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.
Zillow’s photo of 2 Park St.
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.
Mark Oettinger.
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.
Preparation: For several years I have maintained a spreadsheet that contained one line per bridge partner. I only kept track of ones with whom I had played at least one complete session at a sanctioned game. I also had bookmarked the ACBL’s web page that contained the records of club games. However, when I started working on this entry, I was disappointed to discover that the link no longer worked. So, I have needed to rely on my memory more than I hoped.
This document contains stories about partnered with whom I played several times. Part 2 (posted here) describes the ones that I met through the mentoring program or the High-Low game on Sundays and people that I only played with once or twice.
The HBC: The Hartford Bridge Club (HBC) was founded in 1931. It is the oldest continuously operating bridge club in North America. Its headquarters since October 1995 has been at 19A Andover Drive in West Hartford. I played my first game at the club and became a member on January 1, 2008. My partner that afternoon was Dick Benedict (introduced here), with whom I had been playing on Wednesday evenings at the Simsbury Bridge Club (SBC) for several years. At the time the club was charging $30 for a membership. The table fee was $5 for members and $6 for others. At the time I had only been playing in Simsbury. I joined the HBC because I had been asked to play in the games it ran on Tuesday evenings and Saturday afternoons. So, I figured that if I kept to that schedule all year1, it would be a good dealT
Tom Gerchman.
The person who asked me to play was Tom Gerchman. In preparation for playing with him I taught myself thirteen conventions that I had found in a book by William S. Root and Richard Pavlicek. I also bought Michael Lawrence’s CD about 2/1 (pronounced “two over one”), the set of bidding principles used by most players at the HBC and at tournaments. He had played 2/1 with his previous partner, Mary Witt2, and I eventually persuaded him to play it with me as well. At this point I knew enough conventions to be comfortable playing with nearly any new partner.
Tom drove a red BMW convertible. Between 2008 and 2023 he has purchased several new cars. Each one was a red BMW convertible. The license plate was GERCH. On trips he liked to drive, but the back seat was uninhabitable. If we were playing in a team game, the BMW was not big enough to hold four people. He borrowed his mother’s car.
I soon discovered that Tom wanted to play with me because Mary had resigned from their partnership. She wasn’t angry at him; she just did not like sitting across the table from him. I learned this when Tom and I played in a knockout with Mary and Ruth Tucker3 as teammates in the regional tournament in Danbury, CT. We made it to the semifinals of our bracket. After we had been eliminated Tom kept telling Ruth, “I got you gold!”
That evening the four of us went out for supper. I learned at that meal that Ruth had been a small child in Nazi Germany during the Kristallnacht in 1938. She was surprised that I knew quite a bit about the event. I had read about it when I had researched the backgrounds of two popes4, Pius XI and Pius XII, who had both been in Germany during Hitler’s rise to power. Tom had never heard of it.
For quite some time I enjoyed playing with Tom for several reasons. The first was that he liked to go to tournaments, and so did I. In addition, he was still working5, which meant that he could only play in evening games, and on weekends and holidays. That schedule conformed to mine. However, he was an avid golfer. So, in nicer weather he played less bridge. I also like the fact that he was not averse to learning new conventions. Bidding has always been my favorite aspect of the game.
At the SBC Tom occasionally played with his mother, Sue. He was sometimes pretty hard on her when she made mistakes. Wen she died in 2012 (obituary here) I was still playing regularly with Tom, and I went to her wake. I was the only bridge player who attended, but a number of Tom’s golf buddies were there.
After the evening games Tom and a small group of the other players went to the Corner Pug in West Hartford to discuss the hands and drink. Tom might have eaten a very late supper. I don’t think that he cooked, and he was not married.
It took me a while to realize it, but Tom definitely was obsessive-compulsive in some ways. For example we played together on two separate days at the NABC held in Boston in 2008. I discovered that he had memorized in terms of minutes how long it took to get to the site of the tournament from several spots on the route. Furthermore, on the day that I drove I let him off to register us while I parked the car. He insisted that I must park in precisely the same spot that he had used on the previous day. Just to be peevish I parked in the same spot, but one floor lower.
On that occasion we played in an Open Swiss with a pair from the partnership desk. We won our first round against a team from Connecticut. After that it was one humiliating defeat after another. Our teammates were upset at us. We beat a hasty retreat after the last round.
I heard from Mary Witt that Tom read the Hartford Courant every morning and always started with the obituaries. She also said that he had a huge stack of old newspapers in his house. I never went to his house, and so I cannot verify this.
Tom was much more obsessed with the scores than I was. He was pretty hard on me at club games, but he very seldom talked during rounds at tournaments. He also stayed after club games and audited the scores. He once told me that he loved to check calculations. He confided once that he should have been an auditor.
I was still playing with Tom at the time of my Life Master parties at the HBC and the SBC in early 2010. I remember that he gave a little speech at the HBC in which he talked about my habit of sending him emails about what I thought we could have done to do better in the previous game. In my acceptance speech I thanked every single partner that I had had at that point. I thanked Tom for teaching me “that in a six-team Howell, you don’t play against the pair that you follow and the pair that follows you.”
I don’t have any great memories of playing with Tom. We did not do very well at most tournaments. Eventually, I stopped playing with him. I just could not stand the fact that he said and did the same things over and over and over and over. He also talked about the hands too much in club games while we were still playing. I found myself pounding the steering wheel while driving home after playing with him. Fifteen years later I still react negatively to the sound of his voice.
Actually, I quit twice. After the first time he persuaded me to try again. It took me very little time to realize that he was never going to change. I quit again.
I still teamed up occasionally with him for team games. We had much better results when I did not have to sit across from him.
Tom invited me and Sue to the party that he threw for himself on his sixtieth birthday. It was at a restaurant on the west side of town. He was celebrating the fact that he had survived that long. Apparently both his only brother and his father had died from heart attacks when they were in their fifties.
Michael Dworetsky.
After my partnership with Tom was dissolved, on most Tuesday evenings I played with Michael Dworetsky. He had been playing for quite a while before I returned to the world of bridge, but he had only occasionally played in tournaments. I never was quite sure why he had avoided tournaments before I began playing as his partner.
I have several vivid memories of playing with Michael. We drove to a sectional in Johnston, RI, and did well enough to finish first in the C Flight in the afternoon session of the Open Pairs. As the director read the results, I said to Michael, “Let’s see how he does with our last names.” He butchered both of them.
The most catastrophic mistake of my bridge career occurred in the penultimate round of the Flight C qualifying tournament for the Grand National Teams (GNT). We were definitely in contention when Michael made a Help Suit Game try by bidding 3♣. I needed to bid 4♠ if I thought that we could take ten of the thirteen tricks or 3♠ if not. I considered all that I knew about the hand and finally decided that we probably did not have enough. Unfortunately, I did not bid 3♠, I mistakenly passed, leaving Michael in a ludicrous club contract.
