1978-1980 Detroit: Dungeons and Dragons

Posted on March 30, 2021 by Mike

Throughout my life I had enjoyed playing board games, especially war games made by Avalon Hill. However, it was always hard to find people to play with. I read an article about Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) in a magazine in late 1977 or early 1978. The game sounded very intriguing, but the article did not make it very clear exactly what it entailed. There did not appear to be much to it, but apparently in some locations people became very involved in the game.

On August 17, 1948, my thirtieth birthday, a day on which I was already scheduled to have a big party in the evening, I drove to a toy store, located the basic set of Dungeons and Dragons, and bought it. It was not expensive, and the box was not very heavy. When I shook it, something rattled a little.

When I got home I opened it and was a little disappointed. There was no board and no game pieces. The box contained only five dice of different shapes and colors and a forty-eight-page book of instructions. Each die had a unique number of faces: 4, 6, 8, 12, and 20. These were to be used to determine random results for different types of events. Eventually it became pretty clear that the primary purpose of the dice was to provide some substance to the “set”. All that the game really required were the rules, a great deal of imagination, and some way of generating random numbers.

Ah, but the rules. The basic concept of the game was simple. One person served as the referee (called the Dungeon Master or DM). Before the players arrived, the DM needed to spend some time drawing a map on graph paper and creating an outline of the adventure. Many adventures were traditionally underground, but they could just as well be in a castle, a ship, or anywhere else.

I was hoping for weightless +10 mithral armor in XXL.

The various rooms (or caverns or holds or whatever) might be empty, might contain innocuous items, or might contain treasure. Some of the valuables might even be magical (or cursed, for that matter). However, danger lurked everywhere in the form of monsters, evil-doers, and traps. The DM would most likely need to make on-the-spot decisions about unexpected activities from the players, but the more details that were planned in advance the better. It was also a good idea for the DM to have some “random” events ready in case the adventurers dawdled.

To get the adventure going the players need some way of learning about the dungeon. Non-playing characters created by the DM could often fill this role, or it could be arranged that they could find an ancient scroll or something.

Players had to prepare, too. Each controlled one or two characters. The characters’ abilities (strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity) could be generated using six-sided dice. Their endurance, measured in “hit points”, was also determined by rolls of the dice.

Dwarves were short, tough, and cheap. Negotiating a price was called “dwarfing him down”.

Players were allowed to choose the class (fighter, magic-user, cleric, or thief—more came later) and race (human, elf, dwarf, half-elf, half-orc, or halfling) and alignment (lawful or chaotic, good or evil) of their characters. Magic users and clerics could memorize a spell or two. Some races had special abilities or limitations. Every character was born with a little money with which to buy some weapons, armor, and supplies.

Nobody won an adventure, but it was possible to achieve a goal that made some or all of the characters stronger. It was also possible for characters to die.

Spells were definitely useful, but the magic-users’ aversion to armor led to a high mortality rate.

Players were not required to disclose any of their characteristics to the others, but every character had to persuade the others that he/she would be a valuable addition to the party. Recalcitrant characters could and sometimes did say no.

So far, so good. I constructed a little dungeon, and I invited Sue, Vince Follert, and the Benoits to play it. I tried my best to decipher the rules on movement and battles, but it just seemed like the monsters—even the ones that were just powerful humans—moved in slow motion while the party members dashed around and slaughtered them. After a few adventures the players were so powerful and rich that they could take on almost anything,

After the first few games, I knew that something was wrong. The players enjoyed the games, but the battles were not close to realistic. Outcomes were never in much doubt. I read and reread the rules. You can read them yourself here. Take a look. The rules for time and movement are on p. 9. Can you figure them out?

I started to frequent a hobby store on Gratiot Avenue. It sold inch-high lead figurines as well as issues of Dragon magazine and some pamphlets containing details of dungeons or whole campaigns that experienced players had designed. I invested in all of these. The purchases of the magazines and pamphlets were a good idea, but the figurines were a mistake. Anyone who spent a lot of time painting figurines wass going to be very upset if the character died, and a crucial element of the game is the belief of the players in the mortality of the characters. It is what gives the edge to the game.

The first edition of the Player’s Handbook was published in June of 1978. I was not able to lay my hands on one until several months after that. The confusion about movement and how battles (called “melee” in D&D) should be refereed was cleared up by this work. I read it from cover to cover many times, and I had at least a dozen pages tabbed for quick reference.

The quality of the writing in this book was much better than the rules for the basic set. The illustrations were also marvelous.

The Dungeon Master’s Guide was published in 1979. I preordered a copy and picked it up the day that it arrived at Comic Kingdom. The clerk told me that all of their copies were sold the first day. I don’t remember what the book cost, but it was definitely worth it. Everything about the game now made sense. The quality of the adventures that I designed improved enormously.

The Dungeon Masters Guide was also great fun to read. At least twenty pages of mine were tabbed for easy reference.

There was still one problem. The original characters that played in our early adventures were were much too powerful. Their participation in those “Monte Haul” games had left them so rich and powerful that they could no longer sensibly play with inexperienced characters. Superman never took Jimmy Olsen on adventures.

The *Monster Manual* was useful mostly for generating ideas. A DM who used one could show the illustration instead of trying to describe it.

I did not set out to solve this problem, but … In one of the games in late 1978 or 1979 I designed a White Dragon named Frix. For some time I spread fables and stories about his enviable treasures and his awesome super-cold breath. One day a group of the rich and powerful characters assembled a small party and decided to go after Frix.

The adventure started in the usual way. Once in the cave complex, the party ran into a few squads of orcs and the like. They quickly disposed of them and made their way down to the fourth level, which their informant had told them was the abode of the great white dragon. The party found the lair and then burst in without taking any precautions.

I rolled a die to see whether they had surprised Frix. It wasn’t likely. At least one of them was clanging around in plate mail a hundred feet beneath the ground and they talked to one another constantly. So, Frix struck first with his frigid breath. They rolled saving throws, but, alas, they all were frozen to death.

The maps of the city and its environs were about thirty inches on a side.

None of them took this well, but a couple of weeks later Vince, one of the participants, asked me if they could have avoided the peril if they just had asked their cleric to memorize the Resist Cold spell instead of the Cure Light Wounds spell that clerics always used. When I admitted as much, he conceded that they were all idiots and deserved to die.

In a way they became legendary, not for their accomplishments in previous dungeons but for their arrogance and lackadaisical preparation in the last one.

Every building was numbered on the detailed map of the city

I came across The City State of the Invincible Overlord, a publication of the Judges Guild, at Comic Kingdom, and I bought it. It had detailed maps and descriptions of the contents of nearly every business in the city. I bought a lot of 5″x8″ index cards and a box to hold them. I made one card for each business so that I could rapidly find them. From that point on, I started every adventure that I created with the characters at an inn in the city. After the original encounter with the proprietor, another customer, or an employee they could walk to other buildings to purchase gear or ask for information. Setting all this up took a lot of time, but it worked well.

My file had a card for *every building* in the city.

The next major step was a gigantic one. At some point in late early 1979 Sue obtained an IBM 5120 computer for her business, TSI Tailored Systems. How she managed this is explained here. I took advantage of this to write a few BASIC programs that really enhanced the experience of D&D get-togethers both for the players and for the DM.

