2017-2021 Patellofemoral Arthritis

Posted on October 11, 2021 by Mike

Background: I broke the patella (kneecap to you and me) of my right leg in 1974, the final year of my employment in Hartford. This event and its aftermath are described here. For twenty-four years the knee bothered me very little. When I got up from a chair I sometimes walked like Walter Brennan on The New McCoys¹ for a few paces, but otherwise I managed quite well. I took up jogging in the following years. At one time I was able to run eighteen miles in a little more than three hours.

In 1998 or 1999 something happened to my knee. I don’t remember injuring it, but it became quite swollen, and running produced a good bit of pain. I knew that Denise Bessette’s son Christopher had once had difficulty with his shoulder. She told me that Christopher² was very happy with the outcome of the treatment by an orthopedic specialist who had an office in Enfield. I asked her for the physician’s name³ and made an appointment.

I told the doctor my symptoms, and I admitted that I was worried that he would advise me to give up running. He took x-rays and told me that he thought that the doctor who did the surgery on my knee had missed one of the fragments of the patella, and it had fused to a bone or something. He surprised me by asking me if my hip sometimes hurt. I said that it did, but I never suspected that it could be related.

He thought that my problem was tendinitis in the iliotibial (IT) band that connects the knee and hip on the outside of the knee. I later learned that IT band syndrome is rather common in distance runners. He gave me two prescriptions—one for pills to bring down the swelling and one for a few appointments with a physical therapist. It took a few weeks, but the pills worked.

I remember that the young lady who supervised my PT was very cute, but I don’t recall her name. The office that I went to was on the part of Route 5 that I often have driven past on the way to southbound I-91. It no longer is a clinic for physical therapists. At some point a podiatry clinic took over the building.

She taught me some exercises for strengthening the muscles around my knee and especially to stretch the IT band. What worked the best for me was one in which I held onto something with my right hand, stepped over my right foot with my left, thrust the hips to the left, and leaned a little to the right.

I performed the stretches before every time that I went for a run or, after I gave up running in 2008, a walk. I also used the step-over stretch when I felt a pain on the side of my knee or anywhere near my hip. This sometimes occurred when I rose and walked around after being in a sitting position for an extended period. As soon as I exited from an airplane I almost always did the step-over stretch before leaving the waiting area at the gate. It also came in handy for the European bus tours that Sue and I took in the twenty-first century. I probably looked silly, but that simple movement always decreased the pain and in most cases eliminated it.

Easter Sunday 2017: By 2017 my life had changed dramatically in many ways. TSI had been shut down for good for a few years. Sue and I had been on quite a few European vacations and one fantastic African safari trip to Tanzania (described here). I had established for myself an office in one of our spare bedrooms.

On Sunday morning, April 16, 2017, I was in my office working on the computer, probably on something related to bridge; by then I was both webmaster and database manager for the New England Bridge Conference. I arose from my chair to go to the bathroom. I got as far as the door to the office—about six feet—when my right leg gave out. I did not fall; I was able to grab the door frame to steady myself. I experienced a sharp pain in my knee, but it soon subsided.

The weather that Easter Sunday was quite nice. I was enthusiastic about the prospect of getting in a long walk around the neighborhood. In those days I made a circuit of about two miles walking on School St., Hazard Ave., Park St., and North St. I hoped to do two or three circuits that afternoon.

I was less than a quarter of a mile from the house when my leg gave out again. I fell flat on my face on the sidewalk. I got to my feet without difficulty and limped slowly and carefully back home. This seemed more serious than IT band syndrome.

I searched the Internet for information about dealing with knee pain. I learned about RICE: rest, icing, compression, and elevation. For the next month or two I stayed off of my leg as much as possible. I wore my knee brace and iced my knee after exercise. I brought a small chair into the office so that I could elevate it, and I put an ice pack on it until the swelling went down.

Even after the swelling subsided I did not feel comfortable about trying to walk several miles on it. It still felt very shaky. Eventually I decided to make an appointment at the Orthopedic Associates clinic in Glastonbury. I was amazed at the place. It was much larger than I anticipated. There were dozens of people—maybe a hundred—waiting to be seen. Most were older and much less ambulatory than I was. There was no way to tell how many patients were on the other side of the many reception desks.

They took x-rays of both knees, and then I met with Dr. Mark Shekhman, who specialized in hips and knees. He compared the x-rays of my two legs and showed me that there was much less cartilage in my right knee than in my left. He said that he thought my difficulties were due to arthritis, rather than either my fractured patella or the IT band syndrome.⁴ He prescribed more physical therapy, and told me that if I still had pain to call him. Injections could be used to address the problem.

I asked Dr. Shekhman if I could increase my mileage after I completed the therapy. I explained that I was getting fat. He assured me that I could.

The physical therapy that I received this time was overseen by two people at the Hartford Hospital office at 100 Hazard Ave. in Enfield. I don’t remember their names. I went once a week for five weeks in October and November. The prescription required me to attend twice per week, but the guy who worked with me the first week said that my problems were not that serious.

The staff there seemed to be better organized than the therapist with whom I had previously dealt. I usually started with an eight-minute warmup on a stationary bicycle. On the first visit the fellow who worked with me noticed that when I bent my leg I slanted my right knee in. He advised me to slant it out, as I already did with my left knee. He said that I had been favoring my left leg, and the muscles in my right leg needed strengthening. Both he and the female therapist also worked on getting the “knots” out of the muscles and ligaments surrounding the knee.

They also gave me exercises to perform every day. The list grew to include nine exercises, all of which were performed from a prone position. Three of them were stretches—four sets of holding the position for thirty seconds. These were basically prone versions of stretches that I had been doing since my first session in the nineties. The other seven were designed to build strength. They consisted of twenty repetitions of the designated movement.

After the second or third session I was provided with a paper that showed the exercises that I was to be doing. At the last session I was given a new paper that supposedly illustrated all of them. I saved both of these sheets of paper, although they were both badly wrinkled. I discovered recently that the second set only contained eight exercises, and one of those was shown twice. So, for the image shown above I created a composite that included all nine exercises.

I usually did these exercises before I went for a walk—either outside if the weather permitted or on my treadmill. I added one more exercise to stretch my calf muscles to reduce the likelihood of cramps. I found an old brown exercise or yoga mat in my garage. I laid it in the hallway, one of the few places in the house in which I could stretch my six-foot frame. It was a little tight, but I managed.

When I performed these exercises at the clinic I used two pieces of equipment. The first was similar to a dog’s leash. One end was looped around my foot. I grabbed the other end to pull my stiff leg toward my face. Then I pulled a straightened leg across the other leg to the side. The “leash” was also used it to pull a bent leg back to the rear, but I could just reach back and grab my foot for that one. I have good flexibility in that respect. At home I repurposed an old Donald Duck tie as a substitute for the “leash”.

The second instrument was a length of stretchy fabric that had been knotted into a loop. This one was used for the “clamshell” exercise depicted on the sheet, and they let me keep it. After a month or so it snapped in two; I did not replace it.

The left one: I exercised my right leg using this routine nearly every day for almost two years. I felt pretty good about the progress that I had been making until the day on which my left leg almost collapsed while I was walking on School St. I limped back to the house. By the next day the left knee was swollen. I used what I had learned with my right leg to try to address it. Eventually the swelling went away, but the pain still occurred occasionally.

I expanded my exercises to include both legs. I revised the order so that I did not need to change positions so often. I started on my back with the straight leg raise—right and then left—and the bridging. I then did the three exercises lying on my right side followed by the two that required me to be face down—left and then right.

Next I did the three exercises while lying on my left side. I then rolled over to my back again and attached the tie to my right foot for the stretch that pulls the leg back and the ITB stretch. I then transferred the tie to my left foot and did the same two stretches. I finished with the calf stretch that is not shown on the sheet. The whole set took about half an hour.

My left leg was still bothering me when I attended the fall North American Bridge Championships in San Francisco (described here). Quite a bit of walking was required there. It felt very strange to be limping on a different leg. I did my exercises on most mornings, but I was still uncomfortable most of the time that I was there. My right leg did not bother me at all.

