Tag Archives: Benoit, Pam

1977-1980 Part 3D: Debate at Wayne State: Social Life

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Gatherings in and around the Forensics Union. Continue reading →

The social life at Wayne State was far more active than at U-M. In point of fact there was no social life at U-M to speak of. At Wayne there were highly organized activities, spontaneous activities, and pretty much every level in-between.

A Tamarack cabin in 2021. I remember something a little more rustic.

The outing to Camp Tamarack, a resort/campground in Ortonville, MI, had been an annual event at Wayne State every year through 1977. Occasionally it was held somewhere else, but even those weekends included many of the same activities.

We drove up in a few vehicles on a Friday in October, had some social activities in the evening, slept overnight, worked on research for most of the day on Saturday, and returned to Detroit on Saturday evening. When the tradition started, the debaters had stayed two nights.

As I remember it, perhaps twenty-five or thirty people attended the event in 1977. The main social activity on Friday evening was a scavenger hunt, the highlight of which was described here. In previous years George had led the group on a midnight hike. I don’t remember that at all. If it occurred, I think that I opted to turn in early.

The event was a good opportunity for the novices and the experienced kids to get to know one another in an nonthreatening setting. There were also some sporting events. I seem to remember a co-ed volleyball game.

To my surprise the food served was kosher. Jack Kay had to explain the rules to everyone.

For some reason George Ziegelmueller decided not to sponsor this activity in 1978 and 1979. I wasn’t officially coaching in 1980, but I don’t remember the FU going there that year either.

In 1978 and 1979 I led one-day research trips to Ann Arbor. There wasn’t much socializing, but we did all eat lunch together. I should have taken them to Krazy Jim’s Blimpy Burgers, but I did not think of kt.

The Benoits would need XXL.

There was a Halloween Party in the FU lounge in 1978 and possibly in 1979. I remember that Pam and Billy Benoit came dressed as Raggedy Ann and Andy and won an award for the best costume. Vince Follert won an award for having the most outrageous costume. I don’t remember what it was.

I probably came as a soldier (I still had my combat boots, olive drab jeans, and field jacket) or a cowboy (boots and hat). I am sure that I did not make or buy a costume.

I remember Kent Martini and Linda Calo wearing naked-person costumes. Kent was the woman and Linda was the man. They did not win an award in 1978, and so I assume that this was in 1979. It might have been at an unofficial party. George might not have been amused. In 1980 Sue and I drove to Brooklyn for Halloween. I don’t remember whether Wayne State had a party that year or not.

A banquet was held just before the Christmas break every year. We all ate somewhere in Manoogian Hall. In 1977 the theme for the supper was Chinese. Debby McCully and her colleagues at the Golden Mushroom restaurant served the meal.

At these events some of the staff members did skits. I remember that I performed the world’s worst magic act as Wavada the Weird. I did a mind-reading act with a see-through blindfold. I think that I threw a few cards, too. My big trick was to pull a rabbit out of the cardboard box that contained the hanging files for each FU member. I showed the box to the audience, and it really did look empty except, of course, for the hanging files. I then gave voice to the proper incantation and pulled a “rabbit” out of the box.

The rabbit was actually Charlie, one of our long-haired guinea pigs, with a pair of long ears attached to his head. Everyone hated W the W, but Charlie was a big hit.

I don’t remember much about the other Christmas parties. I do remember that Jack Kay (one of the very few Jews in the program) liked to play Santa. However, his ho-ho-ho was pathetic. So, I boomed out a hearty laugh from the hallway just before he entered.

The biggest social event of the year was the DSR-TKA1 (pronounced DISS er tick uh) Banquet, which was held every spring a few weeks after NDT but well before final exams. In 1979 the group of new inductees into the fraternity included me, Vince Follert, Ruth Colwander, Scott Harris, and a few other people. We were expected to put on a skit. Vince wrote most of the script for ours. It loosely revolved around the Tonight Show. Scott was Johnny Carson; I was Ed McMahon. Scott did a Carnac the Magnificent routine with envelopes that I handed him.

Debbie really filled out this outfit; Ruth not so much.

Then the show stopped for a commercial for Debbie Debater Dolls. I was responsible for this part of the script. Ruth came on stage wearing Debbie’s trademark outfit, a blue denim pantsuit. It hung a little loose on Ruth’s wiry frame. I described all of the features of the doll, and Ruth robotically imitated Debbie’s debate mannerisms, saying “Moreover” again and again.

When I spoke the line that began with “Fully inflatable…”, I paused for a beat, peaked behind Ruth, and added a clause that I had left out of the script2: “although this model does not appear to be fully inflated.” Even Ruth cracked up when I did this.