I played with Michael when he made Life Master in a sectional in Westchester County. He drove us into New York City to a deli to celebrate. I had a Reuben sandwich; he had pastrami. We had a great time, but it cost him a fortune to park the car.
He almost always drove us to tournaments. On one occasion I spilled some coffee on the rug in his car. He did not yell at me, but I knew he was upset. He had a very nice car. It was the first that I had ever been in that had a both a built-in GPS and a hand-free telephone.
One of the best calls that I ever made in bridge was when Michael and I played against two ladies, one of whom needed to win the match in order to make Life Master. I opened 1♠, the lady overcalled 2♥, Michael doubled, indicating that he had a pretty good hand with clubs and diamonds. I had six spades, five hearts that included two honors, a club, and a diamond. I passed. We took the first nine tricks. She was down four for 1100 points. She did not make Life Master that afternoon.
I gave a little speech at Michael’s Life Master party. It might have been the best speech that I ever gave. It was not as effective as Urban II’s call for a crusade in 1096, but mine got more laughs. I began by claiming that Michael was a founding member of the club in 1931. I also mentioned the hole in the sole of one of his shoes.
Michael and I played together at the NABC in the summer of 2013. I posted my recollections of this adventure here. We also flew down to the Gatlinburg Regional Tournament in Tennessee in 2013. I took notes and posted them here. We won a knockout and a lot of masterpoints there.
The house in Bloomfield in which Michael lived with his wife Ellen was struck by lightning. Eventually they moved to Palm Beach Gardens, FL, but I have seen Michael at bridge tournaments in New England a few times. He usually was playing with a teaching pro named Bob Lavin.
Dan Koepf.
The nicest person whom I ever met was Dave Landsberg. When I started playing on Tuesday evenings, Dave was playing regularly with Dan Koepf. I invited them to team up with Jerry Hirsch and me in Flight C of the GNT event one year. They accepted, and we did quite well. I then wrote to both of them to ask if either one wanted to play in a tournament with me. Dave responded positively, and we were partners and good friends right up until his death (obituary here) in 2016. In fact, he was planning on playing with me in the Cape Cod Senior Regional the week that he died. I wrote up my experiences at that tournament, including my thoughts about Dave, and posted them here.
Dave was on the HBC’s Board of Trustees, and I was not. I once asked him what the BoT meetings were like. He told me that at that time there was a big controversy over toilet paper. He said that the women on the board were complaining that the toilet paper in the ladies’ room was too flimsy. Dave informed me that his position was that we should give them better paper, but it was only fair that they should agree to pay higher table fees. I laughed for several minutes.
Dave and I won a couple of events together. The most memorable one was in Cromwell, CT, when Dave played with Kay Hill, and I played with Ginny Iannini (introduced here). I posted a photo6 of us on the District 25 website, NEBridge.org, as I did the winners of all events at D25’s regionals. When Dave’s wife Jackie saw the photo of Dave and Ginny side-by-side, she told him that he could not play with her again. When Dave told me this, we both broke out laughing. However, it made me wonder why Sue never complained about me playing with Ginny.
Pat Fliakos.
I was playing with Dave and three other people when I set the world standard for captaining a five-person team in a sectional Swiss in Auburn, MA. We were playing with Pat Fliakos,7 one of Dave’s regular partners, and a pair that we picked up at the partnership desk, Charlie Curley (introduced here) and Mike Colburn. Since Mike and Charlie were regular partners, I assigned them to play all eight rounds. Pat and Dave would play six rounds, four together and two each with me. I would play the middle four rounds. This would allow me to leave early and mow the lawn, which needed it badly. When I departed, our team’s score was slightly above average, but in my absence my four teammates won both of the last two rounds, defeating the best team in attendance in the last round. We finished third overall and first in B and C.
The accident occurred between Worcester and Springfield.
The grass did not get mowed. On the trip home my 2007 Honda was rear-ended on the Mass Pike by someone driving a rental car. I did not yet have a cellphone, but he did. He did not speak English very well, but I did. So I called 911 on his phone. After about twenty minutes a state trooper appeared. After a few minutes he told me that he had given the other man a ticket for following too closely. I already had his insurance information; he had Progressive. So, I just drove home.
A few days later a Progressive adjuster examined my car and assessed the cost to fix a small dent on one bumper at $1500. I later was contacted by someone from Avis, who had rented the car to the other driver. They said that they would accept Progressive’s assessment and asked me to settle for $2,000. I spelled my name for them, and gave them my address. The check arrived a few weeks later. Four or five years later I traded in the car. I never considered getting it fixed.
Dave’s Life Master party at the HBC was shared with Sue Rudd (introduced here). I told the above story (minus the car crash and insurance). I balanced it with the tale of the first sectional in Hamden, CT, in which Dave and I competed as partners. We finished dead last in both the morning and afternoon session. I have never heard of anyone who could match that performance.
The best time that I spent with Dave was when the two of us dined at an Italian restaurant in Hyannis, MA. I recall that I ordered the Bolognese and a glass of wine. The food was good, and the conversation was better. For some reason it was very easy to talk to and to listen to Dave. By the time that we left, we had solved the most serious of the world’s problems.
I went to Dave’s wake and the ceremony for him at Wesleyan, where he had worked. When I met Jackie, I told her that Dave really loved her. I was certain of this because he never rolled his eyes when he talked about her. I really miss him.
A photo of Dave is in the Felix Springer section of this entry.
Peter Katz and I started playing together on Saturdays and Tuesday evenings after I stopped playing with Tom Gerchman. In 2023 I still played with him whenever the HBC had a game on Saturday. We had one great showing in August of 2023, which I have documented here.
Earlier in our partnership Peter and I played together in a few sectionals that were held in the Hartford area. At one of them we happened to have the last sitout in the afternoon session, which meant that we could go home early. Before we left we picked up hand records for that session. It did not take us long to realize that some of the hands that we played did not correspond to the ones on the printout. We reported this to the director, Tim Hill. He did not tear his hair out, but I am pretty sure that I saw his bow tie spinning around.
How could this have happened? Some directors like to play “web movements” when an awkward number of pairs are playing. If, for example, thirty-eight pairs are playing, the standard way to play it would be to have two sections, one with ten tables and one with nine. Both sections would be playing nine three-board matches. Each pair would only play against nine of the other thirty-seven pairs. A web movement would allow for one very large section playing fourteen two-board rounds. This requires two identical sets of boards, and they must be handled precisely correctly, but the directors who do this are very reliable about setting them up correctly.
In this case, however, the directors were not at fault. The two sets of boards were NOT identical. I don’t know how they were able to score this, but they eventually did. The directors definitely earned their salary that day.