Recovery: By the time of the worldwide shutdown due to the pandemic my left leg had fully recovered. Over the spring and summer of 2020 I walked at least five mile nearly every day. On several days I did 7½ miles and at least twice I walked ten miles. I almost never had any pain in my legs. The most likely location of discomfort was in my right lower back. However, I was usually able to stretch this away.

I often rested on the cast-iron bench in front of Dr. Cummiskey’s office.

Over the fall and winter I walked on the treadmill⁵ more often than outside. A new development was a pain on the top of my right foot that spread to the ankle. At first it only occurred when I walked outside. Later a much milder version plagued me on the treadmill as well. I could usually walk for about 1¼ miles before it became difficult to tolerate. After I rested for a couple of minutes and stretched the leg, it went away. However, it usually came back after about the same distance.

We were scheduled to take a European river cruse in October of 2021. My goal was to be able to participate in all of the excursions without leg pain. Since we decided to postpone this cruise until May of 2022, whether I can achieve that still remains to be determined.

1. If you are unfamiliar with Grandpappy Amos’s gait, you can view a short demonstration here.

2. Christopher Bessette’s LinkedIn page is here.

3. I can picture the doctor in my imagination, but I have forgotten his name.

4. In retrospect, I am sure that Dr. Shekhman was correct in his diagnosis of arthritis. However, I think that he was a little too dismissive of my two previous experiences. It was likely that the arthritis was precipitated by the original fracture. Also, the IT band syndrome never really went away. I had rather mild symptoms both before and after the arthritis treatments. Aside from that first day when I fell I never really had much pain in my knee itself.

5. The biggest problem with the treadmill was boredom. I subscribed to the Metropolitan Opera On Demand service for about a year. I streamed operas on my Lenovo convertible PC (which is called Yoga) and watched them while I was walking. I also watched some operas and the entire series Inspector Morse shows on YouTube. Later I subscribed to MHz Choice and watched a large number of European mysteries with subtitles. February 10, 2021, was a very dark day for me. The treadmill broke. Since then I have used the rowing machine when I could not walk. On May 26 I dropped my Big Bubba mug on Yoga and cracked the screen badly. I bought a new Microsoft laptop from Best Buy a few days later.

2021 September: Hurricane Ida and its Aftermath

Posted on September 20, 2021 by Mike

Water water everywhere. Continue reading →

The remnants of Hurricane Ida¹ arrived in southern New England on Wednesday, September 1, 2001. It rained pretty heavily in Connecticut all evening and well into the morning. I was scheduled to play bridge on Thursday at 10AM. I heard on the radio of floods in Manchester and Vernon, about fifteen miles to the south of where we lived in Enfield. I could see no signs of damage in our yard, and there was no standing water in our yard.

This last bit of news was a huge relief. A few weeks earlier a weird localized storm had deluged Enfield and Suffield for a couple of hours. The rest of Connecticut seemed unaffected. For the first time in the thirty-three and a half years that Sue and I had resided at 41 North St. water had somehow seeped into the old part² of the basement. It was not exactly flooded, but there was a little water in some areas, notably the southeast corner, which was piled high with boxes and who knows what. The new part of the basement was completely dry. It took a few days, but the dehumidifier dried up the old side pretty well.

I also walked out into the yard. I saw several inches of water in the yard that faced North St. The water disappeared when the drain in the street was cleared, but the sod remained squishy.

The feeling of relief was short-lived. Before I left for the Hartford Bridge Club on Thursday morning I checked the basement. Both the old part and the new part were dry. After I finished playing, drove back home, ate lunch, took a nap, and went for a walk, I descended the staircase to the basement to empty the dehumidifier. I was aghast to see that there was considerable water in both halves of the basement.

I could see that the cats’ litter box was sitting in a little water in the new part of the basement. My very old cat Giacomo was resting on the broken treadmill, but he was very upset about how his paws had become wet when he needed to use the litter box. I sifted the litter box and moved it, the sifting tool, and the box of Clean Paws litter to a part of the old basement that was still dry. I also dried of His Highness’s paws and carried him to the stairway, which was dry.

Meanwhile Sue made some phone calls. Someone told her that the fire department would pump out the basement if the standing water was six or more inches deep. There was probably an inch or more on the new side, but it did not look like six inches to me.

Sue also located her Craftsman Wet/Dry Vacuum, Sears’ version of what nearly everyone calls a Shop-Vac³. It had been lent to the Somersville Congregational Church. Sue made arrangements to pick it up in the afternoon. I located two long extension cords in my garage. Sue somehow got the vacuum down to the basement. Someone must have carried it down the hatchway stairs for her. I removed my socks and put on a pair of beat-up old sneakers with a few holes in them. I walked through the water to the new side and opened the hatch to try to encourage evaporation.

The GE dehumidifier did the job in the old basement.

Sue operated the machine. I made sure that the cords were kept out of the water. We filled the machine’s barrel⁴ with water, and I used a fourteen-quart bucket to transfer the water to an unused washing machine. We then put the washing machine on the last dot of the spin cycle and turned it on. This step was necessary because there are no drains in the basement. I had used this same technique to empty the dehumidifier.

Sue’s initial approach was to try to create a dry path between the base of the stairs and the washing machine so that we could avoid standing in water, a good conductor of electricity. She filled up a barrel in about twenty minutes. I emptied the barrel into washing machine. As we did this we noticed that the dry space that Sue had just cleared was covered with water again.

Our weapons against the sea of troubles: the washer, the wet/dry vac, and the fourteen-quart bucket.

I suggested that we should concentrate on the new side of the basement, which was consistently covered by more than an inch of water. We were both stunned that it t took less than a minute to fill a barrel. We then had to roll it up the ramp to the old side and empty it in the washer. We were standing in water once we left the ramp, but we were careful to keep the cords dry. We did one more barrel that way, and then stopped for supper. We planned to continue after we ate, but neither of us could summon the energy. We are, after all, old.

I walked this wet path on the old side from the door to the washing machine at least one hundred times. The cord running from the wall plug at left stayed dry.

At 2 o’clock on Friday morning I woke up and went downstairs to continue vacuuming the new side of the basement. I looped the extension cord over some boxes and cabling in the ceiling of the basement to eliminate the need to disconnect the extension cord from the machine every time. I concentrated on the new side and filled four barrels with water. It took me about thirty minutes, but there was no discernible effect on the level of the water. I went back to bed and slept like a dead man.

When I awoke again and checked the basement, both sides seemed worse. The water level on the new side was considerably higher, and the entire old side now had at least a filmy coating of water. I could see no dry spots. Where was the water coming from?⁵ I had to move the cats’ litter box upstairs. I was afraid to move the open box of litter because I could see that the bottom would fill out. I left it where it was and resolved to buy a new box at Shop-Rite.

I worked all day on the basement—not counting a few naps. In all I sucked up about forty-five barrels of water, which produced a notable difference in the level in the new side, about as much as I expected—an inch or so. I kept the hatch closed because I remembered that this was mosquito season, and I had heard warnings about West Nile virus. The mosquitoes that carry the virus like to breed in standing water.

Several avalanches blocked parts of the path from the ramp (bottom) to the hatch door (top). At this point there was at least three inches of water.

When I awoke on Saturday morning there was quite a bit more water than was there before. I checked the new side. The level was a little higher than when I started on Friday. So, more than an inch of water had seeped back in overnight. This was very discouraging. In fact, I decided to abandon vacuuming until the amount of water stabilized. I checked several times a day when I emptied the dehumidifier

I did figure out that I could move the cardboard box of cat litter upstairs if I tipped it sideways. Once I got it upstairs I split a large hold in the middle of what was now the top side. I could then scoop out dry litter with a ladle. In fact, I was able to salvage the entire contents of the box.

On Tuesday September 7 I decided that the water levels had finally stabilized. The dehumidifier seemed to be doing a good job of drying out the old part of the basement, and the newer side was no worse than on Monday evening. I therefore set to work. By 5 o’clock in the afternoon I had sucked up fifty barrels of water from my position on the ramp. I could definitely see the effect on the water level on the ramp itself.

