1974 August-September: Transition to Ann Arbor

Posted on February 20, 2021 by Mike

Before and after the move. Continue reading →

In early August of 1974 Sue and I drove out to Michigan to arrange for housing in or near Ann Arbor. I also wanted to consult with Dr. Colburn about my new responsibilities. We found a suitable apartment to rent on Sheldon Rd. in Plymouth, about midway between Ann Arbor and Detroit. We figured that Sue would probably be able to find a job without much trouble.

We brought our tent and camping equipment with us to save money on hotel rooms. After a few nights in the campgrounds we decided to splurge on a room for one night at a Ma & Pa motel. We chose the best possible night for it: on August 8, 1974, Nixon resigned as President, and we were able to watch him live on television. I was absolutely ecstatic. Everything seemed to be working out for me.

I think that Sue’s apartment in Andover was in the indicated building. This complex is now called Whispering Hills.

Shortly after our return to Andover we hosted a going-away party at the apartment. Absolutely everyone came. It lasted most of the night. I don’t remember very many details, but I definitely recall that when Herget’s girlfriend Mel kissed me goodbye, she REALLY kissed me. I was quite astounded by it.

The guys with whom I played golf gave me a yellow golf ball that they had all signed. I kept the ball for a long time, but I could not find it when I posted this page in 2021.

Puca’s cage has for some reason been relegated to the front porch and delicately balanced on its side. The light is actually at the top of the cage.

I am not certain whether we hired professional movers or just rented a trailer or truck to transport our stuff to Plymouth. We brought both cars. I don’t think that either of them could pull a trailer. The most likely scenario was that we rented a truck, and Sue drove it while towing her Dodge Colt.

The barnboard shelves are now in our basement. Puca’s cage fits in the area marked with a red rectangle.

Because Sue had Puca¹ with her, we needed to take the southern route through Pennsylvania and Ohio. It is not generally advisable to try to cross two international borders with a snake. The move, thank goodness, was relatively uneventful, but we were both quite excited about starting the upcoming adventure together.

Our new dwelling was in a large house that had been converted into four apartments. Ours was on the ground floor on the southern side (on the right in the photo). The apartment had a bedroom, a living room, and a kitchen. Sue had acquired a double bed somewhere, and we put the waterbed in the living room. Puca’s cage was situated in the barnboard shelves that Dennis Comparetto had designed and built to hold him. We had a kitchen table and chairs and some dressers. We might have had a chair in the living room and/or a nightstand in the bedroom. Of course, we also brought my color TV and stereo and a few other necessities such as Sue’s cast-iron treadle-powered Singer sewing machine. The apartment came with a stove, refrigerator, and dishwasher.

A sewing machine should weigh as much as its operator, right?

The apartment had only one heating unit. It was a cube that was about 3.5 feet on a side. At least it did not require oil, as many heating systems in New England did (and still do). It was located in the living room near the door to the bedroom. As long as we kept the bedroom door open in the winter, this was not too inconvenient. Puca’s cage had a built-in heating lamp.

Tenants from all four units parked in front of the building. This might have been a problem if all four residents had two cars, but I do not remember the space ever being overcrowded. However, if anyone is considering moving to Michigan, I would not recommend outdoor parking. In fact, now that I have had a garage for a few years, I would not recommend outdoor parking anywhere. However, in those days we were in our twenties, and the cold and snow did not seem as bothersome.

Sue began hunting for a job. In a fairly short time she found one at an insurance company (it might have been an agency) in downtown Plymouth.

We also discovered plenty of nice paces to shop, including the first “super store” that either of us had ever seen. Meijer’s Thrify Acres (now just called Meijer), which was only three and half miles south of our house in Canton, was a huge supermarket that also sold just about anything that one could buy at KMart. They also had an employee named Marv who often was the cashier in the express lane. He was the most efficient at ringing and bagging that I have ever seen. I never saw him falter.

I started commuting to Ann Arbor. It was a fairly easy drive 90 percent of the time. The most likely problems were at both ends—getting Greenie to start in Plymouth and finding a parking spot in Ann Arbor. In cold weather I sometimes poured hot water directly on the engine before trying to start it. Once or twice I had to hitch-hike, which was not ideal. Fortunately, the people who gave me rides were uniformly friendly. I soon learned which side streets north of the Frieze building were likely sources of available parking. None of this bothered me at all.

This allowed everyone to take advantage of research done by others.

During one of those first few days Dr. Colburn showed me where the debate office was. It was the smallest room on the second floor, but it was more than we had when I was debating—nothing. There were a couple of desks there, and a mimeograph machine. Dr. Colburn informed me that the team’s annual budget was $2500 plus whatever we made on the high school debate tournament that a separate area of the University sponsored. We had no control over how many teams entered or what the entry fee was. We had to run the tournament, and all that we received were the judging fees that the U-M debaters and a few supporters forwent and donated to the team. There was also still a stipend ($1,000 if memory serves) available to one female debater. This “scholarship” dated back to the fifties, but I never heard of anyone actually receiving any money when I was debating. I don’t think that we even had any female debaters when I was a freshman or senior.

