1988-1994 Living in Enfield

Posted on April 29, 2021 by Mike

Our first few years as a suburban couple. Continue reading →

Enfield is the northernmost town in central Connecticut. Historically it was noted for its two industrial giants, the Hartford-Bigelow Carpet Mill and the Hazard Powder Company, which manufactured gunpowder.¹ The town had two claims to fame. 1) Enfield Square was the only mall between Hartford and Springfield, MA. 2) Enfield was at one time home to the great Paul Robeson², or at least to his family. For some reason almost no one in the area seemed to care about the second distinction.

The Neighborhood: Our ranch house on North St. was much more modest than the Robeson’s stately dwelling, and so were those of our neighbors. I did not really know how to be a good neighbor. In the years following our move to Enfield I only really met one of our neighbors. A man named Fred, who was perhaps twenty years older than I was, told me a little about the history of our property. I never really got acquainted with anyone else in the neighborhood.

Part of the reason for this might involve the house’s peculiar layout. The front door to our house faced North St., but the driveway was on Hamilton Court. Fred was our neighbor on that side. The west side of the yard was fenced to separate it from the driveway and sidewalk leading to Hazard Memorial School. Directly across Hamilton Court from us was a two-story house that was divided into four units. It had dozens residents over the years. We seldom interacted with any of them. On the other side of North St. was Allen St., which had only a dozen or so houses before it dead-ended. There was also a house directly across North St. from ours, but I don’t think that we ever met the occupants.

Every year Fred got out a stepladder and trimmed the bushes that separated his backyard from the western side of our yard, which we thought of as the back yard. He informed me that the line of bushes was actually in his property.

Yard Work: That was fine with me, but when Fred and his wife moved to Florida a few years later, the first thing that the family that moved in did was to install a wooden fence adjacent to the bushes. So, the responsibility for maintaining the bushes fell to me willy-nilly.

Those were by no means the only bushes on our property, There were good-sized forsythias in both the northeast and northwest corners of the property. Large burning bushes flanked the house on both sides. Knee-level evergreens decorated the north side of the garage and part of the front. We had at least one rhododendron and two mountain laurels. There were hollies in the front side of the house, but I think that Sue put those in later to replace something else. A hedge of some kind that was about eight feet long, two feet thick, and four or five feet high was positioned fifteen or so feet in front of the door leading to the entryway.

I suspect that the power hedge trimmer might be in this box.

I was well aware that grass and weeds grew, but it had never really occurred to me that these bushes would keep growing all spring and summer, as well as most of the winter. Keeping all of these bushes from overgrowing the house was a task that I had not reckoned on. I bought a power hedge trimmer, but it was heavy, and it could not handle some of the thick branches. I used it on the hedges sometimes, but for most of the other bushes it was easier to use old-fashioned hedge clippers and a lopper. Of course, since we had never faced the issue of bushes before, I had to buy those as well.

Then there were the trees. The property had a spindly pine tree on the east lawn and nine maple trees—seven big red maples that encircled the house, one even larger green maple, and one small Japanese maple that really seemed out of place. In the spring the maples shed thousands of those little helicopter seeds, many of which took root in our gutters. In the fall, of course, the trees discharged all of their leaves.

The very best thing about life in Enfield in those days was that the city had hired a company to come around once a year to vacuum up leaves from the curbside. In our neighborhood it occurred a little after Thanksgiving. I bought a backpack leaf blower, but it still took a lot of time and effort to blow all those leaves down to the street. Even though our corner lot provided us with more footage on the two streets on which we lived than any of the neighbors had, it still seemed as if our mountain range of leaves was as lofty as anyone’s.

The leaf blower has rested in the garage for years.

The town eventually discontinued the blatant socialism of this service. It was replaced with leaf pickup days. The leaves all had to be bundled in large paper bags, and there was a limit to how many could be left at one time. I seem to remember that they allowed twenty bags at a time. When the objective was changed to getting the leaves in bags rather than down to the street, the usefulness of the leaf blower decreased markedly. I eventually abandoned it in favor of old-fashioned rakes. Sue insisted that the best way was to rake the leaves onto a sheet and then carry the sheet to the destination. I tried this, but found the extra step saved no time or effort.

At some point Enfield stopped accepting the bags, too. Instead brown tipper-barrels were supplied. Every week a truck came to collect their contents, which could include any type of lawn waste. Well, my yard’s leaves could fill dozens or maybe even hundreds of those barrels. I decided to just chop up the leaves in October and early November using the lawnmower with its mulching setting. I have been satisfied with the results.

I also had to take care of the 10,000 square-foot lawn, of course. When I say “take care of” I actually mean “mow”. I never fertilized or watered it, and I only spent any time weeding it once—on August 17, 1988, as explained here. I probably should have bought a small tractor as soon as we moved in. It would have paid for itself several times over. However, I was a several decades younger when we moved to Enfield, and I actually liked the exercise of mowing the lawn—as long as the mower was self-propelled.

I went through three or four lawnmowers before I purchased in 2011 or thereabouts a really good one from the Honda dealer across the street from TSI’s office in East Windsor.

Gardening: Vegetable gardening was my primary hobby when we lived in Rockville. When we looked at houses, I always tried to imagine where a garden could be located. It was not easy to find a decent spot on a lawn that also featured so many maple trees that became very leafy just when the crops needed sunlight.

My main garden was a square patch—perhaps fifteen feet on each side—of land right in front of the bushes on the north side of the house. It was between two trees and far enough away from the house that it received six or seven hours of direct sunlight during the summer months. This was adequate for most popular plants, but it was a continual frustration for me, especially since I understood that over time the trees would only get bigger.

That small piece of land was thickly covered by a thick mat of zoysia grass. I needed to use a spade to remove the turf during the first spring. It was backbreaking work, but I persevered. Then I borrowed Betty Slanetz’s rototiller to cultivate the soil. That was much easier, but in the process I accidentally punctured one of the hoses for the sprinkling system that lay beneath our entire lawn.³

I planted the usual crops—tomatoes, peppers, beans, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, and peppers. I had very little luck with root crops—onions, garlic, and carrots. I never did figure out what was wrong with my technique. My carrots never got more than a few inches long. The onions that I produced were scarcely larger than the sets that I planted in the spring.

In later years I purchased the starters for my tomato plants from Jeanie Smith, who lived at the northwest corner of North Maple and Moody Road. I tried several different kinds of tomatoes, but my favorites were (if I remember correctly) Red Rockets. Unfortunately after a few years of spectacular harvests, they got the blight, and it apparently leached into the soil. Thereafter, my harvest were not very good, and there really was nowhere else on the property suitable for growing tomatoes.

In point of fact, I really was not that big a fan of tomatoes per se. However, the chili that I made with freshly picked tomatoes was just delicious.

My favorite crop was green beans. I tried both bush beans and pole beans. I had some really good harvests, but the Mexican bean beetles, which seemed to arrive en masse in early July were devastating. During the first year I went out every morning and pulled off beetles with my fingers. They always hid on the underside of the leaves. I really did not want to use an insecticide, but I could not come up with another way of keeping the beetles and their voracious larvae from destroying the entire crop. In most other cases I eschewed the use of pesticides in order to protect the cats.

One Christmas Tom and Patti Corcoran gave me a book by Mike Wavada entitled All I Know about Beans and Beetles. Every page was blank.

Since I lived in New England I felt compelled to grow squash and zucchini. Nice crops of broccoli and cauliflower resulted after I learned about bacillus thuringiensis (BT), the environmentally safe way to eliminate cabbage worms. I grew some Brussels sprouts that produced little cabbages well into December. One mild winter one of the plants even wintered over and produced more little heads in the spring!

On the west side of the lawn by the fence I grew some asparagus and strawberries. These plants required an awful lot of weeding and attention, but they both produced nice crops for several years.

I gave up on the main garden after a few years. The growth of the surrounding trees had made it increasingly difficult for the crops to receive sufficient sunlight. I kept up the asparagus and strawberries for a few years after that. At some point I probably just became too busy to pay them the attention that they needed.

The Basement: The house on North St. had a full basement. The staircase down was in the hallway that led to the bedrooms, and the door was directly across from the entrance to the kitchen.

The washer and the shelves. The dryer is long gone.

Two large shelving units were built into the walls of the basement. It would have been a huge undertaking to remove them. We did not even consider doing so. The one on the north side we used for storage of books and games that were seldom used and the indoor side of the landing spot for the cats coming through the cat door. Next to it on one side was the case that held the fuses; on the other were the washer and dryer.

A small piece of plywood served as a ramp from the cat door to the top shelf. From there the cats made a right turn and walked over to the edge, jumped down to the washing machine and from there to the floor.

The sprinkler unit is in here somewhere near the shelves.

Next to the shelves on the west wall was the control unit for the underground sprinkler system. I played around with this enough to figure out that I did not want to use it. I saw two disadvantages: 1) Our water bill would increase. 2) The grass would need to be mowed more often.

For my fortieth birthday Sue bought a ping pong table. Evidently I had once told her that I played some ping pong at Allen Rumsey House in the sixties. It was not one of my better sports, and it certainly was not hers. I set it up near the shelves that held games and books.

We played a few times, but it frankly was not much fun. The area where the table was installed was not really suitable. There was not enough light and room for a good game. Furthermore, Sue experienced a lot of trouble keeping the ball on the table.

I drew a red box around the Mateus bottle on the edge of the ping pong table. This is, I think, the bottle from this story.

At some point Sue became interested in N-gauge model trains. She converted the ping pong table into a small train layout. For all that I know, that may have been part of the reason that she bought the table; I certainly never suggested that I wanted one. She and Brian Corcoran also formed a company for purchasing gear called the B&S railroad. All of that stuff is still down on the table in the basement, but only a trained archeologist could unearth it today.

After we got our new kitten, Woodrow, I found an old door that somehow had appeared in our basement. I converted it into a ramp for him from the top shelf down to the ping pong table. A box was strategically positioned to make it easier for him to reach the table. Woodrow used the ramp to get down for the rest of his life, but he preferred to climb up the bookshelves when he wanted to go out. He also like to shinny up trees when he was chasing squirrels in the yard. However, he did not like to climb down, and I had to rescue him a few times.

The rest of the basement was soon filled with boxes of Sue’s junk. Many of them have never been opened since we moved into the house, a period of nearly thirty-four years!

Sports: My interests in most sports waned considerably after we moved to Enfield. I still watched Michigan football games on television, however. Someone even gave me a license plate holder that celebrated Michigan Football. In 2021 it is affixed to its third car.

