2023 May 12-December 31

Posted on October 7, 2024 by Mike

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

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

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

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

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

June

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

September

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

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

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

October

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

November

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

December

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1948-1970 Mom and Me

Posted on August 16, 2024 by Mike

Dolores Wavada Continue reading →

This was the most difficult to write of the hundreds of entries in this project. I decided to set an ending date of 1970 because after I left for the army face-to-face contacts with my mom were quite limited. My dad came to see me when I was working at the Hartford, but it was only for a day at the end of a business trip. Mom stayed home. I don’t remember them visiting us at all for the three years we lived in Plymouth. They both came to Detroit once, and they did not like it at all. After my wife Sue and I moved back to Connecticut they visited a handful of times, but, except for the first trip, they spent most of their time with my sister Jamie and her family.

Sue and I visited them in 1973. After that we were too poor and too busy to travel much until I started flying much more in the nineties. I arranged a stop in the Kansas City area whenever it was feasible, which was pretty often. However, the ones when she was still alive were mostly for parties or other celebrations. I remember very little of the conversation. Also, through much of this period she was reluctant to contribute much.

In fact, I reluctantly admit that the sum total of my knowledge about my mother is pitiful. Dolores Ann Cernech was born on October 2, 1925, in Kansas City. Her parents were John and Clara Cernech. My understanding is that Clara was half German and half Polish. Cernech is a Croatian name. John’s mother was at least partly Irish.

Mom grew up in Kansas City, KS. In 1943 she graduated from Bishop Ward High School, which was less than a mile from the Cernech residence at 40 N. Thorpe. Students in her graduating class were asked to specify who their favorite band leader was (!) and what they hoped to become in life. Dolores Ann Cernech answered “Tommy Dorsey” and “Private Secretary”. The latter seemed like a peculiar response in the age of Rosie the Riveter.

I am not sure how she met my dad, who was a year older and went to high school in Atchison, KS, about fifty miles away. My understanding is that they were already acquainted before my dad enlisted in the army in 1942.

I wish that I had learned more about what my mom did in the period between her graduation and Jim Wavada’s discharge from the army in February of 1946. I have a vague recollection that she had worked in a clerical position somewhere, but she must have been communicating with my dad while he was in the army. They were married on September 1, 1947, which was eighteen and a half months after he was discharged from the army. It definitely was not a shotgun wedding. It was officiated in St. Peter’s by my dad’s brother, whom I knew as Fr. Joe. I did not show up until eleven and a half months later.

What transpired in the year and a half between my dad’s discharge and the wedding? Decades later he disclosed two nuggets of information about that period: 1) Mom’s father was against the marriage, but Clara persuaded him that it was for the best; 2) He might have gotten into serious trouble if he did not get married.¹ He also mentioned something about pinball machines, which in those days were common in bars.

Dolores and Jim took up residence in the Cernech’s house in KC KS. I am not sure if John and Clara lived there at the time. It was not a large house, and I know that at some point John, an employee of the Boss Glove Company, was transferred to Grand Island, NE. I have dozens of questions that I should have asked while they were still alive. Did they have a honeymoon? If so, where? Presumably my dad worked at BMA. Did mom work, too, at first? How did they get around? They did not have a car until 1954.

I have no doubt that my mom ran the household’s finances from day one. My dad was nearly incapable of balancing a checkbook. For the most part she was very frugal at least during the time that I lived at home. My dad bought suits and other dress clothes for work. My mom sewed most of her own clothes.

I am equally certain that my mom took on any task that involve any kind of a machine or any tools. My dad had the least mechanical aptitude of anyone whom I have ever encountered. What about yardwork? The house on N. Thorpe had a very small yard. I doubt that the family owned a power mower. So, somebody must have mowed the grass with an old-fashioned push mower. Uncle Rich might have helped, but my money is on mom. I can’t imagine my dad doing it even once.

Life in KC KS 1948-54

The first big event after the marriage was my birth on August 17, 1948. It must have been a horrific shock for her to see my mangled face. I have been told that the physicians performed the first surgery shortly after birth. There were follow-up procedures before I started going to school and another one after I completed the eighth grade.

My parents almost never brought this up. They had obviously discussed the matter and decided that they wanted me not to fret about my appearance. That certainly succeeded. Very few people whom I have met paid as little attention to appearances as I did.

I remember one trip to the shoe store when I was quite young. The salesman talked mom into purchasing arch supports for my very flat feet. I think that that only happened once. After that off-the-rack was good enough. I did not start using arch supports regularly again until I was in my seventies. Those came from Walmart, cost $10, and could be worn with any shoe or none.

I cannot remember my grandparents ever living in the Cernech house with us. Richard Keuchel², Clara’s youngest brother, lived with us. He kept to himself most of the time, but I remember that he occasionally brought me a small present or gave me some coins for baseball cards.

I vaguely remember mom taking me with her on a few shopping trips. Most of the time she probably walked to Central Ave., a lively retail area just a couple of blocks from the house. We might have taken an occasional bus or “street car” (trolley) as well.

The one type of excursion that impressed me the most was trips to the library. I was allowed to pick out my own books in the children’s section. My tastes primarily ran to westerns. I don’t remember her reading these books to me, but she must have, at least at first. I remember also that I had a rather large book that had fables in it. The only one that I recall was about an ant and a fiddle-playing grasshopper.

My recollection, which is probably at least a little off, is that I had the run of the neighborhood by the time that I was four or five. I am pretty certain that I walked to both kindergarten and first grade, and I remember spending a lot of time with my friends in the neighborhood. I don’t think that I was allowed to cross the alley in back of the house by myself, but I remember playing with friends up and down N. Thorpe Street. I also remember our telephone number, FAirfax 9890.

I remember attending several weddings and funerals of mom’s relatives. However, we had no automobile. Maybe those took place after we moved.

