1966-2024 Bleeding Maize and Blue

Posted on January 28, 2024 by Mike

Michigan football and me. Continue reading →

I undertook this entry to explain what it was like to be a die-hard fan of a football team for fifty-eight years. I supposed that this might be of passing interest to some people (outside of New England, where no one gives a fig about college football), but, in fact I undertook it mostly to see if I could figure out to my own satisfaction why I have cared so much about an institution with no intrinsic value. Furthermore, over the years it has changed so dramatically. The only constants were the huge stadium, the winged helmets, and the school colors—maize and blue (mostly blue).

Before attending U-M: When I was still in grade school (not before—my family did not have a television set) my dad and I often watched professional football games on our black and white television set. This was remarkable for two reasons: 1) my dad seldom watched anything on television; 2) it was one of the few things that we did together. I distinctly remember that a white football was used for night games. Also, until the rule was changed, a runner was not considered “down” until his forward progress was completely stopped.

I knew Otto as #14, but in the days before face guards he must have been #60.

My dad was a fan of the Chicago Bears. My recollection was that his favorite player was Ralph Guglielmi, but he never played for the Bears. I must be wrong. My favorite team was the Cleveland Browns. In the early days my favorite player was #14,Otto Graham. Later, of course, I lionized the incomparable #32, Jim Brown.

Before I went to Rockhurst my dad also took me to one game in Atchison, KS. It involved my dad’s Alma Mater, Maur Hill. I don’t remember the opponent or result. However, Maur Hill was 2-6 in both 1960 and 1961, and so they probably lost.

The Dallas Texans moved to Kansas City in 1963, my sophomore year at Rockhurst, and were rechristened the Chiefs. Through his company, Business Men’s Assurance (BMA), my dad had two season tickets. He went to all the home games, and sometimes he brought me with him to the games at Municipal Stadium. I became a fan of Lenny Dawson¹, Curtis McClinton², Fred Arbanas³, the one-eyed tight end, and the rest of the players. I remained a big fan of the Chiefs while I was in the army and for a decade or so after that.

While I was in High School I attended every football home game. So did all of my friends and most of the other guys. My attitude was really more of a “be true to your school” thing than an appreciation of the game at the high school level. In fact, we all attended all of the basketball games as well. The guys at Rockhurst were proud that they were able to go to one of the very best schools in the area, and they supported all of the teams.

Before arriving in Ann Arbor I did not yet hate Woody or the color scarlet.

Undergrad at U-M:While I lived in Kansas City I did not follow college football very closely. Only three major colleges in Kansas and Missouri had football teams, and one of those—Kansas State—was perennially a doormat. I knew very little about Michigan football. I knew about the intense rivalry between Ohio State and Michigan. I had heard the song, “We don’t give a damn for the whole state of Michigan.” I had read about a few Michigan greats such as Tom Harmon and Germany Schulz. I knew that Michigan had the largest stadium in the country and usually won the Little Brown Jug. Woody Hayes (but not his counterpart Bump Elliott) was already famous.

The student section started on the 50-yard line and went around to the middle of the end zone.

However, it was not until I actually started living at U-M that I came to appreciate the importance of football at the university. Cazzie Russell had led the Wolverines to three consecutive Big Ten titles and to final four appearances in 1964 and 1965. Nevertheless, in the fall of 1966 when I arrived at my dorm absolutely no one talked about basketball even though the previous year’s football team had been a horrendous disappointment. The 1964 team had won the Big Ten and clobbered Oregon in the Rose Bowl. The 1965 team finished only 4-6 despite outscoring the opponents 185-161. Nevertheless, like nearly everyone else in Allen Rumsey House, I purchased season tickets in the student section of Michigan Stadium (no one ever called it The Big House) for a very low price and never gave a thought to going to basketball games.

I followed the marching band up

to the stadium for almost every home football game⁴ during the four football season in which I lived in the dorm. I have recounted in some detail those experiences in the 1966 season here. The last two games of my senior year were ones for the ages. On November 27, 1969, Ohio State was 8-0 and widely considered the best collegiate team of all time. They were riding a twenty-two game winning streak.. Michigan was 7-2, but one of its losses was out of the conference. Since this was the last game of the season, if U-M won, they would be tied with OSU for the the Big Ten championship. The league’s rules dictated that if there was a tie, U-M would go to the Rose Bowl because OSU had been there more recently. Michigan, a huge underdog, won the game 24-12. Wikipedia devoted a very long entry to this historic game. It is posted here.

I knew two of the stars of that game fairly well. They were both sophomores who had spent their freshman year living on the second floor of A-R. At the time I was the president of the house and had some interactions with both Thom Darden, a defensive back who was an All-Pro with the Cleveland Browns, and Bill⁵ Taylor, who scored the most famous touchdown in that game.

Michigan had hired a new coach, Bo Schembechler, for the 1969 season. He had a heart attack just before the Rose Bowl⁶, and so he was unable to coach. The team lost to the University of Southern California 10-3. In retrospect it is hard to believe that one of the most famous Michigan teams of all time did not score a touchdown in its last six quarter.

1970-1973: During the next four years it was somewhat difficult for me to follow the team too closely. In 1970 I was at my parent’s house in Leawood, KS, for the first three games, all of which were won by the Wolverines. For the remaining games I was at Fort Polk, LA (introduced here), for basic training. I learned the scores of the games, but there was no television available, and so I missed the second game of the “Ten Year War” between Schembechler’s troops and those of Woody Hayes. OSU won in Columbus 20-9. The two teams again tied for the Big 10 title, but OSU went to the Rose Bowl because of the “no repeat” rule. In those days Big 10 teams were not allowed to participate in other bowls.

In 1971 I was in the army at Sandia Base, NM (introduced here). The barracks had only one television, and none of the soldiers could afford to purchase one for their rooms. Michigan was 10-0 going into the OSU game in Ann Arbor, where they won a squeaker 10-7. I am pretty sure that I watched that one in the MP Company’s Rec Room. That team lost to Stanford in the Rose Bowl 13-12. Michigan was heavily favored and held the lead, but the team was done in by a fake punt by Stanford on a fourth and ten and a last second field goal. I must have watched that game in Leawood. A few days later I flew to upstate New York to finish my military career at Seneca Army Depot (described here).

In 1972 I was working as an actuarial student at the Hartford Life Insurance Company (introduced here). I watched the team on television whenever they appeared. I remember going to Jan Pollnow’s house for one of the regular-season games. I do not remember which one it was, but it was definitely not the season-ender (better known as The Game) at Ohio State. I am certain of that because Michigan won all of its first ten games, but they lost that one 14-11. This was a heart-breaker. Michigan had a first down at the OSU one-yard line and could not punch it in. The two teams tied for the conference championship, but OSU went to Pasadena, and U-M stayed home.

This man deserved to play inn the Rose Bowl.

In 1973 I was still at the Hartford. Once again the Wolverines won their first ten games. The Big Ten by then was known as the Big Two and the Little Eight. “The Game” was held in Ann Arbor. At the end of the third quarter the score was 10-0 in favor of OSU, but U-M tied it with a touchdown and a field goal. I am pretty sure that I watched that sister-kisser by myself in my apartment in East Hartford. I had a Zenith color portable with rabbit ears. The reception from the two ABC stations (New Haven and Springfield) was not great.

U-M’s quarterback, Dennis Franklin⁸, broke his collarbone in the fourth quarter. This was a decisive factor in the vote that sent the Buckeyes back to California. In two years U-M had lost only one game, but it did not get to go to a bowl game.

By this time Bo Schembechler had installed an option offense that emphasized running. For quite a few years U-M’s quarterbacks were better known for running and blocking than for throwing the pigskin.

Back in Ann Arbor for 1974-1976: In 1974 Sue and I moved to Plymouth, MI, and I enrolled at U-M as a graduate student in the speech department. I bought a season ticket in the student section. A few details about my personal involvement with the team during those years have been posted here.

A little more should be written about the 1974 season. The Wolverines breezed through the first ten games. They even had a 10-3 lead at halftime of The Game. However, OSU kicked three field goals and Mike Lantry⁹, who had earlier kicked a 37-yard field goal, pushed a shorter one very slightly to the left as time ran out. The miss cost U-M the conference championship and a berth in the the Rose Bowl.

Dennis Franklin, who lost only two games in his entire career as starting quarterback at U-M, never got to play in a Rose Bowl, or any other bowl for that matter. That was simply a travesty.

Detroit 1976-1979: For the next three football seasons Sue and I lived and worked in Detroit. I watched every game that was shown on television, but my memories are not too distinct.

The 1976 team lost a conference game at Purdue when the kicker, Bob Wood, missed an attempted 37-yard field goal at the end of the game. It was the first conference loss to one of the Little Eight since my senior year seven years earlier.

However, this team pummeled Ohio State in Columbus two weeks later to win the conference championship and qualify for the Rose Bowl. They lost that game to USC (whom else?).

The story the next year was eerily similar. The Wolverines were shut out in the Little Brown Jug game, but they defeated Ohio State in Ann Arbor. They then lost to Washington in the Rose Bowl 27-20.

It sounds like a broken record, but the 1978 team led by Rick Leach¹⁰, Harlan Huckleby¹¹, and a very stout defense, somehow lost to Michigan State before beating the Buckeyes again in the last game of the Ten Year War. USC then defeated the Wolverines in the Rose Bowl again thanks to a “Phantom Touchdown” awarded to Charles White¹² by a Big 10 ref.

I have two very vivid memory of this period of Michigan football. I remember that I was on a debate trip for Wayne State. For some reason one Saturday afternoon I was absolved of the responsibility of judging for one round. I found a television set and watched Michigan beat up on one of the Little Eight.

The other memory, of course, was the dramatic touchdown pass from John Wangler to freshman Anthony Carter on the last play of the Indiana game in 1979. The game, which was crucial for Michigan’s title hopes, was not televised. But the film was shown on all the highlight shows.

It was a period of frustration. It appeared that Bo’s coaching style could easily produce very good teams. They were always in the top ten and often the top five/. However, they were never good enough to win the last game of the year. Nevertheless the players were heroes to me and to all of the other die-hard fans.

I later read Bo Schembechler’s autobiography, Bo, co-written by Mitch Albom. In its pages he speculated that he might have driven the guys too hard on their trips to Pasadena. They did little besides practice. Most Michigan fans just thought that the team needed a passing game.

Michigan Replay: Most U-M football games were not telecast in the Detroit area while we lived there. However, every Sunday evening Bo Schembechler appeared on a half-hour interview show with Jim Brandstatter¹³, who had been an offensive tackle on some of his very early teams. Sue and I watched these programs every week. When we moved to Enfield, one of the few things that we missed about the Motor City was watching Michigan Replay on channel 4.

I recently discovered that the Michigan Replay shows have been archived by the university and posted on the Internet here. I recently watched the show about the 1980 version of The Game in which neither side scored a touchdown. The first thing that I noticed was that Brandstatter just dwarfed Schembechler, who was himself a lineman in college. The second thing that caught my eye was Bo’s outfit. He was decked out in plaid pants and a grey sports jacket with a Rose Bowl pin. It was 1980, but Bo;s wardrobe was still in the seventies. I wondered if his wife saw this outfit before he left the house.