The fist program automated the process of generating a new character. The player entered a number. The program used the number as the seed for the built-in random number generator and produced a list of the character’s ability scores. The player could save or reject them. If the scores were accepted, a permanent record was made. This program greatly accelerated the process of getting a new player ready for the first adventure.

The next step was to allow the editing of the player record to reflect advancement to higher levels and other important changes. A sheet of green-bar paper that contained almost all of the personal information needed for an adventure could then be printed out for each player.

The final step was the program to assemble a party. When all of the characters had been entered, a printout was created that had information that the DM needed for each player in an easy-to-read format. This dramatically reduced the time spent paging through the handbooks looking for tables.

The last program was the simplest. It just provided a way of printing up a set of rumors to distribute randomly to the characters.

D&D was a lot more fun with these programs. They cut down on the drudgery and left more time for the adventures. No one ever complained about them.

Our basement was an ideal location for an adventure. The DM sat on a stool behind the bar. Their were couches (well, actually one was the back seat of an old Mercedes) and chairs aplenty for the players. People brought their own drinks and snacks.

Sue sometimes played. Her principal character was a cleric named Sr. Mary Chicos, named after a former nun who worked at Brothers Specifications. She also did some work on an adventure featuring Massai warriors, but I don’t think that we ever played it.

A lot of students from Wayne State’s Forensics Union played. In addition to the people mentioned above, the group included Mike Craig and a friend of his who ate an enormous amount of snacks. In other circles the players “crawled” dungeons, but Mike introduced the phrase, “Let’s dunge” to our group. Jo Anne might have come once or twice. Nancy Legge, Gerry Cox, and Mark Buczko were definitely regulars. Kim Garvin came once. I think that Scott Harris also played at least once.

I am sure that there were other participants. A professor in the speech department attended one adventure, and he brought his son. They chose not to play, but they observed for hours.

I don’t remember too many details of the dungeons that I created. I remember one in which the players discovered a space ship. It was not much fun.

I spent a lot of time on the one that the speech prof attended. The characters needed to arrange passage on a ship to get to an island owned by a witch. Fortunately they did not select the boat with the lowest charge. They might have spent the rest of the time looking for Davey Jones’ locker.

When the party arrived at the island, the witch gave them a quest and promised to reward them handsomely if they succeeded in killing her rival, a frost giant. There were two possible approaches to the cave in which her enemy lived; The Path of the Forlorn was full of traps, and the Path of the Misbegotten was subject to attacks from monstrous creatures. The party chose the monster route. The witch, however, insisted that the group’s most fit participant (as measured in hit points) stay behind with her to keep her company. She was SO lonely. So, the party’s best fighter missed the most importantUr part of the adventure.

My favorite part of the dungeon was the entrance to the giant’s lair. It was a sheet of ice thirty feet long at a forty-five degree angle. It was not easy to escape from this place in a hurry. The group did a good job of dealing with the obstacles, and they won the prize. The poor guy who was left with the witch had to be carried to the awaiting ship by the exhausted adventurers.

I liked to play in the adventurer’s groups occasionally. I had six characters that I remember. My original character was Prufrock the cleric. I think that he had a magic hammer. I had two female characters. Kithra was obviously based on Wonder Woman. Her first purchase was high hard boots. Tontonia was a half-elf with a much less dynamic personality. Urgma was very stupid but a strong fighter who was comfortable taking orders. Pslick was a magic user who also had some “psionic” powers. He was also a wise guy. Gubendorf was a thief. He was so obnoxious that he was killed by his own party at the end of his first adventure.

A teenager named James Dallas Egbert III was in the news in 1979-80. He was described as a “genius” or “child prodigy” who was majoring in Computer Science. For some reason he was living in his dorm room at Michigan State in the middle of August in 1979. Then he “disappeared”.

His parents back in Dayton, OH, somehow heard about D&D and the steam tunnels. They thought that he might have been killed by a D&D cult acting out fantasies in the tunnels. They told their theory to the newspapers and hired a private detective.The news reports emphasized two things. 1) JDE3 played D&D; 2) He and some friends explored the steam tunnels in East Lansing. They speculated that he and his friends were acting out an adventure, and he was killed either accidentally or as a sacrifice to Asmodeus (do NOT say the name out loud or you will immediately summon him, and he is NEVER in a good mood).

The detective never found him (but he did find a book deal). JDE3 eventually called the detective and told him that he had taken a bus to New Orleans, where he was NOT developing a D&D campaign based on voodoo or Mardi Gras. The detective tried to talk JDE3 into returning home to Dayton, but that was never going to happen. Instead JDE3 tried unsuccessfully to kill himself twice. He succeeded the third time when he used a gun.

I smelled a rat in this story from day 1. First of all, if he was a computer genius, why was he going to a state-run ag school? What was wrong with MIT or Cal Tech?

Second, why did he not go home for the summer after his freshman year? Most students are eager to compare experiences with their old high school buddies.

Third, I knew a group of guys who messed around in the steam tunnels in Ann Arbor. If I had been running a D&D campaign in those years, a few might have played in it. However, we would never have played in the tunnels. The reason is simple. There is no light. D&D requires lots of reading and mapping. The two activities are totally incompatible. I have never been in the steam tunnels of East Lansing, but I doubt that they are large enough for bugbears, much less giants, djinn, or dragons. Students might have discussed what an adventure in a tunnel would be like, but they would never act it out in such an unwieldy environment. A hero needs room to swing that two-handed sword and enough light to identify his foe.

Finally, it just seemed obvious to me that he had run away. Something must have been going on at home. It turns out that he was gay. When I was a freshman at U-M, my parents suspected me of being gay or on drugs or something because of the way that a friend (without my permission) answered my phone in the dorm. My mom and dad flew up to Ann Arbor to check out the situation. I would bet anything that JDE2 made some kind of threat that caused JDE3 to think that East Lansing would no longer be far enough away from his parents.

A similar take on this sordid tale can be read here.

After we left Detroit I played D&D a few times. When it appeared unlikely that I would have any further use of my materials, I gave them to Sue’s nephew, Travis LaPlante.

1979-1980: Wayne State Debate Tournaments, etc.

Posted on March 27, 2021 by Mike

Debate at Wayne. Continue reading →

The resolution for 1979-1980 was: “Resolved: That the federal government should significantly strengthen the regulation of mass media communication in the United States.” Once again the resolution was much more limiting than the ones of the middle 1970’s. In the fifteen elimination rounds at the NDT the affirmative teams won eight debates, and the negatives won seven.

The coaching staff was quite different. Vince Follert left for Western Illinois. The Benoits also moved on. Jack Kay earned his PhD and accepted a job at the University of Nebraska. I don’t remember if Sheri Brimm was still around. Tuna Snider, Ron Lee, and Gerry Cox joined the staff.

As in the other years, it was all hands on deck for the first couple of months. We spent a great deal of time working with the inexperienced novices in order to find compatible partners and to get them reasonably well prepared for the novice tournament sponsored by the Michigan Intercollegiate Speech League.

I think that Gerry Cox mostly worked with the novices. The only one with significant high school experience was Dennis Corder.

We also reprised the trip to Ann Arbor to research in U-M’s libraries. I don’t remember who came, but the productivity matched the standard set in the previous year.