I had two other short roles. I appeared as Andre Debuschere with a tie that almost reached my knees. I also had one singing line in a sketch that Vince wrote about something debate-oriented (I don’t remember what it was). I belted out in the lowest register that I could handle “For he could not ,,, our spread defeat” to the tune of the “For we like sheep” section of George Frideric Handel’s Messiah.

The crowd loved our skit. I must have attended two more banquets in 1979 and 1980, but I don’t remember them. I suspect that their skits did not measure up to ours.

This was a very good way to end the year. It made everyone feel like they were part of a family. We only met socially a few times a year, but everyone had a warm feeling for the others in the FU.

We also had fundraising events every year. We set up a table in the elevator lobby of Manoogian Hall. In 1978 we sold crepes. Sue Comparetto came in to help out. The other primary inhabitants of the building were the foreign language departments. They were very tough competition. They usually sold bratwursts and knackwursts. Both were absolutely delicious.

This is my chart. Apparently I will do something very emotional and stupid on March 31.

I thought about bringing in our 5120 computer and printer in 1980. It came with a program that print out a 30-day biorhythm graph for someone. The only input required was a birth date and the current date. I thought that people might be willing to pay a couple of bucks for that. It was completely bogus, but I thought that people might be intrigued. At the time biorhythms were a novelty.

I did not suggest this because the computer and printer would have taken up too much space. We only got one table. Also, the machines both weighed a ton. The latter probably would not have been a problem. If I said that no one could carry them from the car to the lobby, Scott would have carried them both in at once to prove me wrong.

300 meld. Write it down.

Every year George had a pinochle party. I played a little when I was an undergraduate, but it did not take me long to get back up to speed. There was often a game in progress in the lounge, and I sometimes sat in. I considered pinochle as bridge for idiots.

In 1979 I was playing in a game in the lounge; one of the novices, Steve Rapaski, was my partner. He played so badly that I wrote up an affidavit for him in which he promised never to play pinochle again. I coerced him into signing it.

A few weeks later George announced the pairings for the party. My partner was Steve. I told him relax and have a good time. Wouldn’t you know it? We won first prize.

Celebrity watching at Shield’s usually meant keeping an eye peeled for Dickie V.

There were many impromptu outings. The question was usually Buddy’s or Shield’s? They both had absolutely great pizza at a reasonable price. It was usually a tough decision, but neither choice was ever a bad one.

Shield’s was Dick Vitale’s favorite restaurant. He was a flop as the coach of the Pistons, but he had been very good at U of D. He had not become a TV star yet, but he was a big celebrity in Detroit, baby. If we went to Shield’s, we might see him. The atmosphere there was very cordial.

Buddy’s was more of a family place. The atmosphere was not as warm as at Shield’s, but it was larger. There was a better chance that they could find a big table for us.

I actually liked Buddy’s better, but by the thinnest of margins. I have only tasted better pizza once, and that was in Naples.

I have one last story. In the spring of 1979, when I was 31, a group of us went to a bar that was near the campus. When we ordered our drinks the waitress said that she would need to see ID from everyone who did not order a coke.

I sprang to my feet and got out my wallet so that I could quickly retrieve my driver’s license. “Too late to take it back,” I insisted. “You carded me, and I insist on showing my license to you.”

I was pretty certain that this was the last time in my life that someone would question my purchase of an alcoholic beverage. My hair was already at least 10 percent grey.

1. DSR-TKA was (and is) a fraternal organization founded to promote competitive speech events in colleges. I never took it seriously, but George definitely did. In researching for these blogs I came to realize that many of the biggest names in debate were officers of the organization.

2. George insisted on approving the script.

1977-1980 Part 3A: Debate at Wayne State: The Program

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George’s way. Continue reading →

Having spent seven years debating against or coaching against the people from Wayne State University, I considered myself fairly knowledgeable about the debate program there on 1977. I knew that George Ziegelmueller had run the show for many years. In the mid-sixties the school produced some top debaters, but I had not been favorably impressed with them in more recent times. I did not realize until very recently that Dr. James Klumpp had directed the program during part of that time.

I met with George in late spring or early summer of 1977. His office was in Manoogian Hall on the fifth floor. The accommodations were MUCH nicer than at Michigan. The offices of the professors in the speech department surrounded a large open area. Across the hall was an even larger open area that served as the lounge for the Forensics Union, the official term for the competitors in debate and individual events (IE). It was at least ten times as large as the U-M debate office. It contained at least one lunch table, a sink, a refrigerator, several couches, and a few work areas.

George explained that all of the students at WSU commuted. They needed a place where they could hang around between classes to study or work on debate.

