Tag Archives: McMurty, Larry

2020-? Streaming

Posted on by
Reply

Lots of good shows. Continue reading →

I watched MST3K by myself.

Since 1972, when Sue and I first got together in Hartford, we had spent many evenings together watching television. I liked a few shows (including wrestling and Mystery Science Theater 3000) that were too silly for her. She liked a few shows (such as Grantchester, Gilmore Girls, and many old flicks on Turner Classic Movies) that were too schmaltzy for me. On the whole, however, our tastes were mostly compatible. During most of this period we watched whatever was on the major networks or we did something else like jigsaw puzzles or two-person games.

Not for me.

Two developments changed these habits: the ability to schedule broadcasted programs to be recorded easily and the ability to watch programs at will through streaming services on the Internet. Streaming, in this context, means watching over a rather short period of time all (or at least a large portion) of the episodes for a television series in order. In the twentieth century the characters on most television programs evolved very little over the life of the series. Basically the primary characters might change within an episode (or occasionally a few episodes), but eventually they returned to their basic original state. So, if a viewer had missed a few episodes, the plot of the current episode was easy to follow.

In the twenty-first century some series still followed that format, but many others deviated. In those shows plot lines might not be resolved within the episode, and characters might have life-changing experiences or even be seriously injured, contract a chronic illness or die. In any case it was much more enjoyable to watch these shows in order once that became practical.

During the year of isolation for the pandemic Sue and I developed a habit of watching a couple of hours of television together every evening. Sometimes we watched public television or a movie on Turner Classic Movies, but our mainstay was streaming. The research for this entry tuned up a surprisingly large number of shows. My comments about the ones listed below are almost all overwhelmingly positive. The reason for that is simple. If either Sue or I did not like a show, we stopped watching. So, the list includes only well-acted shows with interesting plots and characters and a minimum of violence and schmaltz.

Masterpiece/Mystery

For decades Sue and I had been watching the PBS programs shown under the titles of Masterpiece Theater and Mystery (later combined and labeled “Masterpiece”). Four or five times a year very good British shows were presented, one season1 at a time. The first one that I can remember watching was the version of Sherlock Holmes that starred Jeremy Britt in thirteen episodes that closely followed the plots of Doyle’s famous stories. We also enjoyed the first version of All Creatures Great and Small. These two shows appeared on PBS at about the same time in the second half of the eighties.

Here is a list of other Masterpiece shows that I can remember. They are roughly in chronological order.

  • The Poirot show in the mid-eighties that featured David Suchet was. in my opinion, far better than any of the movies based on the many Agatha Christie novels.
  • Lewis was the sequel to the wildly popular Inspector Morse series that I later watched on YouTube both on the television and on my laptop. My favorite characters were Laurence Fox as Hathaway and Clare Holman as Dr. Hobson.
  • Sherlock starring Benedict Cumberbatch was a spectacular updating of the Holmes stories. At times it got a little too spectacular. My favorite character was Una Stubbs as Mrs. Hudson, the landlady at 221B.
  • Endeavour was a clever prequel to the Morse stories set in the sixties and early seventies. The supporting cast was great, especially Roger Allam and Anton Lesser as Morse’s bosses.
  • Sue and I both really liked Baptiste with Tchéky Karyo, but it only had three seasons. This show was a continuation of a British series called The Missing that was never shown on Masterpiece.
  • We also really liked Press, which focused on the conflict between two of London’s newspapers. The BBC did not renew for a second season.
  • We struggled through a whole season of Broadchurch. It had its moments.
  • Unforgotten was a great series. The first episode after Nicola Walker’s departure was a little disappointing.
  • Guilt was a quirky show about two brothers in Scotland and their dealings with a crime family.
  • A new version of Around the World in Eighty Days appeared on Masterpiece in 2021. It was obviously shot before the Pandemic.
  • Anthony Horowitz’s Magpie Murders, which I consider the best detective novel since A Study in Scarlet, was magically transformed into a great television series on Masterpiece. AH’s comments at the end of each episode were a special treat. The sequel, Mayflower Murders, was somewhat disappointing, both in print and on the screen. At the end of the last episode Horowitz announced that there would be a third book, but he was noncommittal about a third television series.
  • The biggest disappointment was was Roadkill, which starred Hugh Laurie (the star of House and the British show Jeeves and Wooster), as an ambitious member of the British parliament.
  • A second version of All Things Great and Small on Masterpiece resumed the story just before World War II. The new Mrs. Hall, Anna Madly, was great. Tristan was disappointing.
  • Mr. Bates Versus the Post Office was an interesting documentary on Masterpiece about a British scandal. The legal ramifications were still ongoing when it was shown in 2024.
  • I liked Nicola Walker’s showpiece, Annika on Masterpiece, better than Sue did. It also starred Jamie Sives, who played a principal role in Guilt.
  • Maryland on Masterpiece was a fairly interesting portrayal of two sisters’ responses to the surprising news of their mother’s secret life and death on the Isle of Man.

