1985-1988 TSI: GrandAd: The System/36 Clients

Posted on May 12, 2021 by Mike

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We installed at least part of the GrandAd system at all of the companies listed below. A few may have actually been Datamaster clients. My recollections of some installations are very dim. In a few I had little or no involvement

Visitors to O&P went through this red door on Elm St.

Although Keiler Advertising evidently had a famous red door in the twenty-first century, in the eighties the most famous red door in Hartford’s advertising community belonged to O’Neal & Prelle¹ (O&P), the agency that was housed across the street from Bushnell Park in Hartford. Our negotiation was with Bill Ervin², who was, I think, already the president of the agency.

We got this account because of a phone call from Paul Schrenker, the graduate student hired by our marketing company (described here). Paul called dozens of presidents of ad agencies. Bill responded that he was interested in our system. This was probably the only positive outcome from that endeavor.

I seem to remember that O&P bought a model 5364 from TSI. I do not remember doing any custom programming, but we almost always at least customized the invoices that they sent to clients.

I worked mostly with Liz Dickman, who was the bookkeeper. Of all of our agency liaisons, she was among the best to work with. She was able to do the reconciliations by herself more quickly than anyone else. I am not sure who drew the following beautiful schematic of the installation. It certainly is not my handiwork.

Evidently we installed a 5363. A 5364 would not have supported so many devices.

Here are my most vivid memories:

On one visit I had to carry something down to the basement. Halfway down the staircase I felt a stabbing pain in my right knee. It did not last, but it was the first time that I had felt pain there since I recovered from the operation in 1974, as described here.
If I was at O&P at lunch time, I generally bought a couple of tacos from one of the food trucks. I then sat alone on a bench in Bushnell Park and chowed down. One day while I sat with my legs crossed a starling popped up on my right shoe, which was about six inches off the ground. He perched there for at least a minute or two to see if I would reward him for his clever trick. When I failed to do so, he flew away.
I recall Liz informing me that she planned to take the CPA exam as a flyer. She said that she did not study for it, or at least not much. She was legitimately shocked when she later learned that she had passed. Perhaps it dawned on her that she was suddenly overqualified for her job. They made her a vice-president.
The installation really went downhill after Liz departed. The guy who operated the computer called TSI and asked for some training. We scheduled a day for him at our office in East Windsor. He was shocked when we billed O&P for it. Evidently either no one told him that TSI had a contract with O&P that clearly designated how much free training (plenty) they received, or someone gave him some bad advice. O&P didn’t pay the bill, and shortly thereafter the agency announced its liquidation.

I am pretty sure that we sold a model 5364 to Eric Tulin Inc.⁴ of Hartford, CT. It might have been TSI’s developmental system. I can remember spending a few days at the office on Hamilton St. The primary operator was a guy, but I don’t remember too much about him. I must have met with Eric as well, but I don’t remember the occasion.

The agency was not very large at the time. I don’t think that they had more than five or six employees.

I recall even less about Knorr Marketing⁵, which was (and still is) located in Traverse City, MI, which is in the northwest part of Michigan’s lower peninsula. The agency, which must have already purchased a S/36, called TSI one day out of the blue.

We sent them some materials, and even though they had never sen a demo, they purchased some portion of the GrandAd system. We sent Kate Behart to do the installation and training. Because we used almost exactly the same system for our record-keeping, Kate knew the accounting and job costing portions of the system. So, I assume that we did not install the media portion.

Kate must have done a good job. We hardly ever heard from them, but Knorr Marketing sent us a Christmas card for many years.

Another mystery GrandAd client for me was Brannigan-DeMarco of New York. They purchased their hardware from IBM. Sue took care of this account. I am not sure how much of the GrandAd system they used.

Sue worked closely with Angela Vaccaro, who was the primary operator of the system. She called for support every few months. Sue always took care of her problems.

Similarly, I know very little about Sullivan & Brownell⁶ of Randolph,VT. Sue handled everything about this account, too. She visited them occasionally. Sue did not need much of an excuse to schedule a trip to Vermont. She has always loved the whole state.

The only thing that I recall about the account was the fact that the media director was a Black woman. That would not ordinarily be even a little surprising, but this was, after all Vermont. In 1990 there were a grand total of 1,951 Black people in the state, including exactly zero lawyers and judges. In fact, only eleven Black people in total lived in Randolph.

Sue told me that the media director and her husband had a farm in the vicinity. Sue told me that she might have stayed overnight there once or twice.

Using a chain saw the husband carved a fox out of a tree trunk and gave it to Sue. It sat placidly on guard out in the grass just beyond the parking spaces of our office in Enfield for many years. In 2021 it wards off coyotes in our back yard. I took a photo of it. It has seen better days.

I handled most of TSI’s interactions with Knudsen-Moore (K-M), an advertising agency located in Stamford, CT. I thought of this as an important account because it finally gave us a toehold in the southeastern (wealthy) part of the state. I also thought that it was cool that one of our clients did business with both King Oscar and the WWE (then known as the WWF).

The audience for my demo was the seventy-two year-old⁷ bookkeeper whose name was Irene. I must have brought a PC, our 5364, and a terminal that we were evaluating for another client. Its screen was very large for the time. This became important because the bookkeeper had very bad vision. In fact, she later confided to me that the reason that she insisted that they choose TSI’s system was because of that terminal. Ordinarily my strikingly good looks are the deciding factor, but as I mentioned, her vision was poor.

The McMahons never showed up at their ad agency when I was there.

It took us several months, for reasons that will soon be apparent, to get them up and running. During this period the agency changed hands not once, but twice. Its final name, which persists to May of 2021 was CDHM⁸.

The holdups for going live with the system were the balances in accounts payable and accounts receivable. The values in these accounts are generally positive for A/R and negative for A/P. If a vendor bills you $100, and you immediately bill the client with a 10 percent markup, A/P will have a transaction with a value of -100, and the entry in A/R will be +110. There will also be offsetting entries, of course. The point is that every company should be able to justify its A/P with a stack of unpaid bills from vendors and its A/R with a stack of open invoices sent to clients.

I entered in all of the open A/P and A/R into GrandAd. I printed a list of each with totals. The system’s totals did not agree with what Irene’s hand-written worksheets said were the current balances. Not only that; her balances, which were reflected in the company’s official general ledger, had the wrong sign! The A/P showed a positive balance, and the A/R showed a negative balance. According to these figures the agency’s vendors owed them money, and they were in debt to their clients!

Irene still insisted that her figures were right. I asked for a meeting with the president, Bill Hoag. The bookkeeper attended, as did a couple of other people. Their accountant was not present. I explained the situation with words similar to those of the previous paragraph. She insisted that her numbers were correct because she had checked every entry. She knew this because there was a little dot next to each figure. Much screaming ensued.

The lady had been using the “balance forward” method. After each transaction a new balance is calculated. This is OK, but at least monthly this balance must be checked against the list of invoices. She had NEVER done this. I later looked over her sheets. They were replete with errors. She simply could not read her own handwriting.

