1974-1976 U-M: Academics

Posted on February 22, 2021 by Mike

Taking classes in subjects in which I had little interest. Continue reading →

Graduate school in the speech communications department¹ at U-M was a joke. The department had several areas of study. The only thing that they had in common was that they all had something to do with making noises with one’s mouth. One of them was fairly rigorous—speech therapy, which dealt with solving the problems of people who have difficulty making certain sounds. All the others—communication theory, rhetoric, mass communication, theater, and oral interpretation (reading aloud)—were all squishy, with an abundance of theories and almost no science. The worst was oral interp. The students would read something aloud, and the professor would tell them what they did wrong. Often they would read a translation of a work originally written in another language! How could anyone take this seriously?

Because I was eligible for seven years of veterans’ benefits, I was reimbursed by the Veterans Administration for my tuition. The way that it worked was a little perverse. I was paying in-state tuition, and the rate was a little less than the amount of my benefits. However, if I dropped or failed classes, the payment from the Veterans Administration was not adjusted. They paid for classes, not success in classes.

As an undergraduate I had taken a few graduate-level classes in math and Greek. They were very challenging. I struggled to pass them. In contrast, none of the graduate-level speech classes that I took in my second stint at U-M were as difficult as my freshman math classes. I found it ridiculous that people who passed these speech classes were somehow on a par with people who had mastered math or science. I had very little interest in subjects I was learning, I devoted the absolute minimum time possible, and I still skated through with no problem.

I discovered that my previous approach to selecting classes may have been misguided. As an undergraduate I avoided papers like the plague. Graduate students in “social sciences” cannot avoid writing papers. I discovered that I was good at the type of expository writing that professors appreciate.

The very first class that I took, Introduction to Graduate Studies, provided the most entertaining session that I encountered in my ten years of college courses. The teacher was Rich Enos², a rhetorician who had just received his PhD from Indiana University. The graduate students in speech at U-M came from all areas. So, some people wanted to learn about radio and television, some were studying film techniques, some wished to become actors, some wanted to read aloud (!), and a few, like me, allegedly wanted to learn the theory of communication or rhetoric. We were a really diverse group. Nevertheless all new students were required to take the same Intro course.

Most lessons in this course were real snoozers. We learned about the style required for papers and a few other things that I have long ago forgotten.

Nose-to-nose or mouth-to-mouth, and what is that Mexican in the corner doing?

I will never forget however, the class conducted by guest lecturer Bob Norton³, who was asked by Rich to explain the use of statistics in speech. Instead, he chose for his topic the research in “Proxemics”, which deals with the effect of space between two people and their ability to communicate. He said that the measurement of the distance between two people was very controversial.

One of the currently accepted paradigms was the “nose-to-nose” method. This approach yields very different results from those of the “mouth-to-mouth” method, according to Norton, if one is talking about two Jews rather than two Chinamen (his words, not mine). He then proceeded to draw a lot of stick figures on the board illustrating problems of various types involving escalators, staircases, and, in one case, a Mexican peeing in a corner.

Almost all of the other students sat in stunned silence during this presentation. A few were even taking notes. I was laughing so hard that at one point I literally fell out of my desk. Don Goldman, who was sitting next to me, snickered a bit, but his heritage as a Southern gentleman prevented full appreciation of the farce.

When the presentation was over, Norton opened the floor to questions. One woman raised her hand and, when recognized, asked, “How do you do a T test?”

Norton answered, “Are you in theater?”

She admitted as much,. He said that that confirmed his suspicions, and he immediately asked if there were any other questions.

She insisted, “I really want to know.”

Norton waited a few seconds and then declared, “I don’t know. I always have to look it up.”

I have not done justice to this presentation. He must have devoted quite a bit of time to working on it. It was the most outrageous thing that I had ever witnessed in any medium. Enos was stunned at first and furiously angry by the end.

I spent a bit of time with both Enos and Norton, separately, of course—they did not get along. Dr. Enos was shocked to find out that I could read both Latin and Greek but had little interest in the ancient writings on rhetoric. I was equally shocked that he could not but did have.

Dr. Norton spent a lot of time with one PhD student who was using Norton’s “Communicator Style” construct in his dissertation. Every other student in the department was scared to death of him. Late one afternoon I went into his office, which was on the other side of the building, and asked him to explain Communicator Style (which now has at least 657 citations on the Internet). He opened the bottom drawer on the left side of his desk and extracted a bottle of sherry. He offered me a glass, but I demurred.

He explained that he had developed a series of questions that supposedly measured psychological trait. He postulated nine traits—dominant, dramatic, contentious, animated, impression-leaving, relaxed, attentive, open, and friendly. I don’t know what basis was cited for limiting the construct to these particular traits, and I don’t know how he determined that the questions actually measured the traits. In both cases he might have built on someone else’s work.

Norton’s contribution involved applying a statistical tool that someone had developed to show the “distance” between the traits in a group of subjects in two dimensions. There was not too much to this; it simply used the correlations between traits and produced a chart that minimized the tension between the thirty-six sets of correlations (dominant with the other eight, dramatic with the other seven, etc.). Traits were arrayed so that they were closer to the ones that they were highly correlated with and distant from the ones with which they had negative correlations.