Varsity: Kent Martini and Chris Varjabedian graduated. Kevin Buchanan returned to the team, and George paired him with Scott Harris. I don’t know why George skipped over Mike Craig, who had had an excellent year in 1978-79 and had also displayed a great attitude. Maybe it was because neither he nor Scott had been a second negative at Wayne State. At any rate, Mike debated with Dave Debold all year.

Someone entered the ZSR library to study and left with a new (to him) cowboy hat.

I do not remember many specifics from this year. I remember only one tournament that I definitely attended, Wake Forest. I do not remember how we did. What I do remember is that I left my cowboy hat in the Z. Smith Reynolds library there.

I don’t remember what specific cases the Wayne State debaters defended during the year. I do, however, remember the one run by the Sutherland twins who debated for Louisville. Their case was about free speech and the cable television industry that was still in its infancy. I judged them on their affirmative several times. and I always voted for them. So did a lot of other judges; no one was surprised that they received a first round bid to the NDT.

I noticed that the second affirmative for Louisville always gave heavy emphasis in the 2AC to a piece of evidence that had seemed innocuous when it was read in the opening speech. Someone on the Wayne State team found the original source for this quote, and I worked with them to develop a sophisticated block of arguments about it. This foiled their strategy. We never lost to Louisville again.

The other popular case that I remember was one that banned billboards. They supposedly caused “blight” and traffic accidents. I thought back on how much I loved Burma Shave billboards and the countless roadside signs for Wall Drug. Also, we would never have made that pleasurable stop at Reptile Land in the previous year if those ads were banned.

These advantages certainly seemed as real to me as the alleged problems, but I could think of no persuasive way to turn them into debate arguments.

Scott and Kevin had a great year, from start to finish. They earned the distinction of being the first Wayne State team to receive a first round bid¹ to the National Debate Tournament, which was held at the University of Arizona. Going into the tournament they were the ninth-ranked team in the country.

Mike and Dave also had a good year. They became the fourth consecutive team from Wayne State to qualify for the NDT at the District 5 tournament. So, in my six years of coaching at U-M and Wayne State, seven of my teams qualified for the NDT, and five teams made it through districts. The one team that did not qualify barely missed after going 0-8 the year before. I was definitely a better coach than I was a debater.

I got to attend the tournament, too. I had seniority, but I had been in the doghouse academically for several months. I knew that George would go, but if he brought anyone else, I thought that it would be Tuna or Ron. At this nationals I spent a lot of time judging.

The adventure of flying to Tucson is described here.

We had a great time in Tucson. The weather was fantastic, and the atmosphere at the university was invigorating after nine months in the cold in Detroit. Young men and women were playing Frisbee in shorts and tee shirts on the lawn of one of the buildings. One morning I went on a jog with Scott and Dave. We even persuaded George to take us to an authentic Mexican restaurant for supper one evening.

Scott and Kevin qualified for the elimination rounds with a 6-2 record. Scott was the #8 speaker in the tournament. Unfortunately, the guys were upset in a 3-2 decision by two ladies from Southern Cal even though Wayne State was on the affirmative. I don’t remember Mike and Dave’s record, but I think that they finished near the middle of the field.

I don’t know how George finagled it, but Scott (partnering with Dave Debold) also won a first-round bid to the 1981 tournament. He and Dave were again 6-2, and Scott was the #2 speaker. Wayne State won its octafinal round, but fell to Pittsburgh, the eventual champions, in the quarterfinals.

I was very happy to read in the NDT book for 1981 that Kim Garvin and Nancy Legge also debated at the NDT that year. I wonder what happened to Mike and Kevin. Kim and Nancy also attended the 1982 edition of the tournament.

1. In two consecutive years, 1967 and 1968, Wayne State was exempted from qualifying for the NDT because its team had debated in the final round of the previous year’s tournament. First round bids were first implemented in 1973.

1978-1979: Wayne State Debate Tournaments, etc.

Posted on March 27, 2021 by Mike

Debate at Wayne. Continue reading →

The debate topic for 1978-1979 was: “Resolved: That the federal government should implement a program which guarantees employment opportunities for all United States citizens in the labor force.”

My recollection of this entire year is spotty. I don’t even remember any specific cases that debaters were running. That word “guarantee” was pretty constraining. Anyone who did not like economics was in for a long year. The national unemployment rate at the time was about 6 percent, but it was slowly decreasing.

As in the previous year all of the coaching staff (except George) spent the first few months working with the novices. I don’t remember any details at all.

The varsity team largely remained the same. Debbie McCully did not exactly graduate (as explained here), but she was no longer associated with the team. Kevin Buchanan was still in school, but he decided not to participate in debate. Chris Varjabedian rejoined the team. George paired him with Scott Harris, and they were clearly the top team all year long. However, Mike Craig and Kent Martini also had a very good year.

All of the debate coaches returned from 1977-1978. Sheri Brimm was added.

The top novice team was Dave Debold and Kim Garvin. They were also quite an “item” for most of the year.

The team did not go to Camp Tamarack in 1978. I am not sure why not. I don’t remember anyone discussing it. I offered to organize a research trip to U-M for the varsity debaters. George deemed it a great idea. I drove a group of the debaters to Ann Arbor. It was probably on a Sunday; Saturday in the fall is devoted to football at U-M. I showed everyone where the libraries were. We then split up, researched for a few hours, and then gathered for lunch. Afterwards, people changed locations and continued researching. Everyone had a pretty good time, and a lot was accomplished. The debaters were a little overwhelmed by the amount and quality of materials available at U-M. I knew very well that there was a lot more within a mile or two, but I did not rub it in.

The social side of Tamarack was replaced by a Halloween party. It is described here.

Varsity: I must have gone to other tournaments during the course of the year, but the only one that I specifically remember is when I accompanied the two top teams on the “Florida Swing”. Scott, Chris, Mike, Kent, and I piled in a van supplied by the university’s motor pool and set off on I-75 for Tallahassee, the home of Florida State University. My recollection is that George made arrangements for us to stay overnight in his favorite “ma and pa” motel in Tennessee.

Everybody on the trip was quite serious about the upcoming debates. Quite a bit of productive work got done. Even so, it was an awfully long time to sit in the car.

Despite the backbreaking drive the debaters did well at FSU. I think that Scott and Chris made it to the final round. Mike and Kent also qualified for the elimination rounds. I have a vague recollection that they may have even been scheduled to face each other in an elimination round, and I had to decide who should advance.

The second tournament was at Central Florida University in Orlando. We had a free day in between tournaments. Unfortunately, there was not nearly enough time available to stand in line at Disney World or any of the other major tourist attractions in the Orlando area.

Fortune shone on us when we were just about halfway to our destination. I spotted a billboard for an interesting place called Reptile Land on state highway 301 near the town of Lawtey, FL, southeast of Jacksonville. We decided to give it a try.

By the time of our visit it was a little bigger than it appears in the photo. It also actually had more than just snakes and alligators. As I recall, their was at least one chimpanzee and diverse other birds and mammals. And there were no lines!

Reptile Land was obviously a tourist trap, but we all had a good time thee. I regret to tell readers that readers that Reptile Land closed forever not long after our visit.

UCF was not yet known for football, but it had a very good debate team in 1978-1979.

After that nice little break we were all business for the rest of our time in the Sunshine State. In the Central Florida tournament both teams again qualified for the elimination rounds. This time they landed on different sides of the bracket. Both teams won their octafinal rounds. Both teams won their quarterfinal rounds. Both teams also won in the semis.