The irony of the situation did not strike me until much later. If someone had caught this egregious error earlier, we would not have won the contract. She recommended us solely because of the big screen on the terminal, remember?

How in the world could an agency with books in this deplorable condition be sold twice? I don’t know.

They asked the bookkeeper to retire. The guy that replaced her was, in some ways, worse.

I am pretty sure that his first name was George. I don’t remember his last name, but I do remember that he insisted that any communication to him include the title “Esq.” Now, I don’t pretend to know who gets to use that title, but I would be willing to bet that not many of them lived at the YMCA, which is where this character lived. George got into arguments with us all the time, and he was abusive to TSI’s employees.

For the first and only time, I finally called the agency’s president about George’s behavior. He said that he would look into it. He called me back less than hour later. He said that the guy had not been in all week, and he was now officially terminated.

The next week the president told me that they had hired a new person. I think that his name was Roger. He was very easy to work with, and he had the record-keeping straightened out in short order.

I drove to CHM an least half a dozen times. I never saw Vince or any other McMahon. It was a big disappointment.

Sue handled the account of Charmer Industries of the Astoria section of Queens. The company distributed wine and liquor products. This was probably a referral from Quique Rodriguez, an IBM rep with whom we had a good relationship.

Sue and I drove there on, as I remember it, a Sunday, carried their computer and printer into the building, and made sure that they were working. Then we drove back to Rockville. I found the whole drive within the city terrifying. I wanted to stop, get out of the car, and kiss the earth when we were back in Connecticut. I have been to NYC many times, but I have never driven inside the city limits.

Charmer had a lot of companies. One specialized in the design of point-of-sale products in bars and liquor stores. Over the years it went by a number of names, including ACC Marketing and the Sukon Group. These were the people who used our system.

Our final liaison in the nineties was Ed Wolfe. As I recall, the company later decided to purchase a small AS/400, the system that replaced the S/36. The AS/400 is described in some detail here. I took the train to New York a couple of times to help with the setup of the new system. Ed was a nice guy and a good client.

Doherty-Tzoumas occupied this building on Dwight Street in Springfield.

I have always thought of Doherty-Tzoumas of Springfield, MA, as a bizarre advertising agency. Dianne Doherty⁹ was the president. She was totally unsuited to running this agency or any other business. Her husband was a very prominent lawyer. I think that he must have set her up in this business, perhaps for tax reasons. I can only speculate.

Her partner, Marsha Tzoumas¹⁰, knew her way around advertising and the business world at least a little, and she was very nice. I felt a little sorry for her.

The agency certainly tried hard to succeed. It always seemed to be a beehive of activity. Quite a few employees had been hired. They liked to hold “focus groups”¹¹ for their clients’ products or services, an idea that I had never previously encountered.

I worked with Marsha and the agency’s bookkeeper to set up the system, and for the most part it seemed to go rather smoothly. However, when we showed the reports for the first monthly closing to Dianne she was overwhelmed.

Dianne hired a financial consultant to help her run the business. He might have been the company’s accountant, but that is not my recollection. I was in a few meetings with him. Most of them were fine, but in one meeting we were discussing the general ledger. Dianne made a very peculiar request. She asked if there were just two or three accounts that she should concentrate on. The request was, in my opinion, absurd. There might be a few that she could pretty much ignore, but to try to focus on any small subset of a company’s books was unthinkable. Most small businesses fail, and there are many paths to failure.

Nevertheless, the consultant took the bait and named a few accounts. I can’t even remember which ones he chose. I assume that cash was one. It is generally a good idea to know how much cash you have. He probably also picked A/P and A/R.

At any rate I knew in that instant that this business was doomed. I was right. In 1991 we received a letter from Dianne’s husband Paul proclaiming that the business was being liquidated. It was the only such letter that we ever received from an ad agency. They owed us less than $100, and so we did not consider suing for it.

I remember that on one occasion Marsha mentioned that she was looking for a good book to read. I recommended Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. I wonder if she took my advice.

In 1987 Rossin Greenberg Seronick and Hill (RGS&H)¹² was the hottest agency in Boston, MA. The president, Neal Hill¹³, was not an advertising guy. Although I never met any of the other three partners, I am sure that they all had a good deal of advertising experience.

The agency had enjoyed two years of explosive growth. It wanted a computerized system for word and data processing. Neal and Ernie Capobianco¹⁴, the director of finance, interviewed us and all of our principal competitors. Their choice of the GrandAd system was a real feather in our cap. We were confident that we could do a great job for them, and we hoped that it would open the Boston market, which we had previously never been able to crack, for us.

The holdup was the word processing element. Neal loved Wang’s approach to word processing, and he thought that DisplayWrite/36 (DW/36) was inferior. However, no ad agency software had ever been written for Wang’s operating system. In fact, I had never encountered anyone who used it for anything other WP.

When Neal told us that they had decided to use our system, he asked what we would recommend for word processing. I said that I was not an expert, but the future was in PC’s. Furthermore, if they planned to use the S/36 only for GrandAd, a 5362, which could support up to twenty-eight locally attached devices, would be more than sufficient.

WordPerfect running in DOS did not look like the answer.

My assessment turned out to be correct, but in 1987 buying PC’s with good word processing software (the most popular at the time was WordPerfect) and connecting them would have been a formidable task. Personal computers in those days were still really personal.

Neal insisted that one system should address all the needs. IBM persuaded Neal that a model 5360 with DW/36 would serve their needs.

Neal approved the purchase of a 5360 (the washer-drier model) directly from IBM.

In the meantime I received a phone call from a salesman at Wang. He wanted us to convert our software to run on Wang’s equipment. I informed him that this would be a monumental task, and, although we had dozens of successful installations on IBM hardware, we had absolutely no experience with Wang’s approach. He told me that if we agreed to convert, he had an agency lined up that would use our system. I asked him if he was referring to RGS&H. When he confirmed it, I told him that they had already signed a contract with us. This was news to him.

The system that IBM proposed included terminals for almost all of the employees. The ones with PC’s got 5250 emulation adapters. Our end of the installation went fine. We did a great deal of custom coding for them. They had spent a lot of money on the system, and they reasonably insisted that it do exactly what they wanted.

Then the bombshell exploded. Microsoft let the world know that Neal Hill had written a letter to them. In it he bragged that RGS&H had poached the copywriter and artist from the agency that had handled advertising for Lotus Development, which at that time was considered Microsoft’s biggest competitor. Microsoft had not yet assembled its Office package, and Lotus 123 and Approach were very popular applications. Neal said that RGS&H knew what Lotus was up to, or words to that effect. He also sent them two plane tickets from Seattle to Boston.

I could sympathize. Evidently no one checked Neal Hill’s work either.

This episode caused a major scandal that has been widely written about in legal, advertising, and business circles as well as in the local press. In fact, if you google the agency’s name you will get several pages of articles about it. There are so many that is very difficult to find any other information about the agency.

Neal resigned in December of 1987. Ernie was named as the interim president. Our system was fully functional by this time. Ivan Dunmire served as our liaison. He did an excellent job.

