1998-2005 TSI: AdDept Client: Proffitt’s

Posted on June 29, 2021 by Mike

Proffitt’s was a chain of department stores based, for the period in which I was associated with the company, in Alcoa, TN. Proffitt’s was the first division in the entity Proffitt’s Inc. The corporation changed both its name and orientation in 1998. The new entity was called Saks Inc. TSI’s relationship with that corporation and the people in Proffitt’s Marketing Group (PMG) has been described here.

Proffitt’s headquarters was four miles south of the airport. I usually stayed at the Hampton Inn at the top of the map. Although the town of Maryville was only about a mile away I seldom went there, and I never went to Knoxville.

I don’t think that I did a demo for Proffitt’s. Rather, the decision to use AdDept there was made by PMG based on the success of the installation at McRae’s that is described here. I definitely remember my first trip to the divisional headquarters. In April of 1998 I flew on Delta from Atlanta and arrived at McGhee Tyson Airport¹, which is also located in Alcoa. I rented a car and drove the short distance to Proffitt’s headquarters, which was in a strip mall that did not have a Proffitt’s store. The mall’s anchor store, if you could call it that, was a Burlington Coat Factory.

By the day that I arrived, the advertising department’s AS/400 was already installed in a closet. Next to it was the system console. There was already a premium on space there, and it got worse very quickly. On some occasions I was required to work in that closet. It was a strong contender for the worst work environment that I had to endure.

The connectivity was also installed and configured by someone else. Specifically, TSI had nothing to do with the selection of the emulation software for the Macs.

Proffitt’s advertising department was not very large. The primary reason for this was that much of the creative and production work had been outsourced to an ad agency in Chicago named Ambrosi. I wrote this about the agency’s practices in April of 2000:

Ambrosi has a minimum charge of $175 for materials. They sent an invoice to Proffitt’s with a line on it with a $175 charge for “eye shadow kit.” Proffitt’s paid it without questioning it. The bill was nearly $20,000 over the budget – for one catalog.

The people: My original contact was the production manager, Tom Henry. All that I remember about him is that he took me to lunch that first day in his Corvette that was not really a Corvette. He said that it was “a knock-off”. I should have asked him to elaborate on the subject, but I did not. I think that we ate at an extremely inexpensive pizza place where you just pointed at the slices that you wanted. I have forgotten the name of the place.

Long after I posted this entry I discovered this photo of a meeting at PMG in Birmingham. Tom Henry is on the left in the shirt with horizontal stripes. On the opposite side of the table are two other people from Proffitt’s: Tom Waltz at the far end and Cindy Karnoupakis in red and white. I think that Tom W. was the manager of the business office before Jim Pierce. Cindy may have been his assistant. Steve VeZain of PMG is waving on the right. I don’t remember the meeting, and I have no firm recollections of Tom W. and Cindy.

I did not work with him much after that day. He was in charge of the department’s computers. Therefore, he had me train some people who worked for him how to check the backups. Leaving this important role up to them was a mistake.

I wrote this about the situation in early 2000:

This installation got off to a very slow start. All the people involved in the project initially bailed out when the data entry started. Three people are now involved – Jeannie Gorman for ROP, Lucy Delk for other media, and Jim Pierce in the business office. Jim, although a very laid-back guy, has more or less taken the bull by the horns in the last few months. They are now using AdDept for closing – accruals and the prepaid to expense journal entry for all media.

Don Alexander² was the Senior VP of the department until July of 2000, but I do not remember dealing with him much. In fact, I remember very little about most of the people in the department until Marianne Jonas came from McRae’s to become the Advertising Director in August of 2000.

Jim Pierce handled the finances. His assistant was named Charlene. Christi Bullock worked with her. Jeannie Gorman scheduled and purchased newspaper advertising. Lucy Delk handled other media. I also took a photo that included a woman named Cindy. I don’t remember any of these people very well. I need to rely on the notes that I have discovered, and they do not begin until 1999. Furthermore, my research has been unable to determine anything about their subsequent lives.

Hardware issues: Most users of the AdDept system on AS/400’s experienced few if any problem with their hardware. If they did, they solved it themselves or got the IT department involved. My notes from Proffitt’s for 1999 and 2000 are replete with references to SNAFUs attributable to hardware. On July 13, 1999, I wrote “Evidently the power failure at Proffitt’s fried their fax modem.” This modem was used to send insertion orders automatically to the newspapers. If it was not working, Jeannie had to print the orders and send them one at a time via a fax machine.

The very next day I wrote the following about an incident handled by Jamie Lisella² at TSI’s office:

Jamie got frustrated with Proffitt’s. As usual they have no one who is both willing and able to do something, in this case switch the modem cables for IBM.

TSI also had an HP Laser Jet 5 in its office.

TSI even was called about very trivial printer issues. This note is dated exactly two months after the modem cable problem:

Their HP 5 printer wasn’t working. The Powersave feature was on. I think when they had a power failure it may have reverted to the factory settings. I turned it off and restarted it. I printed out five copies of my write-up of how to take care of this. Maybe someone will read it this time.

In April of 2000 much of my attention was dedicated to getting TSI’s insertion order project, A^xN, operational. I needed to document potential benefits vis-à-vis having the computer generate faxes.

I asked Jeannie Gorman to try to think of everything she hated about faxing insertion orders. She told me that she has to fax about one in ten by hand because they do not go through. While I was in the computer room I heard several busy signals.

The Disk Crash: In all of the time that TSI worked with IBM midrange systems, only one catastrophic disk failure² ever occurred. It happened at Proffitt’s in late November or early December of 2000, only a few months after Marianne Jonas had moved to Tennessee from Jackson, MS.

One problem with IBM midrange and mainframe computers was that they were so reliable that users sometimes took them for granted. When I set up the system for Proffitt’s I programmed backup jobs that ran every night. All files used by AdDept were saved to tape. A different tape was used every night. They were recycled weekly. So, if there was a failure on Thursday, they could restore from the Wednesday night tape. If, for some reason that tape could not be used, the Tuesday night tape could be used, and so on. Total system saves were done whenever a new version of the operating system or a new set of PTFs⁴ was installed.

The process could not be completely automated. Someone had to change the tape every day and check to make sure that the backup completed normally.

Every multi-user system must have some method to prevent one user from overriding what another user has just done. On the AS/400 this was done at the record level. So, if one person was working on an ad or an invoice, other users were prohibited from deleting or changing information about that ad or invoice while the first person had the record open for editing. When the user finished working on an item or closed the program, the locked record or records were released. This occasionally caused problems when someone called up a record in a program that allowed editing and left the program open.

IBM’s backup procedure was also affected by locked records. It could be set either to skip backing up the locked files altogether or to back up the previous version of the locked records (called “Save While Active”). The latter sounded like a good idea, but it ran the risk of leaving some files out of sync with others. Besides, the backup was only really useful if all the files on it were complete.

When the disk drive was reported faulty, IBM replaced it with a new one. At that point it was discovered that the backup tapes for every day of the previous week were incomplete. The last usable backup was from the system save tape from more than a month earlier. Evidently no one had been checking the backup logs.

When these facts were reported to TSI I ordered an “all hands on deck” response. The problem must have been discovered on a Friday. Jamie made a reservation for me to fly to Alcoa in time for business hours on Monday. Denise Bessette⁵ and I worked out a plan for getting as much of the data as possible back on the system while retaining the system’s integrity. We also devised ways of checking the consistency of the data and printing lists of records that should have matched but did not.

When I arrived at Proffitt’s Marianne escorted me to a conference room, closed the door, and screamed at me for a very long time. She said that it was irresponsible of me not to tell the people involved how to check the tapes. I explained that I had shown the people at Proffitt’s how to do this, and I had shown the two IT people whom she had designated how to perform this task at McRae’s. I also showed her the letter that I had sent to all of the divisions emphasizing how important it was to check the backup logs. It also explained the service that TSI offered for $150 per month whereby a TSI employee would sign on and check the logs every morning. Employees in the advertising department were notified if anything was amiss. Parisian was the only division that purchased this service.

Marianne was not persuaded or even mollified in the slightest by any of these facts, but she let me go on with my work to salvage as much as possible. The notes below include a lot of technical jargon, but at least they show how much effort I made to righten the ship. I have inserted footnotes to explain a few items.

Proffitt’s Recovery Journal
1. Sandy located all of the files missing from the save tape.
2. I used CHGJOB to bring all of the missing files up to speed.
3. I created records on the season file⁶for 001, 002, 011, and 012.
4. I deleted all logical files⁷ with 00 in them. These files were ones on the system save tape that were overridden by the ones on the nightly save tape.
5. I deleted all logical files whose source had been changed since 1/1/01. I then created them again.
6. I wrote a program named CRTPROFJCS to create DPJCSUM from DPJCSXMO. I ran it for 001, 002, 011, 012, and 021.
7. I created a logical file named DAACTSTAD2 to use in my program to create ads in 001 and following.
8. Dave Weeast left Jim a message that I should IPL⁸. I did so.
9. I used SQL to set the values of the latest projections in DPJCSUM to the sum of the open purchase orders plus the actual invoices for 001, 002, 011, 012, and 021. I did not change the original estimates. I tried to explain this to Marianne and to find out whether I should, but I couldn’t get her to understand what I was talking about.
10. I set up the user profile and the directory entry for Marianne, Ivy, and Phyllis Compton. These were the only people that had records in DAUSERS but no user profile.
11. I change the system value QINACTIV to 180. I also scheduled a job to end and start the interactive subsystem at 1 a.m. Bill⁹ said that we should do both of these things.
12. Marianne seemed to think that the store cost accounting would be worthless, but I still think that it is better than nothing for 002 and for the past.
13. Dave Weeast could not get the Mac network to come up. Daniel Moore¹⁰ came in at noon on Monday. Evidently it was never plugged back in. After he plugged it in it worked OK.
14. The HP network printer did not work. The IP address was wrong. I got the new one from Daniel and gave it to Dave Weeast. He changed the address, and it worked fine.
15. I changed DAACTSTAD2 to sort by expense class and month before ad number, so I could do a month at a time.
16. After a great many false starts I was able to get a program called CRTPROFADS to create the ROP ads for 011. It did not put in headlines. I set the columns and inches to 1 each. I set the ad type to 2 (B&W). I used defaults for everything else, borrowing the code from DM021 and DM041. I used storewide as the principal participant and assigned it 100% of the costs.
17. I wrote a query named ROPSEQ10 to extract the first pub on every ad. The results were stored in FEB01ROP, MAR01ROP, etc.
18. I wrote a program named RPFIXCI to calculate the column inches for each ad. It also deduced the ad type – black & white (2), one-color (6), or full color. I then changed the ad types in option 9 for the color ads and the size in option 1 for all ads.
19. I wrote a query named ACTST0011M to get the costs for each insertion in DAACTST. I wrote a second query named CHK0011M to compare this file with DMPSDET and report the discrepancies. I then fixed the obvious ones and kept the short list of the remaining ones.
20. I ran CRTPROFADS and RPFIXCI for February and March. I also did step 19 for both months. The March files and queries have 0012 instead of 0011.
21. The CPU attention light seems to be permanently on with SRC A6001730. Dave Weeast said that it is was OK.
22. Marianne complained about getting stuck in the “Cost” column in DM029 if she accidentally puts something there. I changed DM029S to accept blank, which is what they put in 90% of the time any way.
23. Jeannie did not put in a tape on Monday night, so we could not check the backup. She did put one in on Tuesday.
24. On Monday I worked in an office that had been turned into a shrine to Dale Earnhart. On Tuesday I worked in the closet in which they keep the AS/400. No kidding.
Issues
1. Marianne would like to be able to lock quantities in DM025.
2. I only got through March 2001. I ran CRTPROFAD3 but got no farther.