On the show Bo was charming and gracious. He always credited the players. What was so attractive about his approach on the show was how clear it was that everyone on the team gave 100 percent, and Bo loved them for it even when they failed. When Brandstatter heaped praise on the team’s defense, Bo insisted that the offense, which did not score a touchdown, did its part by running twice as many plays as the Buckeyes. His slogan—”Those who stay will be champions”—never rang truer.

Bo v. the world as seen from Enfield 1980-1989: The Wolverines finally found a passing game, or rather a receiving game, in #1, Anthony Carter¹⁴, who was by almost any measure the most amazing player in the history of college football. He was named a consensus first-team All-American three years running. During those three years Michigan was definitely a running team. In the first two Butch Woolfolk¹⁵ rushed for more than 1,000 yards. In 1981 he set the single-season U-M record with a total of 1,459 yards.

Nevertheless, the “go to guy” was Carter. He was always the first read on a pass attempt and the last read on most. The two quarterbacks who passed to him, John Wangler¹⁶ and Steve Smith¹⁷, are remembered mostly as footnotes in tales of Carter’s heroics.

The 1980 season was the most memorable one for me. Bo’s coaching staff had been depleted in the off-season. He had to hire many new coaches, including Gary Moeller, Lloyd Carr, and Jack Harbaugh¹⁷. The team had a very shaky start. It barely beat Northwestern in the opener and the lost two non-conference games. The fans were dejected, but the team—especially the defense—seemed to get better with each game. The three games before The Game were all shutouts, and the Wolverines racked up 86 point. The 9-3 win in Columbus was ugly, but the victory over Washington in the Rose Bowl was absolutely beautiful.

I have several vivid memories of the period. Most of them are disappointments. I can picture in my mind Cris Carter¹⁸ making a fabulous catch for a touchdown. My recollection is that it won the game for the Buckeyes, but this was not the case. Jim Harbaugh, my favorite Wolverine of all time, rewrite the record book in that game and threw a 77-yard touchdown pass shortly after Carter’s reception had brought the Buckeyes back to within a field goal.

The 1986 team fumbled away the Little Brown Jug that had been on display in the Michigan Union since 1977 and also lost decisively in the Rose Bowl. I do not remember either of those. I do remember that Jim Harbaugh guaranteed that U-M would beat OSU. They did, but only because of a missed field goal. I remember many field goals missed at crucial times, but this was the only one by an opponent that I can recall.

Michigan won the jug back in 1987, but that team won only seven other games. They did beat Alabama in the Hall of Fame Bowl.

Bo’s penultimate team might have been his best job as a coach. Without any great stars it lost its first two games and tied Iowa at Kinnick Stadium. It then won four straight decisively, edged Ohio State in Columbus, and then won the Rose Bowl by upsetting Southern Cal 22-14.

The first game of Bo’s last year was the worst. Rocket Ismail zoomed for two touchdowns on kick returns, and #1 Notre Dame defeated #2 U-M in Ann Arbor but won the remainder of its regular-season games. In the Rose Bowl the Wolverines lost to USC by a touchdown. Bo was incensed by a holding call on a fake punt that had gained twenty-four yards. After the game he resigned as head coach and took a job as president of the Detroit Tigers. He was fired from that job in 1992.

Bo had had heart problems for a long time before he died in 2006. His legacy was smudged by his son Matt’s claim that Bo knew about sexual shenanigans by long-time university doctor Robert Anderson.

Gary Moeller years 1990-94: I think that it was during Moeller’s five-year tenure at U-M that I stopped watching U-M games. His first team lost a close game to Notre Dame and two regular-season games. However, they closed out the season with five wins (tied for first in the Big 10) and handily defeated Ole Miss in the Gator Bowl. The team had developed a passing attack with Elvis Grbac¹⁹ and Desmond Howard²⁰.

The next year the team lost to Florida State, but won its other ten regular-season games. The highlight was a completely horizontal 25-yard touchdown reception by Heisman-winner Howard on a 4th down against Notre Dame. However, the Wolverines were humiliated in the Rose Bowl by Washington.

The team had three ties but no losses in Grbac’s last year. It went to the Rose Bowl again and this time defeated Washington. Tyrone Wheatley was the star

Todd Collins took over at quarterback in 1993. The team lost four regular-season games, but they closed out the season with a 28-0 mauling of OSU and and equally decisive bowl victory over NC State.

Ty Law, one of the greatest defensive backs ever, could not prevent the miracle.

1994 was the last year in which I watched Michigan football live. The disastrous game at home against Colorado was followed by losses to Penn State, Wisconsin, and OSU.

I remember storming out of the house at the end of the OSU game. I went for a long walk, and I was still upset when I returned. The team’s victory over Colorado State in the bowl game did little to mollify me. The stress of these games was becoming too much for me.

Gary Moeller was allowed to resign after being arrested in May of 1995 for drunk and disorderly conduct at Excalibur, a restaurant in Detroit. He served as an assistant coach in the NFL until 2002. He died in 2022.

Lloyd Carr with four-year starter Chad Henne.

Lloyd Carr’s years 1995-2007: Lloyd Carr was named interim head coach after Moeller’s untimely exit. It was made official after the team won eight out of the first ten games. I expected U-M to lose the finale against #2 OSU, and I did not get to see the 31-23 upset in which Tim Biakabutuka rushed for an astounding 313 yards. That team ended the season at the Alamo Bowl, where lost to Texas A&M. The 1996 team also beat OSU and lost its bowl game.

During Carr’s thirteen years as U-M’s football coach I was extremely busy at work. If I was not traveling on a given Saturday, I was certainly in the office from dawn to dusk. I had a small TV on which I occasionally watched football, but I don’t think that I ever watched a Michigan game. I did not even check the scores until I was sure that the game was over. I told people that my favorite weekend was U-M’s bye week.

The 1997 team featured perhaps the greatest defensive back of all time, Charles Woodson, who had been a freshman phenom in 1995 and a consensus All-American in 1996. He was also used—to great effect—as a kick returner and wide receiver. The team won all of its games, but in The Game it needed a tremendous effort from the defense and special teams to overcome a moribund offense. It faced a very good Washington State team in the Rose Bowl.

I watched the game with my friend Tom Corcoran. Woodson was Superman without the cape, but the rest of the team struggled. With a 21-16 lead U-M had the ball with 7:25 to play. Michigan got two first downs passing (once to Woodson) before Wazoo took over on its own seven yard line with sixteen seconds to play. After a hook and lateral play and the most egregious example of offensive pass interference that I have ever seen WSU moved the ball to the Michigan twenty-six. The clock ran out as the WSU quarterback tried to spike the ball. They should have had a play ready to run. I remember telling Tom that I could not believe that this was what I was hoping for. I never wanted to go through anything so nerve-wracking again.

So, U-M was named national champion by the Associated Press, but the coaches voted for Nebraska, which was also undefeated.

The next three years were bizarre. Michigan turned into “quarterback U”. Tom Brady²⁴ and Drew Henson²⁵ battled for the starting job for two years. Brady eventually prevailed. Henson started for U-M in his junior year, which was typified by a 54-51 loss to Northwestern that must have made Bo rip his hair out (if he had any left). Nevertheless, those three teams won bowl games over Arkansas, Alabama, and Auburn.

The last seven years of Carr’s coaching career were drearily predictable. There were only two quarterbacks. U-M beat OSU in 2004, John Navarrre’s senior year. Henne lost four times in The Game. They were all good teams, but …

I watched onlyone game. I was visiting my dad in Overland Park, KS, the weekend in 2004 when U-M played San Diego State (coached by Brady Hoke) in Ann Arbor. U-M, which had lost to Notre Dame the previous week, were behind at the half. The on-the-field female correspondent stuck a microphone in Coach Carr’s face and asked him what he expected in the second half. He said, “I expect a comeback.” U-M did win, but it was really ugly.

The worst and best games were in the last year, 2007. The loss to Appalachian State in Ann Arbor was, at the time, the low point of Michigan Football in my lifetime. The victory over Florida (coached by Urban Meyer and led by Tim Tebow) in the Capital One Bowl was a pleasant surprise. U-M had four turnovers, but Henne passed for 373 yards and was named MVP.

Coach Carr was living in Ann Arbor in 2024.

Rich Rodriguez and Brady Hoke 2008-2014: I felt strongly that after Carr retired U-M should have hired Jim Harbaugh. After a long career as a quarterback in the NFL he had coached the Raiders’ quarterbacks for two years and then transformed a horrible University of San Diego team into conference champions in only two years. Stanford hired him in 2007, but I suspected that he would have accepted any reasonable offer from U-M. Instead someone decided to pay West Virginia University $2.5 million to allow its coach, Rich Rodriguez, to forsake the Mountaineers and come to Ann Arbor.

I saw two of the games of the Richrod/Hoke era in person. Sue and I were in Ann Arbor in 2008 for the team’s home debut against Miami University. It was a horrendous game. I suspected that Miami would have won if its quarterback had not been injured.

It took a couple of years, but Rodriguez was able to field a pretty good offense built around Denard Robinson. The big problem was on defense. Richrod hired Greg Robinson to coach the defense, and the results were absolutely pathetic. U-M fans were not accustomed to teams running up the score on them, but it became commonplace.

The other game that I viewed in person was in Hoke’s regime, but it was also horrendous. It was a night game played at Rentschler Field in East Hartford in 2013. More than half the fans were wearing Michigan’s colors. It was very close up to the end. Michigan ended up with a 21-14 victory.

That game increased my appreciation of the alcohol-free atmosphere of Michigan Stadium. Some UConn fans were really obnoxious. However, the team’s play did not impress me at all.

Michigan somehow beat OSU in Brady Hoke’s first appearance in 2011. That team also defeated Virginia Tech 23-20 in the Orange Bowl. However, it was downhill from there. The 2014 team’s record was 5-7, which caused Hoke to be fired. The Athletic Director who had hired him, Dave Brandon, resigned.

Jim Harbaugh pre-Pandemic 2015-19: My career as a cowboy coder had just ended when Jim Harbaugh’s stint as U-M’s head coach began. He brought “an enthusiasm unknown to mankind” and a basket of new ideas. He took all of the players to Rome as part of Spring practice. He conducted coaching clinics in the southeastern U.S. These radical approaches to the job and the fact that he almost always spoke his mind engendered a lot of enmity against him in the community of coaches.

The 2015 team was much improved. After losing to Utah on the road to open the season the Wolverines won nine of the next ten games. The only blemish was a loss to MSU in Ann Arbor that was reminiscent of Keystone Kops, On the last play of the game the snap to the punter went astray leading to a 27-23 victory for Sparty. In The Game at the end of the season the team was clobbered by OSU, but the Wolverines delivered an even worse thrashing to the Florida Gators in the Capital One Bowl.

Harbaugh with Wilton Speight, who lost an entire season to a back injury.

The next four years were more of the same—one or two stumbles early, lots of very promising victories, and a blowout loss in The Game. In these years, however, the bowl games were also losses. Fans were becoming upset with Harbaugh, but those OSU teams were extremely good. Their teams were loaded with five-star recruits, and U-M’s quarterback always seemed to get hurt near the end of the season.