In short, the program was even more pitifully underfunded than I expected. However, I was definitely up for the challenge.

I was not required to teach, but Dr. Colburn had arranged for me to get a grant of a few thousand dollars. My job was to coach debate. Period.

I learned that the previous debate season had ended in catastrophe. I was never sure of the details, but I do remember these facts: 1) Dr. Colburn was the only staff member from the previous year’s team who was still involved with it. 2) Two sophomores had represented U-M at the previous district qualifying tournament and lost all eight rounds. So, both of my stints at U-M began the year following 0-8 performances at districts.

I met the other debate coach for the upcoming year, Don Goldman. He had just graduated from Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU—pronounced MITT su), which was not exactly a debate powerhouse. He was pursuing a masters in speech, and part of his duties included teaching a class or two. He knew very little about debate, and he was four years younger than I was. Fortunately, he was very easy to get along with, he was quite willing to travel to some tournaments, and he did not at all object to me making all the decisions and doing the lion’s share of the coaching. His wife Terry was also nice.

Schlesinger’s best-seller was published in 1973.

The topic for the 1974-75 school year was “Resolved: That the powers of the Presidency should be significantly curtailed.” This was remarkably similar to the resolution debated in my junior year (1968-69), but that one was limited to foreign policy. This topic was wide open. I suspected that the limitation afforded by the word “significantly” would be negligible.

A few things had changed significantly since my last debate round. Sixteen teams that did well at tournaments throughout the year received invitations to the National Debate Tournament before the district tournaments. Moreover, their schools were allowed to send their second team to districts. In addition, eight at-large bids were sent out after the district tournaments. I did not realize it at the time, but the total size of the field at NDT had also been increased from forty-four to fifty-two.

The primary purpose of the questioning is to establish areas of agreement, not to make the opponent squirm.

Formats of the debates themselves had also changed. Opponents were allowed three minutes of cross-questioning after each constructive speech. In my day high school tournaments had “cross-x”, but very few college tournaments did. Another significant change was that each team was allotted ten minutes of preparation time during the debate. In theory, debaters in my day took no prep time at all. When one speaker sat down, the next was expected to stand up and talk. However, some debaters took so long gathering their materials together to the extent that a few notorious teams were actually taking even more than ten minutes in total. The judges had no guidance as to how much leeway to allow. With the new rule the judges felt more comfortable ordering the timekeeper to start clocking the speech when the ten minutes of prep time were exhausted.

When the two three-minute periods of cross-x were taken into account, in 1974 and subsequent years each team had at least sixteen minutes in total to prepare speeches. What a change! If the debate was scheduled for a room near the library, the participants might have time to do a little research between speeches.

Within the first week I met all of the guys on the team. The district team the previous year had been Wayne Miller and Dan Gaunt. Mitch Chyette and Mike Kelly were ostensibly the second team, and Don Huprich and Paul Caghan rounded out the varsity. Two freshmen completed the team—Stewart Mandel and Tim Beyer. Mike was a senior, I think. Wayne, Dan, Mitch, and Paul were juniors. Don was a sophomore.

All these guys were from Michigan. They told me that there were quite a few other top debaters from the state who were going to school at Michigan. They knew about the team but did not want to debate. Unless one want to study agriculture or theology, U-M had the best reputation in the state. However, I suspect that the reputation of the debate program was much lower.

I also wondered how many good debaters from other states were hiding in the woodwork. There was no way to know. I would never feel right about trying to recruit anyone to participate in a program with such a paltry budget.

I met with the team. I told them who I was. I told them that I was committed to go to as many tournaments as possible within the constraints of the budget, and I was willing to drive my car. I said that we could only pay $5 per day for food; if anyone wanted more, he would need to buy it.

They were not at all daunted by the limitations. They were happy that U-M still had a program and excited about the new debating season and the fact that I was willing to spend a great deal of time helping anyone who wanted my attention. I did not know how much talent we had, but all of the guys had a good attitude.

1. Puca survived the trip to Michigan. He also survived the Michigan winters and the journey back to Connecticut. What’s left of him is hanging on a portable closet residing in our basement. Don’t ask me how he got there; I had nothing to do with it.

1966-1970 U-M: Lingo and Abbreviations

Posted on September 25, 2020 by Mike

Abbreviations & idiomatic terms. Continue reading →

1A: First affirmative speaker. Add C for constructive or R for rebuttal.

2A: Second affirmative speaker. Add C for constructive or R for rebuttal.

1N: First negative speaker. Add C for constructive or R for rebuttal.

2N: Second negative speaker. Add C for constructive or R for rebuttal.

AR: Allen Rumsey House.

Chihote (hee HO tay): A device consisting of surgical tubing and a kneepad for propelling water balloons great distances.

Co-ed: 1) n. female student. 2) adj. containing both male and female students. In this period no house was co-ed, but some dorms (e.g., South Quad) were.

