1948-1970 Dad and Me

Posted on August 29, 2024 by Mike

I have limited the period covered by this entry to the years before I left for the army in October of 1970. The few face-to-face contacts that I had with my parents from my arrival in Connecticut up to the last time that I saw my mom are listed in the “Mom and me” blog entry.

James E. Wavada was born on August 25, 1924, or at least that is what he has always claimed. For some reason he was never able to locate his birth certificate. I learned about this when he encountered difficulty in obtaining an official ID card in 2005 after he moved to Connecticut. He was the youngest of the three sons of Henry and Hazel Wavada. They lived in Holy Name parish in the Rosedale section of Kansas City, KS. His two brothers were named Victor and Henry Joseph (Uncle Vic and Fr. Joe to me).

The Wavadas: from the left Fr. Joe, dad, Uncle Vic, Grandmom Hazel, and Grandad Henry. My mom probably took this photo with her Brownie.

Hazel’s maiden name was Cox. My dad said that they were “Scotch Irish”, descended from the people whom the British government transplanted from Scotland to Northern Ireland. Hazel once confided to me that the Wade Hamptons¹, powerful figures in South Carolina in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were among her ancestors.

Henry was fifteen years older than Hazel. I think that they were both employed in the meat packing industry in some capacity. Henry’s ancestry is foggy to me.² My dad considered himself Irish, but the first Wavadas (or whatever the name was originally) reportedly set sail from Marseilles and lived in Alsace. They apparently settled in Fort Wayne, IN.

Jim was decidedly left-handed. Swinging a golf club was the only thing that he did right-handed^.3 His writing method involved curling his hand around so that he pulled the pen instead of pushing it. My understanding is that that meant that his right hemisphere was dominant and his cerebrum was contralaterally organized. The script that this produced was illegible to nearly everyone except for mom and his secretary.

As a youth dad reportedly had a temporary episode of alopecia totalis. It must have been very embarrassing for him, but all of his hair eventually grew back. I judged that the somewhat weird fact that his scalp hair was still dark when his eyebrows had turned white⁴ was probably related to that illness in his youth. I might be wrong.

For a while he called himself “Pibby”. Evidently he had difficulty saying “Jimmy”.

My dad never had anything good to say about his father, who was an alcoholic. He told me that Hazel had to pull him out of bars. Other anecdotes about Henry and his family have been posted here.

My dad and his two brothers grew up during the depression. It must have been extremely tough on Hazel, but she was up to it. She lived longer than all of my other known antecedents. She died in 1989 at the age of 90.

This, believe it or not, is the dormitory in which the three Wavada boys lived while they

Jim and his brothers all matriculated at Maur Hill, a boarding school run by the Benedictine monks. It was located in Atchison, KS, approximately fifty miles from KC KS. Hazel reportedly negotiated a deal with the Benedictines that one of the boys would become a priest if all three were given scholarships. I know only a few things about my dad’s time at Maur Hill:

The photo of Jim Wavada in the *Maurite* for 1942

His yearbook lists the following activities:
- Course: Classical
- Tatler (the student newspaper): 3
- Honor Roll: 2,3
- Sacristan: 2
- Pres. Servers’ Society: 4
- Student Manager Athletics: 3.
The fact that no activities were listed with a “1” leads me to think that he probably attended Ward High as a freshman and then transferred.
He won the school-wide oratory contest in 1942. This was not in his yearbook, but I learned about it when the school invited him back to judge the contest decades later, perhaps in 1962. I accompanied him to Atchison.
He confided to me that he had been terrible at math (especially geometry) and French. The French teacher reportedly said that he had the worst French accent he had ever heard. I suspect that he got through the other subjects using his incredible memory and his writing and speaking talent.
He learned to play back-handed ping pong. I played him once. He could not handle spin, but his reflexes were much better than mine.
He learned from other students that smoking was cool. He became addicted to cigarettes for more than forty years.
He learned to play golf, but the only clubs available were right-handed.
A man named Henry Etchegaray, who lived in Mexico City but was in dad’s class at Maur Hill (and lettered in football!), visited us one time. I remember no details.

At some point while he was in high school he evidently met my mom. Maybe it was shortly after he graduated and she was on summer break . They never told me the details, and I never asked. I am pretty sure that they communicated by mail while he was in the army, but I have not seen any of the letters.

The guy on the right is dad. The other gentleman is, I think, the man named Louis that we visited in Colorado.

Shortly after high school he enlisted. He told me that he was rejected (in World War II!) by the navy for “insufficient chest and shoulder development”. Maybe it was just as well; he could not swim. I never saw him in a swimming pool or pond, but he did take a motorboat out on Cass Lake in Minnesota a few times.

He was six feet tall and weighed 123 pounds when he first donned the olive drab. His performance on the mechanical aptitude test that the army required new enlistees to take was so bad that the guy running the test accused him of cheating on the other tests.

He served in the Pacific in WW II. He almost never talked about it except to say that he did well in ping pong. He ended as a sergeant, but something that he mentioned once seemed to indicate that he had been busted a rank or two at least once. He had little respect for most of the other grunts that he served with, but he made one life-long friend in Jake Jacobson.

I would love to know where dad and mom were when this photo was taken and who took it. Note that dad has his cigarette in his right hand, probably as a courtesy to mom.

Fighting for more than two years against the Japanese definitely had a permanent effect on his world view. Our family never had rice for supper when Jim was in town. If he ever ate any oriental food, it was not until late in his life. He firmly believed that the two nuclear attacks ended the war. I wondered what he would have thought when historians began to assert that the Japanese government and military leaders were more concerned about the Russians’ invasion of northern islands than the immolation of civilians.

Nearly all of my dad’s friends went to college on the G.I. bill. He did not. I am not sure that he even considered it.

This is my favorite photo from the wedding.

He married Dolores Cernech on September 1, 1947. His brother Joe, who had been ordained only three months earlier, officiated at the wedding in St. Peter’s cathedral in KC KS. What transpired in the year and a half between my dad’s discharge and the wedding? Decades later he disclosed two nuggets of information about that period: 1) Mom’s father was against the marriage, but Clara, her mother, somehow persuaded her husband that it was for the best; 2) He might have gotten into serious trouble if he did not get married. There were no more details, but he also mentioned something about pinball machines, which in those days were common in bars.

Life in KC KS 1948-54

The couple lived for seven and a half years in the house owned by Dolores’s parents, John and Clara Cernech. As far as I know, dad never worked anywhere except Business Men’s Assurance (BMA). I assume that he was employed there when he got married, but I could find no proof of it. As an employee he would have almost certainly received free health insurance. Otherwise, I cannot imagine how he could have afforded all of the medical bills my first few years on earth certainly generated.

Dad and J.K. Higdon, president of BMA, in 1951. I know only one other person with a head shaped like dad’s.

I can only imagine what my dad thought when he heard about my hare lip. He never talked about it later. In fact, I cannot remember him talking to me much at all in the years before I started school. The only memorable conversation was when he lightly reprimanded me for trading my Mickey Mantle baseball card to someone for a Vic Power card.

Dad was apparently pretty active at BMA. He started at the bottom, but by 1951 he was president of the KEO (“Know Each Other”) social club and one of four staff members on the company’s internal newspaper. In a short time he was transferred tp the sales department, where he eventually rose to the rank of Vice President. I think that he may have played a little baseball or softball there, too. The only equipment that he had was a first baseman’s glove. Although he sardonically referred to himself as “a natural athlete”, I never saw that side of him.

My only vivid memory of my dad in the house in KC KS involves the train set that he and Joey Keuchel set up “for me”⁵ in the basement. I am not sure how much my dad actually participated in that effort. I cannot remember ever seeing him use a tool as complicated as a screwdriver.

How dad got to work in the five years after my birth is unclear. Perhaps he took a bus or “street car” (trolly). In 1954 he bought a blue and white Ford. My recollection is that he had quite a bit of trouble with it. The word “lemon” was frequently employed.

I am pretty sure that Jake Jacobson visited us at least once before we moved to the suburbs. I remember that he had a big car, perhaps a convertible. He claimed that he could steer with his belly. When I got rambunctious he would cheerfully shout, “Michael, decorum!” I am pretty sure that the three of us rode with him to Swope Park for a picnic. A fair amount of beer was consumed. I remember a contest of pitching empty beer cans into the trash receptacle. In the fifties this was considered highly responsible behavior. People in those days thought nothing of hurling litter out of car windows. Let the prisoners clean it up.

I have a vague recollection of Fr. Joe taking me fishing at least once at Wyandotte County Lake. I don’t remember if mom or dad (very unlikely) was present. I seem to remember that there was a “gas war” going on. The going price was $.199 per gallon.

To my knowledge the only vacation that the three of us took was a long drive to Colorado to visit a man named Louis, who was one of Hazel’s relatives. I don’t remember his last name. This trip has been recounted here.

Prairie Village

In early 1955 the three of us moved to 7717 Maple, Prairie Village, KS, about twenty miles south of the house on N. Thorpe. My dad may have been in a car pool for work. Several BMA employees lived nearby.

I could hardly believe it when I found this picture. From left on the couch are Grandad John, me, Jamie, Clara, Hazel, Henry. On the far right is my dad. I don’t know who the person leaning in on the left is. I assume that the photographer was mom.

This was a big deal for me. We were in a new parish, which meant that I finished first grade at Queen of the Holy Rosary School instead of St. Peter’s. The Ursulines at QHRS seemed much nicer. Dad actually knew a few of them who had taught at his grade school in Holy Name parish in Rosedale.

When my sister Jamie arrived on the scene in January of 1956 dad must have been at least somewhat involved in picking her name. I don’t know how they came up with Jamesina. No St. Jamesina can be found in Wikipedia. They certainly did not ask my opinion. No one ever called her anything but Jamie.

Sometimes dad brought work home. On those occasions he sat at the kitchen table and filled up pads of paper with writing that reminded me of rain. Otherwise, he stretched out on our green sofa and read the newspapers (the Kansas City Star still had two editions), Time, Newsweek, or something about life insurance or marketing. He took no notes. He was not researching; he was absorbing.

If he read a book, it was non-fiction. I remember him reading only one novel ever, Mario Puzo’s The Godfather.. The salty language put him off.

He never watched movies. He said that he could not suspend disbelief. He saw people walking around furniture saying words that other people had written and feigning emotions. He attended one movie that I know of. It was a biopic, either Lust for Life, about Van Gogh, or The Agony and the Ecstasy about Michelangelo. He said that the movie was good, but, as far as I know, he never saw another one while he was in Kansas.

The only things that he watched on television were sports, especially football, and news. Occasionally he would peak at something that Jamie and I were watching. Batman comes to mind.

Dad and I watched football games as soon as they started appearing on television. I remember that the pros used a white ball for night games, and runners who were knocked down could jump back up and continue running. His favorite team was the Chicago Bears; mine was the Cleveland Browns.

We did no projects together, mostly because the only project that I can remember him doing was working on the lawn. I did the mowing,_⁶ but he did some weeding, planting, fertilizing, and lots of watering. The results were mixed. I helped only when coerced. To me the weeds had the same esthetic value as his Kentucky bluegrass.

Dad took me to several games of the hapless Kansas City A’s, who played their games in Municipal Stadium, which was in a fairly rough neighborhood. My recollection is that we parked on the street for those games. These events have been described here. I don’t remember us talking about anything at the games except how pitiful the A’s were. We were definitely present for the legendary 29-6 loss to the Chicago White Sox on April 23, 1955.

We also took in one home game of Maur Hill football. I don’t remember who the opponent was, but they probably lost. I also have a vague recollection of attending a game at the University of Kansas. Since I remember no details of that event, I may have fantasized it.

Dad and I drove with our neighbor, Ed Leahy, to south-central Kansas one weekend. I don’t think that the Interstates were completed yet. We drove mostly at night. I remember sleeping in the back seat.

We spent one day hunting quail or pheasants and one day at the State Fair in Hutchinson. This adventure has been described here.

The family’s big vacation to the East Coast is detailed here. Dad did almost all of the driving.

I remember two other trips with my dad. I am not sure whether my mom was along. On the first one we visited dad’s Uncle Vic Wavada (Henry’s brother) in, I believe, Nevada, MO. I remember no details at all. Great-uncle Vic died in 1962. By the way, the town is pronounced locally as nuh VAY duh, miz URR uh.

On the other journey we visited an older man named Crispy Ward somewhere near Jefferson City, MO. He might have been a salesman for BMA. We went fishing together in a small boat. I doubt that my dad participated. I had trouble with my line getting caught up in the vegetation. Crispy nicknamed me “Snag.” Fortunately, it did not catch on.

Dad and I did not do very much together. He played catch with me occasionally. The only thing that I recall that he ever taught me was how to wash myself. My reaction was a silent “Well, duh.”

Did my dad have any friends in the area? He talked to a few of the neighbors. He and mom went to social occasions at the homes of some of the other BMA employees a few times. The only other friends that I can recall were Boots and Fay Hedrick. I seem to recall that dad, mom, or both knew them from KC KS. They had a son named John who was about my age.

You could probably do it with one hand in a pocket.

I started wearing glasses in 1958 or thereabouts. My dad also wore glasses when he drove the car. Otherwise, he shunned their use. He nagged me about the fact that I put mine on as soon as I woke up and wore them continually until I went to bed. I took them off when playing football and whenever large amounts of water were involved. He could not understand why I always wore them. I wanted to see, and my prescription was much stronger than his was. The year before I got them I batted .000 in 3&2 baseball. It was humiliating. Give a kid a break.

The other thing that he nagged me about was putting my hands in my pockets. Whenever I heard him say, “You can’t climb the ladder with your hands in your pockets” I would spin my head around to see which ladder he was referring to. I never saw it.

Leawood

At the end of the 1961-62 school year the Wavadas moved south and east a few miles to 8800 Fairway in Leawood, KS. This house was much nicer than either of our previous two residences. It had three bedrooms, a large living room, a dining room, a rec room, a two-car garage, a basement, and an attic. It also had central air conditioning and a large fan in the ceiling of the hallway by the bedrooms. Every summer evening my dad would order the air conditioning turned off and the fan turned on. All the windows were opened except for the ones in my bedroom. I left mine closed and shut my door when I went to bed in order to muffle the sound of the fan.

My dad joined a car pool to BMA. Its members included Malcolm Holzer, the company’s treasurer, and Mac Dolliver, an actuary whose family lived only a block away from us. There was at least one other person in the car pool. In inclement weather they would drive me to Rockhurst High School. On most other days I walked.

For one of my birthdays my parents got me a wooden basketball backboard and orange rim of iron. My dad and, I think, my grandfather, John Cernech, mounted it on the roof above the driveway. The backboard was not quite vertical, and the rim broke in one place, but I still played there extensively.

A later Christmas present was a six-foot pool table that dad and mom clandestinely set up in the basement. Its surface was wood covered by felt that quickly warped, but I did not care. I practiced on it many evenings, especially in cold weather. While I did so I listened to my records on a portable turntable that I acquired somewhere. Nobody could beat me on my table because I knew how to play the “break” in the southeast corner.