While I was at Proffitt’s I spent a little time researching what could have caused this problem. I was pretty sure that everyone turned off their terminals or PC’s before leaving every evening. I was quite certain that no one ever worked so late that their session would overlap the period scheduled for the backup. Moreover, there were only a few other scheduled jobs, and none of them locked records for important files.

Eventually I discovered that one person—a Mac user—did not close active AS/400 sessions before turning off the computer. The third-party emulation software running on the Macs, unlike the PC software that had been written by IBM, failed to notify the AS/400 that the session had ended abnormally. So, the job was still running, and records were locked. That user was Marianne herself.

When I left on Tuesday evening, I thought that the system was in pretty good shape. I left Marianne with a list of the ads that were still inconsistent and told her what needed to be done to fix them.

My recollection is that instead of proceeding as I suggested she decided to delete a large number of ads and have her employees key them in from scratch. That, of course, was her right.

Needless to say, TSI sent an invoice to Proffitt’s for the two days that I spent there. We did not bill them for any of the employees’ time. Marianne refused to pay the invoice. She insisted that the whole mess was TSI’s fault, and Proffitt’s would not pay.

The next time that I was in Alcoa I asked for a meeting with the man (whose name I do not recall) who replaced Don Alexander as Senior VP. I explained the situation to him. The invoice was promptly paid. I never mentioned anything about this to Marianne, and she never said anything to me. Our relationship thereafter was cordial but a little distant.

The Atmosphere:The trip to try to recover Proffitt’s files was no fun, but I went there a number of times, and I had quite a few memorable moments. I usually stayed at the Hampton Inn that was near the airport but not so near that the air traffic disturbed me. One night I was pleasantly surprised to see that I was the Guest of Honor. I received a basket of fruit and, I think, a bottle of wine.

My favorite place to eat was within walking distance of the Hampton Inn. Here is what I wrote about El Sazon¹¹ in September of 1999:

I treated myself to chicken chimichanga last night at El Sazon, a nice little family-run Mexican restaurant within walking distance of the hotel. It came with rice, beans, guacamole, pico de gallo, chips and salsa. I also ordered iced tea with a free refill. My bill was $8.34 with tax. Things are a little cheaper here.

I wonder what you can get for $8.34 today.

My favorite place in all of Tennessee was Springbrook Park, which was about halfway between the Hampton Inn and Proffitt’s. It contained a 1.4 mile dirt path that wound through some very interesting scenery. I vividly remember jogging there nearly every night while listening to opera arias on my CD player or Walkman. Here is how I described one of those experiences:

I had a delightful seven-mile run yesterday evening. It was close to 70 with a gentle breeze. I love running in Springbrook Park – through the woods, alongside the brook, around the fountain, across the wooden bridge, up towards the playground. A few dog walkers, a few amateur joggers who never seem to do more than one lap, a few strollers (mostly in pairs), a lady just sitting in the sun on one of the many wrought iron benches, and two adolescent girls using a jar to catch something in the stream and then — on the next lap — painting each others’ faces with mud divert my attention momentarily from Professor Greenberg’s¹² dissection of Verdi. The very end of the path is steeply uphill. On the last lap the tape had run out, and my calves started to cramp, but I liked the feeling. It meant that I was pressing just enough.

The atmosphere at the Proffitt’s building was also remarkable. The shrine to Dale Earnhardt had a serious competitor for most unusual workspace in the advertising department. One lady’s cubicle was filled to the brim with Warner Brothers cartoon characters—cutouts and stuffed versions of Bugs, Porky, Sylvester, and all the others.

In 1998 the University of Tennessee, located in nearby Knoxville, won the national championship in football. At the beginning of the 1999 season enthusiasm for the prospects of the Vols was at a feverish pitch, and Proffitt’s participated. Here is what I wrote about the most obvious manifestation.

Proffitt’s has put up a whiteboard across from the lunch room. Employees are encouraged to write their predictions for the Tennessee-Florida game. All day long yesterday people were standing around the board, which has also sprouted derogatory comments about various Southeast Conference schools.

After Marianne Jonas arrived, the atmosphere in the department became more serious. On the first occasion in which she invited me to Alcoa she did not let me rent a car. Instead she told me to stay at the Hilton at the airport. She personally drove to the airport and picked me up the next morning. I complained to her that my room was a very short distance from the end of the runway where the delivery service planes departed from between 2:00 and 3:00 in the morning. I got very little sleep because of the roar of their engines.

I needed to use cabs to get back and forth to the hotel for the rest of that trip, but thereafter she let me rent a car and stay at the much cheaper Hampton Inn.

Epilogue: In 2005 Saks Inc. sold the Proffitt’s and McRae’s stores to Belk¹³. The administrative offices in Alcoa were closed. Within a year all of those stores were converted to Belk stores or closed.

To the left is a photo of the Belk store in Foothills Mall in Maryville, TN. It was formerly a Proffitt’s.

1, McGhee Tyson Airport serves the greater Knoxville area. It is located south of the city in the town of Alcoa, which was named for its biggest employer, Alcoa Corporation.

2. My on and (mostly) off relationship with my sister Jamie is addressed in several blog entries. My relationship with the Lisella family is detailed here. The big crisis that developed shortly after her modem incident is described here.

3. Later versions of the AS/400 circumvented this problem using a technique called RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) by which a set of disk drives could be recovered from redundant information on the remaining drives when one failed.

4. PTF is one of hundreds of three-letter abbreviations used by IBM. It stands for Program Temporary Fix. Every few months IBM would release a new set of PTFs for problems in the operating system or in IBM-provided programs.

5. More information about Denise can be found here and in many other blog entries.

6. The season file had two seasons per year. 001 was the spring season of 2000; 002 was the fall season of 2000. The two seasons that began with 01 were for 2001. Thus there was a mixture of past, present, and future on the file.

7. A “logical file” does not contain data. It contains pointers to data that may be sorted in a different order and may not include all of the records.

8. Dave Weeast was in charge of all AS/400’s for Proffitt’s Inc. More information about him can be found here. IPL, which stands for Initial Program Load, is IBM-speak for rebooting the system.

9. I am not sure who Bill is, maybe Bill Giardina, who worked in IT at McRae’s. That installation is described here.

10. I don’t remember Daniel Moore.

11. El sazon means “the seasonings”.

12. Robert Greenberg made a series of recordings for The Teaching Company (which subsequently changed its name to The Great Courses). They analyzed various aspects of classical music and opera. Sue Comparetto and I also attended a few lectures that he gave in association with performances by the Hartford Symphony Orchestra.

13. The advertising department at Belk was in a huge complex in Charlotte, NC. It used AdDept to manage its advertising. The details are posted here.

1991-2007 TSI: AdDept: Federated Department Stores/Macy’s Inc.

Posted on June 24, 2021 by Mike

TSI’s dealings with Federated and Macy’s Inc. Continue reading →

For more than a decade after TSI began marketing AdDept, its software system for retail advertisers, the chain of department stores now known as Macy’s Inc. was called Federated Department Stores (FDS). The company was acquired in the eighties by Robert Campeau, a Canadian real estate magnate. For a short time it was merged with Campeau’s other stores and called Federated and Allied Department Stores. In 1992 the company emerged from bankruptcy as FDS, the same year that Macy’s filed for Chapter 11 protection. In 1994 FDS found enough cash in the cushions of the sofas in the furniture departments of its stores to purchase Macy’s shortly after Santa’s favorite retailer emerged from its own bankruptcy. Details of the takeover can be read here.

In the early nineties I was just beginning to learn about retail in America. It shocked me that a bankrupt company could stiff all of its vendors and then have the wherewithal to buy another company of about the same size. A lot of craziness like this happened in the nineties. I never did figure it all out, and the two companies involved in this transaction were a thorn in the side of TSI for the rest of its existence.

I don’t know why Val used a photo that cut off her chin.

In 1992 FDS had eight regional divisions. Each division produced and placed its own advertising from the divisional headquarters. The first FDS division that contacted TSI about purchasing the AdDept system was the Bon Marché, which was based in Seattle. I was called by Val Walser¹, the Director of the Advertising Business Office there. She had received one of TSI’s mailings in late 1989 or early 1990, and she thought that the system might be what they needed. I talked with her in person twice, once at the Retail Advertising Convention in Chicago and once in Seattle. I gave Val a private demonstration in Chicago, and I showed the system to the rest of the team in Seattle. Those encounters have been described in some detail here.

I don’t think that I knew at the time that the Bon Marché was part of FDS. Even if I did, I don’t think that I realized then that the parent company was about to declare bankruptcy. I was inexperienced; I probably made some errors in judgment. Perhaps I made a mistake by proposing a system that would only be minimally sufficient for their existing operation. Maybe we did not follow up often enough or in the best way.

Although Val informed us that she had requested funding for the system, it was never approved, and after a while we did not hear any more from her. We continued to send materials to her periodically. Until I began the research for this entry I was unaware that she had any involvement in deploying a system that was initiated by the FDS division most distant from Washington, Burdines in Florida. Val apparently oversaw the development of the administrative part of the FedAd (or whatever it was called at that time) system. By then her division was known as Macy’s Northwest, which was folded into Macy’s West, a long-time AdDept user, in 2008.

TSI’s fruitless contacts with Burdines have been documented here.

From the beginning I thought that Jordan Marsh, the Boston-based department-store chain, would be a valuable customer for TSI. Like the Bon Marché, Jordan Marsh was actually part of the Allied group before Campeau acquired Federated and merged all the stores into one gigantic chain. At one time there were also Jordan Marsh stores in Florida and San Diego, but by 1991 all of those stores had closed or were no longer controlled from Boston.

Kate Behart, whose career at TSI is described here, arranged for me to do a demo for people from Jordan Marsh’s advertising department at an IBM office. I don’t remember any of the names of employees at Jordan Marsh. In fact, the only things that I remember about our meeting with them were that Kate was very upset that I had used the word “gals” at one point and that they informed us that they wanted our system.

I am sure that Kate must have followed up on the presentation. She was very conscientious. However, nothing came of it.

Bloomingdale’s, the high-end department store with headquarters in New York City, contacted TSI several times. The last of these exchanges of telephone calls was handled by Doug Pease, whose successful marketing career at TSI is detailed here. We certainly sent them detailed materials about AdDept and the AS/400. I might have done a demo for them at the IBM office. I clearly recall that we went to their headquarters in Manhattan and gathered specs about their needs. I can still picture the Manager of the Business Office, who wore a three-piece suit and had a long pony tail. Guys with pony tails were not unusual in the creative and production areas of advertising departments, but he was the only one that I ever saw in the financial area.