YouTube

The quality of shows on YouTube has always been hit and miss. Most of the ones that I have seen were recorded uploaded one at a time by individuals, not the owners of the material.

The cast of Vera in season 13.
  • Inspector Morse was so popular on ITV in England that in 2008 it was named the greatest British crime drama of all time by readers of Radio Times. It also generated a long-running sequel and a very popular prequel. As far as I know, it has never been shown on free television in the U.S. Fortunately someone uploaded every episode to YouTube, and I watched them all.2 I liked both Lewis and Endeavour a little better.
  • If the poll were run again Vera, which started in 2011, might win. Brenda Blethyn’s performances were just outstanding. Many, but by no means all, of the shows have been uploaded to YouTube, probably illegally. I tried to read a book by Ann Cleeves, who wrote the Vera novels, but I hated it.
  • Sue really liked Rosemary & Thyme, which was about a pair of middle-aged women whose main business was consulting about gardening. People tend to get killed wherever they tended shrubbery, and they solved the crimes. Somehow it worked.

MHz Choice

I am not sure when or where I heard about Mhz Choice, the streaming service that provided (very well done) closed-captioned versions of European mysteries and other shows. It only cost $8.50 per month. The only drawback was that you could either watch on Cox or on a computer. If you wanted to do both, you had to buy two subscriptions. It was difficult to set up the computer to display on the television screen through Cox. In any case Sue didn’t enjoy depending on captions. So, I watched all of the below on my laptop in the basement while using the rowing machine.

The Montalbano series spent a lot of time on balconies of Sicilian restaurants.
  • I learned about the Detective Montalbano made-for-television movies (called “fiction” in Italy) while on our tour of Sicily (documented here). Every one of them (except the last) was outstanding. I tried reading a few of the books written by Andrea Camilleri, but the use of Sicilian dialect in the dialog was off-putting.
  • The prequel Young Montalbano was pretty good, too.
  • I watched the Norwegian drama Acquitted through all of the episodes. By the end I was quite tired of it.
  • Detective DeLuca was a slow-paced crime story about the Mussolini era.
  • I really enjoyed the quirky Swiss show called Allmen. It was about a down-on-his luck thief/con man and the butler who kept him out of jail. There were only four episodes, and they have been pulled from MHz Choice. I discovered that a fifth one was released in 2023, but I have no idea how to watch it.
  • In 2024 I have made it through several seasons of The Undertaker, a story about an undertaker who formerly was a cop. The premise holds up surprisingly well, although I had the impression that he solved more than 100 percent of the murders in the area.
  • BarLume, which means “glimmer” in Italian. was a comedy about an owner of a bar in which three old guys hang out. The two women in the show were fantastic. The premise sort of fell apart after the first season.
  • I absolutely loved Vanessa Scalera’s performance as the title character in Imma Tataranni: Deputy Prosecutor. I would watch her in anything. I also enjoyed the depiction of the amazing town of Matera, which Sue and I visited in October of 2011 (documented here). However, the basic story line went off the rails in the second season and never recovered.
  • I watched two seasons of The Bastards of Pizzofalcone. That was enough. Pizzofalcone is a neighborhood of Naples.
  • Beck was a well-made Swedish cop show. I have watched several seasons. Most of the shows were stolen by Mikael Persbrandt as Gunwald Larsson. I will probably watch more.
  • The only two French shows that I liked featured very quirky women, Corinne Masiero as the title character in Captain Marleau, and Isabelle Gélinas, who has appeared in ten episodes of Perfect Murders.
  • There were a great many German shows that I have not yet watched. Two that I really enjoyed are the Borowski part of the long-running Tatort franchise and Murders by the Lake. Both have very interesting settings that I would love to visit—the port city of Kiel and Lake Constance. Axel Milberg was outstanding as Klaus Borowski, and the show paired him with three intriguing female colleagues. Nora Waldstätten was stunning as Hannah in Lake. She also appeared in one of the Allmen episodes. Unfortunately, she left the show in the third season. I watched a few episodes, but the chemistry was gone.
  • The Bridge was a Swedish production about cooperation between Swedish and Danish authorities concerning serial killers who drive across the long bridge that connects the two countries. The best reason to watch was to see the performance of Sofia Helin as the Swedish inspector who is clearly pretty high on the autism spectrum.
  • I watched one season of the German version of Professor T. It had no magic. I was very disappointed. For some reason MHz Choice does not have the Belgian version.
  • The four seasons of the German period piece Babylon Berlin were mesmerizing. It was set in the Weimar Republic years that followed World War I. The production values were absolutely incredible. Evidently there will be one more season, probably in 2025.

Peacock

NBC’s streaming service was available for free on Cox Cable for over a year during the pandemic. Sue and I took advantage of this nearly every evening. We were disappointed when they started charging for the service, but by then we had watched most of the good series.