So, for the first time in the long history of the Wayne State program, two of its teams closed out the finals of a varsity tournament. We brought home both the first and second place trophies. It was quite an accomplishment, and we were all super-pumped. We could not wait to call George and tell him the news. The trip back to Detroit was much longer than the drive down to Florida in terms of miles, but the time flew by.

It seems strange to report that that jubilant return trip is my last clear memory of the 1978-1979 debate season. I remember that Scott and Chris cruised through districts, but I don’t even recall whether I attended with them. Kent and Mike were awarded a second-round bid. So, for the first time ever Wayne State had two teams at the 1979 NDT at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. George did not bring a second coach, even though the team drove. I don’t remember why not.

At the NDT Scott and Chris qualified with a 6-2 record. This was the first time that Wayne State had qualified for the elimination rounds at NDT since 1967. Kent and Mike won five and lost three. They were the only 5-3 team that missed the elimination rounds. They persevered through a very tough schedule; and when their fate was announced, the crowd applauded their performance. I am sure, however, that it was a tough moment, especially for Kent, who was a senior.

Scott and Chris lost in the octafinals to Harvard on a 3-2 decision. Thus ended one of the greatest varsity debate seasons in Wayne State’s history. Wayne’s teams reached the quarterfinals of various tournaments twenty-seven times, the same number as in the previous year, but the close-out and the NDT performance made this year even better.

Televised Debates. For a few months Wayne State participated in a weekly television program on Channel 20 called City Update. It might have been the lowest-rated program on Detroit’s lowest-rated station. I was already quite familiar with the program because the main presenter was a very good-looking young lady whose name I don’t remember. They gave the team a fifteen-minute segment to present a one-on-one debate on a topic of our choosing. Many debaters and some of the IE performers got to appear before the camera.

Fire did not kill Garth Gimble. He was impaled on a Christmas tree.

The best debate was the one in December in which the topic was something like “Is there a Santa Claus?” Mike Craig stole the show as the negative. One of his arguments was entitled “Christmas tree deaths”. He based it on a segment of the Fernwood 2Night show. However, Mike lost; Jack Kay showed up in a Santa suit to deliver the verdict.

I moderated several of these debates. All that I did was to introduce the debaters and the topic. I was surprised that the whole operation was not more professional. The set consisted of a rostrum in an empty room. Only four of us were present—the two debaters, the moderator, and the camera person. On most occasions the camera person was the attractive lady who also hosted the show. Our segment of the show was taped, but we only got one attempt. If someone flubbed something, it was aired anyway.

On one occasion, however, the rules were slightly changed. Three of us that day taped a promo for City Update—the lovely hostess, a debater (I don’t remember which one; it might have been Ruth Kay), and me standing beside one another behind the rostrum. Someone else might have operated the camera, but I think that the presenter set the focus and then just let it run.

We did six takes. I said my lines correctly the first five times, but either the hostess or the debater was not happy with it. On the sixth attempt they both were fine, but I hesitated a little at one point That was the one we used because I said that I didn’t care.

High School Tournament: Every year that I coached at Wayne State the FU hosted a tournament for high school debaters. We all pitched in. In 1979 I was in charge of the tabulation room. Kent Martini and one or two other people helped out. Kent was done with his portion of the final results before the others had finished theirs. When he announced this fact, I told him to check everything again.

Well, he didn’t do it, and George ended up announcing incorrect results. When the mistake was realized, Kent went to George and apologized. He even told George that I had told him to check everything again.

Kent felt terrible, and, as I described here, I knew exactly how he felt. At least he admitted his mistake.

High School Institute. In each summer Wayne State hosted a week-long institute for high school debaters. U-M also hosted an institute, but theirs was more of a camp. Students stayed in the dorms, and it was famous throughout the state. The U-M institute was run by a Wayne State alumna, Jayne Greco¹, who was also the debate coach at Kimball High School in Royal Oak, the institution that Kent Martini, Mike Craig, and Dave Debold attended.

In the 1979 edition of Wayne State’s institute I gave a lecture on topicality arguments. I insisted that they were an important part of argumentation in competitive debates. At some point I inserted the phrase “despite what Mrs. Greco might say at the U. of M. Institute”. This got back to her, and she complained to George.

George told me that I should call her and apologize to her. My sweaty hands nearly dialed her number several times, but I never did. I did not know what to say to her. I wasn’t sorry. I chose my words carefully, and I did not say anything untrue or insulting. She was notorious for thinking that only a few cases should be allowed so that no negative team would need to argue about topicality. I strongly disagreed.

Besides, I really did not care what she thought of me.

1. Jayne Greco died in 2000. Her rather sparse obituary can be found here.

1977-1980 Part 3B: Debate at Wayne State: The Coaches

Posted on March 15, 2021 by Mike

My recollections of the other coaches. Continue reading →

Any treatment of any aspect of debate at Wayne State University in the second half of the twentieth century must begin with George Ziegelmueller¹. During the course of my seven years of debate I had formed two opinions of him: 1) He was a mediocre debate coach; 2) He was a horrible judge. I certainly underrated him as a coach (at least on the affirmative), but not as a judge. Of course, I was (and still am) prejudiced. After my last tournament (districts in 1970, which is described here) I hated him as much as I have ever hated anyone in my life.

Nevertheless, I can usually compartmentalize. George and I had a good working relationship from the start. I did whatever he told me to do. I had great respect for his ability to deal with the bureaucracy, and I have no doubt whatever that the welfare and success of his debaters meant the world to him.

My favorite George story took place in the Detroit Metro Airport in 1980. Six of us were preparing to attend the National Debate Tournament at the University of Arizona. George and I were the coaches. The debaters were senior Scott Harris, juniors Kevin Buchanan and Mike Craig, and Dave Debold, who was only a sophomore.

We were all very excited. For three of the four guys it was the very first time that they had flown to a tournament. For me it was also very special. I had never been to the state of Arizona. Also, I knew that this might well be my last debate tournament ever.

George handed out the tickets to each of us. He informed us of the gate from which the plane would depart. Before we went through security, however, Dave noticed something amiss. “These tickets are for Phoenix,” he said. “Isn’t the University of Arizona in Tucson?”

Our tickets were indeed non-stop tickets to Phoenix on Frontier Airlines. Incredibly, George was able to exchange the tickets for ones to and from Tucson. We only had to wait in the terminal for an hour or so, and all of our luggage was also transferred to our new flight.

George did not really believe in tipping. Having been to Europe several times, I agree with him in principle. However, this is not Europe; most American restaurants paid (and still pay) their employees scandalously low wages.

The way George expressed his philosophy about tipping was this: “I pay for the meal out of the back-pocket of my pants; the tip comes from the front pocket.” That is, he paid for the bill with folding money and the tip with change.

I only accompanied George on a few trips. When I did, I would covertly pass the hat among the debaters. I would add my donation and give the total collection to one of the debaters. On our way to the car he/she would remember something left behind in the restaurant, return to the table, and supplement the tip with what we had collected.

The tournament in Denver was held at Metropolitan State College, now known as Metropolitan State University. It was an excellent venue.