Did my mom have any friends? I don’t recall any. She knew everyone on N. Thorpe. She grew up there. Someone told me that she selected one of her classmates from Ward High to be her maid of honor. I have a photo of the wedding, but the people are not identified. I think that the same lady might have been my godmother, but she did not have any role thereafter in my mother’s life.

Maybe looking after me was all that mom could handle. Four instances came to mind that might have made her wonder what she had gotten herself into:

In addition to all of the trips to the hospital, she also arranged sessions for me with a speech therapist. This was apparently in anticipation of difficulties in speaking due to the amount of plastic in my upper lift. I don’t remember ever having trouble articulating, and I did well in the formal presentation required by the therapist.
I related the story here about the rock-thrower whom I beat up in kindergarten. I received no punishment that I remember. Mom and the teacher explained that what I did was wrong, but I don’t remember their reasoning. My reasoning was that “he had it coming.” In westerns this happened to people all the time.
One morning I made a scene at Mass because The Lone Ranger was on television³, and I did not want to miss it. I think that mom had to escort me out of the church on that occasion, but I am only guessing.
The problem that I had with the box of letters in first grade is also documented here. I would really love to know what mom thought when the nun informed her that I seemed incapable of reading and writing.

The only other vivid memory that I have of life on N. Thorpe was of mom painting a fruit tree freehand on one of the walls in the kitchen. Everyone praised it. In retrospect it made me wonder what else she could have accomplished if she were not so devoted to our small family. Unfortunately I inherited my artistic ability from Jim.

There might have been some trips. I think that the two of us took a train trip somewhere in the south. Clara (and maybe John) may have also been along. It seems to me that we spent some time in Hot Springs, AR. I am pretty sure that we also visited mom’s relatives in the Dallas area either on that trip or a separate junket. The mother’s name was Jule Palmer or something like that. Either or both of these might have been after the move, but I don’t think so.

Mom loved animals. I remember a dog named Trixie, which was, I am pretty sure, Mom’s pet before she got married. Trixie must have died before we moved. I have no recollection of her at our new house. I am pretty sure that we also had a pet parakeet named Mickey before we moved. Someone taught him to talk, probably mom.

Prairie Village

I found a set of four photos developed at Katz drugs, which was near our house in PV. They were dated Easter 1955. The other three are also at a train station, and they all include a couple whom I don’t recognize.

In early 1955 the three of us moved to 7717 Maple, Prairie Village, KS, about twenty miles south of the house on N. Thorpe. In addition to setting up a household in a suburban location, mom almost immediately had to deal with my childhood illnesses—chicken pox, measles, and whooping cough—that I contracted one after another. Fortunately, that was pretty much the last time that I was sick until I contracted the Russian Flu during exam week in college.

Evidently mom’s father did not think much of the blue house on Maple St. He called it “a cracker box.” My dad told me much later that my mom uncharacteristically retorted, “Yes, but it’s our cracker box.” Well, theirs and the bank’s.

I remember that mom took me to the doctor to receive the smallpox vaccine. I have always hated the idea of injections, and I dreaded this. I had to return for a second (and maybe a third) vaccine because the first one “didn’t take.” The second one did not either. I never got that little volcano-shaped scar on my arm. For the only time that I can remember mom took me aside and told me in a deadly serious tone that I must NEVER forget what she was about to tell me. If ever there was another outbreak of smallpox, it was critical for me to receive the vaccine again.

I spent no time in the hospital while we were living in Prairie Village, but I spent a lot of time at the doctor’s office. I ran into a shopping cart at the grocery store one day. It did not require stitches, but the mark is still visible just a quarter of an inch from my right eye. I ran into a parked car on the lot of Queen of the Holy Rosary during recess. I dodged the tag, and the nineteen stitches in my mouth were a badge of honor. I got four more stitches when I ran into the barbecue grill in our backyard while catching a popup that my dad threw to me. While returning a punt on the football field my nose got smashed and bent a little. On all of these occasions mom drove me to see Dr. Battey, our family physician. On one of the later occasions he told her that my head was held together by catgut.

I almost forgot one incident. Mom insisted that I take the free swimming lessons offered at the PV public pool. I rode my bike to the pool for the morning lessons. One day a German Shepherd came running out of a house on my left, growled, and chomped me on my leg. Someone called mom, and she came and got me. I don’t know how many stitches were required. The dog did not have rabies or anything else. He just got loose that day.

I hated the swimming lessons because I got so cold that my teeth chattered. Also, that was where I realized my footprints looked like they were made by a duck with toes. However, I later was glad that I learned how to swim.

When my myopia became evident in the third or fourth grade, mom took me to the optometrist. Since then I have seldom been seen without my specs unless I was in water or playing football.

My mom drove me to many activities. While writing this I began to wonder when and how she learned to drive, and how she got her license. Maybe she learned before she got married.

Aside from my tendency to run full-speed into inanimate objects, I did not cause many problems for her. She never helped me with homework, but I didn’t need it until I got to the chain rule in calculus class. She didn’t need to nag me to do it. I got tired every evening and voluntarily went to bed at about the same time. She never had to wake me for school. I was usually awake before she was. I took the bus to school, and I was always ready and waiting for the Bluebird.

What she did help me with were projects. I remember that we had to make a map of a state or country out of papier mache. I picked France. I was making a big mess of it until she stepped in. She also helped out with my years in scouting. She was an excellent den mother for a while; all the guys said so. When I had trouble growing bean plants for the Nature merit badge, she gave me a tip (I don’t remember its nature) that allowed me to succeed. She also made a costume of St. Peter for me for wear for an all-saints version of Halloween.

In retrospect I find it incredible that she was willing to get up to drive me to Queen for the 6am Masses for which I was a server and then pick me up when it was over. She also carted me around to sporting events. I often stayed after school (and therefore missed the bus) for band practice or great books or safety patrol or scouts or the school newspaper or football or basketball. Sometimes I walked home, but at least half of the time I engaged mom’s taxi service.