A three-dimensional depiction would have been more accurate, and, for all that I know, he may have tried this. However, displaying it on paper for a book or journal article would be problematic. Going beyond three dimensions would be even more accurate, but no one would be able to envision the maps in n-space.

After I understood his approach, I objected that these depictions didn’t mean anything. Not only did they not represent how the brain—or anything else—was organized. They were actually less meaningful than the raw statistics. That is, simply listing the correlations between the various traits was more meaningful than visually depicting the distances between all traits in the construct. People allegedly felt that they understood the relationships if they could see a picture rather than a set of numbers.

He said that I missed the point. His Communicator Style construct could be used to study virtually any group of people who were willing to fill out his questionnaire. For example, he could take a group of debate coaches (or football coaches or politicians or members of any identifiable class) whom he could assess by some means. Since the construct had been accepted in the literature. he could write a paper that contrasted the communicator style of the successful ones with the construct of the less successful ones. The possibilities were limitless.

At this point he opened the bottom drawer on the right side of his desk and showed me a set of eight or ten papers that he had already written using this approach. He told me that he planned to submit one or two a year to various journals. I admitted to being impressed with his initiative and his laziness.

Evidently he went through with his plan. He published a book on this subject in 1978.

I took Dr. Norton’s statistics class. There were only four students: myself, Goldman, a woman who had attended Tulane and was working on her PhD, and a guy from the mass media area. Norton actually taught the material this time, but the other students had little or no exposure to math since high school, and they were definitely at sea in this class. I helped Goldman.

Norton invited some researchers to present their findings to the class. These guys had administered a lot of questionnaires to people in Toledo. I don’t remember the details, but they had expected to find a correlation between some answers and the result of some event. They were disappointed, but they did find an unexpectedly strong correlation between some other answers and something else.

Norton asked me what I thought about the presentation. I replied that it showed that if you get enough data, you are bound to find something. What they found may have served as the launching point for a separate study, but since what they found did not agree with the null hypothesis, it was not per se meaningful.

The statistics class only had one test, which was multiple-choice. Norton told everyone that he was going to penalize guessing. Did he ever! The scoring was straightforward: number right minus number wrong. I got a pretty good score even though I protested that one of his “correct” answers required a horse in a race to finish both first and second simultaneously. He saw my point, but he was too lazy to change the score. Goldman scored much lower. The woman’s score was just above zero. The mass media guy would have done better to turn in a blank sheet of paper. He had more wrong answers than right ones. Imagine the effect of getting a negative score on a final exam in graduate school.

My recollection is that no one signed up for this class the next semester.

The only class that I really liked was a seminar in Group Dynamics in the psychology department. It was taught by Dorwin Cartwright⁴. Our textbook, which was also called Group Dynamics, was written by Cartwright. Much of the time in class was spent explaining the ideas of his mentor, Kurt Lewin (pronounced leh VEEN), who was largely responsible for bringing statistical methods to the social sciences.

I was most interested in the research about “shift to risk”, a theory that groups are more likely to accept risky outcomes than individuals. Lewin helped design the original set of ten questions that had been used by many researchers to explore this topic. Some of these studies formed the basis for the best-selling book, Victims of Groupthink by Irving Janis. My final paper for Cartwright’s class was a review of this book, which, in my opinion ignored some important facts about the decision-making processes in both the Bay of Pigs incident and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I don’t remember too much about my other classes.

The course in Classical Rhetoric was taught by Dr. Enos. I got little or nothing out of it.
Rhetoric of Social Movements was taught by a professor whose name I don’t remember. He liked me, and he especially liked the fact that I chose the worldwide anarchist movement for the topic of my final paper. However, he did not like the paper itself, which used Transactional Analysis to dissect the oratory. I concluded that the movement was doomed to failure from the start. He said that if I were right, it would be incoherent, which I certainly think was the case. You can’t herd cats, and you can’t organize anarchists.
I took an undergraduate radio-television class overseen by another grad student. It had two projects. One I was completely unprepared for because I had been out of town on a debate trip. I extemporized a how-to presentation on filing debate evidence. The instructor liked it. On the other one, which was a short radio play in the style of Bob and Ray⁵, I worked fairly hard, and Don Goldman co-starred. The instructor didn’t think much of it, but the class really enjoyed it when he played the recording for them. I suspect that he thought that it had been serious.
I missed a lot of classes in a programming course in Algol. When I finally showed up for a class, the instructor made me go to the blackboard (actually green) to explain something. It was embarrassing. I dropped the class rather than risk another such event.
Don Goldman taught a course in directing forensics. Many of the debaters were also in it. None of us ever attended the classes. One day Don came to me and said that he might get into trouble if he gave all the debaters A’s. I told him to give me the B. I did not care two cents about my grades, and they were all concerned about getting into a good law school.
I must have taken another class or two, but I can’t recall any.

One day I was walking rather rapidly on the sidewalk on North University. Books and stacks of papers occupied both hands. The lens popped out of my glasses and disappeared into a snowbank. I made a cursory search but found no trace.

