All of the famous people that I can remember spotting on my trips were on airplanes or in airports. I probably saw others that I either did not recognize or have forgotten about. After all I spent a lot of … Continue reading →
All of the famous people that I can remember spotting on my trips were on airplanes or in airports. I probably saw others that I either did not recognize or have forgotten about. After all I spent a lot of time in New York City, and I went to Robinsons-May in North Hollywood at least half a dozen times.
Sports celebrities: Once in a while I would recognize a famous person in an airport or on a plane. I only talked to two of them, and both conversations were very brief. Most of the celebrities were from the world of sports, or at least “sports entertainment”. Three of them were from ESPN, which is based in Bristol, CT. ESPN’s announcers flew out of Bradley International, the airport in Windsor Locks that I always used.
Jackie Joyner-Kersee was a passenger on one of my flights back to Hartford. She sat in coach. A few people recognized her. She had won three gold, one silver, and two bronze medals at four separate Olympic Games. Her events were the heptathlon and the long jump. Sports Illustrated for Women magazine voted her the Greatest Female Athlete of All-Time.
She was also a star basketball player at UCLA. In 2001 she was voted the greatest female collegiate athlete of the previous twenty-five years.
My recollection is that JJK was in the Hartford area for a charity event. I read about it in the Hartford Courant the next day.
On one of my trips (I think that it might have been on a side trip to visit my parents in Kansas City), I rode on the same plane twice in a row with the same person. That is, my first flight was from BDL to an airline’s hub airport and then from there to my destination. The person who was also on both flights was Chris “Boomer” Berman, a long-time studio host on ESPN.
I had seen Boomer on television many times. My favorite bit was when he adopted his “Swami” persona to give his predictions for NFL games.
I only saw Boomer getting on and off of the airplane. On both legs of our common journey he sat in first class while I was relegated to coach.
My all-time greatest thrill in sports viewing was when Desmond made this spectacular catch against Notre Dame.
I never purchased first class tickets, but because I flew so much, I occasionally was was upgraded. I almost never recognized anyone else in the comfortable seats. Once, however, I sat in first class with a famous sports personality. In fact, I sat right next to Desmond Howard, who was working at ESPN at the time, on a flight that terminated at Bradley. I was in the window seat; he had the aisle seat.
It took me a couple of minutes to recognize him. He did not look like a football player at all. He was only 5’10” and weighed much less than 200 pounds. His most recognizable feature was his broad smile. He had a portable DVD player with him. I was engrossed in a crossword puzzle or a magazine article or something. I had a strong feeling that I was sitting beside someone whom I had seen on television somewhere, but it was not until Desmond smiled at the flight attendant that I recognized him as the 1991 Heisman Trophy winner from my alma mater, the University of Michigan.
When we landed, Desmond quickly rose to exit. I noticed that he had left his DVD player in the magazine storage area on the rear of the seat in front of him. I retrieved it and gave it to him as he was waiting for the exit door to open. He gave me a big smile and thanked me.
The other ESPN personality whom I recognized was Jim Donnan1, the former head football coach at the University of Georgia. I enjoyed his commentary on college football teams before the games were televised. He was always seated behind a desk.
Donnan was the only “personality” whom I approached in an airport. He was dressed in a suit, but he also wore white sneakers. I asked him if he changed his shoes when he went on camera. He said that he wore the sneakers because dress shoes made his feet hurt, and they never showed his feet on camera.
In my experience celebrities generally flew in first class. It was therefore extremely surprising for me to sit across the aisle from Vin Baker2 on a flight back to Hartford. It was not a shock that he was going to Hartford. After all, he was by far the most famous person who ever played basketball at the University of Hartford. What was surprising was that he and his entourage were seated in the coach section. I had trouble finding a place to put my legs, and Vin Baker was 6’11” tall!
I don’t recall whether Baker was still playing in the NBA when he made this trip. His last year was 2006. So, I suspect that he was still playing.
On another occasion I sat next to another large man. This guy I did not immediately recognize, but I could tell from the papers that he was reading and annotating that he was on a recruiting trip as a coach for the University of Oklahoma football team. When I got home I used google to retrieve a list of the Sooners’ coaches. I quickly recognized Kevin Sumlin as the person whom I had sat beside. At the time he was the tight ends coach for Bob Stoops at OU.
In 2008 Sumlin was named the head coach at the University of Houston. He led the team to a 12-1 record and an appearance in a bowl game in 2011. Before that game he accepted the top job at Texas A&M.
In his first year at A&M the Aggies, with Johnny Manziel at quarterback, went 11-2 and beat Oklahoma in the Cotton Bowl. After that his teams, first at A&M and then at Arizona, seemed to get worse every year. His last game as a head coach was an ignominious 70-7 loss to Arizona State in 2020.
The other sports figure whom I recognized on an airplane was more famous than any of the others so far listed. I saved him for last because I only saw him for a few seconds. Also, he was only a “sports entertainment” star.
Many people know of two characters named Steve Austin—the Six Million Dollar Man and Stone Cold. I saw the second one on a flight from Birmingham, AL, to Atlanta. He was sitting in seat 1B, and he had a very large bandage on one of his knees. He apparently boarded early, which meant that absolutely everyone on the plane walked by him. I recognized him immediately, but I didn’t say anything. I assumed that he had received medical attention at one of the sports medicine centers in Birmingham.
I was quite familiar with a third Steve Austin, Stunning Steve Austin, a lithe young wrestler whom I had seen many times on televised WCW performances from Texas. At the time Stunning Steve had long blonde hair, was skinny for a wrestler, and was usually cast as a good guy. His finishing move was called the stunner. Unlike Stone Cold, he was well known for his speed and agility. Also, he never wore armor on his knees or crushed beer cans.
It was hard to fathom, but he was the same guy who later grew into the legendary Stone Cold Steve Austin.
Other celebrities: I saw two fairly famous political figures on airplanes. The first was my congresswoman, Nancy Johnson. One evening we were on the same flight from Washington National to Bradley. I was somewhat surprised by how short she was.