The Forensics Union, which everyone except George called the FU, also had its own bulletin board and trophy cases just outside of the lounge. At Michigan the trophies were piled up in a corner of the debate office. No one kept track of them.

George was aghast to learn that I had carted the U-M debaters around the country in Greenie to save money. The motor pool at Wayne State lent the FU cars. We were, however, required to wash them before we turned them in. This was a good deal for the team, of course, but we often returned from tournaments very late at night, and usually we delivered people to their homes, which were scattered throughout Detroit and its suburbs. I considered it a real pain to wash the car, especially in the winter.

The chicken always looked good at George’s favorite restaurant.

The debaters were not given a per diem for food. Instead, the coach chose the restaurant, and we all ate together. The coach was supposed to use subtlety to indicate what the monetary limit was. George always said something like, “The grilled chicken looks good.” Students could buy snacks with their own money, but no one was allowed to go over the limit to buy a more expensive meal.

The staff in my first year (1977-78) consisted of Jack Kay1 (George’s right-hand man), Pam and Billy Benoit (my office-mates), and the residents of the other office for George’s graduate assistants—Vince Follert, John Pfeiffer, and Steve D’Agostino. Pam, John, and Steve worked with the IE team. The rest of us coached debaters.

The staff for 1978-79 was almost the same. Steve had departed, and Sheri Brimm had been hired.

My last year of coaching was 1979-80. Vince had finished his masters and gone to Western Illinois. Jack Kay departed for Nebraska. I don’t remember if John Pfeiffer was still there. Tuna Snider became George’s right-hand man. Gerry Cox and Ron Lee joined the staff. Ron’s wife Karen may have also helped out. Ken Haught may have worked with the IE people.

George explained his philosophy to me. In order to justify such nice facilities and such a large staff, it was important that the team keep up “the numbers”. So, it was necessary to undertake a massive recruitment effort in September. The people recruited had little or no experience with debate. We held staff meetings in order to assign reasonable pairings. The objective was to get as many people as possible to compete at the three-round novice tournament in October sponsored by the Michigan Intercollegiate Speech League (MISL). This was the tournament in which I had made my collegiate debating debut in 1966. As a coach I had shunned it as a waste of time. However, I would have taken novices who lacked high school experience if I had had any.

For much of September and October the coaches were busy with these new recruits. When the tournament arrived, we loaded up several vans with novices and drove to the site. Our most fervent hope was that every pair won at least one debate. Usually at least one team did not meet that standard. There were some tears.

After that tournament quite a few of the novices dropped out of the program, but at least they had one experience of real debates. George always found at least one more tournament for those who continued with the program.

The rest of the tournament schedule mostly consisted of tournaments fairly close to Detroit. George tried to find places in which everyone could compete. He especially liked tournaments that had a varsity division and a novice division or ones with both IE and debate. I even was called on to judge a few IE rounds, not my most enjoyable experience.

The top varsity teams went to slightly higher-level tournaments, but Wayne State did not attend the swings on either coast and did not go to Georgetown and some of the other top tournaments. This attitude changed a little in the second and third year when our records improved.

The blank schedule looked something like this.

One of my assignments in 1977-78 was to schedule practice rounds, which served as the primary venue for coaching at Wayne. At the beginning of the semester all the coaches and debaters turned in cards with their schedules. They marked off the periods in which they had classes or were otherwise unavailable. Some, for example, had part-time jobs.

I found working with the cards to be clumsy. I photocopied a blank schedule onto a group of overlays used for an overhead projector. I then copied the data from cards onto the overlays with an erasable marker. To find the free periods for each foursome I just had to stack their overlays. In an hour I could easily generate the schedule for the week, and it always met George’s specifications . Previously people had labored over this task for an enormous amount of time and made mistakes.

Vince was assigned this task in 1978-79. He asked me how I did it. I showed him. I don’t remember who was responsible in 1979-80.

Before leaving for the first tournament in which I was in charge I asked for a short meeting with George. I inquired about a few of the team’s policies, including what to do if we were involved in a traffic accident. He said that no one had ever asked him about this. He thought for a moment and then said that he supposed that I should call him.

I could hardly believe that no previous coach had worried about this. Maybe it was understood that George was ultimately responsible for everything in this program. I just hoped that I had not jinxed the program by bringing up the subject.

George was understandably much more interested in public relations than I was. He sent debaters and/or IE people to give speeches or put on debates for various organizations fairly often. I was involved in a few of these, including moderating short debates for a local television station. I even made a commercial for our program.