Doug followed up on our visit with several telephone calls. At one point he became certain that Bloomies would buy the AdDept system. Nevertheless, not long after he had voiced his certainty, he got the telephone call that dashed his hopes. He never told me the details, but he was visibly upset about it.

One of the biggest disappointments in my career was not being able to land Liberty House, the department store in Hawaii and the Pacific, as a client. When Doug, Sue, and I flew out to Honolulu in December of 1995 to meet with Karen Anderson (detailed here), Liberty House was an independent chain of stores that included both department stores and much smaller stores in locations convenient to tourists. Those stores specialized in “resort ware”.

Our presentation went very well. Karen told Doug in a subsequent conversation that she had requested funding for AdDept, but there was a freeze on capital purchases. The freeze persisted until the company entered bankruptcy in 1998 and closed most of the resort stores. When it emerged from bankruptcy it was gobbled up by FDS. At that point the remaining stores were relabeled as Macy’s, and administrative functions were transferred to Macy’s West in San Francisco, one of TSI’s clients.

So, this was as close as we came to a victory in our dealings with FDS/Macy’s Inc.. Many of the newspapers that had been used by Liberty House still subscribed to A^xN in 2014.

AS/400s at FSG. I thought that I had a photo of Len, but I cannot find it.

At some point the AS/400 systems used by the three Macy’s divisions that used AdDept—Macy’s East, Macy’s South, and Macy’s West—were moved to the headquarters of Federated Systems Group (FSG) in Alpharetta, GA, a suburb of Atlanta. I flew down there to consult with Len Miller², who was in charge of all of the FSG’s AS/400s. I don’t remember exactly what the agenda for this meeting was, but I remember that Len said that long-range plan of FDS was to replace the AS/400 systems with home-grown software running on other platforms. However, he assured me that at that point—soon after the merger with the May Company—it was a very low priority. They would still be using the AS/400s for several years.

My other vivid memory of that day was when we passed a room that contained perhaps twenty desks. At each desk sat someone working on a computer. All of the people were IBM employees who were consultants for Federated.

Len’s predictions both turned out to be true. All of the divisions except Bloomingdale’s were eventually folded into one gigantic Macy’s run from the Herald Square Building in Manhattan. The plan was apparently to use the system built for Burdines and the Seattle division, but it did not have all of the features that the people in New York needed. For several years they maintained AdDept in order to run the Loan Room (merchandise loaned to photo studio for shoots) module that TSI wrote for Macy’s East in the early nineties.

In May or June of 2005 I received a telephone call from Robin Creen³, whose title was Senior Vice-president of Macy’s Corporate Marketing. She wanted me to come to New York to discuss the AdDept and A^xN systems. I made an appointment and took Amtrak to Penn Station. Robin instructed me to use the executive elevator at one of the 34th St. entrances rather than the employee’s entrance that I had always used on the other side of the building.

Robin’s office was not in the advertising department. It was on executive row. I don’t remember too much of the meeting, and I cannot locate my notes. I recall that I only got to meet with her once or maybe twice, and I never heard from her or about her again.

I did, however find a copy of a letter that I sent to her on October 7, 2005. Here is the text:

At our last meeting you told me that it was still too early to talk about the future of the existing May Company divisions. Since there have now been several definitive press releases about the makeup of the new Macy’s after the merger, I assume that those restrictions no longer apply.
Needless to say we are concerned about what effect the realignment will have on TSI. We have spent the last 17 years developing AdDept, the software product which has become the standard of the industry for administration of retail advertising departments. The May Company was our largest client.
We know that Federated Department Stores has been working with its Florida division for the last decade or so on a system which overlaps considerably with ours. I am sure that the company has by this time invested a considerable amount of time, money, and manpower in it. It may surprise you to know that I was supposed to be an integral part of the original plan. I met with Mike Rafferty and Gilbert Lorenzo in Huntsville, Alabama, back in the mid-nineties. Their plan at that time was to use AdDept for the accounting functions.
They wanted us to convert our system to run on a PC network using a home-grown relational data base and Microsoft Visual BASIC on each client. To me this seemed like a huge step backwards for us. Their approach would definitely have improved the appearance of AdDept’s front end and provided an integration with the production area, but no one could explain to me how we could possibly support such a system in many locations. The principal problem was that with their proposed architecture someone—presumably TSI—would be required to support both server software and client software. We have never had to support clients—the individual desktop PC’s and Macs. At the time networks were unreliable, Windows was not a mature product, and the Internet was in its infancy. TSI was already supporting a half dozen or more companies, including the two Macy’s divisions, which at the time were not affiliated with Federated. I honestly think that had we participated in the project at the level that they expected, TSI would not have survived as a company. Gilbert and Mike must not have liked my attitude, because we never heard from them again.
Since that time, as I wrote you earlier, most of the rest of the department stores in the country—as well as several other large retailers like Dick’s Sporting Goods—have successfully implemented AdDept in their sales promotion departments. They were able to get affordable systems tailored to their requirements. AdDept is not a sexy system, but it gets the job done.
No one in the entire country—no one—has the experience that TSI has garnered over the last 17 years in understanding the intricacies of administration of advertising systems. We are offering that experience to Macy’s Marketing. Four of the seven newly aligned Macy’s divisions—East, West, Midwest, and whatever the Marshall Field’s division is called—are long-time AdDept users. Lord & Taylor also uses AdDept. Moreover, a large number of May Company employees have considerable experience using AdDept in many different areas. If I were in your shoes, I would consider this as a valuable asset.
TSI has a very strong relationship with its users—both at the corporate and division level. If you talk with the people at the May Company, I am sure that they will verify that we have always done what they asked, that we do an excellent job of supporting our product, and that we give them a lot of bang for the buck.
There is one big additional factor. We are not on their payroll. When they wanted to spend money to make the system do new things, they used us. When they were tightening their belts, they did not have to worry about paying the salaries of programmers, system architects, data base administrators, etc.
So far in our discussions TSI has done most of the talking. What we would really like now is to learn what you and the other people in Federated’s management need to get out of the system. A goal-oriented approach works best for us. We have moved mountains for other clients, and we would definitely appreciate the opportunity to tell you how we would attack your biggest problems. We have never shrunk from such a challenge in the past. Our track record in this regard is essentially flawless. If someone will tell us what they need, we will provide it.
Do you think that we could schedule a face-to-face meeting with you and whoever else is involved in this project about this challenge? We have always been straight-shooters, and we would be eager to listen to whatever you have to say.

My last two encounters with Macy’s were both about insertion orders for newspaper advertising. TSI had developed and successfully marketed an Internet-based system for insertion orders to newspapers. Macy’s West, Macy’s South, and most of the May Company divisions that FDS acquired in the merger used it, and they all loved it. We called it A^xN, which was pronounced “A cross N”.

I knew that, compared to our other AdDept clients, Macy’s East used a small fraction of the programs that comprised AdDept. Still, they were entering the ads, and, therefore, they were a good candidate to use A^xN. I wrote to the Media Director, whom I had never met, and requested a meeting about A^xN. He seemed very interested. We scheduled a meeting, I made a dozen or so copies of our sales materials for A^xN, I packed them in my briefcase, and I boarded the 6:30 train again. I was alone because TSI had no marketing/sales person at the time.

The meeting was not what I expected. It was conducted by a man named Roman from the IT area, not the advertising department. My presentation was very well received. Roman said that it was very impressive.

He pressed me on whether TSI planned to provide a way to send the layouts for ads over the Internet. This surprised me. I thought that this was a problem that had been addressed years earlier. The market leader was the Associated Press’s AdSend service, but I also knew of several competitors. I said that TSI had no plans to enter that market. I explained that we had neither the infrastructure nor the expertise necessary to compete in that arena. Besides, none of our clients had asked for it, and they were not shy about requesting our services.

He said that we should consider it. Macy’s was looking for someone who could enable them to use the Internet for both insertion orders and the delivery of ads, “because, you know, one-stop shopping is better.”

I had three hours on the train to mull this over. I had made a mistake by letting this remark go unchallenged. It seemed like such a silly thing to say. I thought that they would want expertise and experience, not fewer phone numbers.

If one-stop shopping really was the objective, then I had no chance of ever persuading them to use A^xN. Therefore, nothing could be lost by asking for proof of any real value associated with having one vendor doing both tasks. I knew very well that the people who placed orders for newspaper ads were completely separate from the employees who created the actual layouts and sent them to the papers. This was true at Macy’s in New York and at every other large retailer that I had met with.

We never heard from them after that.

I learned later that Macy’s East’s advertising department had never used AdDept for insertion orders, even though they could have easily faxed the orders from the AS/400. Instead, each coordinator had developed ways to communicate with the reps at the paper. It sounded chaotic.

My last frustrating encounter with FDS (by then known as Macy’s Inc.) occurred in, I think, 2007. This one revolved around Dave Ostendorf, whom I had known quite well when he had been the liaison between TSI and the advertising department at Famous Barr, the May Company division based in St. Louis. Much more about my relationship with Dave and the installation at Famous Barr is posted here.

This is the only picture I could find of Dave Ostendorf. He is on the far left side of the table in the white shirt.

Dave called me about the use of A^xN. He said that the people for whom he worked in Macy’s Corporate Advertising department asked him to find out how much we would charge for an interface between A^xN and the system that had been developed internally. Dave was a very straight arrow. I trusted him (unlike everyone else mentioned in this entry) implicitly.

Of course, I asked for more details, but Dave would not provide them. He was rather sheepish about this. He advised me just to write up a proposal in our usual format with as many disclaimers as I wanted to include. He also specifically warned me not to low-ball it. So, I wrote up a quote for $20,000 that may have set a world’s record for use of phrases like “assuming that”.

A short time after I talked with him Dave resigned his job at Macy’s and moved back to his home town of Indianapolis. Needless to say, no one ever called about the quote. I have always suspected that it had been used as a justification for further investment in the corporate system.

So, my interactions with FDS and its successor Macy’s Inc. were completely fruitless. If FDS/Macy’s Inc. was the Brass Ring of our field of software, it was in sight quite a few times, but we were never able to snatch it.

My only real regret is that I do not completely understand why we continually failed. Our success with every other department store chain was close to universal, and the employees in the advertising departments at FDS and Macy’s divisions seemed enthusiastic about what TSI had to offer. However, in these situations we were up against an amorphous alternative, the system developed for Burdines and the Bon Marché, about which I knew very little.

One thing that struck me when rereading the letter that I had written to Robin Creen. I seemed to be asking for an opportunity to see the alternative. As a debater and a debate coach I was much better on the negative. I seemed to feel confident that if they just told me what they were using or planning to use, I could demonstrate what was wrong with it. Even if our software was lacking in some areas, I felt confident that we knew how to change AdDept to make it better.

Fortunately TSI found plenty of work outside of FDS/Macy’s up until the time that Denise and I were ready to dispose of the business. If some of these opportunities had gone the other way, it seems likely that we would have missed out on some of our other achievements.