MGoBlog and BPONE: MGoBlog was founded by Brian Cook in 2004. I must have discovered the website that covered all of Michigan’s sports shortly after that because I am pretty sure that my dad told me that he was impressed by how much I knew about the U-M football team even before he moved to Enfield in 2005. The emphasis of the blogs was on football, of course. The most amazing aspect was that someone (Brian at first, later Seth Fisher) charted and analyzed every play of every U-M football game.

Brian and Seth also appear on the Michigan Insider radio show that was hosted weekly by Sam Webb on WTKA and was streamed on MGoBlog.com. Craig Ross, a lawyer who was born a year or two before I was, also appeared on the show. Ross was a super-fan of all of the U-M sports.

Top row: Sam and Seth. Bottom row: Craig and Brian.

I have spent an inordinate number of happy hours reading and listening to these guys and the other members of the MGoBlog crew. I especially appreciated the analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of U-M’s opponents that was provided by Alex Drain.

Brian, who was a very talented writer, often bared his soul about sports and his personal life. He invented the acronym BPONE, which stood for Bottomless Pit of Negative Expectations. It described a state of mind when one can no longer appreciate the positive aspects of viewing sports because he/she (hardly ever she) is convinced that they will be overwhelmed by negative aspect in the end. BPONE is precisely the reason that I gave up watching the Wolverines on television. Once you have seen Colorado’s “Miracle at Michigan” or the bungled punt attempts against MSU and Appy State it was difficult to keep them out of your mind.

Harbaugh’s glory years 2021-23: I should pass over without mentioning the monumentally stupid college football season of 2020. U-M won two of the six games in which it was able to field a team of players who did not have Covid-19. I blame Trump, who insisted that all the teams should play during the second wave of the most infectious disease anyone had seen.

Aidan Hutchinson was the best defensive player since Woodson.

In preparation for the 2021 season Harbaugh had dramatically reshuffled his assistant coaches. The primary goals were to design offenses and defenses that would be effective against the ones used by Ohio State. The players recruited for these new schemes were big, tough, and smart. Harbaugh promised that he would beat Ohio State or die trying.

Expectations for the 2021 season were not high in Ann Arbor, but there were some scraps of good news. Aidan Hutchinson³⁰, the All-American defensive end, returned. Cade McNamara and five-star freshman J.J. McCarthy seemed promising as quarterbacks.

In fact, this was a very good team. It lost a heart-breaker to MSU in the middle of the season when Kenneth Walker III ran for 197 yards and five touchdowns, but the Wolverines still entered the Ohio State game with a surprising 10-1 record. The team played an inspired game and defeated the Buckeyes by a score of 42-27. They then annihilated Iowa in the conference championship 42-3. They were ceded #3 in U-M’s first appearance in the College Football Playoff. The team was outclassed by eventual champion, Georgia, 34-11. Nevertheless, this was was the most accomplished Michigan team since the 1997-98 team that was named national champion by the AP.

When Corum got hurt, Edwards stepped up.

Even Brian Cook was optimistic about the 2022 team. Hutchinson was gone, but this team had two legitimate quarterbacks, two outstanding running backs, Blake Corum and Donovan Edwards, outstanding receivers, and the best offensive line in the country. The questions were on defense were quickly answered. The team breezed through its first ten games. A stubborn Illinois defense nearly engineered an upset in Ann Arbor, but the team was still undefeated and ranked #3 for The The Wolverines prevailed in Columbus for the first time since 2000 by a score of 45-23. They then sleepwalked past Purdue in the Big Ten championship and entered the CFP ceded #2.

Sherrone Moore (left) and Jesse Minter were probably the best offensive and defensive coordinators in college football.

Their opponent in the semifinal was Texas Christian. Michigan was favored by almost everyone, but J.J. McCarthy had a terrible game, and Blake Corum had been severely injured late in the season. The defense also had trouble stopping TCU’s attack; it did not help that two or McCarthy’s early passes were intercepted and returned for touchdowns. In the end the Horned Frogs won 51-45. Perhaps it was just as well that U-M lost that game. Georgia overwhelmed TCU in the final.

The 2023 team had one goal: to win the national championship. Almost all of the important players and coaching staff returned. The team was ranked #2 behind Georgia for nearly the entire season in both polls.

Two silly “scandals” were distractions. Because of allegations of recruiting violations in the Covid-19 year³¹ Harbaugh did not attend the first three games, which were blowouts of non-conference teams. Because of bizarre behavior of a low-level analyst with the unlikely name of Connor Stalions. He apparently bought tickets for people for games of prospective U-M opponents. Some of them allegedly took videos of the signs used to signal plays³² to the field. The Big Ten’s investigation resulted in the firing of one coach and the requirement that Harbaugh not be on the field for the team’s last three regular season games.

Corum was the star in overtime, but everyone contributed.

Those three very important games—were overseen by the Offensive Coordinator, Sherrone Moore. The results were decisive victories over Penn State, Maryland, and Ohio State. Michigan then shut out Iowa in the last conference championship game ever. After Seth Fisher analyzed each play of U-M’s semifinal overtime triumph over Alabama in the Rose Bowl he called it the greatest of Michigan’s 1,004 victories. The victory over Washington in the final game was less dramatic but equally satisfying.

In the end Michigan was the unanimous choice as #1, and the NCAA said that they had won the title fairly.

Denouement: Nick Saban, the long-time extremely successful coach at Alabama retired. Harbaugh resigned after agreeing to become the head coach for the Chargers, one of his old teams. Sherrone Moore was named U-M’s head coach. McCarthy, Corum, and quite a few others went pro. Some of the coaches accompanied Harbaugh to wherever the Chargers play these days.

In February of 2024 I watched the entire Rose Bowl game v. Alabama. I could not have watched it live. There were too many times in which Michigan committed unbelievable blunders that threatened to blow the game open. The FIRST PLAY was an interception that was overruled! BPONE would have overcome me. At least one vital organ would have failed.

How will Michigan do in the future? I sincerely doubt that the heroics of team #144 will ever be matched by any Michigan team in the future. College football has changed so drastically in the early twenties, and most of those changes do not bode well for the Wolverines.

I am quite happy that I got to experience this event even though I refused to make the kind of emotional investment in the team that others did. Their reward was no doubt greater.

1. Len Dawson, a Purdue graduate, led the Chiefs to victory in Super Bowl IV. He died in 2022.

2. Curtis McClinton, who went to the University of Kansas, was the AFL’s Rookie of the Year in 1962. He played nine years for the Chiefs. He was still alive and living in KC in 2024.

3. Fred Arbanas was a graduate of Michigan State. In January of 1965 he was assaulted in KC and lost vision in one eye. He nevertheless was an All-Star for the Chiefs for several years after that. He died in 2021.

4. The only one that I missed was one of the greatest U-M games of all time, the 1969 Ohio State game. I opted to attend a debate tournament in Chicago instead. This was one of the poorest choices that I ever made. I even gave away my ticket, which was on the 50-yard line halfway up.

5. I never heard anyone call him “Billy” in the year that he lived in A-R. He was generally known as BT, just as Darden was commonly called TD.

6. This game was attended by my parents while I watched on TV in Leawood! I was on my holiday break from classes.

7. Michigan easily won all ten games before the OSU game. The combined scores of it first three home games was 140-0.

8. Dennis Franklin had a cup of coffee with the New York Lions. He lived in Santa Monica, CA, in 2024.

9. Mike Lantry was my age. If he had gone to U-M after high school, he would have played when I was an undergrad. Instead he went to Vietnam. Although he held many records for kicking when he graduated, and he was a first team All-American, he is best remembered for three crucial kicks that he missed in the 1973 and 1974 OSU games. In 2024 he was living in Florida.

10. Rick Leach was still alive in 2024. His professional career was as a baseball player, mostly riding the pine with the Detroit Tigers.

11. Harlan Huckleby played six years for the Green Bay Packers. He was still alive in 2024.

12. Charles White played for the Cleveland Browns and the Los Angeles Rams. He led the NFL in rushing in 1987. He died in 2023.

13. Jim Brandstatter was in the same class as TD and BT. He tried out for the NFL but never played. He had a very long career in broadcasting. He was still alive in 2024.

14. Anthony Carter’s official height was 5’11”, and his weight was 168 lbs. I was two inches taller and 23 lbs. lighter when I entered the army. So, I was much skinnier than Carter. However, compared to nearly all football players, Carter was a midget. He set an incredible number of records. You can find them on his Wikipedia page, which is posted here. Carter was still alive in 2024.

15. Butch Woolfolk was a track star as well as one of the all-time great running backs at U-M. He also had an outstanding professional career. He was still alive in 2024.

16. John Wangler had to fight for the quarterback job his entire career at U-M, and he did not make the grade in the NFL. Nevertheless he will always be remembered for that pass in the Indiana game and his victories in The Game and the Rose Bowl. He was still alive in 2024.

16. Steve Smith started at quarterback for U-M for three years. He played for a couple of years in Canada. He was still alive in 2024.

17. Jack Harbaugh was the head coach at Western Michigan and then Western Kentucky, where his team won the Division I-AA national championship in 2002. The most important aspect of his career at U-M was probably the introduction of his son Jim to the nicest football town and best program in the country. Jim hired him as an assistant coach in 2023 (at the age of 84), and he was on the sideline coaching away when the Wolverines finally won it all in 2024.

18. Cris Carter was a phenomenal receiver, perhaps the best ever, but he had difficulty staying out of trouble. He was suspended for his senior year (1988) at OSU and then had a long and checkered NFL career. The high spots were lofty enough to get him into the Hall of Fame. Since his retirement after the 2002 season he has had had a few jobs in sports broadcasting.

19. Elvis Grbac had a reasonably successful, at least in financial terms, eight-year career in the NFL. He retired to become athletic director of his old high school in Cleveland. Believe it or not, he had a brother named Englebert.

20. Desmond Howard, who went to the same high school as Grbac, had a very successful NFL career and an even more successful career as an analyst at ESPN. I sat next to him on an airplane once during the early days of his career there.

21. I was astounded to learn that in 2023 Tyrone Wheatley had been hired as the head football coach at Wayne State in Detroit. He had a long and successful NFL career with the Giants and Raiders.

22. Todd Collins was never a big star at U-M, but his NFL career, which started in 1995 lasted until 2010, although on two different occasions he took a few years off. He was never a starter, but he evidently was widely considered a reliable backup.

23. Charles Woodson was just as good in the NFL as he had been in college. He played from 1998 to 2015, an astonishingly long career for a defensive back. The greatest interception of all time can be viewed here. In 2024 Woodson worked as an analyst for Fox.

24. Tom Brady became the greatest quarterback of all time in the NFL.

25. Drew Henson dropped out of school after his junior season and signed a contract with the New York Yankees. He bounced around in the minors before and played only eight games with the Yankees before retiring in 2004. He then tried the NFL, where he saw very limited action over a five year career. He was still alive in 2024, apparently working for a company that advised players on economic matters.

26. John Navarre was drafted by the NFL, but he played in only two games. In 2024 he lived in Elmhurst, IL.

27. Chad Henne played fifteen years in the NFL, mostly as a backup quarterback. His last few years were with the Chiefs. He retired in 2023.

