2022, but I did receive a phone call from him once after he left Rob-May in 2000. Jim Lowe, TSI’s marketing person, and I later talked with him briefly at his new place of employment, Wherehouse Music in Torrance. That experience has been recounted here.

2. Beverly Curtis-Frethy left Rob-May in December of 1999. Her LinkedIn page is here.

3. Beverly Garland was an actress in Hollywood. Among many other roles she was Fred McMurray’s wife in the last few years of My Three Sons. She died in 2008, but her hotel still is thriving in 2022, and it is still a Holiday Inn.

4. I don’t remember reading a book by Ethan Coen. Since my notes did not mention the name or describe the plot, it might have been Gates of Eden, a book of short stories published in 1998.

5. This refers to the trip that Sue, Doug, and I took in 1995 to pitch the AdDept system to Liberty House. The description begins here and continues in two subsequent blog entries.

6. I am almost positive that I have seen every episode of The Rockford Files several times. The only bad one is the first one, the pilot, which had a different Rocky and was too much like Philip Marlow. Rockford lived at 29 Cove Road in Paradise Cove in Malibu. The beach that I went to was approximately twelve miles east of Paradise Cove.

At some point on one of my trips I took a late evening photo of the Los Angeles River. It is posted at the right. The river bed was concrete, and the trickle of water that it contained was laughable.

I could swear that back in the seventies I saw on an episode of The Rockford Files a chase scene that took place in the river itself. However, when I watched all of the episodes again (and again) in the twenty-first century first on MyTV and then on Peacock, I never saw such a scene. The show was recently removed from Peacock. I may never know for certain about that chase scene.

7. There was some kind of hydraulic leak that forced us to leave our scheduled plane and board a different one.

Mary Ng.

8. Mary Ng worked at Rob-May until 2005. Her Linked-In page is here.

9. Steve Ornee was employed at Rob-May until 2006. His Linked-In page is here.

10. CAPS was the mainframe corporate accounting system. It was located in St. Louis.

Kyle.

11. Kyle Levine worked at Rob-May until 2004. His LinkedIn page is here.

Dan.

12. Dan Rothbauer did not leave Rob-May until 2006. His LinkedIn page is here.

13. I still hate cellphones in 2022. While sitting in my right front pants pocket my first “smart phone” ordered pizzas on its own. I did not mourn when it somehow got fried by European current. That story, and a lot more is detailed here. Its replacement has not ordered pizza yet, but it did turn itself on while resting in the right front pocket of my blue jeans. I was playing bridge at the time.

Bobby.

14. Bobby McIntosh stayed at Rob-May until 2006. His LinkedIn page is here.

15. Koo Koo Roo went out of business in 2014.

16. By this time I flew on Delta whenever I could. Delta had the most connections to places that I often visited, and I had a Delta American Express card on which I accumulated thousands of valuable miles that I used for vacations.

1994-2002 TSI: AdDept Client: Kaufmann’s

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May Co. department store chain based in Pittsburgh. Continue reading →

Kaufmann’s was a department-store division of the May Company. Its headquarters was in downtown Pittsburgh. It had stores throughout Pennsylvania and neighboring states. TSI was contacted in the spring of 1994 by Mary Ann Brown1, Kaufmann’s Advertising Director. I think that she probably heard of us from someone at either Hecht’s or Foley’s.

In May of 1994 Sue and I drove to Pittsburgh to meet with her. We made the trip by car primarily because we had very little money at the time. We also had scheduled a meeting in the same city with an ad agency, Blattner/Brunner Inc. That meeting and our subsequent visit to the Pittsburgh Zoo has been described here.

Our appointment at Kaufmann’s was scheduled for late in the afternoon, 5:00 as I remember it. We left Enfield fairly early in the morning. Sue, who in those days was famous for her lead foot, did most of the driving. We arrived at the outskirts of Pittsburgh about thirty minutes before the scheduled start of the meeting. At that point we encountered extremely heavy traffic. We were in unfamiliar territory, and, of course, cell phones were still a few years away. So, we arrived a few minutes late.

Mary Ann Brown.

The beginning of the meeting was rather tense. Mary Ann demanded to know why we were late and why we did not call to tell her we were going to be late. If TSI had not already developed a reputation for good work at Hecht’s and Foley’s, I think that she might have told us to reschedule or to forget about it.

Eventually she got down to business and informed us that the people in her department had developed a system for administering the department’s projects. They were satisfied with what it produced. However, they knew that it would not work in the twenty-first century, and they needed to make a decision about whether to rewrite it or replace it. I guaranteed her that AdDept would have no difficulty with the Y2K issue and explained how AdDept’s approach of a multi-user relational database worked. I do not remember meeting anyone else that day.

Sue and I stayed throughout the visit at a Holiday Inn (if my memory is accurate) a few miles north of downtown. We probably presented a demo at IBM the next day, but, if so, I don’t remember it. My recollection is that the entire event was amicable but not decisive.

René in her office.

For years Doug Pease, TSI’s sales person, stayed in frequent contact with Kaufmann’s. I think that Mary Ann must have spent the time arranging funding. My memory of the next trip to Pittsburgh centers around my meeting with René Conrad2 (female), who was the department’s Planning Manager, and John Borman3, who managed the department’s networks and its computer hardware. I don’t know if we had a signed contract yet, but by then they were definitely committed to installing AdDept. In fact the installation did not take place until May of 1998.

John Borman.

I had only limited contact with Mary Ann thereafter. I do remember that she joined René and me for lunch once, and she disclosed that she had for a very short time been (or at least had applied to be) an FBI agent. That was, to say the least, a surprising bit of news.

My first memory of René was her presentation to me of an absolutely enormous D-ring binder with a black cover. Collected therein were samples of all of the reports that they needed. She spent the rest of the day answering questions about the selection criteria and the precise definition of the contents of each column of each report. The bad news was that very few of the reports matched up closely with work that we had already done. The good news was that the design document that resulted from the meeting came closer to meeting the client’s expectation than any that we had produced or would produce later. René was our liaison at Kaufmann’s from the beginning all the way to the end, and she was a very good one.

John, René, and TSI programmer Steve Shaw in a training session in Enfield.

I did not need to spend much time with John. Once their new AS/400 was connected to their network, and I explained that the demand for bandwidth would be minimal since the system was totally text-based, he was satisfied. He took charge of getting the necessary software installed on Macs and PCs, and he connected the AS/400 to the department’s network.

I remember two experiences involving credit and debit cards on trips to Pittsburgh. In those days we kept our cash at Bank of America. The best thing about that was that if I needed cash on a trip I could almost always find a local branch with an ATM. I remember that once I used such a machine at the airport and forgot to reclaim my card when I was finished obtaining the cash. I don’t know what happened to the card after that, but nobody else ever tried to use it.

The William Penn is now an Omni hotel.

For my first couple of installation and support trips, Kaufmann’s asked me to stay at the William Penn Hotel, which was only a block or so from Kaufmann’s. I sometimes arrived in Pittsburgh late in the evening. On one of those occasions some sort of event must have been going on downtown. In the lobby of the William Penn there were unexpected lines of people waiting to check in. In those days it was possible to make a hotel reservation without providing a credit card number. Several people in line had discovered that doing so did not mean that a room would necessarily be available when they arrived. There were a lot of angry people there that evening. Fortunately, I had already heard about this problem, which had been perfectly explained by Jerry Seinfeld with regard to rental cars. You can listen to it here.

The gilded clock on the corner of Fifth Ave. and Smithfield St. is still a landmark.

I usually brought an unusually large bright-blue suitcase with me to Pittsburgh. Because I sometimes had trouble sleeping when I traveled I often include the foam rubber pillow that I found much more comfortable than the soft feather pillows that old stately hotels favored. One day after working at Kaufmann’s I was unable to find the pillow in my hotel room. Evidently the maid had confiscated it. I complained at the desk, and they eventually located it and returned to me.