At the new house dad had a much larger front lawn to maintain. He cared not a lick about the bushes, the side lawns, or the much larger back yard. I think that he was secretly competitive about this hobby. Our neighbors to the north, the Westergrens, had a thick lawn, but the grass was fescue, not bluegrass. Dad considered fescue to be weeds. It completely took over the lawn on the north side of the driveway. My dad concentrated on the 90 percent of the lawn that was south of the driveway. He waged a war against any fescue that somehow crossed the driveway.

By this time we had a self-propelled lawnmower. I was an energetic teenager; mowing the lawn was actually somewhat pleasurable for me. However, once a year dad rented a heavy machine that sucked up loose vegetation from the lawn. It was not self-propelled, and it was a huge pain to push.

As before, dad spent nearly every summer evening listening to news, sports, or talk on his small transistor radio. Never music; he no appreciation of music. Once in a while a song would strike his fancy, but I could not name even one song that he liked that was released between “Oh, My Papa” and “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” Seriously.

Dad had two season tickets to the Chiefs’ home games, which took place at Municipal Stadium until Arrowhead Stadium opened in 1972. Sometimes he took mom. Once or twice a year he took me. In 1965 he let me bring two friends from Rockhurst, Ed Oakes⁷ and Dan Waters. Win or lose, I had a great time at these games. From 1966 to 1969 I could not attend because I was in Ann Arbor. After that I never lived in KC in the fall.

I cannot remember anything about our communication during the games. We talked mostly about the players and strategy.

Why so much responsibility for the pinkies, and only one fat key for one thumb?

Dad had little involvement with my schooling. I sometimes rode to Rockhurst with him and the other members of his car pool. The only other involvement with my high school years that I recall involved speech competitions. He let me have his old Time and Newsweek magazines. I used them in my competition in extemporaneous speaking. They were very helpful.

Dad worked on projects with a Benedictine named Roger Rumery. Fr. Roger somehow obtained a book that explained in detail the process of learning to type. I spent a lot of time with it and an old Royal machine that was, I think, my mom’s.⁸ I became quite proficient at the keyboard. I used my new skill to type evidentiary quotes on index cards, arguments, and entire speeches. Later this skill became even more useful. Only God knows how many millions of words I have typed over the last sixty years or so.

Health

My dad was almost never ill, but he had problems with his back. At some point I am pretty sure that he had an operation that only helped a little, if at all. I have a vague recollection that he occasionally suspended himself in a closet in order to stretch something in his back. I never saw this, and I may have just concocted it from stories. At some point it must have gotten better. I don’t remember him wincing or complaining about it after the early sixties.

The only exercise that dad got was on the golf course. BMA purchased a family membership for the Wavadas at Blue Hills Country Club. Dad played there on weekends. He seldom used an electric cart. He walked with his bag in a two-wheeled cart that he towed behind him.

I must mention that although dad loved the game of golf, he was not very good at it.⁹ He had a good excuse. He was left-handed, and he was using right-handed clubs. He never mentioned this, and he never tried to swing left-handed, at least not to my knowledge. He did experiment with left-handed putting.

Dad and I played together several times per year. Did I enjoy it? Not really. He made me very nervous. He was always watching the group in front of us and the group behind us to make sure that we were not holding anyone up. I was (and am) not a good loser. When I hit a bad shot, I beat myself up over it. I had made a pretty detailed study of the golf swing (described here). I knew how to correct a slice (often) or hook (almost never). It frustrated me enormously that the balls sometimes did not go where I planned.

Nevertheless, playing with him raised my game up to respectability. I did enjoy the competition when I was playing as part of a pair or a team. I played on my company’s team in the army (related in some detail here) and in the golf league at the Hartford. My partner John Sigler and I were in first place in the entire league when I broke my kneecap. Those adventures have been chronicled here.

Occasionally he asked me for evaluations of his swing. I never volunteered an opinion. If I had, it would have sounded something like, “Well, your grip is wrong, and your stance is wrong. It is hard for me to say anything until you change them.”

His reply to my silence would be something like, “I think that I am pushing the ball”, “Am I swaying?”, or “I need to swing through it more.” I had no idea what any of these meant in terms of body parts involved in a golf swing.

My dad played golf until he became lame and blind in his eighties. For decades after I left the Hartford I could afford neither the time nor the expense of the game. In my seventies I had absolutely no regrets about giving it up.

Friends

My parents seemed to have a lot more friends in Leawood than they did in Prairie Village, but not in the neighborhood. Most of them were parishioners at our new parish, Curé of Ars. The two that I remember the most were Mike Goral, a golfing buddy, and Phil Closius. They were both transplants from the New York area.

What I inherited from my dad:

Physical build
Hair color
Head shape
Speaking and writing abilities
Political tendencies
Love of travel, although I did not witness this much as a youngster.

1. The three Hamptons named Wade were very influential in South Carolina in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. If Hazel was a direct descendant (she might have said “related to”), I suspect that Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. would be able to tell me exactly how many slaves they had, but rest assured that there would be a comma in the answer.

2. A fairly large number of Wavadas lived in the Spokane, WA, area. One of them has done genealogical research. My dad had a copy of her findings, but, unfortunately, when he died Sue got her hands on it, and it entered the black hole of her existence. If I had to guess, I would place it in her garage, which has long been impenetrable.

3. Not quite true. I found one photo of him with a cigarette in his right hand.

4.Mine was just the opposite. My scalp was almost completely grey when the first white hairs appeared in my eyebrows.

5. I had no say in the design, and I only was allowed to handle the controls a few times under strict supervision.

6. I would have been too small to handle a lawnmower in the first few years in PV. Someone else must have done it. My money is on my mom.

7. My recollection is that Ed did not bring a jacket and was shivering by the second half.

8. It must have been. My dad certainly did not know how to type. He hunted and pecked.

9. For some reason he was pretty good at using a 3-wood from the fairway. Most people consider this one of the most difficult in the game. He was also a much better putter than I was.

1948-1979 Catholic Upbringing

Posted on August 1, 2024 by Mike

Catholicism and me. Continue reading →

This is a painting of the Ursulines arrive in New Orleans in 1627. I can testify that heir fashions did not change a whit in the next 335 years.

I have been a Catholic or an ex-Catholic for all but a few days of my life. My parents arranged for me to be baptized as a Catholic as soon as it was possible. My mother and father were Catholics. Every single relative whom I met was Catholic. I attended Mass every Sunday and holy day of obligation for approximately three decades. I went to Catholic schools for twelve years; most of my teachers were Ursuline nuns or Jesuits. I was an altar boy in grade school, and a member of the Sodality in high school. I went to a state university, but I never missed Mass, even when I was out of town on vacation or a debate trip. I never missed Mass when I was in the army, working in Hartford, or living in Plymouth, MI, in the seventies. Catholicism formed me in many ways.

Catechism

Biblical stories were rare in Catholic schools.

Catholicism is fundamentally different from other Christian religions in at least three ways. Catholics are not educated using biblical stories, and they are not encouraged to read the Bible on their own. I never heard about Bible studies until I started associating with Protestants. Young Catholics are taught what to believe using the catechism, a thin book of fundamental questions and correct (or at least authorized) answers about God and humans. Catholic students—at least in those days—spent hours memorizing them and many more hours being drilled about them. The first two pairs in the version that we used were:

“Q: Who made you?” “A: God made me.”
“Q: Why did God make you?” “A: God made me to show forth his goodness and to make me happy with him in heaven.”

There were many more. I remember that Sr. Lucy’s second-grade class had an oral exam that covered eight or ten pages¹ of these questions and answers. Before the test I was quite certain that I had all of the answers memorized, but I totally blanked on one of them. This failure totally crushed my spirit. I might have even cried. Sr.Lucy tried to comfort me, but at that point I was accustomed to academic success and just could not countenance my failure.

The catechism was comprehensive and coherent. It represented what Catholics believed. You could argue about other things, but contradicting anything in the catechism was, literally, heresy. For decades I assumed that other sects also had a fixed set of beliefs. When much later I participated in a group reading religious literature, I was shocked to find that the participants—al members of the same Protestant denomination—did not understand and agree upon the fundamental concepts of faith and hope. These people did not share the same religious beliefs. They just liked their minister and the other members of their flock.

To Catholics faith was agreement with the postulates of the catechism. Hope was confidence in God keeping up His/Her/Their side of the bargain. Love was respect for all of creation.

Seven Sacraments

The second identifying feature of the Catholic religion is its seven sacraments.

Other denominations baptize their members. A Catholic baptism has the primary purpose of providing absolution for “original sin”, a tarnish inherited from Adam and Eve that precludes salvation². That explains why the ceremony is arranged by Catholic families almost immediately after birth, and why the infant has no say in the matter.

We were taught that if someone who had not been baptized—whether a solid citizen or a mass murderer—was about to die, it was your duty to baptize them. A priest was NOT required. The nuns taught us that there were several forms of baptism, some of which did not even require holy water. I remember kids arguing about whether water from the radiator of a car could be used in an emergency. The answer may have involved the percentage of antifreeze.

The sacrament that involves confessionals is called penance³. Few, if any, other denominations have meticulously prescribed methods for forgiveness of the myriad sins committed after baptism has wiped one’s slate (that is how I thought of it) clean. Some protestants (commonly called heathens by Church members) claimed that faith alone was enough, but that has always seemed transparently flawed to me. What’s faith got to do, got to do with it? You sinned; you died without absolution; you go to hell.

Cleansing the slate requires confessing one’s sins to an ordained priest. Catholic priests can withhold absolution if they are skeptical of either the penitent’s “heartfelt contrition” or the expression of a “firm purpose of amendment”. To me it made sense that the well-trained clerics were called on to make these important decisions.

Heathens often want to know what it is like to go to confession. For me the anticipation was worse than the event. No priest ever asked me to provide any sordid details, and certainly none ever withheld absolution. The “penance” prescribed could be anything, but in my experience it usually was a small number of Our Fathers and/or Hail Marys as well as “a good act of contrition”, in a prescribed format. After a few years of Catholic schools I (and everyone else whom I knew) could recite these prayers very rapidly. We used to hold races.

I never confessed any “mortal sins”, offenses that would be serious enough to merit eternal damnation. Should I have confessed my involvement with Sue while her first husband was still alive? I don’t think so. The Catholic Church did not recognize their marriage; why should I? Whether the Church would have condoned the forty years that elapsed before we were wed in a short civil wedding is a moot point. By that time I had fallen by the wayside.

Youngsters were allowed to receive the Eucharist when they reached “the age of reason”, usually in the second or third grade. That does not mean that they understand the concept of transubstantiation on which the sacrament is based. However, they were required to make a good confession before their first communion, and the two requisites for absolution demand the ability to distinguish right from wrong. By second or third grade most Catholic youngsters had a pretty good idea of what was “class participation” and what could get your knuckles rapped.

The Eucharist has always been part of the Mass. In my youth the priest lay the consecrated host on your tongue; he did not hand it to you. The priest drank a little wine, but he did not share it with the communicants.

Before receiving the consecrated host for the first time our class had a dry run. It felt like a piece of paper that wants to adhere to the tongue. It has neither of the taste nor the texture of food. I had a lot of difficulty swallowing the (unconsecrated) host the first time that a nun put one on my tongue. I don’t know why; I never experienced any subsequent difficulty.

You can tell he’s a bishop by his crook and his miter.

I never really understood how confirmation fit into the sacraments⁴. It was supposed to make you stronger. You were allowed to pick a name; I chose Peter. The archbishop came to town. We all lined up, and he went down the line and gave each person a gentle slap on the cheek.

Almost no one has ever received all seven sacraments. One would need to be ordained as a priest (holy orders) and married (matrimony). Since women have never been allowed to be priests, half of the population was immediately excluded. A few widowers have been ordained late in life. I never asked whether priests who disclaimed their vows could be married. A vow is a vow, but there may be some wiggle room that I don’t know about.

Father Brown whipped out his stole and ointment and performed extreme unction on lots of murder victims.

Up to the end of the sixties the seventh sacrament was called extreme unction. “Unction” meant anointing with oil; “extreme” meant that it was reserved for terminal cases. I considered this a great name, but it has undergone several rebrandings in the last few decades. It was called last rites for a while and then the sacrament of the sick. At some point it was renamed anointing the sick.

As I understood it, the oil lubricated the pathway to heaven for someone who was deathly ill. On television it was sometimes used even when the symptoms included the termination of all bodily functions. You can never be too careful. Maybe the living soul was stuck between two non-functioning organs. Why take a chance?

Popes

The papacy is the other unique institution. One person, the Bishop of Rome, is given the lifetime occupation of administering the Church worldwide. It has worked pretty well for 2,000 years or so. In the twentieth century I was about as familiar with the popes as the average Catholic. The popes in the first fifty years of my lifetime—Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I, and John Paul II—were well respected by most Catholics. In general they did a good job directing the Church in all areas except one. The elephant in the room will be discussed below.

Several decades after I dropped out of Catholicism I conducted an incredibly detailed study of the papacy—the institution and the individuals. I discovered that the popes were quite diverse. Some were geniuses, some were greedy or vindictive, one was hen-pecked!. A fairly large number of them spent little or no time in Rome. The Holy Ghost, operating through the College of Cardinals (and a number of other diverse electorates), has demonstrated eclectic taste in pontiffs.

The illustrated book that I wrote about the popes is posted here. The story of how it came about is related in this blog entry.

The Calling

The nuns and, to a lesser extent, the Jesuits talked about “the calling”. They uniformly insisted that at some point in their lives an event of some kind occurred that demonstrated to them that their God-ordained destiny was a religious career. None of them described the nature of that event, but each one indicated that anyone who received such a calling understood that God had definitely designated his intention for them.

While I was in grade school and high school I was a devout Catholic and, at the same time, extremely arrogant. I expected to receive the calling from God, probably just after I was an all-America wide receiver at Notre Dame. I listened intently for the call. In my senior year of high school I went on a retreat for several days with the members of the Sodality at Rockhurst. The priest conducting the event emphasized that everyone should listen carefully for his calling. I did, but I heard nothing. I was quite disappointed.

Years later I gave some thoughts as to what the events that so many of my teachers interpreted as a calling could have been. If it was not the usual hormonal firestorm occurring in an unusual setting, I could not hazard a guess. Here’s a clue, however: two of the nuns who were my teachers at Queen of the Holy Rosary were Sr. Ralph and Sr. Kevin. Where did they come up with those names? They are supposed to choose the name of a saint. The following was published by the Houston Chronicle in 2005:

There are two Saint Ralphs in the Catholic hagiography: Ralph of Bourges, a ninth-century French abbot, and Ralph Crockett, a 16th-century English martyr. Compared to Saints Peter and Aquinas, the Ralphs were theological underachievers. Crockett tried to convert England to Catholicism but was hanged, drawn and quartered. Ralph of Bourges’ principal accomplishment seems to be taking part in the Synod of Meaux. Ralph, it appears, is the patron saint of mediocrity.