Jim, Freddie, and Lance in “Nice Guys Finish Dead.”
  • The Rockford Files, which was broadcast in the seventies, was my all-time favorite television series. The only bad episode was the pilot. James Garner was, of course, outstanding throughout. The two episodes that featured Tom Selleck as Lance White, and James Whitmore, Jr., as Freddie Beamer were truly outstanding.
  • Monk was a notch lower, but the humor surrounding Tony Shalhoub’s character was generally good. I especially enjoyed Monk’s second assistant, Traylor Howard as Natalie Teeger, and Monk’s brother Ambrose, played by John Turturro.
  • The best thing about Psych was the premise that most people can be deceived into believing in paranormal powers. The cast was good, too. The only really bad episode was the musical.
  • 30 Rock won an Emmy almost every year, and it richly deserved each one. The cast was exceptionally good from top to bottom. Nobody but Tina Fey could have played Liz. My favorite character was Dennis Duffy, the Beeper King, played by Dean Winters. Every episode was golden, and they were just as funny the second and third time.
  • Parks and Recreation was not quite as good, but Amy Poehler held it together with her spiral binders. Nick Offerman as Ron Swanson stole most shows. The last year or two were not up to par.
  • Leopard Skin was an extremely bizarre set of eight beautifully shot episodes. I enjoyed it; Sue missed an episode or two, and could not make sense of it after that. I would gladly watch it again, if only to see Gaite Jansen as Batty.
  • The Resort was almost as bizarre, but the plot held together fairly well to a very strange ending
  • The comedy Rutherford Falls started out pretty well, but the last few episodes were tiresome. The best characters were the Indians.
  • The Capture had an interesting premise about being able to doctor the transmission of surveillance videos. I was not that enamored by the principal characters.
  • Vigil was about a murder aboard a nuclear submarine. It was very well done. Shaun Evans (Endeavour) appeared as a navy officer with a beard.
  • Five Bedrooms was an Australian series about five single people living together. I found it very engaging, and Sue absolutely loved it. We saw season 1 and 2 on Peacock. Season 3 and 4 were supposed to be on Amazon Prime, but the only place that they seemed to be available in 2024 is on Apple TV+.
  • Intelligence was a silly low-budget British comedy about the worst intelligence agency imaginable. Parts were funny.
  • The first season of Hitmen, a British show about two female freelance assassins who are also lifelong best friends, was hilarious. I watched every episode twice. The second episode, filmed during the lockdown, was disappointing.
  • Code 404 was a moderately funny British comedy about a cop who died and then was resuscitated with an electronically augmented brain. Sue did not like it much.

AMC+

  • Sue and I watched several seasons of the extremely popular show, Mad Men. on FreeVee. Amazon pulled it from the lineup when we were in the penultimate season. We bought a monthly subscription to AMC+. Almost all of the shows were good, but it was clear that the wind was going out of the writers’ sails in the last few episodes.
  • Before we canceled the AMC+ subscription we also watched the first two seasons of Dark Winds. It was based on the the novels of Tony Hillerman that featured native American cops Joe Leaphorn, Jim Chee, and Bernadette Manuelito. The third season will reportedly be shown on AMC in 2025. I will look for it.

Freevee

I take back all of the bad things that I have ever said about Amazon. The Internet giant bought IMDB’s free streaming service (with commercial interruptions), added a great deal of content, and relabeled it as Freevee. Some of these shows were really outstanding, and the price was unbeatable.