I bought these shoes for the Hawaii trip in 1995, but I did not wear them for 26 years.

By this time I had refined my technique pretty well. I positioned the machine on the flat part of the wooden ramp with two wheels on the cement floor of the old basement. When the barrel had filled, I detached the top part of the vacuum and rolled the barrel the fifteen or twenty feet to the washer. I straddled the barrel, bent at the knees, held the handle of the bucket in my left hand, and placed my right fingertips in the indentation on the bucket. I then filled the bucket as much as possible and lifted it up to the washer. This method was the easiest on my back. It also minimized the splashing.

I could do the entire process in four or five minutes. I also saved a little time by only running the spin cycle on the washer every other time. The tub of the washer could hold a little more that two of the vacuum’s barrels. This spin cycle lasted longer than it took the vacuum to fill with water. So, I had a short break every other barrel while I waited for the washer.

On Wednesday I played bridge with Eric Vogel. Afterwards I sucked up another twenty barrels.

On Thursday I was up early enough to run the vacuum through another twenty barrels before playing bridge with Jeanne Striefler at 10 AM. Between rounds Lesley Meyers asked me what had happened to my elbow. I had no idea what she was talking about.

I did another twenty barrels when I arrived home.

Friday was an epic day. I filled and emptied thirty barrels in the morning. The water level near the end was low enough that I had to abandon the ramp for the afternoon session. I added the second extension cord and change the looping of the cords so that I could walk all the way to the hatch and still keep the cords dried.

I vacuumed up seven more barrels in the afternoon, but because the water was now not nearly as deep, it took as long as the morning session.

Most of my time in the afternoon was in two places—right before the hatch and about halfway between the ramp and the hatch. These areas, which were evidently low points, were frustrating because as soon as I would get an area dry, it would fill back up with water seeping in from areas that were filled with some kind of junk that belonged to the other resident of the house. I went back and forth between the two areas.

When I unplugged the vacuum’s cable from the extension cord, I noticed that the vacuum’s male plug was hot. I had already noticed that one of the two prongs was shorter than the other. I could now see that the short one consisted of two pieces of metal that had a slight gap between them. I reported this to Sue. She said that it was a definite fire hazard.

I went back the next two days to work on those two areas. On Saturday I was surprised to find the other cat, Bob, lying on the cement on the path in the new side. There were also a few cat prints near the puddle in the middle. I carried Bob to the staircase, and he easily made his way up. I then extracted about a half barrel.

This is the right setting on the washing machine.

Much less than that came out on Sunday. When I had finished, the new side was pretty much dry. I could see a few small puddles, but there was no way to get at them with the vacuum.

In the afternoon Sue and I were scheduled to go to a picnic for her cousins on the Locke side. As we were about to leave, she exclaimed, “Ooh! What did you do to your elbow?” I asked her what she meant. She drew my attention to a golf-ball-sized lump on the point of the left one. I had to twist my arm around to see it. I then recalled Lesley’s remark on Thursday. I must have already had it then.

The knob was twice this size on Sunday and Monday.

After the picnic Sue and I drove to the to Urgent Care clinics on Hazard Avenue. Neither was open.

On Monday morning, September 13, I drove to the PhysicianOne Urgent Care, the one on the north side of the street. I had been to this location once before, but I am pretty sure that in the interim it had closed and reopened under new management (Yale New Haven Hospital). I arrived at 10 o’clock, with hopes of being home by noon.

I did not know that one made appointments at Urgent Cares. The lady at the desk told me that it would be at least two hours until they could see me. Although most people were required to wait in their cars for a text message, she let me sit in the lobby, where there were only a few usable chairs. The rest of the chairs were Xed off to prevent them from being used. So, I did not get within ten feet of any other patients. That is a good thing because most of them were there to get Covid-19 tests or treatments. The delta variant was still quite active.

One Hispanic lady came in with two children. The boy was about 2’6″ tall. His sister was a little taller. The lady’s mother had a third infant in her arms. They never checked in or entered the treatment area. The lady seemed to be busy with some papers or something. Then the whole family suddenly departed. On the way out I noticed that she was pregnant again.

he physician’s assistant finally saw me after I had been there for nearly three and a half hours. I had spent the time proofreading and rewriting my blog entry concerning 9/11 (which is now posted here). She quickly diagnosed my problem as bursitis. Some other young ladies x-rayed my elbow and wrapped it for me. The P.A. then advised me that if the swelling had not gone down in a week that I should see a physician who specialized in joints. She provided me with the business card of one and a CD that contained my x-rays. .

By Sunday, September 17, the old side was also nearly completely dry. I opened the hatch again to try to air out the new side of the basement. The dehumidifier on the old side shows a reading of 60 percent humidity. It was consistently at 75 or 80 when the water was at its highest.

The knob on my elbow had shrunk a lot. It never did hurt or hinder me in any significant way. I did not plan to call the doctor, but a couple of weeks later the bump was still significant. I tried to schedule an appointment with the doctor recommended by the Urgent Care clinic, but he was out of the office until the end of October, and he only saw patients in Rocky Hill and Farmington, which are both more than thirty minutes away. Fortunately, his receptionist referred me to a doctor who has office hours in Enfield.

On Wednesday, October 6, I had an appointment with Dr. Nicholas Bontempo. He told me essentially what the P.A. had told me earlier. He gave me an elastic “sleeve” to wear over the elbow. It was much more comfortable, but it seemed to provide less compression. So, I applied the wrap over the sleeve.

They scheduled a follow-up appointment for me for November 3. I canceled on October 11. By then the bump was negligible.

Although there had never been standing water in the basement since we had moved to Enfield in 1988, the new (northern half) of the basement was flooded again in April of 2024. My efforts in dealing with that mess have been described here.

1. Hurricane Ida described a very unusual path. It first hit land in Venezuela. It then turned northwest, crossed the Caribbean Sea, a tip of Cuba on August 27, and the Gulf of Mexico before landing again near New Orleans on August 29 as a Category 4 hurricane.

From there it headed northeast, losing strength but dumping a huge quantities of rain everywhere it went. On September 1 it reached the New York City area and caused widespread flooding. It finally petered out in the maritime provinces of Canada.

2. In 2007 Sue and I began the process of refinancing the house and building an addition that was approximately the same size as the original house. A description of this activity was posted here. The addition also had a full basement, which could be reached through an external hatchway in the lawn north of the house. It could also be reached through a door in the northwest corner of the old basement.

3. I had never heard of a Shop-Vac until I ate lunch with Barbara Schane Jackson, TSI’s liaison for the installation at Hecht’s (described here). For some reason she mentioned that she needed to use one. I nodded sagely even though I had no idea what she was talking about. Johnson County in Kansas, where I grew up, is not exactly prone to flooding.

4. If there was ever an indication on the machine of Shop-Vac’s capacity, it had long since been lost. I estimated the size of the barrel at fifteen or sixteen gallons based on the number of fourteen-quart buckets required to empty it.

The new side of the basement was approximately fifty feet by twenty feet—one thousand square feet or 144,000 square inches. One gallon is equivalent to 231 cubic inches. So, each inch of water on the new side contained over 623 gallons. If the barrel contained fifteen gallons, about 41.5 barrels would be required to lower the water level by one inch (assuming no replacement).

5. An admittedly biased description of the process of flooding from the water table is posted here. Perhaps our contractors did not do a perfect job when they installed the new basement.

1992 Cruising Tour of Turkey and Greece: Part 2

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Mike

Three Greek islands, Ephesus, Athens, and Delphi. Continue reading →

Buses transported the entire group from the hotel to the ship, which was considerably smaller than the Song of Norway. This was actually a good thing. It was easier to get around on this ship, and almost all of our time on it would during the hours of darkness.

I think that we must have left Istanbul fairly late in the day. I don’t remember that we had any days at sea. In fact, I do not remember much about being on the ship at all. The schedule was pretty much the same every day. We were always in port when we woke up. We ate breakfast on the ship. Then we disembarked from the ship and did something. Then we returned to the ship. After we left the port we had supper. There was usually some kind of entertainment in the evening.