When I first began playing with Peter he was something of a local celebrity. He and his wife (whom I never met) attended all of the home games of the Hartford University men’s and women’s basketball teams. Peter wore outrageous wigs to the games. I never met his wife, and I only saw photos of him in his super-fan getup.
At some point in the teens the couple got divorced, and Peter stopped attending the games. The marriage must have been stressful on him. He mellowed out quite a bit after the divorce.
At first Peter and I played a version of 2/1 that was not much different from what I had played with Tom Gerchman. At some point Peter began playing on Tuesdays with one of the best players at the club, Tom Joyce. They played a version of the Kaplan-Sheinwold weak 1NT system. I agreed to learn this and play it on Saturdays with Peter. That was what we employed in our big game.
Peter served as webmaster for the HBC. In 2023 I began working with him on posting the club’s monthly calendars.
Before the Pandemic I played regularly with Felix Springer. In fact we played together (and won!) in the very last game on March 15, 2020, before the HBC closed its doors for over a year. We also played together at a few tournaments, including a week at the Fall NABC in San Francisco in 2019. We also played together on a large number of very successful teams, but I usually paired with someone else.
Felix shared his Life Master party with Ken Leopold (introduced here). They asked Dave Landsberg and me to be their teammates. Before the play started, Dave turned to me and said, “Did you read their background stories? Why are they playing with us?”
I don’t know, but it was a good idea. We won our first four rounds. In the fifth round, we faced the other unbeaten team. They had at least five times as many points as we did. It was a very close match that turned on one hand. Laurie Robbins, an excellent bridge player, and I were both West holding the same cards. We each had to make a decision similar to the catastrophic one that I had made in the GNT with Michael Dworetsky. Laurie chose to try for game and went down. I settled for the partial.
Donna Feir.
Donna Feir, the longtime club manager, said that it was the only time that she could remember that the honorees won such a game, and also the only time that they were undefeated.
Felix, as president of the HBC, guided the club through the perilous times of the Pandemic. The club had almost no income, and it still had considerable expenses. He kept everyone involved with periodic newsletter, analysis of playing bridge with robots, and walks in the park. Donna confided to me that without Felix the club probably would not have survived.
In 2022 Felix did something that I never would have expected him to do, and it hurt me deeply. The story is related here.
Ann Hudson.
Ann Hudson lived across the river form Enfield in Suffield, CT, with her husband, Randy Johnson. I thoroughly enjoyed playing with both of them. The card that they played was very sophisticated. I must admit that I had a difficult time to remember the modified Manfield responses to an opponents takeout double.
For a few years Ann and I were rather regular partners for the half of the year that Ann and Randy spent in New England. The other half of the year they lived in South Carolina. In 2022 they moved from Suffield to Hadley, MA.
The only times that I got to play at the HBC with Randy were when Ann had to cancel at the last minute. It only happened a few times. He was an exceptionally good player. We played together in the open pairs in the sectional in Great Barrington, MA, one year and won the afternoon session.
Randy Johnson.
I met Ann while I was working at the partnership desk at the NABC in Providence in 2014. After that we played together pretty regularly at sectional, regional, and NABC tournaments and occasionally at the HBC if she could get away from her chores on their mini-farm.
I usually stopped at the McDonald’s on the south side of Hazard Ave. on the way to either their house in Suffield or at the Hampton Inn that was about halfway between us. On one occasion I was sitting in my blue 2007 Honda in the parking lot while I ate my sausage biscuit with egg. I had turned off the Honda’s engine while I ate. I could not get the car to start, and I did not have a cellphone yet. I had to go in to McDonald’s to use someone’s phone to call Sue, and I had to cancel my game with Ann. If was embarrassing. The best thing about Hondas is their reliability. Mine was telling me that it was time for a trade-in, and I listened.
Ann had actually been born in China. Both of her parents were university professors. They brought her to the U.S. when Ann was very young.
In 2015 my wife Sue and I decided to fly to Denver to play in the Fall NABC. Randy and Ann also planned to attend. Ann and I decided to play in two NABC events: the 0-10,000 Swiss and the 5K Blue Ribbon Pairs.
Kathy Rolfe.
Before those events started I picked up a partner for the evening side game, Kathy Rolfe. I had met her at a previous NABC when we were both playing in the lowest level of the Life Masters Event. When we came to her table she asked me if I was related to Vic Wavada in Kansas City, and—get this—she pronounced my name correctly. It turned out that Kathy knew Vic’s wife Theresa very well, and she had mentioned that I played bridge.
Kathy and I finished near the middle in the side game. We probably should have done a little better.
I had arranged to play in the 10,000 Swiss with a woman from Arkansas named Ti Davis.8 I told her that I was 6-feet tall, grey-haired, and skinny, and I would have on my red and blue Barça hat. She was playing with an Asian woman whom she met at the partnership desk. Unfortunately, we were overmatched in the event and only won one or two rounds.
Leonardo Cima.
On the next day Ann and I teamed up with Randy and one of his regular partners to play in an Open Swiss event. In the second round we played against Leonardo Cima and Valerio Giubilo, famous players from Rome. We had a little time to talk with them before the match. They told me that they were both from Roma. I told them that it was “la mia città preferita in Italia.”
Valerio Giubilo.
In the match Giubilo made an incorrect bid on an important hand causing them to miss a slam. Cima gave him a severe dressing-down. During the rest of the match they both spoke impeccable English, but during this post mortem Cima filled the air with Italian curse words.
We won the match, but we did not do well in the event. Giubilo and Cima won over 100 points in the tournament.
In the Mini-Blue Ribbon Pairs Ann and I played as well as we have ever played. I was very excited when we made it to the second day. We played pretty well then as well, but not quite well enough.
I was too intense for Ann in the Super Senior Pairs and Mini-Blue Ribbon Pairs at the NABC in Honolulu, as described here. She was not angry at me; I think that she felt sorry for me more than anything. After the tournament she drove to the airport and drove Sue and me to Enfield. Ann and I have played together in less stressful situations a few times since then.
I played with Michael Varhalamas a few times at the Saturday game at the HBC. I also played with him at least once in a Swiss in a sectional somewhere in Westchester County. I remember that he drove us there in his truck. Our teammates were two women from, I think, New Jersey. I don’t remember their names. Michael made the arrangements.
Twice during the game he bid dicey grand slams that I had to play. I made the first one without too much difficulty. The second one, however, was in the last round and required a squeeze—not my specialty. However, I pulled it off, and we ended up with a very good score.
Michael and his wife eventually moved to Saint Petersburg. Sue and I went to a bridge game there, and my partner, Chris Person, and I played against him in the first round of a pairs game at the local club. On one hand Chris opened 1[Suit x=”C”]. I passed with three or four points and only one or two clubs. Chris had only three clubs; it was a bloodbath. Michael recommended bidding in that situation, but only over 1[Suit x=”C”], not over any other opening bid.