I began to take jogging more seriously. Enfield is one of the flattest towns in Connecticut, a distinction that made it rather easy to design a course of almost any length that did not involve hills as steep as the one on which we lived in Rockville. I often took a long lunch break that consisted of a run of a few miles, a shower, lunch, and a short nap before I returned to the office.

I buried Woodrow beneath this burning bush

In good weather I ate lunch at our picnic table and napped on the small mattress that came with the camping cot that Sue had purchased when we lived in Rockville. Rocky, the cat that moved with us from Rockville, would emerge from his favorite sleeping sport in the forsythia bushes and beg for a morsel of human food. The tiniest bit satisfied him, and he returned to his bush. As soon as I lay down for my nap, Woodrow, the trailer-trash cat that Sue brought home from St. Johnsbury, VT, generally ambled over from his napping spot beneath the burning bush and plopped himself next to me on the mattress.

4.25 miles between the canal & the river.

I also found two other very enjoyable places to run. The trail at Windsor Locks Canal State Park, which started in Suffield, CT, and the trail that stretched from Northampton to Amherst in Massachusetts.

I became rather serious about the activity. I tried to run as much as possible, even in the winter, although I never ventured out in ice, snow, or, for that matter, rain. I ran eighteen miles one morning in the fall. I refused to carry water, but I did place water bottles at two places along the route. Those were my only stops. I am not sure of the date, but I do remember mentioning it to prospective clients on the trip that I took to Seattle, and that was in 1992 or thereabouts.

I also remember that I ran a few miles the next day. That allowed me to brag to a serious runner, who was a friend of Sue’s from high school, that my personal best for a marathon was twenty-five hours.

Classical Music: While running I listened to music on a Sony Walkman with headphones. I bought a lot of cheap cassette tapes of orchestral works by an eclectic group of classical composers. I made an effort to become familiar with most of the popular composers. My collection included only a few operas. Cassette tape drives were installed on both my Saturn and the Honda that I bought in 2007.

I remember mentioning one afternoon to someone at TSI’s office that while jogging on South Road I had been listening to one of the Hungarian Rhapsodies. I was startled to find myself leaning so much to one side that I almost lost my balance. Then it dawned on me why it had happened. I had just been Liszting.

Entertainment: I have difficulty remembering what we did for amusement during these years. We certainly visited the Corcorans often, and I attended a number of softball and soccer games that involved my sister Jamie’s kids. We went to a Springfield Indians hockey game with Sue’s dad once.

On March 11, 1988, Sue and I saw Roy Orbison at Symphony Hall in Springfield. The warmup act was a comic whom I had never heard of. This was perhaps the most well-behaved crowd in the history of concerts. People who left the concerts patiently waited for “Walk” lights before crossing the deserted streets.

We also enjoyed seeing Sam Kinison at the Paramount Theater in Springfield. I don’t know the date, but the comic died in 1992.

For several summers after we moved to Enfield Sue’s youngest sister hosted a day-long “Betty Bash” at the house in which she lived with Don and their parents. I really enjoyed these events. I always participated in the volleyball games and the epic croquet games (played with Slanetz rules). The food was typical picnic fare combined with special dishes that Betty concocted. Tom Corcoran always came. I remember that Jamie brought her son Joey on his fourth birthday.

I got to meet quite a few of Betty’s friends. They were all considerably younger than I was, but it was easier to relate to them than to the Enfielders that I knew.

Trips and Visits: Sue and I took two big international vacations during our first years in Enfield. The fortnight in England is described here. The write-up of the Turkey-Greece cruise begins here.

Sue and I almost certainly took some shorter trips, but the only one that I remember was the visit that we made to one of Sue’s high-school friends in Austin, TX. That trip involved a drive in a rental car from Dallas, where I did a presentation of the AdDept system for Neiman Marcus. That successful experience is described here.

My parents made at least one trip to New England during our first years in Enfield. I don’t think that they ever stayed in our guest bedroom. Instead, they stayed at a hotel near my sister Jamie Lisella’s⁴ house in West Springfield, MA. My recollection is that the hotel was a Howard Johnson Motel on Route 5. I think that this hotel shut down, and in later years they roomed at the Hampton Inn that was built almost directly across the street.

My parents spent most of their time with Jamie and her kids. I remember, however, that Sue and I drove mom and dad to Old Sturbridge Village once. I remember only that it was quite cold, and we ate lunch or supper at the Publick House or the Bullard Tavern. They seemed to like the idea of having a genuine (well, sort of genuine) New England experience.

I am pretty sure that they came to Enfield for a picnic lunch or supper in our back yard at least once during these early years. I don’t remember the details.

A fairly recent view of the mall from the north. The big building in the center is a Target that was added in 2001

Retail: The mall in Enfield, which is now known as Enfield Square, was developed by the May Company, one of TSI’s primary customers. It opened in 1971, just before I met Sue in my first stint in Connecticut. The mall originally housed three anchor stores—G. Fox (one of May’s department store chains), national chain JC Penney, and Steiger’s, a small chain of department stores based in Springfield. Dozens of smaller shops and eventually a twelve-screen theater were housed in the mall.

You won’t make it in less than ten minutes. There are eleven stoplights on Hazard Ave.

Four large strip malls were built on three sides of the mall. A fifth was positioned a block to the east near several auto dealerships and the post office. At least two or three very large grocery stores have been located in them throughout the years that we have lived in the area. Nearly every type of retailer could be found in a fairly small area. All of these stores were easily accessible from I-91 and Route 5. It was (and still is in 2021) the only large shopping area between Hartford and Springfield, MA. For almost two decades Enfield Square was the only enclosed mall in the Hartford area that was east of the Connecticut River.

Great numbers of people came to Enfield to shop in the years after we moved to Enfield, and the people who lived in Enfield felt little reason to go elsewhere for retail therapy. It was very convenient for Sue and me; our house was less than three miles away.

Sometimes individual retailers seemed guilty of very poor planning. For several years there was a McDonald’s across the street from the mall on both the north and south sides as well as one inside the mall. That last one closed when the mall began to deteriorate.

There was also a RadioShack on the south side of the mall. In the late nineties I made numerous trips to the company’s headquarters in Fort Worth. One day someone in the advertising department heard that I lived in Enfield and told me that the Shack was opening a new store there. I told them that there was already a store in Enfield and asked for the address of the new one. It had a low number on Elm St., which is the street bordering the north side of the Enfield Square. Shortly thereafter a new Shack appeared in the strip mall north of the mall, but—no surprise to me—it lasted less than a year. Many more details concerning my experiences with RadioShack’s advertising department, the other divisions of Tandy, and Fort Worth(less) are recorded here.

Restaurants: By the time that Sue and I moved to Enfield a large number of restaurants had sprung up in and around the mall. The former group included Ruby Tuesday’s and a few transitory fast food places. Of the ones on the periphery The restaurant that has lasted the longest is Olive Garden, which was and still is on the edge of one of the strip malls south of Enfield Square. I went there for lunch with clients or employees a few times.

Originally the building adjoining the Olive Garden was occupied by another Darden Restaurant, Red Lobster. When Red Lobster closed a new restaurant called the Hazard Grille⁵ opened there. Of all of the local eateries it was our favorite. Sue especially liked it when local musicians performed there.

We went to Ruby Tuesday’s fairly often. We liked the salad bar. We picked up fried chicken from KFC on Route 5 with some frequency until its owner retired and closed the store. We tried most of the other restaurants at least once, but we never became regulars at any of them. My dad and I often ate lunch at the Friendly restaurant in the mall’s parking lot. Our orders were totally predictable. He always ordered a senior turkey melt and a coffee. I always got the Reuben SuperMelt and a Diet Coke. Details about my dad’s life in Enfield are posted here.

Among the restaurants that we definitely did not frequent were the other two restaurants with stand-alone buildings on the grounds of Enfield Square. We went to Chi Chi’s once; we did not enjoy it at all. We found the fancy Italian restaurant, Figaro, to be grossly overpriced. I don’t think that Chi Chi’s made it to the twenty-first century, but Figaro is still operational. Sue and I dined there once with my Advanced Italian class.

The Lockes: Sue’s mother’s maiden name was Effy Locke. She had four brothers, three of whom lived in Enfield, as did almost all of their offspring and their offspring’s offspring. So, during the first years of our residence in Enfield Sue and I became much more involved with both her many relatives and the few of mine with whom I had any dealings.

It frankly astounded me that so many people in one family lived so close together. My relatives for the most part spread to the four winds as soon as it was feasible.

I must admit that I had a hard time adjusting to the Lockes. They all had a lot in common and seemed to get along well with one another, but I could not seem to find a way to fit in. I could seldom find anything to talk about with any of the male members of the clan. Most of them drove trucks as part or all of their jobs. The family game was a very simple trick-taking card game called Setback.

The exception in Sue’s family was her uncle Bob Locke, who lived with his wife Carol⁶ in western Michigan. He worked as an engineer. Their family, which included three daughters named Deb, Wendy, and Sandy⁷, drove out to Connecticut in an RV at least a few times. Whenever they did, one of Bob’s siblings threw a party that inevitably included a softball game. All the cousins attended. I played too, at least once.

Of all of Sue’s uncles the one whom I knew the least well was Chet Locke, whose wife was named Elsie⁸. They had two sons. Tim and Natalya live in Stafford Springs in 2021. I never got to know them very well at all. Paul married one of Betty Slanetz’s best friends, Karen Shapiro. Sue and I went to their wedding, which occurred in the early nineties. In 2021 the couple have two grown children.

I knew Charlie Locke because he worked as an electrician for the Slanetz Corporation. I am pretty sure that he and his assistant did the wiring for our office in Enfield. His wife’s name was Gene.⁹ They had two daughters, Patti Caswell¹⁰ and Kathy Stratton. I hardly knew either one of them.

Ted Locke and his wife Judy lived in the house right across the street from the house in which Sue grew up. Since both Don and Betty lived there with their parents (until they moved to Florida), Sue and I saw Ted and Judy quite often. Until she died in 1990, Sue’s grandmother Molly Locke lived with Ted and Judy.

Ted and Judy’s family family included three children. Sue Tkacz is a very perky lady, with whom I have exchanged greetings on a few occasions. Sue and I went to a Christmas party at the home in Somers of Glen Locke and his wife at the time, Sue. The youngest son, Jim, lives in Enfield. His wife Ann worked for TSI for a while.

Almost all of these people—or maybe I should say almost all of the males listed above—were very much into cars and, especially, trucks. So was Don Slanetz. They also knew a lot about who was building or buying real estate or equipment in Enfield and the vicinity. I found it extremely difficult to avoid being a bump on the log at the frequent family gatherings of the Locke clan. My fields of interests are quite diverse, but none of them seemed to overlap the interests of any of these people.