1. Val Walser worked int the advertising department in Seattle until Macy’s brought all of her division’s administrative functions to San Francisco in 2008. Her LinkedIn page, which is here, says that she “directed development of a sophisticated, integrated software product, which was Macy’s premier marketing/advertising system managing all departmental functions.” I presume that this refers to the system once known as FedAd that was begun by Burdines.

2. Len Miller apparently still works for Macy’s in 2022. His LinkedIn page is here.

3. Robin Creen left Macy’s in 2008. Her LinkedIn page is here.

4. Dave Ostendorf’s LinkedIn page is here.

1995 December: Hawaii Trip Part 1

Posted on June 22, 2021 by Mike

Doug, Mike and Sue in Oahu. Continue reading →

In the second half of 1995 Doug Pease, TSI’s Director of Marketing, had been in fairly constant communication with Karen Anderson, the Advertising Director at Liberty House, a chain of department stores in Hawaii. One day he came into the equipment room, which also served as my office, and told me that Karen asked for someone from TSI to fly to Honolulu to show the AdDept system (described here) to them. We arranged to meet with them on two days in the first week of December.

I was very excited about this opportunity, not so much for the potential business as for the chance to go to Hawaii. Sue and I had been through a very rough period (as described here), but the one thing that we really both liked to do was to travel to new places. Moreover, the weather would be starting to get nasty in New England, and it was almost never nasty in Hawaii.¹ I decided to extend our stay in Hawaii to allow enough time to sample all the islands.

I went to Barnes & Noble on the way home the evening that I learned about the trip and purchased two books: The Maverick Guide to Hawaii and Kauai Trails, written by Kathy Morey. I had determined from previous trips that the more that I planned a trip the more that I enjoyed it. Sue and I did a really good job of planning this one.

Doug was not very happy that Sue was coming along. He worried that her presence would be a distraction to the main purpose, which was to land another AdDept client. I listened to his concerns, but I was not about to tell Sue that she had to stay home.

I tried to persuade Doug to take some time at the end and make a vacation out of it as we were doing, but he said that he needed to get back to his family. So, Doug scheduled a separate flight back to Connecticut by himself.

On the morning of our scheduled departure, neither Sue nor her car were around. I called her at her business in Springfield, MA, that she called Dance Space. She said that she had been working on the wiring all night. I told her that it was almost time to leave. She had no idea what time it was.

I later came to understand that Sue’s approach to long-distance travel was to leave exhausted, sleep fitfully on the airplane, and totally crash upon landing. Needless to say, this was not my approach. I did not want to waste one second of daylight in Hawaii.

The three of us flew together from Bradley to Honolulu. It was a very long trip, but we gained five hours, and so, despite the time lost in the layover in Los Angeles, it was still daylight when we landed. I fell in love with Hawaii the instant that we landed. There were palm trees on the airport grounds, the terminal was, for the most part, defiantly open to the elements, and the weather was perfect—sunny, dry, and around 80°.

The Honolulu airport was noteworthy for many things. One that I remember clearly was the ubiquitous stands that contained booklets and leaflets describing things to do in Oahu. I later discovered that similar stands at the airports on the “neighbor islands”. We soon learned not to put too much stock in the recommendations in the booklets, which seemed mostly limited to the heaviest advertisers.

We rented a car and drive to our hotel. The “Interstates” in Hawaii start with the letter H rather than I. It is a safe bet that the two systems will not connect any time soon. I don’t remember the name of the hotel, but I am pretty certain that it had free parking and was near the canal ,only a few blocks north of Waikiki. It was not luxurious, but it seemed nice enough to us. I remember that our room had a balcony, which in Hawaii is called a lanai (lah NIE).

The business visit: I think that we did the demo at IBM’s office before we talked with the people at Liberty House. I much preferred to arrange the visit in the other order. Perhaps we could only get time at IBM on the first day. Karen was extremely positive about the system after my presentation. She also told us that we did not need to wear suits at the Liberty House office. She said that most people there wore “aloha-wear”. We wore suits.

We learned the next day at the Liberty House headquarters in downtown Honolulu that the chain had two types of stores: large department stores that were equivalent to the regional department stores on the mainland, and much smaller boutique stores that catered to tourists. The newest department stores was actually on Guam.

At the end of our meetings we told Karen that it had been snowing when we left Connecticut. She said that she would really like to see it. I told her that she could have it. She insisted, “But it’s so beautiful.”

I replied, “Well, it’s white, if that is what you like, but that’s only for the first day or two, and it sometimes stays around for weeks or even months turning dirtier and uglier by any standard.”

A ;arge Liberty House store was in the Ala Moana shopping center on the southern side of Honolulu. This shopping center was essentially just like a mall on the mainland except that this one has no roof over the interior courtyard. People in Hawaii are not afraid of “Liquid Sunshine” even when shopping. Bloomingdale’s, Neiman Marcus, and Nordstrom have stores there, and there are innumerable boutique stores.

While Doug and I were in meetings, Sue explored Honolulu. At the time she was really into ballroom dancing. She walked to a place near the hotel that had a famous dance floor. I can’t say that I was sorry to miss that visit.

The pitch to Liberty House went as well as could be expected. When we got back to New England, we sent them a proposal, and Karen put in a request for funding. I had every hope for a second trip to paradise to install, train, and investigate a few things that Sue and I had missed. Unfortunately, Liberty House’s corporate management imposed a freeze on capital spending. In fact, Liberty House declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1998, and when it emerged from bankruptcy in 2001, it was acquired by Federated Department Stores and merged into Macy’s West, an enthusiastic AdDept client.

So, the return trip to Hawaii was delayed for twenty-three years. That adventure is described here.

Fun on Oahu: We knew that we needed to get our Luau Cards punched. No one is allowed to leave Hawaii without attending one. I think that we asked Karen and her staff which of the luaus we should was the best. They all recommended Germaine’s, and insisted that it was worth the drive.

Sue, Doug, and I attended, and we all had a good time. The entertainment was pretty good. The food was plentiful if not spectacular, and, best of all, we learned that we had not missed anything by never eating poi. I am sure that Sue took many photos, but I could not find them. Germaine’s website contains an abundance of photos. They can be viewed here.

ABC stores could be found on almost every block of the touristy parts of Honolulu. I spent some time buying postcards to make acquaintances back in New England envious. It occurred to me that people in Hawaii probably never receive postcards. So, I bought one and sent it to Karen.

Notes on the images displayed here: I am virtually certain that somewhere within the house at 41 North St. in Enfield, CT, are hundreds of stunning photographs of this trip. I have only located two of them, and those two have been on display in a collage on the wall of my office for at least ten years. They have faded badly, to the point that their only real use now is to prove that I am not making all of this up.

So, I have been forced to use images copied from the Internet. If anyone objects to the use of any of the images, I will remove the objectionable ones.

Sue, Doug and I drove to the memorial in Pearl Harbor. It was OK, but I did not feel like tearing up or anything. I enjoyed the drive past Aloha stadium better.

Doug and I climbed to the top of Diamond Head one morning. At the time I was in pretty good shape from running, and Doug did a lot of riding on his mountain bike. So, neither of us held up the other. The view from the top was easily worth the effort.

After Doug flew back to New England, Sue and I stayed on the heavily populated island of Oahu. That adventure is described here.

1. Hurricane Iniki had struck the islands (especially Kauai) very hard in 1992. Otherwise you could count on periods of rain every day in the rain forests in the center of every island and clear and warm weather everywhere else.

1986-2005 TSI: Marketing Employees

Posted on June 18, 2021 by Mike

TSI’s salesmen. Continue reading →

By the mid-eighties Sue and I really needed help with marketing. We had some good products to sell, and our service was fantastic. However, our salesmanship was poor. I could often persuade people that I could develop a solution to a difficult problem, but I was not very good at persuading them that TSI’s product and approach were better than those of our competitors.

The first person whom we engaged to represent us was Joe Danko, who lived on Cape Cod. At first the relationship was on a commission-only basis. Later we considered hiring him as our salesman, but we decided against it. The details are described here. Joe was never actually an employee, and we never paid him for his services. I don’t know how much effort, if any, he put in on our behalf.

Trust me; Paul was nothing like this guy.

We hired some consultants to help us. They, in turn, hired a graduate student named Paul Schrenker, to sit in Sue’s office in Rockville when she was on the road. We provided a list of presidents of ad agencies and their phone numbers. In only a few cases was it a direct line, but, even so, quite a few people agreed to talk with him. Ad agency executives were all about relationships. Whether Paul was a potential client or a potential vendor did not matter that much; many agency heads were always on the lookout for connections. So, a surprising number of advertising executives accepted a cold call from a graduate student who knew a lot about biology but very little about any aspect of the business world.

The Patriots debacle was not O&P’s finest hour.

One of the ad agencies, O’Neal & Prelle in Hartford, agreed to an appointment, and we eventually closed the sale. Paul did not participate in closing the sale, but he did make the first appointment.

TSI severed its relationship with the consulting firm. We decided instead to hire a full-time salesman, and we approached it in the same way we had recruited programmers and administrative people—by placing an ad in the newspapers. I think that we interviewed a couple of people. One stood out, Michael Symolon. He seemed excited about the job, and he was quite well-spoken. He was a graduate of Central Connecticut. He had worked in marketing for five years at Triad Systems, a company that specialized in software for dentists.

I think that we hired Michael at some point in 1987. His LinkedIn page, which can be found here, was no help in this determination. Although he included previous and subsequent employers, he left TSI off of his list of experiences. We paid him a pretty good salary as well as commissions.

I remember that when he first began to work at TSI Michael was gung ho about setting up a nationwide sales organization. He advised me to schedule annual trips to exciting destinations exclusively for the most productive reps of our software systems.

This attitude shocked me a little, but he eventually revised his expectations when he discovered how complicated the GrandAd product was. Our competitors could undercut us on price on the hardware, and there was not much that we could do about it. The key to selling was almost always our willingness to customize the system for the prospective client. The idea of setting up a network of sales agents seemed unworkable to me. If I could not deal with the people personally, how could I assess what changes were necessary and feasible?

We gave Michael room to be creative in his approaches, but I was not ready to discuss how to celebrate sales generated by imaginary salesmen.

Terri Provost left the company shortly after Michael was hired. Michael interviewed and hired Linda Fieldhouse to take her place as administrative assistant/bookkeeper. Both of them are described here. Michael assured me that Linda was “at least a nine and a half.”

I am pretty sure that Michael and I went on a couple of ad agency sales calls together. I remember driving up to Vermont with someone—it probably was Michael. When I got out of the car I realized that I was wearing the pants for my pin-stripe suit with my blue blazer. We did not get the sale, but I don’t think that my fashion faux pas was the cause. Vermont is not known for haute couture.

I also remember that Michael accompanied me to Keiler Advertising once. Evidently he had once dated Shelly, who at that time was in charge of bookkeeping there. Michael was very embarrassed by the incident. I did not ask him for historical details.

I don’t remember him closing sales of any new GrandAd clients.