TSI indirectly got swept up in this brouhaha. The articles in the local press mentioned that RGS&H had recently purchased a computer system that was characterized either as a mainframe or as a system that was much too large for the company. So, despite the fact that the people who actually used our software appreciated greatly what we had done, we never had the good reference account in Boston that we had hoped for.

Here are some of my recollections of my experiences with RGS&H:

You can’t make it in thirty minutes if you are afraid to exceed 10 miles per hour.

When I was driving Ernie to lunch one day he complained that my car smelled like tobacco smoke. It must have been Sue’s. Nobody previously had mentioned it. Evidently I was “nose blind” to it.
One of the two contenders for the most harrowing experience of my life (the other, getting caught in the Blizzard of ’77, is described here) occurred when driving back to Rockville. It was snowing lightly, and the traffic was moving at a fairly steady pace on the Mass Pike when I reached Exit #9 for I-84 near Sturbridge. To my surprise I-84 was nearly empty. There were no tracks in the road at all. I could clearly see the reflective markers on both sides of the road, and I used them for navigation. There really was no place to stop between Sturbridge and Rockville. The Celica and I passed no one, and we were only passed by one car traveling at perhaps 30 mph. A mile or so later I saw a car that had slid into the median; I assume that it was the one that had passed me. I did not consider stopping. When I finally reached the exit for Rockville, I had to guess where it was; the asphalt was covered with several inches of snow and there were no tire tracks. I did not think that my car would make it up the steep hills in Rockville, but it did. Sue was very worried; there were no cellphones in those days.
After we moved the office to Enfield in 1988, I usually drove to Springfield, took a Peter Pan bus to Boston, and walked a few blocks to the RGS’s offices. By that time “&H” had been dropped from the agency’s name.
I loved working with Ernie, Ivan, and the other people at the agency. There were no quarrels or misunderstandings.
I remember that I usually walked to McDonald’s for lunch and ate a Quarter-Pounder with Cheese and a Big Mac.
In the nineties Ivan called us a few times for support. By that time PC networks were becoming widespread, and people were touting the idea of “client-server” systems, a term that simply meant that the data was on one system used by everyone, but each person’s computer had its own set of programs. However, Ivan said that many of the people at the agency did not understand this. They thought that the term designated a system constructed to provide better service to the agency’s clients, and they wanted to know why RGS did not have one.

I tried to recruit Ivan to work for TSI, but he turned us down. I am not exactly sure what role he would have played at TSI, but I am pretty sure that he would have done a good job.

Our other installation in Boston, Rizzo Simons Cohn (RSC), was an even bigger fiasco. I was surprised to discover that Sue has almost completely repressed the memory of The Sign of the Three.

We had been contacted by a firm called Computer Detectives (CD). The guy on the phone told us that his company had been hired by the agency to find a computer system for them. It turned out that CD was a two-person company, the guy with whom we talked and his wife. His name was Larry Ponemon¹⁶. I don’t recall hers. We dealt almost exclusively with Larry.

Sue and I went to supper at a Chinese restaurant with them. The both ordered moo shu pork; this is the only thing that Sue remembered about them. They were very surprised when we told them that we had never really had a vacation.

We showed them the system, and they liked what they saw. We gave them a proposal for the GrandAd system running on a S/36 model 5363.

Larry called us to tell us that they had recommended our system to RSC, but the agency preferred to run its system on 3B2, a UNIX computer manufactured by AT&T. They asked us if we could convert our system to run on it.

We researched whether the S/36 version of Workstation Basic¹⁷ would work on a 3B2, and we were assured by the company that wrote and marketed it that it would. We told CD that we were pretty sure that it would, but we would need to adjust our quote to cover the conversion costs. We did so.

We then got to meet another consultant, who, among other things, sold and marketed AT&T computers. We told him that we were accustomed to working with IBM, and we trusted its commitment to support. If he sold the system to RSC, we wanted to know whom we would contact when we had problems or questions. He said that he was our contact. Remember that there were no cellphones, and this guy practically lived in his car. We would need to leave messages. The best that we could hope for was a beeper. Then we would need to depend on him to find someone who was willing and able help us. We were used to dialing 1-800-IBMSERV from anywhere. Someone ALWAYS answered.

The CD people were there at the meeting. They and the AT&T guy assured us that we and the agency’s users would get all the support that we needed.

We converted the software to work on Unix without an inordinate amount of difficulty. That, however, did not mean that it would efficiently do everything that RSC wanted in their environment. We knew nothing about how the operating system would perform when numerous users were working on the same files at the same time. Sue spent several days at RSC trying to get the system to work, but she ran into one roadblock after another, and no one was available to help her.

After a few weeks of this foolishness, the agency got fed up. CD had not disclosed to RSC, who had paid them handsomely to conduct the search, that they were being paid a “finder’s fee” both by us and by the AT&T guy. RSC had never voiced any preference for hardware; that was just a lie. Evidently they had told RSC quite a few whoppers, too. RSC sued CD, and Sue testified for the agency. AT&T took the hardware back and refunded at least part of the cost.

RSC reopened the software search. We submitted the same proposal that we had previously given to CD. Since we had already been paid for the UNIX version, we charged nothing for the GrandAd software or for the customizations. The other contender was a New York company (I can’t remember the name) against whom we often competed. Its software ran on UNIX.

I called the finance guy at RSC, Jonathan Ezrin¹⁸, and asked about their decision. He informed me that they had chosen the other vendor. I asked him what the basis for the decision was. He responded that mostly it was the cost. The answer astounded me. I asked him what the other software company had bid. It was about $10,000 higher than ours. I asked him how they could have considered this less than our bid. He said that to be fair they had included the cost of the software in our original proposal when making the comparison.

I assured him that we were not going to give that money back. I then told him frankly that theirs was the stupidest line of reasoning that I had ever heard, and I slammed down the phone.

RSC dissolved in 1990, less than a year after that phone call. I don’t know what happened to CD. I found no trace of them on the Internet, although Lavinia Harris has published a series of novels about a young couple who call themselves “computer detectives”.

I remember visiting Fern/Hanaway¹⁹ of Providence, RI, a few times. The agency had a System/36 that they had bought from IBM. I think that we installed one or two modules there, but I don’t remember which ones.

IBM must have told Arian & Lowe (A&L)²⁰, an advertising agency of sorts in Chicago, IL, about TSI. Sue said that she went there once. She remembers that the floor of their office would have been good for dancing, but the only thing that she remembered about the company was that their main client was the Beef Board. They mostly produced point-of-sale posters and signage.

I installed some modules of the GrandAd system there and flew out for a couple of month ends. I remember several very strange occurrences.