I don’t remember the other person’s name or even what his position was. My recollection was that he was head of the EPA, but I cannot find him on the list of administrators. I can picture him very clearly in my mind and even hear his voice.
Isn’t Joey’s cap dreamy?
On another trip to Hartford in 1999 or 2000 the first class section was largely populated by vivacious young men who were obviously neither salesmen nor investment bankers. They were, in fact, the boy band NSYNC, and at the time they were extremely popular with the teeny bopper set.
Halfway through the flight one of them, Joey Fatone, came back to the coach section and got down on one knee to talk with an elderly couple that was seated right behind me. They were evidently his grandparents.
My recollection is that NSYNC was going to some venue in the Hartford area to give a surprise performance. I don’t think that this gig was part of one of their tours. It might have even been a private gathering. There were no screaming girls waiting for them at the airport.
I did not see many people in wheelchairs in airports, and of that small number only one (to the best of my recollection) was traveling alone. I recognized him immediately as John Hockenberry. He has been on many shows on public TV. I saw him shopping at one of the stores at the Kansas City airport (KCI).
Seeing him made me wonder what he would do if he got hungry. The food concessions at KCI are on the second floor above the stores. Maybe there was an elevator he could use, but I don’t remember seeing one.
The other person of note whom I saw in my travels was not famous in her own right. The woman sitting next to me on a flight told me that her husband, Bill Haast, had held the record for being bit by a poisonous snake the most times. He was often flown to donate blood to bite victims because he had developed immunity to many varieties of snakes.
I had never heard of Bill Haast. When I looked him up I discovered that he was even more amazing than his wife’s depiction of him. His Wikipedia page is here.
He died in 2011 at the age of 100.
1. Jim Donnan seemed to disappear from ESPN early in the teens. I recently learned that in 2011 a Ponzi scheme in which he was a partner collapsed. His partner pleaded guilty, but Donnan was acquitted on all 41 counts in 2014. The government apparently could not prove that he knew about the fraud. Donnan took a job at the American Sports Network in 2014.
2. In 2021 Vin Baker is an assistant coach with the Milwaukee Bucks. His path has been a rocky one. A Los Angeles Times article with the details has been posted here.
May Co. department stores based in North Hollywood, CA. Continue reading →
Robinsons-May was a chain of departments stores owned by the May Company. Its headquarters was in North Hollywood, CA. Most of its stores were in southern California, but eventually the advertising department in NoHo bought space and time for stores with various logos throughout the western states.
Rob-May’s headquarters was in the upper floors of this department store. It had the largest parking lot I had ever seen for one store, much more than needed.
TSI never pitched the AdDept system to the store’s advertising department. In 1996 the May Company decided to install AdDept in the department store divisions that were not already using it—Robinsons-May, Meier & Frank, Kaufmann’s, and Filene’s.These installations were quite different from the other systems that TSI had installed at May Co. divisions. They began with three days of rather intense sessions in TSI’s office in Enfield while the hardware was on order from IBM. We were teaching them about the system design of AdDept, and they were informing us about their policies and expectations for the system.
I later learned that the Northridge earthquake of 1994 had demolished the rest of the 25-acre Laurel Plaza, but Rob-May’s headquarters survived.
Previous May Co. installations had begun with a site visit in which I had learned about each department’s business procedures and priorities. TSI then presented a formal proposal for the base system and any custom code that I thought was needed. Only after the system had been delivered and installed did we provide training, and it always took place at the company’s location.
At some point in 1998 a group of people from Rob-May visited TSI’s office for orientation and training. Those sessions were also attended by people who would be involved with the installation at Meier & Frank (described here). Robert Myers, with whom we worked in the AdDept installation in the advertising department of the Foley’s division (described here), also was there to provide the perspective of a user of the system.
I found several photos that I snapped on the occasion of their visit as well as a dozen or so that I took in California. I also found text files containing notes from 1999-2003 that helped me remember some of the details of the installation and other happenings in my trips to southern California.
Rob-May’s training visit at TSI: The training sessions were held in what was ordinarily my office. All of my stuff was moved out. Everyone sat around tables, one of which I ordinarily used for a desk. Training booklets were provided for everyone. The photo to the lett was of one of the first sessions, in which Sandy Sant’Angelo (pink shirt on the right) showed the visitors how to sign on to the AS/400 and how the AdDept screens basically worked. Yes, we were still using “green screens”. We occasionally fielded complaints about them, but seldom from the people who actually used them.
The photo on the right was taken after one of the training days in Enfield. On the last evening we all went to the Mill on the River restaurant, but I think that this photo might have been taken at a different place.
Robert Myers was seated next to me. In the photo he is on the far right. The other two people on his side of the table were Rusty Hansen1, the Planning Manager in the Rob-May advertising department and Beverly Curtis-Frethy2, the Controller. Across from Rusty was Doug Pease, TSI’s VP of Marketing. I don’t recall the name of the fellow across from Beverly. He might have been in charge of the department’s network. The other three people in the photo were from M&F.
Rusty Hansen was our primary liaison with Rob-May in the critical first few years.
The installation trip: The first of many enjoyable trips to Rob-May occurred a few weeks after the training session in Enfield. Doug and I flew to Los Angeles. from Hartford. We probably changed planes in Chicago. In those days I liked to fly on American Airlines because I could get frequent flyer miles both from the airline and from Avis for rental cars.
On those early trips I usually stayed at the Beverly Garland Holiday Inn3 in the Studio City neighborhood of North Hollywood, but I am pretty certain that Doug and I were advised to stay at the Sheraton in Studio City on the first trip to set up the AdDept system. I found a photo that I took of its entrnce
Robert was also present for at least part of this to provide another user’s perspective and to assist where he could. .
Rob-May treated us to meals with key employees more than once on that first trip and at least once on every subsequent trip. The smiling guy on the right across from Beverly (red coat) was Mario, the Direct Mail Manager. His last name was nowhere in my notes.