Connie Dube
Before the Pandemic I played fairly regularly at the HBC with Connie Dube ( pronounced DOO bee). I met her when she and Myrna Butler agreed to be teammates with Ken Leopold and me at a regional tournament. They were late for the first round. Helen Pawlowski and Sally Kirtley sat in for them for one or two hands. In case you are wondering, this was definitely not legal. Since Helen told me that Myrna was always late, I did not hold it against Connie.
Connie and I played at a few sectional tournaments. Her availability was quite limited because her husband was suffering from severe chronic illnesses. As of 2023 she has not resumed playing after the Pandemic.
Joan Brault.
At the HBC I have played with Joan Brault quite a few times when one of her regular partners, Mike (really Michele) Raviele or Aldona Siuta, could not play. We have never set the world on fire, but we have played together a few times in 2023.
Paul Pearson and I teamed up with Mike and Joan at a sectional Swiss in the Hartford area. I think that we did pretty well.
She was a very talented artist. She also had a grandson who was a pitcher/outfielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Over the years I have played with Mary Eisenberg both at the HBC and at a few tournaments. She asked her to help her to get her Life Master designation at an upcoming regional tournament in Danbury, CT. We played together in club games at least twice so that we could accustom ourselves to each other’s styles. One of those was a STaC (Sectional Tournament at Clubs) game that we somehow won. We earned a lot of silver points for that, but Mary still needed a small fraction of a gold point.
Mary asked me to drive us to the tournament. She had apparently been in an automotive accident a few months earlier, and she was still shaky about driving, especially at night. I picked her up at a parking lot at a supermarket near her home. I never did understand why this arrangement was necessary, but I did not question it.
We played in the Golden Opportunity Pairs at the tournament. It was a two-session event limited to players with less than 750 masterpoints. At the time I was within a few points of the limit. So, I was not afraid of any of our competitors. It was safe to say that I had more tournament experience than any of them. Gold points were awarded to players who had a good combined score (known as “overalls”) for the two sessions, but a smaller amount of gold was also awarded to the pairs that finished first (both North-South and East-West) out of the ten in each section of ten tables for each session.
We did very badly in the morning. I remember interfering against a team playing Precision. The player with the strong hand doubled my bid, and it resulted in a four-digit score in the minus column. Mary did not play very well either. Our score was bad enough that we had very little chance of getting one of the overall awards. Mary was very disappointed. She asked me if I wanted to go home. Go home? I hadn’t driven all this way when there was still a chance of achieving the objective. I said that we just had to win our section in the afternoon session, and that was (at least from my perspective) a reasonable goal. If we played as well as well as we had in the STaC game, we would prevail easily.
We did much better in the afternoon. I have always had a pretty good feel for anticipating results. I reckoned that there was a pretty good chance that we might have won. You never knew for certain; someone may have received a lot of “gifts” from their opponents.
During the last round they posted the standings after the penultimate round. We checked it when we finished playing the last round. We were in first in our section, but only by one point. I thought back on the last round. On the first hand one of our opponents had made a grievous error that should have given us a good score. On the second hand we bid to the best contract, but Mary made some mistakes in the play. The third hand was mediocre, but we did avoid possible errors.
It took the directors nearly half an hour to post the final scores. Mary was beside herself with worry. They finally posted the scores. We tied for first place, and so we had to split the gold award with the other pair. Fortunately, that was just enough for Mary to become a Life Master.
On a good day the drive the hotel to Hartford took an hour.
The trip back to Hartford was in a downpour. However, my Honda had good tires, and so I was not much concerned with the water, and I still had pretty good vision for night driving. So, I was going the speed limit. I nonchalantly passed trucks that were going slower. Mary had to hide her face for most of the ride. She was terrified of another accident.
When we got to Hartford Mary could not remember how to get to the parking lot when coming from the west. We drove around for five or ten minutes before she got her bearings. Since I still had a half-hour drive to Enfield, I was annoyed by this.
Some months later the club sponsored a Life Master party for Mary. I gave a short speech that highlighted two aspects of her activities. At the time she often brought baked goods or other goodies to the club. She also cooked professionally. She even cooked for the Archbishop of Hartford for a while!
The other aspect was her fear of driving. I claimed that she had taken up racing on the Formula 1 circuit, and I held up a large picture of her alleged Ferrari. This reference went right over (or maybe under) Mary’s head, but a few people in the audience understood what I was talking about.
I may have played with Eric Vogel at the HBC more often than any other player. He started playing a few years after I did, and he amassed a terrific record. After I played with him a while I realized that he shared my interest in conventions. Together we put together a good card.
We also have played together in tournaments. We won one session of the open pairs at a sectional in Connecticut. That story has been told here. At the Presidential Regional in Southbridge, MA, in 2023 we played in Bracket 2 of the knockout. We won the qualifying Swiss very easily but only finished a very disappointing fourth. That tale of woe can be read here.
Eric is another talented artist. He also became the club’s treasurer in 2022. He has not had an easy time with accrual accounting.
Eric unobtrusively became a vegetarian at some point during our partnership. He certainly was one in 2023, but I remember that he complimented me on my chili at one of the pot-luck lunches at the HBC.
Eric’s daughter died in 2022. I went to the service at his church. His wife gave a very nice tribute.
Partab.
Prior to the Pandemic I was playing at the HBC nearly every Tuesday with Partab Makhijani. I expected to resume playing with him when the club reopened, but he did not return to play. I think that he, like many others, might have health issues.
His LinkedIn page (here) said that he was on the adjunct faculty at the University of Hartford.
Buz.
I met Buz Kohn (LinkedIn page here) when he was playing with his mother Joan occasionally on Tuesday evenings. We have played together several times at the HBC both before and after the club closed for the Pandemic.
Although Buz was as good at playing the cards as anyone he was not very tolerant of conventions. I had trouble getting him to even use a convention card.
Buz was still playing at the HBC in 2023, but I think that he also had a house in Florida.
Sonja Smith was Steve’s mother, and she also had triplet girls. When I began playing at the SBC in 2004, Sonja played there regularly with a partner who subsequently moved away.
We played together at the HBC several time before the Pandemic and once or twice afterwards—including one of the sectionals in 2022—before she and her family moved to the South.
Sonja attended the 2018 NABC in Honolulu. Afterwards she and her husband Chris spent a few days in Maui, as did my wife Sue and I. Sonja, who was staying at a resort hotel a few miles north of our base of Lahaina, invited us to join them on Monday, December 3, for an expensive sunset cruise of Maui’s west coast. I described it in detail here. It turned out to be a booze cruise with very loud music. I did not enjoy it at all.