Giovanni Ribisi was the central character.
  • Many shows and movies have been made about con men, but Sneaky Pete might be the best. Every member of the cast was really outstanding. Sue and I also enjoyed the fact that it was largely set in Connecticut. My idol, Ricky Jay, had a small role in the final season. Because he died during the filming, the last episode needed to be rewritten.
  • Sprung was a very funny show that was about one of the side effects of the pandemic—people being released from prison in order to reduce the spread of Covid. This show only had one season, and the ending precluded any chance of a second season.
  • Alpha House was a comedy created by Gary Trudeau, the cartoonist of Doonesbury. It centered around a house in Washington in which four Republican senators stayed. I found it fairly funny, but it only had two season. Trudeau’s wife, Jane Pauley, appeared in one show.
  • Bosch was a treasurer. It was probably the best cop show ever. It certainly was the best that I have ever seen. Titus Welliver was perfect. The rest of the cast was also outstanding. Crate and Barrel, two detectives whom everyone addressed by their nicknames, were hilarious. I read one of the books by Michael Connelly and was severely disappointed.
  • It was hard to believe that Bosch Legacy, the sequel that focused on Bosch’s daughter Maddie, would be nearly as good as the original. Sue and I kept asking how the producers could have known that Madison Lintz, who appeared on Bosch as a gangly teenager, would grow up to be believable as a female version of Bosch.
  • Jury Duty was a “reality” show that was played for laughs. The judge, bailiff, witnesses, and all but one juror were actors. It was fairly amusing.
  • Taboo was a bizarre British show about one man’s bizarre encounter with the British government and the East India Company in the early days of the United States. Tom Hardy was compelling as the main character, James Delaney. It only had one season.
  • Sue and I both liked Eric McCormack in Perception. He played a schizophrenic professor of neurology who solved crimes as a hobby when he wasn’t writing seven books, teaching postgraduate classes, or doing crosswords while listening to Mahler on his Walkman.
  • The Amazing Mrs. Maisel was probably the best home-grown Amazon show that was migrated to FreeVee. The entire cast was very impressive, and the writing was very sharp. It was set in the late fifties and early sixties. The title character was good friends with Lenny Bruce. Many Emmys were won by this show. We watched season 5 on Amazon Prime
  • We also both liked Mary McCormack and the rest of the cast of In Plain Sight, a show about the federal witness protection program. It was filmed in and around Albuquerque, which made it a little more interesting for me.
  • The premise of Person of Interest was that it would be possible for a genius to write a program that simultaneously monitored all forms of electronic data and analyzed it all person by person in order to recognize people who were a threat or being threatened. Plus, it was completely secure, and only one person knew how to use it. This was, of course, preposterous, but if you suspended disbelief, the writers and actors could get you interested in the plots. Michael Emerson was perfect as the genius.
  • The Mallorca Files was a British show about the police on the island of Mallorca. Ellen Rhys and Julian Looman were cops. She was English; he was a native of Munich who moved to Palma and has gone native. The tone was just right. The second season ended abruptly when production was stopped for Covid. However, a third season is in the can and will be shown on Amazon Prime.

Tubi

Tubi was another free streaming service that was available on Cox. Its commercials were a little more annoying than FreeVee’s. The selection of programs were not as good, but we (or mostly I) found a few good ones.

Robert Carlisle played Hamish. He had two different dogs. Both were named Wee Josh.
  • We originally watched Hamish Macbeth, a show about the constable for a remote Scottish village, on the local PBS station. We recorded the episodes when they were shown late (for me) at night on Saturday and watched them together on Monday evenings. We saw the entire series again on Tubi. This series was very loosely based on a series of novels by Marion Chesney. I read one of the books and hated it.
  • The Prague Mysteries was a short but intriguing detective series set in Prague after the dissolution of the Austrian empire. I thought that it was pretty good.
  • The story line for Vexed was similar to that of The Mallorca Files. A straight-laced blonde female detective was paired with a wise-cracking lazy guy. It only lasted two seasons. The blonde in the first season was much better (and hotter) than the one in the second season. For some reason several of the shows in the second season were captioned in Portuguese.
  • Tubi has been my go-to site for Mystery Science Theater 3000. I did not realize that they had made so many of these shows. I also did not realize that there were so many really bad movies. I mean horrendously awful movies that someone presumably paid to watch. I liked the shows with Mike Nelson better than the ones with Joel Hodgson. The real stars were Joel’s robots, Tom Servo (voiced by Kevin Murphy) and Crow (Trace Beaulieu). I was impressed with Kevin’s singing ability, but Crow held a special place in my heart.

Amazon Prime

I subscribed to Amazon Prime just so that we could watch the second season of Mallorca Files. I intended to drop the subscription after we finished watching. However, we discovered quite a few series that we enjoyed quite a bit.

  • I watched Season 1 of Reacher on Freevee. I did not think that she would like it because it was so violent and she is not into body-building types. However, we both watched season 2 together and enjoyed it immensely.
  • In Plain Sight told the story of a small group of U.S. Marshals who managed members of the federal Witness Protection Program in Albuquerque. The writing was good. Mary McCormack and Fred Weller were both charismatic as the two stars. We watched all 61 episodes and liked them all.
  • We had watched an episode or two of Raising Hope on Freevee. It was created by Gregory Thomas Garcia, the brains behind the one-season wonder, Sprung. Two of the principal actors in Sprung had also appeared in RH. Sue and I liked RH, but Amazon wanted us to pay $3 per episode after the second one in the second season, and we demurred.
  • Mr. & Mrs. Smith won many awards in its first season. Donald Glover and Maya Erskine were exceptional. as was the writing.
  • I rewatched all of the episodes of Endeavour, some by myself and some with Sue. This time around I was greatly impressed by the writing of Russell Lewis, who wrote and “devised” every single complicated episode.
  • We both greatly enjoyed the first season of Deadloch, an Australian comedy/mystery about a serial killer in a beach town in Tasmanian that is dominated by lesbians.

Recorded

I had read Lonesome Dove, the truly epic novel by Larry McMurtry, twice before it was shown as a four-part made-for-television movie. It was the most entertaining book that I had ever read, and the movie was just as good. It was very true to the novel; only one character, Charles Goodnight, was left out. It won seven Emmy awards, but somehow Robert Duvall was denied one. We bought a tape of it and watched it a few more times. Prequels and sequels have also been made, but none was as good as the original.