Constructive: Ten-minute speech.

Drop: In debate, to miss or neglect an argument made by the other team.

Flowing: Taking notes (including planned responses to an opponent’s arguments) in a debate. The sheet(s) of paper is called a flow or flow sheet.

House: Smallest unit of dorms at Michigan. Quads had 6-10 houses.

IM: Intramural sports. At Michigan the competition was separated between frat houses and dorms.

MISL: Michigan Intercollegiate Speech League—all colleges in Michigan

NDT: National Debate Tournament held in March every year.

RA: Resident Adviser: one per floor in a dorm.

RD: Resident Director: one per house in a dorm.

Rebuttal: Five-minute speech for advancing, refuting, and summarizing arguments. No new arguments are allowed in the rebuttals.

Resolution: The topic being debated. The same resolution is debated all year. The ones for 1966-1970 were:
1966-1967 RESOLVED: “That the United States should substantially reduce its foreign policy commitments.”
1967-1968 RESOLVED: “That the federal government should guarantee a minimum annual cash income to all citizens.”
1968-1969 RESOLVED: “That executive control of United States foreign policy should be significantly curtailed.”
1969-1970 RESOLVED: “That the federal government should grant annually a specific percentage of its income tax revenue to the state governments.”

Spread: To present an inordinately large number of arguments, sometimes with the intention of dropping some later. If the opponent does not mention an argument, it can be claimed as valid by the team that made it. Spreading can be done by talking fast or using economy of language. The best debaters do both.

SQ: South Quad.

Topicality: The issue in a debate as to whether the affirmative’s plan is a legitimate interpretation of the debate resolution.

U-M: University of Michigan

WQ: West Quad.

1967 U-M Spring Semester

Posted on September 18, 2020 by Mike

A lot of debate. A little class time. Continue reading →

Debate: If you need a primer about intercollegiate debate in this era, you can find it here.

I learned that my partner, Lee Hess, was in ZBT, the Jewish fraternity. He had attended New Trier High in the Chicago area. He claimed that his father was a “cowboy”, by which he meant that he traded futures on livestock prices. Lee had contacts all over the country. He was the complete opposite of me, a stranger in every town save one.

One tournament that I remember rather vividly was at Northwestern. I am pretty sure that we unveiled the moon case there. We ended up with a 1-7 record. My recollection of that “1” is not clear. Maybe we won one affirmative, but I suspect that the moon case exploded on the launch pad.

Jeff chased down the judges of a few of our affirmative rounds to ask them whether we lost the debate on topicality or on one of the substantive issues. I don’t remember what the answer was. It was inconceivable that we would run such a squirrelly case at the district tournament in March. So, I think that we decided to put our effort into patching up the holes in the case¹ that Lee and his partner had run in the first semester. I don’t recall the specifics, but I know that I learned a lot.

The process of debating at the varsity level was a more striking change for me than the actual debates. In high school and in the first semester at U-M we rode to tournaments in cars and/or buses. We always ate at places that emphasized quantity per dollar rather than quality or exotic tastes. We stayed in roadside ma and pa motels or at second- or third-rate hotels.

Early in 1967 Lee and I flew to Boston with Jeff Sampson for the annual debate tournament at Harvard. I had only flown on planes a very few times. I cannot remember previous flights except the ones to and from KC for the holiday break between semesters, and those were both using the program prevalent in that era by which students could fly standby for half-price.

Our first supper on this trip was at the legendary Jimmy’s Harborside in Boston. The three of us took a taxi from Cambridge. I suspect that this was the first time that I had ridden in a taxi.

I know for sure that this was the first time that I had ever eaten lobster. Jeff and Lee pressured me to try it. It seemed to me at the time (and ever since) that it was pretty much a tasteless vehicle for delivering melted butter to one’s mouth. Also, an excessive amount of effort was required to extract the meat. I did get to wear a bib for the first time since I learned to walk.

I am not sure where Jeff stayed, but Lee and I stayed in the dorm at Harvard. It in no way reminded me of Allen Rumsey House. It was a suite; each student had his own bedroom. One or two of the residents were present; the others were still on some sort of break. Lee and I stayed in an empty suite that featured—get this!—a loft with an extra bed. I vaguely recall that one of the missing suite-mates was the son of a U.S. Senator.

On the second night Lee arranged for a young lady whom he already knew from somewhere to visit us in the dorm. Lee produced a couple of bottles of wine and fed Frank Zappa and Fugs albums to the record player. I made myself as scarce as I could without leaving the room—where would I go? Pretty soon Lee and she went up to the loft, where they stayed until morning.

At that point we had debated seven rounds, four on the negative and three on the affirmative. I had no way to judge how well we were doing, but we had faced some pretty good teams. Since the last six rounds were power-matched, that is usually a good sign. Our opponent was the University of Texas, a pretty good team.