The only exception to the above statements that I can think of was Sue’s Uncle Bob. He seemed different from his brothers. I also got along with Sue’s mother and her sisters and most if not all of the women in the extended Locke family, and I do mean extended. Almost all of Sue’s cousins have at least two children and some members of that generation also have children.

The Slanetz Reunion: Seldom had I ever even met any of the relatives of Sue’s father, Art Slanetz. I have a very vague recollection of meeting Sue’s cousin Diane Davis¹¹ back in 1972 or 1973. We encountered her by chance on the street in Rockville. I don’t remember any more than that. I also have a very hazy recollection of going to the house in Enfield of Art’s sister, Margaret Davis¹². I remember being told ahead of time that Art and Margaret did not get along very well. I retain a very strange recollection of having brought her a doormat as a present. I have no idea as to what the context could possibly have been. Other than those two events I had no dealings with or information about Art’s side of the family—with one exception.

I had heard stories about the wunderkind, Margaret’s son Mark. He was reported to be the smartest of all of Sue’s cousins, and in fact the smartest person in his age group in all of Enfield.

I am not sure who came up with the idea of a reunion of the Slanetz family in 1992. It might have been Mark. It was held during the summer at the house in which Sue grew up in 1992. I am not sure why it was held in Enfield. In some ways it was a central location. Carloads of people drove from Long Island, New Hampshire, and Vermont. A few also came from much farther away.

I must admit that I was dreading this event. My only dealing with in-laws¹³ had been at the get-togethers of the Locke family in which I always felt ill at ease. In point of fact I would have skipped it if I could. However, I did attend, and I was very glad that I did.

The Slanetzes were nothing like the Lockes. Although quite a few had been born in the Enfield area, only Art and Margaret had stayed there. They seemed to have spread out all over the country, and their number included an impressive array of intellectuals, businessmen, and creative people. There was no family business, as far as I could tell. Most importantly, the conversations never approached the twin topics of trucks and Enfield gossip.

I don’t remember too many of the details. I do have a clear recollection of avoiding being included in the inevitable group photo.

The most famous attendee was Dr. Charles Slanetz Jr.¹⁴, a heart surgeon and researcher from Long Island. The most memorable connection that I made was with Bill¹⁵ and Norma Slanetz of Keene, NH, and their children Diane Patenaude, Jack, and David¹⁶.

Sue and I made several very enjoyable trips to visit with Bill and Norma. Bill was an avid gardener, and his garden was so large that, compared to mine, it seemed like a farm. I liked to wander around in it and examine the produce.

Their house was high up on a steep hill, and it was not easy to reach. Nevertheless, friends and family were always dropping by. The conversations were always interesting, at least to me, and some sort of activity, planned or spontaneous, always seemed to be happening.

Bill also liked to play bridge, and after I took the game up again in the twenty-first century, we sometime discussed the world’s greatest card game. Norma played too, but she was not as involved as Bill.

1. Both companies are defunct. the buildings of the carpet company have been transformed into apartments. Its Wikipedia page is here. Large portions of the powder factory were destroyed by a tremendous explosion on January 14, 1913. Its Wikipedia page is here.

2. Paul Robeson (1898-1976) is most famous for his portrayal of Joe in Show Boat, and especially for his unforgettable rendition of “Ole Man River”. However, acting was the least of his talents. He was a two-time all-American football player at Rutger, and he was such an outstanding student that he earned membership in Phi Beta Kappa and the Cap and Skull Society. He was also elected Valedictorian of his class. While he was earning a law degree at Columbia he played on two different NFL teams and appeared in several professional play productions. He spent much of his life giving concerts and lectures, often speaking about how much better he was treated by Europeans, especially Russians, than Americans. He was blackballed in the fifties and not prohibited from traveling abroad because of his political views. In 1940 he moved his family into a large house at 1221 Enfield St. (Route 5) in Enfield, which he owned for thirteen years during the highlight of his career as an entertainer. He was on the right side of history from start to finish but the wrong side of politics for most of the rest of his life.

3. This was not a great loss. If I had maintained the system over the decades that we have lived in Enfield, the sprinkler system may have significantly enhanced the value of the property. However, I had no intention of doing something so foolish as to pay higher water bills just to encourage the grass to grow more rapidly. So, the system probably would have ceased functioning properly at some point anyway.

4. A lot more about Jamie and her family has been posted here.

5. The Hazard Grille closed without warning in 2013. A couple of other restaurants succeeded it at that location with no success. In 2021 the building was torn down and replaced by a smaller building that is shared by Starbucks and Jersey Mike’s.

6. Carol died in 2018. Here obituary is here. Sue and I drove out to Michigan in the fall of 2008. We saw Bob, Carol, and their family on this trip, which is described here.

7. All three of the daughters are now married. Their names in 2021 are Deb Batts, Wendy Ahearne, and Sandy Mulder, and they all live in the Grand Rapids area.

8. Both Chet and Elsie are deceased in 2021. I could not find an obituary for Chet. Elsie’s is posted here.

9. Charlie and Gene are both deceased in 2021. Charlie’s obituary is posted here, and Gene’s is posted here.

10. Patti Caswell died in 2019. Her obituary is here.

11. Diane has apparently been married a couple of times. Her last name in 2021 is Clark, but her children are named Quinn.

12. Margaret Davis died in 2010. Her obituary is posted here.

13. Sue and I were not married then, but we were in the second or maybe even third decade of our whirlwind courtship. Everyone expected me to be at the family reunion.

14. Dr. Slanetz died in 2006. The newsletter of the John Jones Surgical Society of Columbia University published a long obituary. It is posted here. Scroll down to page 11 or search for “Slanetz”.

15. Bill Died in 2017. His obituary is posted here. Sue and I drove up to Keene for the funeral.

16. David Slanetz died unexpectedly at his house on the island of Dominica in 2004. His obituary is posted here. Sue and I attended the memorial service.

1988-2004 TSI: AdDept: The Macy’s Installation

Posted on April 15, 2021 by Mike

The first AdDept client. Continue reading →

In early 1988 Sue Comparetto, who had handled the GrandAd accounts in New York City, received a call at TSI from IBM’s Manhattan office. One of our contacts, Quique (KEY kay) Rodriguez¹ wanted to talk with us about Macy’s New York. Its advertising department had been using software programs on an obsolete System/34 to keep track of its advertising expenses and income. The system had been developed internally by people who no longer worked for Macy’s. Documentation was minimal.

Macy’s New York had recently merged with Macy’s New Jersey. The new entity was called Macy’s Northeast, and its offices were on an upper floor of the “world’s largest store” on 34^th St. in Manhattan. The advertising department’s existing system had already been stretched to the limits and would never be able to handle the increased load. Moreover, the users were not happy with some aspects of the code. Alan Spett², one of a very large number of vice-presidents at Macy’s, had been provided by corporate with a budget for replacing or updating the existing system.

This may have been the last time that I actually jumped.

I jumped for joy and clicked my heels when I heard about this opportunity. For some time I thought that companies that produced and/or scheduled their own advertising represented a attractive untapped market for the skills and knowledge that we had acquired from our seven years works with advertising agencies. Evidently I was right. We had never approached any of these departments because I had absolutely no idea how we could even identify which companies created and placed their own ads.

Coincidentally, IBM had just announced a new mini-computer, the AS/400, to replace the System/36 (which had replaced the System/34 in 1983). This announcement and its implications for TSI are described in considerable detail here.

The train brought us to Penn Station, only a block or so from Macy’s.

I made several trips by Amtrak train to the city to document the requirements for the new system. Sometimes I was accompanied by Michael Symolon, TSI’s marketing director at the time, and sometimes by Sue. We soon learned that Macy’s advertising department did everything that an ad agency did except keep track of the amount of time spent on individual production jobs. In fact, they had an advertising agency name that they used when ordering media. In addition, the department had many other needs that regular ad agencies lacked. Specifically, they were required to allocate both production and media expenses to the selling departments. These departments were identified by three-digit numbers. Each was assigned to an administrative group that also had a number. In turn there were three levels of vice-presidents who “owned” administrative groups³.

Macy’s also billed the merchandise vendors (Clinique, Ralph Lauren, Levi’s, etc.) a portion of the expense for ads that featured their products. The cost to the merchandise department was net of these “co-op” billings. The contract could be for a percentage of the media cost or it could be a fixed amount.

The first phase of this job entailed providing Macy’s with everything that they needed to get the ads in all media scheduled—printed schedules in the format that they liked, “insertion orders” (called “delivery tickets” by other retailers) to accompany the materials sent to the media vendors, and so on—in every media. It also included keeping track of expenses and co-op for each level of the merchant hierarchy. There were several different formats that they used for reporting these breakdowns.

I envisioned that the creation of any ad would consist of five steps:

An ad number within the season and a version code that was usually blank would be entered, or ad numbers could be assigned by the system by pressing a function key.
A new ads screen allowed selection of the ad type (e.g., black-and-white ROP) and entry of the primary run date, which must fall with the season.
The other information that applied to all of the media for the ad would be entered on a header screen. This varied by type of ad, but each screen included selection of a pub group—a list of newspapers, markets, or stations.
A media selection screen showed one line for each pub in the pub group with dates, quantities, rates, and other costs or discounts. Any line could be edited or deleted. Additional pubs could be specified.
A participants screen to provide the list of departments or groups for the ad with the expected cost percentages and co-op amounts for each.

Storewide ads could be entered rather quickly. Ads with many departments or groups might take a few minutes. This approach was warmly received. The employees were accustomed to specifying the participants for each pub in the ad.

After the schedule was created, any aspect of an ad could be changed, or the ad could be killed, (in exceptional cases), deleted, or moved to a different date. New ads could be defined. Once the ad was run, the actual participants and the actual co-op could be provided. History records with dates, times, and user ID’s were kept for all changes.

How did Macy’s determine the percentage of the actual cost of each ad that was to be allocated to each department or administrative group? The process astounded me. In one room⁴ were seated from three to five clerks. Each was provided with a stack of newspapers and a list of ads that were scheduled to be run as well as lists of department numbers and the numbers of administrative groups. They looked through the newspapers to find the ads that Macy’s had run. They then measured—with a ruler!—each of the “blocks” in the ad to see how many columns wide (six columns to a page) and how many inches deep (i.e., vertically) the block was. They then entered the column inches for each block. For blocks that were not specific to a department or group, a special “storewide” department #999 was created. The total of the measurements must exactly equal the total size of the ad.

My approach changed this process so that the clerks measured ads, not insertions (the ad in a specific paper). If the ad was already measured, the clerk could see what had been entered, who did it, and when.