We took Amtrak from Hartford’s Union Station to NYC.

Michael also came to New York City with me for at least one very important presentation to Macy’s in 1988. He was almost a hero, as is described here.

Michael invited Sue and me to supper one evening at his house in Farmington. We got to meet his wife and kids. It was a very nice house, but I don’t remember any details.

I am sorry to report that Michael was at the center of TSI’s first great crisis, which is described here.

I ran into Michael at Bradley International one day in late 1988. He told me that he was working for a company that sold advertising software to magazines. I told him that Macy’s had finally signed the contract, that I had been working my tail off to get all the software written and installed, and that TSI would send him his commission check as soon as we got the final check from Macy’s. There did not seem to be any hard feelings.

For a couple of years TSI muddled along without a salesman and with very little effort at marketing. Those were very difficult years in a number of ways. By the spring of 1991 the AdDept system had two pretty substantial accounts, and we felt that it was time to start marketing it seriously nationwide.

Meanwhile, our ad agency clients seemed perfectly content with their current hardware and showed no interest in converting to the AS/400, the system that IBM had introduced in 1988. It is described here.

We hired a young man named Tom Moran to help with marketing. He was a very nice guy, but he knew next to nothing about computers, advertising, retail, or, for that matter, marketing. He was definitely eager to learn, and he was willing to follow up on leads, which was the most important thing. Plus, both Sue and I liked him.

I remember going on two trips with Tom. The first was for a meeting with Hecht’s in Arlington, VA. Sue, Tom, and I drove down to the Washington area. A Motel 6 on the Maryland side of DC kept the light on for us, and I am happy to report that no murders were committed (or at least none reported) there that night. It was the first and last time that I stayed at a Motel 6.

The three of us met with Barbara Shane Jackson, who was in charge of Hecht’s patchwork PC system and her boss, the advertising director, whose name I don’t remember. Tom did not contribute much, but it was a good meeting on the whole. In the end we got the Hecht’s account.

The RAC was held at the Hilton in downtown Chicago.

Tom and I also attended RAC, the Retail Advertising Conference, in Chicago. It was a huge pain to get everything prepared for our booth there. We had to rent an AS/400 from IBM and to hire union employees to set everything up. Nevertheless, we did manage to get our demo computer system working by the time that the attendees came to visit the vendor area.

Some vendors who were familiar to us were there. Camex, the company from Boston that specialized in programming and selling heavy-duty Sun workstations for the production of ads, had an exhibit that was ten times as large as ours and had a dozen or more people. Tapscan, the broadcast software company. was right across the aisle from our booth. One young lady who worked there must have accidentally left her skirt at home. It appeared that over her black pantyhose and high heels, she was wearing a wash cloth that she purloined from her hotel room.

Most of the conventioneers were drunk or at least tipsy by the time that they reached our area. We made one contact with the ad director of Hess’s, a department store chain with headquarters in Pennsylvania. Tom gave him a copy of our sales materials and got all of his contact information. Unfortunately, almost as soon as we had begun correspondence with him, Hess’s was acquired by another retailer, and his position was eliminated.

The convention would have been a complete fiasco except for two things. The first was that I got to introduce Tom to the indescribable pleasure of Italian beef sandwiches purchased from street vendors in the Windy City.

The other redeeming event was the appointment that I had made to do a demo at the convention for Val Walser, the Director of the Advertising Business Office at The Bon Marché, a department store chain in the northwest. The programs worked without a hitch, and she was very impressed with what the system could do. She even invited us out to Seattle for a presentation to the relevant parties at the IBM office there.

Tom accompanied me on that trip, too. Our plane landed in Seattle very late, well after midnight. We checked into our hotel, but we only managed to get a couple of hours sleep. We went to the IBM office, where I checked that all of the software was working correctly. By this time I had been chain-drinking coffee for several hours, and still I felt very sleepy. This was an important presentation, and I had to be at my best.

The demo seemed to go pretty well. Everyone was attentive. The people from the IT department were asking tough questions, which usually boded well for us. I was so tired that I could barely concentrate. As we were putting away our materials I realized that I had been drinking decaffeinated coffee all day.

Nevertheless, I convinced Val and the other important parties. We put together a hardware and software proposal, and they submitted a requisition to the IT department, which also approved it. However, the powers that be at Federated Department Stores¹, the mother ship, vetoed it.

This episode taught me that TSI needed someone who could navigate his way through the bureaucratic structure to find out what the hold-up was. Tom was not ready for this kind of responsibility. In the end, we decided that we could not afford someone who just tagged along for demos. In fact, we were really in the position where we could not afford anything.

Fortunately, we were able to use the Hecht’s installation as an entrée into the May Company, which at the time had about ten divisions. Not long after that I persuaded Foley’s in Houston to install the system, too. I also convinced Neiman Marcus in Dallas to get the system.

Those sales gave TSI both a solid base of accounts and enough revenue that we again looked for a marketing person in 1993. We found what we were looking for in Doug Pease, who had actually worked in the advertising department at G. Fox, the local May Company chain.

At first I had hoped that Doug could do some of the demos, but I soon gave up on that idea. I knew exactly what the system did, what it could potentially do, and what was beyond us. The programmers were generating a lot of code every week, and so these lists were in a constant state of flux. Besides, I had a great deal of experience at public speaking, and Doug did not. I don’t think that I would ever have trusted anyone with the demos.

Doug was a real bulldog once he had a hot lead. He was extremely good at following up on everything. In his first year we closed extremely profitable sales to Lord & Taylor, Filene’s Basement, and Michaels Stores.

In April of 1994 I received an email from a woman named Susan Sikorski, who worked at Ross Roy Communications, Inc. in Bloomfield Hills, MI. The company at the time had eight hundred employees (!) and seven satellite offices. They wanted a production billing system that would feed their Software 2000 accounting system and some internally developed applications.

A few years earlier I would have considered this opportunity a godsend. We had already written interfaces for Software 2000 accounting systems for two AdDept clients. We loved to do interfaces, and the more complicated they were the better. However, we were so busy with programming for clients that Doug had landed that this was my response:

Unfortunately, as I looked over your package, I realized that our system does not really measure up to your requirements. We would have to make very substantial modifications to meet even the minimal requirements. Since we specialize in custom programming, this would not ordinarily be a great issue to us, but at this time we would not even be able to schedule the work for many months. So, I guess that we will have to mass.

And it was almost certainly a good thing that I was forced to make that decision. In 1995 Ross Roy Communications was purchased by the mega-agency called Omnicom Group. If TSI had been chosen for the project, I strongly suspect that the plug would have been pulled on it before the system became fully operational. Susan found a new job at Volkswagen in 1996.

Meanwhile, in the next few years Doug managed to get TSI’s AdDept system into all of the remaining May Company divisions, as well as Elder-Beerman, the Bon-Ton, Stage Stores, two Tandy divisions, Gottschalks in California, and all but one of the five divisions of Proffitt’s Inc., which later became Saks Inc..

Doug and I took many sales trips together. The most memorable one was in December of 1997 to Honolulu to pitch Liberty House³, the largest retailer on the islands.

Doug using a client’s AS/400 for something.

We had a little free time while we were there. Doug and I used it to climb to the top of Diamond Head together. He was an enthusiastic mountain biker, he had been a soccer player in college, and he was quite a bit younger than I was. I was in pretty good shape from jogging. So, neither of us held up the other.

Sue accompanied us to Honolulu, and after Doug returned home, she and I had a great time on four different islands, as is described here.

The other trip that was the most memorable for me was when we flew to Fresno, CA, to pitch Gottschalks, a chain of department stores in the central valley.

In those days you could save a lot of money by flying on Saturday rather than Sunday—more than enough to pay for a day’s food and lodging and a car rental. Doug and I considered going to Yosemite on our free day, but there was a problem with the roads there. Instead we decided to drive along the coastal highway from north to south to maximize our views of the coastline.

I did not have a camera, but Doug did. His was a real camera of some sort. I was not yet into photography, and I had not brought a disposable camera on the trip. Doug took lots of photos. In fact, he ran out of film. When we stopped for lunch he bought some more film.

Doug took a lot more photos on the rest of the journey, or so he thought. When we got to Fresno he discovered that he had no photos at all after lunch. I don’t remember whether he forgot to load the camera after he took out the film. Maybe he did not wind it, or there was a technical problem. That was not the worst of it. He also somehow lost the first roll of film when we stopped for lunch, and it also contained the photos of his newborn child taken before we left.

But, hey, we got the account.

I guess that Doug is unloading new equipment in Enfield.

Doug and I almost never disagreed about what the company should be doing. However, near the end of his tenure he came up with an idea that I just could not sanction. He wanted us to start a new line of business in which we contracted for large chunks of advertising space from newspapers at a discount and then resold it to small businesses at a profit. Maybe he could have sold a lot of space; maybe he couldn’t. In any case such an undertaking would leverage no TSI products or services and none of the skills that the rest of us possessed. In short, he was asking me to backstop a new source of revenue for him. I declined to do so.

Doug and I made a great team. I gathered specs and did the demos. He attended, met the players, and subsequently followed up on everything. When the prospect had signed the contract, he made sure that all the i’s were dotted and the t’s crossed and ordered the hardware if they bought from TSI or a business partner.⁴ By 1999 we had more work than the programmers and I could handle. I told him to stop selling new software systems until the programming backlog could be reduced to a more manageable level, which would not be for at least a year. He made the imminently reasonable decision to look for another job.

After TSI moved to East Windsor in late 1999, we hired one more AdDept salesman, Jim Lowe. His previous experience was with a company that marketed hard cider. The challenge was to get retailers to give them adequate shelf space. It was retail experience, but not exactly the kind that we had dealt with.

Jim was a smart guy, and he could have been a good salesman for us. We went on a trip together to Wherehouse Music in Torrance, CA. Wherehouse was a large chain of music stores in California. Jim and I stayed in a nearby Holiday Inn the first night. We used MapQuest to find to the Wherehouse headquarters the next morning. At the very first turn MapQuest advised us to turn right. This seemed wrong to me, and I turned left instead. We reached the building in less than ten minutes. I don’t know when we would have arrived if I had turned right.

It was a very strange meeting. Rusty Hansen, whom I knew from Robinsons-May, had told them about us. We never got to meet with him or anyone else who seemed to know what they wanted. We did get to meet the president of the company, who was wearing jeans and a tee shirt. I never did figure out what this whole episode was about. The company went out of business within a couple of years.

Jim only worked for us for a few months. He took an offer that was very similar to his old job. Before he left he helped me with a mailing that produced some good leads. I sold the last few AdDept systems to some of those retailers by myself.

Jim’s advice to me when he left was that TSI should concentrate on A^xN, which is described here. I don’t think that he ever really understood that the horse must precede the cart. We needed retailers to be sending us insertion orders in order to be able to send them to newspapers.

Bob Wroblewski was, as I recall, a relative of Denise’s husband. In November of 2003 Denise came up with the idea of paying Bob to get the newspapers signed up.