I remember absolutely nothing about the food. It must have been passable and fairly plentiful. In those days I was probably more interested in quantity than quality. The cost of the cruise was quite low. We did not expect to be treated the way that we were on our two Royal Caribbean cruises (described here).

Our room was OK, and the service at supper was, too. There were no assigned seats, and I don’t ever remember us sharing a table with anyone. I don’t remember our cabin boy, but we must have had one.

If we had had a day at sea, it might have been tiresome. The ship had none of the amenities that the Song of Norway boasted. There was definitely no casino. I don’t think that there was even a game room or an exercise room or anything like that. We did not miss these things; we came to see the sights. If we wanted a drink on the ship, we could get it.

Magicians who specialize in productions need a good tailor.

After supper there was entertainment in a small theater. I remember three of the shows.

A magician performed one evening. I was still quite interested in magic in 1992 even though more than a decade had passed since I had devoted a lot of time to it in Detroit (as described here). The magician came on stage wearing a flashy sport jacket and did at least six or seven “productions”—making things appear out of nowhere: flowers, a cane, a dove, a bunny, etc. Then he took off his jacket for the rest of the performance. I wonder how many other people thought, “Well, I guess that that jacket is empty now.”
I seem to remember that there was a small orchestra/band on the ship. One night they played while some female dancers performed. Ordinarily I would have no interest whatever in such a show. However, Sue and I were within ten feet of one of the dancers when her left breast popped out of her costume. I paid attention after that.
On the last night of the cruise as our ship was en route from Santorini to Piraeus, the orchestra played Greek music, and a gourp of the crew members got up on the stage and showed how to dance to Greek music. One fellow really got into it and tried to coax passengers into joining him for the finale. Only a few did. I think that this fellow may have hit the ouzo a little early that evening.

Our first port of call was Mytilene (mee tee LEE nee), the port city and capital of the Greek island of Lesbos (LEZ voss). Although Mytilene is only 184 miles from Istanbul by air, it was quite a bit farther by sea, perhaps 300 miles. The first phase of our voyage took us down to the base of the Bosphorus, across the entire width of the Sea of Marmara, through the Dardanelles, past the site of ancient Troy, down the western coast of Turkey, then an abrupt turn back to the east, and then south to the western side of Lesbos, where we were actually less than seven miles from Turkey and very far indeed from the Greek mainland.

Sue and I took a guided tour that included at least two stops on the island. About ten or twelve of us were in the group, as I recall. We traveled in a small bus. Our guide was a young lady who was very well spoken and enthusiastic about her home island and Greek heritage. She told us about the historic conflict between Greece, of which Lesbos is one of the most distant islands, and “Asia Minor”, which is how she always referred to Turkey. She also spoke about the Turkish Revolution that ended in 1923 and resulted in the Greeks being expelled from modern Turkey. She called this event “the Catastrophe”. How strange it must be to live in such an otherwise isolated area only a few miles away from your country’s ancestral enemy. I don’t know for certain, but I suspect that the families of most or the residents have been in Lesbos for centuries.

Our first stop was at the Theophilos Museum in the village of Vareia, just outside of Mytilene. Our guide explained that Theophilos Hatzimihail was an eccentric artist who was born in Vareia. She said that he was one of the few people who dared to wear the ancient historical garb, including a kilt and a curved sword. He also was a fanboy of Alexander the Great.

Theophilos’s works were generally very colorful and patriotic. He also often painted the locals of Lesbos engaged in mundane tasks. The guide said that they were like “cartoons”. Clearly she did not mean to disparage them. Instead, she was emphasizing that they told stories and were not necessarily realistic. Also, he also sometimes hand-wrote dialogue next to his characters, but he never used “balloons”.

Many more of Theophilos’s paintings can be viewed on the Internet.

I really enjoyed the visit to the museum. Theophilos was no Caravaggio, but I remember having a really good time looking at his paintings. and I had never felt that way before around art. Maybe it was just because the guide provided some context for me. It had a profound effect on me. It definitely affected the way that I approached subsequent trips.

After we left the museum the bus transported us into the interior of the island to another village. This one was, our guide assured us, locally famous for its beautiful church. I don’t remember the name of the village or the church. The church did not seem that special to me. It certainly was not as ornate as St. Bede’s church in Kelly, KS. The most memorable feature was the pair of nuns who cared for the church. I estimated that they were both about four feet tall.

After the visit to the church we may have stopped for lunch (I don’t remember) before returning to the ship. When I gave the guide her tip, I described the experience as “θαυμάσια”, which means “wonderful”.² She was very surprised by this and smiled widely.

By the way, Sue did not share my enthusiasm about the excursion. Maybe I just had a slight crush on the guide.

Mytilene is in the top center; Kuşadası is in the lower right.

During the night we sailed from Mytilene to Kuşadası, a port city on the Turkish mainland. The primary reason for this stop was to allow passengers to view the remains of the ancient city of Ephesus. Almost all the passengers elected to take the excursion.

Ephesus was for centuries one of the major cities in Asia Minor. It figured prominently in the early years of Christianity. There is even a letter to the Ephesians attributed to St. Paul.

I think that we had a guide for this visit, but I don’t remember him at all. Someone official certainly accompanied us on the bus trip to the site, which is about twenty miles from Kuşadası.

I remember that we were told that the city was a port in its heyday. However, the river and coastline silted up over time. The ruins are now about two miles away from the sea. By the fifteenth century the former city had been completely abandoned.

The ruins, however, were in pretty good condition. Perhaps the best aspect was that it felt like a real city, not just a group of isolated structures.

The one thing that both Sue and I remember the most clearly was the place where a footprint and a drawing in the paving stone have been interpreted as an advertisement for a local brothel. Our guide claimed that it was the oldest advertisement in the world.

The worst aspect was the fact that the site was guarded by soldiers with semi-automatic rifles. In 1992 this was a stunning sight. We were told that there might be a problem with Kurdish groups.

The building that impressed us the most at the time was the huge theater that could seat as many as 25,000. It was extremely well preserved. It took no effort at all to imagine a performance taking place there.

The other really impressive structure was the Library of Celsus. I remembered that the four virtues were celebrated in the facade, but the only one that I remembered was Sophia (wisdom). The other three—bravery, knowledge, and thought— I had to look up online.

The guide did not tell us about Jesus’s mother Mary being escorted to Ephesus by John the Apostle. Supposedly she lived in or near the city up until her last days on earth. However, no Catholic believes that she was buried in the vicinity—or anywhere else. One of the very few statements ever made by any pope under the terms of infallibility was that Mary was assumed into heaven body and soul at the time of her demise. Pope Pius XII made this declaration in 1950 in the Apostolic Constitution, Munificentissimus Deus.

Of course, I was quite familiar with the doctrine of the Assumption when we were in Ephesus in 1992, but I did not know about the papal declaration. What is surprising to me now is that it was not declared earlier. The Assumption has been a part of Christian (but not biblical) tradition for a very long time.

Kuşadası is at the top, Rhodes at the bottom.

The next morning we landed in Rhodes, which is the name of both the port city/capital and the island on which it resides. The only thing that I previously knew about Rhodes was that it was the home of the Colossus of Rhodes, a huge statue that straddled the harbor. The statue disappeared many centuries earlier, but as our ship docked in that same harbor, and it was not difficult to visualize what the statue—one of the seven Wonders of the World—might have looked like in ancient times.

Rhodes was a very interesting place. A medieval wall circumscribed the Old Town. I walked the entire circuit by myself. It affoded great views both of the city on one side and the rest of the island, the harbor, and the sea on the other.

I was even able to read a few of the street signs. I recall that one of the streets was named ίππος, a common word from Homer’s time that is still used. It means horse. If he had ever written it, Homer would have placed a rough breathing mark at the beginning to indicate an /h/ sound. Modern Greek has dispensed with that character and that sound.

The Staircase of the Propylaea was pretty steep, but …

For centuries Rhodes was home base for the Knights of St. John, often called the Hospitalers. Several castles and palaces that they used remained on the island. I think that there were excursions available to visit some of them, but we did not take advantage of them.