St. Kevin lived (allegedly for 120 years!) as a hermit in a very small cave in Ireland. This was on Wikipedia:

One of the most widely known poems of the Nobel prizewinner Seamus Heaney, ‘St Kevin and the Blackbird’, relates the story of Kevin holding out his hand with trance-like stillness while a blackbird builds a nest in it, lays eggs, the eggs hatch and the chicks fledge.

No wonder I didn’t hear anything on that retreat.

“Falling Away”

My transition from ardent Catholic to complete skeptic was a fairly sudden one. The events involved were described in this blog entry.

I must emphasize that in the twelve years that I attended Catholic schools I did not witness or even hear any rumors of any kind of questionable conduct from any teachers or administrators. Furthermore, I did not hear of any inappropriate behavior at any parish that I lived in.

One slightly peculiar event occurred in the few months that I was stationed at Seneca Army Depot in 1972. I have described it in this blog entry.

My dad once told me a story that he heard from his brother Joe, the Benedictine priest (introduced here). Evidently, when he was still in Burlington, IA, he approached the prior or the abbot or some other Catholic bigwig to complain about abusive conduct by one of the other priests. The only result was that the offender was moved to another part of the country. My uncle may have made a minor stink about this and/or threatened to make a major stink. In any case he too was transferred. His destination was as remote as is imaginable, Kelly, KS⁴. Imagine a small country town with a pastor who was a Benedictine monk with a masters degree in economics from the University of Chicago.

I cannot register any surprise at the Church’s response to the flood of allegations of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy. I can only think of three explanations for such behavior by a clergyman:: mental illness, possession by the devil, or simple unwillingness to resist the temptation. In any case the perp was probably called to account for his deeds. He was undoubtedly asked if he was contrite and whether he would be able to prevent recurrences. He almost certainly answered “yes” to both questions. If the bishop felt that he was sincere, he would have no choice but to provide absolution. The man’s immortal soul was at stake. The actions may have been (usually were) criminal, but they did not put anyone’s soul in jeopardy.

If the bishop was not convinced, then he would be faced with the prospect of choosing between mandating mental health assistance, initiating an exorcism, or calling the cops. All of these options would be considered disastrous by any bishop. Keep in mind that the offender had received a calling to work for the Church. He and the other clergy were the tools that the bishop was asked to deploy in order to provide eternal salvation, In my day the number of vocations was critically low and decreasing. So, why not see if the situation could be salvaged?

I don’t think that it was an official policy. Nevertheless, the bishops made the same decision almost without exception: They quietly tramsferred the perps to a different location. This would solve the problem if the subject was actually willing and able to stop his crimes, or if the new location did not provide the same temptations. This may have occasionally worked, or it may have worked long enough for either the perp to die or become unable to commit the crimes or for the bishop to die or be replaced. The other solutions mentioned above would have certainly removed one of the clergy on whom the bishop depended and generated publicity that would likely reduce vocations in the future.

Altar Boy

I served as an altar boy for two or three years. At Queen there were two Masses every weekday. One was at 6am. The other, which was attended by all of the students. was held at 8:30. The 6 o’clock mass was always a low mass, which meant that only two candles on either side of the tabernacle had to be lit by the senior server, mostly because there was no music. These Masses were also much shorter and required only two servers. Actually one would suffice in a pinch, but two looked more balanced.

Sometimes the 8:30 Masses were high Masses. That required lighting six candle that were much higher on the altar. A device⁶ with a long wick at the end of a brass pole is used both to light and snuff the candles. This was the one thing that required a bit of skill. If a lit wick broke off and landed on the altar cloth, there would be heck to pay.

The Mass always proceeded in the same order. The only variation was for the epistle and gospel readings and the sermon. The first two were determined by the Church’s official calendar. The sermon was determined by the priest. At the daily Mass, low or high, it was generally omitted. It was hard enough to keep hundreds of squirmy youngsters under control even when the nuns required that each leave room for his/her guardian angel on one side.

The rest of the Mass was called the “ordinary”. While I was a server it was all in Latin. To become a server you had to memorize all of the responses. Some of these, like “amen” and “et cum spiritu tuo” were easy, but the ones in the beginning were somewhat challenging. The very first response was “ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam.”⁷ Probably the reason for multiple servers at nearly all Masses was to make sure that at least one was able to say the proper response out loud.

At a high Mass the following were sung by the entire congregation: Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei. There were several sets of music for these. Some of them were quite elaborate. There were often hymns at other spots as well. All of these were in blue books that were available in the pews.

The servers were not asked to sing, but each had designated duties. The one on the right rang the bells to wake up parishioners that the important part was coming. The two in the middle handled the cruets that were used in the ablution section The one on the left was called “the dead end” because he (no girls!) had no special responsibilities. When they were not busy, the servers knelt⁸ at the foot of the altar. They got to sit during the epistle, gospel, and sermon. One of the nuns would always be on the lookout for squirming or poor posture.

The priest’s dressing room, called the sacristy was on the left (from the point of view of the congregants) of the altar. Priests wore (at a minimum) a white chasuble and cincture beneath the vestments, which varied in color depending on the type of Mass and the calendar. Green was the most common. The servers’ room was on the right. They wore white short-sleeve surplices over black cassocks. There were about ten of each to choose from, first come first serve. I like to get there early. In the eighth grade I was one of the tallest, and only two or three went down to my ankles. Both the priest and the servers were fully dressed before donning their religious attire.

It was considered an honor to be an altar boy. In retrospect I find it amazing that my mom was willing to drive me to the early service. She was supportive of almost anything that I wanted to undertake.

Mackerel Snappers

Those fish were not “wild caught” within 500 miles of Kansas City.

In the Wavada household meat was NEVER served on Friday. It was likewise absent from my grade and high schools. My recollection is that I had cereal for breakfast and cheese sandwiches for lunch. There was no fresh lobster in the Kansas City area. The only offerings for supper that I remember were spicy boiled shrimp, fried catfish, fish sticks, and tuna and noodle casserole. The last was by far my favorite of those four. However, I don’t think that I complained much. My mother was a very good cook.

Why did we (and nearly every other Catholic family) deliberately refrain from eating meat on Fridays? I don’t think that it was actually decreed by the Church in the way that attending Mass was. That was derived from one of the Ten Commandments. The fasting was just one example of the “offer it up” approach to life that was drummed into us. Whenever you were disappointed, upset, or frustrated, a nun or priest would tell you to offer the situation up to God. Friday was chosen in memory of Good Friday, on which Jesus suffered so much for the rest of us.

Catholics were also encouraged to give up something for Lent, the forty-day period before Easter. Most of the kids whom I knew gave up candy or nothing. Since I did not have a sweet tooth, that would not have been much of a sacrifice for me. I might have tried to do without Coke or potato chips, but I doubt that I had the willpower to endure forty days without them.

Prayers

Praying in the Catholic Church is largely a matter of rote. For example, saying the rosary consisted of saying 53 Hail Marys and a handful of Our Fathers and Glory Bes at a supersonic pace while cogitating about one of three sets of “mysteries”. My family recited the same prayer, which we called “Grace”, before every evening meal. At QHRS my vague recollection was that we all stood up at our desks and recited the same prayer right before lunch. My mother may have made me say it before breakfast. Here is what we said:

Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts, which we are about to receive from Thy bounty through Christ, our Lord. Amen.

I never noticed before that there were two Lords in this prayer. One apparently owns the bounty; the other distributes it. If I had asked about this, I wonder what the nuns would have said.

Here is what I think about prayers with a specific purpose—asking for something, thanking for something, etc. If God is all-powerful, then He/She/They is also omniscient and therefore knows about the situation. Why would God care about whether someone debased himself to obtain something or express an emotion? Surely, if God is ever willing to tamper with nature, the decision would not be induced by nagging. Similarly, why would God care about whether someone was willing to forgo meat on Friday?

To me it is a lot easier to understand why the Church and its clergy would care about enforcing discipline than to think of a reason why an omniscient and omnipotent Being would be impressed by prayers or self-imposed suffering. I remember thinking how strange it was when both Argentina and Great Britain fought over the Falkland Islands. Both countries insisted that God was on their side in the conflict. I wonder if there were many conversions in Argentina from Catholicism to Anglicanism when the Brits prevailed.

Saints and Miracles

A few other religions have saints, dead people who are purportedly now in heaven. In the Roman and Greek Orthodox Churches they are a big deal. Cults that worship saints—especially Mary, Jesus’s mother—have developed over the years. “Queen of the Holy Rosary”, the name of our parish, was an example of the strange twists that the cults can take. Mary had nothing to do with the rosary. It was invented many years later. I don’t know if there is a singular “holy rosary” somewhere, but the only way that Mary is associated with the beads is the fact that the Hail Mary prayer is recited fifty-three times.

As far as I was concerned the popes decided—using a complicated legal process that involved the assessment of miracles and a “devil’s advocate”—who was a saint. Since the pope was infallible, that was it; they were in. Later I learned that during the first few hundred years of Christianity, lists of martyrs and other prominent Christians were created. At some point all of the people on the list were referred to as saints even though the process of getting on one of these lists was much less sophisticated than the rigorous process with which I was familiar.

The medals that I remember were pinned to the visor on the driver’s side.

In my day St. Christopher was one of the most popular of all saints. Many Catholics carried a medal of the saint. It supposedly provided protection against accidents. There were many contradictory stories about St. Christopher, but the evidence that he was a real person (as opposed to a fable or a composite of different people) was scant. In 1970, the year that I graduated from college, the Church removed him from the calendar, but he was still worshiped as a saint in some places. For that matter Charlemagne, who routinely executed thousands of people whom he captured, wass widely considered a saint and venerated as such. Although the emperor was never canonized, his statue was placed prominently in the narthex of St. Peter’s Basilica.

I think that my mom had a St. Christopher medal in her Oldsmobile 88. I could be wrong.

To be confirmed as a saint you had to have several miracles attributed to you. I firmly believed that there were thousands of documented miracles associated with these holy people. I took it as a “given”, not worth thinking about any more.

The nuns and priests that I encountered did not spend a lot of time discussing the saints. The one story that I remember vividly featured St. Dominic Savio and his biographer, Don Bosco. The saint died when he was only fifteen. Evidently he was extremely intelligent and absolutely devoted to becoming a saint. For a while I was inspired by his attitude, but eventually I reverted to my previous philosophy of doing whatever I could get away with.

The champion canonizer has himself been canonized by Pope Francis.

I am not sure which miracles Pope Pius XII (discussed in great detail here) attributed to little Dominic. By 1978, the beginning of the pontificate of Pope John Paul II, advancements in science had made obsolesced the standards of evidence previously used for verification of miracles. J2P2 canonized approximately 480 people, probably more than all of his predecessors combined. What process did he use? He just announced every so often that the list of saints was longer.

Much later I did a little research in the area of hagiography. I concluded that anyone who lived before the Renaissance and is considered a saint should be treated with suspicion. Some almost certainly were fabrications, others were probably composites of two or more stories, and some who were real people were rascals or worse..

Sacred Objects

The *duomo* in Milan is one of the most amazing plzdes that I have seen.

The Catholic Church has for a very long time made use of statues, paintings, and relics. The duomo in Milan has over 3,400 statues, including a very large number on its roof and a very famous one in the church of a flayed St. Bartholomew carrying his own skin. The altar in every church contains a blessed relic—usually a fragment of a bone alleged to be from a saint.

I remember that my class had a raffle of a few such tokens one year. Kids bought raffle tickets. First prize was a statue of Jesus that was perhaps fifteen inches in height. The secondary prizes were far inferior, probably “holy cards” with a picture of a saint or a miracle and some explanatory text on the back. For some reason I really wanted that statue. My only source of income was my allowance, which, if memory serves, was twenty-five cents per week. However, I spent almost nothing. I bought quite a few baseball cards over the years, but otherwise I was miserly.

On the day of the auction I brought all of my money to school and purchased more than half of the total tickets. Sure enough, I won the statue, but I did not win any of the other prizes. In retrospect I should have bought no tickets. After the auction I could have made the winner an offer he/she could not refuse.

I don’t remember what happened to that statue. I don’t think that it survived the move from Prairie Village to Leawood. For the most part my family did not take part in the iconography that was prevalent in Catholic homes in the fifties and sixties. However, I do remember wearing one religious item for quite a few years, a Brown Scapular.

The scapular was composed of two cloth rectangular pieces connect by two straps. One piece went on the front and one on the back. It was inspired by the habit of the Carmelites, which was, or course, much larger. The ones that I saw were woolen. Evidently, that requirement was dropped at some point.

You can’t just buy scapulars. I don’t remember this happening, but at some point the older kids at QHRS must have been “enrolled”. Part of the admonition is “Wear it as a sign of her [i.e., Mary’s] protection and of belonging to the Family of Carmel.” Furthermore, “whoever receives the scapular becomes a member of the order and pledges him/herself to live according to its spirituality in accordance with the characteristics of his/her state in life.”

Although it has never officially been part of the Church’s teaching, the Brown Scapular has for a very long time been linked with the “Sabbatine Privilege”, which promises that the wearer will be released by Our Lady of Mt. Carmel¹⁰ from Purgatory on the first Saturday after death. This was great! Purgatory was the place to which people were sent if they died with venial sins that were not absolved. Every “impure thought” was such a sin. Practically every adolescent who died would be forced to spend time—an hour, a year, a millennium?—roasting in purgatory. If, however, he had the Sabbatine Privilege, his time there would be less than a week. If he got in a car crash after partying hard on a Friday evening, he might go straight to heaven as long as he was still wearing his Brown Scapular. “So long, losers!”

My scapular had several pieces of cloth in each of the two sections. That is all that I remember of it. I don’t remember when I stopped wearing it. I certainly did not wear it in Ann Arbor.

There also was a version of the scapular that was a medal.

Big Events

The two big events on the Church’s calendar were, of course, Christmas and Easter. I remember being surprised that I was chosen for the boy’s choir as an eighth grader. We sang “Oh, Holy Night” at the midnight Mass.

For Easter I was chosen in the eighth grade to serve either at the high Mass on Maundy Thursday or Easter Sunday. I do not remember which.

1. This is almost certainly an exaggeration, but I remember quite clearly that this was a momentous event. Maybe it was preparation for First Communion or Confirmation. The most famous version is the Baltimore Catechism, which has been posted here.

2. In my day babies who died unbaptized supposedly went to a place called Limbo. In 2007 the Church waffled a bit on this and concluded that there is hope that God will do what humans were unable to do, namely baptize them himself. Don’t try to visualize this.

3. For some reason it seems to be called “Penance and Reconciliation” in 2024.

4. I wonder if it was added later to bring the list to seven. Most religious lists seem to have three or seven items. I might be on to something. The Encyclopedia Britannica The number of sacraments also varied in the early church, sometimes including as many as 10 or 12. In the sixteenth century the Council of Trent specified the list that we learned.