The main purpose of the visit was to install the AdDept software in the AS/400 that IBM had delivered. I did all of that myself. The secondary purpose was to make sure that a regimen had been set up whereby the tables that the system needed—newspapers and other vendors, selling departments, the organizational structure for the merchandise, employees, etc. I also needed to show Rusty how to set up user profiles both for the AS/400 and for AdDept and how to deal with the printers and errors reported by the system. Finally Doug and I needed to talk to the managers of the various areas of the advertising department to try to discover special needs and any procedures that were unique to Rob-May. For example, invoices from the Los Angeles Times were recorded in a general ledger account that was different from the one used for all of the other newspapers.
Beverly, Karen, and Robert at Karen’s favorite restaurant in Beverly Hills. Where was Doug?
Finally, and perhaps, most importantly, we got to meet Karen Jones, the Advertising Director. She provided us with insight as to the department’s highest priorities. Karen and I hit it off very well right from the start. She was (unduly) impressed by an analogy that I made: “Memory is to disk as electricity is to magnetism. If you lose power, the system loses what is in memory but retains what is stored magnetically on the disk.”
In retrospect this does not seem like a great pickup line to me, but she definitely became enamored of me and treated me royally whenever I visited Rob-May. I once casually mentioned to some employees at Rob-May that “Karen Jones loves me.” Everyone agreed. I did not think that we made good headway in the first year or two, but Karen always seemed to think that I could do anything.
Sonia.
My goal from the first trip was for the software for one of the media (newspaper, direct mail, or broadcast) produce something useful. It was very important that the system not be regarded as on that they fed a lot of information but got little in return.
As I usually did, I concentrated on printing a schedule for their newspaper advertising and the faxing to some papers of a set of insertion orders. To that end I worked closely with Sonia Ban. I think that there was still work needed on the schedule when I left, but we did manage to send some faxed insertion orders to newspapers, and they were impressed by that.
My home for the week.
View from the courtyard of the BG Hotel.
The new system: For various reasons the people in the IT Department of the May Co. decided that Rob-May’s system should be upgraded in 1999. The original system had been purchased from and installed by IBM. The new system was a model 270, and it was purchased from Savoir Technology Group, a company that was authorized to sell IBM midrange systems. I flew out to Robinsons-May to complete the process by installing the AdDept software on the 270 and migrating the data.
I still have the notes that I sent back to TSI about this trip. At the time American Airlines had a direct flight from Bradley International to LAX. I flew out on a Sunday morning and arrived early enough (gaining three hours) that I could pick up my rental car at Avis, drive to Malibu, the home of my icon, Jim Rockford, and spend some time at the beach.
I went to Topanga State Beach, which is in Malibu. It was pretty nice but cool. I don’t think that it even reached 80 degrees today, and there was a fairly strong breeze from the north. I made a little camp. I lay on my beach towel, listened to my CD’s, finished my Ethan Coen book4, and watched the surfers and the rest of the California scenery. I took a long walk all the way up and down the beach. I got a lot of sun. I think I am as dark now as my last day in Hawaii5. If I had stayed any longer, I would have been sunburned.
I think this was the first time since Hawaii that I have just goofed off during the day for more than an hour.
Incidentally, Malibu is where Jim Rockford parked his trailer on the beach. The Rockford Files is by far my favorite TV show ever. I looked for the trailer, but I didn’t find it6.
Valley Village Park is the green area in the middle. NoHo West is the new name of Laurel Plaza. I usually drove on the 101. The exit went right into Rob-May’s parking lot.
What I discovered on Monday did not meet my expectations. I had started the day at dawn by driving my rental car from the Beverly Garland Hotel to the park that was halfway to Rob-May to get my five mile run in. Then I returned to the hotel, showered, got dressed, ate breakfast, and drove to Rob-May. The following excerpt provides a glimpse into what it was like to be a cowboy coder at the turn of the century.
I expected the system to be set up and the TCP/IP connection established. I figured that I would install AdDept and BASIC. I would also migrate the user profiles and the data libraries from the old box. Instead, I found that the system was still in the box. I had to set it up using the instructions in the box. This went OK. However, when I got to the point at which I had to do a system save, it balked and said that QGPL and QUSRSYS were not installed. I had Rusty look through his boxes to see if he had system software. He did. I spent many hours installing the operating system and PTF’s. I kicked off the system save just before I left.
I don’t suppose there is any great harm. Everyone will have to use the old system tomorrow. Their connectivity consultant is coming in tomorrow. I hope he will be able to tell me how to do the TCP/IP connection.
Keep in mind that I was not (and am not) an engineer. Far from it. I am not good at this type of thing. I am good at designing systems and writing code. Things were still FUBB on Wednesday evening, when I wrote the following.
The problems we had here were cabling. They decided to run the new system on Ethernet rather than Token Ring, which meant that they had to change the hub into which they were plugged. The IT guy had no empty sockets. He unplugged something he thought was unimportant. It brought down the e-mail system. Before he found this out he was out putting out a fire somewhere else. People had a hard time chasing him down.
I don’t know if I got blamed by anyone for the company’s lack of email that day, but it would not surprise me. The dispatch I sent on Friday at least contained some good news.
Yesterday went much better. Their new system is now almost completely functional. I still spent most of the time putting out small fires. I ran CMPPFM last night for every member of QBASSRC to see if I can find any more changes that the black box was missing. Robinson’s new system is incredibly fast. Reports that took over half an hour run in one minute.
I figured out how to copy the system directory entries over to the new box. I had to copy a bunch of files from QUSRSYS that start with QAOKP.
I copied ADDEPT, QGPL, and QUSRSYS from the old machine to the new one and named them ADDEPTOLD, OLDQGPL, and OLDQUSRSYS. Last night I ran the source comparison program on QBASSRC in ADDEPT. I printed out the differences and was surprised at how many there were. I then realized that the old box was a week ahead of the 150 at TSI. I thought for sure that I checked this. I created a change library but there was no time to install it. I will have to do it after hours. This cut down on the number of differences, but there is still be a pretty good number. There must be a flaw in my updating routine.