It was nice having such an identifiable suitcase. On an early-morning US Airways flight on July 25, 1999, from Bradley to the Pittsburgh airport that served as a hub. I was the only passenger who checked a bag to Pittsburgh. I went to the carousel listed for my flight. No bags ever appeared. I was worried that the bag had not been removed from the plane. Here is what I wrote about the incident in my notes:

When I got into Pittsburgh, my bag was missing. I went to the baggage office. They had no record of my bag. I had seen them put it on the plane and take it off. I told her [the baggage agent] so. She went to look for it and found it. She said the tag had come off. I can’t imagine how this happened. But guess what. I didn’t get angry through any of this.

Dr. Sonnen.

While staying at at the William Penn I experienced one of the worst incidents that I ever encountered in my trips to see clients or prospects. I was suffering from the only disease that I contracted in all the years that I traveled extensively. Throughout the visit I was constantly running a low-grade fever and had a few other annoying but not debilitating symptoms. I soldiered on, and I somehow got everything accomplished that was on my list. When I returned home I went to my doctor, Victor Sonnen4. He gave me a blood test and eventually diagnosed the problem as a urinary infection. Some antibiotics knocked it out.

I did not really like staying at the William Penn. I could get to Kaufmann’s in two minutes, but this was not a great advantage from my perspective. I was always up early, and there was nowhere very close that served breakfast. I could eat in the hotel, but I have always found that hotel food was not very good and terribly overpriced. The evening meals posed a similar problem. I won’t go to a swanky place by myself. The only restaurant within walking distance that I liked was a Chinese takeout place.

In later years I stayed at a Hampton Inn in the Greentree section of town on the south side of the Ohio River. I loved the free breakfast bars at Hampton Inns, and this one sometimes served tasty snacks such as pizza or chicken wings that were good enough to serve as a supper in the evening. The only drawback was that there was nowhere that was reasonably flat to go for a jog. If you live in Pittsburgh, you must learn to like hills.

Maggie Pratt.

On two occasions I went to supper with René and her assistant, Maggie Pratt5. Since they both took the bus to work, I drove us in my rental car. They directed me to small restaurants that they knew near the University of Pittsburgh. I don’t remember the food that well, but I do remember that dining alone on the road is not a hard habit to break.

One thing that I remember clearly was that René suffered from migraine headaches. When she got one she still tried to work, but it was obvious that she was in considerable torment.

René volunteered as an usher at the Pittsburgh Opera. In the 1999-2000 season Verdi’s La Traviata was performed. In the last act the heroine, Violetta, who has been suffering from consumption (tuberculosis) dies. René did not like this part of the opera at all. It seemed to long to her: “She should just die and get it over with!” I did not dispute this assessment, but I find parts of other operas to be much more tedious.

Luxury apartments occupy most of the upper floors of Kaufmann’s flagship store now. Target is scheduled to open a store on one or two low floors. There is now a skating rink on the roof!

Kaufmann’s advertising department was on one of the top floors of the flagship store on Fifth Avenue in Pittsburgh. The most peculiar thing about it became evident when one needed to use the men’s room. One was located on the same floor as the advertising department, but the only way to reach it was to walk through the beauty salon. I did not feel at all comfortable doing that. Therefore, I took the escalator up to the top floor, the home of the bakery. This restroom was a little farther away, but I found the atmosphere much more pleasant.

Everyone at TSI worked very hard on the programming projects for Kaufmann’s. The people there were uniformly supportive, and everyone seemed pretty good at what they did. I am embarrassed to say that I don’t remember the names of any of the media managers. The name Debi Katich is in my notes from 1999. I think that she was the Direct Mail Manager, but I may be wrong.

I do not remember the name of the Senior VP (Mary Ann’s boss) at the time of the installation. As I recall, he let Mary Ann pretty much run things. I definitely do remember the name of his replacement in 1999, Jack Mullen6, who had been Doug’s boss (or maybe his boss’s boss) at G. Fox in Hartford.

Always on sale somewhere.

I also do not remember too many details of the code that we provided for them. The detail about newspaper ads that I recall most clearly is that the store’s contract with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette provided for significant discounts if they ran several full-page ads in the same issue. It was like buying two-liter bottles of Coke or Pepsi. The first three ads might cost $X but once the fourth ad was ordered, the price on all of them changed to $Y for all four ads. This was not easy to code because individual ads could be added, deleted, or moved (to another date) at any time. Also, the size could change. Any of these events could change the rate for all the other full-page ads in the paper that day. Not only did the rates and costs for all the affected ads need to be changed, but history records were also necessary.

Kaufmann’s used AdDept for keeping track of all of its advertising. They even uploaded their broadcast buys from the SmartPlus system that they used.

In 2000 Kaufmann’s was an enthusiastic supporter of the implementation of the AxN project. Several people offered the opinion that the newspapers would never pay for subscribing to the service. Mary Ann did not agree. She said, “They’ll subscribe if we tell them to.” I visited three of Kaufmann’s largest papers to explain what we planned to do and to solicit suggestions. When I mentioned that I was meeting with the IT director at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, John Borman confided to me, “I want his job.”

In 2002, the Kaufmann’s stores’ Pittsburgh business headquarters closed, and its back-office operations were consolidated into those of Filene’s Department Stores in Boston. The consolidation was probably inevitable, but everyone at TSI would have greatly preferred for the new managing entity to be located in Pittsburgh.

1. In 1921 Mary Ann Brown is the Administrative Manager at her alma mater, the University of Pittsburgh. Her LinkedIn page is here. I don’t know why she left her role at Kaufmann’s off of her résumé.

René on LinkedIn.

2. René Conrad’s LinkedIn page is here. After the May Company folded the Kaufmann’s division into Filene’s in 2002 I tried to get René to work for TSI. She was interested enough to pay us a visit in East Windsor, but she turned down our offer. Instead she went to work for a theatrical company in an administrative role. We stayed in touch for a few years, but I had not heard from her for more than a decade. However, she recently sent me an email in which she confessed that she owed me a book.

3. John Borman’s LinkedIn page is here.

4. Dr. Sonnen died in 2010 at the age of 96. He was certainly in his eighties when he treated me. His obituary is posted here.

5. I am pretty sure that Maggie Pratt’s LinkedIn page is here.

6. Jack Mullen’s LinkedIn page is here.

1985-1988 TSI: GrandAd: The System/36 Clients

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The rest of the ad agencies. Continue reading →

We installed at least part of the GrandAd system at all of the companies listed below. A few may have actually been Datamaster clients. My recollections of some installations are very dim. In a few I had little or no involvement

Visitors to O&P went through this red door on Elm St.

Although Keiler Advertising evidently had a famous red door in the twenty-first century, in the eighties the most famous red door in Hartford’s advertising community belonged to O’Neal & Prelle1 (O&P), the agency that was housed across the street from Bushnell Park in Hartford. Our negotiation was with Bill Ervin2, who was, I think, already the president of the agency.

We got this account because of a phone call from Paul Schrenker, the graduate student hired by our marketing company (described here). Paul called dozens of presidents of ad agencies. Bill responded that he was interested in our system. This was probably the only positive outcome from that endeavor.

I seem to remember that O&P bought a model 5364 from TSI. I do not remember doing any custom programming, but we almost always at least customized the invoices that they sent to clients.

I worked mostly with Liz Dickman, who was the bookkeeper. Of all of our agency liaisons, she was among the best to work with. She was able to do the reconciliations by herself more quickly than anyone else. I am not sure who drew the following beautiful schematic of the installation. It certainly is not my handiwork.

Evidently we installed a 5363. A 5364 would not have supported so many devices.