5. My experiences with Fr. Joe after he was sent to Kelly are posted here.

6. I expected to discover a Latin name for the pole, but it is merely called a candle lighter.

7. I discovered in my Latin class that some heathens might have been able to read this, but they would not have understood us when we said it. They had a markedly different way of pronouncing some letters. They rendered Caesar’s famous dictum “Veni; Vidi; Vici” as “WAY knee WEE dee WEE kee”.

8. What a wonderful thing it was to still have cartilage!

9.In my day the three sets were the Joyful Mysteries, the Sorrowful Mysteries, and the Glorious Mysteries. They told the story of Mary and Jesus in chronological order. Each had ten “decades”, one for each group of ten beads. I had never heard of the Luminous Mysteries, which are apparently prayed on Thursdays. All of these have been explained in detail on the Internet here.

10. I am 99 percent certain that “Our Lady of Mt. Carmel” is the same as Mary, the mother of Jesus. For some reason she has dozens of titles, each of which emphasizes something different about her. Incidentally, the Church has never officially preached that Mary shows up and checks for slightly charred scapulars every Saturday. However, it dies claim that Mary never died. She was “assumed” into heaven. If an archeologist ever makes a case that Mary’s tomb has been found, all Catholics must immediately denounce him/her/them as a heretic.

1966-2024 Bleeding Maize and Blue

Posted on January 28, 2024 by Mike

Michigan football and me. Continue reading →

I undertook this entry to explain what it was like to be a die-hard fan of a football team for fifty-eight years. I supposed that this might be of passing interest to some people (outside of New England, where no one gives a fig about college football), but, in fact I undertook it mostly to see if I could figure out to my own satisfaction why I have cared so much about an institution with no intrinsic value. Furthermore, over the years it has changed so dramatically. The only constants were the huge stadium, the winged helmets, and the school colors—maize and blue (mostly blue).

Before attending U-M: When I was still in grade school (not before—my family did not have a television set) my dad and I often watched professional football games on our black and white television set. This was remarkable for two reasons: 1) my dad seldom watched anything on television; 2) it was one of the few things that we did together. I distinctly remember that a white football was used for night games. Also, until the rule was changed, a runner was not considered “down” until his forward progress was completely stopped.

I knew Otto as #14, but in the days before face guards he must have been #60.

My dad was a fan of the Chicago Bears. My recollection was that his favorite player was Ralph Guglielmi, but he never played for the Bears. I must be wrong. My favorite team was the Cleveland Browns. In the early days my favorite player was #14,Otto Graham. Later, of course, I lionized the incomparable #32, Jim Brown.

Before I went to Rockhurst my dad also took me to one game in Atchison, KS. It involved my dad’s Alma Mater, Maur Hill. I don’t remember the opponent or result. However, Maur Hill was 2-6 in both 1960 and 1961, and so they probably lost.

The Dallas Texans moved to Kansas City in 1963, my sophomore year at Rockhurst, and were rechristened the Chiefs. Through his company, Business Men’s Assurance (BMA), my dad had two season tickets. He went to all the home games, and sometimes he brought me with him to the games at Municipal Stadium. I became a fan of Lenny Dawson¹, Curtis McClinton², Fred Arbanas³, the one-eyed tight end, and the rest of the players. I remained a big fan of the Chiefs while I was in the army and for a decade or so after that.

While I was in High School I attended every football home game. So did all of my friends and most of the other guys. My attitude was really more of a “be true to your school” thing than an appreciation of the game at the high school level. In fact, we all attended all of the basketball games as well. The guys at Rockhurst were proud that they were able to go to one of the very best schools in the area, and they supported all of the teams.

Before arriving in Ann Arbor I did not yet hate Woody or the color scarlet.

Undergrad at U-M:While I lived in Kansas City I did not follow college football very closely. Only three major colleges in Kansas and Missouri had football teams, and one of those—Kansas State—was perennially a doormat. I knew very little about Michigan football. I knew about the intense rivalry between Ohio State and Michigan. I had heard the song, “We don’t give a damn for the whole state of Michigan.” I had read about a few Michigan greats such as Tom Harmon and Germany Schulz. I knew that Michigan had the largest stadium in the country and usually won the Little Brown Jug. Woody Hayes (but not his counterpart Bump Elliott) was already famous.

The student section started on the 50-yard line and went around to the middle of the end zone.

However, it was not until I actually started living at U-M that I came to appreciate the importance of football at the university. Cazzie Russell had led the Wolverines to three consecutive Big Ten titles and to final four appearances in 1964 and 1965. Nevertheless, in the fall of 1966 when I arrived at my dorm absolutely no one talked about basketball even though the previous year’s football team had been a horrendous disappointment. The 1964 team had won the Big Ten and clobbered Oregon in the Rose Bowl. The 1965 team finished only 4-6 despite outscoring the opponents 185-161. Nevertheless, like nearly everyone else in Allen Rumsey House, I purchased season tickets in the student section of Michigan Stadium (no one ever called it The Big House) for a very low price and never gave a thought to going to basketball games.

I followed the marching band up

to the stadium for almost every home football game⁴ during the four football season in which I lived in the dorm. I have recounted in some detail those experiences in the 1966 season here. The last two games of my senior year were ones for the ages. On November 27, 1969, Ohio State was 8-0 and widely considered the best collegiate team of all time. They were riding a twenty-two game winning streak.. Michigan was 7-2, but one of its losses was out of the conference. Since this was the last game of the season, if U-M won, they would be tied with OSU for the the Big Ten championship. The league’s rules dictated that if there was a tie, U-M would go to the Rose Bowl because OSU had been there more recently. Michigan, a huge underdog, won the game 24-12. Wikipedia devoted a very long entry to this historic game. It is posted here.

I knew two of the stars of that game fairly well. They were both sophomores who had spent their freshman year living on the second floor of A-R. At the time I was the president of the house and had some interactions with both Thom Darden, a defensive back who was an All-Pro with the Cleveland Browns, and Bill⁵ Taylor, who scored the most famous touchdown in that game.

Michigan had hired a new coach, Bo Schembechler, for the 1969 season. He had a heart attack just before the Rose Bowl⁶, and so he was unable to coach. The team lost to the University of Southern California 10-3. In retrospect it is hard to believe that one of the most famous Michigan teams of all time did not score a touchdown in its last six quarter.

1970-1973: During the next four years it was somewhat difficult for me to follow the team too closely. In 1970 I was at my parent’s house in Leawood, KS, for the first three games, all of which were won by the Wolverines. For the remaining games I was at Fort Polk, LA (introduced here), for basic training. I learned the scores of the games, but there was no television available, and so I missed the second game of the “Ten Year War” between Schembechler’s troops and those of Woody Hayes. OSU won in Columbus 20-9. The two teams again tied for the Big 10 title, but OSU went to the Rose Bowl because of the “no repeat” rule. In those days Big 10 teams were not allowed to participate in other bowls.

In 1971 I was in the army at Sandia Base, NM (introduced here). The barracks had only one television, and none of the soldiers could afford to purchase one for their rooms. Michigan was 10-0 going into the OSU game in Ann Arbor, where they won a squeaker 10-7. I am pretty sure that I watched that one in the MP Company’s Rec Room. That team lost to Stanford in the Rose Bowl 13-12. Michigan was heavily favored and held the lead, but the team was done in by a fake punt by Stanford on a fourth and ten and a last second field goal. I must have watched that game in Leawood. A few days later I flew to upstate New York to finish my military career at Seneca Army Depot (described here).

In 1972 I was working as an actuarial student at the Hartford Life Insurance Company (introduced here). I watched the team on television whenever they appeared. I remember going to Jan Pollnow’s house for one of the regular-season games. I do not remember which one it was, but it was definitely not the season-ender (better known as The Game) at Ohio State. I am certain of that because Michigan won all of its first ten games, but they lost that one 14-11. This was a heart-breaker. Michigan had a first down at the OSU one-yard line and could not punch it in. The two teams tied for the conference championship, but OSU went to Pasadena, and U-M stayed home.

This man deserved to play inn the Rose Bowl.

In 1973 I was still at the Hartford. Once again the Wolverines won their first ten games. The Big Ten by then was known as the Big Two and the Little Eight. “The Game” was held in Ann Arbor. At the end of the third quarter the score was 10-0 in favor of OSU, but U-M tied it with a touchdown and a field goal. I am pretty sure that I watched that sister-kisser by myself in my apartment in East Hartford. I had a Zenith color portable with rabbit ears. The reception from the two ABC stations (New Haven and Springfield) was not great.

U-M’s quarterback, Dennis Franklin⁸, broke his collarbone in the fourth quarter. This was a decisive factor in the vote that sent the Buckeyes back to California. In two years U-M had lost only one game, but it did not get to go to a bowl game.

By this time Bo Schembechler had installed an option offense that emphasized running. For quite a few years U-M’s quarterbacks were better known for running and blocking than for throwing the pigskin.

Back in Ann Arbor for 1974-1976: In 1974 Sue and I moved to Plymouth, MI, and I enrolled at U-M as a graduate student in the speech department. I bought a season ticket in the student section. A few details about my personal involvement with the team during those years have been posted here.

A little more should be written about the 1974 season. The Wolverines breezed through the first ten games. They even had a 10-3 lead at halftime of The Game. However, OSU kicked three field goals and Mike Lantry⁹, who had earlier kicked a 37-yard field goal, pushed a shorter one very slightly to the left as time ran out. The miss cost U-M the conference championship and a berth in the the Rose Bowl.

Dennis Franklin, who lost only two games in his entire career as starting quarterback at U-M, never got to play in a Rose Bowl, or any other bowl for that matter. That was simply a travesty.

Detroit 1976-1979: For the next three football seasons Sue and I lived and worked in Detroit. I watched every game that was shown on television, but my memories are not too distinct.

The 1976 team lost a conference game at Purdue when the kicker, Bob Wood, missed an attempted 37-yard field goal at the end of the game. It was the first conference loss to one of the Little Eight since my senior year seven years earlier.

However, this team pummeled Ohio State in Columbus two weeks later to win the conference championship and qualify for the Rose Bowl. They lost that game to USC (whom else?).

The story the next year was eerily similar. The Wolverines were shut out in the Little Brown Jug game, but they defeated Ohio State in Ann Arbor. They then lost to Washington in the Rose Bowl 27-20.

It sounds like a broken record, but the 1978 team led by Rick Leach¹⁰, Harlan Huckleby¹¹, and a very stout defense, somehow lost to Michigan State before beating the Buckeyes again in the last game of the Ten Year War. USC then defeated the Wolverines in the Rose Bowl again thanks to a “Phantom Touchdown” awarded to Charles White¹² by a Big 10 ref.

I have two very vivid memory of this period of Michigan football. I remember that I was on a debate trip for Wayne State. For some reason one Saturday afternoon I was absolved of the responsibility of judging for one round. I found a television set and watched Michigan beat up on one of the Little Eight.

The other memory, of course, was the dramatic touchdown pass from John Wangler to freshman Anthony Carter on the last play of the Indiana game in 1979. The game, which was crucial for Michigan’s title hopes, was not televised. But the film was shown on all the highlight shows.

It was a period of frustration. It appeared that Bo’s coaching style could easily produce very good teams. They were always in the top ten and often the top five/. However, they were never good enough to win the last game of the year. Nevertheless the players were heroes to me and to all of the other die-hard fans.

I later read Bo Schembechler’s autobiography, Bo, co-written by Mitch Albom. In its pages he speculated that he might have driven the guys too hard on their trips to Pasadena. They did little besides practice. Most Michigan fans just thought that the team needed a passing game.

Michigan Replay: Most U-M football games were not telecast in the Detroit area while we lived there. However, every Sunday evening Bo Schembechler appeared on a half-hour interview show with Jim Brandstatter¹³, who had been an offensive tackle on some of his very early teams. Sue and I watched these programs every week. When we moved to Enfield, one of the few things that we missed about the Motor City was watching Michigan Replay on channel 4.

I recently discovered that the Michigan Replay shows have been archived by the university and posted on the Internet here. I recently watched the show about the 1980 version of The Game in which neither side scored a touchdown. The first thing that I noticed was that Brandstatter just dwarfed Schembechler, who was himself a lineman in college. The second thing that caught my eye was Bo’s outfit. He was decked out in plaid pants and a grey sports jacket with a Rose Bowl pin. It was 1980, but Bo;s wardrobe was still in the seventies. I wondered if his wife saw this outfit before he left the house.

On the show Bo was charming and gracious. He always credited the players. What was so attractive about his approach on the show was how clear it was that everyone on the team gave 100 percent, and Bo loved them for it even when they failed. When Brandstatter heaped praise on the team’s defense, Bo insisted that the offense, which did not score a touchdown, did its part by running twice as many plays as the Buckeyes. His slogan—”Those who stay will be champions”—never rang truer.

Bo v. the world as seen from Enfield 1980-1989: The Wolverines finally found a passing game, or rather a receiving game, in #1, Anthony Carter¹⁴, who was by almost any measure the most amazing player in the history of college football. He was named a consensus first-team All-American three years running. During those three years Michigan was definitely a running team. In the first two Butch Woolfolk¹⁵ rushed for more than 1,000 yards. In 1981 he set the single-season U-M record with a total of 1,459 yards.

Nevertheless, the “go to guy” was Carter. He was always the first read on a pass attempt and the last read on most. The two quarterbacks who passed to him, John Wangler¹⁶ and Steve Smith¹⁷, are remembered mostly as footnotes in tales of Carter’s heroics.

The 1980 season was the most memorable one for me. Bo’s coaching staff had been depleted in the off-season. He had to hire many new coaches, including Gary Moeller, Lloyd Carr, and Jack Harbaugh¹⁷. The team had a very shaky start. It barely beat Northwestern in the opener and the lost two non-conference games. The fans were dejected, but the team—especially the defense—seemed to get better with each game. The three games before The Game were all shutouts, and the Wolverines racked up 86 point. The 9-3 win in Columbus was ugly, but the victory over Washington in the Rose Bowl was absolutely beautiful.

I have several vivid memories of the period. Most of them are disappointments. I can picture in my mind Cris Carter¹⁸ making a fabulous catch for a touchdown. My recollection is that it won the game for the Buckeyes, but this was not the case. Jim Harbaugh, my favorite Wolverine of all time, rewrite the record book in that game and threw a 77-yard touchdown pass shortly after Carter’s reception had brought the Buckeyes back to within a field goal.

The 1986 team fumbled away the Little Brown Jug that had been on display in the Michigan Union since 1977 and also lost decisively in the Rose Bowl. I do not remember either of those. I do remember that Jim Harbaugh guaranteed that U-M would beat OSU. They did, but only because of a missed field goal. I remember many field goals missed at crucial times, but this was the only one by an opponent that I can recall.