By Thursday evening Rob-May had successfully used the system for one full day. I left fairly confident that the people in TSI’s office could deal with any remaining glitches. However, one of the last notes that I sent back to the office was prescient.
These guys need a lot of training. Most of them do not know what an error is and what to do about it. Rusty just kind of lets them go on their own, even the ones that he works with.
I flew back on Friday. It was an excruciating experience. Seven and a half hours after I left the hotel I was still in LAX! I wrote the following when we had finally boarded.
LAX, which is my least favorite airport in the country, was playing some kind of shrieking sound over the intercom the last 20 minutes that we were there. I was afraid I would miss an announcement, so I had put my CD player and headphones away. A couple to my left has not one but two babies. They paid for two tickets, but were using two rows! After they made us get off7, the situation became so ridiculous that I took it easier. This lasted until about ten minutes ago when the stewardess whacked my elbow, which was not sticking out at all. At the time it was about 40 degrees in the cabin. After takeoff it went up to about 90. Now it is dropping again.
The new team: The turn of the century brought a lot of changeover among the employees at Rob-May with whom TSI dealt. My notes said that when I came to install the new box, Karen Elmo had been replaced by Heidi Houghton. I have a vague recollection of Karen Elmo, but none of Heidi. The notes also report that I worked with the Co-op Coordinator, Doyle O’Dell, who asked for a report of committed co-op v. actual. I was able to show report #DM594 to him. I took a photo of him; he evidently was happy with the report.
Mary Ng at Rob-May.
The biggest changes happened in 2000. Rusty Hansen was replaced by Mary Ng8, and Beverly Curtis Fethy’s replacement was Steve Ornee9. Mary was the new liaison with TSI, and we worked closely together for several years. Chad Sesser’s title was Newspaper Analyst. He reported to Karen Jones.
The notes that I have from the three-day trip in October of 2000 show that Mary was very direct about what she wanted from AdDept.
Direct mail was on the menu for lunch in the Rob-May cafeteria with (I think) Kyle Levine11, Mary, and Dan Rothbauer12, the Direct Mail Manager.
Mary said that their objectives are to do all of direct mail on AdDept, to pay all invoices on AdDept and to upload them to CAPS10, to use AdDept for closing, and to use AdDept for planning. This was way too much to cover in three days. Even with three days I was barely able to gather enough information to put together a game plan.
They wanted to know which division they should visit if they wanted to see how to use AdDept for direct mail. I recommended Kaufmann’s. Lord & Taylor uses AdDept extensively for direct mail, but they do not use our cost accounting for closing of direct mail.
Chad is on the left. I don’t remember the fellow with whom he was talking.
I also spent quite a bit of time with Chad Sesser. He told us that he had already downloaded sales from the mainframe at least once. He did not remember how he had done it, but he knew the name of the person in their Information Services department who had helped him.
On the last evening Karen Jones again sprang for supper at the restaurant in Beverly Hills. I might have gotten lost crossing the hills; I distinctly remember that I did on one occasion.
At the restaurant I noticed a blonde woman who was much more buxom than Ellie Mae Clampett. She was sitting with some other people a few tables away from the group from Rob-May. The most astounding thing to me was that for all of the time that we were there—which must have been at least ninety minutes—she was talking on her cellphone while paying scant attention to anyone at her table.
I should mention that I did not have a cellphone in 2003, and the people who talked on them loudly in airports bothered me a lot. I could not imagine anyone answering a phone in a restaurant, much less talking for an extended period. It seemed unimaginably rude to me, but I realized that I was partaking of a totally different culture in Milburn Drysdale’s town.
The projects: TSI did quite a bit of custom coding for Robinsons-May. We also helped them to integrate the data from M&F when the responsibility for managing the stores previously in that division was transferred to North Hollywood. Fortunately, their 270 was easily up to this task. I did not need to travel to California to install another upgrade.
Rob-May had two types of ads that I had never heard of: TMC’s and PWP’s. TMC stands for “total market coverage”. On certain days of the week or on special occasions some newspapers delivered a greatly reduced version of their paper to all households in an area that did not subscribe to the paper. If the same ad (ROP or insert) was run in the regular edition and this reduced edition, it had a higher rate because more eyeballs would see it.
I don’t remember what a PWP was, but I think that the concept was similar. Newspapers were desperate to retain the same level of revenue even as their circulations shrank in the twenty-first century.
My first visit to Rob-May after Mary Ng’s arrival triggered a very large number of fixes (changed for free) and requests for changes (quoted). This was definitely good news in that they were finally interested in taking full advantage of the system. On the other hand, it meant more pressure on the programming staff to produce what Rob-May—and other clients—needed in a reasonable amount of time.
The programming that was most valuable from TSI’s perspective was constructing an interface with another system. In some cases AdDept was the sending system; in others it was the receiver. Our expense invoice entry and claims system had the ability to feed the corresponding corporate accounting system (CAPS). Several changes had to be made to this module to accommodate peculiarities at Rob-May.
Our sales analysis and productivity programs used tables that were fed by the corporate sales system. Most of the May Co. divisions used the same ad agency (Doner) for broadcast. The agency sent a file to Rob-May. The departmental employees ran a program that TSI provided to update the broadcast section of the schedule in AdDept.
The last item on my notes from the trip in April of 2003 reported:
I spent ten minutes talking with Chad, Bobby McIntosh14, and the QPS programmer about the interface that they want to create. Nothing came of it.
Chad said that he will write up the details of what they would like the QPS interface to do. We can then quote it. The problem that he could not handle with query is how to treat sections. QPS has a job for each page, but the media schedule is on the book.
Bobby McIntosh was the Manager of Advertising Systems. The advertising production area used the Quark Publishing System (QPS) to manage the workflow of some of their direct mail catalogs and newspaper ads. I do not remember this meeting described above at all. If we were to undertake an interface like this, it would have been a massive job that would have taken at least several months. Therefore, I don’t think that we ever got to the point quoting construction of the interface.