Here are my most vivid memories:

  • On one visit I had to carry something down to the basement. Halfway down the staircase I felt a stabbing pain in my right knee. It did not last, but it was the first time that I had felt pain there since I recovered from the operation in 1974, as described here.
  • If I was at O&P at lunch time, I generally bought a couple of tacos from one of the food trucks. I then sat alone on a bench in Bushnell Park and chowed down. One day while I sat with my legs crossed a starling popped up on my right shoe, which was about six inches off the ground. He perched there for at least a minute or two to see if I would reward him for his clever trick. When I failed to do so, he flew away.
  • I recall Liz informing me that she planned to take the CPA exam as a flyer. She said that she did not study for it, or at least not much. She was legitimately shocked when she later learned that she had passed. Perhaps it dawned on her that she was suddenly overqualified for her job. They made her a vice-president.
  • The installation really went downhill after Liz departed. The guy who operated the computer called TSI and asked for some training. We scheduled a day for him at our office in East Windsor. He was shocked when we billed O&P for it. Evidently either no one told him that TSI had a contract with O&P that clearly designated how much free training (plenty) they received, or someone gave him some bad advice. O&P didn’t pay the bill, and shortly thereafter the agency announced its liquidation.

I am pretty sure that we sold a model 5364 to Eric Tulin Inc.4 of Hartford, CT. It might have been TSI’s developmental system. I can remember spending a few days at the office on Hamilton St. The primary operator was a guy, but I don’t remember too much about him. I must have met with Eric as well, but I don’t remember the occasion.

The agency was not very large at the time. I don’t think that they had more than five or six employees.

I recall even less about Knorr Marketing5, which was (and still is) located in Traverse City, MI, which is in the northwest part of Michigan’s lower peninsula. The agency, which must have already purchased a S/36, called TSI one day out of the blue.

We sent them some materials, and even though they had never sen a demo, they purchased some portion of the GrandAd system. We sent Kate Behart to do the installation and training. Because we used almost exactly the same system for our record-keeping, Kate knew the accounting and job costing portions of the system. So, I assume that we did not install the media portion.

Kate must have done a good job. We hardly ever heard from them, but Knorr Marketing sent us a Christmas card for many years.

Another mystery GrandAd client for me was Brannigan-DeMarco of New York. They purchased their hardware from IBM. Sue took care of this account. I am not sure how much of the GrandAd system they used.

Sue worked closely with Angela Vaccaro, who was the primary operator of the system. She called for support every few months. Sue always took care of her problems.

Similarly, I know very little about Sullivan & Brownell6 of Randolph,VT. Sue handled everything about this account, too. She visited them occasionally. Sue did not need much of an excuse to schedule a trip to Vermont. She has always loved the whole state.

The only thing that I recall about the account was the fact that the media director was a Black woman. That would not ordinarily be even a little surprising, but this was, after all Vermont. In 1990 there were a grand total of 1,951 Black people in the state, including exactly zero lawyers and judges. In fact, only eleven Black people in total lived in Randolph.

Sue told me that the media director and her husband had a farm in the vicinity. Sue told me that she might have stayed overnight there once or twice.

Using a chain saw the husband carved a fox out of a tree trunk and gave it to Sue. It sat placidly on guard out in the grass just beyond the parking spaces of our office in Enfield for many years. In 2021 it wards off coyotes in our back yard. I took a photo of it. It has seen better days.

I handled most of TSI’s interactions with Knudsen-Moore (K-M), an advertising agency located in Stamford, CT. I thought of this as an important account because it finally gave us a toehold in the southeastern (wealthy) part of the state. I also thought that it was cool that one of our clients did business with both King Oscar and the WWE (then known as the WWF).

The audience for my demo was the seventy-two year-old7 bookkeeper whose name was Irene. I must have brought a PC, our 5364, and a terminal that we were evaluating for another client. Its screen was very large for the time. This became important because the bookkeeper had very bad vision. In fact, she later confided to me that the reason that she insisted that they choose TSI’s system was because of that terminal. Ordinarily my strikingly good looks are the deciding factor, but as I mentioned, her vision was poor.

The McMahons never showed up at their ad agency when I was there.

It took us several months, for reasons that will soon be apparent, to get them up and running. During this period the agency changed hands not once, but twice. Its final name, which persists to May of 2021 was CDHM8.

The holdups for going live with the system were the balances in accounts payable and accounts receivable. The values in these accounts are generally positive for A/R and negative for A/P. If a vendor bills you $100, and you immediately bill the client with a 10 percent markup, A/P will have a transaction with a value of -100, and the entry in A/R will be +110. There will also be offsetting entries, of course. The point is that every company should be able to justify its A/P with a stack of unpaid bills from vendors and its A/R with a stack of open invoices sent to clients.

I entered in all of the open A/P and A/R into GrandAd. I printed a list of each with totals. The system’s totals did not agree with what Irene’s hand-written worksheets said were the current balances. Not only that; her balances, which were reflected in the company’s official general ledger, had the wrong sign! The A/P showed a positive balance, and the A/R showed a negative balance. According to these figures the agency’s vendors owed them money, and they were in debt to their clients!

Irene still insisted that her figures were right. I asked for a meeting with the president, Bill Hoag. The bookkeeper attended, as did a couple of other people. Their accountant was not present. I explained the situation with words similar to those of the previous paragraph. She insisted that her numbers were correct because she had checked every entry. She knew this because there was a little dot next to each figure. Much screaming ensued.

The lady had been using the “balance forward” method. After each transaction a new balance is calculated. This is OK, but at least monthly this balance must be checked against the list of invoices. She had NEVER done this. I later looked over her sheets. They were replete with errors. She simply could not read her own handwriting.

The irony of the situation did not strike me until much later. If someone had caught this egregious error earlier, we would not have won the contract. She recommended us solely because of the big screen on the terminal, remember?

How in the world could an agency with books in this deplorable condition be sold twice? I don’t know.

They asked the bookkeeper to retire. The guy that replaced her was, in some ways, worse.

I am pretty sure that his first name was George. I don’t remember his last name, but I do remember that he insisted that any communication to him include the title “Esq.” Now, I don’t pretend to know who gets to use that title, but I would be willing to bet that not many of them lived at the YMCA, which is where this character lived. George got into arguments with us all the time, and he was abusive to TSI’s employees.

For the first and only time, I finally called the agency’s president about George’s behavior. He said that he would look into it. He called me back less than hour later. He said that the guy had not been in all week, and he was now officially terminated.

The next week the president told me that they had hired a new person. I think that his name was Roger. He was very easy to work with, and he had the record-keeping straightened out in short order.

I drove to CHM an least half a dozen times. I never saw Vince or any other McMahon. It was a big disappointment.

Sue handled the account of Charmer Industries of the Astoria section of Queens. The company distributed wine and liquor products. This was probably a referral from Quique Rodriguez, an IBM rep with whom we had a good relationship.

Sue and I drove there on, as I remember it, a Sunday, carried their computer and printer into the building, and made sure that they were working. Then we drove back to Rockville. I found the whole drive within the city terrifying. I wanted to stop, get out of the car, and kiss the earth when we were back in Connecticut. I have been to NYC many times, but I have never driven inside the city limits.

Ed Wolfe.

Charmer had a lot of companies. One specialized in the design of point-of-sale products in bars and liquor stores. Over the years it went by a number of names, including ACC Marketing and the Sukon Group. These were the people who used our system.

Our final liaison in the nineties was Ed Wolfe. As I recall, the company later decided to purchase a small AS/400, the system that replaced the S/36. The AS/400 is described in some detail here. I took the train to New York a couple of times to help with the setup of the new system. Ed was a nice guy and a good client.

Doherty-Tzoumas occupied this building on Dwight Street in Springfield.