28. This is my favorite figure of speech. It is called preterition.

29. Thankfully Walker played only one season for MSU. He was drafted by the Seahawks.

30. In 2024 Aidan Hutchinson was the cornerstone of the rebuilt Detroit Lions.

31. Brian Cook and the other MGoBloggers call this incident “hamburgergate”.

32. I was shocked to learn that it was illegal to go to other teams’ games to scout. I also assumed that everyone tried to “steal” signals and that teams took measures to make this nearly impossible. The NFL has installed technology that allows the coaches to talk to the players on the field. College coaches refuse to consider this arrangement.

1972-1974 Connecticut: The People

Posted on February 15, 2021 by Mike

Friends, memorable acquaintances, and relatives. Continue reading →

I met a large number of people working at The Hartford. Here is an alphabetical list of the ones that I remember. At the end are a few people whom I remember only by first name. If no department is mentioned, the person worked in Life Actuarial. If no specific responsibility is mentioned, it is safe to assume that the individual was an actuary or actuarial student.

The only think that I remember about Larry Abbott is that he always came to work without a suit coat. He kept a sports coat near his desk to wear to meetings in other departments. I think that he worked in Group Actuarial.
I did not know Pat Adams very well. I remember criticizing her pitiful sneeze in the study room. I also remember that she took—and passed actuarial exams two at a time.
Lou Aiello was a clerk in Life Actuarial. He might have worked for Alan Gibb. He batted .500 (1 for 2) for the Mean Reserves, and his hit was the most legendary in the history of the team.
At some point I sat near Barb Bednarz. I think that it might have been when I came back for the summer of 1975. I remember talking to her about Monty Python and explicating my theory that a human being trained from birth to run on all fours could win Olympic medals.
Paul Campbell arrived after I did. He was a Variable Annuity actuary. He played once or twice for the Mean Reserves softball team.
Jim Cochran came to Hartford in 1973. He and his wife Ann were close friends. They taught me a subset of the rules to Sheepshead. Jim played on both Mean Reserves teams and took my place on the golf team. He was the outsider in the 345 Club carpool. I keep in touch with him via email. Some people called him “Crow”. I think it had something to do with the original spelling
Tom Corcoran has been my close friend for over forty-eight years. Having grown up in the Boston area, in the seventies he still pronounced his last name in almost exactly the same way that Jim Cochran pronounced his. Tom, who participated in nearly every aspect of my life at the Hartford, married Patti Lewonczyk on 1/07/77.
Sue Comparetto worked as a clerk for nearly every insurance company in Hartford. We got married on 12/08/12, when it finally made sense for tax purposes. She took the photos for the Mean Reserves softball album.
Carolyn DesRochers was a supervisor in the Individual Pensions Department. I worked with her while attempting to determine the source of the problems with the annual reports for the policyholders. She was married to Chris.
Chris DesRochers¹ started, I think, a year before I did. I succeeded him in the role of preparing a monthly report for Jan Pollnow. He was married to Carolyn. I think that I helped them move.
Paul Engstrom played both years for the Mean Reserves softball team, but I don’t have any clear memories of him.
Wayne Foster ran the payday pool. He had been a communications specialist in Vietnam. He was awarded a Bronze Star for completing an international phone call.
Don Francis was the #2 man in the Life Actuarial Department. He played softball with us a few times, but I did not know him very well.
Tom Garabedian worked in the Group Actuarial Department. He was one of the best players in both basketball and softball.
Paul Gewirtz was the senior actuary in the Individual Pensions area. I think that he became a fellow of the Society of Actuaries while I was at the Hartford. He made a memorable contribution to the lore of the Mean Reserves softball team.
Alan Gibb was a supervisor in Life Actuarial. I did not have much interaction with him.
My only contact with Bob Goode, a top executive, was a very nerve-wracking phone call during my short period working for Mike Winterfield.
I am not sure where Les Gubkin worked. He somehow found out about the Mean Reserves and joined the softball team in 1973.
Jim Hawke began working at the Hartford in 1973. We soon became close friends, and we still stay in contact by email. He played a little softball for the team, but he is most famous for the picnic with Ethan, Sue, and me on Bunyan Mountain. He also took over my bedroom in the 345 Club and my spot in the carpool.
I remember Jim Housholder, but the only conversation that I recall clearly was when he explained about a new product he was working on—a whole life policy with a death-exclusion rider.
Kevin Kirk worked in Individual Pensions. He and his wife came over to have supper and watch The Wizard of Oz with Sue and me in East Hartford. Kevin played on both the basketball and softball teams.
Donna Kolakowski was one of the youngest clerks. She attended some of our events. I went to lunch with her and Jim Hawke a few times.
Jim Kreidler once called me a jock, one of the greatest compliments that I ever received. He wimped out in the epic tennis match of 8/18/73. He went to England to work there.
Patti Lewonczyk² was a supervisor in Individual Pensions. We worked together on proposals. She married Tom Corcoran. They went on vacations with Sue and me in the twenty-first century.
Frank Lord³ played on the softball team. He might have also played basketball, but his best sport was tennis. He was the first person that I knew who drove a BMW. I saw him in 1988 at the Mark Twain House when I won the story contest.
I think that Mel Majocha worked at the Hartford somewhere. She went out with Tom Herget. I went to her parent’s house for a cookout once. I will never forget how she said goodbye to me.
Dave McDonald was Secretary (boss) of the Individual Pensions Department. He asked me to investigate the problem producing the annual statements for customers.
Gail Mertan went out with Tom Garabedian. I don’t know where (or if) she worked.
Marsha Monico went out with Tom Herget. I don’t know where (or if) she worked.
Bill Mustard played golf with John Sigler, Norm Newfield, and me. I think that he worked in IT at the Hartford.
Norm Newfield was a tremendous athlete. He worked in Human Resources. He played on a flag football team in New Britain, and he participated in my football pool. He was part of our foursome in golf and an opponent in the golf league.
Scott Otermat⁴ was my supervisor in the Individual Pensions Department. His favorite author was Ayn Rand. He had a dog named Cinders. I helped him move to Bristol. He liked to work on his MG. His full name was actually Scott C. Otermat, Jr. I tried to get him to promise to name his first-born Scott C. Otermat The Third so that his initials would be the same as his first name.
Damon Panels lived across the street from the tower building. He occasionally gave a soirée in his apartment. Sue and I went to see him years later in Bloomfield, CT.
Tony Piccerillo was a recent graduate of Trinity College who worked in Individual Pensions.
Jan Pollnow hired me. He was a star play on both athletic teams. He was my last boss before I moved to Plymouth.
Russ Pollnow was Jan’s brother. I don’t know where he worked but he played on the 1974 softball team.
Parker Prine worked with Norm Newfield in Human Rellations. He played in the football pool and won one week. Tom Herget accused me of making him up and keeping the winnings for myself.
Ann Randazzo was Don Sondergeld’s secretary and the unofficial office manager of the Life Actuarial Department.
I don’t know where Keith Reynolds worked. He played softball and went to bars with us.
Bob Riley was a supervisor in Life Actuarial. He was Sue’s boss and a first baseman on the 1974 team.
I don’t know where Charlie Robinson worked. He played on the softball team.
David Rowe was an exchange student from England who worked as an actuary in Life Actuarial. The four bases on a softball diamond confounded him. Traffic on roundabouts in England goes clockwise.
Gerry Schwartz, an employee of the Operations Research Department, had the dubious honor of managing the HP-3000 computer system.
John Sigler was my golf and tennis partner. He also played on all of the Mean Reserves teams.
Fred Smith played on the basketball teams. He was famous for being able to read paper tapes.
Don Sondergeld was VP and Actuary (big cheese). He never berated me publicly for insulting his wife. In 2021 he is still an active member of the Hartford Bridge Club.
Mike Swiecicki⁵ left the Hartford before I did. I remember him as being a phenomenal player at games that required hand-eye coordination.
Laurie Weisbrot (a guy) worked in Group Actuarial. When he passed the tenth exam he purchase a vanity plate: LRW-FSA.
Mike Wheeler played on the softball team both years.
Jo White was a senior clerk. She played a lot of golf, mostly at the Buena Vista Golf Course in West Hartford.
Ron Wittenwyler played third base on our softball team in 1973. His wife Jane came to some games.
First names only:
- Bill: Norm Newfield’s partner in the golf league;
- Jackie: Sue’s landlady in Rockville;
- Lisa: who worked for Don Francis;
- Paula: a clerk who worked for Patti Lewonczyk and whom I made cry;
- Ray: a supervisor in Individual Pensions;
- Ron: who married Jackie.
- Tad: a clerk who worked for Alan Gibb.

Sue Comparetto had a million friends. I have undoubtedly forgotten more than I remember. Here are a few that I met during this two-year period.

Marlene Boulerice was with Gary Gudinkas at the time. Sue went to high school with her.
Diane DeFreitas was Sue’s roommate in East Haddam.
Gary Gudinkas was a short guy who was with Marlene. Sue knew him from high school.
Karen Peterson worked at Travelers Equity Sales with Sue and went on the trip to Alaska with her.
Diane Robinson⁶ worked at Travelers Equity Sales with Sue and went on the trip to Alaska with her. We visited Diane a few times at her home in Vermont.
Pat and Stan Slatt had a very large python and a boa constrictor.
Bob and Susan Thompson had a dachshund and a very old Plymouth.
Sue knew Evelyn Umgelter from high school.

It took me years to sort out Sue’s relatives on her mother’s side. I’m only listing first names. Except for Effy, their last name in 1972-74 was Locke. Almost all of them lived within a mile or two of Sue’s childhood home on North Maple in Enfield. Sue was older than all of her cousins and siblings, and I was older than she was. So, I am pretty sure that all of the people of Sue’s generation were living at home during this period.

Bob was the only one of Effy’s brother who left Enfield. He moved to western Michigan and worked as an engineer. Sue and I visited his family in the nineties.
Carol⁷ was Bob’s wife.
Charlie⁸ was Effy’s brother. He was an electrician who did work for Sue’s Father. He lived within a couple of miles.
Chet⁹ was also Effy’s brother. He was buried in his military uniform. He lived within a couple of miles.
Effy Slanetz¹⁰ was Sue’s mother.
Elsie¹¹ was Chet’s wife.
Gene¹² was Charlie’s wife.
Glenn was a son of Ted and Judy and therefore Sue’s first cousin. He lived a few miles away in a new house
Jimmy was a son of Ted and Judy and therefore Sue’s first cousin.
Judy was Ted’s wife. They lived across the street from the Slanetz home.
Molly¹³ was Sue’s Grandmother and Effy’s mother. She lived in a room attached to Ted and Judy’s house. She loved to play bingo.
Paul was Chet’s son. a grave-digger, and Sue’s first cousin.
Patti¹⁴ and Cathy were Charlie’s daughters and therefore Sue’s first cousins. I did not know them very well.
Susie was Ted and Judy’s daughter and Sue’s first cousin.
Ted was Effy’s youngest brother and therefore Sue’s uncle.
Timmy was Chet’s son and Sue’s first cousin.