I do not remember Mom giving me much advice beyond basic Catholic principles. However, I very clearly remember her reaction when I got into a fight with Michael Bortnick. He was my age but considerably bigger. I came into the house crying and told mom that he beat me up, and he was bigger than I was. She merely replied, “Then you should have avoided fighting him.” I remembered that and applied it with great success throughout my remaining life..

As soon as I was old enough I got to play on a team in the local 3&2 baseball program that served as a Little League for Johnson County, KS. The team was sponsored by Sunflower Drugs. I undoubtedly made the team through the intercession of Don Wood’s father. This was the last summer before I got glasses. I was a good fielder and base runner, but I batted .000. I only hit the ball once—on my very last at-bat.

The next summer I did not make the team. I was ready to quit baseball, even though I really wanted to play. I was even more depressed than I was when I missed a catechism question in second grade (described here). I was totally unprepared mentally for failure.

My mom told me that I should not quit; there were plenty of other teams. It was good advice. I somehow learned about the team sponsored by Bauman’s Red Goose Shoes. I had a good time on that team, and I even got quite a few hits.

Mom did not like the idea of me playing football in the seventh and eighth grade, but she allowed me to go out for the team. Even after she had to take me to the doctor after I got clobbered on a punt return, she let me continue. It meant a great deal to me.

I remember that for a short period we (I am not sure if Jamie was involved) spent a few minutes every evening reading the Bible from start to … well, I think that we finished Genesis before the project was abandoned. I would love to have heard that decision being made.

Like millions of other Americans our family owned a nicely bound Bible with those incredibly thin pages. Ours, of course, was the Douay-Rheims version, which is the only English version recognized by the Catholic Church. It had a dozen or so brightly colored illustrations. I don’t know what happened to it.

My mom was friendly with all of the neighbors, but the only ones that she socialized with were the Leahys. I remember that once when I was in second or third grade she was late getting home from somewhere. For perhaps the only time ever I was all alone after the school bus dropped me off. I started crying, and Jean Wallace, the lady with three kids of her own who lived directly across the street, calmed me down.

At some point we procured a phonograph player and a few records, probably 78s, which in those days were made of very brittle shellac. My dad’s favorite song was Eddie Fisher’s version of “Oh, My Papa”. I was playing it one day. When I took it off the turntable, I dropped it, and it broke. I was very upset, but mom consoled me.

The only television shows that I remember my parents watching were Your Hit Parade and Perry Como’s show. As the English say, my mom fancied Perry. We watched a lot of other shows, too, but none of them stand out in reference to my mom.

When she was working, which seemed to be doing all of the time, she often broke into a song. The one that she sang the most was the Andrews Sisters’ version of “Dance with a Dolly”⁴.

Jamie

One day shortly after we moved to PV my parents announced to me that they were “praying” to have another child⁵. I thought that this was a great idea. I would have a baby brother whom I could boss around and eventually teach “the ropes”. Imagine my shock when dad told me that mom had given birth to an girl on January 4, 1956. Did they actually pray for a girl? Why?

Jamie was nothing like me. Her face was decidedly not mangled. By the time that she was a few years old she had blonde hair⁶. Even I thought that she was good looking. Furthermore she avoided crashing into objects much better than I did. Her visits to Dr. Battey’s office were always routine.

I was approximately seven and a half years older than Jamie. I figured that she could figure out pat-a-cake on her own, and so I mostly ignored her. However, we often watched Captain Kangaroo and Romper Room together before I went to school.

The fact that mom had another little one to mind nearly all the time that I was in grade school made it even more remarkable that she was willing to drive me to all my activities. I think that it also explained why she let me roam the neighborhood with no evident supervision. She even let me shoot off firecrackers on the Fourth of July.

Decades later Jamie told me that as she was walking to kindergarten at Tomahawk School some older boys accosted her. I had heard nothing about this, but I was often oblivious. I wonder what I would have done if I knew about this. I would have been in the eighth grade, at least two years older than anyone at Tomahawk.

I remember that I asked mom one year whether I could help with playing Santa Claus on Christmas eve. She let me do it. I don’t remember any details.

Our pets have been discussed in some detail here. My mother’s role was central. My dad had no use for animals. He was obviously either fearful of or disgusted with them to an extent that I never saw in any other person. Mom made sure that they were

Mom handled the tricky situation that begin with the appearance of a dachshund (eventually named Sam by me) with no tags brilliantly. She allowed him to go back to his owners on his own, but for some reason he seemed want to stay at our house. She advertised somewhere that we had him, and eventually someone claimed him. Jamie was crushed, and I was also upset, but mom explained to us that we had no right to take him from the other family.

My grandmother Hazel came to the rescue by giving us her pet dachshund Tippy. However, he seemed to want to spend most of his time with me.

Leawood

At the end of the 1961-62 school year the Wavadas moved south and east a few miles to 8800 Fairway in Leawood. Once again we were in a new parish, Curė of Ars. Jamie started grade school in September at C of A, and I started my freshman year at Rockhurst High School. So, this was a new experience for everyone.

I don’t recall having many conversations with my mom. I cannot remember asking her any probing questions. My recollection is that on most days she worked pretty much from the time that she got up until the supper dishes were in the dishwasher, and all of the food and accoutrements had been put away. The one major incident in my youthful life that she had to deal with was the time in 1964 when she had to accompany me to traffic court. Nothing came of it, but I did grow up a little bit that evening.

My mother was a great cook. We enjoyed delicious meals almost every day except, of course, on Friday. My parents decided that instead of eating out occasionally, we would have steak on Saturday evening. My dad grilled them over charcoal on the patio in good weather. If the weather did not allow that, mom broiled them. My favorite meal, by far, was fried chicken⁷. We had it once a week, usually on Wednesdays.