The Director of Financial Operations for the agency was Neta Magnusson²¹. We generally had lunch together. She always had more than one martini. I could never have concentrated in the afternoon if I had imbibed a small fraction of what she downed. I stuck with Diet Coke or iced tea.
A&L used its S/36 model 5360 for word processing. One time when I was there working on the GrandAd system, they somehow lost some WP documents. A few people blamed me for this. I protested that I had not done anything to any documents. Fortunately I knew enough about how DW/36 worked that I could also demonstrate that I could not possibly have done anything.
I ordinarily stayed at a Holiday Inn that was a short distance from A&L. On one trip I had to stay an extra day. The Holiday Inn had no availability for that extra night, but they found me a place to stay and called a cab to take me there. The cab driver said that I definitely would not want to stay there. Instead, he took me to another place that was in a rather rough part of town. However, the room was OK, and it was only one night. I was, however, happy to be out of there the next morning.
The agency’s was in downtown Chicago. I had to take cabs back and forth to O’Hare. One time I somehow left my glasses in the cab. Believe it or not, the next time that I went to A&L I stopped at the taxi dispatcher. My glasses were in the Lost and Found box safe and sound.
One of the cab drivers spoke no English at all. His girlfriend sat in the front seat and translated for him.
Another cab driver picked me up at A&L. I wanted to go to O’Hare. He asked me for directions. I actually rode with a cab driver in Chicago who did not know how to get to the airport! Fortunately, this was one of my last trips to A&L; I could have given him instructions blindfolded.
The favorite expression of the system operator at A&L was “Have a good one!” I realized that this was cheerful and completely innocuous, but for some reason it really irritated me.
My favorite part of the trips to Chicago was the prospect of having an Italian beef sandwich, either at the airport or bought from a street vendor.

It seems appropriate to end with the bittersweet tale of Charnas Associates of Manchester, CT. TSI and IBM scheduled a presentation to the agency at the IBM office in Hartford. The presentation was scheduled to take two hours. I went to the office early and loaded our GrandAd demo system onto the 5360 at IBM. I also went over my notes for the presentation.

The turnout was unbelievable. Around twenty people showed up from the agency. I was always happy if we got one; I had done worse than that.

I had a lot of experience at this. The format varied by only a little. Someone from IBM acted as the host. He or she was always dressed impeccably and spoke glowingly about how wonderful IBM’s systems and support were and what a close working relationship IBM had with independent software developers like TSI. Then they turned it over to me.

Not this time. The IBMer went around to each and every person in the room and asked them what they would like the computer to do to help with their jobs. After each answer he would rush back to a whiteboard and add it to the list of items that were already on the board. The he would ask them to evaluate how important this was to them. He was hoping that they would attach a monetary value to it, but he was willing to settle for peace of mind or saving time. He dutifully recorded the values as well.

This went on for at least an hour and forty-five minutes. Then he spent a few minutes praising the System/36 before he let me talk for a couple of minutes. I could not possibly do my presentation in less than a half hour. So, I had to forget about my slides and my demo and try to talk about the big picture. The worst part was that damnable list on the whiteboard behind me. Needless to say, our software addressed less than half of the wish list. Of course no one suggested “Help us find which clients are unprofitable and why” or “Help us improve cash flow”.

I was so angry at the IBMer that I could have punched him. If I had not sworn after that fight in the fifth grade with Tom Guilfoyle that I would not engage in fisticuffs, I might have.

We followed up on this, but we never heard from Charnas.

A few years later in 1989 I was scheduled to give my first AS/400 demonstration of the AdDept system that I was still in the process of installing at Macy’s in New York. TSI did not own an AS/400 yet, and so I had made a backup tape at Macy’s. I planned to install Macy’s programs and data, dummy up the data so it was not recognizable, give the demo, and then erase the programs from the disk.

I never finished the first step. Something about the tape made the AS/400 system at IBM hang up. Commands could not even be entered at the system console. I worked with these incredibly reliable machines for twenty-six years. This was the only time that I saw something like this happen.

The IBM people were furious at me. They were certain that the problem occurred because our programs were written in BASIC. I calmly explained that the programs never got restored. Something happened during the restoring process.

Nobody from IBM attended my demo. I went to the demo room to do a song and dance with no accompaniment. Only one person was there, and she was not even one of our invitees. She identified herself as a media buyer at Charnas who had heard about the event from one of her clients. I explained how the GrandAd system worked and which agencies were using it.

She told me that Charnas had a S/36. She did not know the model. I asked her how big it was. “Oh, it’s big!”

She said that they used it only for word processing, and everyone hated it. That guy from the first demo had sold them a 5360 with no software except DisplayWrite36!

I don’t remember what happened after that too clearly. I am sure that I went to Charnas’s office in Manchester at least a few times in the early nineties. I think that I installed an abbreviated media system for them. Then I got heavily involved in the AdDept system.

Charnas apparently went out of business in July of 1992.

While I was looking for information about the agency I came across the book shown at the right. It was commissioned by Robert Bletchman, an attorney from Avon who died in 2008. His obituary is here.

There is only one copy of the book on this website. The title is How to Achieve the Release of Unidentified Flying Object Information from the United States Government.The first reader with $50 can claim it. Shipping is free!

The publication date for this book is in 1985. I am pretty sure that this effort antedated Art Bell’s Coast to Coast AM show on WTIC radio by approximately ten years.

1. O’Neal & Prelle went out of business in 2000.

2. Bill Ervin died suddenly in 2003. His obituary is here.

3. Liz Dickman is now the CEO of Integrated Physicians Management Services in East Hartford. Her LinkedIn page is here.

4. Eric Tulin Inc. changed names and ownership a few times before giving up the ghost in 1991.

5. Knorr Marketing’s website is here.

6. In 2007, as reported here, Tom Brownell apparently transferred his client list to a group of his employees. They changed the name of the agency to 802 Creative Partners and moved the headquarters to Bethel, VT.

7. By coincidence 72 is my own age as I write this in May 2021. To be honest, if I tried to keep a manual ledger, I probably would not be able to read my handwriting either.

8, The agency’s website is cdhm.com.

9. Dianne Doherty now goes by Dianne Fuller Doherty. She resides in Longmeadow, MA, in 2021. After the agency’s failure she devoted her life to helping other small businesses, especially those run by women, get started. Her story is described here.

10. Marsha Tzoumas is now known as Marsha Montori. In 2021 she is the Chief Marketing Officer at Six-Point Creative Works, an ad agency in Springfield. Her LinkedIn page is here.

11. I used focus groups in my short story (described here).

12. RGS&H went through five name change. Its final incarnation, GSOD, Inc. dissolved in 2007.

13. Neal Hill landed in Canada. His LinkedIn page is here.

14. Ernie Capobianco telephoned me in the early 1990’s. At the time he had just started working at Valentine-Radford, a big ad agency in Kansas City. He arranged for me to meet with some principals and the IT guy. I also visited Ernie’s apartment in Johnson County. I think that I caught him at a bad time. His LinkedIn page, which skips over his time at RGS&H, is here.

15. Ivan Dunmire lives in New York City. His LinkedIn page is here.

16. I think that Larry Ponemon now runs the Ponemon Institute, which has something to do with privacy, security, and computers. His page on the organization’s website is here.

17. Workstation Basic was designed to emulate the Datamaster version of BASIC running under DOS and later UNIX. More information is here.