My adventures in southern California: North Hollywood is best known for the unbelievable attempted bank robbery in 1997 at a Bank of America branch that was only a mile or so north of the Rob-May headquarters. The two robbers wore home-made body armor and bore much better weapons than the police. Foiled in their escape, they shot it out with the lawmen for an extended period of time. They were eventually killed, but not before the two sides discharged roughly two thousand bullets. Twelve police officers and eight civilians were wounded, but no one besides the perpetrators died.
A slightly fictionalized made-for-TV movie about the incident aired in 2003. No one from Rob-May ever mentioned it in my presence. If I had not seen the movie, I probably never would have known about it.
The LAPD Museum has an exhibit that features the perpetrators, their weapons, and their body armor. Because it was not opened until 2007, I never went there. By then Macy’s had taken over the May Co., and Rob-May was no longer a client.
OK, there was a little fire damage.
The most interesting thing that I saw in North Hollywood was an apartment building that had a large sign on it offering “Free Rent”. I took a photo of it from my rental car.
At the time TSI was actively looking for a new site for our office. I sent an email to Denise Bessette, who ran the office when I was out of town, about it. I suggested that we move our operation to North Hollywood in order to take advantage of this opportunity. If we had rented a handful of apartments, we would have had plenty of room to grow our business. For some reason she did not urge me to sign a $0 lease while I was in the vicinity.
One evening I decided to take a drive into Hollywood itself. I arrived at the corner of North Highland Ave. and Hollywood Blvd., where I saw a throng of people around the Ripley’s Believe it or not. The whole neighborhood was incredibly touristy. I did not even park my car. I drove back to my hotel in Studio City as quickly as I could.
For my last few trips to Rob-May I abandoned Beverly Garland and drove a little farther north to stay at a Hampton Inn. I did this for a couple of reasons. I had found that I liked Hampton Inns better than other hotels. I had an American Express card that I used for stays at Hamptons and other Hilton hotels. This paid off in free stays, which I used either for business trips or vacations.
I also was not enamored with the neighborhood in Studio City. I only found one place to run, and it was a little boring. I had to make several circuits of the path in the park, and the scenery no longer interested me. The biggest factor, however, was food. I had not been able to find many places that served tasty and healthy meals and also could be used—takeout or sit down—comfortably by a lone diner. My notes of July 1999 reported:
I had trouble finding affordable edible food in California. I ended up eating twice at Koo Koo Roo15, which has vegetables. The problem is that the only main courses they serve are rotisserie chicken and ¼ pound of turkey. I had the chicken both times.
The closest Hampton Inn was in Santa Clarita. The drive did not bother me much. The inconvenience was more than offset by the free breakfasts and occasional free snack in the evening. It was close to a large suburban shopping center. I don’t remember exactly where I ate, but I had no problem finding what suitable restaurants.
The best aspect of staying in Santa Clarita was that I discovered a really interesting trail in Quigley Canyon, a park that is very close to Gene Autry’s Melody Ranch. I really enjoyed running through the hills in the park. I had to climb a fairly steep incline to reach the trail that ran along a ridge. A sign at the trailhead warned about snakes and mountain lions, but I never encountered any wildlife while I was running.
Departure: I almost always flew back to Connecticut on a red-eye flight. I would leave LAX at 9 p.m. or later, arrive somewhere on the eastern side of the Mississippi at dawn or earlier, change planes, and then catch another flight to Bradley.
I always filled the gas tank before returning the car to Avis. I once made the mistake of stopping at a gas station in south-central L.A., an area that was close enough to LAX that the gas gauge would appear full. It was past sundown, and the place was not well lit. This was one of the very few times in my life that I felt afraid. I had lived for over three years in inner-city Detroit, but this area was fairly notorious because of the Rodney King incident.
What was scary about this gas station was that a few young men were walking around and approaching customers who were pumping gas. One came up to me and asked me something. I made some kind of noncommittal reply. He was annoyed with my response, but he did not do anything. I got back in my car and returned to the highway with deliberate speed.
On another occasion Karen Jones took me and a group of employees to a restaurant that was in either Burbank or Pasadena. I had my car, and after supper someone outlined for me how to get to LAX. Everyone assured me that I had plenty of time to make my flight. I probably did, but I made a wrong turn somewhere, and by the time that I arrived at the Avis counter, I was really pressed for time.
This was the first and only time that it took a long time to check my car back in at an Avis location. In every other instance no more than five minutes was required. However, this time there was a long line that moved very slowly. By the time that I returned the car and boarded the Avis bus, there was little chance of arriving at the gate in time for my overnight flight on Delta16 to Hartford by way of Atlanta.
When the bus let me off at the terminal I rushed up to the Delta desk with my suitcase. The agent confirmed that I had missed my flight. She then calmly booked me on a different flight that went to Bradley through Cincinnati and was leaving within the hour. I was not charged anything extra for this change, and I arrived in Connecticut less than a half hour later than my scheduled arrival time.
Epilogue: Rob-May used the AdDept system until 2005 or 2006 after the May Co. was purchased by Macy’s. On August 30, 2005, administration of the stores was transferred to another AdDept client, Macy’s West in San Francisco. The history of the installation at Macy’s West is detailed here.
The store in North Hollywood was turned into a Macy’s. It and its oversized parking lot stayed open until October of 2016. The entire acreage is still, six years later, in the process of being transformed into a mixed-use area renamed NoHo West. The retail part of the project evidently suffered from the emergence of the pandemic. A directory map can be found here.
An aerial photo of NoHo West taken in 2019, at which time it was described as “fully framed”.
1. Rusty Hansen does not seem to have an Internet presence in 2022, but I did receive a phone call from him once after he left Rob-May in 2000. Jim Lowe, TSI’s marketing person, and I later talked with him briefly at his new place of employment, Wherehouse Music in Torrance. That experience has been recounted here.