I worked very hard during my first year at Wayne. I went to whatever tournaments George selected for me, and I did not step on anyone’s toes. Even before districts I asked George if I could go to the National Debate Tournament in Denver in the spring. George was taken aback by this request.

Jack Kay, after all, was his right-hand man. George said that I could accompany the team to districts, but he and Jack would judge. I replied that the team (Debbie McCully and Scott Harris) did not need me at districts. However, they had very little experience on the national circuit, and I had a lot. I knew many of the debaters on the national scene and almost all of the coaches. I even volunteered to pay my own way to Denver if and when our team qualified. George eventually agreed, and he found the money.

This helped diminish, but not erase, the memory of the round against Ohio U. at districts in 1970.

Pam and Billy Benoit² (beh NOYT) were my office-mates in Manoogian Hall. They had both attended Ball State University in Muncie, IN, and Central Michigan in Mount Pleasant. In 1979 Billy presented a paper on philosophy at a conference in Amsterdam. Pam went with him. I don’t remember how they got away with this. They both taught several classes.

Sue Comparetto somehow persuaded them to allow her to join them on this trip. She enjoyed the city immensely, and has wanted to return³ for the last forty-two years.

The Benoits once invited Sue and me over for supper in their apartment, which was near the campus. The repast itself was a little skimpy by my standards until they pulled out their fondue pot and the dipping snacks.

Billy and Pam were among the first players of Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) after I had purchased the original boxed set on August 17, 1978, as a present for myself on my thirtieth birthday. In the first few adventures we took turns as Dungeon Master. These were “Monte Haul” dungeons. The player characters soon reached level 5 or 6.Outlandishly rich orcs were slain by the thousand.

When the Player’s Handbook appeared a year or so later, I constructed a dungeon with a style that was more verismo. Deep in that dungeon was the lair of the fiercest monster they had yet to encounter, Frix the White Dragon. Non-player characters had warned everyone that he was very powerful because of his super-cold breath. One day Pam, Billy, and Vince Follert decided to go after him.

After a few minor skirmishes they found Frix’s cave, but, alas, Frix struck first and turned the entire party all to icicles. All three players were very angry at me for not providing them with a way to resurrect their highly prized characters.

The denouement of this story is in Vince’s section of this blog.

In 2021 I unearthed my slightly warped copy the graduate student’s bible.

By the time that Billy and Pam were ready to submit their dissertations in the spring of 1980 Sue and I had an IBM 5120 computer in our house. Sue used it for her fledgling programming business. I also tinkered with it. I had written a word processing program that printed documents in the format approved by the American Psychological Association. The only printer that it could use was a dot-matrix, but that was not yet considered gauche. I called my program “Amanuensis”.

The 5120 supported this printer and no other.

The university allowed graduate students a fixed number of minutes of computer time per semester. Pam and Billy traded me their minutes for one or two semesters in exchange for my printing of their dissertations using Amanuensis. Needless to say, I had to enter the text and footnotes through the keyboard. Producing a long paper with footnotes perfectly on a manual typewriter was a daunting task.

I ran into a few problems because, of course, no one checked my work. They became very jittery as the deadline day approached, but I was able to hand the final copies over to them with a few hours to spare.

In the winter of 1978-1979 Pam and Billy invited Sue, me, Vince, and, I think, John Pfeiffer to a weekend at a family cabin near Pokagon (poh-KAY-gun) State Park⁴. My recollection is that we drove there on Friday evening and returned on Sunday afternoon. Two thing stand out in my mind from this event. The first was mundane. Evidently there was a shortage of water in the plumbing system. The bathroom bore a sign that read: “If it’s yellow, let it mellow; if it’s brown, flush it down.” Five of us shared that toilet.

The other memory of that trip is epic. The toboggan run in the park is long and fast. The channels for the toboggans were not particularly narrow, but Billy was a big guy, and, to put it in nautical terms, he was broad in the beam. I think that we only participated in one run. We split into two groups of three. I went with Vince and John. Sue was in the Benoit’s group. The safety precautions for the ride were minimal. A guy at the top yelled “Keep your legs in!” before he gave the toboggan a shove.

Our toboggan ride was somewhat thrilling because the pace was fast, and the riders had absolutely no control. I was in front. I just made myself as small as I could. The guy behind me had his legs on both sides of me. The guy behind him likewise put a leglock on the middle man. By the time that we reached the bottom, which was a quarter mile from the launching tower, one of Vince’s legs had rubbed against the side of the track a few times. He was sore but not injured. John and I were unscathed.

The three in the other toboggan did not fare as well. All three suffered scrapes. Billy was by far the worst. He stuck out on both sides of the toboggan and suffered rather ugly burns. We did not take him to the hospital, but he could hardly walk for a day or two, and he was sore for weeks.

Sheri Brimm joined the program in the fall semester of 1978. She had just graduated from Wright State University in Dayton, OH. She knew very little about debate. If Wright State had a debate team, I never heard of it, and they were in our district.

Sheri lived in an apartment near campus with her husband David. I seem to remember that he was going to Law School at Wayne State.

I was in one class with Sheri. I think that it was with the rhetoric professor, Dr. Jim Measell. For one of our assigned papers he provided very explicit instructions for what he wanted. I knew this guy and warned Sheri that she should do it exactly the way that he prescribed. She said that she thought that what he really was looking for was creativity. She may have been kidding, but she got a bad grade on the paper.

I also took one trip with Sheri. We were in charge of a van full of debaters headed for a nearby tournament. Akron University comes to mind, but I may be wrong. I let her drive because I wanted to work with some of the debaters. While we were still in Detroit it began to snow or sleet, and there was a little ice on the road. Basically, it was a normal winter day in Michigan in the seventies. The van started to skid. I yelled to her from the back of the van, “Slow down.”

“The car is hydroplaning,” she explained, but she did not drive noticeably slower.

“Hydroplaning is on water. This is ice. SLOW DOWN!” I countered.

I did not have many dealings with Sheri even though she returned for 1979-80. George may have let her work with some of the novice debaters, and she kept a chair warm during practice rounds.

Gerry Cox⁵ was my age. George was eighteen years older than I was. Everyone else in the FU was younger than I. Gerry joined the staff in 1979 after finally earning his bachelor’s degree the previous spring. I coached Gerry in my first two years. We became good friends, even though we had almost nothing in common. I also kept in touch with Gerry after I left Wayne St. He came to visit Sue and me twice while we lived in Rockville, CT. More memories of him can be read here.

I have three vivid recollections of Gerry from that last year. For years Gerry had been associated with the department off and on. I remember well the way that he treated the departmental secretary, whose name was, I think, Janet. On one occasion Gerry approached her desk and greeted her with the following: “Why don’t we rent a room at a hotel, rub Crisco all over both of our bodies, and see what happens?”

This approach was quite a bit different from my short conversations with her.

The second strong memory is of the only time that I ever saw Gerry nervous. He was for some reason chosen to give a speech on traffic safety to members of the Detroit Police Department. It may have been a contest. I drove him there for moral support.

Gerry had seen these up close a few times.

Gerry was reluctant even to enter the room. Apparently he feared that one of Detroit’s finest would recognize him from years gone for encounters in markedly less formal encounters, probably bars. At last we entered and took a seat. Gerry kept his eyes lowered while we were so seated.