Jeanne Striefler and her husband Fred invited Sue and me to their house in West Simsbury several times before the Pandemic. Jeanne and I also played together at the HBC several times and played at teams events at nearby sectionals and regionals. She was part of our ill-fated team at the Presidential Regional described in Eric Vogel’s section. She served as the club’s secretary for many years.
Jeanne also played regularly at the SBC both before and after the closure for the Pandemic.
Jeanne was from Omaha, Nebraska. She grew up closer to my old stomping grounds than anyone else in the HBC.
Ron Talbot.
Ron Talbot, who attended Notre Dame, was the president of the HBC for two years. Before the Pandemic I played with him fairly often at the HBC as well as at a few sectionals in Rhode Island. If his partner was male. he wore a baseball cap while he was playing. If female, he was bareheaded.
Ron told me that he walked three miles every morning. I much preferred to do my walking in the evening. He also walked fifty miles in three days on the Appalachian Trail with his children and/or grandchildren. I don’t know if I could have done that.
Ron moved to Naples, FL, before the Pandemic. He has returned to the HBC once or twice.
Trevor Reeves.
Trevor Reeves served as president and then treasurer of the HBC. He implemented the budgeting system that was instrumental in helping to get the HBC through the Pandemic.
I played with him a few times at the club and at tournaments, including an open pairs game at the Summer NABC in Toronto in 2017 in which we were first in our section in the evening session.
Trevor was involved in the GNT difficulty that I described at the end of Felix Springer’s section.
The player with whom I have played for the longest time is my wife Sue. W have played together at the SBC, the HBC, at tournaments, on cruises, and clubs while we were traveling.
Sue’s HBC photo.
Sue had never played bridge when we met in 1972, but she had played a lot of setback, a much simpler trick-taking game, with friends and family members. She had no trouble learning the rules of bridge, but she had a difficult time understanding even the basics of the strategic principles concerning bidding and play.
I vividly remember one of the first times that we played as partners. It was at the house in Wethersfield of friends of ours, Jim and Ann Cochran, who were introduced here. I may have had a gin and tonic or two. It was a friendly game of rubber bridge. Nothing was at stake.
Sue and I got the bid in a suit contract, and Sue had to play it. The hand was not very challenging; all she had to do was to lead a few rounds of trump and then take her winners. Unfortunately, she neglected to take out the trumps before taking her high cards. So, the Cochrans were able to ruff several of her winners, and the contract went down.
Ann helpfully provided Sue with a way of remembering the importance of drawing trumps before attacking side suits. She taught her the old adage, “Get the children off the street!”
A few hands later Sue played another suit contract. She once again forgot about her opponents’ children, and they once again made enough mischief to set the contract.
On the third hand that I witnessed from across the table in my role of dummy, Sue’s failure to draw trumps led to another failed contract, I lost my temper, slammed my fist down, and broke the card table. I would have offered to buy them a new one, but at the time we were, as the British say, skint.
Nearly forty years passed before Sue and I played together at a sanctioned game. She joined the ACBL in 2011, seven years after I did. By the time that she started to play, I was already a Life Master. She blamed me for not warning her that the ACBL had changed the requirements for that rank on January 1 of 2011. The organization increased the number of required points, but they also made available new opportunities for obtaining them.
Over the years Sue and I played together at a few NABC tournaments, two bridge cruises, and at a few clubs in New England and Florida. At first I tried to get her to go over the hands with me after a session of bridge, but she really hated to do so. Our games together did not improve much over the years.
Sue has a lot of trouble with time, and in competitive bridge only seven minutes are ordinarily allotted for each hand. Contributing to this difficult are the facts that she plays—and does every other thing—rather slowly, keeps a very detailed score, and insists on playing North, the position that maintains the official results.
Mary Petit
I remember one Sunday in which we played in the High-Low game at the HBC. By chance I declared more than my usual share of contracts. We finished first! I cannot remember any other occasion on which we enjoyed even a modicum of success.
Sue would like to do better, but she does not have the drive that I have always had to improve one’s game. In short, she never reads books or bridge articles. She sometimes goes over a result sheet, but never with a critical eye.
She participated in the mentoring program once. Her mentor, an experienced player named Mary Petit, offered her some tips. Later Mary asked me why Sue did not use any of them. I knew the answer, but I could not explain it in a way that anyone else could understand. So, I just said, “That’s the way that Sue is.”
Document here are more of my partnerships at North America’s oldest bridge club before it closed for the Pandemic . Partnerships after the reopening are described here.
1. I naturally thought that I had twelve months of play. In fact, however, the year started on October 1 at the HBC. So, I needed to play 25 times in nine months, which I did.
2. I never got a chance to play with Mary Witt before she moved to Cary, NC. I have occasionally communicated with her by email.
3. Several years later Ruth asked me to play with her at the HBC. I remember that I made a mistake of some kind on one hand that prevented us from getting any points. She mentioned that she knew that I was going to do that. Ruth was a good player, but she never made Life Master because she did not like tournaments. She died in 2020 at the age of 86. Here obituary can be found here. Her parents brought her to the United States in 1940.
4. An abbreviated recounting of my long obsession with papal history has been posted here. The chapter of my book about papal history that makes reference to Nazi Germany is posted here.
5. Tom was an actuary, but he never made FSA. In 2023 he was still working part-time at a pension consulting firm called PCI.
6. This photo was unfortunately lost when the server on which NEBridge.org ran had a catastrophic system failure in 2015. I also had a copy of the photo, but I cannot find it.
7. Pat still plays bridge, but she moved to Charlottesville, VA.
8. As it happened, we played against Ti’s team in the semifinals of the Summer NABC in Washington in 2016. Her team won the match and the event. I did not play against her. She and her partner played the same direction as Felix and me.
The third major stop that Sue and I made on our Hawaii trip in 1995 was on the island of Maui. The flight from Lihue to the principal airport on Maui at Kahului took about forty-five minutes. En route our plane passed over the islands of Oahu and Molokai1. Maui is not as old as Oahu, which in turn is newer than Kauai. Maui has two large volcanic structures, which makes the island look like a large irregular circle and a smaller one that slightly overlap each other. The large mountain is Mt. Haleakalā, which is over 10,000 feet high, almost twice as high as Mt. Waialeale on Kauai. The other mountain is generally just called West Maui Mountain.
Most of the people who resided permanently on Maui lived in the area between the two mountains from the outskirts of Kahului southwest to Kihei. That was also the location of almost all the island’s retail establishments and almost no tourist attractions, of which there were a very diverse multitude elsewhere.