In one way the Wayne State team was somewhat backward. George probably had a pretty good idea of the way that many judges evaluated debates, but the team lacked a systematic way of keeping the ballots. I showed George how I had stored all of U-M’s ballots sorted by judge in an accordion file. I asked if I could have the ballots when he was finished with them. He agreed.

Wayne State belonged to a national debate fraternity, Delta Sigma Rho-Tau Kappa Alpha (DSR-TKA). U-M had also belonged, but as far as I could tell, the school never really participated. George took the organization quite seriously. Wayne always attended the DSR-TKA nationals in March, and every spring there was a banquet in Manoogian. New members (like myself in 1978) were inducted and expected to provide entertainment.

The Forensics Union sponsored several extracurricular activities while I was there. Every year there was a Christmas party, the DSR-TKA banquet, a week-long summer institute for high school debaters, a trip to Camp Tamarack, a research trip, a fund-raising event of some sort, and, one year, a pinochle tournament. At U-M we had nothing similar to any of these.

1. My recollections of each of the other coaches are in a separate blog.

1977-1980 Part 1: Dealing with Detroit

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Living in Detroit was convenient but challenging. Continue reading →

U-M’s speech department knee-capped its debate program for the 1976-77 school year. I finished up my masters degree and applied to George Ziegelmueller at Wayne State as a PhD student. I was accepted. My new career as a graduate assistant started in the fall semester of 1977.

This lot is where our house was. The tree was not there.

This lot is where our house was. The tree was not there when we lived there.

When I took the job at Wayne State, Sue was already working at Brothers Specifications in Detroit. It therefore made sense for us to move from our apartment in Plymouth to Detroit. We could get a lot more for less money, and both of our drives would be shorter. We rented a house at 12139 Chelsea, near City Airport (now called Coleman A. Young International Airport) and Chandler Park. We had at least twice as much space as before, and that did not count the full basement with a large wet bar.

At the time of our move I still had my little green Datsun 1200 hatchback. Sue’s Colt had been abandoned after it threw its third rod. She bought a gigantic Plymouth Duster to replace it. We called it the Tank; neither of us had ever owned a full-sized car before. I vividly remember changing one of its tires on an upward sloping exit ramp on the Ford Freeway in an ice storm. I got the card jacked up, but while I was loosening the bolts the jack gave way, and I had to start over. I was in a really rotten mood when I finally arrived home.

Sue and I had no complaints at all about the house on Chelsea. The rent was unbelievably cheap, and the house was well-built and comfortable. Furthermore, we lived there for quite a while without incident. The house to the right in the photo was occupied by a couple named Freddy and Juanita and their holy terror of a son, Fre-Fre, who used to throw rocks at me when I mowed our lawn. We were friendly with everyone in the neighborhood. When we moved in during the summer of 1977, all of the houses on both sides of the street were occupied. By the time that we left in very late 1980 several houses were empty and two or three were boarded up.

The first troubling incident occurred on New Years Eve. Sue and I were watching New Years Rocking Eve or one of the other countdown shows. We heard a fairly loud sound that could only have been a collision between two cars. I went outside and saw that our Plymouth Duster, which, as always, we had parked on the street in front of the house, was now sitting up past the sidewalk into the bushes in Freddy and Juanita’s front lawn. The left front bumper was a little dented, but otherwise it seemed OK.

The boy who lived directly across the street, whose name neither Sue nor I can now remember, told me that he had seen the car that crashed into ours and pointed up the street. I jogged up to where the car had just parked. I memorized the license plate number and the address of the house that the people in the car had entered.

Then we called the police. They came, but they were not much interested in pursuing the matter. They went to the house that I indicated, but the man who claimed to have driven the car said that our car pulled out and struck his car. He was allegedly sober, but the other man was not. Even though I told the police that there was an eyewitness, they said that there was nothing that they could do. Hey, it was New Years. No blood, no foul.

The second incident was at the office that I shared with Pam and Billy Benoit in Manoogian Hall at Wayne State. I was there in the evening because I was scheduled to teach a three-hour speech class in the College of Lifelong Learning. The next morning we all realized that some stuff was missing from the office. We called Wayne State Police. The lady who investigated noticed that the door had been scratched by some kind of tool. Evidently someone forced it open. That was a relief to me. The stuff the Benoits had lost was more valuable than what I lost (I don’t remember the items—a radio, I think). I am notoriously absent-minded, and I feared that I had forgotten to lock the door.

That week all of the doors in the building were outfitted with steel plates that were designed to prevent anyone from tampering with the locks.

PanasonicOur house in Chelsea was attacked three times. The first time was in 1978 or 1979. While Sue was at work and I was at school, someone broke the glass on our back door and entered the house in broad daylight. They took the television, the Panasonic stereo unit that was also in Bob’s apartment on the Bob Newhart Show, and the AR-15 speakers.