18. Jonathan Ezrin apparently now lives in Plymouth, MA. He does not have a LinkedIn page.

19. Fern/Hanaway was dissolved in 1998.

20. It appears that in 1991 A&L was taken over by Daryl Travis. Various versions of Arian, Lowe and Travis (no Oxford comma) existed after that, but I think that the operation in Chicago did not survive for long. The Beef Board account represented a high percentage of its billings.

21. I think that in 2021 Neta Magnusson lives in Geneva, IL, a suburb on the west side of Chicago.

1955-1961 Part 1: QHRS

Posted on August 19, 2020 by Mike

Early years at Queen of the Holy Rosary School. Continue reading →

After my parents and I moved from Kansas City, KS, to suburban Prairie Village in early 1955, I began attending Queen of the Holy Rosary School (QHRS) in Overland Park. The faculty consisted of Ursuline nuns who lived in a convent behind the school and a few lay teachers, all women. Back in the day my dad and his brothers had been taught by Ursulines. In fact, in 1955 a few of the nuns who taught my dad were at QHRS.

For all the years that I can remember the principal at QHRS was Sr. Dominica. To say that she ran a tight ship is an understatement. As at St. Peter’s, we were all required to attend mass before school. The youngest kids sat closest to the altar. Sufficient space between the students was enforced to accommodate each one’s invisible guardian angel.

Girls at QHRS were required to wear uniforms of plain blue skirts and white blouses. There may have been other requirements. I cannot remember the standards for the boys. I never cared about clothes at all. My mother generally bought pants for me at J.C. Penney. She probably got my shirts there, too.

At the time QHRS had no cafeteria. The students all brought their lunches in paper bags or lunch boxes. We ate at our desks in the classroom. I think that students could buy a small carton of milk for a few cents. Some kids traded food. Mine was always the best; I never traded.

A cafeteria of sorts was installed in one of the expansions, but I don’t remember ever eating lunch there. There certainly was never a kitchen for preparing lunches to sell to students. Students could buy cup-sized containers of milk.

I usually took the bus to school. The driver’s name was Bernardine. Two girls on our street also rode the Bluebird. Their names were Michaelene Dunn and Kim Somebody. They were a couple of years older than I was. Once or twice I used their wisdom and experience as a source for the meaning of taboo words, phrases, and gestures.

I was very happy to join Sr. Mildred’s first-grade class early. Sr. Mildred had actually taught my dad at Holy Name School in KC KS. She was a very nice person; all the kids liked her.

A few weeks after I joined the class I contracted all three common childhood diseases—measles, mumps, and chicken pox—one after the other. I was out of school for at least two weeks. I doubt that I missed as many days during my next seven plus years at QHRS. I remember no great difficulty with my lessons after rejoining my class.

One huge difference between St. Peter’s and QHRS was that at the end of every six-week period Fr. Ryan, the pastor of the parish, personally visited every class, called each student up to stand beside him, and read the grades aloud. If a student’s grades seemed to be slipping, he/she got grilled. I must be remembering this wrong. Fr. Ryan must have skipped some classes or some students. In any case, the effect was terrifying.

In second grade (1965-1966) I was in a combined class of first graders and second graders. The first graders outnumbered us by at least two to one. The teacher who received this unenviable assignment was Sr. Lucy.

Sr. Lucy habitually abandoned our class during the lunch hour, presumably to fix herself a stiff drink or take a sedative. During her absence we were not allowed to cavort or even to speak. One student was assigned the role of monitor. This lucky person was assigned the task of taking down the names of miscreants. After a while this nerve-wracking duty was permanently assigned to me. I must have been rather judicious. I was never depantsed or beaten senseless at recess.

I remember a few episodes from this class. The first one was when someone decided to stage a basketball game at recess between the second-grade boys in our room and the other group of second-grade boys. We only used one basket. There were no substitutions. Everyone played who was there. There was no referee. Only a few of us were able to get the ball up as high as the basket.

The other team had more than twice as many boys as ours. They won the game rather easily. I was still the biggest kid in our class, and I scored all of our points. I don’t know why I remember this pathetic exercise. Maybe it was the first time that I participated in a team event in which someone kept score.

One of the students, whose last name was Martindale, had trouble reading. His parents obviously helped him study the text beforehand. When called upon to read aloud, he would retell the story but he did not use the words of the text. Many of us giggled, but I don’t remember anyone ridiculing him about it.

By the way, we did not use the “Dick and Jane” books that were a staple at the public schools. The protagonists in our books were David and Ann. Every once in a while a lesson involving Catholic principles was included. I remember that their father lost his job at some point. Things like that never happened to Dick and Jane.

We second graders spent a great deal of time preparing for our first communion, which is, or at least was, a very big deal for young Catholics. As part of our preparation Sr. Lucy required us to memorize a list of items from our catechism,¹ which consisted a set of questions and incontestable answers. The first two were:

Fr. Ryan put the host right on the tongue. There was no handoff.

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

When Sr. Lucy interrogated the second graders (out loud) on the answers that we were required to memorize, I was unable to come up with the complete answer to one of the questions. This distressed me terribly. I had not encountered much failure since dealing with the boxes of letters that hid from me at St. Peter’s; to fail at something so important was devastating. I think that I felt that I had let down my mom, who had quizzed me the night before. Sr. Lucy tried to console me.

I also remember fainting once when we were preparing for first communion. It is the only time that I have fainted in my life, and in the first class section of a flight I once sat next to the one and only Desmond Howard, Michigan’s Heisman Trophy winner and ESPN star.

Before we could receive communion, we had to go to confession, which meant that we had to confront Fr. Ryan one-on-one. Until Fr. Finnerty arrived a year or two later, Fr. Ryan had no assistants. I can’t say that I remember any details. I don’t remember what I admitted to in that first confession, but I certainly did not ask forgiveness for beating up that BAD kid in kindergarten.

My third grade teacher was Mrs. Nolan. There was such an influx of students that we now had two full classrooms of third graders, and wings had been added to the school building to accommodate this.

I was very happy not to be in the other third-grade class, which was taught by the notorious Sr. Veronica. She often made errant children kneel in the hallways. One time she yanked by the ear a boy who was not moving rapidly enough to suit her. The ear tore near the lobe and a large quantity of blood erupted. He was not badly hurt, but he looked like someone took a knife to him.

Decades later I told my dad how mean Sr. Veronica was. He informed me that she had taught at Holy Name when he was a boy. He also told me that her twin sister was much meaner, and everyone was terrified of her. I asked him what became of her, half expecting him to say that a house had landed on her. Remember, this is Kansas; tornadoes were common.

By the third grade most of the boys realized that acting up in class was not worth the punishment, which at QHRS was quick and rather severe. The worst punishment was to be sent to Sr. Dominica’s office, over the door to which was a sign advising those who entered to abandon all hope before they crossed the threshold.

However, many of us came to appreciate that our teacher would occasionally need to leave the classroom for a few minutes. During that interlude we could get away with all kinds of mayhem as long as we were not caught when she returned. In our class the mechanism for this was the “spitball” (or “spitwad” in some dialects), a piece of paper which had been formed into a ball and placed in one’s mouth until it congealed into a spheroid suitable for throwing. A piece of notebook paper could generate two good spitballs. I prided myself on having two or three spitballs concealed and at the ready at all times.