Instead, we went to the nearby town of Lindos, which is pronounced like “LEAN those”, except that the last consonant sound is an /s/, not a /z/. It has a nice beach, but it is most famous for its Acropolis. One of the most stunning events of my life was climbing the very wide Staircase of the Propylaea there. Sue recalls ladies who sat on the steps selling home-made lace products.

Nothing but sky was visible at the top as one ascended the stairs. It was a surreal experience. However, when the top was finally reached, the view in every direction was absolutely stunning—ruins of the church of St. John, the sea, the village, the beach. It was almost too much for the senses to handle.

… the view from the top was spectacular in every direction.

Rhodes is in the upper right. Santorini is in the upper left. The big island at the bottom is Crete.

During the night we sailed west toward our final island, the picturesque Santorini. We knew nothing about it until we arrived there.

The small island is a long way north of Crete, but an event there had a large effect on the Minoan civilization that was based on its much larger neighbor to the south. That is because circa 1600 BC the volcano on Santorini (which was then one single island called Thera) erupted massively³ and buried the settlement at Akrotiri on the southern part of the island. It also caused tidal waves and earthquakes that wiped out the Minoan civilizations on Crete and other islands.

I was game for riding a donkey up to Fira, …

The caldera of the volcano, which has became the harbor after the eruption is surrounded by very steep cliffs. The capital city of Fira and, from there, the rest of the towns and villages, can be reached by road. One way to get to the top is to ride a donkey. A faster way is to take the cable car. Both Sue and I remember exploring Fira and having lunch at a restaurant there, but neither of us remember how we got up and down. We definitely did not ride donkeys. We must have taken a cable car.

The roof in this photo of the Akrotiri site collapsed in 2005.

In the afternoon we took a bus to the archeological site of Akrotiri. This was the most informative and interesting excursion of the entire trip. When we arrived, the excavation was in its twenty-fifth year. These are probably the best preserved ruins ever discovered, and large portions of them were open for public viewing.

Our guide told us about some of the artifacts that were found here. It is indisputable that the merchants of Akrotiri traded with people from all over the Mediterranean. A large amount of written material was also discovered. It is in a language called Linear A. Unfortunately, we were told that no one has been able to decipher it.⁴

During our last night at sea the ship sailed northwest from Santorini (which Google Maps sometimes still calls Thera) to Piraeus, the port for Athens. We were then taken by bus to the hotel. During the drive we passed the Panathenaic Stadium in which some of the events of the first modern Olympics were held in 1896. We also were surprised to see a statue of Harry Truman, who was honored there because of the Marshall Plan that was implemented during his administration.

Most of the group took the excursion to the Acropolis. How could you visit Athens without seeing the Acropolis? Actually, I was a little disappointed by the Parthenon. It definitely was impressive to see from anywhere in Athens⁵, but when we finally arrived there, we discovered that a good bit of it was covered by scaffolding. So, for me at least, this was mostly just a matter of “ticking the box” on the bucket list. I did learn one new word that actually stuck in my memory: Caryatid.

The only social interchange with any of the other tour members that I can remember occurred while we were standing around on the Acropolis. As we looked down on Athens sprawling beneath us, we got into a conversation with two young ladies from the West Coast. They were interested that we owned a business, which we accurately described as “struggling”. One of the women astutely pointed out that we could not be doing too badly if we could afford to take a nice vacation like the one that we had both experienced. It was a nice thing for her to say, and it improved my mood.

After we had wandered around the Acropolis for the allotted period of time the bus drove us down to the National Archeological Museum in the center of Athens. Although I am absolutely positive that we visited it, I don’t honestly remember anything about it at all. If you want to know what is in it, I recommend that you watch the nine-minute video that is posted here.

At the hotel we had picked up a pretty good street map of Athens. I talked Sue into walking back from the museum to the hotel. If we became too tired or sore at some point, we could probably flag down a taxi. Incidentally, the taxi drivers in Athens were almost indistinguishable from the ones in Istanbul—same gender, same mustaches, same cigarettes held at all times in the right hand.

I wanted to stop at a clothing store or sports store in Athens to try to buy soccer jerseys with team names in Greek for my nieces. We stopped in a few places, but I don’t think that we found anything of that nature that was very appealing. The retailers in the center of Athens were mostly oriented toward selling souvenirs or very expensive stuff to tourists. It may be that the fad of wearing fake jerseys had not yet reached Greece in 1992.

At one point in the journey back to the hotel we stopped for a rest. Sue and I were resting on a low wall. An elderly woman approached us and addressed us—in Greek, of course. As quickly as I could, I tried to form the most useful short sentence that I could think of: “Δεν καταλαβαίνω,” which means “I don’t understand.” Before I could get the first word out, she correctly diagnosed our ignorance of her native language, turned her back and walked away. By the way, that first word, “Δεν”, is pronounced almost exactly like the English word “then”.

We happened to pass the home of the Prime Minister of Greece just as they were performing the ceremony of the changing of the guards. The soldiers wore absolutely absurd costumes, and their marching style would certainly have qualified them for the Ministry of Silly Walks. If the Turks frightened their enemies with their mustaches, the shoes of the Greek soldiers must have disabled their foes with uncontrollable laughter.

Sue and I had a good time at supper describing these guys to some of the other members of our tour group who had gone to the same restaurant. The atmosphere was festive, but the food was at best mediocre.

On our last day we took a bus to Delphi, the home of the famous oracles. The highlight of the trip occurred just as we made the turn to the west. I saw a sign for Marathon. It was fun to imagine the messenger making his fatal run from Marathon back to Athens along the same route that we had driven. I could visulaize him prostrate near the stadium as he called out in a strained voice, “Νίκη!”

Delphi itself was another disappointment to me. We got to hear the story of the oracles, and we saw the ruins along the side of a hill from a distance, but we were not allowed to get very close to them.

In point of fact, at this point in the trip we had seen about as many ruins as we needed to see. We had viewed a large number of broken columns and ruined buildings. At this point we would rather have dealt with something alive or at least intact.

Sue and I enjoyed this trip immensely. It seemed regretable that the only really disappointing day was the last one. I think that the trip would have worked better if it had been in the opposite direction—starting in Athens and ending in Istanbul. That would have put the most impressive ruins at Ephesus closer to the end and the one island with no ruins at all, Lesbos, just before Istanbul.

We flew back to JFK Airport on Long Island. The trip was completely uneventful; at least I don’t remember any problems. My recollection is that a limousine service brought us back to Enfield. In those days a company called CT Limo⁶ specialized in driving between the Hartford area and the international airports around New York City. Their prices were competitive; if not, I would never have agreed to such an extravagance.

1. Her attitude to me seems strange in retrospect. The Ottomans conquered Turkey in the fifteenth century. A few Christians still lived there, but the Turks were dominant until the end of World War I. At that point the allies and Greeks tried to impose a government on the area, but the Turks revolted and won their autonomy. So, she was really pining for a time that had been erased from history more than five hundred years earlier.

2. The word is pronounced, believe it or not, “thahf MAHS ee ah”. The alpha-upsilon diphthong in modern Greek is pronounced “ahf” or “ahv”, depending on the next letter. Upsilon is still a vowel when used alone, but when used with another vowel it has developed a consonant sound.

3. The volcano is still considered active. It last erupted in 1950. The ones in the 1920’s were more serious and caused some damage.

3. Volcano

4. Little progress has been made in the subsequent years. When I heard about this my first thought was that I would love to work on this project.

5. Mark Twain’s stealthy visit to the Parthenon is described beautifully in The Innocents Abroad. He was quarantined on the ship, but a group of men snuck ashore, made their way to the Acropolis and visited it by starlight.

6. CT Limo still exists and still offers this service.

1993-2006 TSI: AdDept Client: Foley’s

Posted on July 22, 2021 by Mike

May Co. division based in Houston. Continue reading →

I remember getting two phone calls from Beverly Ingraham¹, the Advertising Director at the May Company division based in Houston, Foley’s. The first one came in early 1993 before we had hired Doug Pease to handle our marketing. I spoke with Beverly about AdDept, TSI’s administrative system for large retail advertisers. She had learned of it from one of our mailings.