A similar process was also required for each page of each direct mail piece and newspaper insert. The ads for other media were not measured, but actual percentage breakdowns were recorded.

Similarly, the actual co-op dollars received from the selling departments (a process called “turning in”) could be recorded. Lists of missing co-op could be printed.

The most important financial reports for Macy’s compared the committed co-op and costs with the actual measured costs and actual co-op. They could be run for any or all merchants (the vice presidents who owned the departments) and any or all media.

Camex was located at 75 Kneeland St. in Boston.

In addition to all of this, Alan had ideas for other modules such as an inventory system for the merchandise used for photo shoots in the studio in Newark and a system to manage the shoots themselves. He also wanted us eventually to work on an interface with the Camex system that Macy’s used to create the images for the ROP⁶ ads and books. Thank goodness these ideas were not included in the original contract.

TSI’s GrandAd system for ad agencies had been built around a file for ads, the key to which was a three-digit client number and a five-digit job number. So, each client could have up to 99,999 jobs. For the departmental system, which I decided to call AdDept, I designed a similar structure, but, since Macy’s itself was the only client, I made the three-digit code stand for the season. 891 meant spring of 1989. 892 was fall of 1989. Eventually, a one-digit code for the century was added as well, but otherwise this proved to be a very feasible approach.

Many other structural changes were necessary. The most significant one was the designation of a one-character version code as part of the unique identifier (key) to the main media file. This could be used to make distinctions that varied by pub (media vehicle). For example, one item in an ad might be “swapped out” for a different item in another ad. The catalogs sent to some markets might not include some pages.

The new table for the pub groups mentioned above allowed Macy’s to identifying papers in which they often ran the same ad, e.g., the tabloids. There was no limit on the number of pub groups, and pubs could be in any number of pub groups.

I did not mention this to anyone at the time, but while I was gathering requirements, I noticed a very serious flaw in the design of Macy’s existing software for the S/34. The same ad was run in a few papers, but each insertion in each paper was given a separate ad number. The clerks doing the measuring were each assigned one or more newspapers. They measured and then entered into the computer the amount of space for each department in each ad. The person next to them might have already measured the same ad in a different paper, but there was no way for them to use that information; they had to key it all in again. So, with the S/34 design the increase in the number of papers added by the merger would more than double the work in allocating costs. My approach would decrease the work even with more papers. They would only measure the ad in one paper.

How great was this? The ROI for this feature alone would easily surpass the cost of the entire system in the first year!

How was such a colossal blunder possible? Well, the S/34 programs were designed for Macy’s New York, which advertised almost exclusively in only three papers: The New York Times (a broadsheet), the Daily News (a tabloid), and Newsday, a Long Island newspaper with a unique shape. Each of these would require separate versions and therefore separate measurements. However, all of the new papers were either tabloids or broadsheets. There was no need for separate measurements.

At some point in mid-summer TSI needed to do a presentation for Macy’s at IBM’s office on Madison Avenue in New York. There was no competition; no other software developer wanted anything to do with this project. The alternative for Macy’s was to enlist their IT department to do something. No one mentioned this, but I was quite certain that the IT department would not be able to deliver a functioning system that met all the requirements within the required time frame. Of course, I was not certain that we could do it either. However, we had delivered several large projects on schedule, and I was willing to put in the hours⁵ to make this one a success.

590 Madison Ave., then known as the IBM Building.

I wanted to demo the GrandAd system and explain how we would adjust the database to fit Macy’s. I made arrangements to use a S/36 in IBM’s office at 590 Madison Avenue to show how our advertising agency system currently worked and how it could be adapted. I considered–and still do–this to be the most important presentation that I ever gave. It was my only chance to persuade Macy’s Advertising Director, Howard Adler, that TSI should be contracted to do the project. I figured that if we got Macy’s, and we did a good job, a whole new market would be opened to us. At that point I was still naive enough to assume that other retailers would surely be much less difficult because we had already done the programming for the largest retail advertiser in the country.

I needed to transport our GrandAd programs and our demo data to New York. Not only was it not possible in 1988 to send them there electronically using something like FTP. We did not even have access to a compatible medium. The I/O device on IBM’s S/36 in NYC read 8” diskettes. Our system in CT used 5¼” diskettes. So, I saved our programs and our data onto nine 5¼” diskettes. Then I used a machine that I had purchased for just this purpose to copy the 5¼” diskettes onto previously blank 8” diskettes. I then loaded the 8″ diskettes into a “magazine” that I had obtained somewhere. The S/36 in New York included a device for reading diskettes from such a magazine.

This is the only photo that I could find of a magazine. The diskettes are inserted in and removed from the opposite side.

You say that you are not familiar with the concept of diskette magazines? For over a decade IBM used them on the S/34 and the S/36. As far as I know, no other system from any manufacturer followed suit.

They were almost completely plastic. Their width was about an inch and a half. The other dimensions were just large enough for 8” diskettes. One side was open to allow insertion and removal of diskettes. Small plastic rails on the top and bottom of the open side kept the diskettes separate from one another. The only thing on the magazine that was not plastic was a small metallic bar near the top of the open space that held the diskettes in. The bar could be lifted up on a hinge to allow access to diskettes. The machine that read the diskettes could also do this (like a juke box), and it was smart enough to read them sequentially.

The process of saving and converting the programs and data, which I probably did over a weekend, took several hours. I then inserted the 8” diskettes into the magazine, put it in my sample case with my other materials, and then stowed the sample case in the trunk of my Celica. I do not remember why, but I must have left the car in the sun for several hours. When Michael and I reached New York and took out the magazine, we could see that the little iron bar that restrained the diskettes had apparently become hot enough to melt little notches into all the diskettes. The magazine drive on IBM’s system refused to read them. O tempora, o mores!

Michael had a brilliant idea. He used a sharp knife to slit the edge of each damaged diskette and nine new diskettes that we borrowed from IBM. The actual data was not, of course on the plasticized paper that one could handle (and therefore slit). It was on a very thin circle of magnetized film inside. For each new diskette Michael replaced the blank film disk inside with the one that he had retrieved from a diskette that I had made. Then he carefully inserted the nine new diskettes that hopefully contained our programs and data into the magazine. I then loaded the magazine into the S/36’s magazine drive again and entered the command to restore the files. The machine successfully read six diskettes. However, at that point it made an awful noise and totally mangled the seventh diskette including, because we had no way to reseal the side that Michael had slit, the precious film inside.

So, I was faced with the prospect of making the most important presentation of my life with absolutely no software to demonstrate. The pony in my “dog and pony show” was a stick-figure drawing. Would anyone notice?

Fortunately, my many years of experience in debate at adjusting a presentation at the last minute kept me from panicking. I began the presentation by apologizing for the technical problem. I then illustrated the approach that we proposed to take using the whiteboard that IBM provided, and I answered questions as well as I could.

It was enough. Macy’s agreed to put in motion the process of contracting with TSI. As Alan later said, “You were definitely the only game in town.”

The plan was to install the system in the “System/36 environment” of a B30 model of an AS/400. The I/O devices were a single 8” diskette drive and a ½” tape drive. TSI had no system that had either of these drives, and so our only choice was to execute the cumbersome conversion process every time that we needed to make changes.

TSI could not even afford J. Cheever Loophole.

I sent Alan our usual two-page contract. He sent it to their legal department and returned one with about twenty-five pages. I should mention that the TSI was dirt poor at this time. Sue and I had been low on funds before, but this was the first situation that rose to a crisis level. Details are posted here. We certainly could not afford a lawyer. I had to read the contract very carefully and assume the worst. After a few changes, we agreed, signed it, and started work. I did almost 100 percent of the coding. The other programmers were busy with work for our other clients, and I did not trust Sue to do the work.

I was not able to use a single program from the GrandAd system. I thought that at least one of the many insertion order programs that we had written for ad agencies would be usable without much modification, but I was wrong. The people in retail advertising just do not think like the people in advertising agencies. Every single program was written from scratch.

We had no time to produce a detailed design document describing the project. Our drop-dead deadline was the end of the season in late January. All programs must be totally functional. The process was:

Write the code.
Get it to the point where there was something to show to Macy’s.
Save the changes to 5¼” diskettes.
Copy the 5¼” diskettes to 8” diskettes.
Take the train to New York.
Install the new software from the 8″ diskettes. This could take up to an hour.
If changes had been made to the database definitions, make them on Macy’s system.
Make changes on the fly as necessary.
Show Macy’s how the new code works.
Save the changes to 8” diskettes.
Bring the 8″ diskettes on the train ride to TSI.
Copy the 8” diskettes to 5¼” diskettes.
Install the changes on TSI’s system.

The luxurious Windsor Locks Amtrak stop. This is the view looking north. From the parking lot the engine’s light could be seen under the bridge.

This was, to be sure, a terrible way to do things. It required me to make at least one trip to New York every week for several months. Usually it was up and back on the same day. I stayed overnight at a hotel a couple of times. Often I made two up-and-back trips in a week. Each trip required a twenty-five minute drive to the train platform. I boarded the train at 6:00 AM in Windsor Locks. There is only a platform there. I therefore sat in my car with the heat on until I saw the light of the train approaching.

The word you did not want to see was “DELAYED”.

If everything went well, I arrived back at the train platform at 9:30PM. The trains in the evening, however, were almost never on time. Those trains originated in Miami, FL. There were plenty of opportunities for delay as each one crawled its way north. A report on my most memorable Amtrak experiences is posted here.

During this process Alan would quite often come up with new thoughts as to what should be in the “base system” covered by the contract. I grumbled, but I almost always did what he asked. One morning I saw a Daily News in Penn Station with the headline “Macy’s Computer System is Driving Me Crazy!” I bought a paper, cut out the headline, and taped it to the inside of my sample case.

Meanwhile, TSI had received only a deposit from Macy’s. However, we were desperate to receive that final check. I saw no alternative to this nightmarish schedule.

The scope of the project was enormous, and almost nothing from the GrandAd code was usable for this project. In addition to everything else, the emphasis at Macy’s was on newspaper ads. In my experience ad agencies used the term “print”, which for them referred to direct mail and magazines. Most agencies treated newspapers as magazines that published more often on cheaper paper to a geographically limited audience. The ingrates who ran the papers did not even offer discounts to ad agencies. Macy’s, on the other hand, could run a dozen or more ads in one issue of a newspaper.

Mirabile dictu! By February, 1989, the system was stable enough that Macy’s paid us most of the balance. This did not end the crisis at TSI, but it allow us to meet the payroll for a few months. In retrospect, I cannot imagine how we pulled it off. I remember working seven days a week. I was always at work by 6AM, and I seldom left before 7PM⁷. I admit that I always went home for lunch, and I usually took a short nap.