I was not big on breakfasts. Cereal usually sufficed for me. A special treat was “pigs in the blanket”, which were link sausages baked inside of biscuits that had been folded over them.

My lunches were the envy of everyone in my classes. Usually I had a ham sandwich, an apple or other fruit, a small bag of chips, and a thermos of soup. Most kids had to put up with cheese sandwiches or PB&J with little or no variety. I went to a Catholic school; many of those moms were making at least a half dozen lunches. In high school I usually ate lunch in the cafeteria.

Trips

My dad worked in the sales department at BMA. Every few years my dad and mom would take a business trip together for big meetings. They were generally at a resort or in the vicinity of special events. They were usually gone for the better part of the week. Sometimes they hired someone to take care of Jamie and me. I had very little interaction with these women. I remembered that the suppers that they prepared with uniformly disappointing.

I found four photos that were labeled “Easter 1957” by the company that developed them. At the time I was finishing second grade, and Jamie was a little over one year old. They show my mom and dad stepping onto a train. Based on her outfit, this must have been a business trip on which she joined him. Someone must have taken the photo. I am guessing that it was Clara Cernech. She probably took care of us while they were gone.

My mom did not regale us with tales of these adventures. I remember that she was most impressed by the one in Banff, Canada. I have no recollection of her talking about any of the other places, and I doubt that I pestered her for details.

Details about our family vacation trips have been provided here.The four of us took one big vacation to the east coast while we were living in PV. Mom took over the driving for a part of the trip. That was the only time that I ever saw my dad riding shotgun. Most of her time was spent with Jamie, who was only three or four years old. Our other trips were usually to Minnesota. Mom must have enjoyed the breaks from cooking and cleaning, but she mostly seemed to busy herself with other things.

Health

My mom was in good shape. She did not smoke. She drank very little, and ate mostly fresh foods in moderate amounts. She also exercised. I remember her watching Jack LaLanne and his dogs, Happy and Walter. I never partook of these activities, but I remember being awestruck when Jack nonchalantly did vertical pushups on a step on a ladder.

She also played golf a little. She played with my dad and me a few times, and while I was waiting to get drafted we played as a twosome. I think that she played with other ladies off and on. She was a good athlete, but her golf swing got worse the more that she played. In the end she bounced her torso up and down on every swing. This peculiar motion made it very difficult to hit the ball cleanly. I always suspected that advice from my dad was responsible for the degradation of her game. I don’t know how much (or even if) she played after I entered the army.

She wast 5’7″, which was considered quite tall in the forties. She was skinny enough to be nicknamed bird-legs in high school. She never got fat or even a little pudgy.

I only remember mom being sick a few times, mostly during the Christmas season. Overworking and the pressure probably got to her. She did have a few issues. Her “sinuses” bothered her a lot. She took Dristan tablets for the “sinus headaches”, but they did not help much. I also remember some kind of saltwater purge that she did. When my dad quit smoking many years later this issue disappeared almost immediately.

She also suffered from varicose veins. I don’t know any details. She might have also had diabetes. I know that her mother did. Mom never complained about anything, and she never let any symptoms slow her down.

When she was in middle age she started to have problems with memory and confusion. It was not Alzheimer’s, but the doctors never were able to pinpoint what caused her so much difficulty. My dad said that she asked him one time, “Jim, what did I do wrong to deserve this?” Of course, he had no answer.

When she died in 1998 (described here) my dad did not request an autopsy to determine what the source of her problems was. I rather hoped that he would, because I wanted to do something about it if I inherited it. I am older when I write this than she was when she died. So, I guess that I did not get it.

The biggest regret in my life is that I squandered the opportunity to know this wonderful woman better.

What I inherited from my mom:

Skin color
Hair
Build
Social reticence
Love of music (but different taste)
Work ethic
General demeanor
Aversion to arguments
Early bird.

1. The fact that I asked no more questions is, to me, convincing evidence that I must be somewhere on the autism spectrum. I have never asked people about their lives. Although I have always been good at remembering names, I almost never remember the names of relatives of acquaintances, even if I have seen them many times. For example, I have a great deal of difficulty remembering names of members of Sue’s family. I know my own cousins, but I could not name any of their children. It never really occurred to me that I was excessively solipsistic. I just considered myself less nosy than most. In my defense I always try to think of the potential effect on others before I do something, and I never deliberately do anything that might inflict pain on someone else.

2. Uncle Rich apparently died in 1972. My recollection is that he worked for a company called Gustin Bacon Mfg. that manufactured pipe joints and, for a time, air horns for trains. I have no idea what he did there. I also don’t know if he remained in the house on North Thorpe after the Wavadas moved south in 1955.

3. I don’t know when we purchased the TV, but I was a big fan of the Howdy Doody Show, and I am almost certain that I watched Hopalong Cassidy, which only ran until 1952. I cannot picture our television in the house on N. Thorpe, but we must have had it there.

4. This was a bizarre song: three women fantasizing about dancing with another woman. “All the fellows wishing they were me.”

5. This naturally raises the question of whether my parents employed birth control. The Church has never sanctioned anything besides the “rhythm method” for birth control. If that was what they did, they were certainly good at it. I was conceived a little over two months after their marriage. Jamie was conceived shortly after they moved to a new house with a spare room.

6. It turned quite a bit darker by the time that she went to school.

7. When I started cooking for myself I almost immediately tried to fry chicken. I never got it quite right. It is difficult and time-consuming. The spattering of grease makes a mess. I eventually just gave up. It did not seem to me to be worth the effort.

8. In my dad’s estate I found a used ticket for Super Bowl III and one for the Rose Bowl in 1970 that featured Michigan and Southern Cal.