I got to know Bob on a trip taken by the two of us to California to persuade Rob-May and Gottschalks to use A^xN. We both misjudged how well the two demos went. The people at Gottschalks seemed excited; Rob-May was somewhat cool. However, Rob-May soon came around, and I never did persuade Stephanie at Gottschalks to use A^xN.

Here is how the marketing process worked. After a retailer’s advertising department that scheduled its newspaper ads in AdDept agreed to use A^xN for insertion orders, it provided us with a list of its newspapers with contact information. I wrote a letter to each paper asking them to subscribe to the service. The letter was printed on the retailer’s letterhead and was signed by the advertising director or ROP manager at the newspaper. However, it was sent by us along with a contract that I had signed. The monthly rate was approximately what the newspaper charged for one column inch in one issue. This was a negligible fraction of what the advertiser spent. Then Bob called each one and persuaded them to sign up.

I don’t know (and I don’t want to know) what Bob said to the papers, but he had a very high success rate. He also earned quite a bit for himself in commissions. At one time we had over four hundred newspapers that subscribed for the service!

Bob’s wife died while he was still working with us. I drove to Providence, which is where he lived, for the wake.

1. Federated Department Stores owned many large chains that were all very promising potential AdDept clients. The rejection of The Bon Marché’s request may have been a blessing in disguise. In January of 1990, shortly after this meeting, Federated filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. It could have been really ugly.

2. Susan Sikorski is apparently working as a consultant for Avaya in 2021. She is featured as a graduate of Wayne State on this webpage.

3. We learned later that the advertising department at Liberty House had approved the purchase of the AdDept system, but the order was never placed because in March of 1998 Liberty House filed for Chapter 11, and the funds for new systems were frozen.

4. TSI was throughout its existence a certified member of IBM’s Business Partner program. However, because of the size of the company we were bit allowed to sell IBM hardware directly. Instead, we needed to pair up with a “managing Business Partner” who actually could place orders. We dealt extensively with several of these companies—Rich Baran, BPS, Savoir, and Avnet. There may have been others.

1990 A Memorable Fortnight in Search of Camelot

Posted on June 10, 2021 by Mike

Innocents abroad again. Continue reading →

If I had read *The* *Innocents Abroad*, I might have brought a notebook on the trip to London. I definitely brought at least one to Milwaukee.

In December of 1989 I had won a story contest (described here) held by the Hartford Courant. The prize was a two-week trip for two to England!

I should mention at the outset that neither Sue nor I took any notes on the trip to England. I think that Sue must have brought her camera, but I have not located any of her photos. I definitely took no photos. So, all of the following content was based on our memories, and the photos that are include, with the sole exceptions of the tattered notebook on the right, the shot of Rocky perched on the toilet, and our souvenir coaster, were all taken by others.

I might have made a mistake in the dates, but the schedule worked out so perfectly that my confidence level is rather high, especially considering that the events happened more than thirty-one years ago.

My preparation for my first trip across the Atlantic was, by necessity, greatly inferior to my efforts for our twenty-first century vacations. Research was much more difficult in 1990. The Internet sort of existed, but there was no Google or Wikipedia. We had Cox cable in our house, but Cox did not offer Internet services until the last half of the nineties. Even AOL dial-up was still three years in the future.

Moreover, I had no time to research. The installation of TSI’s AdDept system at Macy’s in New York was entering phase two (as described here), and, at the same time, we were desperate to sign up a second large retailer to use the system that we had worked so hard to develop for Macy’s. TSI was in a rough spot. We no longer had a dedicated marketing person, and we were also quite short on cash.

We obtained a guidebook somehow, probably from the library. Sue and I decided that we wanted to see as many famous sights as possible, but, despite what I had said to Lary Bloom at the Courant, on the way we would also try to investigate some places that were related to the Arthurian legends.

Sue worked with the Jameson Travel people that the Courant had hired to handle the details of trip. The newspaper provided enough money to cover all transportation costs (including auto rental) and lodging. We had to pay for food and anything else that we wanted. Our basic plan was to eat big breakfasts at the hotels and either lunch or supper at a restaurant. The other meal would be snacks that we picked up at whatever store we chanced upon.

We had a pretty good plan with four bases of operation:

London for three nights. Starting with our arrival early in the morning on Thursday, February 22, 1990, and ending with a car rental on Sunday the 25^th.
Wells for three nights with side trips to Glastonbury Tor, Stonehenge, Wookey Hole, and Cadbury Castle. We drove through, or at least very near to, Bath (BAHTH) on the way.
Plymouth for two nights with a side trip to Tintagel (tin TAH gehl) and a stop in Bristol on the way to York to enable Sue to shop for miniatures on her thirty-ninth birthday.
York for three nights with a drive through the Dales and, on the return trip to London, a short stop in Barnsley so that Sue could see Locke Park as well as an afternoon stop in Warwick Castle.
Back to London for two nights. Since we gained five hours flying west, we would arrive in Boston at lunch time or even earlier.

The story of my trip actually begins on a February flight from Bradley not to London but to Chicago. It was an early morning United flight on Monday the 19th. For some reason most of my airplane horror stories have involved flights on United airlines. The one to Chicago, however, was quite uneventful.

From O’Hare I took a cab into town for a meeting at One IBM Plaza with some IBM sales reps who specialized in the retail sector. Some really big retailers had headquarters in Chicago. Sears and Walgreens came to mind. Marshall Fields still had its headquarters in Chicago at that point, too. I tried to explain AdDept to them, but they had trouble understanding it. I am not sure that they even realized that retailers had advertising departments.

From IBM regional headquarters I took a cab to the train station, where I bought a ticket on the next Amtrak train to Milwaukee. The schedule said that it was a ninety-minute journey. Unbeknownst to me, this train happened to be the famous Empire Builder, which went from Chicago all the way to Seattle and Portland. Union Station in Milwaukee was its first stop.

When I boarded my car, it was rather empty. I found a seat by a window, lifted my suitcase up to the overhead rack, and sat down to read.

To my surprise, a man who may have been in his sixties approached me and asked if he could sit next to me. Here was my chance. All that I had to do was to utter the word “No.” I, however, chose politeness. This would be a better story if I had introduced myself and asked the gentleman his name, but I was not that polite.

I didn’t say that it was an express train.

My unexpected companion explained that he and his wife were traveling together to Oakland, CA, to visit their daughter. They liked to take trains, but on long trips like this one they soon tired of each other’s company. So, they each sought out other people to sit with and engage in conversation.

The gentleman was certainly friendly. He asked me where I was getting off and, after I responded, what I was going to do in Milwaukee. Nobody could explain TSI’s unique business in just a few minutes, and my activities that day would seem confusing to anyone. I did my best, and he listened politely.

The cars were a little sleeker, but this was still the Milwaukee Amtrak Station in 1990.

Then, without being asked, he told me that he was from a small town south of Chicago. He may have also worked the price of corn into the conversation at some point as I glanced longingly at the mystery novel balanced on my lap.

Somehow the topic worked its way around to his daughter’s marital status, which was evidently “divorced”. She had moved to the west coast and was living by herself “because, you see, he turned out to be one of them gay fellows.”

Fortunately, this revelation came just as the train was pulling into Milwaukee’s Union Station. Some other passenger would undoubtedly get to hear the rest of the story. Actually, probably several unsuspecting people would be subjected to it. In the cab from the station to my first appointment it occurred to me that the idea of sitting with strangers on the train was probably the wife’s.

My destination in Milwaukee was the office of an ad agency, the name of which I don’t remember. I met there with some people to discuss the possibility of the agency purchasing an AS/400 and running ADB, the version of TSI’s ad agency system designed for that computer, on it. The employees at the agency treated me very nicely and seemed quite interested in what the system had to offer.

At the close of the business day I took another cab to the Mark Plaza Hotel in downtown Milwaukee, which was within walking distance of the Boston Store. P.A. Bergner and Company owned that store and a large number of other department stores in the north-central states. The advertising department for the entire chain was located on one of the top floors of the store.

Before going to bed I called Sue and told her about the two meetings as well as my encounter with the long-distance rail traveler.

At Bergner’s I met with the production manager, Dan Stroman, and the loan room manager, Sheree Marlow Wicklund. Their loan room was much simpler than Macy’s. The merchandise seldom was sent to outside photo studios. One person could really run it without a computer.

We had not written a system for keeping track (called “trafficking”) of the status of the various aspects (copy, layout, art, photography, etc.) of production jobs yet. So, what Dan was interested in was a new area for me. I also met with the finance and newspaper people. More details are here.

In 1990 a small restaurant in the Milwaukee Airport sold these delicious brats.

After an entire day gathering system requirements, I left with a lot of notes in my spiral notebook, a folder full of sample reports, and my suitcase. I took a cab to the airport. I bought two Usinger’s brats for supper, spent a few minutes in the airport’s used book store, which, as I recall, had a set of Goethe’s complete works that was short a couple of volumes.

Nobody made this drive in an hour in the evening on February 13, 1990.

It was snowing lightly when I boarded the plane. My journey home went through Chicago. That first leg was always so short that the seat belt light was never turned off.

We had barely taken off when the pilot announced on the intercom that O’Hare Airport had just closed because of an ice storm. So, the plane was being diverted to the nearest available airport, General Mitchell International Airport, the same one from which we had just departed.

When we had landed, an agent proudly informed us that United had hired buses to transport all the passengers to O’Hare. So, evidently the airport itself was still open, even if all of the runways were closed. I was a little fearful of a bus ride in a storm that was ferocious enough to frighten the airport that was a hub for two of the nation’s largest carriers, but I really needed to get back to Enfield to attend a meeting scheduled for the next day.

The rest of the trip went as smoothly as could be expected. The bus that I was on made it to O’Hare. I had to wait in line to speak with a United agent, but I was then booked on a flight to Hartford that was scheduled to depart early the next morning.

Since the cancellation was due to the airport’s decision, United did not offer to put me up at a hotel. I had no credit cards and too little cash remaining from all of those cab rides to pay for a room on my own. So, I snatched as much sleep as I could in one of the seats that were specifically designed to prevent people from nodding off and missing their flights. I had a lot of company.

For the next two decades I was a regular at Executive Valet Parking.

The flight the next morning left on time and arrived in Hartford on time. I took the shuttle to the airport parking lot, ransomed my car, and then drove back to Enfield.

I arrived at our house a little before noon. I called the office and told them that I would take a shower, grab an hour or so of sleep, eat lunch, and then come into work. I did not sleep much, but otherwise I followed that plan.

In the afternoon a couple from New Jersey appeared at our office. I don’t remember the details of this meeting. I seem to recall that it had something to do with our pitch for Paramount, which is described here. These people had experience with UNIX, the operating system preferred by Paramount. “UNIX” had always been sort of a dirty word in our office.

After they left I formalized my notes from my three meetings in Chicago and Milwaukee and sent letters to the people with whom I had met. That is what you had to do in the days before email. Because we were scheduled to depart for London the next evening, I left it up to Kate Behart to follow up on the phone with them.

I did not feel hopeful about the meeting in Chicago and the meeting at Bergner’s. The last meeting in our office was just a flyer. On the other hand, my hopes for the ad agency in Milwaukee were pretty high. If someone from the agency called our references, I thought that we could get it. Our clients loved us, and they always praised our work.