Michigan won the jug back in 1987, but that team won only seven other games. They did beat Alabama in the Hall of Fame Bowl.

Bo’s penultimate team might have been his best job as a coach. Without any great stars it lost its first two games and tied Iowa at Kinnick Stadium. It then won four straight decisively, edged Ohio State in Columbus, and then won the Rose Bowl by upsetting Southern Cal 22-14.

The first game of Bo’s last year was the worst. Rocket Ismail zoomed for two touchdowns on kick returns, and #1 Notre Dame defeated #2 U-M in Ann Arbor but won the remainder of its regular-season games. In the Rose Bowl the Wolverines lost to USC by a touchdown. Bo was incensed by a holding call on a fake punt that had gained twenty-four yards. After the game he resigned as head coach and took a job as president of the Detroit Tigers. He was fired from that job in 1992.

Bo had had heart problems for a long time before he died in 2006. His legacy was smudged by his son Matt’s claim that Bo knew about sexual shenanigans by long-time university doctor Robert Anderson.

Gary Moeller years 1990-94: I think that it was during Moeller’s five-year tenure at U-M that I stopped watching U-M games. His first team lost a close game to Notre Dame and two regular-season games. However, they closed out the season with five wins (tied for first in the Big 10) and handily defeated Ole Miss in the Gator Bowl. The team had developed a passing attack with Elvis Grbac¹⁹ and Desmond Howard²⁰.

The next year the team lost to Florida State, but won its other ten regular-season games. The highlight was a completely horizontal 25-yard touchdown reception by Heisman-winner Howard on a 4th down against Notre Dame. However, the Wolverines were humiliated in the Rose Bowl by Washington.

The team had three ties but no losses in Grbac’s last year. It went to the Rose Bowl again and this time defeated Washington. Tyrone Wheatley was the star

Todd Collins took over at quarterback in 1993. The team lost four regular-season games, but they closed out the season with a 28-0 mauling of OSU and and equally decisive bowl victory over NC State.

Ty Law, one of the greatest defensive backs ever, could not prevent the miracle.

1994 was the last year in which I watched Michigan football live. The disastrous game at home against Colorado was followed by losses to Penn State, Wisconsin, and OSU.

I remember storming out of the house at the end of the OSU game. I went for a long walk, and I was still upset when I returned. The team’s victory over Colorado State in the bowl game did little to mollify me. The stress of these games was becoming too much for me.

Gary Moeller was allowed to resign after being arrested in May of 1995 for drunk and disorderly conduct at Excalibur, a restaurant in Detroit. He served as an assistant coach in the NFL until 2002. He died in 2022.

Lloyd Carr with four-year starter Chad Henne.

Lloyd Carr’s years 1995-2007: Lloyd Carr was named interim head coach after Moeller’s untimely exit. It was made official after the team won eight out of the first ten games. I expected U-M to lose the finale against #2 OSU, and I did not get to see the 31-23 upset in which Tim Biakabutuka rushed for an astounding 313 yards. That team ended the season at the Alamo Bowl, where lost to Texas A&M. The 1996 team also beat OSU and lost its bowl game.

During Carr’s thirteen years as U-M’s football coach I was extremely busy at work. If I was not traveling on a given Saturday, I was certainly in the office from dawn to dusk. I had a small TV on which I occasionally watched football, but I don’t think that I ever watched a Michigan game. I did not even check the scores until I was sure that the game was over. I told people that my favorite weekend was U-M’s bye week.

The 1997 team featured perhaps the greatest defensive back of all time, Charles Woodson, who had been a freshman phenom in 1995 and a consensus All-American in 1996. He was also used—to great effect—as a kick returner and wide receiver. The team won all of its games, but in The Game it needed a tremendous effort from the defense and special teams to overcome a moribund offense. It faced a very good Washington State team in the Rose Bowl.

I watched the game with my friend Tom Corcoran. Woodson was Superman without the cape, but the rest of the team struggled. With a 21-16 lead U-M had the ball with 7:25 to play. Michigan got two first downs passing (once to Woodson) before Wazoo took over on its own seven yard line with sixteen seconds to play. After a hook and lateral play and the most egregious example of offensive pass interference that I have ever seen WSU moved the ball to the Michigan twenty-six. The clock ran out as the WSU quarterback tried to spike the ball. They should have had a play ready to run. I remember telling Tom that I could not believe that this was what I was hoping for. I never wanted to go through anything so nerve-wracking again.

So, U-M was named national champion by the Associated Press, but the coaches voted for Nebraska, which was also undefeated.

The next three years were bizarre. Michigan turned into “quarterback U”. Tom Brady²⁴ and Drew Henson²⁵ battled for the starting job for two years. Brady eventually prevailed. Henson started for U-M in his junior year, which was typified by a 54-51 loss to Northwestern that must have made Bo rip his hair out (if he had any left). Nevertheless, those three teams won bowl games over Arkansas, Alabama, and Auburn.

The last seven years of Carr’s coaching career were drearily predictable. There were only two quarterbacks. U-M beat OSU in 2004, John Navarrre’s senior year. Henne lost four times in The Game. They were all good teams, but …

I watched onlyone game. I was visiting my dad in Overland Park, KS, the weekend in 2004 when U-M played San Diego State (coached by Brady Hoke) in Ann Arbor. U-M, which had lost to Notre Dame the previous week, were behind at the half. The on-the-field female correspondent stuck a microphone in Coach Carr’s face and asked him what he expected in the second half. He said, “I expect a comeback.” U-M did win, but it was really ugly.

The worst and best games were in the last year, 2007. The loss to Appalachian State in Ann Arbor was, at the time, the low point of Michigan Football in my lifetime. The victory over Florida (coached by Urban Meyer and led by Tim Tebow) in the Capital One Bowl was a pleasant surprise. U-M had four turnovers, but Henne passed for 373 yards and was named MVP.

Coach Carr was living in Ann Arbor in 2024.

Rich Rodriguez and Brady Hoke 2008-2014: I felt strongly that after Carr retired U-M should have hired Jim Harbaugh. After a long career as a quarterback in the NFL he had coached the Raiders’ quarterbacks for two years and then transformed a horrible University of San Diego team into conference champions in only two years. Stanford hired him in 2007, but I suspected that he would have accepted any reasonable offer from U-M. Instead someone decided to pay West Virginia University $2.5 million to allow its coach, Rich Rodriguez, to forsake the Mountaineers and come to Ann Arbor.

I saw two of the games of the Richrod/Hoke era in person. Sue and I were in Ann Arbor in 2008 for the team’s home debut against Miami University. It was a horrendous game. I suspected that Miami would have won if its quarterback had not been injured.

It took a couple of years, but Rodriguez was able to field a pretty good offense built around Denard Robinson. The big problem was on defense. Richrod hired Greg Robinson to coach the defense, and the results were absolutely pathetic. U-M fans were not accustomed to teams running up the score on them, but it became commonplace.

The other game that I viewed in person was in Hoke’s regime, but it was also horrendous. It was a night game played at Rentschler Field in East Hartford in 2013. More than half the fans were wearing Michigan’s colors. It was very close up to the end. Michigan ended up with a 21-14 victory.

That game increased my appreciation of the alcohol-free atmosphere of Michigan Stadium. Some UConn fans were really obnoxious. However, the team’s play did not impress me at all.

Michigan somehow beat OSU in Brady Hoke’s first appearance in 2011. That team also defeated Virginia Tech 23-20 in the Orange Bowl. However, it was downhill from there. The 2014 team’s record was 5-7, which caused Hoke to be fired. The Athletic Director who had hired him, Dave Brandon, resigned.

Jim Harbaugh pre-Pandemic 2015-19: My career as a cowboy coder had just ended when Jim Harbaugh’s stint as U-M’s head coach began. He brought “an enthusiasm unknown to mankind” and a basket of new ideas. He took all of the players to Rome as part of Spring practice. He conducted coaching clinics in the southeastern U.S. These radical approaches to the job and the fact that he almost always spoke his mind engendered a lot of enmity against him in the community of coaches.

The 2015 team was much improved. After losing to Utah on the road to open the season the Wolverines won nine of the next ten games. The only blemish was a loss to MSU in Ann Arbor that was reminiscent of Keystone Kops, On the last play of the game the snap to the punter went astray leading to a 27-23 victory for Sparty. In The Game at the end of the season the team was clobbered by OSU, but the Wolverines delivered an even worse thrashing to the Florida Gators in the Capital One Bowl.

Harbaugh with Wilton Speight, who lost an entire season to a back injury.

The next four years were more of the same—one or two stumbles early, lots of very promising victories, and a blowout loss in The Game. In these years, however, the bowl games were also losses. Fans were becoming upset with Harbaugh, but those OSU teams were extremely good. Their teams were loaded with five-star recruits, and U-M’s quarterback always seemed to get hurt near the end of the season.

MGoBlog and BPONE: MGoBlog was founded by Brian Cook in 2004. I must have discovered the website that covered all of Michigan’s sports shortly after that because I am pretty sure that my dad told me that he was impressed by how much I knew about the U-M football team even before he moved to Enfield in 2005. The emphasis of the blogs was on football, of course. The most amazing aspect was that someone (Brian at first, later Seth Fisher) charted and analyzed every play of every U-M football game.

Brian and Seth also appear on the Michigan Insider radio show that was hosted weekly by Sam Webb on WTKA and was streamed on MGoBlog.com. Craig Ross, a lawyer who was born a year or two before I was, also appeared on the show. Ross was a super-fan of all of the U-M sports.

Top row: Sam and Seth. Bottom row: Craig and Brian.

I have spent an inordinate number of happy hours reading and listening to these guys and the other members of the MGoBlog crew. I especially appreciated the analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of U-M’s opponents that was provided by Alex Drain.

Brian, who was a very talented writer, often bared his soul about sports and his personal life. He invented the acronym BPONE, which stood for Bottomless Pit of Negative Expectations. It described a state of mind when one can no longer appreciate the positive aspects of viewing sports because he/she (hardly ever she) is convinced that they will be overwhelmed by negative aspect in the end. BPONE is precisely the reason that I gave up watching the Wolverines on television. Once you have seen Colorado’s “Miracle at Michigan” or the bungled punt attempts against MSU and Appy State it was difficult to keep them out of your mind.

Harbaugh’s glory years 2021-23: I should pass over without mentioning the monumentally stupid college football season of 2020. U-M won two of the six games in which it was able to field a team of players who did not have Covid-19. I blame Trump, who insisted that all the teams should play during the second wave of the most infectious disease anyone had seen.

Aidan Hutchinson was the best defensive player since Woodson.

In preparation for the 2021 season Harbaugh had dramatically reshuffled his assistant coaches. The primary goals were to design offenses and defenses that would be effective against the ones used by Ohio State. The players recruited for these new schemes were big, tough, and smart. Harbaugh promised that he would beat Ohio State or die trying.

Expectations for the 2021 season were not high in Ann Arbor, but there were some scraps of good news. Aidan Hutchinson³⁰, the All-American defensive end, returned. Cade McNamara and five-star freshman J.J. McCarthy seemed promising as quarterbacks.

In fact, this was a very good team. It lost a heart-breaker to MSU in the middle of the season when Kenneth Walker III ran for 197 yards and five touchdowns, but the Wolverines still entered the Ohio State game with a surprising 10-1 record. The team played an inspired game and defeated the Buckeyes by a score of 42-27. They then annihilated Iowa in the conference championship 42-3. They were ceded #3 in U-M’s first appearance in the College Football Playoff. The team was outclassed by eventual champion, Georgia, 34-11. Nevertheless, this was was the most accomplished Michigan team since the 1997-98 team that was named national champion by the AP.

When Corum got hurt, Edwards stepped up.

Even Brian Cook was optimistic about the 2022 team. Hutchinson was gone, but this team had two legitimate quarterbacks, two outstanding running backs, Blake Corum and Donovan Edwards, outstanding receivers, and the best offensive line in the country. The questions were on defense were quickly answered. The team breezed through its first ten games. A stubborn Illinois defense nearly engineered an upset in Ann Arbor, but the team was still undefeated and ranked #3 for The The Wolverines prevailed in Columbus for the first time since 2000 by a score of 45-23. They then sleepwalked past Purdue in the Big Ten championship and entered the CFP ceded #2.

Sherrone Moore (left) and Jesse Minter were probably the best offensive and defensive coordinators in college football.

Their opponent in the semifinal was Texas Christian. Michigan was favored by almost everyone, but J.J. McCarthy had a terrible game, and Blake Corum had been severely injured late in the season. The defense also had trouble stopping TCU’s attack; it did not help that two or McCarthy’s early passes were intercepted and returned for touchdowns. In the end the Horned Frogs won 51-45. Perhaps it was just as well that U-M lost that game. Georgia overwhelmed TCU in the final.

The 2023 team had one goal: to win the national championship. Almost all of the important players and coaching staff returned. The team was ranked #2 behind Georgia for nearly the entire season in both polls.

Two silly “scandals” were distractions. Because of allegations of recruiting violations in the Covid-19 year³¹ Harbaugh did not attend the first three games, which were blowouts of non-conference teams. Because of bizarre behavior of a low-level analyst with the unlikely name of Connor Stalions. He apparently bought tickets for people for games of prospective U-M opponents. Some of them allegedly took videos of the signs used to signal plays³² to the field. The Big Ten’s investigation resulted in the firing of one coach and the requirement that Harbaugh not be on the field for the team’s last three regular season games.

Corum was the star in overtime, but everyone contributed.

Those three very important games—were overseen by the Offensive Coordinator, Sherrone Moore. The results were decisive victories over Penn State, Maryland, and Ohio State. Michigan then shut out Iowa in the last conference championship game ever. After Seth Fisher analyzed each play of U-M’s semifinal overtime triumph over Alabama in the Rose Bowl he called it the greatest of Michigan’s 1,004 victories. The victory over Washington in the final game was less dramatic but equally satisfying.

In the end Michigan was the unanimous choice as #1, and the NCAA said that they had won the title fairly.

Denouement: Nick Saban, the long-time extremely successful coach at Alabama retired. Harbaugh resigned after agreeing to become the head coach for the Chargers, one of his old teams. Sherrone Moore was named U-M’s head coach. McCarthy, Corum, and quite a few others went pro. Some of the coaches accompanied Harbaugh to wherever the Chargers play these days.

In February of 2024 I watched the entire Rose Bowl game v. Alabama. I could not have watched it live. There were too many times in which Michigan committed unbelievable blunders that threatened to blow the game open. The FIRST PLAY was an interception that was overruled! BPONE would have overcome me. At least one vital organ would have failed.

How will Michigan do in the future? I sincerely doubt that the heroics of team #144 will ever be matched by any Michigan team in the future. College football has changed so drastically in the early twenties, and most of those changes do not bode well for the Wolverines.

I am quite happy that I got to experience this event even though I refused to make the kind of emotional investment in the team that others did. Their reward was no doubt greater.