Eventually Gerry gave his speech, which argued that requiring helmets for riders of motorcycles was a bad idea. It was a terrible speech. He claimed that requiring helmets would not reduce injuries much and that in some cases it would be counterproductive. I was shocked that a former Wayne State debater would make such a claim without a whiff of evidence.

Helmets are obviously counterproductive.

The close of his speech was greeted with tepid applause. As he approached me, he said softly, “Let’s get out of here.”

In the car I asked him why he made those claims without any evidence. He was stunned. He asked me, “Are you saying that I forgot to read the evidence?”

When I confirmed it he laughed and laughed and buried his head in his hands.

Steve D’Agostino coached some of the Individual Events (IE) people in 1977-78. I hardly knew him. I think that he had academic problems and left after one year.

Vince Follert⁶ was a pretty good debater at Loyola in Chicago, a Jesuit university. I judged him a few times before he graduated in 1977. His partner was weak, and the coaching at Loyola was not great. Even so, they did pretty well. I was favorably impressed.

Vince had a studio apartment near the campus. I am not sure that I ever entered it. He came to supper at our house on Chelsea a few times. We became pretty close friends. We usually ate lunch together at one of a few favorite restaurants on Woodward. Woodward Coney Island is still there in 2021! Their loose hamburger sandwiches were very tasty. I don’t remember the name of the other restaurant. Vince was enchanted by one of the waitresses who never wore a bra.

Vince stayed at Wayne for two years. I taught his classes whenever he was at a tournament, and he returned the favor when I was out of town. In the fall of 1978 he made the mistake of asking me to take his very first class. Here is how I began: “My name is Mike Wavada. Don’t write it down; I am not your teacher. Your real teacher is named Vince Follert. He is away at a debate tournament today. You won’t like him. He is fat, he smokes like a chimney, and he talks too fast.”

I did not mention it, but he also went through several six packs of Diet Pepsi every day.

Vince was as fond as I was of Dungeons and Dragons. He played every chance that he got. He was even more angry than the Benoits were at the instantaneous demise of his beloved characters when they stormed into Frix’s lair. I think that Vince’s main character was named Guelph the Elf.

Several months later he confronted me about the incident. “Resist Cold is a first level clerical spell, isn’t it? We were just idiots. We deserved to die.” He was right. They probably could have absconded with Frix’s fabulous treasure horde if they had bothered to prepare for cold weather with spells that any rookie cleric would know.

Vince and I attended a convention of the Central States Speech Association⁷ in the spring of 1979. We both presented papers there.

I don’t remember why we did not take Greenie. Instead, we rented a car from Budget. We got a good deal. There was a modest daily charge, but there was no mileage limit. My recollection is that we drove to St. Louis, went to the convention, and then drove back within twenty-four hours. That seems almost incredible. Maybe the trip took two days. In any case the man at Budget was astounded when he looked at the odometer.

I did not witness Vince’s presentation. His panel occurred at the same time as mine. Walter Ulrich, a very fine coach at the University of Houston, presented the first paper in our room. He argued that the value of the proposition should always be from the perspective of the collective interest of the people of the United States. There was time for questions after the evaluations. I asked Walter what he thought of propositions that were stated at a different level. For example, one of them that I debated in high school said that nuclear weapons should be controlled by an unspecified international organization. He opined that those resolutions were illegitimate.

The approach I called unfair is based on Archbishop Whately’s view of presumption.

My paper, which was the last one in our session, was on causality. I posited was not a useful construct in argumentation. Debates should focus on necessary conditions and sufficient conditions. I also argued that the negative teams had the responsibility to defend something in every debate. It was perfectly OK to defend what currently existed or what the government might do, but arguing that a case should be rejected because Congress could just pass a law to solve the problem or provide the benefit was an unfair reliance on the concept of presumption.

The two reviewers hated my paper. Dave Ling, the coach from Central Michigan (and a Wayne State alum), was at least nice about it. The other reviewer was from Washington University of St. Louis, a guy who was renowned as the worst judge on the circuit. He made fun of me. The time allotted was exhausted by the time that they finished. I did not get a chance to rebut what they said.

Most top coaches would have agreed with every word that I said, but they did not often attend conventions like this one.

One last memory of Vince popped into my head. One day in 1979 he came into Manoogian with a hickey on his neck. He made no attempt to hide it, but he would not talk about it.

Vince received his masters degree in the spring of 1979. He coached debate for Dale Hample at Western Illinois in 1979-1980.

Ken Haught might have been on the staff in my last year, 1979-1980. I remember him, but only vaguely

Jack Kay was George’s right-hand man when I arrived. He was still a graduate student, but he had an office of his own. I came to learn that Jack had been a member of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in his younger years. Reportedly he had actually met Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda.

Jack married Ruth Colwander, who was just a sophomore in my first year at Wayne State. Jack had been the coach of Ruth and the other novices in the previous year. They had done very well.

I don’t know why, but I interacted very little with Jack. I remember only two fairly innocuous incidents. The first occurred at a staff meeting. George told us that some financial assistance had become available for one debater. I don’t remember the amount. George asked for suggestions as to who should get it. I immediately recommended that Ruth, who was the only serious debater who had a job, should be considered. Jack, who was involved with but not married to Ruth, was astonished at my suggestion. I guess that he thought of me as a foe. If so, it was not mutual.

The second event occurred at the National Debate Tournament in 1978 in Denver. Wayne State sent one team (Debbie McCully and Scott Harris) and three coaches to this tournament.

Wayne State’s team met (I think) one of the teams from Redlands in the eighth round. The whole tournament knew that both teams from Redlands were running a case that had something to do with infanticide. I had never heard it, and I no idea of the substance of Redlands’ plan.

Jack ran into the library. I don’t know if he found anything. I kept out of his way.

Jack had, however, heard the case in a previous round. When he saw that our team was facing Redlands, he rushed to the library to try to photocopy something. He then spent the little remaining time lecturing Debbie and Scott on how to attack the cse.

I wished that he had shared his ideas with us earlier—there were fairly long breaks for power-matching after every round. I said absolutely nothing at the time; he might have had an inspired argument.

Scott and Debbie lost 3-0. If Jack had not taken over, I would have advised them to relax and avoid the temptation to twist any of their prepared arguments to fit this case. Instead, they should just try to challenge everything, make reasonable claims of their own, and watch for mistakes. They should then concentrate on finding one decisive argument that they could win and sell it dramatically in the last rebuttal.

Of course, they still probably would have lost to a team with more high-level experience.

Jack was a big guy. He was also, unless I am mistaken, the only Jewish member of the staff. He was, I guess because of his size, recruited to play Santa Claus at the FU Christmas party. However, his “ho-ho-ho” was worse than pathetic. So, I made the big laugh from off-stage while he was entering.

Ron Lee joined the staff in 1979-80 wife his wife Karen. She was my age and debated at either Southern Illinois or Illinois State. She might have done something with the team at Wayne, too.

Ron debated at Wayne State, at times with Jack Kay. The only thing that I remember about his coaching technique was that he insisted that the team eat at restaurants that had waiters and/or waitresses. He hated going to counters for his food.

John Pfeiffer came from Florida He was at Wayne State for my first two years. In the second year he was the IE director.

John had an interesting background. He had worked at Disneyland as a strolling bear character. He said that it was the worst job in the world. He had also appeared as a character on roller skates in Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona.

Donaldson’s Covenant books were my favorites.