2. Beverly Curtis-Frethy left Rob-May in December of 1999. Her LinkedIn page is here.
3. Beverly Garland was an actress in Hollywood. Among many other roles she was Fred McMurray’s wife in the last few years of My Three Sons. She died in 2008, but her hotel still is thriving in 2022, and it is still a Holiday Inn.
4. I don’t remember reading a book by Ethan Coen. Since my notes did not mention the name or describe the plot, it might have been Gates of Eden, a book of short stories published in 1998.
5. This refers to the trip that Sue, Doug, and I took in 1995 to pitch the AdDept system to Liberty House. The description begins here and continues in two subsequent blog entries.
6. I am almost positive that I have seen every episode of The Rockford Files several times. The only bad one is the first one, the pilot, which had a different Rocky and was too much like Philip Marlow. Rockford lived at 29 Cove Road in Paradise Cove in Malibu. The beach that I went to was approximately twelve miles east of Paradise Cove.
At some point on one of my trips I took a late evening photo of the Los Angeles River. It is posted at the right. The river bed was concrete, and the trickle of water that it contained was laughable.
I could swear that back in the seventies I saw on an episode of The Rockford Files a chase scene that took place in the river itself. However, when I watched all of the episodes again (and again) in the twenty-first century first on MyTV and then on Peacock, I never saw such a scene. The show was recently removed from Peacock. I may never know for certain about that chase scene.
7. There was some kind of hydraulic leak that forced us to leave our scheduled plane and board a different one.
Mary Ng.
8. Mary Ng worked at Rob-May until 2005. Her Linked-In page is here.
9. Steve Ornee was employed at Rob-May until 2006. His Linked-In page is here.
10. CAPS was the mainframe corporate accounting system. It was located in St. Louis.
Kyle.
11. Kyle Levine worked at Rob-May until 2004. His LinkedIn page is here.
Dan.
12. Dan Rothbauer did not leave Rob-May until 2006. His LinkedIn page is here.
13. I still hate cellphones in 2022. While sitting in my right front pants pocket my first “smart phone” ordered pizzas on its own. I did not mourn when it somehow got fried by European current. That story, and a lot more is detailed here. Its replacement has not ordered pizza yet, but it did turn itself on while resting in the right front pocket of my blue jeans. I was playing bridge at the time.
Bobby.
14. Bobby McIntosh stayed at Rob-May until 2006. His LinkedIn page is here.
15. Koo Koo Roo went out of business in 2014.
16. By this time I flew on Delta whenever I could. Delta had the most connections to places that I often visited, and I had a Delta American Express card on which I accumulated thousands of valuable miles that I used for vacations.
In the Model T days the name still had the apostrophe.
Doug Pease, TSI’s Marketing Director who was introduced here, took the phone call from someone in the IT department at Gottschalks (never an apostrophe) in 1994. Gottschalks was an independent chain of department stores based in Fresno, CA. I am not sure how the people in the IT department had heard about TSI. We had previously had only incidental contact with the Advertising Director there. Since they seemed like an ideal candidate for the AdDept system, I quickly agreed to talk with them in person.
The only reasonable way to get to Fresno was by way of LAX. Sometimes I drove (3+ hours). Sometimes I took the short flight.
Doug and I flew out to Fresno on a Saturday to make a presentation and gather specs about their requirements. On Sunday we decided to drive up to Carmel by the Bay and then drive down Highway 1 along the coast. This was a very pleasant trip for me, but, as I described here, Doug enjoyed it a lot less than I did.
The presentation and demo in Fresno seemed to go well, but almost no one from advertising except Robert Guinn1, the manager of the Advertising Business Office, attended. At some point during that first visit Doug and I were also introduced to the president of Gottschalks. He made the startling claim that he would make sure that the other members of the Frederick Atkins2 group would also purchase AdDept3.
Shortly thereafter a contract was signed, and a small AS/400 was ordered.
In December of 1994 I flew back to Fresno and installed AdDept on an AS/400 that the company had purchased from IBM. The machine was kept in the data center. That room had tight security, and it was always very cold, at least from my perspective. Because it was December, I had my overcoat with me. The only place that I wore it was in the data center.
Gottschalks’ headquarters was several miles north of downtown Fresno.
Gottschalks recommended that I stay at the DoubleTree hotel in downtown Fresno. It was right next to the casino4. The entire downtown area, aside from the casino, was pretty much dead by the mid-nineties. I did not like staying at that hotel. Fortunately, it was easy to persuade Gottschalks to let me stay somewhere on the north side of town that was both cheaper and closer to the company’s headquarters at 7 River Park Place East.
The primary purpose of the installation was not to improve or make more efficient Gottschalks’ advertising. Its main use was to keep better track of the money spent by the department. Here is what I wrote in 2000:
The liaison is now and always has been an accountant. The advertising department has shown very little interest in using the system. Their opinion is that the system was forced down their throats. This opinion is accurate. The accounting department and the IS department purchased the system in order to hold the advertising people’s feet to the fire.
On the other hand, there may be an opportunity here. Most of the people involved at the time of the installation have moved on. If contact is made with the new people, we may be able to sell them on efficiencies to be derived from using AdDept for scheduling.
Shortly after I wrote this evaluation Ernie Escobedo5, who succeeded Robert as TSI’s primary contact, arranged for an upgrade to the painfully slow AS/400 that they had been using. The new Model 170 was sitting next to the old one in the frigid data center when I arrived on August 19, 2000, to migrate the AdDept programs, the data, and everything else.
The fiasco: Writing about this episode is one of the most painful things in the entire 1948 Project. It was certainly the low point of my career as a cowboy coder.