In contrast, I am not sure that I met any of Sue’s uncles, aunts, and cousins on her father’s (Slanetz) side during this period. I got to meet a lot of them at a Slanetz family reunion that was held years later at Sue’s family house.

Art¹⁵ was Sue’s dad. He farmed when Sue was little. When I knew him, he had a corporation with several irons in the fire—construction, trash, water, and who knows what else.
Betty was Sue’s youngest sister.
Don was Sue’s only brother.
Karen was Sue’s younger sister. She was older than Betty and Don.
Margaret¹⁶ Davis was Art’s sister. She had three children.
- Mark was the brains of the family. I saw him once in Houston, and he has visited our house occasionally.
- Robby still lives in Enfield in 2021.
- I met Diane only briefly. I think that she in South Carolina in 2021.

Chris DesRochers died in 2013. His obituary can be read here.
Patti and Tom Corcoran married while I was coaching debate in Michigan in the late seventies. They had two children, Brian and Casey, who in 2021 both live in Burlington, VT, with their respective families. Patti died in 2011. My tribute to her can be read here.
Frank Lord died on July 3, 2020. His obituary is here.
Scott Otermat left the Hartford in 1980. He died in 2016. His obituary is here.
Mike Swiecicki left the Hartford before I did. He died in 2015 after a twenty-five year career as an actuary with CAL PERS. His obituary is here.
Diane Robinson died in 2009
Carol Locke died in 2018. Her obituary is here.
Charlie Locke died in 2017. His obituary is here.
Chet Locke died in 2004. His obituary is here.
Elsie Locke died in 2018.
Effy Slanetz died in 2002. Her obituary is here.
Gene Locke died in 2018.
I think that Molly Locke died in 1990.
Patti Locke Caswell died in 2019. Her obituary is here.
Art Slanetz died in 2017. His obituary is here.
Margaret Davis died in 2010. Her obituary is here.

1972-1974 Connecticut: The Mean Reserves

Posted on January 15, 2021 by Mike

_t+1/2V_x Continue reading →

The above expression is the actuarial depiction of a “mean reserve” for a life insurance policy. The age at issue is x, and, if I remember correctly, the number of elapsed years is t. V is the symbol for reserve. The +1/2 indicates that it is valuated halfway through the year. Thus, it is the “mean” (average) reserve value for the year.

The Hartford Life hired four young men as actuarial students in 1972. Because of my time in the Army, I was the oldest and the last one hired. The other three were all recent college graduates, and they were all named Tom: Corcoran, Garabedian, and Herget. The three of them shared more than the name Tom; they were all quite interested in sports (especially baseball and basketball), and they were all pretty good athletes as well.

I was almost as interested in sports as they were, but my baseball (documented here) and basketball (documented here) careers were not exactly sterling. Besides, my favorite sport has always been football, and my biggest passion was college football, which was almost unknown in New England—at the time Boston College was the only school in New England that played in the top division, as opposed to five in the state of Michigan alone.

Tom Corcoran¹ was a recent graduate of Brown. He grew up in Stoneham, a suburb on the north side of Boston. He was a die-hard fan of the Sawx and the Celtics. He also played for the rugby club at Brown. Tom was strong, and he knew a lot about basketball, or at least a lot more than I did.

Tom Herget² was from Aurora, IL, west of Chicago. He had just graduated from the University of Illinois, where he majored in parties and minored in math. Tom had uncanny success in basketball with his devious moves near the basket. He was without a doubt the friendliest guy whom I have ever met. He also often made Jack Benny look like a big spender.

Tom Garabedian³, a graduate of Bowdoin College in Maine, lived within walking distance of my apartment in East Hartford. Tom was a skillful ball handler and very quick. He was often asked to defend the opponent’s best scorer, even those who were six or more inches taller.

At some point in the summer we were joined by John Sigler, who was a year or two older than I was. He transferred to Life Actuarial from the Data Processing Department. John graduated from the University of South Carolina. His favorite sport was golf, and he was very good at it. We played golf together a lot. More details are provided here. His basketball game was about on a par with mine.

By the end of the summer the five of us knew each other pretty well. I had not worked with any of them but Tom C., Tom H., John, and I were on the twenty-first floor, and we usually ate lunch together. Tom G. worked in the Group Department, but we all knew him pretty well.

Tom Herget, who had quickly made friends with many people in both buildings, somehow learned that the Hartford was sponsoring a basketball league. He decided to put together a team. He recruited all five of us along with a handful of other guys. The ones that I remember were:

Kevin Kirk.

Kevin Kirk, the only non-actuary on the team, worked in the Individual Pensions Department. He was a point guard on his college team at Belmont Abbey, a small college in North Carolina.
Jan Pollnow was one of the very best players in the company. He went to the University of Wisconsin.
Fred Smith was a big strong guy who was a force under the boards.
Frank Lord was an actuarial student who had attended Dartmouth. His best sport was tennis.

Jim Cochran.

I am quite sure that there was at least one more player for our first game. I distinctly remember that we had ten players. Maybe Mike Winterfield played. In 1973-74 Jim Cochran, who came from Wisconsin, played as well.

I was 6’1″, 145 lbs. when I left the Army.

The games were old school—there was no three-point line. None of the teams had uniforms. However, we did have real refs, and they did not swallow their whistles. I was once called for a technical foul when I emoted the word “Geez” after an opposing player who was dribbling with his right hand karate chopped me with his left. On the other hand, several charging fouls were called on opposing players who sent me flying with incidental contact on drives to the basket. I wasn’t flopping. These guys were husky, and I was a reed with a high center of gravity.

I think that it was Tom H. who came up with the name “Mean Reserves”. It was a brilliantly wonky idea. He also supplied a few of us with “warmup jackets”, which were actually shirts evidently abandoned at the dry cleaners by an unidentified auto service place. Tom bought them for a buck or two. The other two Toms got one with “Rocco” embroidered over one pocket. Mine said “Neal”. Tom got one for himself as well, but it was anonymous. We wore them faithfully to the games. I am sure that our opponents were impressed.

The gym at Northwest Catholic.

The aptness of the team’s name was demonstrated in the first game, which, like all the others was played at Northwest Catholic High School in West Hartford. We played against five guys who were in their thirties or forties. We pressed the entire game, and we played two platoons who relieved each other every five or ten minutes. We had to lay off a bit in the second half. The opponents were so winded that they were nearly ready to quit (or maybe die).

We had pretty good teams both years. We won a lot more often than we lost. After each victory most of us would gather for pizza and beer at The Keg,⁴ a restaurant/bar on Sisson Avenue. We might have gone there when we lost, too. We did not need much of an excuse to keep the party going.

In both years the best team in the league was the one representing the company’s Mailroom. One of their guys was by far the best player in the league. He towered over everyone, and he could consistently hit jump shots from the top of the key. We put Garabedian on him, and that helped, but if he ever got the ball near his spot, the scorekeeper could just record two points without looking.

I remember once that we were scheduled to play the Mailroom, and with a minute or two left in the warmup time, only three of their guys had shown up. Just a few seconds before they would have had to forfeit, two or three more guys appeared and played the whole game in blue jeans.

I also remember that one guy from the Mailroom was not very tall and was quite portly. We figured him for the weak link, but we were wrong. Not only could he dribble and shoot, but he could really jump, and he was also in pretty good shape.

I think that I showed up for every game, but I was seldom much of a factor. I only have one other vivid memory. We were scheduled to play a good team from (I think) Operations Research. They had two really good players, a ball-handler whose name I don’t remember, and a scoring machine whose last name was Kolodziej.

We were shorthanded. Jan Pollnow and Fred Smith did not play. Tom Corcoran was pressed into playing center, and I played most of the game at one of the forwards. Tom said that we should play a zone defense and told me that my responsibility was to keep Kolodziej from going “back-door.” Seeing the blank expression on my face, he explained that when Kolodziej got the ball on my side to let him go and to stand next to the out-of-bounds line between him and the basket so that he could not drive past me under the basket. To drive to the basket he would need to go where the guards could help defend him. To my astonishment this strategy worked.

We all played our best game, and we proved that we could win without Jan. This was the only time in my life that I ever played more than half of an official basketball game that was won by my team. The beer and pizza tasted very good that night.

I do not have any paperwork or photos for the basketball games, and my memory is faulty. Sorry.

* * *

Fortunately, I have a treasure trove of information and photos for the softball teams. Sue Comparetto⁵ and I put together an album documenting the first two years of the Mean Reserves softball team. Here is the introduction to that tome.

Spring 1973 found the weekday residents of the twenty-first floor tired but restive after their first successful basketball season. A memorandum was circulated by the Men’s Club announcing the organization of a softball league for that summer. The whole floor responded with the usual enthusiasm to such memos, but basketball captain R. T. “Tom” Herget happened to read the memo before throwing it away, and, remembering his old mushball days in Illinois, he decided to try to organize an entry.

A typical reaction to Tom’s recruiting was Kevin Kirk’s “What?” Paul Gewirtz thought that a softball game was played with a Nerf ball and a hoop. Eventually, however, enough “players” responded to form an all-volunteer team!

The first thing that the team needed was a name. Tom remembered the stories that used to be passed around on LaSalle St.⁶ about the legendary T. V. “Mean” Reserve. Mean passed up a promising career as a relief pitcher for Eddie Feigner’s King and His Court softball team to pursue a lifelong ambition of correlating the five-step delivery with mortality among professional bowlers. “Just the thing to inspire the team to greatness”, thought Tom, but his suggestion that the team be known as the TV’s was rejected, and we were stuck with the same name as the basketball team’s—the Mean Reserves.

Bunting is common in fast-pitch softball.

Slow-pitch softball uses the standard ball that is twelve inches in circumference. Each team has ten players in the field. The extra player usually plays in the outfield. Pitches must be underhand with an arc of between three and ten feet. Bunting was not allowed. Leadoffs and stealing of bases were also verboten.

Everyone who played on the basketball teams also played softball. The following guys also joined us in 1973:

Jim Cochran, who also played on the basketball squad later in the year, led the team in hitting with a .538 average, in 1973.
Wayne Foster, who ran the payday pool, was the only Vietnam veteran (that I know of) on the twenty-first floor. he told me that he was awarded a Bronze Star for putting through an international phone call for the guy who maintained the list. He played first base.
Charley Robinson from the Special Risk Underwriting Department played in about half of the games.
Scott Otermat⁷, who went to Oberlin College and was my supervisor in the Individual Pensions Department, shared pitching duties with Frank Lord and me.
Ron Wittenwiler was a very good third baseman, but he only came to a couple. of games.
Les Gubkin also played in a couple of games. I remember him, but not where he worked.
Mike Swiecicki⁸ was a very athletic actuarial student, but he only played softball once or twice.
Paul Gewirtz bought his first baseball glove before showing up for one game. He played more in ’74. His defensive play was, well, noteworthy.
Paul Engstrom was a good enough fielder to play shortstop. He also was a bigger factor in ’74.

John Sigler hit .480 in 1973.

We did not actually win any games in 1973, but we made the playoffs anyway. We were eliminated in the first round.

Achievements: Tom Corcoran had eight RBI’s. Tom Garabedian scored eight runs. I led the team in hits and at-bats and was second in both runs and RBI’s.