After supper I packed. I remember bringing along several books by Jack Vance. Chick Comparetto¹ had volunteered to take care of our cats, Rocky and Woodrow, while we were absent. It was not a weighty responsibility. They had their own door. I had purchased plenty of Cat Chow. If Chick forgot to give them water, they were not shy about helping themselves to the toilet. If they got hungry, Woodrow was adept at ripping open the bag of food. They probably also had two or three survival tricks that I had not yet discovered.

We must have brought either travelers’ checks or a lot of cash on the trip. I am quite sure that we had no credit cards.

Someone drove us to Logan. I have a vague recollection that it might have been Sue’s sister Betty.

I remember nothing about the experience in the airport in Boston. Our plane did not leave until late in the evening. We must have eaten something in the airport, but it was not memorable.

We lost five hours in the flight across the Atlantic, and so it was rather early in the morning when we landed at Heathrow. We had no trouble with our luggage or with customs. That aspect of travel was much easier in those days.

We also had no difficulty finding the driver who had been hired to meet us. I don’t remember his name or what he looked like, but I recall him being very welcoming in a reserved, British manner. He asked about the contest, and he recommended that we invest £5 each in the double-decker bus tour of London.

I am pretty sure that the Camelot was somewhere on this map.

He drove us right to the Camelot Hotel², our home for the next three nights. It was located on or near Sussex Place quite near Hyde Park. As soon as we entered the hotel, Sue and I had the same thought: “We are staying at Fawlty Towers!” Manuel was missing, and the details were all different, but the feel was remarkably similar. I suppose that at one time there were small urban hotels run by amateurish entrepreneurs in the United States, but by 1990 they were pretty much extinct.

We had to sign the guest registry, which was a huge book lying open on a desk, not a counter. A television was on behind the desk, and—I am not making this up—an episode of Fawlty Towers was playing.

My recollection is that the hotel comprised eight or ten nondescript rooms.We found ours and unpacked. We were both tired, but adrenaline overpowered the jet lag.

The person at the desk told us where we could catch a double-decker bus. We left our oversized key at the desk, walked to the location described to us, mounted to the second level of a bus, and took the tour. It was, as our driver had promised, a good way to get a feel for the city.

I don’t remember where we ate lunch, but afterwards we took a stroll in Hyde Park. It was very relaxing. I was surprised to see that people still used the Speaker’s Corner as a public pulpit. At some point an interesting thought popped into my head. I looked at my watch and then remarked to Sue, “Do you remember that guy on the train to Milwaukee that I told you about? I just realized that he is still on that same train.”³

That evening we walked a few blocks over to Baker St. I don’t remember what our motivation was originally, but when we arrived there we naturally tried to locate 221B. It didn’t exist. Moreover, there was no 221 at all.

We did find a steakhouse near that location, and, although we knew that the English were not famous for their cuisine, we gave it a try. The restaurant had a sound system that played pop tunes. The one that was playing as we walked through the door was “Baker Street” by Gerry Rafferty, which had been released twelve years earlier. The coincidences on that day were truly unbelievable. The food was OK, and Sue and I had fun trying to name the other songs. “Baker Street” never came up on the sound system again.

I only remember one other restaurant that we patronized in London. It was a Greek restaurant⁴ that was a block or two from the hotel. My recollection is that it was in the basement of some building, but I may be wrong. I distinctly remember that the food was absolutely delicious, by far the best of any of the food that we ate in England. I also remember that there were only two other people in the restaurant. They were seated at a table as far from us as was possible. They seemed to be just chain-smoking, drinking coffee (or something in coffee cups), and speaking in Greek. I struggled to hear a familiar word or phrase, but since the only Greek I knew then was thousands of years out of date, the task was hopeless.

In London we walked and/or took the tube everywhere. I thought that London’s Underground system was wonderful. It was so easy to figure out. I was used to the mass transit systems in New York and Boston. They were both haphazard and uncomfortable by comparison. I even bought a tee shirt advertising the London Underground. Here are things that I remember Sue and me doing in London:

We definitely went to the British museum. I was thrilled to see the real Rosetta Stone there. It was right out where you could touch it. They had lots of other stuff, of course, but the most memorable for me were handwritten lyrics by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Those were definitely kept in cases where no one could touch them. I also remember the pigeons on the steps. There must have been a thousand of them.
We spent the better part of a day at the Tower of London. I was very impressed by the armory and the Yeoman Warders in their fancy dress. I had no use for the massive collection of shiny rocks, but others stood in line for a chance to adore them. One of the few souvenirs that we bought on the entire trip was the coaster shown on the right.
We walked to Buckingham Palace, but we did not watch the changing of the guard. It was chilly that day. While we were in the vicinity, we went to Westminster Abbey and were a little grossed out that so many people were entombed there. I guess that they have to put the cadavers somewhere. We also saw Parliament, #10 Downing Street, Big Ben, and the Thames.
Sue wanted to visit St. Catherine’s House in London to look up information about some of her ancestors on her mother’s side, the Lockes and Kings. I didn’t go in with her. I don’t remember what I did, but just looking in windows is quite entertaining in London. I think that I might have found a bookstore.
We were very impressed with the retail on Oxford St., which I found much more exciting and dynamic than the stores on Fifth Avenue in New York.
The ducks in the ponds in Hyde Park were very striking. They had complicated and beautiful markings. Neither of us had seen the like, not even in zoos. I also really liked the coots. Their oversized feet impressed me.
From Hyde Park we could see both Kensington Palace, which at the time was the home of the Prince and Princess of Wales, and Royal Albert Hall. We didn’t visit either one. It probably would not be cool for someone from the Colonies just to drop in on Chuck and Di, and we already knew how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.

We did not find that being a pedestrian in London was too difficult. At the enormous intersections there were usually pedestrian subways. The hardest part for us was remembering to look to our right first when attempting to cross a side street.

On our very last night in England we went to see Agatha Christie’s play, The Mousetrap, at St. Martins Theater. It was very enjoyable. Maybe we should have tried something a little more daring, but I am very happy to say that I viewed this play when it was only in the thirty-eighth year of its record run.

The worst part of our entire trip began when we picked up the rental car. I think that the travel agency provided us with transportation to the car rental agency. It was only then that Sue revealed that she had specified a standard transmission car, and she was afraid to try to drive it. So, I needed to learn how to shift with my left hand on a perilous journey from the very heart of London to the M4 during the morning rush hour.

I made many mistakes. Other motorists even honked at us a few times, probably the only horns that I heard while we were in the U,K. The British seemed more reluctant than their American counterparts to draw attention to bad driving. Embarrassed and frustrated, I did manage to get the car onto the freeway without causing any accidents.

A little west of Reading Sue suddenly announced, “There he is! I just saw a bear!”

Intent on my driving, I dared not gawk. I took a quick peek in the direction that she pointed. I saw nothing. At the time I did not know that bears had been extinct in England for fifteen hundred years. It probably was just an ordinary Bigfoot.

We took the M4 almost all the way to Bristol. Driving on the M roads in England was no more challenging than driving on interstates in the U.S. However, when we exited from the M4, the rest of the drive was on the A roads, which were very narrow by American standards. I remember that when we drove through the outskirts of Bath I was fearful of scraping against the stone walls that formed the border of the road. Fortunately, we encountered very few cars coming in the opposite direction. When we finally reached our destination in Wells, I was happy that the trip was over and more than a little anxious about the next nine days on the road.

In Wells we stayed at the Red Lion Hotel, which is described here. I think that the building at some point was converted to other uses. I remember that our room had a four-poster bed. I had seen them in movies, but I don’t think that I had ever slept in one.

We spent the rest of that first day in Wells exploring the town. The focus of attention was definitely the huge Gothic cathedral that is dedicated to St. Andrew the apostle. Although it is now the see of the Anglican Bishop of Bath and Wells, it was constructed in the late middle ages when England was a Catholic country. It seemed totally out of place. Wells is little more than a village, and the cathedral is actually set apart from the town. I would have expected the town to have grown up around it.

The Bishop’s Palace was equally awesome or perhaps even more so. His Lordship George Carey⁵ evidently was not apprised of the arrival of the esteemed visitors from across the pond. We saw his home from a distance, and we were even treated to the sight of some episcopal long-johns hanging out to dry. However, we were not invited into the palace grounds where, according to Wikipedia, croquet games are rather common. I would have loved to hear someone explain the rules of the English version of the game.

A word about the weather: Although all of England is well north of New England, the weather in late February and early March was much nicer than what New Englanders would expect. It seemed more like mid-April. Flowers were out, and the grass was green. We wore jackets every day, but we were seldom cold. We also were lucky not to encounter much rain.

For me the most interesting feature in the town of Wells was the memorial on the sidewalk to Mary Rand, a resident of Wells who won the gold medal in the women’s long jump in the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo. The plaque measured out the exact distance that she jumped.

What I remember most about those days was the driving. No matter which of us was at the wheel, both of us became irritable. For some reason the roundabouts gave us the most difficulty. It was bad enough to have to remember to go clockwise. The big problem, however, was the signage. The highway numbers were seldom provided at the exits. Instead a sign displayed the name a town that was somewhere on that section of road. This was, I am sure, useful for people who knew where all of those towns were, but they did not help us at all. Furthermore, it seemed as if at least half the time the name on the sign was “Taunton”, and visiting Taunton was not on our agenda

I am not sure where we went on which days, but I am sure that we went to all of the following places:

Our guidebook described a place called “Cadbury Castle”. It was supposedly someone’s idea of where Camelot (or maybe Camalet) was. We had a lot of trouble finding it. Finally we came upon the village of North Cadbury. We asked someone at a pub where Cadbury Castle was, and they directed us down a one-lane road that was actually just two tracks. Those were the last humans that we encountered on this adventure.

We went as far as we could by car. We stopped the vehicle, locked it, and set off on foot.

Ahead of us were two troughs, a lot of thick underbrush, and a formidable grassy mound. We made our way through the underbrush for thirty or forty yards. Sue got attacked by stinging nettles and was forced to retreat in agony.

In those days if there was a hill in front of me, I climbed it. I made it to the top of this so-called “hillfort”, but I saw no trace of a fort. On the top of the hill a dozen or so cows were peacefully grazing. They ignored me. I could also see Glastonbury Tor in the distance. That was something, I guess.

To be fair, I should add that the sun was out. The legend is that on a misty day you can see the Once and Future King and his famous knights.

When we arrived back at the hotel, Sue asked someone what to take for stinging nettles. They informed us that the best treatment was a plant called “dock”, which always grew near the nettles. That was not in our guidebook.

We also drove to Glastonbury Tor, another ancient hill in Somerset. A lot of people think that this is a magical place. it certainly has an unusual shape. Evidently in the middle ages a monastery was there. Legends abound about it being associated with King Arthur, but there is a dearth of evidence.

A paved path now leads to the tower atop the tor. I don’t think that it existed in 1990.