We stayed in a nice but inexpensive hotel in the old port town of Lahaina, which is on the west coast of the West Maui part. The resorts on Maui were (and still are) mostly north of Lahaina or south of Kihei. These areas are very dry, as opposed to the eastern side of Mt. Haleakalā, which is a tropical rainforest. In the nineteenth century a series of canals and ditches dug by the East Maui Irrigation Co. brought water from the east side to the west. The purpose was to improve the sugar cane production, but the main long-term effect was to turn Maui into a mecca for all kinds of tourists.
The roads in Maui were only slightly more complicated than those of Kauai had been. A highway ran all the way around the seacoast. In the northeast corner of West Maui it was only one lane wide in some spots. In the southwest side of East Maui there were unpaved sections that were dangerous to drive. That corner of Maui was (and is) subject to flash floods of biblical proportions. There is also a road that runs along the west side of Mt Haleakala and one that zigzags up to the rim of the caldera.
We rented a car and drove from the airport to our hotel, Plantation Inn in Lahaina. Of course, we had to circumvent the mountain, which meant that we spent roughly the same amount of time on the highway as we had spent in the air en route from Lihue.
Our hotel was about three blocks from the ocean. We stayed for two or three nights. It must have been three. I clearly remember doing activities that certainly would have consumed more than two days worth of daylight. Sue and I both loved the Plantation Inn2. It was convenient to everything, it offered free breakfasts, the room was nice, and it was within our price range.
Both Molokai and Lana’i are clearly visible from the northwest coast of Maui. Lana’i is only 16.4 miles from Lahaina.
On our first evening on Maui a person representing several of the tourist spots came to the hotel, made a presentation about them, answered questions about them, and sold tickets at a discount, of course. All tickets sold everywhere in Hawaii are always at a discount. I remember that all the other attendees were jealous when they heard how long our Hawaiian vacation was.
We bought two tickets for the trip in a van to watch the sun rise over the caldera of Mt. Haleakalā and to ride bicycles down. Someone from the tour company would pick us up at the hotel at 3AM. We also purchased tickets for an excursion across the Maui Channel to the island of Lana’i3 on a later day.
So, we did not get much sleep that first night. The temperature can get down to near freezing at the top of the mountain. I thought that I would be warm enough in a couple of sweatshirts and a nylon jacket, but I was wrong. Fortunately, the company that ran the tour brought along enough insulated ski jackets with hoods for everyone.
The drive up the mountain was slow but uneventful. It was, of course, dark the entire way, and so we were not able to enjoy any views. The last few miles on switchbacks seemed to take forever. Nevertheless, we arrived at least an hour before dawn. The tour guides brought thermoses of coffee and cocoa to keep us warm as we awaited the big event. While we shivered, the guides unloaded the bicycles from the vans.
By the time that the sun peeked over the eastern edge of the caldera, perhaps one hundred people joined us on the western edge. I don’t honestly remember the colors of the sunrise. The sky was already pretty well lit because the sun had already cleared the horizon of the ocean several minutes before it appeared atop the mountain. I wasn’t disappointed, and so it probably was at least somewhat spectacular.
I definitely remember the silversword plants near the edge of the caldera. They were unlike anything that I had seen before. The interior of the caldera was also very interesting. There were clouds below us, but below them we saw plenty of vegetation, and hiking trails were also evident. It had not occurred to me that people might come to Haleakalā just to explore the caldera.
Almost as soon as it was full daylight, our bicycle guide asked loudly, “Who are Sue and Mike?” When we identified ourselves, he told us his name (I forget it) and his hometown of Springfield, MA. He said that when he lived there he often came to the stores in Enfield to shop.
We posed like this, but Sue was on the seat facing forward. I had my hands on her shoulders, my left foot on the rear fender, and my right foot raised high. There is a photo of it somewhere.
Here is how the descent worked4. About a dozen people were in our group. We each were given a bicycle. One van preceded the cyclists, who were more or less in single file. A second van followed the group to prevent any motorists from trying to overtake us. Pedaling was hardly ever needed; gravity did all the work. The group made several stops to allow the cars to go by and to enjoy the scenery. I am pretty sure that near the bottom of the mountain we stopped at a restaurant for breakfast.
Before we departed out guide explained all of this and said that we would be starting at 10,000 feet and descending to the beach. One cyclist asked him how high we would be at the end. He answered the question with his own pertinent question: “How tall are you?”
The demon was IN my bike, not on it.
The guide assured us that the bicycles were regularly maintained, and a mechanic rode in one of the vans. Sue’s bike was fine. Everyone’s was fine, except mine. I knew bikes. I rode bikes constantly as a kid. I rode bikes in 1973 and 1974 in Hartford and occasionally in the subsequent years in Plymouth. I felt very at home on one.
This bike was possessed by a demon. As we coasted down the road my bike started pedaling backwards on its own! I could not stop it/ It was all that I could do to maintain my place in line. I certainly paid no attention to the scenery, breathtaking as it no doubt was.
This would have helped.
I don’t think that any mechanic could have fixed the problem. An exorcist might have had a better chance. Nevertheless, at the first stop I asked the mechanic to check out the bike. He immediately determined that something was seriously wrong with it. They had brought a spare bike, which they let me ride. I found it much easier to control.
However, there was a reason why this bike had not been assigned to someone originally. The brakes, which were activated by levers beneath the handles, were probably adequate for a normal bike ride, but after a few miles of downhill coasting I had both brakes pressed tightly to the handlebars, and the bike was still accelerating.
A few times I actually needed to employ the Fred Flintstone method of braking with the soles of my feet. I am serious.
When I told the mechanic about the braking problem, he said that he could not fix it on the spot, and he did not have any more bikes. He offered to let me ride in the van with him. Since I still had quite a bit of rubber left on the bottoms of my sneakers, I returned to my wheeled mount for the rest of the journey. It was a little harrowing, but I managed.
Every time that we stopped, everyone in our group peeled off a layer of clothes. By the time that we reached the beach and turned in our bikes, it was at least 80°. Don’t ask me to describe the scenery; I was concentrating on my braking. When we finally reached it, the beach was nice. I enjoyed the beach.
The guides drove us back to the hotel in time for lunch. I don’t remember for certain what we did in the afternoon, but I recall that on one afternoon or evening we stumbled upon a live concert in a park. We sat on the lawn for a while and listened to music. I cannot remember for sure whether it was Hawaiian music, rock & roll, or some combination. As always, Sue really enjoyed the music. I soaked up the atmosphere.
On the second day (I think) we decided to drive to Hana. This seemed a peculiar thing to do because the destination, the town of Hana, was a real nothing. However, there is was an abundance of things to see on the way. The drive itself, with its twists and turns and one-way bridges, was sometimes an adventure. There was always the chance of a flash flood, but the weather was actually dry and very pleasant.
I made sure that we left early in the morning. It was pretty important for haole tourists to avoid attempting this trip during the rush hours. The native Hawaiians knew this road very well, and they had little patience with tentative drivers. I remember that we had a plan to pick up some food that had an advertised special, but for some reason this did not work out. I don’t remember where we ended up eating any of our meals that day. We might have stopped at roadside stands.