I have always thought of Doherty-Tzoumas of Springfield, MA, as a bizarre advertising agency. Dianne Doherty9 was the president. She was totally unsuited to running this agency or any other business. Her husband was a very prominent lawyer. I think that he must have set her up in this business, perhaps for tax reasons. I can only speculate.

Her partner, Marsha Tzoumas10, knew her way around advertising and the business world at least a little, and she was very nice. I felt a little sorry for her.

The agency certainly tried hard to succeed. It always seemed to be a beehive of activity. Quite a few employees had been hired. They liked to hold “focus groups”11 for their clients’ products or services, an idea that I had never previously encountered.

I worked with Marsha and the agency’s bookkeeper to set up the system, and for the most part it seemed to go rather smoothly. However, when we showed the reports for the first monthly closing to Dianne she was overwhelmed.

Dianne hired a financial consultant to help her run the business. He might have been the company’s accountant, but that is not my recollection. I was in a few meetings with him. Most of them were fine, but in one meeting we were discussing the general ledger. Dianne made a very peculiar request. She asked if there were just two or three accounts that she should concentrate on. The request was, in my opinion, absurd. There might be a few that she could pretty much ignore, but to try to focus on any small subset of a company’s books was unthinkable. Most small businesses fail, and there are many paths to failure.

Nevertheless, the consultant took the bait and named a few accounts. I can’t even remember which ones he chose. I assume that cash was one. It is generally a good idea to know how much cash you have. He probably also picked A/P and A/R.

At any rate I knew in that instant that this business was doomed. I was right. In 1991 we received a letter from Dianne’s husband Paul proclaiming that the business was being liquidated. It was the only such letter that we ever received from an ad agency. They owed us less than $100, and so we did not consider suing for it.

I remember that on one occasion Marsha mentioned that she was looking for a good book to read. I recommended Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. I wonder if she took my advice.

In 1987 Rossin Greenberg Seronick and Hill (RGS&H)12 was the hottest agency in Boston, MA. The president, Neal Hill13, was not an advertising guy. Although I never met any of the other three partners, I am sure that they all had a good deal of advertising experience.

The agency had enjoyed two years of explosive growth. It wanted a computerized system for word and data processing. Neal and Ernie Capobianco14, the director of finance, interviewed us and all of our principal competitors. Their choice of the GrandAd system was a real feather in our cap. We were confident that we could do a great job for them, and we hoped that it would open the Boston market, which we had previously never been able to crack, for us.

A Wang word processing terminal.

The holdup was the word processing element. Neal loved Wang’s approach to word processing, and he thought that DisplayWrite/36 (DW/36) was inferior. However, no ad agency software had ever been written for Wang’s operating system. In fact, I had never encountered anyone who used it for anything other WP.

When Neal told us that they had decided to use our system, he asked what we would recommend for word processing. I said that I was not an expert, but the future was in PC’s. Furthermore, if they planned to use the S/36 only for GrandAd, a 5362, which could support up to twenty-eight locally attached devices, would be more than sufficient.

WordPerfect running in DOS did not look like the answer.

My assessment turned out to be correct, but in 1987 buying PC’s with good word processing software (the most popular at the time was WordPerfect) and connecting them would have been a formidable task. Personal computers in those days were still really personal.

Neal insisted that one system should address all the needs. IBM persuaded Neal that a model 5360 with DW/36 would serve their needs.

Neal approved the purchase of a 5360 (the washer-drier model) directly from IBM.

In the meantime I received a phone call from a salesman at Wang. He wanted us to convert our software to run on Wang’s equipment. I informed him that this would be a monumental task, and, although we had dozens of successful installations on IBM hardware, we had absolutely no experience with Wang’s approach. He told me that if we agreed to convert, he had an agency lined up that would use our system. I asked him if he was referring to RGS&H. When he confirmed it, I told him that they had already signed a contract with us. This was news to him.

The system that IBM proposed included terminals for almost all of the employees. The ones with PC’s got 5250 emulation adapters. Our end of the installation went fine. We did a great deal of custom coding for them. They had spent a lot of money on the system, and they reasonably insisted that it do exactly what they wanted.

Then the bombshell exploded. Microsoft let the world know that Neal Hill had written a letter to them. In it he bragged that RGS&H had poached the copywriter and artist from the agency that had handled advertising for Lotus Development, which at that time was considered Microsoft’s biggest competitor. Microsoft had not yet assembled its Office package, and Lotus 123 and Approach were very popular applications. Neal said that RGS&H knew what Lotus was up to, or words to that effect. He also sent them two plane tickets from Seattle to Boston.

I could sympathize. Evidently no one checked Neal Hill’s work either.

This episode caused a major scandal that has been widely written about in legal, advertising, and business circles as well as in the local press. In fact, if you google the agency’s name you will get several pages of articles about it. There are so many that is very difficult to find any other information about the agency.

Neal resigned in December of 1987. Ernie was named as the interim president. Our system was fully functional by this time. Ivan Dunmire served as our liaison. He did an excellent job.

TSI indirectly got swept up in this brouhaha. The articles in the local press mentioned that RGS&H had recently purchased a computer system that was characterized either as a mainframe or as a system that was much too large for the company. So, despite the fact that the people who actually used our software appreciated greatly what we had done, we never had the good reference account in Boston that we had hoped for.

Here are some of my recollections of my experiences with RGS&H:

You can’t make it in thirty minutes if you are afraid to exceed 10 miles per hour.
  • When I was driving Ernie to lunch one day he complained that my car smelled like tobacco smoke. It must have been Sue’s. Nobody previously had mentioned it. Evidently I was “nose blind” to it.
  • One of the two contenders for the most harrowing experience of my life (the other, getting caught in the Blizzard of ’77, is described here) occurred when driving back to Rockville. It was snowing lightly, and the traffic was moving at a fairly steady pace on the Mass Pike when I reached Exit #9 for I-84 near Sturbridge. To my surprise I-84 was nearly empty. There were no tracks in the road at all. I could clearly see the reflective markers on both sides of the road, and I used them for navigation. There really was no place to stop between Sturbridge and Rockville. The Celica and I passed no one, and we were only passed by one car traveling at perhaps 30 mph. A mile or so later I saw a car that had slid into the median; I assume that it was the one that had passed me. I did not consider stopping. When I finally reached the exit for Rockville, I had to guess where it was; the asphalt was covered with several inches of snow and there were no tire tracks. I did not think that my car would make it up the steep hills in Rockville, but it did. Sue was very worried; there were no cellphones in those days.
  • After we moved the office to Enfield in 1988, I usually drove to Springfield, took a Peter Pan bus to Boston, and walked a few blocks to the RGS’s offices. By that time “&H” had been dropped from the agency’s name.
  • I loved working with Ernie, Ivan, and the other people at the agency. There were no quarrels or misunderstandings.
  • I remember that I usually walked to McDonald’s for lunch and ate a Quarter-Pounder with Cheese and a Big Mac.
  • In the nineties Ivan called us a few times for support. By that time PC networks were becoming widespread, and people were touting the idea of “client-server” systems, a term that simply meant that the data was on one system used by everyone, but each person’s computer had its own set of programs. However, Ivan said that many of the people at the agency did not understand this. They thought that the term designated a system constructed to provide better service to the agency’s clients, and they wanted to know why RGS did not have one.

I tried to recruit Ivan to work for TSI, but he turned us down. I am not exactly sure what role he would have played at TSI, but I am pretty sure that he would have done a good job.

Our other installation in Boston, Rizzo Simons Cohn (RSC), was an even bigger fiasco. I was surprised to discover that Sue has almost completely repressed the memory of The Sign of the Three.

We had been contacted by a firm called Computer Detectives (CD). The guy on the phone told us that his company had been hired by the agency to find a computer system for them. It turned out that CD was a two-person company, the guy with whom we talked and his wife. His name was Larry Ponemon16. I don’t recall hers. We dealt almost exclusively with Larry.