Tom and John Barnaby hardly made a dent in the ongoing bloodbath in Midsomer.
  • Midsomer Murders has been on British television for over twenty years. It was set in an imaginary county called Midsomer that had only one town, Causton, which seemed to be surprisingly crime-free, and a large number of villages in which murder was as common as gossip. For the first decade of the series every single actor was white. Then the producer was changed, and subsequent every episode had one or more actor who was not white. Many of the murder weapons were outlandish. My favorite one was an episode in which two people were trampled to death by dairy cows in a barn.
  • Elementary was another Sherlock Holmes update. This one was set in New York City and featured a Dr. Joan Watson (Lucy Liu) and a suitably British Holmes (Jonny Lee Miller). This was a really good show that ran on CBS for seven years. The last few shows were weak. We recorded reruns on an off-brand network.
  • Sue and I discovered Resident Alien on Peacock. We watched the first season there and the second two on recordings of showings on the Syfy channel. Alan Tubyk played the title character, who came from another planet who took over the body of a doctor in a town in Colorado. Tubyk has been perfect throughout, and the rest of the cast has also been very good. It must have been difficult to come up with plausible scripts with this premise. The second and third seasons were, however, only slightly inferior to the first.
  • One of the first British shows that we watched on PBS was Father Brown, based on the mysteries written by G.K. Chesterton. The shows were set in a village in the Cotswolds. Mark Williams was perfect as the priest, and I especially liked Nancy Carroll as Lady Felicia.
  • Shakespeare and Hathaway was set in Stratford-Upon-Avon. The shows were mildly amusing, but the plots were never gripping, and—aside from haircuts—the characters never developed.
  • We watched two different versions of Wallander. The first season of the Swedish version was excellent, but it went swiftly downhill. I did not like the British version that starred Kenneth Brannagh. He even changed the pronunciation of the chief character’s name.
  • The Belgian version of Professor T. was weirdly delightful. Koen De Bouw played a criminology professor with extreme mental problems that included frequent interactions with hallucinations. The rest of the characters put up with him to varying levels. I missed some of the episodes. If I had a chance I would love to see them. Apparently it is available on PBS Passport.
  • Sue and I enjoyed the first season of Marie Antoinette, which focused on the teenager shipped from Vienna to live at Versailles. Evidently a second season has been filmed.

1. On the major networks a “season” once consisted of twenty-six or even more episodes. It was designed to run from the middle of fall to the end of spring. In the summer reruns or pilot productions were show. In other countries a season might consist of just a few episodes. Most of the Masterpiece and Mystery shows had only four or five episodes, but sometimes they exceeded the expected length of just under one hour.

2. I did not provide a link because when I looked on YouTube in 2024, I was unable to find the set of uploaded Morse episodes that I had watched.

3. I was astounded to discover that the screenplay antedated the novel. Many years earlier McMurtry tried to get it made as a feature film with John Wayne, James Stewart, and Henry Fonda. The project was scuttled when Wayne insisted on playing Gus McCrae.

1988-2003 The Enfield Pets: Part 1

Posted on by
3

Rocky and friends Continue reading →

In 1988 Rocky and Jake, the two cats that had adopted us as caretakers a couple of years earlier, made the move with Sue and me from Rockville to Enfield. After spending their first winter indoors in Rockville, they had been allowed to roam in the neighborhood of the Elks Club. They always came back to one of our doors when they wanted food, shelter, or a massage. They seemed to have learned what was dangerous, although for Rocky earning the knowledge probably knocked him down to eight lives, as explained here.

Neither seemed to have much difficult adjusting to the change of scenery. There was so much more for them to explore, both inside and out. Rocky particularly liked the fact that when he was outside he could leap up to the windowsill near the dining area and gaze through the window at the activity going on inside. After we started opening the window for him when he did so, this became his preferred form of ingress. Rocky was a real leaper. None of our other cats ever attempted this feat.

Rocky and I watched football games. Popcorn was one of the few human foods he did not like.

Rocky loved to be petted. His favorite technique was the full-body massage, but he would accept any kind of petting by just about anyone whom he knew well.

Jake was a much more private cat. He always seemed to pick a corner and sit there silently analyzing the situation. He tolerated a little petting as the price to be paid for a constantly full bowl of Purina Cat Chow.

The night of October 31, 1988, was a sad one. Sue and I went out for supper, as I remember, and when we came back we found Jake’s dead body on the street. I buried him in the yard, but I don’t remember where.

Sue and I did not feel devastated at Jake’s demise. We had lost quite a few pets by that time. We liked Jake, and we missed him, but neither of us had formed a strong attachment to him.

I don’t remember where our next pet, Buck Bunny, a very large grey and white rabbit with long floppy ears, came from. I am quite certain that I had nothing to do with the acquisition, but Sue had no recollection of us even having a rabbit during this era until I showed her his photo. Buck’s home was a large wire cage in the westernmost small bedroom. The barnboard bookshelves were also in that room. It was a sort of library, but it held as many games as books.