As soon as the teacher left the room an aerial battle pitting the guys in the desks near the door (my team) against the the enemy forces by the windows would ensue. The guys seated in the middle and all the girls occasionally incurred collateral damage. War is not pretty.

My usual strategy was to fire all my missile early and then to switch to using my three-ring binder as a shield. When the teacher returned, the boys still actively engaged in combat sometimes were punished, but I was never caught in the act.

At the end of our last third grade class, Mrs. Nolan announced that she and her husband were moving to Venezuela. Therefore, she would not be teaching at QHRS any more. Everyone was sad.

My memories of fourth, fifth, and sixth grades are sketchy. I only had one teacher per year, but I cannot recall who taught which year. I am pretty sure that I had Sr. Ralph and Sr. Kevin once each. One of the two might have taught me twice. If not, I don’t remember who the other teacher could have been.

In one of these years our whole class received the sacrament of confirmation, the most difficult of all the sacraments to explain to heathens and apostates. It is not a prerequisite for anything, and no additional obligations are entailed. From the perspective of the students there are two salient factors: 1) You are allowed/required to pick a “confirmation name”. 2) The sacrament is administered by the local bishop (in our case the archbishop) himself.

St. Peter's supposed sword is in the Poznań Archdiocesan Museum in Poland. — St. Peter’s supposed sword is in the Poznań Archdiocesan Museum in Poland.

I picked the name Peter to honor St Peter the apostle. So, my official Catholic name is Michael Dennis Peter Wavada. Everyone was required/allowed to choose the name of a saint whom he/she especially admired. Despite the bad memories of the eponymous school in KC KS, I picked Peter. It was mostly because of the dashing way that he had wielded his sword to relieve Malchus of one of his ears.

The appearance of Archbishop Hunkeler in our parish was a very big deal. He was the bishop at the time that our diocese was promoted to being an archdiocese. So, he was the very first Archbishop of KC KS. This is a very important distinction, but I have never been able to figure out exactly why.

The big moment in the ceremony is when the archbishop addresses each candidate individually and slaps her/him on the face. Anyone who runs to his/her parents to get mom to kiss the boo-boo or dad to beat up the archbishop is automatically disqualified. Everyone else is accepted. In our class everyone took the blow like a soldier of Christ, although a few students flinched. Frankly, I think that the archbishop’s right hook did not have as much power as we had heard. He was, after all, in his sixties.

The nuns liked to ask question in class. If you thought that you knew the answer, you raised your hand. The nuns often liked to call on kids who did not know the answer. I remember holding my hand up for so long that I had to support it with the other one. All the time I was saying “S’ter, s’ter” to get her attention. Other kids were doing the same.

English was not my favorite subject, but I loved diagramming sentences. Many students hated it, but it just seemed to come naturally to me.

I was shocked to learn that most of the kids were paid by their parents for A’s and B’s on their report cards. Mine wanted to know what the problem was when I got a B. I never received a C except in music and art. I felt a little cheated by the lack of remuneration, but I did not complain to my parents.

After a few years it was evident that, while I had no difficulty at all with any of the other subjects, I had absolutely zero talent for art. The lack did not bother me. While the teachers droned on about something that I already understood, I often drew battle scenes that involved lots of strafing of stick figures by stick airplanes. I was only marginally better at music, which at QHRS was identified with singing ability.

In fourth grade I could no longer see the blackboard very well. The teacher told my mom that I probably needed glasses. She was definitely right. My first pair had grey plastic frames. By the time that I finished high school my vision was 20-400 in one eye and 20-450 in the other. However, I could see OK with my glasses, and I could read with them or without them.

May and September in Kansas City are hot, and the school had no air conditioning. The teachers opened some windows from the top using a long stick with a hook on it. Flies then invaded the rooms in substantial numbers. I was a ruthless murderer of the interlopers, mostly with my bare hands. I was equally adept with the clapping method and the one-handed grab and squeeze. It grossed out the girls, but no one complained.

A guy in our class, Mike O’Shea, claimed that he had been run over by a truck. He said that he fell down in the street as the truck was speeding toward him. It was too late to get up, and so he positioned himself so that the wheels missed him. By flattening himself he avoided the undercarriage. This was the first time in my life that I disbelieved what someone told me. Who knows? Maybe it did happen.

Even if it did, I could top it. Everyone in the class witnessed the time that I ran over a car.

No, no. It's not really Red Rover unless you play on asphalt. — No, no. You have to play Red Rover on asphalt.

Recess: We had two fifteen-minute recesses, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. We also had thirty minutes to play outdoors after lunch. The lower grades played on the asphalt. The upper grades played on the dirt behind the schools. Popular activities for the boys were Red Rover, dodgeball, beanbag tag, and a self-describing game called Kill the man with the ball. We would have played the usual sports, but there was not enough time to get organized.

The girls mostly jumped rope while singing or played pat-a-cake while singing. Their squandering of precious recess time with such meaningless endeavors was the main reason that I had such a low opinion of them.

Red Rover and kill the man with the ball caused a lot of bruises, scrapes, and torn garments. However, the one time that I got really hurt at recess was while playing beanbag tag. Someone else threw the bag at me when I was running full speed on the asphalt. I neglected to account for a car that was parked there. There was a lot of blood. The wound required nineteen stitches, but they were on the inside of my right cheek. There was no scar, and it healed fast.

I always title this story “The time that I ran over a car.” By the way, I leapt at the last second, and the beanbag missed me. The guy who was “it” had to crawl under the car to get the beanbag.

When we were in the upper grades, and the springtime weather was nice enough, all the boys would sprint to our designated area to play baseball. The play resumed exactly where we had left off at the end of the previous recess, which may have been the previous Friday. Not a second was wasted.

They did not happen often, but fights sometimes broke out at recess. They were usually preceded by an exchange of pushes and exclamations, the most common of which was “Oh, yeah?” When the first punch was thrown, a circle was formed around the contestants. Eventually a nun would come, blow her whistle, and shame the pugilists into ceasing.

I was in my share of fights. The only one that I remember losing was not at school. Michael Bortnick, who lived behind me and was bigger than I was, pinned me down and then beat on me until I said “uncle.” I went to my mom and complained. She said, “Well, if he is bigger and stronger than you, you shouldn’t fight with him.” I was dumbstruck.

I remember my last fight, which was in the fifth grade. My opponent was Tom Guilfoyle. We had been fighting for a few seconds when he threw a haymaker at my face. He missed, and I continued to fight. However, at the moment that his right fist went sailing past my face I made a resolution to stay away from fights. I never came close to getting in another one. Even in my dotage I still avoid verbal arguments.

If we had to stay inside, there were board games and card games for us to play. I remember that in the second grade, I played checkers many evenings and weekends with my dad. I never won a single game. I also played checkers against my classmates at recess, and I never lost.

I remember playing a card game called Authors. I think that when you collected three or four books by the same author, you could win points. It resembled Rummy. By the time that I read any of these books or poems at least I knew what the authors looked like and the names of some of their other works. I think that I eventually read every one of these authors except, of course, Louisa Mae Alcott.