What enabled the completion of this seemingly impossible task in that amount of time was the fact that Alan somehow got Gary Beberman⁸ to serve as the project manager. He could speak advertising to the workers at Macy’s and geek to us. I only trained one person; Gary trained the others. I am not sure where Alan found Gary or how he got assigned to the project, but he was a godsend. He saved us a huge amount of time and frustration, and he was also quite adept on pouring oil on troubled waters during the frustrating periods in which I was working feverishly on the code.

The next two projects for Macy’s were an inventory system for the “loan room” (usually called “merch room” at other retailers) and a more sophisticated system of entering and reporting actual costs, what Macy’s called “financials”. I gathered the specs for these projects on trips to Macy’s and produced detailed design documents, which Alan quickly approved.

Denise Bessette did almost all of the programming on these two large requests, and she did an outstanding job. I installed the code and showed the people at Macy’s how to use the programs.

Merchandise that was afraid of the traffic could have just as easily taken the train.

The loan room gathered merchandise needed for photo shoots and sent it to the photo studio in Newark or to some other location. Part of the automation of this process was the printing of tags for each item. Almost as soon as this was implemented, the amount of pilferage reportedly decreased dramatically. The merch room manager told me that previously a lot of merchandise had trouble remembering the way back to Manhattan from Newark. She was extremely happy with the new system.

Denise also completed the other project according to the approved design document, and I delivered it. The finance manager then produced a bevy of changes that she wanted. I offered to quote the changes at TSI’s usual fee of $75 per quote. Alan said that Macy’s was under the impression that these programs fell under the terms of the original contract. It clearly did not include them. He was also surprised that I insisted on charging for my time at Macy’s after the warranty period. I would not give in on these matters, and this caused some bitterness.

At some point in this process TSI leased an AS/400 model B10 from IBM. We hooked everyone up to it, and we converted all of Macy’s programs to run in the native environment instead of the System/36 environment. This project went fairly smoothly. I don’t remember any great headaches, and the programs were considerably faster.

In other respects the installation also proceeded rather smoothly as long as Gary was there, but when he and his wife moved to the West Coast, things started to get a little testy. Alan hired Satish Rahi⁹ (accent on the second syllable in both names) to manage the installation. Satish must have presented himself as an alternative to paying TSI to program reports. He thought that he could produce any desired output using a third-party query product from a company called Gupta Technologies. Their Wikipedia page is here.

Satish was shocked that the product did not work on most of our tables. I told him that there was nothing in our contract that said or implied that third-party products (of which even then there were quite a few) would work with tables that we designed and implemented. IBM’s Query/400 product had no trouble with any of our tables. After considerable digging I determined that the source of the problem was that we wrote records in BASIC, not in SQL¹⁰, which was not even available on the AS/400 yet. The designers of Gupta’s product evidently did not take this into account when they began marketing to AS/400 customers.

Satish started lecturing me about industry standards for databases. I explained that the industry standard for writing x-digit positive integers in BASIC was N x, which left-pads these numbers (such as the ad number) with blanks, as opposed to ZD x, which left-pads with zeroes. In fact, most versions of BASIC did not even have a way to write “zoned decimals” without writing extraneous code to do it¹¹. One day I got so upset while arguing with Satish about this that I seriously considered driving down to the Amtrak stop so that, after sitting on a train for over three hours, I could ride the elevator up to his floor at Macy’s and punch him in the nose.

Not long after this conversation Alan fired Satish, and eventually we changed all the programs to “zone” all the integers. Of course, we got paid for neither this project nor the conversion to the native environment, but we felt that we had to do them to hope to stay in IBM’s and Macy’s good graces.

From that point on we dealt with Denise Jordaens¹² and Lee Glickman¹³ at Macy’s. Things stabilized, but the department did not get nearly as much out of the system as it could have.

Over these years Macy’s went through a lot of changes. In January of 1992 the company declared bankruptcy, thereby leaving TSI with a stack of unpaid invoices. In 1994 Macy’s was absorbed into Federated Department Stores, which had itself just emerged from bankruptcy. This gave them a new set of standards to abide by. Eventually other acquisitions gave Macy’s in New York a large number of new stores to manage on the east coast. They continued to use the loan room system and to pay our maintenance bills. They never asked about any of the enhancements that were installed at Macy’s South and Macy’s West.

There were other complications as well. On one occasion Macy’s asked for someone from TSI to visit so they could explain their problems with and aspirations for the system. My schedule was totally booked for weeks in advance. I asked Sue to take the trip. She did. I don’t know what transpired, but Denise Jordaens later told me that they made a voodoo doll of Sue and stuck pins in it.

I may have made some bad decisions about Macy’s. I did not yet understand how decisions about products and services like those offered by TSI were made in a large retail advertising department. This issue is discussed in more detail here.

TSI probably should have charged more for the original installation and used the money to hire another full-time programmer. Maybe we should have tried to borrow money from somewhere. I was unwilling to put all of our eggs in the Macy’s basket. Macy’s declaration of bankruptcy was a devastating blow to TSI. When Macy’s was acquired by Federated Department Stores¹⁴, it appeared to me that the decision to concentrate our efforts elsewhere had been a sound one.

As it turned out, however, Macy’s eventually gobbled up nearly all of the regional department stores in the entire country. The strategy that I chose helped TSI succeed for more than twenty years, but if I had gambled on Macy’s, we might still be in business in 2021. On the other hand, we would have been working almost exclusively for Macy’s for most of that time. Such an experience might have really driven me crazy.

The story of the Macy’s installation had a bizarre final chapter. It is recorded here.

1. According to his LinkedIn page (which is here), in 2021 Quique Rodriguez is retired and enjoying family time. I suppose that it is possible.

2. Alan Spett lives in Atlanta in 2021. His LinkedIn page can be found here.

3. So, I designed the database with five levels of participants. The lowest level was always called a department, but the names of the other four levels to be used on reports and screens could be specified by each AdDept client. At all Macy’s divisions they were called Administrative Groups, Group VP’s, Senior VP’s, and Group Senior VP’s.

4. This same room housed the AS/400, at least for a while. I sat at an empty desk when I was there. When the first phase of the installation was completed, some of the measurement clerks were reassigned to other tasks.

5. Unfortunately, I don’t think that I was careful enough to account for the large number of unproductive hours that I would spend on trains, in meetings at Macy’s, and in converting files. The round-trip train ride alone accounted for six or seven hours and a drive of nearly an hour, So, each full day at Macy’s was matched by another full work day getting there and back!

6. ROP stands for “run of press”. All display ads (as opposed to preprinted inserts) that are run in a newspaper are called ROP. It is not an acronym; all three letters are pronounced.

7. I am a “morning person”. Any work that I did after 7PM was likely to be counterproductive. Moreover, I needed a few caffeine-free hours so that I could fall asleep at 10PM and stay asleep.

8. I have kept in touch with Gary Beberman. He moved to California to work as a consultant and then was employed by Macys.com. Macy’s West and Neiman Marcus hired him as a consultant during their AdDept installations. He was the only consultant whom I ever respected. He has lived in Marin County for the last five years. He and his wife are hoping to retire to Italy.

9. Satish Rahi’s LinkedIn page is here.

10. SQL (structured query language) was invented in the seventies by two IBM researchers, but at the time of the debut of the AS/400 no IBM computers used it much. The reason, we were told, was that it was much less efficient than the ISAM methods that IBM endorsed. Later IBM computers, including the AS/400, were designed to maximize the efficiencies of SQL queries.

11. What I said to Satish was correct from my perspective, but perhaps I should have asked him what made Gupta Technologies think that the AS/400’s relational database conformed to these “industry standards” that he cited. After all, SQL had been invented by IBM, and IBM was not yet positioning its AS/400 as an alternative to the “standard” databases such as Oracle, Sybase, or Informix.

12. According to her LinkedIn page (here) Denise Jordaens still works as coordinator of media systems for Macy’s.

13. I think that this might be Lee Glickman’s LinkedIn page.

14. A more detailed discussion of TSI’s long and torturous relationships with Federated Department Stores can be found here.

1985-1999 TSI: GrandAd: The Whiffs

Posted on April 15, 2021 by Mike

We struck out at a lot of agencies. Continue reading →

I am no salesman. I could make a pretty good case for the GrandAd system either in a formal presentation or in a meeting, but I was the worst at closing sales. For one thing I have had a lifelong abhorrence of talking on the telephone, especially to strangers. TSII probably could have closed some of these if I had just called people back to find out what they were thinking.

I just noticed that this guy is swinging left-handed with a right-handed club.

I also could have spent more time researching our opponents’ products. I could not think of a way to do that without devoting a lot of time and effort. I had other priorities. Maybe we should have hired one to do it.

My middle game was also poor. I did not know how to ask what a prospect’s budget was. I could tell if I was dealing with a gatekeeper, but I did not know what to do with that information.

Some of our problems were substantive, and there was not much that we could do about them.We wanted to reach agencies that had between five and one hundred employees who did not yet have an administrative system and (before the introduction of the smaller models of the System/36) were within driving distance. During some periods IBM offered no systems with any appeal to our target market. We never seriously considered hooking up with another vendor, but in retrospect it seems incredible that IBM let this happen.

In nearly all cases IBM’s prices for hardware were higher. They should have been. IBM equipment was more reliable and the service was beyond compare. However, the price differentials were often enormous. Purveyors of systems that ran on UNIX or PC’s could claim many of the same advantages that we claimed, charge more for their software, and still show a bottom-line price that was considerably lower than ours.

So, we faced a lot of rejection in our years of dealing with ad agencies. I feel certain that I have repressed the memories of a fairly large number of failures in this arena.

The following are arranged alphabetically. It might make more sense to put them in chronological order, but I have found few records to help me to remember the dates.

The Hartford Area

Probably the most painful failure was the loss of Elbaum & Co., Inc. We had been pitching or negotiating with Marvin Elbaum¹, the owner, for several months. Finally, in early June of 1986 he had signed the contract, which included some custom programming, and put in the hardware order.

I am pretty sure that the phone call came on June 13, 1986. Marvin himself called and said that a new opportunity had suddenly arisen, and he wanted to cancel the order. He said that he had an unexpected opportunity to merge with Lessner Slossberg Gahl and Partners Inc. I advised him that we had already begun work on the custom code that he approved. He told me to bill him for it. He also said that he would plead the case in the new agency for using the GrandAd system. This was pure BS. If it wasn’t, he would have arranged for us to do a presentation for his new partners at LSGE Advertising, Inc.²

This was the worst possible news. I knew that Lessner’s agency already used the system marketed by one of our biggest competitors. Since the merged agency would be located in Lessner’s headquarters in Avon, there was no chance that it would junk the system just because Marvin asked politely, and Marvin also probably realized this. Besides, Marvin was the president of the new agency, but Gary Lessner was the CEO.