We kept Buck in his cage most of the time because, like most rabbits, he had an instinct to gnaw on things. Before we released him from the cage, we placed all electrical cables up out of his reach. That was possible because, unlike Slippers (described here), he was not much of a leaper.

Sue visited her friends Diane and Phil Graziose in St. Johnsbury, VT, pretty regularly. Sometimes I joined her, but just as often she went by herself. On one of those solo trips she brought home a tiny tan and white kitten. It was so small that it fit in the breast pocket of her flannel shirt. the mandatory state uniform of Vermont.

The kitten was one of many feline denizens of the trailer park in which the Grazioses lived. It probably should have been allowed to nurse for another week or so. However, this was probably the best chance that it would ever get to avoid spending a Vermont winter outdoors. The situation worked out well. We gave him milk for a few days, and then he found the bowl of Cat Chow and the water bowl on his own.

Rocky enjoyed exploring the big yard.

Rocky had little use for the pipsqueak, but the kitten immediately made friends with Buck Bunny. They really hit it off. The kitten liked to sit near Buck’s cage, and when Buck came out they played together or just snuggled.

When the kittne was more mature we got it fixed, of course. By then it had become rather obnoxious, and so we were not a bit surprised when we learned that it was a tom. I named him Woodrow1 after Woodrow F. Call, one of the protagonists of my favorite novel of all time, Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry.

After his medical procedure Woodrow decided that I was his buddy. He loved to take naps next to me. Almost any time that I went into the bedroom and got into bed, Woodrow climbed up to join me.

Meanwhile, Rocky had claimed Sue as his BFF. When Sue and I sat in the living room chairs (purchased used from Harland-Tine Advertising, which is described here, and draped with white cloth) Woodrow sat on my lap and Rocky found Sue’s. The two cats were totally different.

A very young Woodrow.
  • Woodrow liked all people. Whenever anyone visited us, Woodrow greeted them immediately. Rocky usually hid.
  • Rocky loved almost any kind of human food; Woodrow liked only Cat Chow and ice cream.
  • Woodrow was a hunter; Rocky preferred to snuggle. He exalted in his full-body massages.
  • Woodrow liked to be carried with his back down and all four legs up. Rocky did not mind being picked up, but he insisted on the chest-to-chest method.
  • Woodrow liked the top of his head to be rubbed hard, but any other style of petting annoyed him.
  • Woodrow climbed trees (although he usually waited to be helped down); Rocky never did.
  • Rocky was mostly silent. In his later years Woodrow gave off all manner of soft sounds as he walked around. I called them his “play-by-play”. Except for that one time in the flea bath he preferred not to speak English.

Woodrow and Rocky eventually became buddies. When I returned home after work, they were almost always together on the lawn next to the driveway waiting for me. The sight of them always cheered up, no matter how rough the day had been. I often sang to myself, “with two cats in the yard, life used to be so hard.” Our house was indeed a very fine house.

However, Woodrow did not abandon his first friend, the lagomorph. He still like to lie or sit next to Buck’s cage, and when we let Buck out, the two still socialized.

Actually, they socialized too much. Buck tried to hump the fully grown Woodrow whenever they were together, and Woodrow put up with it. It wasn’t just a phase, either.

Sue and I decided that we needed to get Buck Bunny fixed. I loaded him inside his cage into Sue’s car, and she drove him to the vet. She explained the problem to the doctor. He examined Buck and reported to Sue that “Buck” was actually a female.

Sue asked him why the rabbit was engaging in these activities if he was not even a male. The vet replied that he was only a veterinarian, not a psychiatrist. So, we still let the two buddies hang out together. If the rabbit (who was by then officially renamed Clara, after my mother’s mother, Clara Cernech, who had died in 1980) got too amorous, we just put her back in her cage.

I don’t remember the circumstance of Clara’s death. She was a French Lop, a breed with a lifespan of only five years. She was fully grown when we adopted her.

My favorite moments with Woodrow and Rocky were when I came home for lunch in the summertime. Both cats napped under bushes. Rocky customarily slept in the cluster of forsythia bushes in the northeast corner of our lot. Woodrow favored the burning bush halfway between the house and the driveway to Hazard Memorial School.

The one-piece table in the background was repurposed as a place to pile dead branches when we got the red one.

I liked to eat my lunch while sitting at the picnic table in the yard and reading a book.When I brought my food (no matter what was on the menu) out to the picnic table, Rocky stumbled groggily out from his resting spot. He sat on the ground next to me for a while and looked up hopefully. Then he raised his front paws up to the bench and nudged my elbow with his snout. Eventually he often leapt up on the table. He knew it was not allowed, but he could not help himself.

I always broke down and gave him a tiny piece of meat. No matter how small the morsel was, he purred loudly while he ate it, got down, and retreated back to his bush to finish his nap.

A mole’s-eye view of Woodrow.