Foley’s flagship store at 1110 Main St. was demolished in 2013. I am not sure what replaced it.

I informed her that we had installed the system at a “sister division”, Hecht’s. I emphasized that it had been helping the employees at Hecht’s with their monthly May Company reports as well as many quotidian administrative tasks. She asked me to fly to Houston and show the system to them. Although I don’t remember the occasion, I must have spent a day or two talking with potential users, primarily Richard Roark² in the business office at Foley’s off in one of the top floors of the flagship store on Main Street. The demo must have been at an IBM office. Sue might have come with me to Houston, but neither of us remembers the trip. We met Beverly and Linda Knight, the Senior VP of Advertising³. The people at Foley’s all seemed enthusiastic and exceptionally nice, as they did every time that I visited there.

After we returned to Connecticut, I wrote up a proposal to run the AdDept system on the F10 model that had recently been introduced by IBM. There is little doubt that I also included quotes for some custom programming—I forget the details.

I was very excited about this. I knew that Foley’s advertising must have had money because the May Company had recently merged the D&F division, which had been based in Denver, with Foley’s. The combined operation would be run from Houston. That gave them stores in Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado. The May Co.’s purse strings were bound to be a little looser than usual.

I was also excited because I was quite certain that most of the work that we had done for Hecht’s would be usable for Foley’s with only minor adjustments. For once we seemed to be on familiar ground.

Over the next week or two I talked with Richard Roark about some of the items in the proposal. When I finally got the second call from Beverly, she did not immediately say that the project had been approved. I had to ask her. She said, “Oh, yeah. Sure.” She then corrected my assumption that Richard Roark would be the liaison. She assured me that she would tell me who it was, and she did a little later.

I remember very well my first visit to Foley’s in May of 1993 to install the system. I flew on Continental Airlines from Bradley to Intercontinental Airport⁴, which was twenty-three miles north of the city center. I took a shuttle bus to the Hyatt Regency Hotel, which was only a couple of blocks from Foley’s headquarters.

The Hyatt featured a lobby that was both luxurious and sometimes very noisy. A bar was right in the middle of it, and the area above was open all the way up to the roof, thirty stories up. It was like an echo chamber or a natural amplifier. So, half of the rooms had windows that viewed the lobby. After my first stay there I always requested a room with an outside window.

That’s the Hyatt’s bar way down there in the middle of the lobby.

The elevators all had glass walls on the lobby side. I am not ordinarily affected by heights or tight locations, but the rapid descent in these glass cages made me quite uneasy.

I distinctly remember my first stroll to Foley’s from the Hyatt. It was March. I knew that I would not need the overcoat that I had worn to the airport in Connecticut, but I did have on a wool suit. The lobby of the Hyatt was very cool. I went through the revolving door and I was smashed in the face by the heat and humidity. It was like walking into a sauna.

By the time that I ~~swam~~ walked the few blocks to Foley’s big brick building, I had grown tolerant of the humidity. However, I was not expecting to see ten or so mendicants sitting on the sidewalk near the employees’ entrance. This crew was not the aggressive kind I had encountered in my life in Detroit and visits to New York. They just seemed hopeless. I don’t know why, but I was shocked to see this in Texas.

I don’t actually remember too much else about that day. That is a good thing. In TSI’s thirty-five year history we only had a few near-disasters or crises, and I distinctly remember each one.

I recall that one of our first big assignments for Foley’s was when the Houston Chronicle bought out the Houston Post and its assets in 1995. Foley’s was by far the largest advertiser in both papers. They ran dozens of ads every week, and the newspaper coordinators had already recorded the schedules for both papers for several months ahead.

Their first requirement was a list of all ads that were scheduled to run in the Post but not the Chronicle. That was not difficult; I wrote a query to produce the list. They would need to decide what to do with those ads and adjust the schedules for the Chronicle where necessary.

Next, they needed to delete all of the ads scheduled for the Post. This was was a little more difficult. I had to replicate exactly the process that would have occurred if they canceled them individually. That meant that I had to write history records for each deletion, and all subsidiary files and summary records needed to be updated as if the deletions were being done one at a time.

Finally, they needed me to find all the ads in the Chronicle that were full depth (the longer dimension), which, if memory serves, was twenty-one inches. All of these ads would be one-half inch deeper because the Post’s presses, which the Chronicle planned to use going forward, cut the paper to that size. That meant that the costs (Foley’s kept track of actual costs billed by the papers and costs marked up to reflect production expenses that they showed the merchants) had to be recalculated.

Since any paper could change its size (and many subsequently did), I made this one into a program that could be attached to a menu available to the users. Since AdDept’s rate calculations had been externalized into separate callable modules, this was also not too difficult. History records and updates of subsidiary files and summaries were required for this step, too.

They needed all of this in just a couple of days. There was no test environment. No one helped me, and no one tested the code that I produced. On TSI’s developmental system I simulated a few ads of each type and tested the code on them. When I felt satisfied with it, I sent the code to Foley’s over the phone lines, crossed my fingers, and ran the programs.

I must have done a pretty good job. No one complained.

Visits to Foley’s were frequent during the nineties. Sometimes they wanted training, but usually they wanted to describe enhancements that they desired. Two of the trips had a comical aspect. The first one was when I asked Sue to take one of the early trips for me. I cannot remember what the objective for the trip was. She did not have a credit card in those days, and she forgot to bring any cash. Fortunately, someone at Foley’s cashed a check for her, or she might have needed to join the beggars clustered by the employees’ entrance.

On another occasion I wore my running shoes on the flight to Houston. When I had arrived in Houston, as usual I took the shuttle to the Hyatt. When I opened my suitcase at the Hyatt, I was aghast to discover that I had brought only one leather shoe. How could my valet have been so careless?

I recalled that I had seen a Payless Shoe Source, at one time a division of the May Company, between the hotel and Foley’s. I bought a pair of black leather shoes at Payless for $20. They were so uncomfortable that I threw them away as soon as I arrived home after the trip. However, they saved me from embarrassment during the three days of that visit. I figured that my misbegotten purchase was the equivalent of a bargain-priced rental for less than $7 per day.

One of Robert’s most important jobs was to keep the printers clean and full of paper.

Our first liaison at Foley’s was Robert Myers⁵. I think that he must have come from the IT department. He helped to set up a system whereby the store managers could view the contents of their ads on systems in their stores before the ads were run. He tried to get me (of all people) to market the arrangement to other retailers. I suppose that he meant that we should try to offer it as an enhancement to AdDept, but the guts of what he had done involved infrastructure that was unique to Foley’s. I didn’t understand most of it, and I was too busy with things that I understood a lot better to devote time to learning it.

Robert attended nearly all of the training sessions when I came to Houston, and he did a good job of writing up software requests when I was not around. He was one of our best liaisons.

That is Robert talking and facing the camera. The bearded guy in the foreground is Doug Pease⁶. This picture was not taken at Foley’s. I don’t recognize the other three.

Robert once expressed the opinion to me that XML would become the solution to all of the interoperability problems of software systems. I had read a little about it, but I did not understand it. He did not do a good job of explaining it. He may have been right, but to my knowledge XML never entered the main stream among software developers. TSI implemented a lot of interfaces with software from other companies. Sometimes we sent them files, and sometimes AdDept received and processed files. We never considered using XML.

One day Robert took me on a road trip. This must have been over a weekend, probably the one in which I oversaw the migration from the F10 that Foley’s initially purchased in 1993 to a faster model with more capacity, the 270.

We drove down⁷ to the Johnson Space Center (now called Space Center Houston). We spent some time at the exhibits that they have about manned space flight. It was OK, but ever since I was required in 1967 as a member of the varsity debate team at the University of Michigan (explained here) to argue against the concept of putting an American on the moon, it has always seemed to me that it was an expensive and dangerous idea with very little payoff. So, I was not as gung-ho as most of the visitors to the center.

I found notes that indicated that I went out to dinner with Robert Myers and his wife in 2000. I have no clear recollection of the occasion.

The May Company determined that AdDept should be installed in all of its department store divisions. The process of reaching this decision is described here. Robert was assigned by the May Company to help with the installations at several other divisions. On a few occasions we crossed paths at other divisions.