I’m not even slightly superstitious. If I were, I probably would have noted that the horrible phone call took place on Friday the 13th. Furthermore, Denise was on vacation, and Sue and I were looking after her cat. Yes, the cat was all black.

On the other hand, I don’t remember walking under any ladders, breaking any mirrors, opening an umbrella indoors, or spilling any salt that day.

Maier Advertising³ (the first syllable is pronounced like the fifth month of the year) was famous. When the lists of the top agencies were printed, Maier was always at or near the top of the rankings of local agencies in terms of billings. Everyone who had anything to do with advertising knew that this was baloney. How? Everyone in the advertising community knew where everyone else in the community worked. Maier did not employ enough people to do all the work to justify those reported billings.

For a while Maier claimed to have branch offices. I am certain that one was announced in Boston, but I think that there were also others. Actually, there were no offices, but they did have a phone number with a local area code and exchange, but it rang in Hartford.

I was invited to meet with Maier’s bookkeeper at the company’s headquarters, which was then in Hartford. My recollection is that only two or three other people were there. Bill Maier was definitely not present. I counted only six or seven desks, and I only saw one office. This did not look or act like a major agency.

I roughed out a tentative proposal, but I could tell that the bookkeeper was in no position to make a decision or to put me in contact with such a person. Actually, I doubt that Bill Maier would have deferred on this subject to anyone.

The Charnas account was not exactly a whiff. It was more like chipping in for a double bogey. It is described here.

There were two other agencies in the Hartford area that I visited, but I do not recall the names of either one. The first one was really a public relations firm in, as I recall, South Windsor. In fact, its strategic approach was the opposite of advertising. Its employees searched for businesses that were spending money on advertising and promised to get the same or better results using press releases. I think that we outlined a stripped-down GrandAd system for them, but we could not strip down the hardware cost enough to make a competitive bid.

My recollection is that the other local agency was in Glastonbury. Sue and I came to meet with the female financial manager. The only thing that I remember about this meeting was that she was the most strikingly attractive woman whom I had ever met. However, I never saw her again. I can’t even visualize her,

Sue was surprised when I told her that I thought that the woman was very attractive.

The Boston Area

Our biggest disappointment of the many whiffs in the Boston area was the involvement with Rizzo Simons Cohn. It is described in detail here.

I met with a woman from Epsilon once. They were a big company then, and they are gigantic now. I tried to explain to her what we did, and she tried to explain to me what they did. At the time I did not understand what she said. I have looked at the company’s current website, which is here, and I still don’t fully understand what it means to be outcome-based. What is the alternative?

I did learn enough from our conversation to realize that our GrandAd system was nothing like what she was looking for.

At the IBM office in Copley Place I did several demos. One that I remember was a morning session for several employees at an ad agency on Tremont St. in Boston. The name escapes me. The demo seemed to go well. They invited me to meet with them in the afternoon at their office. I asked for the address. They gave it to me, but they warned me not to drive. They said that I should take “the T”, which is what people in Boston call the commuter rail system, MBTA.

I was disdainful of their suggestion. I had a map of Boston and plenty of experience driving in Beantown. I knew that the roads were unpredictable and that people made left turns from any lane. I grabbed some lunch and then headed out in my Celica.

It was an adventure, but I made it. Tremont was one-way, of course. I was prepared for that. I was shocked to discover that the streets that paralleled it on both sides were also one-way, and all three ran in the same direction. I had to steer my Celica all the way to Boylston Street to get past their office so that I could turn onto Tremont. Then I was very fortunate to spot the P (public parking sign) forty or fifty yards to my right. I parked and entered the office with seconds to spare.

This meeting seemed to go OK, too. At the end I asked how to get back on the Mass Pike. They told me that it was easy to get there from Copley Place, but the only route from Tremont was very difficult to describe.

Maybe it was a good thing that I never heard from them again.

Gray Rambusch, Inc. is a complete mystery. I know that we billed them for something, but I am almost positive that I never visited them or did a project for them. Doug Pease might have sold them something. The agency is still in business.

The Big Apple

The term “boutique agency” is used a lot in New York City. I knew that the large agencies were beyond our abilities, but to me “boutique” just indicated smaller size. Then I talked with people who worked at a couple.

The first was an agency that specialized in theatrical productions—Broadway and smaller. The lady who worked there explained that, as any fan of The Producers knows, each show is a separate company, and they tend to go out of business very abruptly and disappear without a trace. The most important things for the agency were to get their invoices to each show before it opened and to hound them for payment.

The other boutique agency that I talked with specialized in classified ads. They had hundreds of clients for whom they placed ads in the handful of papers that served the city. I don’t think that there was much chance that this agency would survive the Internet.

Kate Behart³ and I rode Amtrak to New York City on one occasion. I think that it was to talk with an ad agency, but it might have been for some other reason. TSI was watching every penny at the time. I had purchased a book of ten tickets. On the trip to Penn Station I used one, and Kate used one.

On the return trip I gave my ticket and the book to the conductor; he took the ticket. Then I handed the book to Kate, she tore out a ticket, and she handed it and her ticket to the conductor. He refused it. He said that only one person could use the book at a time. I directed his attention to the back where it clearly stated that it entitled “the bearer” of the ticket and booklet to passage to or from Penn Station. I bore the booklet when I paid for myself. Then I handed it to her, and she became the bearer.

He had the gall to tell me that I did not know what “bearer” meant. I said “Bearer: one who bears. ‘To bear’ means ‘to carriy’.” I argued that the term bearer was not ambiguous. It was like a bearer’s bond; anyone that has possession can redeem it. He claimed that it was Amtrak’s policy that tickets from booklets could not be used for more than one person. I said that Amtrak’s policy was actually clearly explicated on the back of the ticket book. Where was his evidence of anything different? He said that a letter had been sent to conductors. When I asked to see it, he threatened to throw both of us off the train at the next stop. I asked to speak to his superior.

This was not a big train. It was unlikely that there were more than two conductors. So, I was fortunate that there was anyone on the train who was senior to the fellow who threatened to evict us. The other conductor took Kate’s ticket, and he asked me politely not to do this again.

I never needed to do it again. If the occasion had come up, … I don’t know.

We pursued another New York agency during a period in the early nineties when we had no salesman. I took the train to New York and gave a presentation at IBM’s office on Madison Avenue. Terri Provost⁵ accompanied me. We then took a cab to the agency’s office. The discussions there seemed to go pretty well.

This agency was much more like what we were accustomed to dealing with than the boutique agencies. I thought that we could do a good job for them. On the train ride back I first consumed my fried chicken supper from Roy Rogers. Then I talked with Terri about the potential client and emphasized how I thought that we should proceed.

The next day at the office I asked her to compose a letter to send to the agency’s president. The letter was friendly and polite, but it did absolutely nothing to advance the sale. I don’t know why I thought that she would know how to do this, but I was wrong. I had to pretty much dictate the whole letter to her. It also made it clear to me that I could not depend upon her to follow up on it, and I did not have the time to do it myself. We whiffed again.

Others Within Driving Distance

Sue and I drove down to Englewood, NJ, to visit an ad agency called Sommer Inc. It was a small business-to-business agency run by a couple who were older than we were. I don’t remember too much about the experience, but I thought that we would be a great fit for them.

My clearest memory of the trip is that I was very hungry by the time that we reached the Garden State, and Sue stopped at Popeye’s so that I could wolf down a few pieces of chicken before we met with them.

We did not get the account. I think that they might have been put off by the price and instead purchased a cheaper PC system.

Somehow we got a tip about an advertising agency in Vermont that was looking for an administrative software system. It might have been in Burlington. I talked to the proprietor on the telephone, and he seemed serious. I think that this might have been in 1987 or 1988 when we were desperate for business.

Our marketing director, who at the time was, I think, Michael Symolon⁷, accompanied me on the trip to the north country. We left Enfield fairly early in the morning. The weather was cold enough that I wore an overcoat. When we arrived at the agency I realized that I had put on the pants that went with my suit, but I had mistakenly donned my blue blazer instead of the suit coat. The combination looked ridiculous.

It was pretty warm in the agency’s office. So, when I took off my overcoat, I also took off the blazer. I still probably looked strange in shirtsleeves when Michael was wearing a suit, but I did not feel like a clown.

The presentation went OK. Michael may have followed up on the visit, but it was probably another case of sticker shock.

The only other ad agency that I remember driving to was in Schenectady, NY, northwest of Albany. The building in which the agency was housed had obviously been repurposed. The ceiling was crisscrossed with large and small pipes or air ducts. Each had been painted in bright primary colors. The effect was quite striking.

The agency had been using the AdMan software system on PC’s for a couple of years. It seemed to me that there must have been something about the system that the users did not like. Otherwise, why was he looking for new system? I tried to talk with the office manager about it. He was, however, very reluctant to discuss what they were currently doing or what they would like to do. Instead he wanted me to describe the advantages or our approach. Of course, he also wanted to know the cost.

I hated it when prospects did this. A major strength of our system was that we could adapt it to meet the needs of almost any user. This was difficult to present. I much preferred to tell people how we would address their problems. Then I could introduce ideas that they did not expect.

During the drive back to Rockville I did not feel good about this call. I suspected that I had been used to gather information for some sort of hidden agenda of the office manager. I had no concrete evidence to go on, but the whole situation did not feel right.

Distant Prospects

Touchdown Jesus could not have made a sale in South Bend.

I had flown to Chicago in late 1988 to meet with some IBM representatives who specialized in retail about the AdDept system that we had just installed at Macy’s. I rented a car afterwards and drove to South Bend, IN, for a presentation at the IBM office for people from local advertising agencies. We had sent letters to all of the agencies in the area, and four or five had expressed interest in the GrandAd system.

Three little old ladies attended the demo, and they all sat together. No IBMers showed up. It reminded me of the debate in which I performed at Expo ’67, which is described here. I talked with the ladies, or rather one of them; they were all from the same agency. They told me that their agency currently used a system marketed by one of our competitors. They told me that the system had actually been installed by someone who lived in South Bend. When I asked who supported the system they claimed not to know.

.The whole trip was a complete waste of time. We got nothing from any of the people that I met in Chicago, and the South Bend agency later told us that they were not interested.

In February of 1989 we were pitching two important prospects in the Milwaukee area. Both the journey to Milwaukee and the return trip were memorable. They are described here.