After lunch I usually took a short nap in the yard on a mat or blanket. As soon as I had made myself comfortable, Woodrow emerged from his bush to check out what I was doing. I always slept on my side. After I had assumed the sleeping position, Woodrow walked up so that he was about a foot from my chest. He then flopped over toward me, and we both stacked a few z’s.

In inclement weather they repeated their tag-team act. Rocky begged for food at the table in the dining area, and Woodrow climbed up on the bed to join me for a nap.

The boudoir with the modesty curtain held open by the hamper.

When he was not napping with me, Woodrow moved from place to place in search of the best locations for sleeping. One of his favorite places was on a towel in the small storage area in the bathroom. He arrived there by jumping up on the clothes hamper. He then moved aside the curtain with one of his front paws and sprang into the niche. I called this obscure hidey-hole “Woodrow’s boudoir”. Occasionally when someone used the toilet or the shower, he startled people when he stuck out his head from behind the curtain to look at them with sleepy eyes.

Woodrow preferred Cat Chow to all other forms of food except ice cream. The only time that he paid much attention to Sue was when she sat down with a bowl of ice cream. Then he became more of a beggar than Rocky.

Although Woodrow loved to hunt, he was not possessive about his catches and kills. He often was seen parading around the house with a mouse in his mouth. Sometimes he dropped one at my feet or Sue’s. I had to pick them up quickly. There was a fifty-fifty chance that the poor crittur was still alive. I released many outside; after that they were on their own.

Two were distinctive. One day I was taking my daily postprandial nap in the bed. Unbeknownst to me Woodrow brought into the bedroom his latest prey, a small bird. He silently entered, crawled under the bed with his catch in his mouth, positioned himself directly below my head, and commenced to crunch the bones between his jaws. It was a very disconcerting addition to my dreamscape. Needless to say he left the remains beneath the bed for me to clean up.

A dove only weighs about 4 oz. Woodrow could carry one easily.

On another day I came home for lunch to find that Woodrow had apparently brought home a guest, a full-grown mourning dove. Evidently Woodrow had lost his appetite, but the bird may have thought that he was on still on the menu. He flew about, crashing into one window after another in a panicked attempt to escape. I finally chased him into the library, where I opened the window and closed the door. When I came home after work there was no sign of him. We have never found a cadaver, and so I presume the dove found his way out.

Imagine him with 20 sharp claws.

Woodrow was the only pet that we ever had who clearly had multiple personality disorder. His was more like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde than The Three Faces of Eve.

I called Woodrow’s alter-ego Nutso Kitty. Whenever he entered this state his eyes glazed over, and he stalked and attacked anything that moved. One day Woodrow was placidly napping with me when, unbeknownst to me, he underwent the demonic transformation. I must have moved my hand a little. He pounced on it with all twenty of his switchblades extended. After literally throwing him out of the room, I rushed to the bathroom for first aid. My hand throbbed in pain for a few days. Fortunately it was my left hand, which has never been much good for anything except typing.

This even looks like Woodrow.

In 1992 or 1993 Sue and I made a trip to Dallas to pitch TSI’s AdDept software system to Neiman Marcus (described here). We then drove our rental car to Austin so that Sue could visit her high school friend Marlene Soul. Marlene exhibited a toy she used to keep her cats active. It was a long very limp stick with a feather on the end. With every slightest move of the hand the cat was drawn inexorably to the dancing feather.

As soon as I got home I purchased one so that I could torture Woodrow. He absolutely could not resist it. After he chased it for at least an hour he hid under a chair so that he could not see it. I pulled it out every time that I thought about that bloody left hand.

We had to take Woodrow to the vet twice to patch him up after fights. Both times he had abscesses that the vet had to drain and then sew up. After the first one, I tried to teach Woody to keep his left up, but he got tagged again a few months later. I never got to see how the other cat did in these scrapes, but I doubt that he escaped without some damage.

I don’t really have many good stories about Rocky. He was consistently a very sweet cat for all of the eighteen years that I knew him. He never got into a fight, or at least he never got seriously hurt. When we brought him to the vet for shots he went completely limp when we put him on the examination table. The vet called him “catatonic cat.”

Once, however, Rocky was missing for three days. Sue and were quite concerned. I had walked up and down the nearby streets looking for him several times. I also took the car and expanded the search area. Sue and I searched everywhere in the house. No luck. However, when I checked the garage for the third time Rocky came slowly out from behind some junk. He followed me inside and nonchalantly drank some water. Within a day he showed no sign of any problem.

How, you may ask, could the cat have hidden in the garage? Why not just pull out the car and search thoroughly? Well, there was no car in the garage. It was full of Sue’s junk, packed from floor to ceiling, as is her new garage as I write this. A thorough search of the garage would have entailed taking all of the junk out piece by piece and piling it somewhere on the yard. Then, whether I found him or not, I would have had to reassemble the mess in precisely the way that I found it.