Left to right are Charisse Cossey, who was the TSI liaison after Robert, Sharon Mullins (the second-in-command), Beverly Ingraham, Ralph Annunziato, and Angela Hurry. That’s my big blue mug in the foreground. This room was called “The Wall Room” because the ads for the current week were always displayed on the wall.

Beverly Ingraham had a nameplate on her desk that said “Bevo”. I don’t know whether she was an alumna of UT⁸, or if it was a play on her name. Maybe both.

I remember doing one project that Beverly was especially interested in. The IT department was able to provide us with sales by department by store by day. I wrote a program to convert this file into a usable format for AdDept programs. We then used the information in reports and screens for each merchant that showed them in each market the total costs of their ads (or parts of ads) and the associated sales.

The ability to provide this kind of information was a big feather in Beverly’s cap. This was the first of several TSI projects aimed at evaluating the productivity of the advertising. The concept was actually more useful as a sales tool to show the power and reach of the AdDept system than as a practical tool for the advertisers. If more than one media was employed for a sales event, it was impossible to attribute which of the ads produced the results.

I don’t have distinct memories of most of the projects that we undertook for Foley’s. For the ones after Denise Bessette became VP of Software Development (as explained here) I only wrote up the requests. I don’t have an excuse for forgetting the ones between 1993 and 1997 I probably did most of the coding myself.

This is Robert at a buffet lunch at the department. I don’t remember the reason for it.

I unearthed some notes for a visit in 2000 about insertion orders for newspapers. Foley’s two newspaper coordinators were Hedy Wolpa⁹ and a lady named Leila, whose last name I don’t remember. I was shocked when they told me that they had not been faxing insertion orders to the papers directly from the AS/400 because they could only order by date, not by publication. They thought that this made it difficult for them to specify positioning (such as “Back page of main section”) while ordering. I also learned that they also did not realize that they could specify much longer special instructions as well.

This would never do. They had paid us to provide insertion orders in the precise format that Foley’s had specified, and they had paid IBM for the faxing hardware and software. We might have even gotten a commission on that. Furthermore, TSI needed for them to be ordering in AdDept so that we could switch them to using the product that we were about to release, A^xN (described here).

I think that this picture was taken at Filene’s. Robert is seated with two fingers raised. I don’t recognize the other people. That’s definitely my yellow spiral binder on the table.

While I was at Foley’s I wrote a new front end program for the insertion orders. It allowed them to order for one paper at a time. They were very happy; it was just what they wanted.

Denise hated for me to do things like this on the road. She did not want me to modify any code on the fly. I understood that. In this case, however, I thought that it was better to beg forgiveness rather that to ask permission from Denise. The top priority of this trip was to get Foley’s on board for insertion orders. They became an enthusiastic users, and all their papers subscribed to A^xN¹⁰ a soon as we made it available.

Foley’s was, by most measures, our best client. They used almost every aspect of the system. They even used the SmartPlus interface for broadcast that was originally designed for the GrandAd system for ad agencies. Their agency, which was in Dallas, sent them files with schedules and audit data.

Several Foley’s users also became very adept at using Query/400 to design some of their own reports. They used this product as much as or more than any other client. They sometimes used their queries and a product called ShowCase Strategy without any assistance from TSI.

As of 2000 TSI had delivered and installed approximately 200 custom programming projects to Foley’s.

1. Beverly Ingraham was promoted to Senior Vice President of Advertising at Foley’s in January of 2000. She held that position until the division was dissolved after Macy’s acquired the May Company in 2006. I am pretty sure that she went to the Macy’s Central division in Atlanta and headed the advertising department there for several years. I think that in 2021 she lives in Spring, TX, twelve miles north of the airport. If I am correct, then she is my age and therefore probably retired.

2. Richard Roark’s LinkedIn page is posted here.

3. In 2000 Linda, who was by then known as Linda Knight Quick, resigned as Senior VP of Foley’s to take a job at Penney’s. Foley’s sued to prevent this because of a non-compete clause in her contract. I was unable to determine how the situation was resolved.

4. In 1997 it was renamed George Bush Intercontinental Airport.

5. I have a note from January of 2000 that indicated that he was doing Internet development for Foley’s IT department using Cold Fusion, but I do not know what he has been up to in the last two decades.He helped me identify some of the people in photos of employees from Foley’s and other May Co. divisions. He also said that his association with TSI changed his life, but he did not explain how.

6. Doug Pease was TSI’s most successful marketing director. Much more can be read about him here. I think that Doug and I must have stopped at Foley’s as part of a marketing trip to Stage Stores, also in Houston. That installation is described here.

7. I wonder if I had a rental car for that trip. Robert lived a long way from downtown Houston. He generally took the bus to work!

8 The mascot of the University of Texas Longhorns is a steer named Bevo. The current one in 2021 is Bevo XV.

9. Hedy Wolpa’s LinkedIn page can be viewed here. She worked at Foley’s for thirty-one years!

10. The design of A^xN is described in some detail here.

1994-2002 TSI: AdDept Client: Kaufmann’s

Posted on July 22, 2021 by Mike

May Co. department store chain based in Pittsburgh. Continue reading →

Kaufmann’s was a department-store division of the May Company. Its headquarters was in downtown Pittsburgh. It had stores throughout Pennsylvania and neighboring states. TSI was contacted in the spring of 1994 by Mary Ann Brown¹, Kaufmann’s Advertising Director. I think that she probably heard of us from someone at either Hecht’s or Foley’s.

In May of 1994 Sue and I drove to Pittsburgh to meet with her. We made the trip by car primarily because we had very little money at the time. We also had scheduled a meeting in the same city with an ad agency, Blattner/Brunner Inc. That meeting and our subsequent visit to the Pittsburgh Zoo has been described here.

Our appointment at Kaufmann’s was scheduled for late in the afternoon, 5:00 as I remember it. We left Enfield fairly early in the morning. Sue, who in those days was famous for her lead foot, did most of the driving. We arrived at the outskirts of Pittsburgh about thirty minutes before the scheduled start of the meeting. At that point we encountered extremely heavy traffic. We were in unfamiliar territory, and, of course, cell phones were still a few years away. So, we arrived a few minutes late.

The beginning of the meeting was rather tense. Mary Ann demanded to know why we were late and why we did not call to tell her we were going to be late. If TSI had not already developed a reputation for good work at Hecht’s and Foley’s, I think that she might have told us to reschedule or to forget about it.

Eventually she got down to business and informed us that the people in her department had developed a system for administering the department’s projects. They were satisfied with what it produced. However, they knew that it would not work in the twenty-first century, and they needed to make a decision about whether to rewrite it or replace it. I guaranteed her that AdDept would have no difficulty with the Y2K issue and explained how AdDept’s approach of a multi-user relational database worked. I do not remember meeting anyone else that day.

Sue and I stayed throughout the visit at a Holiday Inn (if my memory is accurate) a few miles north of downtown. We probably presented a demo at IBM the next day, but, if so, I don’t remember it. My recollection is that the entire event was amicable but not decisive.

For years Doug Pease, TSI’s sales person, stayed in frequent contact with Kaufmann’s. I think that Mary Ann must have spent the time arranging funding. My memory of the next trip to Pittsburgh centers around my meeting with René Conrad² (female), who was the department’s Planning Manager, and John Borman³, who managed the department’s networks and its computer hardware. I don’t know if we had a signed contract yet, but by then they were definitely committed to installing AdDept. In fact the installation did not take place until May of 1998.

I had only limited contact with Mary Ann thereafter. I do remember that she joined René and me for lunch once, and she disclosed that she had for a very short time been (or at least had applied to be) an FBI agent. That was, to say the least, a surprising bit of news.

My first memory of René was her presentation to me of an absolutely enormous D-ring binder with a black cover. Collected therein were samples of all of the reports that they needed. She spent the rest of the day answering questions about the selection criteria and the precise definition of the contents of each column of each report. The bad news was that very few of the reports matched up closely with work that we had already done. The good news was that the design document that resulted from the meeting came closer to meeting the client’s expectation than any that we had produced or would produce later. René was our liaison at Kaufmann’s from the beginning all the way to the end, and she was a very good one.