In 1974 (the rebuilding year) even more people played:

Bob Riley was a Rock at first base
Don Sondergeld had only one official at-bat, but he appeared in quite a few of Sue’s photos.
Jim Hawke, often called “Hawkeye” in tribute to his thick glasses, held a masters degree in math from UConn. He also played a really hot ragtime piano. You have probably heard of his son Ethan, the famous actor.
Mike Wheeler played in several games, but I don’t remember him at all.
Lou Aiello only batted twice, but he got one hit and one RBI that no one will ever forget.
Jim Housholder only batted once.
Keith Reynolds was a fast runner who could cover a lot of ground in the outfield. He worked on another floor.
Paul Campbell, was hired as a Variable Annuity actuary in the middle of the season.
David Rowe was an exchange actuary from England. He had one hit in four at-bats. He might have done better, but he sometimes ran to third base when he hit the ball. We also had to keep reminding him not to carry the bat on the base paths.

Bob Riley was our rock at first base in ’74.

One of Tom C’s round-trippers.

Achievements: Tom Corcoran was again the star of the team with twenty-four hits, nineteen runs, twenty RBI’s, three triples, and four legitimate home runs. He also was our best outfielder. He actually gunned down a few overly ambitious base runners.

I led the team (and the league) in hitting with a .720 average. I also hit one comical home run.

Over the two years I had 33 hits in 54 at-bats. This was quite a change for the guy who only hit the ball once in his first entire season. How did I do it? Well, there were several important factors.

No, Tom H. is not left-handed. I included this photo to show my heavy aluminum bat. The street in the background is the one that aided my home run.

I had bought a very heavy aluminum bat, which I still have. No one else could stand to use it.
I stood at least two feet away from home plate and towards the front of the batter’s box. When the ball came over the plate it was outside and slightly behind me.
After I entered the batters box, look longingly toward left field and then point the bat in that direction. Often this charade would induce the right fielder and the short fielder to take several steps to their right.
The right fielder was usually the team’s second-worst fielder (after the catcher).
I concentrated on hitting the bottom center of the ball while stepping toward right field. This swing always imparted left-to-right (slice) spin to the ball.

Frank Lord’s 1-8 pitching record was the team’s best.

I only made seven outs in 1974. Three or four of them came in one frustrating game in which the opposing pitcher threw the ball with the back of his hand toward the plate. This put backspin on the pitches. My swing usually produced soft line drives between first and second. In that one game, however, I was able to hit nothing but ground balls and weak pop-ups.

I tried to emulate his technique in pitching practice, but I could not consistently throw strikes. I don’t think that I would ever be able to master it.

Memorable events: We won a game! I don’t remember which team we beat, but Frank Lord was the winning pitcher. We made the playoffs again. This time we lost by only 8-6 to the Staggers, the top-seeded team. It was easily our best game. The explanation is here.

Sue missed all of my 33 hits, but she did get this shot of me coaching 3rd base in street clothes.

Here is how I hit a triple and a home run. In both cases I hit soft line drives over the first baseman’s head. When the ball hit the ground it made a right turn because my swing always produced a slice. In the first case I was standing on third by the time that the ball made it to the infield. In the other case the ball made it to the street, which sloped rather sharply away from the infield. The ball actually was picking up speed when the right fielder picked it up. I was crossing the plate as the ball reached the first baseman.

No one who was present will ever forget Lou Aiello’s RBI single. Lou had not played a lot of baseball. His other at-bat for the Mean Reserves was a strikeout, which is almost unheard of in slow-pitch softball. It is important to note a few things that provide context for his successful plate appearance.

1. Many pitchers backed up three or four steps as soon as they released the ball.
2. Most teams put their worst defensive player at catcher.
3. Catchers never crowded the plate. They generally stood several feet back and fielded pitches on one bounce if they fielded them at all.
4. As I mentioned, both bunting and base-stealing were illegal.

</ol

On his second at-bat Lou swung and missed a couple of times. The crowd shouted encouragement. Lou then connected, but just barely—the bottom of his bat grazed the top of the ball, causing it to roll to a stop a few feet in front of home plate. The Mean Reserve bench erupted with “Run, Lou, run!” The catcher was stupefied, and the pitcher was slow enough charging back in to get the ball that Lou had reached first base before the throw. Meanwhile, the Mean Reserve who had been on third scored easily because the catcher was still confused and made no move to defend home plate.

This episode goes down in the Mean Reserve annals as “Lou Aiello’s Swinging Bunt”.

Don Sondergeld had a nice swing, but he only had one official at-bat for the team

So, yes, we occasionally had a left-handed second baseman. You won’t see one in the majors, but then again, the Mean Reserves did not turn many double plays. We put Paul at second base because the vast majority of infield balls are hit to the other side of the field.

In this game, however, someone hit a rather sharp grounder almost right at Paul. Instinct took over, and Paul reached down to catch the ball with his bare left hand rather than his gloved right hand. He did a good job of stopping the ball, and so I moved over to first base and positioned myself to catch his throw.

To everyone’s surprise Paul did not pick the ball up and throw it to me. Instead, leaving the ball in the base path, he turned and purposefully jogged into right field. I hurried over to get the ball. I barely beat the pitcher and shortstop there, and I reached for the ball. Meanwhile, the hitter had rounded first and run past the three of us. When I picked up the ball, there were no Mean Reserves near second base. So, the hitter got a really cheap double.

This did NOT happen.

knocked his thumb off

I swear on George Brett’s pine-tar bat that this is a true story.

1. Tom Corcoran married Patti Lewonczyk from the Individual Pensions Department. He still has a house in Wethersfield, CT, but he also has an apartment in Burlington, VT, where both of his children, Brian and Casey, and their families reside.

2. In 2021 Tom Herget and his wife live in his home town of Aurora, IL. He sends me a Christmas card every December.

3. In 2021 Tom Garabedian is living in the Boston are.

4. The family that owned The Keg moved the operation to Farmington in 2002. The Hartford Courant covered that event here. The building at 99 Sisson Avenue is now a Wood N Tap restaurant.

5. Much more information about Sue can be found here.

6. The headquarters of the Society of Actuaries was on LaSalle St. in Chicago. It subsequently moved to the suburb of Schaumburg.

7. Scott Otermat left the Hartford in 1980. He died in 2016. His obituary is here.

8. Mike Swiecicki left the Hartford before I did. He died in 2015 after a twenty-five year career as an actuary with CAL PERS. His obituary is here.

1972-1974 Connecticut: Working at Hartford Life

Posted on January 13, 2021 by Mike

My short career at Hartford Life. Continue reading →

The Hartford has two adjacent buildings. I worked in the tower.

Needless to say, I spent the first half of my first working day at the Hartford¹ filling out forms. Then I was told that I would be working in the Group Department. My supervisor for the afternoon was the woman who kept score at basketball games. However, the next day I was reassigned to the twenty-first floor, the home of Life Actuarial, Individual Pensions, and Special Risk Underwriting.

The insurance world had advanced somewhat while I was in the Army. The hordes of clerks with huge Fridens on their desks were still there, but there were a few electronic calculators as well. In 1972 electronic calculators required electricity, and cost as much as the Fridens, about $1,000 each, roughly half the price of my car, Greenie! The companies took strong measures to keep them from being stolen.

My specific assignment was to assist Mike Winterfield,² an actuary who had joined the Hartford when his old company (in St. Louis, I think), which specialized in variable annuities³, was purchased by ITT and folded into the Hartford. He had a vacation planned, but first he needed to submit a business plan for the VA product to his bosses at the Hartford.

My recollection is that ITT required a return on investment (ROI) of 15 percent for all of its subsidiaries. So, the algorithms that Mike developed for the business plan fixed the return ratio at .15 and juggled the other assumptions to make it work. There were no spreadsheet programs available yet in 1972.⁴ To evaluate the assumptions Mike designed an accountant’s worksheet with about eleven columns and I don’t know how many rows, probably one for each year. I only helped worked on this for a few weeks; I don’t remember many details. He would change one or two assumptions, I make all through the calculations to determine how much capital infusion the infant product needed to reach the desired rate of return.

These columnar worksheets were ubiquitous at insurance companies in the early seventies.

Someone else would check my work and put little red dots beside each number that had been verified. This approach, of course, meant that all of the clerical work in the department had to be done twice, but when programs were written to replace the accountant’s sheets, nothing replaced the red dots.

Finally, after many iterations everything seemed to be in order. The plan was submitted, and Mike went on vacation. A day or two later I had the dubious distinction of being quizzed tin a three-way phone call about the plan. The interrogators were Don Sondergeld,⁵ Vice President and Actuary, and Bob Goode, a high muckety-muck of the Hartford. They asked me several questions that stumped me. I disclosed what I did know, which was limited to how each cell on the worksheet was calculated. I am pretty sure that this information was not what they were looking for. Before I hung up I had to wipe off about a quarter cup of perspiration from the receiver for the telephone, which I shared with Sue Comparetto,⁶ the only clerk with an electronic calculator.

I have always had an aversion to phones. My VA experiences did not help.

The only other duty that I remember from my time in the VA area was calculating proposals for salesmen. They told us how much money prospects wanted to invest and when they wanted to receive the annuities. I, of course, had no clue what the market would do in the interim. So, we made an assumption of a specific interest rate, perhaps 6 percent. The sales agents would occasionally call to complain that a competitor’s proposal assumed a higher return that yielded a higher annuity amount or lower premium. I tried to explain that any company could in theory use any interest rate, but the Hartford’s policy was to use the same rate on all proposals. The salesmen often heard the first part, but not the second. They would try to pressure me into giving them a better quote. I never gave in, but once again the phone got drenched with sweat.

Hartford's insurance companies had hundreds of these. — Hartford’s insurance companies had hundreds of these.

For some reason I kept getting moved around. My recollection is that in my first six weeks or so at the Hartford, I sat in five or six different grey steel desks. All of the actuarial students were rotated from one area to another, but nobody moved as much as I did.

My next stop was in the Individual Pensions Department. The name was a little misleading. The purchasers of the product were small businesses, not individuals. For some of the prospective customers it worked out better to buy individual policies for each eligible employee than one group policy.

My first assignment there was to take over maintenance of the program that was used to calculate proposals for the pension plans. An actuary named Fred Smith had been doing this, but the bosses had more important assignments for him. The Hartford offered several varieties of them from single-premium fixed interest to variable annuities. The proposal program could use any interest rate to generate the premiums for a fixed-benefit plan or the benefits for a fixed-cost plan.

This program ran on a computer that was located not at the Hartford but at Kaman Aerospace. The Hartford had its own computers, of course, but their use was jealously guarded by the Data Processing Department. Many actuaries were quite capable of doing the programming, but it was very difficult to get access to the mainframes. So, the Actuarial Department rented time from two different companies. Kaman had an HP 2000A; Tymshare had a DEC PDP-10. Kaman was cheaper, but Tymshare had more features. We used interpreted BASIC on both systems.

Each punched row on the tape contained one byte (character) of information. Fred Smith could read these tapes!