I also seem to remember Chinese checkers. There must have been quite a few other games, but I don’t remember them.

Field Trips: My recollection is that the entire school attended The Ten Commandments and Ben Hur at a big theater. Maybe they limited attendance to the older grades. I got very little out of these movies. Everything but the chariot race bored me. Maybe I was too young; maybe I just don’t like religious movies; maybe I don’t like Charlton Heston.

I don’t remember the year, but my class went to a matinee concert by the Kansas City Philharmonic. I enjoyed that. I also liked our eighth grade field trip to the Natural History Museum at KU.

This wasn’t a field trip, but a small acting company came to our school and put on a melodrama. I thought that it was awful.

1. The most commonly used was A Catechism of Christian Doctrine, Prepared and Enjoined by Order of the Third Council of Baltimore, generally called the Baltimore Catechism. I think that the one that we used was slightly different.

1961-1962 QHRS 8th Grade

Posted on July 27, 2020 by Mike

Last year at the Queen. Continue reading →

The enrollment at Queen of the Holy Rosary School (QHRS) increased dramatically while I was there. By the time that I was in the eighth grade, almost one hundred kids were in the graduating class. The school buildings still exist in 2020, but QHRS has been replaced by a new school called John Paul II School, which serves two parishes, Queen and St. Pius X. The athletic teams, known in my day as the Rockets, are now called (I think) the Huskies. I counted twenty-one 8th grade graduates in the 2020 class, only eight of whom were boys. The school’s website says that they compete in the CYO football league, but I don’t see how.

The great tragedy is that when QHRS was eliminated, so apparently were all of the records. So, this website may be the only extant source of information about my heroics on the gridiron.

Final report cards in 2020 were delivered via something called Educonnect. Father Ryan, who read aloud every student’s report card in every six-week period of all eight years that I attended QHRS, must have rolled over in his grave.

The 2020 staff comprised twenty-five women and two men. In my day almost all the teachers were Ursuline nuns. We had a nurse, a Spanish teacher, and a math teacher who were lay women. Perhaps there was one more woman. There were definitely no men.

The JPII school website now mentions core classes and “specials”. At QHRS every class was a core class. When I was in eighth grade we attended mass at 8:00 every day. Our classes were religion, English, math, Kansas history, and Spanish. Ms. Jancey taught math, and Ms. Goldsich taught Spanish. The rest of the classes were taught by Sr. Ralph and Sr. Kevin. It seems reasonable to expect that we would have been taught some kind of science and/or civics, but I have no memory of either. Since we got grades in music and art, some time must have been allotted for them.

There was definitely no phys ed. We had two recesses, which I think lasted thirty minutes each, and a lunch hour. So, maybe we only had time for five or six classes.

By the way, there was no food served at lunch, but you could buy milk for almost nothing. I had a big grey lunch box, and I am positive that my mother prepared the best lunches.

What did I learn? I learned a technique for approximating square roots that I actually used in my first summer job. I learned a lot of trivia about Kansas that no one at the University of Michigan knew. I learned to count and to say a few phrases in Spanish. There probably was other stuff that stuck, but I cannot pinpoint any.

My eighth grade graduating class had close to one hundred students, but I only attended classes with half of them. We had two groups, dumb and dumber. I never took any classes with any of the students in the dumber group. If they did not participate in any activities, I might not know them.

We sat in alphabetical order in the same classroom all day long. The teachers came to us. So I will list the students in that order. Here are the boys that I can remember:

Ricky Ahrent was on the basketball team.
Bernie Bianchino was on the football team.
Tommy Bitner
Brennan Botkin
Andy Brown, who had asthma, played on the 1960 football team. I don’t remember him on the ’61 team. He might have been in the other class.
Bob Dalton was definitely not in my eighth-grade class. He might not even have been at QHRS that year. We had been very good friends several years earlier, when he went by Leo. His parents owned a set of greenhouses in which they grew flowers. I was shocked to discover that Dalton’s Flowers is still thriving in Overland Park in 2021.
I think that Joe Fox was on the basketball team.
Mike Farmer had red hair.
Gary Garrison was in Boy Scouts. He was also in my class at Rockhurst.
Jim Glenn was one of the linemen on the left side for the football team.
Tom Guilfoyle had a brother in the other 8th grade class and another brother in 7th grade. I think that Tom played basketball.
Arthur Gutierez. Nobody seemed to recognize that his dark complexion and last name might have indicated that his family might have come from a former Spanish colony.
Joe Hrzenak was on the football team.
Mike Kirk was on the football team. He was also in the Boy Scouts.
Joe Landis was on the football team.
Jim Neal was on the football team and Bauman’s Red Goose Shoes.
Denny McDermott was on the football team.
Mike O’Shea was on the basketball team.
Larry Pickett was on the basketball team.
Gary Renner arrived for the last two years. He was a pretty good friend. He went to Rockhurst, but he was not in my homeroom class.
Kent Reynolds was on the basketball team. He was the only person who was in the same class that I was for all eight years.
John Rubin’s Wikipedia entry is here.
John Rutherford was on the basketball team.
Mark Schoneman
John Skuban
Mark Smith
Mike Wiedower sat behind me.
Pat Wise played on the basketball team. His dad was the coach.

I had virtually no interactions with the girls who sat on the other side of the room. Here are the ones that I can remember

Pat Clooney was, I think, the girl who read the dictionary.
Linda Ernie
Mary Ann Furst
Mary Ann Gallagher
Antoinette Garcia moved before 8th grade. For some reason she was considered to have cooties.
Ann Grady
Anita Habiger
Patty Lally was my foe in the spelling bee in seventh grade. She must have been in the other class.
Christine Lutz
Mary Pat Maher
Mary Margaret Martin was big.
Barbara Miller was a very good singer.
Nancy Miller
Vicki Morris was very tall.
Mary Mulcahy worked on the News and Views. She called me at home once. I don’t remember why.
Kathy O’Connor
Gloria Shorten was the shortest person and the first girl to begin to fill out her sweaty.
Sally Shawberger
Barbara Yeado.

Of all these people, I have only had subsequent contact with three: Gary Garrison, Gary Renner, and John Rubin, who all went to Rockhurst High School, as I did. I also saw Barbara Yeado perform in a musical put on by her high school and Rockhurst. I think that my cousin Terry Cernech was also involved in it.

I partook in almost every available extracurricular activity.

I often served at mass (i.e., was an altar boy), sometimes at the mandatory 8 am mass, sometimes at 6 am. The best duty was a funeral or wedding; sometimes there were tips.
I was “editor” of the school newspaper, News and Views. Sr. Kevin actually did most of the work, but I did write a poem and an editorial. I also remember interviewing some guys who were trying to involve the school in some sort of scheme. I also learned the five W’s plus How with a Wow in the lead.
I played alto saxophone in the school band, which was led by Rocco DeMart. The only other band member whom I remember was Sammy Caccioppo on trombone.