1. Len Dawson, a Purdue graduate, led the Chiefs to victory in Super Bowl IV. He died in 2022.

2. Curtis McClinton, who went to the University of Kansas, was the AFL’s Rookie of the Year in 1962. He played nine years for the Chiefs. He was still alive and living in KC in 2024.

3. Fred Arbanas was a graduate of Michigan State. In January of 1965 he was assaulted in KC and lost vision in one eye. He nevertheless was an All-Star for the Chiefs for several years after that. He died in 2021.

4. The only one that I missed was one of the greatest U-M games of all time, the 1969 Ohio State game. I opted to attend a debate tournament in Chicago instead. This was one of the poorest choices that I ever made. I even gave away my ticket, which was on the 50-yard line halfway up.

5. I never heard anyone call him “Billy” in the year that he lived in A-R. He was generally known as BT, just as Darden was commonly called TD.

6. This game was attended by my parents while I watched on TV in Leawood! I was on my holiday break from classes.

7. Michigan easily won all ten games before the OSU game. The combined scores of it first three home games was 140-0.

8. Dennis Franklin had a cup of coffee with the New York Lions. He lived in Santa Monica, CA, in 2024.

9. Mike Lantry was my age. If he had gone to U-M after high school, he would have played when I was an undergrad. Instead he went to Vietnam. Although he held many records for kicking when he graduated, and he was a first team All-American, he is best remembered for three crucial kicks that he missed in the 1973 and 1974 OSU games. In 2024 he was living in Florida.

10. Rick Leach was still alive in 2024. His professional career was as a baseball player, mostly riding the pine with the Detroit Tigers.

11. Harlan Huckleby played six years for the Green Bay Packers. He was still alive in 2024.

12. Charles White played for the Cleveland Browns and the Los Angeles Rams. He led the NFL in rushing in 1987. He died in 2023.

13. Jim Brandstatter was in the same class as TD and BT. He tried out for the NFL but never played. He had a very long career in broadcasting. He was still alive in 2024.

14. Anthony Carter’s official height was 5’11”, and his weight was 168 lbs. I was two inches taller and 23 lbs. lighter when I entered the army. So, I was much skinnier than Carter. However, compared to nearly all football players, Carter was a midget. He set an incredible number of records. You can find them on his Wikipedia page, which is posted here. Carter was still alive in 2024.

15. Butch Woolfolk was a track star as well as one of the all-time great running backs at U-M. He also had an outstanding professional career. He was still alive in 2024.

16. John Wangler had to fight for the quarterback job his entire career at U-M, and he did not make the grade in the NFL. Nevertheless he will always be remembered for that pass in the Indiana game and his victories in The Game and the Rose Bowl. He was still alive in 2024.

16. Steve Smith started at quarterback for U-M for three years. He played for a couple of years in Canada. He was still alive in 2024.

17. Jack Harbaugh was the head coach at Western Michigan and then Western Kentucky, where his team won the Division I-AA national championship in 2002. The most important aspect of his career at U-M was probably the introduction of his son Jim to the nicest football town and best program in the country. Jim hired him as an assistant coach in 2023 (at the age of 84), and he was on the sideline coaching away when the Wolverines finally won it all in 2024.

18. Cris Carter was a phenomenal receiver, perhaps the best ever, but he had difficulty staying out of trouble. He was suspended for his senior year (1988) at OSU and then had a long and checkered NFL career. The high spots were lofty enough to get him into the Hall of Fame. Since his retirement after the 2002 season he has had had a few jobs in sports broadcasting.

19. Elvis Grbac had a reasonably successful, at least in financial terms, eight-year career in the NFL. He retired to become athletic director of his old high school in Cleveland. Believe it or not, he had a brother named Englebert.

20. Desmond Howard, who went to the same high school as Grbac, had a very successful NFL career and an even more successful career as an analyst at ESPN. I sat next to him on an airplane once during the early days of his career there.

21. I was astounded to learn that in 2023 Tyrone Wheatley had been hired as the head football coach at Wayne State in Detroit. He had a long and successful NFL career with the Giants and Raiders.

22. Todd Collins was never a big star at U-M, but his NFL career, which started in 1995 lasted until 2010, although on two different occasions he took a few years off. He was never a starter, but he evidently was widely considered a reliable backup.

23. Charles Woodson was just as good in the NFL as he had been in college. He played from 1998 to 2015, an astonishingly long career for a defensive back. The greatest interception of all time can be viewed here. In 2024 Woodson worked as an analyst for Fox.

24. Tom Brady became the greatest quarterback of all time in the NFL.

25. Drew Henson dropped out of school after his junior season and signed a contract with the New York Yankees. He bounced around in the minors before and played only eight games with the Yankees before retiring in 2004. He then tried the NFL, where he saw very limited action over a five year career. He was still alive in 2024, apparently working for a company that advised players on economic matters.

26. John Navarre was drafted by the NFL, but he played in only two games. In 2024 he lived in Elmhurst, IL.

27. Chad Henne played fifteen years in the NFL, mostly as a backup quarterback. His last few years were with the Chiefs. He retired in 2023.

28. This is my favorite figure of speech. It is called preterition.

29. Thankfully Walker played only one season for MSU. He was drafted by the Seahawks.

30. In 2024 Aidan Hutchinson was the cornerstone of the rebuilt Detroit Lions.

31. Brian Cook and the other MGoBloggers call this incident “hamburgergate”.

32. I was shocked to learn that it was illegal to go to other teams’ games to scout. I also assumed that everyone tried to “steal” signals and that teams took measures to make this nearly impossible. The NFL has installed technology that allows the coaches to talk to the players on the field. College coaches refuse to consider this arrangement.

1981-1985: TSI: A4$1: The Clients

Posted on April 6, 2021 by Mike

We delivered the code. They paid us the buck. Continue reading →

IBM’s introduction of the System/23 Datamaster in June of 1971 was a tremendous opportunity for TSI. In fact, if the announcement had been a month later, I probably would have given up on TSI and looked for a job.

The Datamaster was one of the very few systems in the early eighties that offered small businesses of all shapes the opportunity to automate their operations. There were competitive hardware systems, of course. Some of them offered more processing bang for the buck, but none of them had the three magic letters I-B-M on the hardware. IBM had a well deserved reputation of delivering high-qualiity system with unmatched service. “No one ever got fired for recommending IBM,” was a popular saying.

What we did not realize until we got our hands on it was that the Datamaster was extremely easy to program. Of all the systems that we worked with, I enjoyed working on a Datamaster the most. We delivered an enormous amount of code to meet incredibly diverse requirements in a very short period of time.

We depended on IBM for most of our new clients. The exceptions were Harstans Jewelers (described here) and advertising agencies (described here and here). I am uncertain of the order in which we acquired the new clients. The order in which I have listed them here may not correspond to the order in which we did the projects.

In most cases we took delivery on their systems in our office in Rockville and then carted them to the user’s location when the systems (or at least the most important modules) were ready. Once this started we always had at least one system in the office until the time that we bought one for ourselves.

Paul Prior sold Ledgecrest in the eighties or nineties, but it is still in business in 2021. It is now called Ledgecrest Health Care Center.

One of the most memorable clients was Ledgecrest Convalescent Hospital, a nursing home in Kensington, CT. The proprietor was Paul Prior¹, one of the most interesting people whom I have ever met and one of the few clients whom I got to know pretty well.

When Sue and I first met Paul I was quite intrigued by his business. Paul’s goals were not much different from those of any other small business. He wanted to bring his company into the twentieth century. Most of the applications that interested him were fairly standard,—patient billing and accounts receivable, accounts payable, and general ledger.

The last was his top priority because a high percentage of his receipts came from reimbursement from the government. The amount that the state reimbursed the business depended on his keeping a close eye on expenses. A mistake could cost thousands. So, the objective was to produce a system that allowed Paul to keep Ledgecrest’s expenses within state guidelines year after year. Anything over the legally prescribed “caps” would be disallowed.

The important thing was for him to learn where he stood while he still had time to do something about it. He needed to project his spending fairly accurately beginning in the middle of the year or even earlier. This sounded to me like something that would be valuable to all of the nursing homes in Connecticut. I had high hopes of marketing it to the dozens of nursing homes in the state, and I did. That effort is detailed here.

Paul also ran a second company called Priority Services. It provided Meals on Wheels to aged and disabled people.

After we won the contract and delivered the first part of the system, Paul told me how much he enjoyed working with the system. For reasons that I did not yet understand he had done all of the initial data entry himself. As usual he was drinking coffee from his dirty cup. He never washed it because, he said that it protected him from a weak cup. That was the day that he identified for me the feature in our systems (I forget exactly what impressed him) that convinced him to hire us. I chuckled when I informed him that our systems did not actually have that feature. He must have mixed us up with someone else.

Paul told me that he had been drafted in the fifties and took part in the Korean War. I don’t use the word “fought” because he told me that as soon as he got close to combat he “went over the hill”, was apprehended by MPs, and then spent some time in the brig.

When he got his discharge (I didn’t press him for details) and came home, he discovered that his older siblings had taken control of the family business that had been founded by their parents. According to Paul, everything was a mess. Bills were going unpaid, and the standards of patient care had dropped precipitously. Meanwhile his brothers and sisters were living high on the hog.

Paul somehow chased them out and took over the management and eventually the ownership of the business. He went to each creditor and arranged a plan for paying all the bills. Eventually he reestablished the reputation of the institution. I was very impressed by this. Nobody had ever related for the origin story of his business.

While I worked with Paul on getting reports from the G/L system to provide the information needed to maximize his income from the state, I got to meet the other three people in the office, all of whom were female. The first was named Dorie. She served as secretary and reception. She also paid all the bills. I don’t remember the second lady’s name. She was, among other things, in charge of Priority Services. The last was Paul’s daughter, Kathy, who helped out part time. I think that she was engaged to be married.

I don’t remember exactly what the system that we designed for Priority Services did. I think that they recorded who was to receive meals on specific days, and the computer printed delivery routes. I seem to remember that it also did billing. One day Paul asked the lady who ran this system to get me a cup of coffee. She asked me how I liked my coffee. I requested just a little bit of sugar and no cream.

The beverage that she brought me back was so sweet that I could not drink it. She explained that she could not find any sugar, and so she substituted a packet of Sweet’n Low. That didn’t seem like enough to her, and so she poured in a second envelope. From that day forward I drank my coffee black. I eventually learned to appreciate the bitterness.

The last system that we got working was accounts payable. I spent one session with Dorie in which I tried to learn how she did things. I asked her how many bills they had in accounts payable. She responded “None.”

I mansplained to her that I meant how many invoices that she had not paid yet. She insisted that she had none. Eventually I realized that, unlikely as it may seem, she was right. As soon as she got an invoice from the mailman she wrote out a check, stamped it with Paul’s signature, put it in an envelope, and mailed it.

Paul, perhaps mindful of his terrible experience with debts to vendors when he took over the business, tolerated this approach. However, he understood, that it tied his hands with respect to cash flow. Furthermore, after Dorie paid the bills they still had to be entered into the general ledger system.

The problem was that Dorie was terrified of the computer. The night after I talked with her about accounts payable, she could not sleep at all. I wasn’t there, but the next day she came to Ledgecrest and was ready to quit her job. Paul assured her that she would not be required to use the computer.

Instead, Paul entered in records for all the vendors himself. Once he had done so, it was easy for him to keep up with them. He did not need to enter a stack of open invoices and reconcile balances. Paul found something else to keep Dorie busy.

I doubt that anyone with an MBA would have approved of this extreme “Theory Y” management style, but it seemed to work for Paul.

Ledgecrest and Priority Services upgraded to a System/36 in the late eighties.

I can’t prove it, but I strongly suspect that NSNE was in the west side of the indicated building.

In many ways National Safe Northeast was not an exceptional company. Most of their customers were banks. By the time that I started working with them their primary products were no longer safes, but Automated Teller Machines (ATMs). Their office was in an industrial park in West Hartford². The most peculiar thing about it was that four family members were often present: Tony Bernatovich, who ran the company, his wife Lynn, who had a title but no evident responsibilities, his daughter, who was sort of the office manager when she was there, and a very large dog.

They wanted us to install a rather standard bookkeeping system. We made very few adjustments to the accounts receivable, accounts payable, and general ledger systems. It made me wonder why the IBM rep did not just sell NSNE IBM’s packaged systems. They would have worked pretty well.

Tony’s real interest was in a customized payroll system. NSNE used a method called “half-time due”. You haven’t heard of it? Neither has anyone whom I have ever met. There is not the slightest passing reference to it on the Internet.

NSNE did not want its installers to work overtime. Since they were out on the road, it was difficult to control their hours. Employees who put more than forty hours on their timesheets were only paid half of their usual rate for the excess. Not double-time, not time-and-a-half, just half-time. If the total pay for the period was less than the minimum wage, they were paid the minimum wage.

Was this legal? I don’t know. There are several case files for lawsuits involving NSNE³, but I did not find any that involved complaints about illegal compensation schemes. Incidentally, although I was always on the lookout for an edge for our software, I never considered marketing this feature.

We primarily worked with three people at NSNE. Joan Kroh was the accounting manager. Her assistant’s name was Darlene. There was another employee named Jimmy. I do not recall either last name.

I am not sure what Jimmy did, but one morning no one else was there, and he was supposed to enter some accounts payable. The system was on, but he could not get it to work. I tried to talk him through it over the phone. I asked him to key in GO APMENU and then press Enter. As God is my witness, I talked on the phone with him for forty-five minutes, and he could not accomplish this. Finally, Darlene came in and keyed it in with no difficulty. It took her less than a minute.

I have two other fairly vivid memories. In one of them I was driving my car to NSNE. It overheated. I had to pull over to the side of the road. I loosened the cap on the radiator, and steam and hot water blasted me in the face. I was not hurt, but I was a mess. I went to NSNE anyway. I never have cared much about appearances.

Darlene and Joan played in a woman’s football league. It was flag football, but these ladies were serious, and Joan was one of the best players. I was very impressed.

When the Lingerie Football League appeared on television I could not help thinking about the contrast between the ladies on TV playing “tackle” football in bikinis and shoulder pads and Joan’s teammates wearing sweatpants and tee shirts knocking one another on their asses.

This was not a pleasant drive. Route 44 can be very busy.

I never felt as ill-at-ease at a client’s offices as I did at John LaFalce, Inc., on Route 44 in Canton, CT. John⁴ was (and apparently still is) an interior designer. His retail office in Canton showcased a lot of eclectic furniture and doodads. I avoided the showroom lest one of my elbows occasion an unintended purchase. Rich people came there to hire him to redo the interiors of their Connecticut homes while they were living in one of their other houses. Or maybe vice-versa.

I think that TSI just implemented accounts payable and general ledger systems for them. We might have done some other programming that I don’t recall. There really was only one user, the bookkeeper, whose name was Jan Shustock.