We gained access to the remote systems using a teletype machine connected to a phone line. Our data was stored on paper tape. I think that we stored the programs on the remote hard drive, but I might be mistaken. The teletype had the ability to take information from the keyboard and/or the tape reader. Output was printed on an 8.5″ continuous roll in 10-pitch Courier at a breathtaking ten characters per second. The unit also including a tape-punching device. Because it made a lot of noise when printing or punching, the teletype was isolated in a very small room, maybe 4′ x 8′.

Later a second unit was added. It did not have a tape device, but it printed at thirty characters per second using a round disk. It was not a “daisy wheel”; the disk was metallic and was perpendicular to the page. People came from every floor and from the Hartford’s other building just to watch that baby hum. To many it seemed magical that it could print so quickly and accurately.

The pension proposal program was in good shape when Fred turned it over to me. There was an up-to-date listing, and Fred had inserted a lot of comments. I had to learn BASIC, but a thin handbook of the commands was available. BASIC was similar enough to MAD, the only language that I had ever coded in, that I mastered it fairly quickly.

The first thing that I did was stupid. I removed all the comments to make the program more efficient. In my defense:

I documented what the program did did on a separate document referencing the line numbers.
Programs in those days were so slow that removing the comments actually did make it slightly more efficient.
My one and only programming class was six years earlier, and Господин Muchnik never taught us about documentation.
I had no training for this job.
Shut up; I already admitted that it was stupid.

Patti Lewonczyk⁷ was in charge of producing the proposals. A girl named Paula, who was, I think, fresh out of high school, did most of the data entry. One time something went wrong. I don’t remember what the problem was, but I fixed it easily. However, I had to ask Paula to run the program again for one plan—perhaps a fifteen-minute job. She got very upset and started crying. Evidently she thought that I was yelling at her. I told her that she did nothing wrong, but she was still very distraught.

My second big project in Individual Pensions involved the reports that were sent annually to the companies that had purchased one of these products. A company in New York had developed a software program to produce these reports. A group of clerks led by Carolyn DesRochers filled out coding sheets with the current census information for each plan a month or so before the anniversary. This information was supplied to the Hartford by the customer.

How, you may ask, did we get the coding sheets to the software company? Someone from the Hartford transported a box of them every day to the bus depot downtown. A Greyhound bus then brought them to New York where someone from the vendor picked them up. The vendor’s software program then processed the data and created the report on attractive formatted paper and sent it to Hartford in a box on another bus. Someone from the mailroom picked it up at the bus station and delivered it to Carolyn.

Dave McDonald’s⁸ title was only Secretary, but that indicated that he was the top man in the department. He summoned me to his office one day to tell me that for some reason the program to produce the annual reports was no longer producing accurate information. The clerks had been observed whiting out the numbers printed on the reports by the computer and inserting corrected numbers using typewriters. This required a great deal of time and produced ugly reports that reflected badly on the company and especially the department.

I Iinterviewed Carolyn and a clerk or two about it. I also talked with someone knowledgeable at the vendor. It turned out that the vendor only allowed for a few choices of interest rate when setting up a policy. This caused no problems for a while, but by 1972 interest rates had started to rise, and the Hartford was quoting (and selling) plans with higher interest rates than the program could handle. The proposal program that Patti’s group ran calculated the interest using standard compound interest formulas. The report program, however, did not calculate interest; it looked it up on tables that someone had populated when the system was written. Evidently the designer of the program did not know the actuarial formulas, and no one had foreseen the significant increases in interest rates. I asked my contact at the vendor if their programmers could fix this. He was not sure that anyone would know how to address it.

I reported back to Dave McDonald all that I had discovered. He was gobsmacked. I never found out what was done about it, and I did not ask who had approved the purchase of a service with such a severe and obvious flaw in it. I designed thousands of programs over the subsequent five decades. I took some wrong turns, but I never made this big of a mistake.

The other task that I remember concerned lapse rates. In determining a reasonable premium for any life insurance product—all the pension plans had an insurance component—it is important to account for the possibility that whoever pays the premium might allow the policy to lapse. In general, there are quite a few lapses in the first year of life insurance policies and much lower rates later. On these policies there were inordinately high lapse rates for the first five or six years. I was asked to examine a sampling of the policies to determine what the causes were.

I discovered that most of the alleged lapses were not caused by the customers’ failure to pay the premiums. Instead, the sales agents were arranging “attained-age conversions”. The agent went to an existing customer and told them that the Hartford was now offering a new product that would be a better deal for them. He would request a quote from Patti for converting the plan. This was done by lapsing the policies on the old plan and issuing new policies based upon the current age of the policyholders. The agent was right. The customer who converted received either lower premiums or higher benefits.

Everyone (except the Hartford) profited from attained-age conversions.

It was a win-win-win-lose situation. The customer and its employees got a better plan, and the agent got a first-year commission on the same plan. Since the first-year commission on many life insurance policies is more than 100% of the first annual premium, this was a real windfall for the agents. Moreover, since the Hartford had four or five individual pension products, an agent could pull the same trick more than once. Quite a few agents had been doing this for years. The Individual Pension products were yielding good sales but no profits.

I know that there were fairly high level meetings that involved Dave, Paul Gewirtz, the actuary in our department, and the Sales Department. The sale people were adamant that this technique should not be taken away from them. Evidently some of the agents who used it were very influential. The problem was not resolved by the time that I left, but in the end my understanding is that the Hartford (and most other companies) stopped selling these products.

The A model of the HP 2000 could support 16 users, the F could manage 32. Rumors claimed that some employees on the twenty-first floor had found the built-in game programs, including a nifty one in which two people could call plays for opposing teams in a football game.

At some point someone put me in charge of the computer room and the computers. This did not involve much responsibility, but no one was suspicious if I spent time in there during slack periods. I wrote a program to produce sheets for a football pool. Each week I selected twenty competitive college games and five programs. At the bottom of the page I listed my Bottom Ten college teams. I think that I charged $1 per entry, and the person with the highest score won the whole pot, which was between $20 and $30. I might have gotten in trouble for this, but the spirit of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” prevailed. I won the jackpot once.

On paydays there was also a pool that was run by Wayne Foster. At first employees bought tickets, and the person whose ticket was drawn won the prize. I bought a ticket every week, but I never won. Sue Comparetto won the pool once, and she tried to use the money to buy a round of drinks at the Shoreham Hotel, the site of the customary Friday night get-together of employees from the twenty-first floor. Since she was almost certainly the poorest person in attendance, the offer was rejected and, in fact, roundly disparaged as contrary to the spirit of the payday pool.

After Connecticut instituted a lottery, the rules were changed so that half of the pot was used to buy lottery tickets. The lucky winner got both the remaining cash and the tickets. I never participated in this, and it surprised me that any actuary would have anything to do with lottery tickets, which have a worse payoff than the numbers racket.

At some point Don Sondergeld assigned a special project to Tom Corcoran and me. The company that marketed the software for the APL programming language wanted to sell the Hartford the rights to use the language on the mainframe. The plan was to install in the handful of departments in which actuaries worked expensive APL terminals that were connected to the mainframe. A certain portion of the computer’s disk space would be allocated to the APL users. Something may have been done about sharing memory, too.

The advantage was that the actuaries would gain access to the computing power of the mainframe without being subject to the rules of the Data Processing Department. In those days tying to get new software projects approved and implemented by the DP people was an incredibly time-consuming task. The standard joke was that if you wanted to know how long a project would take, double the estimated amount and use the next higher unit. So, one hour meant two days; six months meant twelve years, etc.

APL programs require far less (in terms of number of characters) of computer code to make the same calculations. However, the APL representatives were unable to give us an example of a project that was relevant to Life Actuarial or Individual Pensions that APL could handle significantly better than Fortran or BASIC. It would be totally inappropriate for the two big projects that I had worked on. Both required extensive use of string variables. In APL a string of characters was treated as an array rather than a different type of simple variable. To me this seemed like a fatal flaw. Tom was more enthusiastic than I was. He liked the simplicity, and he had heard good things about it elsewhere.

I am pretty sure that the Hartford never purchased the product. This project was probably doomed from the start; my specialty was debating on the negative. Selling me on anything is very difficult.

The bills from Kaman and Tymshare produced a strong reaction. The Hartford bought its own HP 3000 computer and charged the Operations Research Department, not the Data Processing Department, with its management. A guy named Gerry Schwartz was put in charge of the new machine. Its operating system supported both BASIC and Fortran. The connections were over telephone lines using teletypes. Users in several departments brought over some simple BASIC programs that they had been using on Kaman’s HP 2000, and things went quite well for a while.

After my stint in Individual Pensions I was rotated to work for Jan Pollnow. My primary responsibility was to produce a monthly report, which my predecessor Chris DesRochers⁹ (husband of Carolyn), had been generating using a set of columnar accounting sheets.

I decided to write a BASIC program on the HP 3000 to replicate Chris’s sheets. As I added more code it got slower and slower. Eventually it brought the system to its knees. I had to set it off to run when I left at 5:00 and hope that it finished before I arrived fifteen hours later.

Gerry Schwartz blamed this on BASIC. He said that I should convert this new program to Fortran. Since I had never used Fortran, it took a while to do this. The conversion helped a little, but it still was horribly slow. Then Gerry suggested that I use “the segmenter” on the Fortran code. This involved breaking the program into pieces. This was a new concept for me, but at least there was printed documentation. I don’t remember any details of this implementation, but segmenting did improve the performance to a level of barely tolerable.

I spent a great deal of time getting this to work, but it made the monthly task much easier. The program ran without problems for a few months, but then one month’s data produced erroneous results. The problem was easy to fix, but it was a black eye for the department, and Jan called me on the carpet for it. As usual, no one checked my work.¹⁰

A few months before my departure Jim Cochran was brought in to our area to work with me. I made sure that he understood both the technical and operational aspects of the program before i started my next adventure.

* * *

I retain a few other vivid memories of my days working at the Hartford. People with a “coffee cart” came around every day at about 10 a.m. to sell coffee, donuts, and other pastries. This prompted a coffee break that became longer and longer over the weeks. Eventually the bosses warned everyone not to turn it into a floor party

I cannot remember the exact time that the buzzer rang to indicate that it was closing time. I wager that most of the clerical employees can. A large portion of the clerks, almost all of whom were female, would have all of their materials put away and their belongings gathered well in advance. The mad dash to the elevators when the buzzer sounded was somewhat comical.

Most of the clerks in Life Actuarial were supervised by Bob Riley. Almost all of them had Fridens on their desks, and they used them all day long. The machines were not 100 percent reliable. Every once in a while one would go berserk while performing division and start making awful noises. I am not sure why the clerks themselves were not allowed to unplug the calculators, but Bob always rushed over to take care of it. They generally seemed to work OK after they were plugged back in.

There must be a mountain of those Fridens somewhere. I wonder where it is.

Making copies of documents in those days was a process. At the time photocopiers were both rare and expensive. To my knowledge there was only one in the entire tower. It was manufactured by Xerox, and everyone called it the XM¹¹ machine. Someone would carry the document from the department to the floor on which the machine resided. The courier would stand in line near the operator of the machine. Sheaves of documents were presented one at a time to the operator, who passed judgment on whether they were worthy of duplication. For those that qualified copies were made, and both sets were given to the courier.