It is a safe bet that I had Usinger’s brats on any trip to Milwaukee.

I took a cab to the ad agency first. I do not remember the name of the agency, but I recall that they seemed to be very interested in our approach. I had to sell a bit of blue sky concerning the hardware. I pitched running the System/36 ad agency system on an AS/400. They would be the guinea pig for this, but the alternative was to try to sell an approach that IBM had publicly abandoned.

I thought that the meeting went very well. I gauged that we had a very good chance of getting this account. I was not able to follow up immediately, however, because Sue and I took our first vacation ever immediately following this trip to Milwaukee.

In the end we did not get the account. After returning from the vacation we soon became so busy that our failure might have been a blessing in disguise.

In 1990 (I think) I received a telephone call from Ernie Capobianco, whom I knew from RGS&H (described here). He said that he now was working for an ad agency in Kansas City, Valentine-Radford. They already had a System/36, but they were not satisfied with what they were getting out of it.

I arranged to stay with my parents while I pitched the account. My dad told me the agency was one of the largest and most respected in KC.

I met with the systems manager in the morning. They had been using standard accounting packages and were trying to use their general ledger for client profitability analysis. It did not work. It would never work. There were a lot of other problems, too.

Two or three officers of the company took me to lunch at Putsch’s 210 on the Country Club Plaza, the swankest restaurant in the Kansas City area. They wanted to know what it would take for them to get the kind of information from their S/36 that Ernie got at RGS&H.

I informed them that their software system was not designed for a business as complex as an ad agency. They were trying to eat soup with a knife. If we were going to do the project, we would do it right. We could probably convert some of the data for them, but we wouldn’t be able to patch their software. We would want to install our system.

It was not what they wanted to hear.

Our last pitch to an ad agency was, I think, in May of 1994.⁸ Sue and I drove to Pennsylvania to talk with people from Blattner/Brunner, Inc.⁹ We also met with Kaufmann’s, the May Co. division, on the same trip. We spent a day at the Pittsburgh zoo before we returned.

The people at B/B were definitely serious about getting a system They asked all the right questions. They even questioned whether the AS/400 was really a relational data base. Their doubt was understandable. Every other database (Oracle, Sybase, Informix, etc.) had a name, but at that point IBM had not yet begun calling the AS/400’s database DB2/400 even though the design of the system had been fully relational since the introduction of its predecessor, the System/38, back in 1978!

The agency was rapidly growing, and it was famous in the area for its “Killer B’s” billboard, which was nominated as one of the best ads in Pittsburgh’s history. Winning this account might have really launched ADB, which is what we called the AS/400 version of GrandAd.

I left the follow-up on this account in Sue’s hands. I had my hands full with Kaufmann’s, which gave us a huge notebook of reports that they wanted us to include in their system. Sue definitely fumbled the ball. She could have handled this; she just chose not to. This was one of the main reasons that I became very upset with her in 1994. The details of this “second crisis” are described here.

1. Marvin Elbaum has had several careers since the merged agency folded in 1992. I think that in 2021 he is a realtor for William Raveis in southeastern Connecticut. His LinkedIn page is here.

2. The Hartford Courant declared LSGE, Inc. defunct in 1992.

3. By the time of the pandemic Maier Advertising had “evolved” into a business-to-business agency named Blue Star Communications Group. Its website is here.

4. A write-up of Kate Behart’s career at TSI can be found here.

5. Much more about Terri Provost’s stint at TSI can be found here.

6. Sommer Inc. was acquired by Greenstone Rabasca Roberts of Melville, NY, in 1989.

7. Michael Symolon’s time as TSI’s marketing guy is discussed here.

8. Ernie’s ad agency in Dallas, Square One, bought Valentine-Radford in 2003.

9. I am pretty sure of the date because there was an annular solar eclipse. The only solar eclipse in the nineties that was visible from Pennsylvania was on May 20, 1994.

10. Joe Blattner has departed, but in 2021 the agency is still active as M.J. Brunner, Inc. The agency’s website is here. Joe Blattner’s web page is here.

1980-1981 Transition to Rockville

Posted on April 4, 2021 by Mike

Back in the Land of Steady Habits. Continue reading →

By the fall of 1980 my dream of a life as a debate coach seemed unattainable. I enjoyed coaching as much as ever, but I could not visualize how I could make an enjoyable career of it. A few colleges hired someone just to coach debate, but these highly prized positions seldom turned over. Although I had a good record, I had no strong connections. Moreover, I had no idea how to find and obtain such a job.

There was not an abundance of potential coaching positions, and the vast majority of them were for someone with a PhD who would act as Director of Forensics and would also perform other roles in the speech department. This path did not appeal to me for at least four reasons:

I would need to finish my PhD, which meant doing my dissertation. This did not appeal to me at all, for reasons that are described here.
I could not see myself as a faculty member of a speech department. I had little or no respect for any of the speech professors that I had met, and I dreaded the prospect of dealing with departmental politics.
I would be expected to research and publish. Nothing about the field of speech communication interested me enough to research.
I would be expected to teach and serve on committees of MA and PhD candidates. I would almost certainly get stuck teaching the statistics class that every grad student hated. I probably also would be the guy on the committee who forced students to deal all of the problems with the design of their studies. I cannot seeing myself approving any approach that misused statistics or drew only patently obvious conclusions. I would not mind much if some people didn’t like me, but I did not want to be the ogre of the department.

There was one other factor. Sue and I had very little money by the end of 1980. I needed to start bringing in some bacon pretty quickly. I knew that I had a real talent for computer programming, and I really enjoyed bringing an idea to life. So, I determined that I should try to help Sue turn TSI into a real business.

But not in Detroit. The neighborhood that we lived in had deteriorated markedly. The third break-in at our house (described here) convinced us that we had to move. Following the rest of the Caucasians to the suburbs would be expensive and would only address one problem. The other was that the entire Detroit area was in the throes of a severe auto recession. Finding customers there would be difficult for the next few years. Most of the rest of the country was doing better. Sue wanted to return to New England, and I concurred.

The third break-in was, in one way, a blessing in disguise. The thieves took the television and the stereo. They did not take the 5120 computer, which weighed ninety-nine pounds, or the printer. We didn’t have any valuables, drugs, or guns, but they certainly looked for them. Between the second break-in and the third we had bought renter’s insurance. So, we had fewer things to move, and the claim gave us enough money to hire movers.

I think that Sue made a short trip back to Connecticut in the fall of 1980 to look for a place for us to rent. Somehow her dad helped her find a wonderful house in Rockville. The rent was $300 per month. That was more than twice what we paid in Detroit, but it was still an incredible bargain, and it was a perfect place for a small business.

Rockville, a “village” in the town of Vernon, was less than a half-hour drive from downtown Hartford, even in rush hour. The prosperous part of the Hartford area was mainly on the west side of the Connecticut River. However, we would not have been likely to find anything comparable in the wealthy suburbs. If we did, our rent would probably have been a four-digit number.

Rockville at the turn of the century (i.e., around 1900) was a very prosperous mill town. Eight decades later it was still the location of many mansions that were once owned by the people who owned or managed the mills. One of the most impressive of the mansions was (and is) owned by the Rockville Lodge of Elks¹. We rented the mansion’s Carriage House from the Elks. The address was 9 North Park St. North Park has one of the steepest slopes without switchbacks of any straight street that I have ever seen. I never tried to jog up it.

The Carriage House was a split-level dwelling. The stairway was in the middle. To the left of the front door pictured at left were levels 1L and 2L and the attic. To the right were the half cellar and levels 1R and 2R. The front door was on level 1R. Two rear doors were on level 1L.

Behind the house was a courtyard that was approximately twenty feet deep and twice that in width. The left side of the courtyard was open. The other two sides were brick covered with ivy. I eventually planted a vegetable garden here.
Level 1L contained the living room (which contained a fireplace), a dining area, pantry, and a kitchen on the far left. We used the massive barnboard shelves to serve as a divider between the dining area and the living area. A door led from the kitchen to a courtyard. A second door to the courtyard was on a landing at the foot of the stairs in the middle of the house. The only shower in the house was on that landing.
The half-cellar was across from the back door in the middle of the house. It had a sink as well as the oil burner, water heater, and fuse box. Above it was level 1R. The only use we had for the cellar was during my abortive sauerkraut experiment several years later.
Level 1R contained the main office. We placed the 5120 computer and printer and Sue’s credenza here. Eventually the office acquired additional equipment and furniture. There were windows on the front side and on the right. There were no windows on the courtyard side.
The master bedroom took up the front half of Level 2L. The spare bedroom housed the waterbed and later became Sue’s office. That room and the bathroom (tub but no shower) were on the courtyard side.
Level 2R was another bedroom with a sloped ceiling. We only used it for overnight visitors.
Level 3L was an attic that could be reached from the bedroom on 2R by a door at the top of three or four stairs. It contained possessions of a previous resident. We did not use it.

Key: H=Carriage House; C=Courtyard; E=Entrance Driveway; X=Exit Driveway; G=Garage; K/B=Elks’ Kitchen and Banquet Hall; B=Bar; M=Main House; W=Woods.

One-way driveways leading to the main house and the Elks Club bar were on either side of the Carriage House. The entrance could be seen from the main office on 1R and the exit from the kitchen on 1L.

The club had garage space for three cars. We were allowed to use one of them. The garage was forty or fifty feet from the kitchen door.

The grounds of the Elks club contained a fairly large wooded area. In the winter we scoured it for firewood. We could not afford to buy it at a store. We were quite poor throughout our first few years in Rockville. I think of these as the macaroni years.

The placement of the shower was inconvenient, but the only thing that I really hated about the Carriage House was the oil heat. It was horribly obsolete in 1981². I can hardly believe that I am still living in a residence with such an outmoded heating system forty years later.

When we moved in we only had one phone line. Eventually we bought a multi-line system.

Most of our friends from 1972-1975 were no longer in the Hartford area. We reconnected with Tom and Patti Corcoran, who were living in Wethersfield, the city just south of Hartford. By this time they had two kids, a boy named Brian and a girl named Casey.

I think that this photo of Casey and Brian is from 1983 or 1984.

We spent a lot of time with the Corcorans. They often fed us much better than we would have otherwise eaten. They came to visit us occasionally as well. I remember that I fixed country-style ribs and sauerkraut for them once. I don’t think that Casey tried any; in her early years she consumed only nectar, ambrosia, and the dew from daffodils. However, Brian was shocked when he took the first bite. “This is good!” he exclaimed with as much enthusiasm as he ever exhibited.