The girl was gone when I woke up. Lee was a mess. If we had been on the negative, we probably would have just forfeited. As 1A, Lee just had to read the constructive speech. The rebuttal would definitely be difficult, but Lee was determined to give it a try. We removed a sentence or two from the 1AC, but he still could not quite finish what was left in ten minutes. Nevertheless, we were still in contention until Lee’s rebuttal, which was unspeakably bad. I tried to pull it out in the last rebuttal, but it was hopeless. For the first time in my life I mentally blamed my partner for losing a debate. I only did it one other time.

I am uncertain how important that debate was. Both teams were either 4-3 or 5-2 going into the debate. If we were 5-2, it probably cost us qualifying for the octafinals. If we were 4-3, it only kept us from having a winning record.

Jeff did not yell at Lee, at least not in my presence.

Mike Denger became an anti-trust lawyer. — Mike Denger became a prominent anti-trust lawyer.

I don’t remember when it happened, but at some point I got to watch Northwestern’s team of David Zarefsky and Mike Denger debate in an elimination round against Georgetown, another national power. I was very impressed with all four debaters, but especially Denger, who had won the NDT the year before. It gave me something to aspire to.

At least once Dr. Colburn drove us on a debate trip. He liked to stop at Win Schuler’s restaurant, an institution in Michigan. Their specialty was prime rib. It was pretty late, and the place was almost empty by the time that we were finishing supper. Dr. Colburn had ordered a yard of beer, in which he had made little progress. A guy at the next table was giving him a good-natured hard time about it. Somehow a wager was made as to whether Dr. Colburn could finish the whole yard. Dr. Colburn promised that if he couldn’t, he would stand on his chair and sing “The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi.” The other guy offered to stand on his chair and sing “God Bless America” if Dr. Colburn finished it. Dr. C., not that far removed from his fraternity days at Sigma Chi at the University of Indiana, had little difficulty, and the other fellow paid off. We all applauded his performance.

Dr. Colburn never considered asking Lee or me to drive us back to Ann Arbor, but we made it in one piece.

Lee and I went 4-4 at districts with twelve ballots out of twenty-four. We had ascended to mediocrity.

Classes: My recollection is that I attended nine or ten debate tournaments during the semester. We ordinarily left Wednesday afternoon or early on Thursday and returned late on Sunday. So, I missed a lot of classes.

I remember almost nothing about Math 196. I attended less than half the classes. I don’t remember the teacher at all. I kept up with the textbook by studying for a couple of hours per week early in the morning. I ended up with a B, which was something of a triumph considering how little effort I expended.

Russian was a big problem. I had no time to go to the Language Lab to improve my listening skills, which were negligible. Furthermore, I had missed so many classes that I had lost my ear for the language.

After acing the class in the first semester, I did very poorly on the midterm in the second. We were required to listen to a paragraph read by one of the teachers and then answer questions about it. The fact that I could not understand the reading and therefore could not answer the questions contributed to my panic on the grammar section of the test as well. I knew enough to do pretty well, but I choked.

I went to see the teacher. His desk was in the Frieze Building, right next to the desk of Mrs. Rado, my teacher from the fall semester. I explained to him about my attendance at the debate tournaments. He knew that I had done well in the first semester, but he was not too sympathetic about the way that I set my priorities. I did pretty well on the final. I was hoping for a B, but I only got a C.

My other big problem was Chemistry 106. I had taken 103 in the first semester; the continuation course was 105. My faculty adviser insisted that this was beneath me, and he signed me up for 106, the continuation class for 104. I never really got on track in this class. I scored an abysmal 38% on the midterm. Believe it or not, my score was only a little below average.

The worst part was that my labs were on Thursdays. After one of the few recitation session that I had attended, I approached my teacher, Ms. Koljenin, and told her that I had missed six chem labs. She denied that I had done so.

I patiently explained that because I represented the university at intercollegiate debate tournaments, I had indeed missed six labs. She asked me my name and looked it up in her grade book.

“You’ve missed six labs!” she exclaimed.

I asked her if I could make them up over the Easter break. She said that would be impossible. I then asked if the lab would be open. She affirmed that it would. Before she could say anything more, I asked if she would allow me to try to make up as many as I could over the break. She relented.

Most of the experiments involved identifying an unknown sample by performing various tests on it. I got my samples and made every effort to do all the experiments. However, I am really bad at this sort of thing. My samples would not cooperate. For example, if I was supposed to judge the color as yellow or green, it would appear brown. I did all six experiments, but if I got half of them right, I would be surprised.

I studied diligently for the final. I did much better than on the midterm. I got a C in the class. I was just happy that I would not need to take any more science classes.

Fortunately, my fourth class was Greek 101. No one else in the class had ever taken Greek. I had four semesters in high school with a very good teacher. In a class in the third week I was called on to read—in Greek—a few sentences that we had never seen. I did, with good pronunciation and very few pauses. I then translated them without any difficulty. The next day fully half of the students were missing from the class. In any case, I cruised to an A.

In sum, I got an A, a B, and two C’s. Not good, but not a catastrophe. I certainly did not want to explain a D to my parents, who were, after all, footing the bill.