I did call for Rocky each time that I opened the garage door, but he must have been asleep or just obstinate.

Show no mercy!

Both Rocky and Woodrow stayed outside a great deal during the summer. They both were tormented by fleas every year. I felt great sympathy for them. They were obviously suffering terribly. I tried to help them.

  • I tried to pick the fleas off. During each session, I slew several dozen by squeezing them between my fingernails. I could hear their shells crack, but a few days later there would be just as many.
  • I tried flea collars. Rocky, who must certainly have had a set of bolt-cutters secreted away in the bushes, always showed up without it within a few hours. The collar helped a little with Woodrow, but there was no guarantee that the fleas would cross it. He also hated the collar, but Rocky would not lend out his tools.
  • I tried flea powder. It helped a little for a short time.
  • Flea baths actually worked, but both cats hated them. After a short struggle Rocky submitted meekly, but he also gave me a look that asked what he had done to make me despise him so much. Woodrow, of course, fought me tooth and nail. I had to don gloves and my army field jacket to pick him up. One time—I swear that this is true—he clearly screamed out the word “NO!!!!” as I dipped him in the medicated water in the tub.
Advantage was even better than Frontline.

Of course, if we did not attack them quickly, the fleas got in the carpet, and, after we got them off of the cats we had to “bomb” the house. That was not a bit pleasant.

Fortunately, the flea problem was solved when our vet supplied us with Frontline2, the monthly drops on the back of the neck, at some point in the nineties. I don’t know if there were side effects, but the product sure worked on the fleas. It was great having flea-free cats and a flea-free house.

Not long after Woodrow established residency with us, I bought a cat door and installed it in a window that led to the top of the basement. It was located just below the bathroom window. Just below the window on the basement side was the top of some shelves that were there when we moved in. From the shelves I placed a spare door at a 45° angle to serve as a ramp down to the ping pong table. A box served as a step up to the table or down to the floor.

Rocky seldom used the cat door. He preferred for a human to let him out through one of the doors or in through his favorite window. When he did enter through the cat door, he did not use the ramp. Instead he jumped from the bookshelves to the washing machine and from there to the floor. He exited the house by jumping up on the picnic table and climbing the shelves.

Other cats occasionally tried to use the cat door. Brian Corcoran gave me his Super Soaker, which proved to be very effective at chasing them away. However, the felines were most active at night, and I was not. Occasionally one would get in and help himself to some Purina Cat Chow.

I often heard the distinctive caterwauling of two or more cats that were about to engage in that furious and bloody activity known as a catfight. Once I saw Woodrow in the basement on the bookshelf near the cat door loudly warning a cat not to poke his head through. He definitely meant business. His body was crouched and taut, ready to for action. His right paw was raised with all five claws drawn. He reminded me of Horatius at the bridge.

Ours was indoors, and I only saw him from the rear before he scurried away.

There were a couple of other uninvited guests. One night I heard some very loud munching coming from the hallway. I jumped out of bed, turned on the hall light, and beheld an opossum helping himself to the Cat Chow in a bowl at the other end of the hall. I assume that the opossum was a male since it did not have a dozen babies on its back.He had evidently found his way through the cat door, down to the basement, and up the stairs. My footsteps frightened him enough that he rushed down the stairs, never to be seen again.

The story of the other remarkable intruder can be read here.

Sue and I took quite a few long trips after Rocky and Woodrow moved in, and the cat door was installed. We also invested a few dollars in a gravity-fed Cat Chow dispenser. Whenever we took a trip we left Rocky and Woodrow “home alone”. We provided them with plenty of food and water, and Sue arranged for someone to check on them every few days. This arrangement worked well for our trip to Texas (described here), our cruising tour of Greece and Turkey (described here), our trip to Hawaii in 1997 (described here), our misbegotten adventure in Maine and Canada (described here), and our first tour of Italy in 2003 (described here).

Rocky died later in 2003 at the age of eighteen. I am pretty sure that he used up all nine of his allotted lives. Even though I was much closer to Woodrow for the many years that we had both of them, I cried when Rocky died. He was so tough and such a nice cat. I really missed him.

The story of the Enfield pets continues here.

1. A better choice probably would have been “Augustus”. His personality was much more like the free-spirited Gus McCrae’s than the rigid Woodrow Call’s.

2. I later switched to Advantage II. It was cheaper and worked better.

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

Posted on by
2

The rest of the ad agencies. Continue reading →

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are my most vivid memories:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ed Wolfe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Wang word processing terminal.

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

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

WordPerfect running in DOS did not look like the answer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AT&T 3B2 model 400.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I hated whiteboards after this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charnas apparently went out of business in July of 1992.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. Knorr Marketing’s website is here.

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

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

8, The agency’s website is cdhm.com.

Marsha.
Dianne.

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

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

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

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

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

Ernie Capobianco.

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

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

Larry Ponemon.

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

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

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

19. Fern/Hanaway was dissolved in 1998.

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

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