Sue registered TSI as a partnership at the town hall in Rockville. She was the president; I had no title. We never sat down and decided who was responsible for what part of the business. She arranged for her dad’s accounting firm to help her set up our books. Dan Marra³ of Mass and Hensley worked with her.

We hoped to be able to establish a relationship as the go-to programmers for IBM’s small business clients, but that did not work out too well at first. IBM went through periods when they loved the third-party programmers who specialized in IBM systems and periods when they were not eager to work with us. Early 1981 was one of the latter periods.

I tried to come up with ways to market Sue’s experience with IBM’s construction payroll system. Unfortunately, we had no access to any lists of IBM’s installations. Sue did some custom work for FH Chase Inc., a construction company south of Boston, and another firm in Boston. At FH Chase she worked with Victor Barrett⁴ and Mary Brassard. I also recently came upon an invoice from 1981 that Sue sent to Scott & Duncan, Inc. in Roxbury, MA, for a change to its payroll system. It was sent to the attention of Paul Williamson. I don’t remember anything about that company.

Sue sold one copy of Amanuensis, the word-processing program that I wrote, to Brown Insulation in Detroit, and I developed the retail inventory control and sales analysis system for Diamond Showcase. Sue also did some work for clients that she had contacted when we were in Detroit. They included CEI, based in Howell, MI, which owned a number of companies in various locations,

We were not making it. Sue and I were very frugal, but we were not reaching our “nut”. For one thing, the price of oil, which was at an all-time high, was killing us. I was just about at the point of throwing in the towel and looking for a job doing … I don’t know what. However, in July of 1981 IBM made an announcement that had a big effect on both our business and our personal lives. It was not the IBM PC; that came later. It was the System/23, also known as the Datamaster. At some IBM offices it was called the Databurger.

1. The Elks still own it in 2021.

2. I am embarrassed to say that forty years later we are still living in a house that is heated by oil. It makes me feel like a caveman.

3. Dan Marra lives in Colchester in 2021.

4. I am pretty sure that Victor Barrett works and lives in St. Charles, MO.

1979-1981: Detroit: The Birth of TSI

Posted on March 31, 2021 by Mike

An unimpressive beginning. Continue reading →

In retrospect it seems that it should be rather easy to pin down the date—or at least the year—that our company, TSI Tailored Systems, was founded. The fact is that it was not that big a deal at the time. Sue was already helping to support the software that Gene Brown and Henry Roundfield had installed at their customer’s sites when they proposed that she take on support of the customers as an entity separate from them.

The transition was a simple one. Sue merely had to get a DBA (“doing business as”) from the state of Michigan, which anyone can do. There were no out-of-pocket expenses. Gene and Henry allowed her to use space in theor office in Highland Park. Of course, they were no longer paying her a salary. She needed to make arrangements to get paid by the users of the systems that Gene and Henry had sold. The customers were already paying hardware and software maintenance to IBM or, if the system was new, they soon would be.

One thing that I don’t recall is what was done about phone bills. In those days long-distance calls were expensive, and at least two of the 5110 clients were not local calls. Furthermore, Sue can be gabby on the telephone. I wonder what the arrangements were for those charges.

To tell the truth, I don’t even remember talking with Sue about whether TSI was a good idea. We certainly didn’t draw up a business plan or anything like that. I suspect that she just decided to do it.

The name was definitely Sue’s invention. “Tailored” was the key word. From the very beginning the company’s philosophy was to make the system do exactly what the customer wanted. At first the original code was written by another company (IBM or AIS). After the first few years we wrote and marketed only code that we had written—every single bite of it. The concept of “open source” was not prevalent and definitely not profitable. Even if other developers had offered their code for free, we would not have trusted it. There was a lot of garbage code out there. Some of ours probably was, too, but everyone is used to disposing of their own garbage.

And what did the I in TSI stand for? Fifteen years later it stood for incorporated. Now it stood for nothing, but It was blue with stripes just like IBM’s log.

When did the blessed event happen? Well, all of Gene and Henry’s clients had IBM 5110’s. The 5120, which totally replaced the 5110, was announced in February of 1980¹. So, TSI must have been started before that. I think that Sue probably made the decision in the last quarter of 1979.

Sue’s commute was not too bad. We lived near I-94 and Highland Park was near I-75. She drove through Hamtramck, the other town that is completely surrounded by Detroit.

Sue’s credenza has, like many other large objects in our house, been repurposed as a place to stack miscellaneous ~~junk~~ smaller items.

I definitely know what the company’s first asset was. Sue purchased a used steel credenza and somehow got it to the office in Highland Park and from there to our house on Chelsea.

While she was still working in Highland Park Sue communicated with most or all of Gene and Henry’s customers. She told those who were using the AIS software without a license that they needed to obtain a license. I don’t know if Gene and Henry charged them or not. If so, hey must have been furious. In any case, Sue offered them a way out of a potential mess, and most agreed to the offer.

The next major event for TSI was the sudden appearance in our house in Detroit of a 5120. Somehow Sue’s dad, Art Slanetz, arranged for this. Sue told me that some guy named Smith went in on the original purchase, but he later decided not to use it. I had no role in this deal.

Those guys without ties must be customers. In those days all male IBM employees wore white shirts, ties, and suits.

We must have received one of the very first 5120’s that were installed in Detroit. I remember that we had a very difficult time to get it to work. The customer engineer (IBM-speak for hardware repairman) had spread out computer parts all over the spare bedroom, which was now the TSI office. He was in there talking on the phone with someone from IBM for several hours. It was nearly 5:00 before he got the computer to work.

Sue used the 5120 to make some necessary changes to the customers’ software. She could then send or bring the updated diskettes to the customers. This was not a great system, but it was better than any feasible alternative. I was never involved with this end of the business. I think that I accompanied her once to Brown Insulation, but that was the extent of it. In fact, the only other reasonably local account was Cook Enterprises, which was based in Howell, MI.

At one point we flew to Kansas City so that Sue could meet with the people from AIS. They were very happy that the customers who had been using pirated versions of their software had actually purchased licenses. They provided her with file layouts and other documentation of their accounting software. Of course we also stopped in to see my parents. We only stayed a couple of days.

Computers were not used for word processing in 1980. My first project was to write and test Amanuensis, a program to store and produce my prospectus and the article that I wrote with proper spacing for footnotes. It did not have a spell-checker. In fact, it lacked a lot of things. Nevertheless, it saved me a lot of time. As far as I know it was the only word processing program ever written for the 5120.

As is described here, I also used Amanuensis to produce big documents for the Benoits. We actually sold a copy of this program to Brown Insulation. It was the first sale of a system that contained only code that we had written. I don’t remember what we charged. I don’t even know if they ever used it. They paid the bill and did not complain about it.

Over the summer of 1980 I wrote the software that is described here for our Dungeons and Dragons adventures. I also wrote a program to keep track of the status of warships in the Avalon Hill game called Wooden Ships and Iron Men. The latter program was never actually used. I could never find anyone to play with.

After we moved back to Connecticut we somehow got a chance to develop an inventory system for Diamond Showcase, a jewelry store with a handful of locations in the Hartford area. I think that the home office was in Farmington.

Diamond Showcase has almost been erased from history. I found only this matchbook cover on eBay.

The company already had a 5120. Perhaps they purchased it to use for an accounting application. The proprietor wanted to use the computer as a multi-location inventory and sales analysis system. He hired someone who ran a small software company (I don’t remember his name) to find people who could do the job. The software guy interviewed some workers at DS put together a half-assed set of specifications. Somehow he heard about us. Maybe it was from IBM, but we did not yet have a close relationship with the Hartford branch.

Sue and I met with the lady at DS who was in charge of the project once or twice. We proposed to do the project for $5,000. Evidently no one else was interested, and so we got it. At that point we might have had business cards and stationery. I wrote up a contract based on one that AIS used.

The more that I think about it the more amazing this seems to me. In the next thirty-five years TSI would be involved in many situations in which we tried to convince people that we possessed the skill and the knowledge to provide what they wanted. Sometimes we succeeded and sometimes we didn’t. I can think of no other occasion on which we succeeded with such sparse credentials. We had no references and no training. Sue’s experience was not close to applicable. I had written some cool programs, but I could hardly show them output from my D&D system. In early 1981 we barely even had a business.

Maybe nobody in 1981 had credentials. Software for small businesses barely existed; we were among the pioneers. Perhaps the software guy vouched for us or at least told them that we were the best people available. At any rate, they signed the contract and gave us a deposit. I went to work.

I wrote all the software for Diamond Showcase using principles that I had internalized reading through the listings for the IBM and AIS programs that Sue supported. The key was to use three diskettes (one for programs, one for detail of transactions, and one for all the other tables) and to process transactions in batches. Although I did not know that I was doing so, I normalized³ all the files.

If you had a box of these you could run a small business.

The system actually worked fairly well considering how little experience that I had. The difficult question in supporting any inventory system is “Why does they system say that I have x of them when there are only y in the store?” This was less of an issue with jewelry. Most of the items are unique, and so the quantity on hand is always 1 or 0. The biggest challenge for a retail jewelry system was to make sure that the user does not run out of room on the diskettes. They only held one megabyte of information, a small fraction of what is used to store a single photo on a cellphone. In 2021 storage on hard drives is given in terabytes. A terabyte is a million megabytes!

TSI’s first installation should have been a momentous event, but I have very few vivid memories of it. I remember that on one of my trips to the company’s headquarters the lady with whom I worked asked me a question that I could not readily answer. She said that she liked the computer and she liked the software. She wanted to know what other printers were available for the 5120. I told her that I was sure that IBM must have other printers. I was wrong. I had to call back to tell her that the one she had was the only one available. I was beginning to learn a little about how IBM did business.

As usual, the good guy with the gun was not able to stop the hormonally delusional young man with an inferior gun.

On Monday, March 30, 1981, Sue and I had just driven the Duster into the parking lot of the DS headquarters (not a store) when we heard on the radio that President Reagan had been shot.

Later, of course, John Hinckley Jr’s² motive for the attempted assassination—to impress Jodie Foster—was disclosed to the public. For a short period it appeared that America might be upset enough about this outrage to try to prevent a similar incident, but we settled for the usual thoughts and prayers.

1. The strengths and limitations of these systems are described here. There was no way to communicate with them from a remote location.

2. Hinckley was found not guilty by reason of insanity. In 2016 he was released from a mental hospital to live with his mother. That stipulation was removed in October 2020.

3. A Wikipedia page explains normalizing of databases. You can read it here. The principles apply equally well to relational databases and those using the indexed-sequential access method (ISAM) championed in the eighties by IBM because of better performance.

Wavablog

Memoirs, bridge, popes, travel, and other stuff

Tag Archives: Comparetto/Wavada, Sue