The new system used RISC processors; the previous system used CISC. The compiled versions of the hundreds or maybe thousands of programs in the AdDept system needed to be converted. I had already done this a few times, including on a system used in TSI’s office. In fact, we used precisely the same model of AS/400 that Gottschalks had just purchased, and I was very familiar with the CISC model that they had been using. I knew that it would take most of the weekend to effect the changes, but I was quite confident of my ability to pull it off. I was so certain that I had scheduled time at Robinsons-May in North Hollywood for Tuesday and Wednesday. I planned to drive to Santa Clarita on Sunday evening and commute from the Hampton Inn there to Rob-May
The trip started very well. Here is what I wrote:
Yes, I often wore a suit, too.
I managed to get upgraded to first class for both legs today. Nadine told me that when she called three weeks ago they told her that there were no first class seats available on the Cincinnati to LA leg. It was indeed full, but I got one of the seats.
In first class they give you a hot wet towel before dinner. I have never quite understood what this was for. I guess that maybe they are afraid that the common people might have touched something on their way through our section. We wouldn’t want their common germs to mix with ours. I had delicious food on both flights. The food in first class on Delta is really excellent.
A guy across the aisle from me who was at least my age had a short haircut which had been dyed blonde on top. The only thing I can think of to explain this is that he must be the manager of a supermarket who did it to identify with his employees.
Wow! We just passed over Albuquerque. I could easily pick out the base that I was stationed on, the airport, and the two golf courses I played. The last was easy. They were the only green spots to be seen. The southwest is really desolate.
The drive to Fresno wasn’t too bad. Well, the first 22 miles were horrible, but the last 200 were easy. The car has a CD player. I played the duet CD through twice. I changed cars at Avis. When I got to Fresno, I realized that I still had the key to my first car. Whoops.
I am pretty certain that I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express on that occasion. I must have arrived late. The only room that they had was handicapped-accessible. There was a tub, but no shower. I had to sit down and spray myself with one of those handheld devices that are so common in Europe.
Both a football (soccer) and volleyball team are known as the Fresno Heat.
Although it was August, and Fresno had a reputation for very hot summers, I brought a jacket because I knew that I would be cold in the data center. If I had not, I would have been even more miserable than I was. David Seeto, our technical contact in the IT department, was there during the following process:
The new system came with the operating system and licensed programs already loaded. We had to call IBM to find out what to do. Unfortunately Gottschalks’ software contract did not cover weekends. Nevertheless we finally got IBM to tell us how to remove the licensed programs. When we did so, we got a processor check on the new machine. We called IBM again. They told us first that we probably had a bad disk drive, but we should try to IPL from the tape again. We did. This time the system said that it could not find one of the disks, but it completed the task. A second IBMer told us how to reconfigure the disks to find the second disk drive. By now it was 4 PM.
A “processor check” is a fatal error. The system is not usable without extraordinary intervention.
I then began the process of bringing over the data (trivial but time-consuming) and programs (much more complicated). The most important programs were in the library named AdDept. I successfully brought that entire library over to the new system. Then I deleted all the objects in the AdDept library on the old system. I don’t know why I decided to do that. It was certainly unnecessary, but I could not see how it could cause a problem. That system with all of its contents was surely headed for the junk heap anyway.
The process of converting all of the programs was still running when I left on Saturday evening. I came in on Sunday morning and was delighted to discover that the conversion had completed without any problem. I then put the system through some simple tests to make sure that everything was OK. I soon discovered that, while some programs performed correctly, a few of the most important ones did not. The most commonly used program in the system, WRKADS (work with ads), produced erroneous results.
I tried recompiling the programs that were producing erroneous results. That did not help. This was intolerable. I had no choice. I had to make the CISC system usable again. Here is what I wrote to my partner, Denise Bessette (introduced here), about the process.
David Seeto.
Well, I think that clearing that AdDept library was the stupidest thing that I have ever done. My recovery technique did not work. The 3/5 tape was missing everything changed from their previous install through that date. I had no way of knowing what the previous install date was. Therefore, I selected everything on the RISC box with a change date from 1/1 through 4/30. I think that this is a fairly good approximation since there was definitely an install here on 4/20. However, I did not discover this until 7 PM. I left Gottschalks at 11:15. The files were finished, but the compiles were still running. Could someone sign on tomorrow morning to test the WRKADS programs? Send me a message with the results.
I canceled my hotel reservation in Santa Clarita. I am staying at the Holiday Inn near Gottschalks. I plan to go into Gottschalks to make sure that things are running reasonably well.
Could you tell Mary Ng that I will try to be in early in the afternoon?
If I had to work with David Seeto every day I would have to take a header off of a bridge.
I only punched one wall today. The wall is fine, but one of my knuckles is very sore.
Gottschalks’ IT department placed a service call with IBM. A customer engineer appeared and ran diagnostics on the new hardware. He testified that it was all in order. As far as IBM was concerned, since the hardware was functioning correctly, the problem must lie in either its BASIC program product, for which IBM had withdrawn support, or our AdDept code. In either case it was not IBM’s problem. End of story. The fact that exactly the same model in Connecticut produced results that were different from those of the one in California did not affect the judgment of the IBM people in Fresno.
I tried to explain this to the people in the IT department at Gottschalks. I promised that I would continue working on the problem remotely. They were not a bit happy with a resolution that left them with an unusable computer that they had already paid for and a very slow one. However, they agreed to keep the new system on, as well as the communications setup that allowed people in TSI’s office to sign on to it. So, at least I would be able to gather data from afar.
I returned to New England with my tail between my legs. Two important clients were angry at me, and I could not blame either of them.
I had plenty to keep me busy for the next few months. At some point I flew to California to make up for the visit to Rob-May that I had canceled. A week or two later I flew to Bradenton, FL, to do a demo for Beall’s. After that trip I needed a few days to cobble together a detailed Design Document and a proposal.
During the periods in which I was at TSI’s office I devoted as much time as possible to trying to isolate the problem with Gottschalks’ new system and to find someone at IBM who would listen to my argument. I remember more about the former than the latter. I do, however, remember the moment when I asked an IBMer to look at an example that contained almost no programming code at all. While working in the BASIC interpreter at Gottschalks I displayed on the screen the erroneous result from a simple sum of two constants. I then performed the same task on TSI’s system and got the right answer.