1982 Jim Wavada’s Retirement from BMA

Posted on August 18, 2023 by Mike

I found an album with my dad’s name engraved in gold on the inside front cover. It contained thirty-five snapshots of celebrations at my dad’s employer, Business Men’s Assurance (BMA), an insurance company based in Kansas City1. This brought to … Continue reading →

The original BMA Building was across the street from Union Station.

At some point in 1982 I received a very surprising telephone call from my dad. He had decided to retire—at the age of 58! His employer for over thirty years¹ was downsizing by offering attractive severance packages to its employees. He helped to design the program, and when the president of the company learned that he was on the list of people taking early retirement, he protested, “But Jim, this wasn’t designed for people like you.”

My dad told me that he replied, “True, but it didn’t exclude me either.”

In March of 1951 my dad presented a birthday greeting to the president of the company.

When did my dad start working at BMA? I remember thinking at the time of his death in 2011 that his life was perfectly divisible into three units of twenty-nine years each. However, that would mean that he started work in 1953. That cannot be true. I have recently discovered proof that he was employed there in 1950. Furthermore, I know that I spent a lot of the time in the hospital in my first year of life. If he had not had a good insurance policy—and BMA employees had excellent policies—I doubt that my parents could have afforded the hospital bills. Finally, I doubt that John Cernech would have allowed his only daughter to marry a guy without a job. So, I think that Jim probably started working at BMA before September of 1947.

What did you do for a year and a half, Sergeant Wavada?

I have no idea what he did between the time of his discharge from the army as a sergeant in the 300th Infantry Regiment on February 18, 1946, and his wedding on December 1, 1947. He hinted to me once that my mom and her mom, Clara Cernech, saved him from going down a really bad path during this period.

What did my dad do at BMA? I have never been too certain. He probably started at the bottom. He finished high school in 1942, but, despite the fact that he certainly qualified for veterans’ benefits, to my knowledge he never took a college course.

In 1951 he was the president of the KEO (“Know Each Other”) Club at BMA. A photo of him presenting a birthday greeting to the president of the company appeared in the company’s newspaper in March. I think that he also told me that he played for one summer on the company’s baseball or soccer team. He had a first baseman’s mitt that he picked up somewhere.

In 1963 the company moved to the BMA Tower. No, it was never known as Grant’s Tomb.

Maybe he joined BMA’s Sales Department in 1953, and he told me that he had spent 29 years there. That would make more sense. The Sales Department managed the company’s salesmen. I think that what my dad mostly did was write materials used by the company. I know that at one time his title was Vice-president of Public Relations. I also know that during the last few years he spent most of his time writing speeches for the president of the company, Bill Grant. He hated this assignment. Mr. Grant often spoke against Medicare, and my dad understood what a good program it was.

I remember the quite a few names mentioned by my dad. Some of these people I probably met once or twice, but I have seen none of them since high school. Here is the list: John Saylor (his boss) and his son Bill, Bernie Johnson, C.R. Moreland, Lyle Hopkins, Kenny Higdon, Bill Purinton, Roy Uto. I remember that dad’s secretary—or at least one of his secretaries—was named Jeanette. I also remember a woman who attended his wake in 2011 and appeared in some of the photos below. I think that her name was Mary Jean or something like that. If I ever knew her last name, I have forgotten it.²

Here are the photos in the same order that they were in the album. There are two sets of photos. The first fifteen were taken at a banquet at a huge round table at BMA Tower. The second set of twenty were evidently shot on a different occasion in and around my dad’s office. I have added captions when I knew anything about them.

My mom is in white. My dad is to her right. His vision was almost as bad as mine, but he almost never wore glasses except to read and drive. He considered them effeminate.

The woman seated at the window came to Jim’s wake. The only other person whom I recognize is my dad in the foreground. No sign of his bald spot yet, and not a single grey hair. Bill Grant, the company’s president collected art depicting western scenes.

My mother was either convulsed in laughter or she spotted a huge spider on the ceiling. The man shown in profile is Bill Saylor.

I think that this was either Bill Grant of John Saylor.

I think that this was either Bill Grant of John Saylor.

Note the tie bar. By the time that I spent much time with him as an adult both of my dad’s eyebrows were white, but he still had no trace of grey hair. I was the opposite. He stopped smoking in the late eighties.

My mom would be upset that this photo showed the very slight bump on her nose.

This was the lady who came to the wake, Mary Jean.

I was surprised to see my dad reaching with his right hand. He was left-handed. The only thing that he did right-handed was playing golf. Maybe he had a cigarette in his left hand.

This is the last photo of the first set.

This is the first photo of the second set. The gag gift of the white paint might be a reference to a project that I worked on the summer before I went into the army. I was supposed to paint the house, but I did not finish. It is possible that they never got anyone else to finish it.

I think that this cake was for my dad’s retirement. If the golfer was meant to be my dad, his aim was to the right of the hole (with the red flag in it) because he was playing the horrendous slice that accompanied each of his swings. He learned to play golf (and smoke) in high school at Maur Hill. There were no left-handed clubs available.

I think that my dad is holding some golf balls. I think that it is totally unfair that I had more grey hairs before I started working at TSI than he had when he retired from BMA.

I think that the big guy in the back with the plaid jacket might be John Bolin. I knew his son in the Boy Scouts.

“So, a priest, a rabbi, and an insurance guy go into a bar …”

1. The insurance operations of BMA (the A originally stood for Accident Insurance), which included my dad’s pension and health insurance, was sold to Assicurazioni Generali in 1990. AG sold it to the Royal Bank of Canada in 2009;

2. I spent several hours on the Internet trying to discover what became of the people on this list, but I was unsuccessful.

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

Posted on May 12, 2021 by Mike

The rest of the ad agencies. Continue reading →

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are my most vivid memories:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WordPerfect running in DOS did not look like the answer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can’t make it in thirty minutes if you are afraid to exceed 10 miles per hour.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charnas apparently went out of business in July of 1992.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. Knorr Marketing’s website is here.