We did stop to gawk at some waterfalls. By that point, however, we had already seen quite a few fairly spectacular ones in Kauai. So, we were looking for something different. We definitely stopped at the Ke’anae Arboretum. I have never been much of a botany enthusiast, but I was impressed by the large number of rainbow eucalyptus trees with their multi-colored barks.
I am pretty sure that we actually drove a little way past Hana. The guidebook had reported that the Sacred Pools of Ohe’o were worth a trip. So, we stopped there for a few minutes.
I don’t think that we made any stops at all on the return trip. We were rather desperate to reach civilization again while there was still enough light to see the road.
On the way back we noticed Mama’s Fish House, which is on the north coast of East Hawaii, where the big waves are. We either stopped there for supper that evening, or else we decided to eat there later. I remember that it had a very impressive view of the rugged north shore. I have never been much of a fish eater. Catholics who grew up in Kansas when I did think of fish as what people are forced to eat on Friday. When I think of fish, I think of frozen breaded rectangles.
Our other big adventure in Maui was much less stressful. We took a short cruise on a catamaran across the Au’au Channel to Lana’i. There were perhaps twenty passengers on our boat. I am pretty sure that Sue and I were the oldest couple.
The boat had large powerful engines, but it also had a sail. At least once during the trip the captain turned off the engines and raised the sail. This was, I think my first time ever sailing. Few people in Kansas buy sailboats for their ponds, and no yachtsman from the Sunflower State has ever won the America’s Cup.
We definitely saw glimpses of whales from a distance while we were at sea. I have a vague recollection that a few dolphins swam alongside the boat for a while, as well.
At the time most of Lana’i was owned by Dole5. Pineapples had been grown there in great numbers, but pineapple production was abandoned in 1992. At the time of our visit the company was trying to find other uses for its assets. It rented out the park at Hulopo’e Beach to tourist groups. It was a nice spot for some snorkeling and a picnic. The boat brought plenty of gear for snorkeling, and the crew gave us a quick class in how best to do it. I did not pay too much attention, and I was reprimanded when I did it wrong.
Snorkeling provided the opportunity to see some very colorful fish and other sea creatures. Unfortunately, no one had taught them any tricks yet, and so I soon lost interest.
I am pretty sure that the crew served us lunch after the snorkeling was over. We then were escorted around in large jeeps tp some of the camps on the elevated parts of the island that were formerly occupied by plantation workers and managers. It was of some slight historical interest, but no one told us the whole history of the island. For Sue and me this was just a relaxing interlude in an otherwise hectic period on Maui.
I might be imagining this, but I have a dim recollection of driving up to the ‘Iao Valley, which is close to the center of West Maui. The rugged scenery there was enough to draw tourists. However, the site actually has more historic interest than esthetic.
During the trip I had begun to become more and more curious about Hawaii’s history. I was surprised to learn that Hawaii did not have a king until 1810, about the same time that Europeans became interested in the islands. The man who united the kingdom was Kamehameha the Great. His greatest victory was the Battle of Kepaniwai, which occurred in 1790 in the ‘Iao Valley within sight of the Needle. A decisive factor was Kamehameha’s use of two cannons supplied by two British subjects who became the king’s closest advisers..
One evening we came up with the idea of having a sunset picnic on the beach. We bought some food from a grocery store in Lahaina and drove south until we found a suitable beach. We were pretty much by ourselves. I don’t think that we cooked anything. We had a good time just spotting whales and eventually watching the sun disappear into the Pacific Ocean.
The flight from Kahului to Kona Airport on the Big Island took about forty-five minutes. During the flight we were treated to a pretty good view of Mt. Haleakalā and, from a distance, the two huge mountains on the Big Island, which almost no one ever calls it by its official name, Hawaii
The Big Island is gigantic in comparison with the other islands. It is bigger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined, and it contains over 63 percent of the total area of the state of Hawaii. Moreover, because of the lava flow from Kilauea, the percentage is constantly growing.
It turned out that this last leg of our time in Hawaii was as much educational as it was entertaining. As on the other islands, we set out just to relax and have fun, but we ended up learning a lot on the Big Island in a short time.
If you go to the Big Island, and you want to explore at all, you really must rent a car. We stayed at the Kamehameha Hotel, which was close to the airport, but we intended to see as much of the island as possible. So, we immediately rented a car.
I guess that you could consider our hotel6 a resort—it had a Liberty House inside, and there was a luau every evening on the beach. However, it did not have that feeling of a prison in which the clients are both protected from intrusion by outsiders and actively discouraged from leaving the grounds. That has long been my impression of the big gated resorts.
Queen Lili’ukolani.
On the ground floor of the hotel was a fairly large display that narrated in some detail the story of Hawaii’s kingdom, from the great triumphs of Kamehameha the Great not long after the American Revolutionary War through the tragic overthrow of Lili’uokalani in 1893 and her scandalous imprisonment. For me there was one surprise after another: Kamehameha received critically important help from a man from Wales and a man from Lancashire. So many members of the royal family died from Western diseases unknown on Hawaii. In fact, the king and queen both died in London while waiting for an audience with George IV. The Hawaiian royal family then became Christians, dressed as westerners, and had close ties to Queen Victoria and her family.
I found this all to be fascinating, and it ignited a desire for me to discover the reality underlying the Disneyfied stories that have been handed down. I had never really felt this way before about anything historical. Since then I have been inspired to conduct independent detailed analyses about many events.
Sue and I spent most of our time on the Big Island in our rental car. We headed south immediately mostly because I wanted to see just how far south we could actually get. The ultimate goal was the southernmost7 point of the entire United States, which we could reach after about an hour and a half of driving.
In the first half of the drive to the south we passed several coastal towns on our right. Most of the “land” to the east looked almost like asphalt. It was lava from an eruption of Mauna Loa that had not yet disintegrated into dirt. Mauna Loa, the largest active volcano in the United States, last erupted in 1984.
112 miles of this followed by a marathon? No thanks.
We were driving through the area that hosted the annual Ironman Triathlon. It consisted of a 2.4 mile ocean swim, followed by a 112 mile bicycle ride, and ending with a marathon of 26.2 miles. I had always considered the participants as a breed apart, but when I saw the course in person I was stupefied. There was no shade! None at all! And it practically never rained on this side of the Big Island. For the participants it must have seemed like exercising in a toaster oven.
On the second half of the journey to South Point we saw cattle ranches on the hills to our left, and a pretty good-sized herd of cattle was grazing there. We had enjoyed steaks from cattle raised on this island during our rain-soaked barbecue on Kauai.