It might have been possible to use interoffice mail to do this, but there was no telling when (or even if) the documents would be returned.

I searched the Internet for pictures of photocopiers from this era, but I found nothing that approached the bulk of the one used at the Hartford (as I remember it).

1. I did not realize this at the time, but the Hartford was owned by ITT, which was then the prototypical conglomerate. Under Harold Geneen the company acquired all kinds of businesses. When Geneen left, the ITT spun off the Hartford.

2. In 2023 Mike Winterfield was still an active member of the Hartford Bridge Club. I played with him at a tournament once, as described here.

3. The purchaser of an annuity agrees to pay an amount—all at once or in installments. The party selling the annuity adds interest and deducts expenses and profit before paying it back in installments when the purchaser reaches a certain age. In variable annuities the interest rate is recalculated each year based upon the performance of the stock market or another index. Insurance components complicate the calculations. In the early seventies few actuaries were familiar with this product.

4. VisiCalc was released in 1979, but it only ran on an Apple II. Lotus 123 did not appear until four years later! Excel was introduced in 1987.

5. In 2020 Don Sondergeld is retired, but he is an active member of the Hartford Bridge Club.

6. There is much more information about Sue here and in subsequent entries.

7. Patti and Tom Corcoran married while I was coaching debate in Michigan in the late seventies. They had two children, Brian and Casey. In 2021 they both live in Burlington, VT, with their respective families. Patti died in 2011. My tribute to her can be read here.

8. Dave McDonald retired from the Hartford in 1995 as a Senior Vice President. He died in 2011. His obituary is here.

9. Chris died in 2013. His obituary can be read here.

10. These four words will probably be on my tombstone: Nobody checked his work.

11. XM stood for Xerox machine, but everyone still added another “machine” on the end when talking about it.

1972 April-June: Transition to Connecticut

Posted on January 9, 2021 by Mike

SEAD to Ann Arbor to Kansas City to East Hartford. Continue reading →

It could have been worse.

Although my last official day of active duty¹ in the army was Monday, April 10, 1972, I had most of the last week off for out-processing—visits to the dentist and doctor, filling out forms, etc. The only thing that I remember vividly about April 10 was that there was still snow on the ground at Seneca Army Depot (SEAD), which made it ninety-two snow-covered days in a row since the day that I arrived.

My plan was to stop in Ann Arbor on my way back home. I missed U-M much more than I missed KC. By this time I had lost touch with all my high school friends, but I had exchanged letters with Bill Davey, who was finishing his first year at Law School. Some of the guys from Allen Rumsey House, notably Frank Bell, were probably still there, too. My plans were not very specific. I would stay in Ann Arbor until I ran out of money or stopped enjoying it.

I still wear this occasionally.

I remember nothing about the trip to Ann Arbor. I probably took the reverse of the route that I had taken in January to get to the Rochester Airport. Then I flew to Detroit Metro, and I must have caught a bus to Ann Arbor. I would not have paid for a taxi, and Bill did not have a car. I think that I must have been wearing my uniform, but I don’t remember whether it was fatigues or “class A’s”. All my meager possessions were in my duffel bag. I am pretty sure that I did not bring a suitcase to SEAD. They let me keep all my Army clothes, including my field jacket, which I still have.

I must have walked from the bus stop to Bill Davey’s apartment. I slept on a couch or the floor there for the time that I was in town.

What did I do during the day? Well, mostly I walked around the campus and the surrounding area. I visited Allen Rumsey House, where I talked to Frank Bell and a few other guys. I walked down to the I-M building to see that AR’s record score for 1969-70 posted on the wall. I might have dropped by the Frieze Building to say hello to Dr. Colburn. I also have a vague recollection of attending some sort of hockey game with guys from AR. It wasn’t a varsity game. Maybe it was an intramural contest.

It is still at least two miles from the U-M campus to a McDonald’s.

McDonald’s was the only place that I could fill my belly for $1, but there were none near the campus. I remember walking to the one on the west side of town at least twice. The no-nonsense hamburgers were twenty-five cents; I ate four of them on each visit.

The old B-School building has been replaced by a much more modern complex.

I spent one afternoon at the placement office of U-M’s Business School. Someone there provided me with a list of actuarial contacts at quite a few large insurance companies.

After a few days in Ann Arbor I began to feel like an outsider. I decided to fly home and figure out my future in the comfortable environs there.

At home in Prairie Village I composed and typed letters to thirteen insurance companies. I explained my situation—just out of the Army with two actuarial exams. All thirteen responded. Ten companies said that they were not interested. Three in Hartford—Hartford Life, Aetna, and Travelers—wanted me to come in for an interview. They agreed to split the cost of my airfare and hotel expense. They put me up at the Hilton, which was within easy walking distance of all three.

This is the old Hilton on Asylum Avenue. In 2021 there is a parking lot on the site.

I flew out by myself and took a taxi from Bradley to the Hilton. I do not remember too much about the interviews. I definitely talked with Jan Pollnow (a guy) at the Hartford. I remember that the atmosphere at the Hartford seemed much more open and relaxed. It reminded me of BMA. Even the buildings were similar towers.

At both the Aetna and Travelers there seemed to be rows and rows of clerks with mechanical calculators, real numbers factories. The Hartford had plenty of clerks also, but they seemed better placed, and there was more open area.

I think it was the Aetna that made me take the Actuarial Aptitude Test, which had two parts, verbal and math. I got all the questions right. The guy who escorted me around told me that I was the first person who ever did that. He said that plenty of applicants scored 100 percent on the math part, but no one else had ever gotten all the verbal questions right.

I received identical offers from all three companies at a starting salary of $13,000 per year, which seemed to me like a truly enormous amount of money. I had never made as much as $300 per month in the Army, and I did manage to save part of that. Another way to look at it was that my first year’s salary was much larger than the total amount of out-of-state tuition for four years at a top-rate university. Things were different in those days.

I accepted the offer from the Hartford and started making plans for my move to the Hartford area. The first order of business was to buy a car. My Army friend Al Williams had purchased a small Toyota in Albuquerque. I rode in it several times, and it seemed like a cheap, practical, and reliable car. My dad, who served in the Pacific in World War II, had a very low opinion of anything Japanese. He advised me to buy an American car, but there were none as cheap as Toyotas and Datsuns. Furthermore, most people who had not been strafed by the Japanese thirty years earlier thought that the Japanese cars were at least as good as what came out of Detroit in the seventies.

However, more and more I looked at Datsuns and Toyotas, and I decided on a Datsun 1200 hatchback. I would be able to fold down the back seats and cart an enormous amount of my stuff from KC to Hartford. I picked a bright green one, which I called Greenie. I never had a problem finding that car in a parking lot.

I tried to negotiated by myself by playing one dealer against another, but I am pretty sure that they had an agreement. They certainly were not desperate for the sale. At any rate, I did get to witness the Fargo scene in which the salesman pleaded my case with the sales manager. I think that he threw in an AM-FM radio and floor mats rather than reduce the price, which was around $2,000. My dad co-signed the loan.

No “girlie stuff” on either greenie.

The car was totally devoid of “girlie stuff”²: power steering, brakes, or windows, automatic transmission, etc. It did not have a manual choke, but I learned how to set the one on the motor. It was a nice car on the inside, but it was awful on snow and ice, had too little power too carry a big load over the hills of Pennsylvania, and, in its twilight years was very difficult to start in the winter. Still, I loved it. It was mine.

I did not leave for Hartford immediately. I bummed about for a little bit, and then my sister got mononucleosis, and I had to help my mother out. Jan Pollnow called to ask when I would be coming to work. I set a date in June. It may have even been July.

I loaded pretty much everything that I owned into Greenie, said goodbye to my family, and set off on a route similar to that of the big family vacation of my youth. Thank goodness for the Interstate Highway System that made my drive a lot easier than my dad’s. I left very early in the morning, but I did not try to make it all the way to Hartford. I never exceeded the speed limit.

My recollection is that I stayed overnight in Hazleton, PA, but I don’t see how I could have driven that far by myself in one day. I can easily see myself leaving at the crack of dawn, but I would lose one hour by traveling east, and I definitely remember that I did not speed. To tell the truth, Greenie was uncomfortable at any speed over 60. Furthermore, I would not trust myself to drive very far after dark. Maybe I stopped at motels for two nights, once in some less memorable place in Indiana and once in Hazleton.

I had no credit card. I paid cash for everything. That, of course, was not unusual in the seventies.

The Shoreham was torn down and replaced by an office building decades ago.

I made a reservation for a couple of nights at the Shoreham Hotel, which at the time was located between the Hartford and the Aetna. I spent the evenings looking for an apartment. I used the want ads to locate two furnished apartments. I went to see both of them. One was very close to the Hartford. I was not crazy about the neighborhood. Instead I put down a deposit on one in East Hartford that actually had two addresses, 45 Olmstead and 23 Spring St. It looked like a motel that had been converted into apartments. It had a swimming pool in the back.
This is a satellite view in 2021 of the area that in 1972 was occupied by the apartment complex, which I think was called “The California Apartments” or something similar. The apartment building and the pool are completely gone, but the parking lot on the right is the one that was formerly used by residents of the apartment. I resided there until August or September of 1973.

The KFC is still on Burnside Avenue, but it has been spruced up.

I unloaded all my stuff from Greenie. I had to walk upstairs, but in those days that was nothing to me. I had not brought anything that I could not carry by myself. I opened a bank account at Connecticut Bank and Trust (CBT—the bank that listens—and deposited the money that was in my KC account. Then I went shopping at the JM Fields department store on Silver Lane. I bought everything that I could think of that I would need—pots, pans, linen, pillows, towels, dishes, silverware, a cookbook, and all kinds of soaps and cleaning materials.

On the way back to the apartment I stopped by Kentucky Fried Chicken (not yet KFC) for supper. I am pretty sure that I ordered the eight-piece dinner (extra crispy), which in those days was two meals for me, and a large Coke.³ It was not as good as my mom’s chicken, but it was still tasty.

I knew almost no one at all in New England, but I had been in the same situation in 1966 at U-M. It felt good to be on my own, and I was primed for a new adventure.

1. Draftees were required to spend two years on active duty, two in the active reserve, and two in inactive reserve. When the active duty period for draftees was reduced in 1972, the active reserve period was concomitantly increased. So, I was in the active reserve until October 5, 1974. Since the Army had made it clear that it did not want the draftees, there was not much danger of being called up to active duty during that period. However, for three summers rather than two I was subject to being called to go to “summer camp” for two weeks of training.

2. I purloined this phrase from Rosemary Boxer on the British television show Rosemary and Thyme. She was disparaging the later Range Rover models for the inclusion of such frills.

3. Diet Coke was not introduced until 1982. The only low-calorie cola drink that the Colonel offered in the seventies was Tab, which had that horrible after-taste.

Wavablog

Memoirs, bridge, popes, travel, and other stuff

Tag Archives: Pollnow, Jan

1966-2024 Bleeding Maize and Blue

1972-1974 Connecticut: The Mean Reserves

1972-1974 Connecticut: Working at Hartford Life

1972 April-June: Transition to Connecticut