I learned that semester that I needed to be more careful about selecting my classes. If my chem labs had been on Monday or Tuesday, I probably would have gotten a B in chemistry. If I had also insisted on taking 105 instead of 106, I might have gotten an A.

Although I enjoyed Russian a lot, I realized that I needed to avoid languages that required listening skills. They just required more time than I could afford to devote.

I also realized that I needed to avoid taking classes that required papers. I may have dodged a bullet by missing out on Great Books.

My phys ed class, which was held in Waterman Gymnasium, was in badminton. I learned very little from the instructor. He explained the rules and then basically let us play. One guy, who was an accomplished tennis player, was much better than anyone else. My recollection is that I was a distant second, but that might just be arrogance.

We had two tournaments. In the singles tournament I drew the tennis player in the first round, and he crushed me. However, in the doubles my partner and I did not face him until the finals. By picking on his hapless partner we actually gave them a pretty good game, but we lost.

Allen Rumsey House: Charlie Delos² and I shared room 315 for the second semester. We got along well enough that we planned to share a room for sophomore year as well.

By the second semester I knew everyone on the floor pretty well and most people in the house. The people who had pledged fraternities in the first semester were seldom seen in the second. They mostly hung around at their frat house.

At some point I learned how to juggle. So did quite a few other people, including Dave Zuk. I remember him practicing throwing three balls against the eastern wall in 314.

When we could not get four for bridge, we played hearts or spades. Paul Stoner was the worst hearts player ever. He was fascinated with “shooting the moon”—taking tricks containing all thirteen hearts and the queen of spades. Sometimes he would try for it even after one of the other players had taken a heart. This became known as a “Stoner run”.

On Friday nights the television set in the separate TV room was set to NBC to watch the back-to-back acronym shows, “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” and “T.H.E. Cat”. I wasn’t much invested in the latter, but a bunch of adventurous guys, including Dave Zuk, actively emulated the show’s hero, played by Robert Loggia. They got into various locked university buildings either through the network of tunnels that hey had mapped or by climbing the drain pipes to gain access through unlocked windows on higher floors. Unfortunately, one of these guys was seriously injured when a drain pipe came loose and he fell a few stories to the ground.

Incidentally, on these Friday nights the guys in the game room were usually watching an NHL game. I had no interest whatever in hockey. I was a big fan in general of many sports—I had religiously watched ABC’s Wide World of Sports as a kid. However, I could not follow the puck very well on the black & white television.

This changed after the first time that I saw Bobby Orr on the ice. Over the next three years I watched him as often as I could. If the Bruins were not on, I still had no interest in the sport.

AR held elections for all officers in the spring. Only students who were planning on returning to the dorm the next year were allowed to vote. I decided not to run for secretary. Instead I ran unopposed for the office of the editor of the house’s newsletter, Rumsey Rumors. I think that there had only been one issue all year, but I planned to take the job at least a little more seriously.

I am a little confused about who ran for president. If Ken Nelson was not the president during my freshman year, then he ran unopposed and won. At the time there was a rule that one could be president only for one year.

1. In his basement Lee recently found a typed copy of the constructive speech that he used when debating with me in the spring of 1967. It must have been the very speech that he read in that infamous eighth round at Harvard. It called for the U.S. to abandon the commitment to Taiwan (specifically to Chiang Kai-Shek), to recognize Communist China, and to terminate the trade embargo. I have no recollection of running this case. I must not have done much research.

2. I found this webpage devoted to Charlie Delos.

1970 Part 2: January-March: Debate

Posted on July 10, 2020 by Mike

1970’s debate tournaments. Continue reading →

In my last undergraduate semester at U-M I planned to spend a LOT of time on debate. This was my last chance to qualify for the National Debate Tournament, and I intended to make the most of it. This post has details about a few debates. If you need a primer on intercollegiate debate in 1966-1970, you can find it here.

I must describe our coaching staff in 1969-70. Bill Colburn was the Director of Forensics, but he no longer worked with the debaters or took trips. The Debate Director was Juddi (pronounced like Judy) Tappan, who was finishing her PhD. We had two excellent graduate assistants, Roger Conner, Mark Arnold’s partner in 1968-69 at Oberlin, and Cheryn Heinen, who had been a very good debater at Butler. Roger and Cheryn could probably have been a big help, but they were seldom allowed to go to big tournaments, and neither planned a career as a debate coach. Because the program had very few debaters, we hardly ever had practice rounds, and when we did, Juddi ran them. Cheryn did not work with us much.

Juddi’s major contribution was to insist that I reserve the last thirty seconds of my 2AR to summarize the case. She was big on style and polish. No one else did this in 1970; time was too precious. So, on the affirmative we always had less time to present and answer arguments than our opponents did.

We received valuable help from an extremely unexpected source. In my senior year Jimmie Trent was a professor in the speech department at Wayne State University. He had been a legendary debate coach at (of all places) Emporia, KS, and was universally credited with introducing the Plan-Advantages form of affirmative case, which by my time had almost completely replaced the traditional Need-Plan format.