South Point, the whole southern tip of the island (also known as Ka Lae), is a National Historic Landmark, probably because it is where the Polynesians first landed when they discovered Hawaii. It was (and is) extremely windy. However, on the day that we were there, the sea was relatively calm, nothing like the satellite image shown at the right.
When we arrived at the point a couple of people were wading in the water ten or twenty yards from the shore. I took off my shoes and went in. I walked out just far enough that I was two or three meters farther south than either of them. I then turned around and hurried back. So, I can safely state that for a few seconds I was farther south than anyone else on American soil.
This stunt was at least a little dangerous. The Halaea Current has a strong reputation for pulling people out to sea. If the current grabs you, you can try to ride it, I guess, but the nearest land mass to the south is several thousand miles away.
We drove back to the hotel the same way that we came. There was really no choice. I don’t remember what we did in the evening. We again avoided going to the luau, but it was not possible to avoid listening to it.
Our last night in Hawaii was scheduled to be spent at Volcano House, a lodge run by Ken Direction Corporation of Hilo for the National Park Service. It was adjacent to the west rim of the largest caldera of Kilauea, the most active volcano in the United States. We checked out of our hotel and began the long drive across the island. For most of the journey the largest of the mountains, Mauna Kea, was on our left and Mauna Loa was on the right. Their elevations are 13,803′ and 13,678′ respectively.
Once the mountains were behind us, the climate changed dramatically. Hilo and the surrounding area are a tropical rainforest.
The main reason that we even included the Big Island on our itinerary was so that Sue could visit her friend Patty Johnson, who was assistant editor the magazine Dancing USA9. Sue had talked with her over the phone but had never met her in person. Patty lived in a small prefabricated home on the northeast side of Kilauea, which, at the time of our visit was spewing red-hot lava on its southeast flank.
Sue and Patty mostly conversed about dancing and the magazine. I remember that Patty mentioned that her son sometimes earned money by harvesting “mac nuts”. I did not realize that macadamia nuts were a cash crop on the Big Island. In fact, I knew nothing at all about them10.
Patty recommended that we drive to the black sand beach, Punalu’u, on the south shore. Sometimes legally protected sea turtles came ashore there to bask in the sun.
From Patty’s house we drove up to Volcano House, where all forty-two rooms offered stunning views of the caldera and beyond. When we checked in, we received some unexpected news. We had vaguely heard about the folderol about the federal budget that culminated in a shutdown of the federal government, but we were still surprised when we learned that, although we could stay there that night, Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park would be closed for an indefinite period starting the next morning.
The only effect that this really had on us was that we immediately scurried over to the nearby Jaggar Museum, which would be closed on the following day. We found that the little museum was a great source of information about the geology of volcanoes.
We learned that Kilauea was a very active and complicated entity. The chain of islands that we call Hawaii were all generated by the same process, which was (and is and will be) still ongoing. A very hot spot below the bottom of the Pacific Ocean was causing this disruption. The ocean floor was very slowly moving from east to west over this spot. The volcanoes created on the other islands were dormant or nearly so, but Kilauea was definitely still affected.
We saw and smelled steam vents but no eruptions.
At the time that we were there, there had been continuous eruptions since 1983. However, they were, for the most part, not explosive eruptions. Instead lava often flowed down from a vent in the side of the mountain all the way to the ocean where it was very gradually increasing the size of the island as the relatively cool ocean waters solidified the liquid lava.
Fortunately this lava flow was generally on top of lava flows that had occurred a few years earlier. Consequently, no inhabited areas were in imminent peril.11 We heard that it was possible to get quite close to where the lava was trickling into the sea, but we did not have time even to think about attempting such a feat.
At the museum we also learned about the hot spot’s other big project, the Lo’ihi seamount, which is an underwater volcano about twenty-two miles southeast of the Big Island. If it keeps going at its current pace, it could surface in less than 100,000 years. I doubt that anyone from our species will be around to notice it.
Sue and I also made a short visit to the black sand beach at Punalu’u. The sand was, indeed, black. I do not remember whether we saw any sea turtles. If we did, they did not perform any noteworthy tricks.
Our trip back home was not without incident. At some point during our adventures, the zipper broke on one of our suitcases. My recollection is that we tried to hold it shut with a strap at first, but eventually we purchased another suitcase somewhere. However, Sue refused to throw away the defective luggage. In her words, “There are people who fix zippers.”
I was unwilling to pay for an empty broken suitcase to be flown from Hawaii to Connecticut. So, after trying to give it away, Sue finally let me junk it at the Hilo Airport.
The flight from Hilo to Honolulu was fun. From the window I got good views of Maui, Molokai, and Lana’i, as well as the coastline of the Big Island that we had not had time to explore. I remember nothing about our red-eye flights back to New England. I am quite sure, however, that the first thing that we did upon entering our house was to make certain that Rocky and Woodrow, our pet cats, were OK.
1. Although the island’s name is sometimes pronounced as four syllables, it officially has only three. The last one rhymes with “dye”.
2. We liked it so much that we stayed in the same hotel when we returned to Maui in 2018, as described here. In some ways we liked it even more the second time.
3. The apostrophe indicates that Lana’i (unlike the word spelled with exactly the same letters in exactly the same order that means “balcony”) has three syllables: lah NAH ee.
4. This method is no longer allowed. Individuals can still ride bicycles down from the rim of the caldera, but groups of cyclists must start no higher than the entrance to the park, which is 3,500 feet lower. While we were on the island a young Japanese woman who was in a bicycle group lost control, slid into the upcoming traffic, and was killed.
5. In 2012 Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, purchased 98 percent of the island from the company that owned Dole. He has subsequently invested a lot of money in the island. There are now two Four Seasons Resorts! I doubt that I would recognize much about the island in 2021.
6. The official name of the hotel is now The Courtyard King Kamehameha’s Kona Beach Hotel. It is owned and operated by Marriott.
8. Part of the answer to the trivia question: Name the southernmost, northernmost, westernmost, and easternmost states. The other three correct answers are Alaska, Alaska, and Alaska.
9. The magazine appears to be defunct in 2021. I also could not find any mention of Patty on the Internet.
Nine delicious deserts.
10. In 2021 I generally eat exactly one freshly baked white chocolate macadamia nut cookie after both lunch and dinner every day.
11. That changed in 2018, they year in which lava flows wiped out several settlements and destroyed hundreds of houses. The national park was closed on May 17, just before eruptive activity in the caldera propelled volcanic dust 30,000 feet into the air. Explosions, earthquakes, and collapses of structures continued on the mountain for five months.
In 2020 a water lake that had formed in the caldera was suddenly replaced by a lake of lava. A fiery plume then erupted to the height of 30,000 feet. The eruptions eventually dissipated. On May 26, 2021, the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory announced that Kīlauea was no longer erupting. The lava lake had completely crusted over a few days earlier.