Sue and I went to supper at a Chinese restaurant with them. The both ordered moo shu pork; this is the only thing that Sue remembered about them. They were very surprised when we told them that we had never really had a vacation.

We showed them the system, and they liked what they saw. We gave them a proposal for the GrandAd system running on a S/36 model 5363.

AT&T 3B2 model 400.

Larry called us to tell us that they had recommended our system to RSC, but the agency preferred to run its system on 3B2, a UNIX computer manufactured by AT&T. They asked us if we could convert our system to run on it.

We researched whether the S/36 version of Workstation Basic17 would work on a 3B2, and we were assured by the company that wrote and marketed it that it would. We told CD that we were pretty sure that it would, but we would need to adjust our quote to cover the conversion costs. We did so.

We then got to meet another consultant, who, among other things, sold and marketed AT&T computers. We told him that we were accustomed to working with IBM, and we trusted its commitment to support. If he sold the system to RSC, we wanted to know whom we would contact when we had problems or questions. He said that he was our contact. Remember that there were no cellphones, and this guy practically lived in his car. We would need to leave messages. The best that we could hope for was a beeper. Then we would need to depend on him to find someone who was willing and able help us. We were used to dialing 1-800-IBMSERV from anywhere. Someone ALWAYS answered.

The CD people were there at the meeting. They and the AT&T guy assured us that we and the agency’s users would get all the support that we needed.

We converted the software to work on Unix without an inordinate amount of difficulty. That, however, did not mean that it would efficiently do everything that RSC wanted in their environment. We knew nothing about how the operating system would perform when numerous users were working on the same files at the same time. Sue spent several days at RSC trying to get the system to work, but she ran into one roadblock after another, and no one was available to help her.

After a few weeks of this foolishness, the agency got fed up. CD had not disclosed to RSC, who had paid them handsomely to conduct the search, that they were being paid a “finder’s fee” both by us and by the AT&T guy. RSC had never voiced any preference for hardware; that was just a lie. Evidently they had told RSC quite a few whoppers, too. RSC sued CD, and Sue testified for the agency. AT&T took the hardware back and refunded at least part of the cost.

RSC reopened the software search. We submitted the same proposal that we had previously given to CD. Since we had already been paid for the UNIX version, we charged nothing for the GrandAd software or for the customizations. The other contender was a New York company (I can’t remember the name) against whom we often competed. Its software ran on UNIX.

I called the finance guy at RSC, Jonathan Ezrin18, and asked about their decision. He informed me that they had chosen the other vendor. I asked him what the basis for the decision was. He responded that mostly it was the cost. The answer astounded me. I asked him what the other software company had bid. It was about $10,000 higher than ours. I asked him how they could have considered this less than our bid. He said that to be fair they had included the cost of the software in our original proposal when making the comparison.

I assured him that we were not going to give that money back. I then told him frankly that theirs was the stupidest line of reasoning that I had ever heard, and I slammed down the phone.

RSC dissolved in 1990, less than a year after that phone call. I don’t know what happened to CD. I found no trace of them on the Internet, although Lavinia Harris has published a series of novels about a young couple who call themselves “computer detectives”.

I remember visiting Fern/Hanaway19 of Providence, RI, a few times. The agency had a System/36 that they had bought from IBM. I think that we installed one or two modules there, but I don’t remember which ones.

IBM must have told Arian & Lowe (A&L)20, an advertising agency of sorts in Chicago, IL, about TSI. Sue said that she went there once. She remembers that the floor of their office would have been good for dancing, but the only thing that she remembered about the company was that their main client was the Beef Board. They mostly produced point-of-sale posters and signage.

I installed some modules of the GrandAd system there and flew out for a couple of month ends. I remember several very strange occurrences.

  • The Director of Financial Operations for the agency was Neta Magnusson21. We generally had lunch together. She always had more than one martini. I could never have concentrated in the afternoon if I had imbibed a small fraction of what she downed. I stuck with Diet Coke or iced tea.
  • A&L used its S/36 model 5360 for word processing. One time when I was there working on the GrandAd system, they somehow lost some WP documents. A few people blamed me for this. I protested that I had not done anything to any documents. Fortunately I knew enough about how DW/36 worked that I could also demonstrate that I could not possibly have done anything.
  • I ordinarily stayed at a Holiday Inn that was a short distance from A&L. On one trip I had to stay an extra day. The Holiday Inn had no availability for that extra night, but they found me a place to stay and called a cab to take me there. The cab driver said that I definitely would not want to stay there. Instead, he took me to another place that was in a rather rough part of town. However, the room was OK, and it was only one night. I was, however, happy to be out of there the next morning.
  • The agency’s was in downtown Chicago. I had to take cabs back and forth to O’Hare. One time I somehow left my glasses in the cab. Believe it or not, the next time that I went to A&L I stopped at the taxi dispatcher. My glasses were in the Lost and Found box safe and sound.
  • One of the cab drivers spoke no English at all. His girlfriend sat in the front seat and translated for him.
  • Another cab driver picked me up at A&L. I wanted to go to O’Hare. He asked me for directions. I actually rode with a cab driver in Chicago who did not know how to get to the airport! Fortunately, this was one of my last trips to A&L; I could have given him instructions blindfolded.
  • The favorite expression of the system operator at A&L was “Have a good one!” I realized that this was cheerful and completely innocuous, but for some reason it really irritated me.
  • My favorite part of the trips to Chicago was the prospect of having an Italian beef sandwich, either at the airport or bought from a street vendor.

It seems appropriate to end with the bittersweet tale of Charnas Associates of Manchester, CT. TSI and IBM scheduled a presentation to the agency at the IBM office in Hartford. The presentation was scheduled to take two hours. I went to the office early and loaded our GrandAd demo system onto the 5360 at IBM. I also went over my notes for the presentation.

The turnout was unbelievable. Around twenty people showed up from the agency. I was always happy if we got one; I had done worse than that.

I had a lot of experience at this. The format varied by only a little. Someone from IBM acted as the host. He or she was always dressed impeccably and spoke glowingly about how wonderful IBM’s systems and support were and what a close working relationship IBM had with independent software developers like TSI. Then they turned it over to me.

I hated whiteboards after this.

Not this time. The IBMer went around to each and every person in the room and asked them what they would like the computer to do to help with their jobs. After each answer he would rush back to a whiteboard and add it to the list of items that were already on the board. The he would ask them to evaluate how important this was to them. He was hoping that they would attach a monetary value to it, but he was willing to settle for peace of mind or saving time. He dutifully recorded the values as well.

This went on for at least an hour and forty-five minutes. Then he spent a few minutes praising the System/36 before he let me talk for a couple of minutes. I could not possibly do my presentation in less than a half hour. So, I had to forget about my slides and my demo and try to talk about the big picture. The worst part was that damnable list on the whiteboard behind me. Needless to say, our software addressed less than half of the wish list. Of course no one suggested “Help us find which clients are unprofitable and why” or “Help us improve cash flow”.

I was so angry at the IBMer that I could have punched him. If I had not sworn after that fight in the fifth grade with Tom Guilfoyle that I would not engage in fisticuffs, I might have.

We followed up on this, but we never heard from Charnas.

A few years later in 1989 I was scheduled to give my first AS/400 demonstration of the AdDept system that I was still in the process of installing at Macy’s in New York. TSI did not own an AS/400 yet, and so I had made a backup tape at Macy’s. I planned to install Macy’s programs and data, dummy up the data so it was not recognizable, give the demo, and then erase the programs from the disk.

I never finished the first step. Something about the tape made the AS/400 system at IBM hang up. Commands could not even be entered at the system console. I worked with these incredibly reliable machines for twenty-six years. This was the only time that I saw something like this happen.