Jimmie Trent died in 2013. I found no other photos.

Jimmie had a big impact on my thinking about the negative. I was almost always 1N, which meant that I attacked “the case,” the reasons for adopting the plan. One of my principal weapons was “inherency,” which challenged the affirmative team to prove that the “present system” was incapable of producing an equally desirable result. Jimmie argued that this was an unreasonable standard. In his (and eventually my) way of thinking, both teams must defend an approach. The negative’s approach could, of course, merely allow things to continue unchanged, but it could not keep changing its mind about what that entailed, i.e., “we could just …” I did not immediately change my tactics on the negative, but on the affirmative I always tried to pin down the other team.

On the negative Jimmie recommended that we try the Emory switch when we thought that we could get away with it. Previously I was 1N, and I attacked the case. The 2N attacked the plan, arguing that it would not achieve what the affirmative claimed and that it would cause severe problems. With the Emory switch the roles stayed the same, but my partner became 1N, and I became 2N. We attacked the plan first and then the case.

This had many advantages. More of the plan attacks were “canned,” which is to say that they were the same for many different plans and therefore written out in some detail. Having the extra time to prepare for attacking the case was more valuable than for attacking the plan. 2N got more time when he needed it most‐to rebuild his plan attacks after the affirmative had answered them.

Also, of course, it messed up the opponents’ strategy. Each of them was doing an unfamiliar task, and our approach also gave the 1AR only five minutes to rebuild their case and to deal with the defenses of the plan attacks. Finally, it let me give our last speech, and I was a little better at selling.

There is an obvious counter to the switch. The affirmative team can delay presenting its plan until the 2AC. One of Dartmouth’s teams tried this against us. However, the 1AC made no sense without the plan, and two or three minutes were still available when he finished. I had no trouble adapting. I just reverted to my old role as 1N, and the 2A, who had to present the plan in his constructive for the first time ever, had too little time to defend the case well.

A better approach, which we would have used if anyone had tried the switch against us, would be for the 2AC to present additional advantages of the plan after (or before) dealing with the plan attacks. Then, the 2AR can then drop some advantages and defend others.

We only lost one round all year when we switched. We met a pretty good team from Loyola of Baltimore at a tournament in Miami. They did not even try to defend their case in rebuttals. They only argued that our approach was unethical because it emphasized the “spread,” i.e., taking advantage of time limitations to present more arguments than the opponents could possibly answer. We had a very good set of answers to these arguments, but the judge voted against us on the ethics issue. The lesson we learned was to avoid the switch if the judge seemed too conservative. Loyola evidently knew the judge better than we did.

Our first trip in January of 1970 was the “East Coast Swing,” where we used the switch in every round except the one in which Dartmouth delayed presenting the plan. My partner, Bill Davey, and I were allowed to fly to Boston to participate in the tournaments at Boston College and Harvard. At BC we went 5-3 and narrowly missed qualifying for the elimination rounds. Because we did not have a long drive ahead of us, we decided to watch the octafinals. I watched Brown on the affirmative v. Southern Cal. Bill watched a different debate. One of the Brown debaters was visibly startled when he saw me enter the classroom and sit down. He nudged his partner and whispered something to him.

A few minutes later I found out why. Brown’s first affirmative constructive speech was word-for-word the same as ours! Evidently they had tape-recorded one of our rounds at some previous tournament and transcribed it. I have never heard of anyone—in the previous seven and a half years of debating or the subsequent six and a half years that I coached—doing anything like this. In disgust I stopped taking notes a few minutes into the speech.

Brown’s was a bad strategy. USC, which ran a similar case when they were on the affirmative, annihilated them. I was totally embarrassed that a team incompetently running our exact case qualified for the elims at this tournament, and we did not. I told Bill about it, but no one else.

In contrast, Harvard, which was the biggest tournament of the year, with over 100 teams in attendance, was our best tournament ever. In the prelims we were 7-1, losing only to Canisius on our affirmative. By the way we had an astoundingly good record on our negative all year. If we got to face Canisius in the elimination rounds, we would be “locked in” on our negative.

In the octafinals we faced an overmatched team from Boston College. We lost the coin flip (as usual; we only won one coin flip all year), and so we had to debate affirmative. It didn’t matter. All three judges voted for us.

The quarterfinal match against Oberlin was somewhat controversial. The Oberlin pair was Mark Arnold, whom I knew from our days in Kansas City, and freshman Paul Zarefsky, whose brother had been a champion debater at Northwestern, and he now coached there. We were affirmative again. The timekeeper was a debater on Canisius’s second team. We barely knew him, but he was friendly with our opponents.

The first two speeches delivered by Davey and Zarefsky were fairly routine. I was somewhere in the middle of my constructive when someone, I think it was Arnold, yelled out “Time.” The timekeeper was busy taking notes and had neglected to time my speech. He put up the 5 card, followed quickly by the 4. Arnold was sure that he gave me extra time. I thought that he cost me at least a little, and he certainly flustered me a little when 5 turned into 4 so fast.