I remember a meeting that involved one of the guys who ended up buying out John LaFalce, Inc. After the purchase they changed the name to LaFalce Campbell Robbins. The third person in our meeting was an IBM sales rep. The new owner mentioned something about red and blue not going together. As one, the rep and I held out our red and blue ties and looked down at them.

I also remember being stunned when TSI delivered the Datamaster that we had been working on to JLF. They asked me where, in my professional opinion, in their business office they should locate the computer system . They had sixteen employees, most of whom designed interiors for a living. They were asking a coffee-swilling code jockey how to arrange their furniture. I told them how long the cables were, but I refused to venture any further opinions.

SMI, in the south end of Hartford, has hardly changed in appearance at all in forty years.

Sue did most of the work for Standard Metals. The proprietor was Steve Buzash⁵. The person with whom we worked the most was named Carol. I recall very little about what we did for them, probably A/R, A/P, and G/L. I remember Steve talking with us about designing an inventory system. His inventory consisted of pieces of metal of various compositions, shapes and sizes. He often cut off pieces and sold them. It sounded like a nightmare to me.

Carol and Steve got married. They invited us to their unusual wedding, which took place on a large boat on the Connecticut River. After the ceremony there was a supper, which was followed by something that most of the people in attendance had never heard of, Karaoke.

Two people ran the show, a guy who served as MC and a woman in a sparkly dress who was obviously a professional singer. He told us tha we were going to be the entertainment, and we were going to have FUN!!!

To get things started, the lady sang a song. Needless to say, she hit every note perfectly and also inserted a few bel canto flourishes. Everyone was totally intimidated. I, for one, was wondering how far the shore was, and whether it would be worthwhile to try to swim for it in my suit and dress shoes.

When no one volunteered, the MC tried to coerce people into trying it. He promised “we will make you sound good.” A few people eventually ventured forth. I think that Sue sang a duet of something with Carol. The event lasted at least ten hours. No, I guess that would be impossible, but it sure seemed like it.

Dave Tine asked us to provide a computerized system for his sister’s company, Videoland, a company that sold home entertainment systems and rented VHS tapes. Its store and office were on Farmington Avenue in Hartford, but we never went there. I have a vague recollection that TSI did a simple inventory system for her. We probably also provided A/P and G/L systems. We billed Dave Tine for our work.

The company went out of business when Blockbuster Videos started appearing on every corner.

After we had a few installations, IBM accepted us into its fledgling Business Partner Program, which meant that we could make a little money selling hardware. One of our very first sales was to the Business Office of Avon Old Farms School. The Business Office Manager was Walter Ullram⁶. We sold them three diskette-based Datamasters. One was used for accounting functions by Mary Lee Pointe. One was used strictly for word processing by Walter’s secretary. The third was used by the bank. I don’t remember the names of either of these ladies.

The best thing about the AOF installation was that one-third of it required no support at all. The secretary loved IBM’s word processing system, and she learned how to use it from the manuals.

The first time that I visited AOF Walter showed me the system that he had developed for tracking on accountants’ sheets the school’s usage of oil in comparison with the heating-degree days. I was very impressed with how he had devised a scientific system to pinpoint inefficiencies and control the amount of money spent on heating all of the buildings. I was less impressed when I visited a few of the other buildings and saw that people there were coping with the cold weather by using incredibly inefficient electric space warmers.

I went to a very good prep school, but it was nothing like AOF. All Rockhurst students commuted. Most of the AOF students were boarders. They had uniforms, but they deliberately looked like slobs. We had no uniforms, but everyone dressed pretty nicely. The tuition at AOF was about thirty times what my parents paid. I soon learned that a lot of the AOF guys were “trust fund” students. Neither parent paid the tuition. It was paid by a trust set up when the parents divorced. Nearly all of the students were wealthy. Few were on scholarships.

I mostly worked with Mary Lee, whom I liked a lot. She had one very strange mannerism. A light on her telephone indicated whether calls originated inside the school or outside. When she answered outside calls, she began in a voice nearly as deep as Lauren Bacall’s, “Good afternoon, Mrs. Pointe speaking.” For inside calls, she sounded like Jerry Lewis’s falsetto, “Hello-oh?”

AOF reported a problem with connectivity. I cannot remember why they had to run long cables (maybe for Mary Lee’s printer), but they did. The cables did not run along the floorboards. They went through the walls and ceiling. We eventually discovered that the connections were OK, but some squirrels living above the ceiling had chewed through the cables.

Deposits at the AOF bank were not insured by the FDIC.

I was surprised to learn that AOF had a bank for its students. The parents did not send money for incidentals directly to the students. Instead the money went to the school, and the students were allowed to withdraw it. It was a simple system to write, and the lady who used it really liked it.

All in all this was a very satisfying installation. Walter and the users bragged about it to others in the faculty. I was considered a hero by all of the people that I worked with, and TSI made quite a bit of money on it.

I knew that there were quite a few prep schools in New York and New England. I was hopeful that there might be business office managers at some who were interested in automating. When I learned that Walter’s brother held that position at Westminster School in Simsbury, I was pretty optimistic. The story of our attempt to market Mary Lee’s system is told here.

Another favorite client was Viscom International in West Simsbury. Although their business was the importing and marketing of parts for boats, three of the four employees had formerly worked at advertising agencies. In fact, “Viscom” was short for “visual communication”. They were therefore very interested in the ad agency system that we had developed for Harland-Tine.

The principals were Curt Hussey and Frank Hohmeister⁷. The third advertising guy was an artist. I don’t remember ever even talking with him. Mostly I dealt with Curt and the administrative person, whose named was Mary. She also doubled as a model in ads that they produced to feature marine equipment that they imported from France. As Frank remarked once, “She could fill out a pair of jeans.”

The most enjoyable thing about this account were the lunches that Kurt, Mary, and I consumed in the small restaurant in the shopping center in which they were located. I recall good food and good conversation.

The account itself was a fairly difficult one. The primary system was inventory, and users are often unhappy with their inventory systems. Every transaction must be perfect, and designing a bullet-proof auditing system is difficult. Although their system was working fine at the time, they eventually decided to buy an IBM AT and ditch the Datamaster. The primary motivation was that Curt wanted to be able to do spreadsheets.

My recollection is that Curt had a heart attack while I was still visiting Viscom frequently. He came back to work not too long after that.

Mary left Viscom to work in a restaurant well south of Hartford that was managed by her husband. Sue and I went there for supper once, but I don’t remember any details about it.

Viscom went out of business in 1993.

We sold two Datamasters to the Feldman Glass Co. in North Haven. That was one less than the number of companies that they had. The parent company manufactured glass bottles that they sold and delivered to companies in the Northeast that distributed food or anything else in bottles. This company required only fairly standard accounting software.

The second company was named Anamed. It provided hospitals and the like with small plastic bags that contained tooth brushes, combs, and other hygienic items for patients. I think that we wrote a billing program for this service.

The bookkeeping for these two companies and the data entry for the computer was done by a mother-daughter team. The mother was named Isabel Blake. I don’t remember the daughter’s name.

I don’t remember the name of the third company. It specialized in “fulfillment”. Liquor companies ran contests in which they awarded fairly valuable prizes in exchange for some large number (fifty or more) of labels from their bottles. I don’t know how that Feldman Glass got involved in organizing and keeping track of all of this, but I guess that it was no more distant from its core business than Anamed was. At any rate they told me how they wanted it to work, and I did it.

One day I overheard one of the Feldman/Anamed ladies say that they had bought the wrong computer. I knew very well that it was unlikely that they would have found anyone who was willing to customize three different systems for them on any other computer. It was much easier to criticize the Datamaster’s specs than the quality of the installations. Someone had probably scoffed a the notion of using an underpowered system. I assume that they bought something else after using our systems for several years. It was just as well. Their businesses were so unique that we could not really even use them as a reference account.

I could find no evidence of the existence of any of these companies past the early nineties.

One of our strangest clients was Hartford Cutlery, a one-man operation owned by Bob Burke⁸. His parents owned East Granby Machine⁹, which had actually purchased the Datamaster. Bob’s business was sharpening knives and scissors for restaurants. I don’t think that he had any employees. His grinding equipment was kept in a little room at his parents’ company, but the Datamaster was actually in his house a few blocks away. That’s right. We sometimes made house calls.

Evidently all restaurants of any note had at least two entire sets of knives and scissors. Once a week Bob picked up a tray of cutlery from his clients, sharpened all of the pieces, and then returned them to the restaurant. Maybe he could pick up and deliver at the same time if he came very early or very late.

We wrote a billing program for him. It saved him a lot of time. It fed accounts receivable and general ledger systems.

Bob felt constrained by geography. There were not enough high-quality restaurants within an easy drive for him to make very much money. I could see what he meant; East Granby is not usually considered the center of the culinary universe.

Bob then told me his plan, or maybe it was his dream. He wanted to invade New York City. His scheme was to rent (or inherit or buy or steal) a helicopter and begin making daily flights to the city to collect knives to sharpen. He figured that he could undercut the prices of the local competition and still make a hefty profit. We didn’t talk about how he would get around in the city. I suppose that he could buy (or inherit or rent or steal) a truck of some sort to hold the trays of cutlery as he went from one posh dining establishment to another. There might be a place to park it near the helipad, although, now that I think of it, parking spaces there went for upwards of $50 per day even in those days.

Bob used our software for quite a while, but then we lost touch. I have seen no evidence that he ever implemented the plan or, for that matter, that he didn’t.

Putt Brown ran his family’s business, Mono Typesetting, in Bloomfield. I think that he may have gotten our name from a mutual friend and client, Ken Owen, whose story is here. We did a time and materials billing system for him that fed rather standard accounting systems.

These were great, but newer ones were better.

Putt and I often ate lunch together. He was a peculiar dining companion in that he saw a menu as not so much a list of food choices as an agglomeration of type fonts. He often lamented about the state of his industry. He said that he was forced to purchase new electronic typesetting equipment every year. As soon as he got a new system it was obsolete.

I don’t think that he realized it yet, but not very long after this conversation everyone would become a typesetter. Every font imaginable became usable by every Tom, Dick, and Harry with a personal computer that cost a tiny fraction of the systems that Putt was burning through. I am pretty sure that Mono was the last standing typesetting company in the Hartford area, but Moore’s Law killed it as well.

At the time I was a fairly serious vegetable gardener in the small patch of courtyard behind our house in Rockville. Putt told me that he was going to try raised beds for his next planting. Raised beds are quite a bit of work, but they allow more heat to reach the roots, which, for some plants, stirs more growth. It seems like the technique would work best for root crops. The other advantage is that you can sit down rather than kneel down when weeding the crops.

I wonder if Putt actually tried it and whether it worked.

In 1988 I was very surprised to see Putt again in a very unusual setting. In fact, I was wearing a disguise. The incident is described here.

This Atari ST sort of looks like a computer

Suzanne Nettleton owned and operated a company in Middletown, CT, called Professional Relief Nursing. The company maintained two lists, nurses looking for work and institutions looking for nurses. PRN then matched them up.

Suzanne had already had two bad experiences with computing systems. Several years earlier she had tried to get someone to develop a system for her on an Atari computer. You could play Pong on it, sure, but I never heard of anyone trying to develop an administrative system on one.

On her second attempt she did a better job of selecting the computer (a Datamaster), but she chose the wrong people to develop the software. It worked OK at first, but at some point they refused to support it any longer. So, Suzanne asked us to take over the maintenance.

We printed out the listings of the programs. They did not meet our standards by a long shot, but they were fairly simple. We insisted on converting the programs to meet our standards. She agreed, and we signed a contract. Over the years we did a fair amount of additional programming to provide a more comprehensive system.

I have two vivid memories of this installation. The first was the drive to the PRN office. I was shocked that there were two stoplights¹⁰ in Middletown on Route 9, a six-lane high-speed highway.

The second memorable event occurred when I showed up early one afternoon for an appointment with the guy that Suzanne had hired to operate the Datamaster system. When he saw the McDonald’s bag that I brought with me, he exclaimed, “Oh, you eat styro-food!”

By far the most prestigious name on out A4$1 client list was only three letters long, IBM. A new department devoted to the IBM Business Partner Program resided in the company’s Armonk, NY, complex. We drove there and talked with Dick Patten, the IBMer in charge of the program, about installing a customized system for lead-tracking on a Datamaster. He liked our approach, and we were equally enthusiastic because we had already developed lead-tracking software for our own use. We also had installed it elsewhere a couple of times.

So, we signed a contract. Dick was then shocked to find out that he could not get IBM to deliver him a Datamaster for several months. He was astounded even more when we told him that if he ordered it through TSI, we could deliver a system in two weeks. Our orders went through “the channel”, which, sometimes but not always, had much better delivery times than were available elsewhere.

For a moment Dick actually considered our offer. Instead, he informed his hardware contact at IBM about our offer. He then demanded to know why the business partners had better access to systems than the man IBM had chosen to manage the business partners. Evidently they found one for him.

While we were in Armonk we chatted one day with a female college student who was employed by IBM for the summer. She told us that IBM had a policy of providing summer jobs to offspring of its employees who were at or above a certain level. She qualified because of her father’s rank.

She said that hers was the best job ever. She astounded us when she disclosed her hourly pay rate. $17 sticks in my mind, but that seems excessive. Also, on her first day her supervisor told her to go to the supply closet and take whatever she thought that she might need. No one kept track of anything like that.

When IBM found itself in financial difficulties in the nineties, this young lady’s tale popped into my head.

TSI had two clients in East Greenwich, RI. One of our most important was an advertising agency that is described here. The other was on the other end of the spectrum. Thorpe’s Wine and Spirits, which I think was just called Thorpe’s Liquor Store in those days, was a small adjunct to Thorpe’s Pharmacy. The pharmacy was sold to a major chain (weren’t they all?), but the liquor store still survives.

The proprietor, Gill Thorpe, told us that he had a Datamaster that he would like to used for an inventory system for his liquor store. We had quite a bit of experience doing retail inventory by this time, and the liquor operation was much simpler than a chain of jewelry stores. So, we took on the project in spite of the distance. I found the contract for this account in a box that Sue stored in my garage. We only charged them $500!

We evidently did a good job. The operator, Richard Thorpe¹¹ (Gill’s son), called us for support a couple of times, but he never complained about the system, and they never asked for any enhancements.

One of the last Datamaster clients that we worked on, and certainly the site of the last such system that was still in use was the Regal Men’s Store of Manchester, CT. This store also had the distinction of being the only TSI client (other than IBM) that I personally patronized. I did not go there often, but when I needed something, I generally made the drive.

There was not much to the system. My recollection is that they did nothing but accounts payable on their Datamaster. I would have remembered if we had installed an inventory system.

IBM stopped marketing the Datamaster in 1985. We still supported our clients, and more than once we helped them find used parts—usually diskette drives. In the early nineties we were still supporting all the software that we had written for the Datamaster, but we sent a notice to all of these clients that we would NOT address the Y2K issue on these systems, and we would not support them after 1999. By this time IBM had reasonable hardware alternatives for most of them, but none of the A4$1 clients hired us to convert their code.