The IBMer was forced to admit, “This must be a hardware problem.” A day or two later he got the customer engineer to return to Gottschalks and replace the “floating-point processor,” which I did not even know existed. Evidently it was used by BASIC and almost nothing else. I signed on and put the new system through its paces. Everything seemed to work perfectly. I called Gottschalks and scheduled another trip in November to effect the migration.
The flight out to California was not as pleasant as the one before the disastrous August trip. Upon arrival in Fresno I wrote back to Denise,”I was nearly overcome with sadness in the airport in Chicago. If this trip goes well, I will probably feel better. The last one made me rethink my whole approach to life.”
Gottschalks went from a grey box to a black one.
The November migration also occurred over a weekend. It went much more smoothly than the first one, but there were still quite a few hiccoughs.
I cleared out the TSIDATA library on the new machine. I then restored the data from the CISC box. It took six hours.
I keyed in all of the user profiles. I checked the system variables, the backup and cleanup schedules, and the automatic reply list entries. I set it up so that QSNADS was started with QBATCH. I keyed in all of the scheduled jobs. I scheduled jobs to stop and start fax support.
Todd Burke5 from IBM came in the afternoon. He had installed the operating system in August. However, he had failed to install the extended help, the previous compiler support, Advanced Function Printing (needed for faxing), and the Communications Utilities (needed for RJE6). He set up a console in the operator’s area so that it receives break messages from the QSYSOPR message queue.
DATEINFO7 was not in TSIDATA. I discovered this last time, but I forgot. I had to restore it from the old system.
I installed all changes from our system from 8/17 through 11/3. I didn’t leave on Sunday until 8 PM. I was the first to go. I was so tired that I missed my exit going back to the hotel.
I changed TOSHA_B’s user ID to TOSHA_A8 and STEPH_K’s to STEPH_M. If they are going to use ID’s like those, they should prevent the women from getting married.
Todd set up the faxing incorrectly. I don’t know what he did wrong, but the software support person had me delete everything he did and key it in again. She also had me fudge one of their files using DFU9!
When I left everything was working. David Seeto said that he felt as if a huge weight had been lifted from his back.
I’ve spent considerable time in the L.A. airport three times this year. No movie producer has yet to approach me with a multi-picture deal.
That was not the end of the story. I submitted two invoices to Ernie Escobedo for my time at Gottschalks in August and November. I did not ask for reimbursement for the dozens of hours that I had spent researching the problem and trying to get IBM to take a second look When TSI had not received payment more than a month later, I asked Ernie about them. He said that he was “not inclined to pay them.”
I wrote him a long letter in which I described the efforts that I had undertaken to get that defective new system to work. I also said that I understood why Gottschalks was still upset about the situation, but the villain in this case was IBM. The company had installed equipment that did not work and refused to recognize that fact just because the diagnostics that someone at IBM had designed did not allow the customer engineer to detect the problem. Ernie promptly approved the payment of both invoices.
Stephanie Medlock.
AxN: In 2003 Bob Wroblewski and I made a trip to California to show TSI’s online insertion order system to Rob-May and Gottschalks. That trip and Bob’s involvement with the project has been described here.
The reception to the presentation seemed quite positive, bur Stephanie never agreed to try AxN. She stuck with faxing her orders until the end.
Life in Fresno: During most visits to Fresno I stayed at a Hampton Inn that was a short drive from Gottschalks’ headquarters. I always rented a car; public transportation was not a viable option in Fresno. I found no restaurant in which I felt comfortable dining alone. For most suppers I got takeout. There was no shortage of establishments that specialized in fast Mexican food.
My only recreation was running. I was able to map out a course through the suburban streets near the hotel. Traffic was a problem at only a few intersections.
The weather always seemed good. The most peculiar thing that I remember about Fresno was the tule fog. Occasionally a fog bank would abruptly drop the visibility to zero for a short period of time. This happened once while I was there. On Highway 41, the major north-south road in the San Joaquin Valley, it caused a collision that involved a large number of vehicles. The phenomenon has its own Wikipedia page.
Epilogue: In 2000 Gottschalks acquired the Lamonts department store chain. The acquisition gave Gottschalks a presence in the Pacific northwest and Alaska. In retrospect this must have been the impetus for the upgrade to the AS/400. However, the results did not meet expectations. In 2008 the company was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange. In the next year it declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy. By July of 2009 all the remaining stores had been closed.
Robert Guinn.
1. Robert Guinn’s career after Gottschalks led him back to his alma mater, Fresno State, as is described on this webpage.
2. Frederick Atkins Inc. was a non-profit company that bought merchandise for the companies in the Frederick Atkins Group. In the late nineties quite a few independent chains of department stores still belonged to the group. A description of the concept is posted here. The company went out of business in 2015. At that point the number of independent department store chains could be counted on one hand.
3. As far as I remember, he persuaded no other company to buy the system. Of course, I did not expect him to. However, he did arrange for me to make a presentation to members of the group at a convention in Naples, FL. That adventure has been described here.
4. The Club One Casino, which was really just a card room, moved away from downtown during the pandemic.
5. I do not remember Todd Burke, but I found his LinkedIn page here. For some reason his list of experiences skips over his time in Fresno, as well as everything else in 1999 through 2018.
6. RJE is one of the hundreds of TLAs (three-letter abbreviations) employed by IBM in those days. It stands for Remote Job Entry. I don’t remember precisely how it worked.
7. I don’t remember what DATEINFO was used for or why it was not in TSIDATA, the library that contained all information that pertained to the client.
8. According to LinkedIn Tosha’s user ID would be TOSHA_G if she was still working at Gottschalks. For some reason I was not allowed to see her LinkedIn page, but I did find a reference to her here.
9. DFU was shorthand for Data File Utility. We never told any of our clients that it existed, and we never used it. It allowed the user to go in and change any field on any record of any data file. There was no audit trail whatever. This violates sacred principles of database design.