I don’t remember a lot about our visit here. I don’t clearly recall the tower at the top of the hill at all. Therefore, I was skeptical as to whether I climbed to the top. Sue, however, has told me that I did. Evidently I don’t remember the tower because no one was allowed to enter it. Therefore, its distinguishing feature—no roof!—was not visible to me.

Sue also reported that a dozen or so New Agers were busy absorbing Glastonbury’s vibes.

The good thing about it was that the town of Glastonbury was actually fairly easy to find. I can’t say that about most of the other sights in Somerset. We had a devil of a time finding Stonehenge. Surely, there must have been a lot of tourists who wanted to see these big old rocks. Nevertheless, there was precious little signage to indicate their location.

We were not allowed as close to the stones as the people in this photo are.

We did find it, but it was probably the biggest disappointment of the entire trip. At the time no one was allowed to approach, much less touch the stones. I don’t recall that we ever were within one hundred feet of them. I honestly think that we would have gotten more out of a film about the place.

By this time we were getting rather tired of driving around Somerset searching for legendary hills and ancient inanimate objects.

Our last stop in Somerset, however, was delightful. Wookey Hole is a set of caves that are located just a few miles to the northwest of Wells. We knew about the caves from the guidebook, but we were surprised by the fact that there were actually other really enjoyable things to see and do nearby.

The caves were quite interesting. We took a little tour with a local guide. The best part of it was the way that she pronounced Wookey Hole. The first syllable was at least a fifth higher than the rest of the name. Since we had heard no human speech anywhere near any of the other attractions in Somerset, it was nice to have someone explain the geology of the caves.

In addition to the natural formations, someone had constructed a small museum⁶ that emphasized a few diverse elements of the culture in and around Wookey Hole.

The paper-making demonstration was the most educational. Until then I had absolutely no idea how trees and rags were turned into paper. The penny arcade machines were also something that I had never seen before. Visitors could even play the games using old-school pennies that they could buy there. The carousel section had complete carousels (going clockwise, of course), as well as stunning individual statues. I remember seeing a beautiful lion, but I was unable to find a picture of it on the Internet.

Sue and I found our visit to Wookey Hole both fun and relaxing. We then undertook the drive up to Cheddar Gorge. I am not sure why we did not stop here. Sue absolutely loves cheese. In retrospect I have trouble understanding how she could have resisted the temptation to stop and sample one of her favorite cheeses.

Our next destination was Plymouth, which is a genuine city on the south coast. On the way there we took a slight detour to drive through Exmoor, which includes some really diverse and beautiful areas.

Our hotel in Plymouth was not as memorable as the first two. I have a vague recollection that it also had a restaurant. We took a short pedestrian tour of the city, mostly so we could say that we had seen the spot from which the Pilgrims departed.

I remember that at the restaurant I was served some Devon Cream. I had never had this before and remarked about it to Sue. My face must have registered disgust because the waiter rushed over to ask me if there was something wrong. This, by the way, never happens to me in the U.S.

The main reason that Sue and I bothered to come this far west was to have somewhere to stay while we ventured to Tintagel, the ruins of a real castle in Cornwall on the Atlantic coast.

Tintagel⁷ was definitely worth visiting. However, it was a difficult drive from any direction. Furthermore, a fairly long walk was (and evidently still is) required to reach the ruins from the parking lot. We went there in February, and a very cold wind was blowing in off the Atlantic. We did not get as much out of this experience as we might have if the weather had been nicer or we (i.e., Sue) had been in better condition. We did get a look at the castle ruins and Merlin’s cave. The view of the ocean was stunning.

I am not sure about this, but I think that we decided not to drive directly back to Plymouth. Instead we headed to Barnstaple, a city with which we were familiar from playing the British Rails game. All of the cities in this section are at the base of a very high cliff. This accounts for the peculiar fact that all of the rivers flow to the south.

On Sue’s birthday we left from Plymouth with the intention of reaching York by supper time. I asked Sue what she wanted for her birthday. She said that she wanted to shop for miniatures at a store she knew about in Bristol. So, that is what we decided to do.

Somehow we came up with an unusual plan. We drove to a location on the outskirts of Bristol, which in 1990 had about 400,000 inhabitants. We parked the car and took a city bus downtown. Sue somehow knew which bus to take and the stop at which we needed to exit. When we got off of the bus, Sue looked around but could not see any familiar buildings or street names.

She did find a Dr. Who-type phone box (not booth in England). Somehow she figured out how to make it work. She called the store. The woman who answered asked her what she could see from the phone box. Sue told her. The woman merely said two words: “Turn around.”

Sure enough, Sue found herself looking at the miniatures store. She went in; I did not. I had enough trouble—even at that age—dealing with full-sized objects. While Sue was shopping for tiny things, I walked around and looked in windows. If I discovered a store that sold books or games, I probably went inside. I don’t think that I bought anything, but Sue definitely did. Good! It was her birthday.

We somehow caught another bus that brought us back to the car park. We fired up our vehicle and easily found our way back to the M5. Sue received one more present. We got off of the throughway at Cheltenham and drove through the Cotswold country to Bourton-on-the-Water the home of the Model Village. It took about half an hour.

I think that this is the model, not the real village.

I probably would not have made this side trip if I had been by myself. However, Sue has always felt a special attachment to the Cotswolds and particularly its thatched roofs. The Model Village itself is definitely worth seeing once. It was a nearly exact replica of the real Bourton-on-the-Water within which it resides. What I found the most interesting was that the model itself is indeed modeled at the same one-ninth scale. I naturally wondered if that model included a one-eighty-first model of the model and so on. I mean, some people write on grains of rice; what is the limit?

My attitude might help explain why, although everyone likes working with me, nobody ever asks me to go anywhere with them.

The remainder of the trip to York was uneventful. We stayed for three nights at the Royal York Hotel, a huge very old hotel near the train station. In one way I was glad that we did not go any further north. The people in the north spoke perfect English, of course, but the accent was so strong that it was difficult to understand.

The other memorable supper that we ate might have been our first night in York. I don’t remember the rest of my order, but the vegetable was broccoli. It had been cooked so long that it had turned grey. The waiter, who had emigrated from Greece, noticed my horror. He told me that the English always overcooked the vegetables. I conversed with him a little. I told him that I had taken ten semesters of Homeric and Attic Greek in high school and college. He did not seem too impressed. He probably knew that these classes would not have helped me understand him. I later learned that while modern Greek grammar has not changed much through the millennia, the vocabulary and pronunciation had evolved drastically.

I think that Sue let me do most of my exploring of York on my own. While I was out walking around the city I think that she visited the Railway Museum, which was very near the hotel.

I never pass up a chance to walk the walls of a city. York’s were probably the best.

I remember visiting the stunning York Minster, which was awesome both inside and out. It must surely be the most impressive church in England. I am quite certain that I climbed as high as they allowed in the ancient cathedral. The view of the city and the countryside was breathtaking.

I also walked around atop the ancient stone walls of the city. I cannot remember whether I made it all the way around, but I recall thoroughly enjoying this experience.

York was such a delightful old city. It was very pleasant to experience it both from street-level and from above.

Sue and I definitely visited the Jorvik Viking Center⁸ together. This museum emphasized the history of the area before the arrival of the Normans in the eleventh century. Many lifelike displays depicted the lifestyles of the Vikings who inhabited the area. The details were based on archeological excavations that produced thousands of objects.

We also went for a drive in the Yorkshire Dales that we knew from the television series All Creatures Great and Small. We stopped at a house or store for some reason. We talked with a lady there who used the word “fortnight”. I told her that no one in America ever used the word. She asked me what Americans said instead. She seemed mildly surprised when I replied “two weeks”.

After we left York we made two stops on our way back to the Camelot Hotel in London. The first was in Barnsley, where we searched for Locke Park, named after one of Sue’s relatives, a railroad magnate named Joseph Locke. We stopped to ask for directions. We were told that it was at the corner of Locke and Park. Where else? Sue is not a direct descendant, however. Joseph and his wife Phoebe had only one child, whom they adopted.

Our second stop was at the fabulous Warwick Castle. This stop was recommended by one of TSI’s clients, Mary Lee Pointe at Avon Old Farms School. I had mentioned to her that we were going to England and wanted to see at least one castle. She said that sh had visited several of them, and Warwick Castle was the most interesting.

The castle and its grounds made a fitting end to our motoring excursions. I cannot imagine a more awe-inspiring setting that was matched by the opulent displays in the interior. As I recall, we had a picnic lunch together on the grounds.

We made a memorable pit stop on the way to London. The facilities themselves were mediocre at best. What got my attention was a sign at the entrance demanding “NO FOOTBALL COACHES.” A “coach” to Brits was a tour bus. “Football” referred to the game called soccer in the states. So, the rest area actually prohibited busloads of soccer hooligans.

We managed to locate the car rental agency in London. I don’t remember how we got ourselves and our luggage to the hotel for the last two nights.

I don’t remember which of the activities that I listed in the first London section were actually performed on our last full day in London. I am pretty sure, however, that, as I mentioned, Sue and I attended the theater on our very last evening.

“Memorable” is definitely the right word for this”‘fortnight” in England. I can hardly believe how many things we did and how vividly they have remained in my memory and Sue’s—with no notes at all. How times have changed! It is now a titanic struggle for both Sue and me to recall what we did the day before yesterday.

One thing that I cannot remember clearly is what we did about the business. In the course of the two weeks, we must have called the office at least four or five times. I cannot recall needing to deal with any pressing problems.

1, Chick Comparetto was the father of Sue’s first husband. He lived less than a mile from us. He died in 2020. His obituary is here.

2. Alas, there is no longer a Camelot Hotel in London, and I was not able to identify any hotels that might be successors. Perhaps the building was converted to some other use.

3. This is my favorite shaggy-dog story of all time, and it is 100 percent true.

4. I think that this restaurant might still be in business in 2021. A restaurant called Halepi seems to be in the right location, and everything mentioned on its website, which can be visited here, rings true.

5. His Lordship George Carey became Archbishop of Canterbury, England’s ranking clergyman, in the following year. He retired in 2002. Like most bishops everywhere he got entangled in scandals about reporting clerical sexual abuse. In 2017 he resigned his last formal relationship with the church, which meant that he was no longer allowed to officiated at services.

6. Not many people were at Wookey Hole when we visited. I remember thinking in 1990 that this place needed some good old American marketing. Maybe Ambrose could have helped. Subsequently it has been Disneyfied into a real touristy place. Check out its website here.

7. Tintagel has changed in the three decades since we were there. A visitors’ center has been added, a footbridge has been constructed, and someone was allowed to carve a gigantic image of Merlin’s face on the side of the cliff.

8. The Jorvik Viking Center is still in operation. Its website is here.

Wavablog

Memoirs, bridge, popes, travel, and other stuff

Tag Archives: Comparetto/Wavada, Sue

1998-2005 TSI: AdDept Client: Proffitt’s

1991-2007 TSI: AdDept: Federated Department Stores/Macy’s Inc.

1995 December: Hawaii Trip Part 1

1986-2005 TSI: Marketing Employees

1990 A Memorable Fortnight in Search of Camelot