The IBM people were furious at me. They were certain that the problem occurred because our programs were written in BASIC. I calmly explained that the programs never got restored. Something happened during the restoring process.

Nobody from IBM attended my demo. I went to the demo room to do a song and dance with no accompaniment. Only one person was there, and she was not even one of our invitees. She identified herself as a media buyer at Charnas who had heard about the event from one of her clients. I explained how the GrandAd system worked and which agencies were using it.

She told me that Charnas had a S/36. She did not know the model. I asked her how big it was. “Oh, it’s big!”

She said that they used it only for word processing, and everyone hated it. That guy from the first demo had sold them a 5360 with no software except DisplayWrite36!

I don’t remember what happened after that too clearly. I am sure that I went to Charnas’s office in Manchester at least a few times in the early nineties. I think that I installed an abbreviated media system for them. Then I got heavily involved in the AdDept system.

Charnas apparently went out of business in July of 1992.

While I was looking for information about the agency I came across the book shown at the right. It was commissioned by Robert Bletchman, an attorney from Avon who died in 2008. His obituary is here.

There is only one copy of the book on this website. The title is How to Achieve the Release of Unidentified Flying Object Information from the United States Government.The first reader with $50 can claim it. Shipping is free!

The publication date for this book is in 1985. I am pretty sure that this effort antedated Art Bell’s Coast to Coast AM show on WTIC radio by approximately ten years.

1. O’Neal & Prelle went out of business in 2000.

2. Bill Ervin died suddenly in 2003. His obituary is here.

3. Liz Dickman is now the CEO of Integrated Physicians Management Services in East Hartford. Her LinkedIn page is here.

4. Eric Tulin Inc. changed names and ownership a few times before giving up the ghost in 1991.

5. Knorr Marketing’s website is here.

6. In 2007, as reported here, Tom Brownell apparently transferred his client list to a group of his employees. They changed the name of the agency to 802 Creative Partners and moved the headquarters to Bethel, VT.

7. By coincidence 72 is my own age as I write this in May 2021. To be honest, if I tried to keep a manual ledger, I probably would not be able to read my handwriting either.

8, The agency’s website is cdhm.com.

Marsha.
Dianne.

9. Dianne Doherty now goes by Dianne Fuller Doherty. She resides in Longmeadow, MA, in 2021. After the agency’s failure she devoted her life to helping other small businesses, especially those run by women, get started. Her story is described here.

10. Marsha Tzoumas is now known as Marsha Montori. In 2021 she is the Chief Marketing Officer at Six-Point Creative Works, an ad agency in Springfield. Her LinkedIn page is here.

11. I used focus groups in my short story (described here).

12. RGS&H went through five name change. Its final incarnation, GSOD, Inc. dissolved in 2007.

13. Neal Hill landed in Canada. His LinkedIn page is here.

Ernie Capobianco.

14. Ernie Capobianco telephoned me in the early 1990’s. At the time he had just started working at Valentine-Radford, a big ad agency in Kansas City. He arranged for me to meet with some principals and the IT guy. I also visited Ernie’s apartment in Johnson County. I think that I caught him at a bad time. His LinkedIn page, which skips over his time at RGS&H, is here.

15. Ivan Dunmire lives in New York City. His LinkedIn page is here.

Larry Ponemon.

16. I think that Larry Ponemon now runs the Ponemon Institute, which has something to do with privacy, security, and computers. His page on the organization’s website is here.

17. Workstation Basic was designed to emulate the Datamaster version of BASIC running under DOS and later UNIX. More information is here.

18. Jonathan Ezrin apparently now lives in Plymouth, MA. He does not have a LinkedIn page.

19. Fern/Hanaway was dissolved in 1998.

20. It appears that in 1991 A&L was taken over by Daryl Travis. Various versions of Arian, Lowe and Travis (no Oxford comma) existed after that, but I think that the operation in Chicago did not survive for long. The Beef Board account represented a high percentage of its billings.

21. I think that in 2021 Neta Magnusson lives in Geneva, IL, a suburb on the west side of Chicago.

1976-1977 U-M: Debate?

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My last year coaching at U-M. Continue reading →

I did not learn of the demise of Michigan’s debate program in time to take steps to finding somewhere else to coach during the 1975-76 school year. Also, I seem to remember that I still needed at least one class to complete the requirements for my leisurely masters degree. I had not yet decided what to do. At some point during the fall I wrote a letter to George Ziegelmueller about coaching at Wayne State University in Detroit beginning in the 1977-78 school year. This was somewhat difficult to do. I had very little respect for George as a coach and none as a judge. However, Wayne State had by far the largest debate program in the state and had a PhD program in speech. I frankly doubt that I could have gotten hired anywhere else.

Early in the school year I had a long talk with Don Huprich. He told me that U-M’s debate team was a hopeless mess. The new coach, Jack Nightingale (I think that was his name, but I never met him), was a new graduate student in speech who knew less about competitive debate than the previous year’s novices, Dean Relkin and Bob Jones. Don wanted to debate with Stewart Mandel on the national circuit. He said that he would fund the expenses for the whole year himself. He asked me to coach and accompany them on trips. He owned a car that we could use. It was newer and nicer than mine, and because it had automatic transmission, anyone could drive it. He may have even offered to pay me a little money to help.

This little door financed U-M debate in 1976-77.

I was astounded by this offer. Don explained that his father held the patent on “fruit doors”, the little devices on the back of refrigerated trucks. He had reportedly made a LOT of money on this invention. Don evidently had access to enough of it to finance a two-person one-coach debate team. He also had figured out how to represent the Michigan debate team without going through the speech department. I am not sure how he managed it, but he was able to choose the tournaments that he wanted to attend, and he mailed in the registration forms himself. Neither I nor Jack Nightingale had anything to do with it.

I had no reason to reject Don’s proposition. I had nothing planned for either semester, and I was definitely not yet ready to abandon the quest on which I had set out two years earlier.

The debate topic for 1976-77 was “Resolved: That the federal government should significantly strengthen the guarantee of consumer product safety required of manufacturers.” A few cases were very popular that year: cigarettes, air bags for automobiles, and gun control. What was left of the U-M debate team had many disadvantages vis-à-vis the other schools, but we had one huge advantage—the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI) and its enormous library. Don and Stewart spent a great deal of time there.

I don’t remember too many details about the season, but I do remember watching an octafinal round at an early tournament, maybe Western Illinois. Stewart and Don must have been debating in another room. If they had been eliminated and I had not been scheduled to judge, we would certainly have gone home. I don’t remember which teams participated in this debate. The affirmative ran a case that banned automation. Really. All automation.

Occasionally the best arguments are simple.

Both affirmative and negative debaters were always expected to justify their claims with evidence. Some ideas, however, are so ridiculous that no one has bothered to research or write about them. This was clearly one of those ideas. It is difficult to attack such a case using any usual approach. The other team doubtless has a few documented examples where automating a process was a bad idea, but what researcher would bother to document the myriad cases in which machines improved life? Does anyone want to return to the days when fields were plowed by horses and oxen? Does anyone want to eliminate machines that allow people to survive life-threatening injuries or illnesses?

I don’t remember many of the negative’s arguments, but the second negative won the debate (and probably removed the case from the circuit) when he pulled out a dictionary and read the definition of “automation”. He then just spoke frankly for a few minutes and outlined a strong case for a civilized country with a modern military and health system and an economy that took advantage of science.

The judges all voted negative, and I never heard of this case again. What surprised me was that the affirmative must have prevailed in a few previous rounds. Maybe the used a different case.

On the whole this was definitely an affirmative-biased topic. It was relatively easy to find a manufactured product that was apparently causing problems. It was much more challenging for the negative to show that the proposed regulation of that product would make things worse. Furthermore, there were thousands of consumer products, and the affirmative chose which ones were the subject of the debate. The negative had to be prepared for almost anything.