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

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

8, The agency’s website is cdhm.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

19. Fern/Hanaway was dissolved in 1998.

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

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

1985-1999 TSI: GrandAd: The Whiffs

Posted on April 15, 2021 by Mike

We struck out at a lot of agencies. Continue reading →

I am no salesman. I could make a pretty good case for the GrandAd system either in a formal presentation or in a meeting, but I was the worst at closing sales. For one thing I have had a lifelong abhorrence of talking on the telephone, especially to strangers. TSII probably could have closed some of these if I had just called people back to find out what they were thinking.

I just noticed that this guy is swinging left-handed with a right-handed club.

I also could have spent more time researching our opponents’ products. I could not think of a way to do that without devoting a lot of time and effort. I had other priorities. Maybe we should have hired one to do it.

My middle game was also poor. I did not know how to ask what a prospect’s budget was. I could tell if I was dealing with a gatekeeper, but I did not know what to do with that information.

Some of our problems were substantive, and there was not much that we could do about them.We wanted to reach agencies that had between five and one hundred employees who did not yet have an administrative system and (before the introduction of the smaller models of the System/36) were within driving distance. During some periods IBM offered no systems with any appeal to our target market. We never seriously considered hooking up with another vendor, but in retrospect it seems incredible that IBM let this happen.

In nearly all cases IBM’s prices for hardware were higher. They should have been. IBM equipment was more reliable and the service was beyond compare. However, the price differentials were often enormous. Purveyors of systems that ran on UNIX or PC’s could claim many of the same advantages that we claimed, charge more for their software, and still show a bottom-line price that was considerably lower than ours.

So, we faced a lot of rejection in our years of dealing with ad agencies. I feel certain that I have repressed the memories of a fairly large number of failures in this arena.

The following are arranged alphabetically. It might make more sense to put them in chronological order, but I have found few records to help me to remember the dates.

The Hartford Area

Probably the most painful failure was the loss of Elbaum & Co., Inc. We had been pitching or negotiating with Marvin Elbaum¹, the owner, for several months. Finally, in early June of 1986 he had signed the contract, which included some custom programming, and put in the hardware order.

I am pretty sure that the phone call came on June 13, 1986. Marvin himself called and said that a new opportunity had suddenly arisen, and he wanted to cancel the order. He said that he had an unexpected opportunity to merge with Lessner Slossberg Gahl and Partners Inc. I advised him that we had already begun work on the custom code that he approved. He told me to bill him for it. He also said that he would plead the case in the new agency for using the GrandAd system. This was pure BS. If it wasn’t, he would have arranged for us to do a presentation for his new partners at LSGE Advertising, Inc.²

This was the worst possible news. I knew that Lessner’s agency already used the system marketed by one of our biggest competitors. Since the merged agency would be located in Lessner’s headquarters in Avon, there was no chance that it would junk the system just because Marvin asked politely, and Marvin also probably realized this. Besides, Marvin was the president of the new agency, but Gary Lessner was the CEO.

I’m not even slightly superstitious. If I were, I probably would have noted that the horrible phone call took place on Friday the 13th. Furthermore, Denise was on vacation, and Sue and I were looking after her cat. Yes, the cat was all black.

On the other hand, I don’t remember walking under any ladders, breaking any mirrors, opening an umbrella indoors, or spilling any salt that day.

Maier Advertising³ (the first syllable is pronounced like the fifth month of the year) was famous. When the lists of the top agencies were printed, Maier was always at or near the top of the rankings of local agencies in terms of billings. Everyone who had anything to do with advertising knew that this was baloney. How? Everyone in the advertising community knew where everyone else in the community worked. Maier did not employ enough people to do all the work to justify those reported billings.

For a while Maier claimed to have branch offices. I am certain that one was announced in Boston, but I think that there were also others. Actually, there were no offices, but they did have a phone number with a local area code and exchange, but it rang in Hartford.

I was invited to meet with Maier’s bookkeeper at the company’s headquarters, which was then in Hartford. My recollection is that only two or three other people were there. Bill Maier was definitely not present. I counted only six or seven desks, and I only saw one office. This did not look or act like a major agency.

I roughed out a tentative proposal, but I could tell that the bookkeeper was in no position to make a decision or to put me in contact with such a person. Actually, I doubt that Bill Maier would have deferred on this subject to anyone.

The Charnas account was not exactly a whiff. It was more like chipping in for a double bogey. It is described here.

There were two other agencies in the Hartford area that I visited, but I do not recall the names of either one. The first one was really a public relations firm in, as I recall, South Windsor. In fact, its strategic approach was the opposite of advertising. Its employees searched for businesses that were spending money on advertising and promised to get the same or better results using press releases. I think that we outlined a stripped-down GrandAd system for them, but we could not strip down the hardware cost enough to make a competitive bid.

My recollection is that the other local agency was in Glastonbury. Sue and I came to meet with the female financial manager. The only thing that I remember about this meeting was that she was the most strikingly attractive woman whom I had ever met. However, I never saw her again. I can’t even visualize her,

Sue was surprised when I told her that I thought that the woman was very attractive.

The Boston Area

Our biggest disappointment of the many whiffs in the Boston area was the involvement with Rizzo Simons Cohn. It is described in detail here.

I met with a woman from Epsilon once. They were a big company then, and they are gigantic now. I tried to explain to her what we did, and she tried to explain to me what they did. At the time I did not understand what she said. I have looked at the company’s current website, which is here, and I still don’t fully understand what it means to be outcome-based. What is the alternative?

I did learn enough from our conversation to realize that our GrandAd system was nothing like what she was looking for.

At the IBM office in Copley Place I did several demos. One that I remember was a morning session for several employees at an ad agency on Tremont St. in Boston. The name escapes me. The demo seemed to go well. They invited me to meet with them in the afternoon at their office. I asked for the address. They gave it to me, but they warned me not to drive. They said that I should take “the T”, which is what people in Boston call the commuter rail system, MBTA.