The easiest safety patrol job was the crosswalk on 71st St. Hank Bauer, the baseball player, lived in one of those houses right across the street from the school. — The easiest safety patrol job was the crosswalk on 71st St. Hank Bauer, the baseball player lived in one of those houses right across the street from the school.

I was a captain of the safety patrol. Before and after school we would stop traffic on Metcalf and 71st St. to let pedestrians cross. Many kids walked to school. Metcalf was a very busy four-lane state highway. We wore white belts and carried sticks with flags of yellow and green, not stop signs. My mother did not like the idea of children being used to direct traffic, but no one was ever injured on my watch.
I played football and basketball. There are separate blog posts for these adventures.
I was in a choir that gave a concert for parents. I was not allowed to whistle. I just pretended. We sang, among other things, “Donkey Serenade” from the movie Firefly. It has remained one of my favorites. Jack Jones’s fabulous rendition is here:
I was also in the boys’ choir that sang “O Holy Night” on Christmas Eve. It was led by Fr. Finnerty. I was astounded that they let me participate in either of these choirs. My worst grades were always in music and art.
I was a patrol leader in the Boy Scouts. Our group was named the White Buffalo patrol after the Indian legend featured on an episode of Rin Tin Tin. Mary Ann Gallagher’s younger brother was in this patrol.
I was in a Great Books Club that met occasionally. I don’t remember any specifics at all.

I took the bus to school. When I had to arrive early or stay late I rode my bike or walked unless it was bad weather. If I had to serve the 6:00 mass, my mom drove me and picked me up. I doubt that I ever expressed my appreciation for this.

We had an election for the meaningless title of president of the class. QHRS did not in any way resemble a democracy. It was a monarchy; the queen was Sr. Dominica, the principal.

As usual, I was nominated by the boys’ party. I don’t remember which girl defeated me. I don’t blame the dozens of girls who voted against me. I was definitely “stuck up.” I had little use for them, and I did not care much what any of them thought of me.

We put on a panel discussion of the United Nations. I remember that someone in the audience asked why the US contributed so much more than other nations to it. I suggested that it might be because we were the richest country. My answer got a round of applause.

Everyone got to participate in one debate that was judged by the class. The topic for our match was whether to eliminate homework. My teammates were Linda Ernie and Joe Hrzenak. We each gave one speech. Joe went first, then the negative, then Linda, then the negative, then me, then the negative. Our plan was to replace homework with more time at school. Our argument was that help from teachers was better than help from parents and siblings. I can think of several good arguments against this approach, but the negative did not present any. They just read their prepared statements that praised the value work done after classes. Nevertheless, we lost the vote of the students. Despite the result, this activity sparked my interest.

I started listening to pop radio at some point. The stations were WHB (710), which produced a Top 40 list that was available at record stores, and KUDL (1380), which produced the Great 38.

Field Day was always the highlight of the year for me. We stayed outside all day! One year I was playing left field in a softball game. For some reason I did not have my baseball glove, which I ordinarily brought to school every day in the spring. Someone hit a popup down the third base line. I took off for it at full speed. At the last second I pulled off my cap and caught the ball in it on a dead run. They should not have allowed this, but, after a big confab, they did.

My most ignominious defeat came on the 8th grade field day. In the broad jump competition I won the boys’ half; Ann Grady won the girls’ half. I then had to jump against her, and I came up a fraction of an inch short. I should have congratulated her, but I did not. At the time I did NOT blame my shoes, which were orange (?) and leather. I don’t know why I wore them. Maybe I had no sneakers, which were called “tennis shoes” in KC in the sixties.

De La Salle High School tried to recruit 8th grade boys by sponsoring a math competition. QHRS always participated. Ms. Jancey one day made an off-the-cuff list of boys in our class who she thought should participate. She named everyone except for Joe Hrzenak, the universally acknowledged worst student, and me. I was going to go anyway, but the contest was canceled because of snow.

Rockhurst High School did not need to recruit. Instead they gave a test to determine whom they would accept. At least twenty boys from QHRS took the test, but only four of us were accepted. Rockhurst gave ten scholarships based on test scores. None of us got one, but three of us (Rubin, Garrison, and I) placed in the top (of six) classes.

QHRS also gave a scholarship. We had to write an essay on why we should get it. Mine argued that the prize should go to Joe Fox, whose father had recently died. The winner was John Rubin, who essentially said that if he won, he would chain himself to his desk and avoid all human contact for four years. It made me gag.

If I had been there, she would not have even gotten one.

Co-ed parties were strictly prohibited before 8th grade graduation. Somehow John Rubin got a papal dispensation for a Halloween party for six of us. I discovered there that my big mouth was a tremendous advantage when dunking for apples. No one else could grasp an apple in their teeth. I captured all the apples and won by acclimation.

Sally Shawberger threw a party soon after graduation. I was invited. Since I had my last cosmetic surgery on my lip scheduled for the same day, I was rescued from this prospective nightmare. I think that this fortuitous scheduling might have been recompense from God for attending church at least six times a week for eight years.

I played some golf and mowed some lawns over the summer. In 1962 the family moved from 7717 Maple in Prairie Village to 8800 Fairway in Leawood. The new house had a MUCH bigger lawn, and it was within easy walking distance of both the Ward Parkway Mall and Rockhurst High School’s new building on State Line.

The red rectangle is the mall. The blue rectangle is Rockhurst.

The event that I most remember was when I was minding my sister Jamie, who was six years old at the time. Suddenly I started gagging. Eventually I was able to pull a strip of gauze that was three or four feet long out of my throat. I had no idea what it was, but I felt OK when it was over. Jamie was horrified.

On her arrival my mother told me that this was padding that they put in my nose when they operated. She said that the doctor had told her that this would happen. I don’t know why she did not warn me.

The chicks really go for a guy with an OA sash.

I went with Troop 295 to Camp Nash for a week, as I had the previous summers. This one was memorable because I was chosen to join the Order of the Arrow. It was fairly dramatic. The whole troop was gathered in a big circle around a campfire one night. The scoutmasters walked around the circle and stopped behind one of the scouts. They then slapped him hard on the right shoulder three times.

All of those selected were then brought to another campfire where they were told the Order’s password, which is called “the admonition”, and apprised of the initiation ceremony. Each selected scout was escorted in the dark to a separate place in the woods and given a blanket, an egg, two matches, and a canteen of water. They were told to make a camp, sleep, cook the egg, and eat it. In the morning each had to find his way back to his troop.

I thought that this was very cool, and I was proud to be able to bring the extra match back to my to our camp. Thank goodness that it did not rain. It seldom did in Kansas in the summer in those days.

If you want to know the secrets of the society, you can learn them on the Internet. However, you must know the admonition, AND be able to key it in with all lower-case letters and no spaces or hyphens. I remember the admonition, but no one told me how to spell it, and it is not a bit obvious.

Wavablog

Memoirs, bridge, popes, travel, and other stuff

Tag Archives: Guilfoyle, Tom

1985-1988 TSI: GrandAd: The System/36 Clients

1955-1961 Part 1: QHRS

1961-1962 QHRS 8th Grade