The three most important debates of the year— the semifinals and finals of NDT—were all won by the affirmative teams. Of the fifteen ballots cast in these debates, twelve were for the affirmative. Southern Cal won its semifinal on the affirmative 5-0 but lost the final round on the negative 4-1.

Those debates completed a pattern that was established much earlier in the year. If a team had a choice between debating affirmative or negative, it almost always chose affirmative. In contrast, in my senior year seven years earlier the team that won the coin flip in every elimination rounds in which I participated chose negative.

Sam Peltzman.

In 1976-77 many negative teams depended on the writings and research of Sam Peltzman of the University of Chicago. His books and articles claimed that in many cases when people’s devices were made apparently safer by a governmental requirement, the people using the devices adopted riskier strategies because they feel more comfortable doing so. For example, people wearing seat belts might drive faster or more recklessly. He had documented some cases in which adding safety devices apparently resulted in the increase in deaths or injuries.

Another approach used by many negative teams was to label harmful effects documented by their opponents as “self-imposed”. Plenty of philosophers have argued that in a free society individuals should be allowed to judge their own costs and benefits. This approach could be used, for example, against a law mandating helmets for those riding motorcycles. A person who is not wearing one may be putting his own life in danger, but his lack of a helmet is extremely unlikely to harm others. Any harm that he might suffer is self-induced.

No speed governor for Joey.

I really liked the case that Don developed based on speed governors for automobiles and trucks. Because of the energy crisis it was already illegal to drive over fifty-five miles per hour almost everywhere in the United States. Why then were many cars built to go ninety miles per hour or more? It was easy to show that decreasing the maximum speed saves lots of lives every year. In fact, speed governors had been tried in some jurisdictions. The harm was not self-imposed, at least not entirely, because most serious accidents involve more than one vehicle, and passengers seldom were allowed to vote about how hard the driver pressed the accelerator pedal. The “Peltzman effect” does not apply either. What can drivers do to offset the limitation on speed? Take a nap? Drive on two wheels like Joey Chitwood?

Many teams in 1976-77 had nearly unbeatable cases. Negatives had to be very clever. Sometimes the best approach was to argue topicality1. However, most debaters and their coaches were averse to these arguments. They were more comfortable arguing about facts and analysis than about semantics.

I don’t remember if Don and Stewart wen to the tournaments in California. I definitely did not.

For me the most memorable event of the year was the “east coast swing”. As I recall, Don’s original plan was to attend all three tournaments—Boston College, Harvard, and Dartmouth. So, the three of us set out early in the morning on Friday, January 28, 1977. As always, we drove through southern Ontario. The roads were perfectly clear all the way through Canada, but as we approached the U.S. border we noticed that the snow was piled up pretty high on the sides of the road. We were not aware that Lake Erie, which is south of Ontario and west of Buffalo, had at that point been frozen over for forty-five days! Several feet of powdery snow had been accumulating on the surface.

We drove on Route 405 to the border crossing between Lewiston, NY, and Niagara Falls (red arrow in upper left corner). At this point we were right on schedule. The roads were clear, and the visibility was good as we headed southeast on U.S. 62 skirting the northeast suburbs of Buffalo. On each side of us the snow was piled at least ten feet high. We could see no buildings. We knew that we were in a populous area, but the only evidence of civilization were a few road signs peaking out over the snowpack. It was an awesome experience, but we had no reason to feel threatened. The change in conditions only began when we reached the New York Thruway (I-90) near Williamsville (second arrow from left).

All these photos (except the toll booth) are from the Buffalo or Batavia area during the Blizzard of 1977.

Quite suddenly the wind, which blew from the west, picked up dramatically, and the snow began to fall. The wind whipped the snow around the front of our car from both sides. Visibility dropped to near zero. At times we could not see to the end of our car’s hood. Soon it became impossible even to tell where the lanes were. It was cold, but Stewart and I rolled down our windows and helped Don, who was driving, keep the vehicle on the road by continually reporting to him him how far it wase from the snowbank. He slowed down to 10 miles per hour or less.

This was the famous Blizzard of 1977 that killed twenty-three people, many of them on the stretch of road that we needed to travel. We were quite familiar with this stretch of the NY Thruway. There were no cities of much consequence near the highway until we reached Syracuse, which was most of the way across the state. Something bad would probably happen to us if we tried to go that far.

While we were inching along the highway, semis occasionally passed us. Perhaps the drivers thought they could outrun the storm. However, the wind, which gusted up to sixty-nine miles per hour, was a bigger problem than the snow. It was picking up powdered snow from Lake Erie and from Buffalo, which had already received more than ten feet of snow that year, and dumping it on the Thruway. We caught glimpses of several jackknifed eighteen-wheelers on both sides of the eastbound portion of the highway.

We quickly determined that we needed to leave the highway at the first exit that we came to. We looked and looked, but we never saw an exit. We could not see any of the road signs well enough to read them. In fact, for a long time we could see nothing in front of or behind us and only the snowbanks to the left and right. We continued moving slowly eastward for almost three hours.

At last I spotted a sign for a Rodeway Inn peeking over the snowbank on the right. It was perhaps fifty yards away. I figured that in all likelihood there must be an exit nearby. I was so concerned about missing the exit that I actually considered recommending that we abandon the car and try to make our way toward that sign by crawling over the snowpack, which was at least ten feet deep. Instead Don slowed down the car even more to avoid missing the exit.

We never did see any signs for the exit, but by maintaining a constant distance between the car and the snowbank on the right we accidentally departed the highway at the exit for Batavia, NY (arrow on the right in the above map). Our first indication that we were no longer on the Thruway was the array of toll booths ahead of us, and we could not see them until we were almost upon them.

Conditions were much worse than this.

It was a great relief to see a live human being in the toll booth. We paid our toll and told him that the Thruway should definitely be closed. He replied that it had been closed for more than an hour. We asked him if there was a hotel nearby. He advised us that there was a Holiday Inn2 near the end of the ramp.

Don guided the vehicle into the hotel’s snow-covered parking lot. At the reception desk they told us that only a few rooms were still available. Needless to say, we took one. We then asked if the hotel had a restaurant. It did, but the desk clerk said it had been closed when the food ran out. He assured us that there would be a breakfast buffet in the morning. We would have greatly preferred to have a breakfast buffet that evening, but it wasn’t in the cards, and we did not even discuss taking the car out to search for a restaurant or market. Instead we each purchased several candy bars from the machines. An hour or so later those machines were empty.

We called Tuna Snider, the coach at Boston College, and told him that we were stuck in Batavia. He was surprised to hear how bad the conditions were. I am not aware of any other teams that got stuck in this morass. I told the BC people that I did not know when we would arrive, but I would be happy to judge when we got there. Tuna said that that would be greatly appreciated. He said that he would pay me $10 per round, which was the usual rate.

We also called home and told everyone that we were alive and safe.

I am pretty sure that we had missed lunch, and we definitely had nothing but candy bars for supper. Don, Stewart, and I were therefore hungry and disappointed. However, we all appreciated how much worse it could have been. We set our alarms and asked for a wake-up call in time for us to be at the breakfast buffet as soon as the doors were open. That night we slept the sleep of the just.

By daybreak the snow had stopped. The wind was still blowing, however. So, snow that was pushed to the side of the road by the plows was often quickly replaced by snow blown off of the snowpack. The Thruway was still closed in both directions.

On the way to breakfast we saw that dozens of people had set up camp in the hotel’s lobby. Many were still sleeping. We were near the beginning of the buffet line and piled on the food. The restaurant usually allowed unlimited trips to the buffet, but on this occasion the management sensibly limited everyone to one trip. Nevertheless, they ran out of food while we were finishing our plentiful meal.