Tuna Snider¹⁰ came to Wayne State in 1979-80, my last year, and was installed in Jack’s old office. I had known him a little when he was the coach at Boston College. I never heard anyone call him anything but Tuna.

I don’t think that I went to any tournaments with Tuna. In fact, the only interaction with him that I remembered was when he noticed that I was often sitting around the debate lounge reading a paperback book. One day he asked what kind of fiction I liked, and I answered, “Swords and sorcery”. He made a positive noise and returned to his office. In truth I read most of these fantasy books just to get ideas for D&D dungeons.

For some reason Tuna did not attend the NDT with us in Arizona in 1980, and my memories of his involvement with the program seemed to be minimal. Perhaps he had a falling out with George.

1. George died in 2019. A press release from the university can be read here.

2. In 2021 the Benoits are on the faculty of the communications department of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Billy’s Wikipedia page is here. His boss’s career is described on this webpage. Click on her photo or the blue text.

3. Sue and I have a river cruise scheduled for October of 2021. It departs from Amsterdam, and we have also scheduled one extra day there.

4. The toboggan run at Pokagon State Park remained open through the pandemic winter of 2020-2021. Its website is here.

5. Gerry died in an automobile accident in, I think, the eighties. At the time he owned a company that produced machined parts for auto dealers. It was located in his family’s home town in Kentucky.

6. Vince died of colon cancer in the early eighties.

7. In the twenty-first century it is called the Central States Communications Association.

8. In 2021 Ken is the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Dickinson State University in North Dakota.

9. Jack died in 2015. A tribute to him can be read here.

10. Tuna Snider got his PhD from Kansas, not Wayne State. He died in 2015 after spending more than thirty years at the University of Vermont. His Wikipedia page is here.

1977-1978 Wayne State Debate Tournaments, etc.

Posted on March 14, 2021 by Mike

Debate at Wayne. Continue reading →

The resolution for 1977-78, my first year at Wayne State, was: “Resolved: That the United States law enforcement agencies should be given significantly greater freedom in the investigation and/or prosecution of felony crime.”

The three resolutions during the time that I was at Wayne State were much more limited than the previous three that the guys from Michigan debated. This may have been an adverse reaction to the topic for 1976-77, the consumer product safety resolution. It was a nightmare for negative teams.

Wayne State’s debate team was in a rather strong position at the beginning of the school year. George Ziegelmueller and Jack Kay were both experienced coaches. Vince Follert had been a good debater for several years at Loyola of Chicago, and he had attended both regional and national tournaments. Against fairly heavy odds I had coached teams through the district tournament to qualify for the National Debate Tournament (NDT) two years in a row. No coach at Wayne the previous year had comparable credentials.

In 1977 Wayne State had, for the first time in several years, qualified for the NDT. One of the two debaters from that NDT team, Chris Varjabedian, was returning. The other, Bill Hurley, had graduated and was in Law School. The biggest problem, from my perspective, was that no one had much experience on the “national circuit”.

The Novices: George named Jack Kay to continue as “Director of Novice Debate” for the third year in a row. That was a pretty strong indication that George intended to coach the varsity debaters himself. During the first couple of months the rest of us concentrated on getting the new batch of inexperienced novices ready for the Michigan Intercollegiate Speech League tournament. Wayne’s novices debated three rounds against novices from other schools. All pairs debated the same side (affirmative or negative) all three rounds.

Working with these inexperienced students was time-consuming and often frustrating. Little time was left for any of the coaches to help the experienced debaters. Each coach saw some of them in a practice round or two, but the emphasis for us was on getting the new people prepared for MISL.

The first step was to get recruits to fill out a form with contact information and a short description of each one’s experience and goals. We then interviewed each person. After all the interviews were completed, the staff met as a group to make pairings. The objective was to try to match up people with approximately the same enthusiasm and potential. We did a horrible job. First impressions in meetings proved worthless as indicators of potential.

At least four freshmen had significant high school experience—Kevin Buchanan, Mike Craig, Nancy Legge, and Teresa Ortez. The boys, who both came from top Michigan high school programs, were assigned to debate together. Nancy’s partner was Teresa. I don’t remember if any of this foursome went to MISL.

In fact, I remember precious little about the whole process. Although I devoted many hours to getting my charges as prepared as possible, I harbored no illusions that many of the inexperienced debaters would stay with the program. If they had to face off against Buchanan and Craig, they would not know what hit them.

Camp Tamarack: George had a clever trick for keeping people on the team after MISL Novice. He scheduled an overnight trip for the entire FU to Camp Tamarack, a woodsy resort in Ortonville, MI. The alleged purpose was to do research, but several recreational activities were built into the schedule. We drove up on Friday afternoon and returned on Saturday evening

I remember a few things about the weekend. First, the food service was kosher. Jack Kay had to explain the rules to everyone.

My most vivid memory of the weekend was Kent Martini’s outstanding performance in the scavenger hunt, as I described here.

I wasn’t very impressed with the research aspect of this exercise. George or Jack checked out some books on the debate topic from the Wayne State library. I missed having access to the outstanding U-M library system. It was so much better than Wayne’s. On the other hand, this approach certainly made everyone feel that they were part of the team.

The Varsity: For the first semester the big question for the varsity debaters was; “Who will debate with Chris?” At the beginning of the year the two main contenders were Debbie McCully and Kent Martini. Debbie was (at least in theory) a senior; Kent was a junior. In addition, the novices from the previous year were pretty good. Four of them had closed out the finals of a novice tournament that year. Of the three that returned to the team as sophomores, it was obvious to all of the coaches that Scott Harris was more than a cut above the others.

Somewhere around the Christmas break Chris Varjabedian quit the team. I have no idea what prompted this, but he returned the next year.

George tried the three combinations of Debbie-Kent, Debbie-Scott, and Kent-Scott. The results were not decisive. George asked me which pairing I thought was the strongest. I voted for Kent-Scott. I assume that George also asked Vince and Jack and maybe even Billy Benoit. I was a little surprised when George named Scott and Debbie as the representatives at district. Scott did first negative and second affirmative.

Not this (although Wayne State did have a highly rated fencing team).

One thing that was never in doubt was the affirmative case that had been developed by George and Chris. They called it “fencing”, but it was really about labeling all goods for sale in the United States and recording all transactions on a mythical computer. “Super computers” existed in 1977, but they were far less powerful than a twenty-first cellphone. Hand scanners did not exist. All transactions would need to be entered by hand. Think about that. Every time that currency was exchanged for goods anywhere in the United States, someone would have to input the transaction into the national database, whether it was a girl scout selling cookies or a container ship bearing goods from foreign countries. Also, of course, there were no networks. Without the Internet, how would they check the database?

I absolutely hated this case. It epitomized what I called a “Class Z case”. The idea was so insane that no one would have bothered to describe what was wrong with it. George and Chris found a few articles that postulated a reduction in thievery if a good record keeping system was implemented.¹ There were no nationwide studies; it was just a thought experiment.

The negative teams were in a tough position. They could attack the evidence proffered by the affirmative, but what else could they do? Little had been written about the subject. What writer or researcher would be inspired to warn of the dangers of relying on a computer that clearly did not exist and a process that still would not be close to feasible after four decades of Moore’s Law²? And who would publish the ravings of such a Cassandra?