AR15We called the police, but they would not come because the perpetrators were no longer there. They told us to come to the precinct station to fill out a report. Since we did not have insurance, we could not see that that would accomplish anything. We did tell our landlord. He commiserated with us, and he replaced the glass on the door.

The second attack came when I was alone in the house taking a nap. I was awakened by a crash of glass that seemed to come from the back of the house. I kept my aluminum softball bat near the bed for just this eventuality. I walked swifty towards the back door brandishing my bat. The guy must have heard me; when I reached the door, he was running through our back yard toward the alley. I was disappointed. I planned to look him squarely in the eye and then swing at his knees. What if he pulled out a gun? Well I was still bullet-proof at that point.

I called the police and the landlord. The former gave me the same answer as previously. The latter replaced with plexiglass all the windows facing the back yard.

When I told some of the people at Wayne State about this incident, Gerry Cox took me aside and said that he and his 9mm handgun would like to move into our house for a little while. I declined his offer, which was serious.

5120By the time of the third attack late in 1980 we had replaced the television and the stereo system. This time when I came home I found the entire back door in the basement at the bottom of the steps. The plexiglass had held, but the hinges had not. This time the house was ransacked. Our brand new television and stereo were gone, but, thank goodness, they did not touch our computer and printer. They were both very heavy, and at the time it was pretty much unheard of for anyone to have a computer in the house.

This time the police came. They were especially interested in the fact that the mattress had been removed from the bed. The investigator told us that they were looking for guns.

This attack was a blessing in disguise. At that point we had already decided to go back to Connecticut after Christmas. The burglary gave us fewer things to move, and the insurance money just about covered the cost of moving what remained.

Sue learned about our last problem before I did. She received a call at home from the police. They informed her that someone had stolen the battery from our car, and they had it at the precinct station near Wayne State. She called me at work. I had driven the Duster that day and parked it on the street near Manoogian Hall.

This was, as I recall, my very last day at Wayne State. I persuaded someone to let me use his battery to help jump-start the car. That worked. I then very carefully drove a couple of miles to the precinct headquarters. If the car had stalled, I would have been stranded. There was no battery in it, and I had no means of communication.

I parked and stepped inside. I had to sit around for quite a while before a detective could talk with me. He said that the theft had been witnessed through binoculars by a Wayne State cop positioned on the roof of one of the buildings. She had called the DPD, and they apprehended the thief while he was still carrying the battery. He told me that the perpetrator was also wanted for grand theft auto.

JCPI asked him for the battery. He said that the police needed it as evidence. I insisted that I needed the battery. My car was parked outside, and there was no battery in it. Furthermore, we were leaving town within the week, and we absolutely needed the battery. He still tried to claim that the battery was evidence, but when I pointed out that they had an eyewitness, and they were actually going to prosecute the guy for the auto theft, he relented.

The property officer led me down to the area where all the “evidence” was kept. There were two batteries in the cage. Neither was tagged. He asked me which one was mine, and I pointed at the JC Penney one. If I had pointed at the other one, I am sure that he would have given it to me. I had heard that every year the DPD had a big event in which it sold all of the unclaimed property. There was no way that anyone ever intended to use my battery as evidence.

WWI had no involvement whatever in the most serious incident. I was home watching Wonder Woman while Sue went to a nearby drug store for something. When she stepped inside the door, a guy with a gun told her to go to the back of the store and sit on the floor. She did so. Eventually, the guy left and the police came. Sue told them that she didn’t know anything, and they let her go.

She was still pretty upset when she arrived back at the house. She said, “I couldn’t believe it. I walked into the drug store right in the middle of a robbery. The guy had a gun!”

I replied with great compassion, “Really? You sound a bit unnerved. You missed a great Wonder Woman. They showed Lynda Carter in a bathing suit.”

There was one other major problem with living in Detroit—the snow. The city plowed the main streets, but it never maintained the streets in our neighborhood. The years that we lived there were characterized by cold and snowy winters. For weeks after a snowfall the streets had two cleared ruts a foot or so wide. Essentially every side street became one-way. Getting from our house to a main road was often a real challenge, especially for my Datsun, which was the absolute worst car in bad weather.

We did not have a problem with rats at our house, but other parts of the city did. The city purchased small steel dumpsters for every residence. The lids were rubber or plastic. Ours was back by the alley. Not long after these dumpsters were in place, somebody discovered that it was fun to put a lit M80 in one and shut the lid. The dumpster survived with no difficulty, but the lid was blown to bits. Pretty soon the rats had easier access to the garbage than ever.