Many of the people stranded in the hotel were truckers. They were able to obtain up-to-the-minute information about the road conditions. We learned from one of them that from Syracuse to the east the Thruway was open, but that it was doubtful that the area near Batavia would reopen until the following day.

I don’t think that I-490 and I-390 existed in 1977.

A more promising development was reported later in the morning. Evidently Route 33, a two-lane road that connected Rochester with Batavia had just opened. From Rochester we could allegedly take another two-lane road, Route 31, toward Victor, NY. The Thruway was allegedly open from there to New England.

We allowed a few intrepid truckers to blaze the trail before we decided to try it. Maps were still plentiful in 1977, and I think that Don had one. Having made sure that we had good directions for making the proper connections on these side roads, we cleared a few feet of snow off of Don’s car and set off for Rochester. Initially we had to drive a mile or so south to reach Route 33 in the middle of Batavia. The roads were surprisingly passable in Batavia. The residents had never seen this kind of storm, but they had considerable experience at dealing with snow.3

The interstate shown on this map from Rochester to Victor did not exist. We took Route 31.

Route 33 was a little precarious. Snow that was continually blowing onto the highway made conditions a little slippery, but at least we could see. In a few places the width that had been cleared was not sufficient for two cars, but we encountered almost no vehicles headed for Batavia. By the time that we reached Rochester the conditions were much better. The drive on Route 31 was even easier. In fact we faced no more significant delays all the way to Boston.

I am pretty sure that I judged quite a few rounds at the Boston College tournament. They paid me, and I gave the money to Don. Don and Stewart rested up and then watched at least one elimination round. I also have a dim recollection of all three of us going to a party thrown by the tournament staff and the BC coach, Tuna Snider.

I don’t actually remember anything else about the part of the trip involving the debating. Don and Stewart surely debated at Harvard, but I don’t remember how they did. I have a vague recollection of being on the Dartmouth campus. I seem to remember that the guys did well there. I might be wrong

I have one strong memory of the drive home. Since there were three potential drivers, we elected to drive straight through with only minimal stops. We did not run into any snow. It was, however, dark and very cold when we crossed the border into Canada. Don was exhausted. He handed the keys to me.

I was alert for the first hour or so, but then I also became very sleepy. There was almost no traffic. Don and Stewart were both dead to the world. I unilaterally adopted a policy of pulling the car over to the breakdown lane every twenty or thirty minutes. I then exited from the car and stood for a second in the bitterly cold air before I walked completely around the car. I then got back in and drove on.

By the time that we reached Windsor, I had my second wind. I drove straight through from there to Plymouth, where I gave the keys back to Don.

When I arrived home Sue told us that she had been praying that we would find an Eskimo lady to take us in.

My only recollection of the remainder of the debate season before districts was an elimination round that I, along with two other debate coaches, judged between Harvard and Georgetown. They were two of the very best teams in the country. Georgetown was on the affirmative, arguing in favor of mandatory air bags.

At the conclusion of the debate the other two judges quickly signed and turned in their ballots. I, however, was not a bit certain who had won. I spent at least fifteen minutes asking to read various pieces of evidence from both teams. In the end I voted for Harvard. One of the other judges had voted affirmative and one negative, but neither thought that it was close.

I was not too worried about Don and Stewart’s prospects at districts. Northwestern’s top team had received a first round bid. I did not think that anyone else could touch the case on speed governors, and I was pretty sure that Don and Stewart, who had done well in some prestigious national tournaments, could win at least two rounds on the negative.

I was right. We all got to go to NDT at Southwest Missouri State University4 in Springfield.

The drive to SMS was long, but we were accustomed to long road trips. We had plenty to discuss on the way. For once we knew exactly the set of teams from which our opponents would be drawn.

We did not stay at the hotel recommended by the tournament. Don found one a couple of miles from the SMS campus that featured much lower rates.

The black & white episodes are much better than the ones in color.

I should mention that the people in southern Missouri talk with a much more pronounced drawl than the residents of KC, St. Louis, and points north. Springfield is near the Ozarks, the home of Jed Clampett and his kin. It resembles Arkansas much more than it resembles northern Missouri

The SMS campus was very nice. I have a pretty clear recollection of one debate round that I judgied. Two guys from UMass were on the affirmative. Their case had two distinct parts. One part advocated gun control; the other mandated speed governors. That part was similar to Don and Stewart’s case.

The room in which the debate took place was in a building facing the quadrangle in the middle of campus. It was a beautiful spring day, and someone had opened a window or two in the room. The first affirmative had completed his presentation of the case. Prep time for one of the subsequent speeches was in progress when a fair amount of commotion could be heard through the window. Some SMS students were evidently being overly boisterous.

Someone in the room, perhaps a judge, asked, “What was that?” Because I took judging very seriously, I kept my peace. However, I thought of an extremely appropriate answer: “They probably heard that some Yankees had come down here talkin’ about takin’ their guns away and slowin’ down their cars.”

For NDT every judge was asked to explicate his judging philosophy in a paragraph or two. These were accumulated, duplicated, and included in the tournament welcome packets. We also had brought the accordion file of U-M ballots from previous tournaments (and years). Before the tournament started every team was allowed to name three judges that they wished to exclude from judging them. This process was called “striking”. I don’t remember which judges we struck, but the emphasis was definitely on competence rather than who associated with whom. I did not generally go to coaches’ parties and so I was not really aware of those relationships.

In the eighth round Don and Stewart faced a very good team, Fabiani5 and McNamara from Redlands. They had received one of the coveted first-round bids. I do not recall which team was on the affirmative. I also do not remember the other two judges, but one was Brad Ziff from Georgetown. Everyone in the tournament knew that this was an important round. A few people from District 5 approached me to tell me that I should have put Brad Ziff on our strike list. They said that he never voted against Redlands.

At any rate Redlands won the debate 3-0 and advanced to the elimination rounds. In fact, they made it as far as the semifinals. Don was convinced that Redlands had won on reputation, not arguments. He was so upset that he refused to attend the final assembly in which the qualifiers were announced, and speaker awards were presented. I had no real jurisdiction over him, but I was six years older. I said that we were all going to swallow our feelings and go to the assembly with our heads held high.

Don protested that I had made an angry display at Harvard once. I admitted that I did, and it was wrong. I insisted that we all attend the assembly, and we did. If anyone knew how he felt, it was I. Still, attending was the right thing to do.

The drive back was not a lot of fun. Don really wanted to debate in the elimination rounds at NDT. He deserved it, too. I suspect that he had worked harder that year than anyone in the entire history of U-M debate.

Georgetown won the NDT that year.

At some point during the year I drove to Wayne State in downtown Detroit and met with George Z. He said that he had talked with Dr. Colburn, who had informed him of an incident involving expense reports. I explained that I had turned a large number of them at once, and the secretary got upset. He just laughed at that. He offered me a job as a teaching assistant. I seem to remember that they also waived the tuition.

1. “Topicality” refers to arguments about whether the affirmative’s plan is a legitimate interpretation of the resolution. For the 1976-77 resolution some might argue that the federal government was not the actor, that the action was not significant, that manufacturers were not required to do anything, etc.

2. My recollection is that it was a Holiday Inn, but the hotels that in 2021 are located near the exit that we stumbled upon do not include a Holiday Inn. There are also no Rodeway Inns nearby either.

3. A first-hand blog of the event in Batavia can be read here.

4. The university is now called Missouri State. The “Southwest” part was dropped in 2005.

5. Mark Fabiani was only a sophomore in 1977. He was the top speaker at the 1979 NDT. He later became a very prominent political figure both in Los Angeles and nationwide. His Wikipedia page is here.

6. Brad Ziff’s LinkedIn page is here.