Anyway, we won three of the five ballots. Oberlin had had a very good first semester, they had done well at BC, and Arnold was considered one of the best debaters in the country. He later coached at Harvard.

Dallas Perkins had a lot more hair and a few less pounds in 1970.

Our opponent in the semifinals was Georgetown, a perennial national powerhouse, represented by Dallas Perkins (who also later coached at Harvard) and Howard Beales. Once again we lost the coin flip. I thought that we debated pretty well, but all five judges, including Laurence Tribe, voted for Georgetown. I will always think that if we had won that coin flip, we would have won the tournament, but who knows?

Still, it was our best tournament ever, and I was the #5 speaker out of the 200+ who attended. Dartmouth also had a tournament, but we did not attend.

When I called Bill Colburn to pick us up at Metro Airport, I told him that we had dropped eight ballots at Harvard. He just said “Really?”, and I replied, “Yes, but the good news is that seven of them were in the quarters and semifinals.”

Hank Stram & the Chiefs matriculated up and down the field.

I remember riding home from a bitterly cold tournament on January 11. I was sitting shotgun and therefore had control of the radio. I found a CBS station, and we listened to the surprisingly calm voices of Bob Reynolds and Tom Hedrick. It was near the end of Super Bowl IV, and the Chiefs seemed to be running out the clock. The Vikings were thirteen-point favoritess, and so we all assumed that the Chiefs had just given up. Au contraire, mon frère! KC had pounded Minnesota 23-7. I knew that my dad and all my friends in KC would be ecstatic.

Juddi made all of the decisions about pairing and scheduling. Two of her decisions puzzled me. The first was to have me debate with sophomore Mike Hartmann at the most important tournament in the district at Northwestern. Mike was a really good debater, and Juddi must have wanted to give him some incentive for the next year. That’s fine, but we had never debated together, and he did not know our case. I would not have minded too much if it was another tournament, but Northwestern was perhaps the most important tournament of the year.

Mike and I won all of our negative rounds and two of the four affirmatives. One of the losses was to a good team. The other was to the worst team in the tournament from Northeastern Illinois University, which I had never heard of. Their record in the tournament was 1-7. The judge, whom I had never before seen, gave both Mike and me higher speaker points than either of the NEIU debaters (although considerably less than we received in any other round). However, he gave NEIU their only victory of the tournament. The text on the ballot was short and bitter: “I just can’t vote for this case.”

Sixteen teams qualified for the elims. We were seventeenth. You know what they say about horseshoes and hand grenades.

I think that 1970 was also the year that Bill and I flew to the tournament at the University of Miami. I remember that it was 70° warmer when we exited the plane than when we boarde. I also remember that right in the center of the campus was a huge swimming pool. The diving team was practicing when we were there. The centerpiece of the Michigan campus is the graduate library.

It was not a great tournament. My recollection is that the elimination rounds started at the quarterfinals, and we missed on speaker points. This was very annoying for a number of reasons. The first was that we lost a negative round on ethics, the only time that we lost when we switched and one of only a handful of negative losses all year.

The other annoying thing occurred against a weak team. The judge was a Miami debater who had graduated the year before. He came up to me before the round and told me that he knew the debate was a mismatch. He demonstrated a little sideways wave with his hand as he said something like “If I do this, cut it short. There’s no reason to prolong the agony.” I ended up cutting at least a minute or two off of my constructive, and I jettisoned the thirty-second summary in my rebuttal. We did win, but he gave us speaker points that were well below our average.

The third annoyance was that we had wasted time and money on this second-rate tournament. I don’t remember any more details about where we went and how we did.

Districts:I need to mention that Juddi and Jimmie tried for a while to keep their torrid relationship secret, but nearly everyone surely knew about it. At some point during the year they got married, and Jimmie tendered his resignation at Wayne State to become chairman of the speech department at Miami of Ohio. Juddi decided that she might be a political liability for us. She decided not to go to districts.

We had to supply two judges. Roger and Cheryn were chosen. This was fine with us, but it did not erase the last few months.

1970 was the first year that I seriously prepared for the district tournament. Roger worked with us quite a bit. We prepared by sprucing up our affirmative case to appeal to a more conservative audience and by working on how our arguments would work without the switch. We were too afraid of political consequences to pull the switch at districts. The only round that we had lost with the switch we had lost on ethics. We could certainly expect arguments like those in every round. Some judges might vote against us on general principles even if the negative did not make the arguments.

Some words of explanation about the District 5 qualifying tournament for the NDT are in order. The district was composed of four states‐Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. The national committee also invited seven additional pairs that did not qualify.

Northwestern was always a national power. Its coach, David Zarefsky, left his top team, Gunderson and Strange, at home because he was confident that they would receive an invitation to the NDT, and he was right. Northwestern sent its second team, Sitzma and Welch, to the district tournament. This was a break for us. We had beaten Sitzma and Welch all three times that we had met them during the year.