I don’t remember the tournament at which this happened, but I have a very clear memory of an elimination round that I watched rather late in the season. It pitted one of Northwestern’s superb teams against Wake Forest’s duo of Ross Smith and John Graham. I was not judging the round; I wasn’t even taking a flow. I remember sitting next to Jim Maniace (pronounced MAN us, but I called him maniac), the only good debater from Notre Dame that I ever heard. He had won a place in my heart when he told a Wilbur Mills joke while debating in a round that I judged. When he saw me chuckle, he promised more such jokes at the end of his speech, and he delivered.

In this round Northwestern had pulled out a new case. Wake tried to attack it, but when it came time for the 2NR, Graham decided that their only chance of winning was topicality. He devoted all five minutes to this one argument. He carefully explained each portion of the argument. This was unheard of, but it worked! Wake won on a split decision. The Northwestern debaters in attendance were certain that their colleagues had answered the argument, but the judges disagreed. I have never heard a debater talk so forcefully and persuasively for so many minutes. It was actually quite a moving experience.

In preparation for districts Scott and Debbie began to work intensely with George. I helped them as much as I could on the negative. Debbie’s files were a huge mess, but there was too little time to do anything about them before districts.

Scott and Debbie participated in the tournament that Wayne State hosted just before districts. It was highly unusual, but not illegal or unethical, for a school to enter its best team in its own tournament. Scott and Debbie won first place. So, going into districts they had a lot of confidence.

I helped them prepare for district in at least one instance. Ohio University was running a case about arson. Their main source of evidence was a privately published an study (without peer review) about fire departments. I don’t remember OU’s plan was, but the study cited correlations between whatever it was (give me a break; it was over forty years ago) and fires determined to be arson. The study showed a graph of the relationship with the proposed solution on the Y axis and the arson fires on the X axis. If there was high correlation, the plot should approach a straight line that decreased. Instead it looked like a tightly clustered square of dots that neither increased nor decreased.

Publishing correlations on non-parametric data should definitely be a felony crime.

I discovered that the authors did not use the absolute numbers on either axis. Instead they had rank-ordered each and calculated correlations based on those numbers. This is a big no-no in statistics. I found a quote in a statistics text that indicated that correlations were only applicable on normally distributed groups like the raw numbers and not on so-called non-parametric data like the ranks. Scott used this against Ohio U. at districts. Two judges voted on this issue alone. One said that the affirmative got destroyed and never even realized it.

Several weeks before districts I met with George. I requested to go to the NDT in Denver. I told him that Scott and Debbie did not need me at districts. Eventually he agreed. George and Jack judged at districts. I was, in fact, right; Scott and Debbie cruised through districts and qualified for the NDT.

Scott and Debbie in *Speaker and Gavel*.

George elected to send them to DSR-TKA nationals, which was held at the University of Illinois March 22-25. They won the tournament, and Scott was the fourth-ranked speaker. The competition was pretty good, too. It included Kansas, Kentucky, and Utah.

In the interval between districts and NDT Vince and I worked with Scott and Debbie on their approaches on the negative. I organized a “Debbie Defilement Party” for all day on one Saturday. A few people dropped in to help us or make fun of us.

Debbie wrote out a new outline for her evidence. We then used my method of writing the outline levels on the dividers.

I took all the cards out of her file boxes, and the two of us, with some help from her friends, refiled each one. Occasionally we had to change the outline slightly or add more dividers. Before we inserted a card, we recorded the outline level on it. So each card in each section was labeled with the same level,e.g., II A 3 b 2).

This was, of course, time-consuming, but it more than made up for it by the time that it saved in refiling later. We got it all done in one day. This exercise had the additional advantage of fording her to become familiar with evidence that had been forgotten over the course of the year.

Vince helped with this, and at some point he mentioned something about writing some blocks³. Debbie uttered the immortal words, “Block me, Vince; block me up the wazoo.”

George scheduled several practice rounds before NDT. Only one was on their affirmative (the fencing case). I was the negative. I made plan attacks that they hadn’t heard yet. I had to admit that they did a pretty good job of defending the case.

Three coaches and two debaters boarded the plane for Denver. Jack, who smoked, had to sit in the back. In those days as soon as the “No smoking” signs went out, a blue-grey cloud immediately formed in the back of the plane. The most dreaded words when buying a ticket were, “All we have available are seats in the smoking section.” Waiting in line for the rear toilet was not a pleasant experience regardless of the location of one’s seat..

I have three rather clear memories of this trip. The first was a very favorable impression of downtown Denver. Free buses were always available throughout the center of the city. It was very easy to go to restaurants and to commute to the tournament site without a car.

My second strong memory is of the first round. I watched Scott and Debbie on the negative against two guys from Loyola of Los Angeles. I don’t remember the details of the debate, but Scott and Debbie were awful. At the end all four debaters were rightly convinced that Loyola had won all three ballots. Worse still was the fact that Scott and Debbie were screaming at each other. At one point one of them walked off in a huff. I have seen many debaters get upset with their partners, but never anything like this.

I talked with Scott and Debbie individually. I listened sympathetically to the complaints. Eventually they both calmed down and were willing to soldier on. There were only fifty-two teams in attendance. The goal was to be in the top sixteen. Losing one debate, no matter how badly, was definitely not a disaster. Losing trust of one’s partner was much worse.

I asked them if they wanted me not to listen to any more debates. They both thought that was best. In all honesty, I don’t remember what I did for the rest of the tournament. I might have had some judging assignments.

Scott and Debbie won four of the next six rounds. My other clear memory is of their eighth round assignment. It was recounted here.

Oh, please. They left out at least forty races.

I had my own great idea for a case, but no one on the team appreciated it. My idea was to increase the powers of law enforcement by creating a new agency to investigate felonies committed by aliens. I was not referring to the kind that cross the borders in the southwestern U.S. I meant the Greys, the Reptilians, and the other fifty-one well-documented unearthly races who had abducted countless American citizens.

I was half-serious about it. I was always attracted to cases with no evident disadvantages. The negative evidence on this case would be even scarcer than on the fencing case. The affirmative obviously could not employ the need-plan format, but surely the data gathered in the process of investigating sightings would be very useful if mankind ever needed to negotiate with the mother ship. At the very least the agency could publish a list of the people who were complete wackos.

During the summer of 1978 the other coaches and I worked with high school kids in Wayne State’s debate institute. The team that I worked with the most closely ended up winning the tournament at the end. I took no great pride in this achievement, but they were certainly better at the end of the week than they were at the beginning.

1. The principle was probably correct. When TSI implemented such a system for the inventory used in photo shoots by Macy’s in the nineties, the amount of pilferage experienced by the advertising department decreased dramatically.

2. Gordon Moore, the founder of Intel predicted in 1965 that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit would every year. In 1975 he revised it down to doubling every two years, which proved to be a good approximation of the improvement in the speed of the processors.

3. A “block” is an argument that is written out in detail with sub-points and evidence.

Wavablog

Memoirs, bridge, popes, travel, and other stuff

Tag Archives: Craig, Mike

1978-1980 Detroit: Dungeons and Dragons

1979-1980: Wayne State Debate Tournaments, etc.

1978-1979: Wayne State Debate Tournaments, etc.

1977-1980 Part 3B: Debate at Wayne State: The Coaches

1977-1978 Wayne State Debate Tournaments, etc.