This tiny ad is the only reference I could find on the Internet.

In 1999, however, the computer operator at Regal’s, Ann Gareau, begged us to make her system work past New Year’s Eve. I told her that they really should get a new computer and that all of our other Datamaster customers had moved on. She told me that management would never approve the purchase of another computer. She was probably right. The company closed its doors in 2000.

I told Ann that the programs would probably still work in 2000, but the aging would look strange. They might occasionally need to fudge the system date to get the program to accept some dates. She seemed satisfied by that.

I have a strong feeling that I left out at least one other A4$1 client.

1. I think that Paul still lives in Berlin, CT, in 2021.

2. The address was 21-C Culbro Drive. The street no longer exists. I don’t know what happened to it.

3. Among these is one that mentions the NSNE computer system. That’s us!

4. John LaFalce’s LinkedIn page is here.

5. Steve Buzash’s LinkedIn page is here. Evidently he has moved to Jacksonville, FL.

6. Walter Ullram is retired. He lives in Farmington, CT.

7. Frank Hohmeister died in 2015. His obituary is here.

8. Bob Burke died in 2015. His obituary is here.

9. East Granby Machine is now called Burke Precision Machine Co., Inc.

10. The state has a plan to remove these annoying lights in 2023.

11. Richard Thorpe died in 2010 at the age of only fifty. His obituary is here.

1955-1961 Part 2: The Neighborhood

Posted on August 23, 2020 by Mike

Life on a short street in Prairie Village, KS. Continue reading →

This is 7717 Maple in 2020. We moved into it in 1955. The house that I remember was much different:

It was light blue.
There was only one garage.
The window to the left of the door was a picture window, not a bay.
The shutters look different. I am not sure that there were any.
The addition on the right is new.
The trees are much larger. I am not even sure that there were any trees in the front.
A maple tree on the right between the houses is gone. It is possible that it grew into the huge tree on the right. It was small and skinny when we left in 1962.
Rooms have been added in the back, too.

Our version of the house contained three small bedrooms, one bathroom, a living room, and a kitchen. There was no basement. It was difficult to entertain company, but it was much more comfortable than the house on Thorp, and it was OURS.

The yard, especially in the back, was steeply sloped. Nall Avenue was at this point quite a bit higher than Maple. The best places to play on our lot were the two side yards, both of which have now pretty much been eliminated by expansions.

I remember an occasion on which my dad and I were playing catch in the backyard. He threw it to me with a lot of loft but not much distance. I ran downhill to catch it, which I did. Unfortunately I my momentum carried me into a corner of our barbecue grill, and it took a small chunk out of the left side of my forehead. It was not that big of a deal. Four or five stitches took care of it. It left a small scar that wrinkles have long since rendered invisible.

Pictured at the right is Maple Street. Nall Avenue on the right is a major street that runs north and south. Tomahawk Road, the street at the top is one of the few streets in the area that is not perfectly straight. To the left (west) it runs to Tomahawk School, which is where Jamie went to kindergarten in 1961-62. At this point it straightens and becomes a north-south street that terminates at 85th. To the right Tomahawk dead-ends at Nall, but at 75th St. it resumes its diagonal route northeast to the Prairie Village shopping center and beyond.

My recollection is that all of the houses on Maple Street were simple ranches. Some had basements, and some did not. The Nall Avenue end of the street was significantly higher than the Tomahawk end. The slope of the street that was south of our house was steep enough for sledding in the winter. The bottom of the cul-de-sac was also lower than the main road, but the slope was not as steep.

Car traffic on Maple was very light. Virtually always the cars entering from Tomahawk or Nall pulled into a driveway. Parking on the street was legal, but people seldom took advantage of this. Kids playing in the street were common. The residents knew to look out for them.

A creek (pronounced “crick” in our neighborhood) ran behind the houses on the west side of Maple. I am not sure of its function. I do not recall finding more than a few inches of water there. It certainly was no barrier to me and my friends if we wanted to go in that direction on foot. Occasionally it was a source of discovery and adventure. I remember that what we called crawdads occasionally appeared.

In 1955 our house was near the southern edge of civilization. A few blocks to the south of us were fields that had been farms only a few years earlier. I remember that while exploring a field I once discovered a mouse nest complete with babies. By the time that we moved the frontier was much farther south.

I inserted house numbers on the above map for all of the other houses on Maple. They may not be the right mailing addresses for some. My purpose was to simplify the references in describing our neighbors, starting with the side on which we lived, the east.

I am not sure who lived in the house labeled 7701. I have a vague recollection that it was an older couple with no kids. I do remember that the house on the Tomahawk side of 7701 did not exist during the period that we lived on Maple. The lot was vacant. I played football there with Don and Steve Wood and a fellow named Tuftadahl who lived on Tomahawk.

The Woods lived in 7703. Don was my age. Steve was one or two years older. They were both athletic and strong. I went down to their house many times through the fifth or sixth grade. I am not sure what happened after that. The family might have moved away.

There was no baseball field within walking distance, but we still spent a lot of summer days involved with the game. I remember many hours spent playing 500 with them. This is a baseball game that involves one player hitting fly balls to the other players. When a player on the receiving end had earned 500 points, he became the hitter.

Our other favorite diversion was hot box, which required three players. Two guys have mitts, and one of them has the ball. The other guy is “in the middle”. He tries to get past one of them. The guys with mitts try to tag him. They can throw the ball back and forth. This process is called a “rundown”. I was good at both aspects of this game, and it contributed to one of the greatest moments of my young life. It is detailed here.

I played on the Sunflower Drugs 3&2 League team with Don. Those adventures are detailed here.

Watching the All-Star Game together in the basement was the highlight of the summer. We all knew all the players from their trading cards.

The Woods were more into army games than cowboys. So, we staged quite a few mock battles with toy guns. I had a pretty realistic double-barreled shotgun that I brought to these engagements. As with the western scenarios the most important thing was to die heroically or at least spectacularly.

In bad weather we played games in their basement. They enjoyed a variation on Monopoly with which I was not previously familiar. The main change to the rules was that if someone rolled doubles, he (there was never a she) was not automatically awarded another turn. Instead, whoever could grab the dice got the free turn. Most of these games ended on a roll of doubles that quickly became a wrestling match over the possession of the dice. I never was involved in any of this grappling, but I did watch in awe when Don and Steve went at it. It usually ended when Mrs. Wood came down and yelled at them.

I don’t remember who lived in 7705. Kim, who rode on the Bluebird with us to QHRS, lived in 7707 or 7709. I don’t remember who lived in 7711, 7713, and 7715. No kids lived in any of those houses.

A family moved into 7719 a few years after we arrived. They had two boys. One was a little older than I was. The other was a little younger than I was. I can picture them, but I can’t remember their names. We played together pretty often, but I only have one really vivid memory. These guys each had a pair of boxing gloves. We had a series of boxing matches. Both of these kids and a few others were there. In the only bout that I was in I hit the other guy quite often, and he hit me almost never. The match was ruled a draw because the other guy “showed that he could take it.” I was upset for a minute or two, but I did not make a scene. Maybe I should say that if I made a scene, I don’t remember the details.

I only had one interaction with the lady who lived in 7721. One winter, probably 1960 or 1961, we had a pretty big snow, close to a foot. She hired me to shovel her walk. I did, but it took me a long time. It was almost dark when I finished. She paid me what we agreed on and added an additional dollar or two. I was grateful enough to remember the incident decades later but not enough to remember her name.

On the west side of the street I never met the occupants of 7702, 7704, or 7706. The Beesons lived in 7708. I think that the father, Bill, was one of our scoutmasters. There were two boys, John, who was one year younger than I was, and Mikey, who was another year younger.

PV Pool. There was no slide when I was there, but there was a regular pool, a diving pool with two or three boards, and a kiddie pool.

They must have moved in in the late fifties. I don’t remember them being around when I played with Don and Steve Wood. I spent a lot of time with John, however, after that. Both of the Beesons were strong swimmers, much better than I was. Since there was no swimming pool in the neighborhood, we must have gone up to Prairie Village Pool together. It was east of us near Shawnee Mission East High School. I did not really like to go there much. I always got cold, and it was embarrassing because my very flat feet left distinctive footprints—like a duck with toes.

I remembered that we played three-on-three football games on the island of the cul-de-sac. It was especially fun in the snow. I don’t remember who the other players were.

I don’t remember who lived in 7710. Michaelene Dunn, who also rode the Bluebird, lived in 7712. I don’t remember who lived in 7714.

7716 was the home of Ed and Ina Leahy. They were older than my parents by quite a bit, but they were probably their best friends, at least in the neighborhood. Ed was retired. He previously sold some kind of agricultural equipment.

One year Ed drove my dad and me to the Kansas State Fair in Hutchinson. It was 210 miles away, but driving west through Kansas you can make pretty good time. The roads are straight, and the traffic is usually light. I was in the back. I got very tired or maybe just bored. I tried to sleep in the car, but I could not get comfortable.

My clearest memory of the fair was when the guy in the dunk tank sang “The Old Grey Mare” when Ed walked by. He was trying to taunt Ed into buying tickets to rent a softball to throw at the target next to him. Hitting it would send him into the tank. Ed didn’t fall for it.

I was not too impressed with the fair. I had no need for a new harvester, but Ed knew a lot of the guys who had exhibits. The rides have never interested me very much. I never liked the scary ones, and the others are just stupid.

My .410 looked a lot like this one. The stock was plastic.

Somehow I had acquired a .410 shotgun. I had fired it at tin cans with Fr. Joe once or twice. Otherwise it remained mounted on my wall. I thought it was cool for it to be there, but I never so much as touched it or let anyone else touch it.

Ed took my dad and me hunting once. It might have been on the Hutchinson trip, but it might have been separate. We drove to a farm somewhere in Kansas to shoot at pheasants after the fields had been harvested. I fired at one at about the same time that someone else did. It came down, but to this day I do not know if I slew the bird, or the other guy did. He had a 12-gauge or a 16, both much more powerful than mine. So, I was probably blameless. I don’t know what happened to the bird’s carcass. I never went hunting again.

The Lotzkars lived in 7718. I think that they moved in a few years after we did. They had two or three kids, the oldest of whom was several years younger than I was.

One year there was a neighborhood picnic and party. I think that the Leahys sponsored it. Someone had a movie camera and showed the result later. I was the oldest kid there. I spent the time showing the Lotzkars how to slide like a ballplayer and climbing the T-shaped clothesline poles.

I babysat for the Lotzkars a few times. I recall that once the parents did not return home until pretty late. I watched Stars and Stripes Forever, the biopic about John Philip Sousa. on the Late Show. I have a low opinion of marches now, but I liked this movie well enough at the time.

Bob and Eleanor Anderson lived at 7720. If they had any kids, they were grown up. I remember my dad talking politics with Bob in the Andersons’ yard in 1960 after Kennedy won the Democratic nomination. My dad opined that the Republicans should have nominated Nelson Rockefeller. Bob replied that the only thing that doing that would prove was that somebody born with a silver spoon in his mouths could bedome president.

One summer day Bob took me to Municipal Stadium for an A’s game—just the two of us. It was a great time. We had very good seats on the first base line. Bob had a foghorn of a voice. Throughout the game he ruthlessly tormented the A’s second baseman, Jerry Lumpe. I did not like Lumpe either for reasons that currently escape me.

Bob’s voice carried so well that people all over the stadium were looking at him. Several ballplayers, including Lumpe, turned their heads in our direction.

I don’t remember the result of the game, but Lumpe went hitless. I think that he made an error in the field, too.

Lumpe was one of those players that the Yankees traded to KC when he seemed to be past his usefulness. To be fair, his best season was 1962, when he hit .301 for the A’s. He was a skinny guy, but he also managed to hit ten home runs that year. His average for the A’s was slightly better than his average for the Yanks. Lumpe died in 2014 at the age of 81.

I think that Bob died before we moved to Leawood. Eleanor continued to live in their house on Maple by herself.

The Wallaces lived across the street from us at 7720. I think that Mr. Wallace’s name was Ken. Her name was Jean. She and my mom were good friends. The Wallaces had three kids: Kenny, Sandy, and Gary. All were younger than I was. Gary was Jamie’s age.

I remember that one day I was for some reason home alone. Jamie must have been with my mom. I did not know where they were, and I got very upset. I think that I was even crying. Jean Wallace saw me and comforted me. A few minutes later our car appeared in the driveway.

Next to the Wallaces in 7722 was the Stivers family. Bill and Marie had two kids, Barbie was Jamie’s age, and Brad was a couple of years younger.

Bill Stivers claimed to have only one vice, fireworks. He bought a lot of fireworks for July 4, and he shot them off well into the night. For some reason this really irritated my dad. The dogs also hated it.

I don’t remember who lived in 7724 and 7726.

My first friend in the area lived in the house on Nall Avenue behind ours (7717). Michael was my age and the oldest son of Wally and Cherie Bortnick.¹ Michael also had a sister Donna who was a couple of years younger. There may have been one or two younger kids, too.

A big twister hit nearby Ruskin Heights in 1957. It killed 44 people

Their house had a basement. Whenever there was a tornado, which seemed to be every Friday in May, we would troop up to the Bortnick’s house (and I do mean up) and congregate in the southwest corner of their basement. This was a blast. The chances of getting hit by one of those midwestern tornadoes was minuscule, and if you did get hit, you were probably a goner no matter what. So, it was a great time to party, and we did.

I also remember that for a short while Wally and Michael and I ran around the Nall-Maple-Tomahawk block once or twice in the morning before school. This was in an era when nobody went jogging. I liked doing it, and it might have influenced my later decision to run regularly.

Michael had a chemistry set in the basement. We used to do half-assed experiments together. I enjoyed messing around with it, but it did nothing to inspire me to study the sciences.

The Bortnicks moved away after a couple of years. However, I think that they stayed in the KC area. Michael joined our class at Rockhurst High in sophomore or junior year and graduated with us.

I don’t know who owned the empty lot south of the Bortnick’s house. No one seemed to claim it. Vacant lots just seemed to exist in those days. That one was probably too small for another house.

A girl named Louise lived in the house north of the Bortnick’s. Her last name escapes me. Her mother threw a birthday party for her, and I was invited. All that I remember about it is that we played pin the tail on the donkey. No donkeys were injured. The paper tails were affixed with scotch tape rather than pins.

1. I was shocked to discover that Donna Bortnick died in 2013, and Wally, Cherie, and Michael had all preceded her. In all, Wally and Cherie had eight children—four boys and four girls.

Wavablog

Memoirs, bridge, popes, travel, and other stuff

Tag Archives: Rockhurst High

1948-1970 Dad and Me

1948-1979 Catholic Upbringing

1966-2024 Bleeding Maize and Blue

1981-1985: TSI: A4$1: The Clients

1955-1961 Part 2: The Neighborhood