The district committee evaluated all the twenty-four teams in attendance. Six were rated A, six B, six C, and six D. Everyone debated two from each group.

Maybe we were not mentally in gear. Roger had tried to teach us to yodel, which he claimed was the best way to warm up. At any rate we lost the first round on our affirmative to a C team from Indiana State. Both Bill and I were just off. I thought that we had won, but I can understand why a judge could vote against us.

Then we met two pretty good teams—Hample and Sproule from Ohio State on our affirmative and Sitzma and Welch on our negative. We mopped the floor with both of them, and they knew it. It turned out that they were our two A teams. This kind of surprised me.

The next three rounds seemed uneventful. The seventh round was on Saturday evening. We faced an obnoxious guy named Greg Rigo from Ohio University on our negative. I don’t remember his partner’s name. They were a mediocre team with a very standard case. We debated fairly well and pretty much pounded them.

Two of the judges had familiar faces. The third one, who voted against us, was someone whom I had never seen. He came from one of the very weak schools. This sometimes happens, as it did to Mike and me at Northwestern.

One of the familiar judges voted for us and wrote that it was not close. The other judge, George Ziegelmueller, was the long-time Director of Forensics at Wayne State in Detroit. In my four years at U-M he had NEVER voted for any of our teams. His ballot in this debate was incomprehensible.

When I started debating in 1966, Wayne State was a highly ranked national power. The team of Kathy McDonald and Don Ritzenheim had narrowly lost in the final round of the NDT two years in a row. By 1970 they were just another mid-level team. I am not sure what happened to them, but it must have frustrated George.

Needless to say the Jimmie-Juddi business probably did not sit well with George. A faculty member at his school, who had probably never helped coach any of his debaters, was giving valuable tactical advice to a rival school! This just was not done.

I worked for George for three and a half years in the late seventies. I never brought this up, and neither did he. In those years I confirmed my impression that George was not considered a good judge. His note-taking was weak, and he tended to get fixated on one aspect of the debate, even if the debaters did not emphasize it.

The eighth and final round was on Sunday morning. Unbeknownst to us Juddi had shown up for the coaches’ cocktail party on Saturday night. I am sure that she pumped everyone with whom she was on speaking terms for information. Outside the room of our last debate she showed up with a huge grin on her face. She told us that we were doing very well, but we shouldn’t be too overconfident We had also heard a lot of buzz in the hallways that we had blasted everyone on our schedule.

At any rate in the last round we were on the affirmative against a so-so team from Illinois State. Both Bill and I were superb. We obliterated them. I had absolutely no doubt that we picked up all three ballots. In fact, one of the judges, David Angell from Albion College awarded me a perfect score of 30 and wrote on the ballot that it was the best performance that he had ever seen.

All the debaters, coaches, and hangers-on assembled for the announcement of the five qualifying pairs. Juddi was all excited when we told her that the last debate was by far our best.

Next came the assembly. Five teams would qualify for NDT. It took them at least half an hour to process the ballots. The district chairman finally came out and began, “There was one team that was 6-2 but …”

I swear the following is true: I screamed out “Oh no!” and buried my head in my arms on the desk in front of me. Everyone looked at me as he continued, “unfortunately had too few ballots to qualify. So, let’s have a hand for the University of Michigan, 6-2 with fourteen ballots.”

We lost ten ballots, five of them on the negative. We had only lost one negative ballot in the second semester, and that was on ethics. We lost that first affirmative debate 3-0. OK, I can live with that. We beat both of our A teams and our B teams. We kept both Ohio State and Northwestern from qualifying. The critical round, though, was clearly the seventh. There was no way that we lost that debate. However, we also somehow lost three other ballots on our negative. This just never happened that year.

In retrospect I think that we should have somehow made it clear to the other schools that we would definitely not be using the Emory switch at districts. The other 23 teams that were going to districts probably wasted many hours trying to figure out how to adapt to our tactic. This could have irritated a lot of people.

We submitted an application for a post-bid, but I knew we wouldn’t get it. The district recommended the two Northwestern teams and Ohio State in a tie for first. They recommended us, but as their fourth choice. They thought we were only the ninth best team in the district! NDT only gave seven post-district bids altogether. The other three from our district all got bids. Once again we got the shaft.

Our performance at Harvard earned us an invitation to the Tournament of Champions. Juddi encouraged us to go, but I could see no point to it.

Thus ended my debate career. Was I bitter? Yes. I only had one goal, and I would never get another chance to achieve it.

Bill Davey made it to the quarterfinals of NDT in 1971. He is a professor at the University of Illinois. His very impressive biography page is here.

In 1972 Mike Hartmann also made it to the quarterfinals of NDT. He is a lawyer. His webpage at the firm of Miller Canfield is here.

Wavablog

Memoirs, bridge, popes, travel, and other stuff

Tag Archives: National Debate Tournament

1974 August-September: Transition to Ann Arbor

1966-1970 U-M: Lingo and Abbreviations

1967 U-M Spring Semester

1970 Part 2: January-March: Debate