I was disdainful of their suggestion. I had a map of Boston and plenty of experience driving in Beantown. I knew that the roads were unpredictable and that people made left turns from any lane. I grabbed some lunch and then headed out in my Celica.

It was an adventure, but I made it. Tremont was one-way, of course. I was prepared for that. I was shocked to discover that the streets that paralleled it on both sides were also one-way, and all three ran in the same direction. I had to steer my Celica all the way to Boylston Street to get past their office so that I could turn onto Tremont. Then I was very fortunate to spot the P (public parking sign) forty or fifty yards to my right. I parked and entered the office with seconds to spare.

This meeting seemed to go OK, too. At the end I asked how to get back on the Mass Pike. They told me that it was easy to get there from Copley Place, but the only route from Tremont was very difficult to describe.

Maybe it was a good thing that I never heard from them again.

Gray Rambusch, Inc. is a complete mystery. I know that we billed them for something, but I am almost positive that I never visited them or did a project for them. Doug Pease might have sold them something. The agency is still in business.

The Big Apple

The term “boutique agency” is used a lot in New York City. I knew that the large agencies were beyond our abilities, but to me “boutique” just indicated smaller size. Then I talked with people who worked at a couple.

The first was an agency that specialized in theatrical productions—Broadway and smaller. The lady who worked there explained that, as any fan of The Producers knows, each show is a separate company, and they tend to go out of business very abruptly and disappear without a trace. The most important things for the agency were to get their invoices to each show before it opened and to hound them for payment.

The other boutique agency that I talked with specialized in classified ads. They had hundreds of clients for whom they placed ads in the handful of papers that served the city. I don’t think that there was much chance that this agency would survive the Internet.

Kate Behart³ and I rode Amtrak to New York City on one occasion. I think that it was to talk with an ad agency, but it might have been for some other reason. TSI was watching every penny at the time. I had purchased a book of ten tickets. On the trip to Penn Station I used one, and Kate used one.

On the return trip I gave my ticket and the book to the conductor; he took the ticket. Then I handed the book to Kate, she tore out a ticket, and she handed it and her ticket to the conductor. He refused it. He said that only one person could use the book at a time. I directed his attention to the back where it clearly stated that it entitled “the bearer” of the ticket and booklet to passage to or from Penn Station. I bore the booklet when I paid for myself. Then I handed it to her, and she became the bearer.

He had the gall to tell me that I did not know what “bearer” meant. I said “Bearer: one who bears. ‘To bear’ means ‘to carriy’.” I argued that the term bearer was not ambiguous. It was like a bearer’s bond; anyone that has possession can redeem it. He claimed that it was Amtrak’s policy that tickets from booklets could not be used for more than one person. I said that Amtrak’s policy was actually clearly explicated on the back of the ticket book. Where was his evidence of anything different? He said that a letter had been sent to conductors. When I asked to see it, he threatened to throw both of us off the train at the next stop. I asked to speak to his superior.

This was not a big train. It was unlikely that there were more than two conductors. So, I was fortunate that there was anyone on the train who was senior to the fellow who threatened to evict us. The other conductor took Kate’s ticket, and he asked me politely not to do this again.

I never needed to do it again. If the occasion had come up, … I don’t know.

We pursued another New York agency during a period in the early nineties when we had no salesman. I took the train to New York and gave a presentation at IBM’s office on Madison Avenue. Terri Provost⁵ accompanied me. We then took a cab to the agency’s office. The discussions there seemed to go pretty well.

This agency was much more like what we were accustomed to dealing with than the boutique agencies. I thought that we could do a good job for them. On the train ride back I first consumed my fried chicken supper from Roy Rogers. Then I talked with Terri about the potential client and emphasized how I thought that we should proceed.

The next day at the office I asked her to compose a letter to send to the agency’s president. The letter was friendly and polite, but it did absolutely nothing to advance the sale. I don’t know why I thought that she would know how to do this, but I was wrong. I had to pretty much dictate the whole letter to her. It also made it clear to me that I could not depend upon her to follow up on it, and I did not have the time to do it myself. We whiffed again.

Others Within Driving Distance

Sue and I drove down to Englewood, NJ, to visit an ad agency called Sommer Inc. It was a small business-to-business agency run by a couple who were older than we were. I don’t remember too much about the experience, but I thought that we would be a great fit for them.

My clearest memory of the trip is that I was very hungry by the time that we reached the Garden State, and Sue stopped at Popeye’s so that I could wolf down a few pieces of chicken before we met with them.

We did not get the account. I think that they might have been put off by the price and instead purchased a cheaper PC system.

Somehow we got a tip about an advertising agency in Vermont that was looking for an administrative software system. It might have been in Burlington. I talked to the proprietor on the telephone, and he seemed serious. I think that this might have been in 1987 or 1988 when we were desperate for business.

Our marketing director, who at the time was, I think, Michael Symolon⁷, accompanied me on the trip to the north country. We left Enfield fairly early in the morning. The weather was cold enough that I wore an overcoat. When we arrived at the agency I realized that I had put on the pants that went with my suit, but I had mistakenly donned my blue blazer instead of the suit coat. The combination looked ridiculous.

It was pretty warm in the agency’s office. So, when I took off my overcoat, I also took off the blazer. I still probably looked strange in shirtsleeves when Michael was wearing a suit, but I did not feel like a clown.

The presentation went OK. Michael may have followed up on the visit, but it was probably another case of sticker shock.

The only other ad agency that I remember driving to was in Schenectady, NY, northwest of Albany. The building in which the agency was housed had obviously been repurposed. The ceiling was crisscrossed with large and small pipes or air ducts. Each had been painted in bright primary colors. The effect was quite striking.