John, René, and TSI programmer Steve Shaw in a training session in Enfield.

I did not need to spend much time with John. Once their new AS/400 was connected to their network, and I explained that the demand for bandwidth would be minimal since the system was totally text-based, he was satisfied. He took charge of getting the necessary software installed on Macs and PCs, and he connected the AS/400 to the department’s network.

I remember two experiences involving credit and debit cards on trips to Pittsburgh. In those days we kept our cash at Bank of America. The best thing about that was that if I needed cash on a trip I could almost always find a local branch with an ATM. I remember that once I used such a machine at the airport and forgot to reclaim my card when I was finished obtaining the cash. I don’t know what happened to the card after that, but nobody else ever tried to use it.

For my first couple of installation and support trips, Kaufmann’s asked me to stay at the William Penn Hotel, which was only a block or so from Kaufmann’s. I sometimes arrived in Pittsburgh late in the evening. On one of those occasions some sort of event must have been going on downtown. In the lobby of the William Penn there were unexpected lines of people waiting to check in. In those days it was possible to make a hotel reservation without providing a credit card number. Several people in line had discovered that doing so did not mean that a room would necessarily be available when they arrived. There were a lot of angry people there that evening. Fortunately, I had already heard about this problem, which had been perfectly explained by Jerry Seinfeld with regard to rental cars. You can listen to it here.

The gilded clock on the corner of Fifth Ave. and Smithfield St. is still a landmark.

I usually brought an unusually large bright-blue suitcase with me to Pittsburgh. Because I sometimes had trouble sleeping when I traveled I often include the foam rubber pillow that I found much more comfortable than the soft feather pillows that old stately hotels favored. One day after working at Kaufmann’s I was unable to find the pillow in my hotel room. Evidently the maid had confiscated it. I complained at the desk, and they eventually located it and returned to me.

It was nice having such an identifiable suitcase. On an early-morning US Airways flight on July 25, 1999, from Bradley to the Pittsburgh airport that served as a hub. I was the only passenger who checked a bag to Pittsburgh. I went to the carousel listed for my flight. No bags ever appeared. I was worried that the bag had not been removed from the plane. Here is what I wrote about the incident in my notes:

When I got into Pittsburgh, my bag was missing. I went to the baggage office. They had no record of my bag. I had seen them put it on the plane and take it off. I told her [the baggage agent] so. She went to look for it and found it. She said the tag had come off. I can’t imagine how this happened. But guess what. I didn’t get angry through any of this.

While staying at at the William Penn I experienced one of the worst incidents that I ever encountered in my trips to see clients or prospects. I was suffering from the only disease that I contracted in all the years that I traveled extensively. Throughout the visit I was constantly running a low-grade fever and had a few other annoying but not debilitating symptoms. I soldiered on, and I somehow got everything accomplished that was on my list. When I returned home I went to my doctor, Victor Sonnen⁴. He gave me a blood test and eventually diagnosed the problem as a urinary infection. Some antibiotics knocked it out.

I did not really like staying at the William Penn. I could get to Kaufmann’s in two minutes, but this was not a great advantage from my perspective. I was always up early, and there was nowhere very close that served breakfast. I could eat in the hotel, but I have always found that hotel food was not very good and terribly overpriced. The evening meals posed a similar problem. I won’t go to a swanky place by myself. The only restaurant within walking distance that I liked was a Chinese takeout place.

In later years I stayed at a Hampton Inn in the Greentree section of town on the south side of the Ohio River. I loved the free breakfast bars at Hampton Inns, and this one sometimes served tasty snacks such as pizza or chicken wings that were good enough to serve as a supper in the evening. The only drawback was that there was nowhere that was reasonably flat to go for a jog. If you live in Pittsburgh, you must learn to like hills.

On two occasions I went to supper with René and her assistant, Maggie Pratt⁵. Since they both took the bus to work, I drove us in my rental car. They directed me to small restaurants that they knew near the University of Pittsburgh. I don’t remember the food that well, but I do remember that dining alone on the road is not a hard habit to break.

One thing that I remember clearly was that René suffered from migraine headaches. When she got one she still tried to work, but it was obvious that she was in considerable torment.

René volunteered as an usher at the Pittsburgh Opera. In the 1999-2000 season Verdi’s La Traviata was performed. In the last act the heroine, Violetta, who has been suffering from consumption (tuberculosis) dies. René did not like this part of the opera at all. It seemed to long to her: “She should just die and get it over with!” I did not dispute this assessment, but I find parts of other operas to be much more tedious.

Luxury apartments occupy most of the upper floors of Kaufmann’s flagship store now. Target is scheduled to open a store on one or two low floors. There is now a skating rink on the roof!

Kaufmann’s advertising department was on one of the top floors of the flagship store on Fifth Avenue in Pittsburgh. The most peculiar thing about it became evident when one needed to use the men’s room. One was located on the same floor as the advertising department, but the only way to reach it was to walk through the beauty salon. I did not feel at all comfortable doing that. Therefore, I took the escalator up to the top floor, the home of the bakery. This restroom was a little farther away, but I found the atmosphere much more pleasant.

Everyone at TSI worked very hard on the programming projects for Kaufmann’s. The people there were uniformly supportive, and everyone seemed pretty good at what they did. I am embarrassed to say that I don’t remember the names of any of the media managers. The name Debi Katich is in my notes from 1999. I think that she was the Direct Mail Manager, but I may be wrong.

I do not remember the name of the Senior VP (Mary Ann’s boss) at the time of the installation. As I recall, he let Mary Ann pretty much run things. I definitely do remember the name of his replacement in 1999, Jack Mullen⁶, who had been Doug’s boss (or maybe his boss’s boss) at G. Fox in Hartford.

I also do not remember too many details of the code that we provided for them. The detail about newspaper ads that I recall most clearly is that the store’s contract with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette provided for significant discounts if they ran several full-page ads in the same issue. It was like buying two-liter bottles of Coke or Pepsi. The first three ads might cost $X but once the fourth ad was ordered, the price on all of them changed to $Y for all four ads. This was not easy to code because individual ads could be added, deleted, or moved (to another date) at any time. Also, the size could change. Any of these events could change the rate for all the other full-page ads in the paper that day. Not only did the rates and costs for all the affected ads need to be changed, but history records were also necessary.

Kaufmann’s used AdDept for keeping track of all of its advertising. They even uploaded their broadcast buys from the SmartPlus system that they used.

In 2000 Kaufmann’s was an enthusiastic supporter of the implementation of the A^xN project. Several people offered the opinion that the newspapers would never pay for subscribing to the service. Mary Ann did not agree. She said, “They’ll subscribe if we tell them to.” I visited three of Kaufmann’s largest papers to explain what we planned to do and to solicit suggestions. When I mentioned that I was meeting with the IT director at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, John Borman confided to me, “I want his job.”

In 2002, the Kaufmann’s stores’ Pittsburgh business headquarters closed, and its back-office operations were consolidated into those of Filene’s Department Stores in Boston. The consolidation was probably inevitable, but everyone at TSI would have greatly preferred for the new managing entity to be located in Pittsburgh.

1. In 1921 Mary Ann Brown is the Administrative Manager at her alma mater, the University of Pittsburgh. Her LinkedIn page is here. I don’t know why she left her role at Kaufmann’s off of her résumé.

2. René Conrad’s LinkedIn page is here. After the May Company folded the Kaufmann’s division into Filene’s in 2002 I tried to get René to work for TSI. She was interested enough to pay us a visit in East Windsor, but she turned down our offer. Instead she went to work for a theatrical company in an administrative role. We stayed in touch for a few years, but I had not heard from her for more than a decade. However, she recently sent me an email in which she confessed that she owed me a book.

3. John Borman’s LinkedIn page is here.

4. Dr. Sonnen died in 2010 at the age of 96. He was certainly in his eighties when he treated me. His obituary is posted here.

5. I am pretty sure that Maggie Pratt’s LinkedIn page is here.

6. Jack Mullen’s LinkedIn page is here.

Wavablog

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