The agency had been using the AdMan software system on PC’s for a couple of years. It seemed to me that there must have been something about the system that the users did not like. Otherwise, why was he looking for new system? I tried to talk with the office manager about it. He was, however, very reluctant to discuss what they were currently doing or what they would like to do. Instead he wanted me to describe the advantages or our approach. Of course, he also wanted to know the cost.

I hated it when prospects did this. A major strength of our system was that we could adapt it to meet the needs of almost any user. This was difficult to present. I much preferred to tell people how we would address their problems. Then I could introduce ideas that they did not expect.

During the drive back to Rockville I did not feel good about this call. I suspected that I had been used to gather information for some sort of hidden agenda of the office manager. I had no concrete evidence to go on, but the whole situation did not feel right.

Distant Prospects

Touchdown Jesus could not have made a sale in South Bend.

I had flown to Chicago in late 1988 to meet with some IBM representatives who specialized in retail about the AdDept system that we had just installed at Macy’s. I rented a car afterwards and drove to South Bend, IN, for a presentation at the IBM office for people from local advertising agencies. We had sent letters to all of the agencies in the area, and four or five had expressed interest in the GrandAd system.

Three little old ladies attended the demo, and they all sat together. No IBMers showed up. It reminded me of the debate in which I performed at Expo ’67, which is described here. I talked with the ladies, or rather one of them; they were all from the same agency. They told me that their agency currently used a system marketed by one of our competitors. They told me that the system had actually been installed by someone who lived in South Bend. When I asked who supported the system they claimed not to know.

.The whole trip was a complete waste of time. We got nothing from any of the people that I met in Chicago, and the South Bend agency later told us that they were not interested.

In February of 1989 we were pitching two important prospects in the Milwaukee area. Both the journey to Milwaukee and the return trip were memorable. They are described here.

It is a safe bet that I had Usinger’s brats on any trip to Milwaukee.

I took a cab to the ad agency first. I do not remember the name of the agency, but I recall that they seemed to be very interested in our approach. I had to sell a bit of blue sky concerning the hardware. I pitched running the System/36 ad agency system on an AS/400. They would be the guinea pig for this, but the alternative was to try to sell an approach that IBM had publicly abandoned.

I thought that the meeting went very well. I gauged that we had a very good chance of getting this account. I was not able to follow up immediately, however, because Sue and I took our first vacation ever immediately following this trip to Milwaukee.

In the end we did not get the account. After returning from the vacation we soon became so busy that our failure might have been a blessing in disguise.

In 1990 (I think) I received a telephone call from Ernie Capobianco, whom I knew from RGS&H (described here). He said that he now was working for an ad agency in Kansas City, Valentine-Radford. They already had a System/36, but they were not satisfied with what they were getting out of it.

I arranged to stay with my parents while I pitched the account. My dad told me the agency was one of the largest and most respected in KC.

I met with the systems manager in the morning. They had been using standard accounting packages and were trying to use their general ledger for client profitability analysis. It did not work. It would never work. There were a lot of other problems, too.

Two or three officers of the company took me to lunch at Putsch’s 210 on the Country Club Plaza, the swankest restaurant in the Kansas City area. They wanted to know what it would take for them to get the kind of information from their S/36 that Ernie got at RGS&H.

I informed them that their software system was not designed for a business as complex as an ad agency. They were trying to eat soup with a knife. If we were going to do the project, we would do it right. We could probably convert some of the data for them, but we wouldn’t be able to patch their software. We would want to install our system.

It was not what they wanted to hear.

Our last pitch to an ad agency was, I think, in May of 1994.⁸ Sue and I drove to Pennsylvania to talk with people from Blattner/Brunner, Inc.⁹ We also met with Kaufmann’s, the May Co. division, on the same trip. We spent a day at the Pittsburgh zoo before we returned.

The people at B/B were definitely serious about getting a system They asked all the right questions. They even questioned whether the AS/400 was really a relational data base. Their doubt was understandable. Every other database (Oracle, Sybase, Informix, etc.) had a name, but at that point IBM had not yet begun calling the AS/400’s database DB2/400 even though the design of the system had been fully relational since the introduction of its predecessor, the System/38, back in 1978!

The agency was rapidly growing, and it was famous in the area for its “Killer B’s” billboard, which was nominated as one of the best ads in Pittsburgh’s history. Winning this account might have really launched ADB, which is what we called the AS/400 version of GrandAd.

I left the follow-up on this account in Sue’s hands. I had my hands full with Kaufmann’s, which gave us a huge notebook of reports that they wanted us to include in their system. Sue definitely fumbled the ball. She could have handled this; she just chose not to. This was one of the main reasons that I became very upset with her in 1994. The details of this “second crisis” are described here.

1. Marvin Elbaum has had several careers since the merged agency folded in 1992. I think that in 2021 he is a realtor for William Raveis in southeastern Connecticut. His LinkedIn page is here.

2. The Hartford Courant declared LSGE, Inc. defunct in 1992.

3. By the time of the pandemic Maier Advertising had “evolved” into a business-to-business agency named Blue Star Communications Group. Its website is here.

4. A write-up of Kate Behart’s career at TSI can be found here.

5. Much more about Terri Provost’s stint at TSI can be found here.

6. Sommer Inc. was acquired by Greenstone Rabasca Roberts of Melville, NY, in 1989.

7. Michael Symolon’s time as TSI’s marketing guy is discussed here.

8. Ernie’s ad agency in Dallas, Square One, bought Valentine-Radford in 2003.

9. I am pretty sure of the date because there was an annular solar eclipse. The only solar eclipse in the nineties that was visible from Pennsylvania was on May 20, 1994.

10. Joe Blattner has departed, but in 2021 the agency is still active as M.J. Brunner, Inc. The agency’s website is here. Joe Blattner’s web page is here.

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