About two months later I was walking in the same area and I spotted a lens in the grassy area between the sidewalk and the street. It was scored by deep scratches, but it was definitely the one that I had lost.

Masters candidates at U-M had a choice of writing a thesis or taking more classes. Since the VA paid me to take classes but did not pay me to research and write, I selected the leisurely method of taking more classes. I got my degree in 1976.

1. The speech department no longer exists. Most of the areas were appended to the journalism department. The resulting department is now called “Journalism and Screen Studies”. U-M now also has a communication department. I am not exactly sure what is in it. The theater and speech therapy areas are, I think, in other “schools”. Theater is in the School of Music, Theater, and Dance. The speech therapy people have their own department called “Speech-Language Pathology”, which I think is in the School of Medicine. The debate team is not associated with any of these departments.

2. According to his LinkedIn page Rich left Michigan in 1979 and taught at Carnegie-Mellon University for sixteen years. Since 1995 he has been at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth.

3. Bob left Michigan some time before 1978. He spent his academic career at the University of Wisconsin.

4. Dorwin Cartwright died in 2008. He has a short Wikipedia page.

5. Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding produced hilarious radio skits for the long-running NBC show, Monitor Radio. They were interviews or pseudo-dramas in which all of the characters were played by one of them or the other. My dad was a loyal listener to Monitor Radio. I found most of its offerings boring, but I loved Bob and Ray. I still have a copy of their book, Write if You Get Work.

1966-1970 Miscellaneous Events

Posted on February 19, 2021 by Mike

Things unrelated to life at U-M. Continue reading →

The Leishmans lived at 8801 Fairway, which was directly across the street from our house.

During each of the four years that I was an undergraduate at Michigan I came home for the Christmas holiday. A very unusual event occurred in one of those holidays. I think that it was the first one, 1966, but it might have been 1967. During the fall I had been alerted by my parents that my cousin and my classmate at Rockhurst High School, Terry Cernech, was getting married. The bride, Debbie Leishman, lived directly across the street from my family’s house in Leawood. They wanted me to be an usher at their wedding.

Terry, who lived nearly twenty miles away in Sugar Creek, had met Debbie during the production of a musical that featured performers and crew from Rockhurst High School, which both Terry and I attended, and Debbie’s high school, Notre Dame de Sion, a Catholic preparatory school for girls. Strange as it might seem, I had absolutely nothing to do with them getting together.

Terry and I were seniors when the play was staged. Debbie was a year or two younger. I am therefore pretty sure that she was still in high school at the time of the wedding. Terry was in college. His Facebook page says that he “studied at University of Notre Dame.”

The ceremony might have been held here at St. Ann’s church in Independence.

If there was a bachelor’s party, I was not invited, or maybe my parents neglected to tell me about it. I am pretty sure that the wedding ceremony was at a Catholic Church. Since the Leishmans were not Catholics, I am quite sure that the ceremony was not at our parish, Curé of Ars. So, I figure that it must have been held at the Cerneches’ church, St. Ann’s in Independence, MO, Harry Truman’s home town. I am almost certain that Terry went to grade school at St. Ann’s school.

So, why did the happy couple choose December for this occasion? Well, it probably wasn’t for tax reasons—both the bride and groom were full-time students. Everyone knew the answer, of course. In the language of the day, they had to get married.

Terry’s brother John was the best man. Before the ceremony he talked for a while with my parents. He said that he had been up all night talking with Terry. According to John, his brother had ingested a large amount of “Dutch courage” to prepare himself for the big event. John was dubious about the whole situation.

My job as usher was trivial. People sat where they wanted. I don’t recall that I had to wear a tuxedo or any other kind of costume. My real responsibilities began at the reception where I discovered that no one in the Leishman household was talking to anyone on the Cernech side. My dad did not get along particularly well with either Terry’s father, my Uncle Dean, or Mr. Leishman. So, I was drafted to pass messages between the two patriarchs. I do not precisely recall any particular message, but the flavor of most of them was something like the following:

“Tell that son of a bitch that if he thinks that he is going to …”
“He said what? Tell that worthless sack of shit that that will never happen until hell freezes over.”
“That’s NOT what we agreed on! You tell that two-faced bastard …”
“That’s it. I’ve had enough of that asshole. Just tell him to shove it.”

Needless to say, I sanitized the messages a bit before I delivered them. For a while I found this farce slightly amusing, but eventually it wore me down.

The marriage did not last very long. I don’t know what became of any of the Leishmans. Terry remarried; in 2021 he lives in Springfield, MO.

During the exam period right before Christmas, in December of 1967 (I think) I came down with influenza. When I have recounted this story, I called what I had the Russian flu. However, apparently the disease, which started in November in Michigan and Florida, was actually popularly known as the Hong Kong Flu. I somehow got through my exams, but I was completely wiped out. I slept through the entire plane ride to KC, and then I spent another day or so in bed at my parents’ house. This was my last real illness until my tuxedo-wearing cat Jake gave me cat-scratch disease in the mid-eighties.

A different member of my high school class, John Williams, also got married and had a son while he was going to college. He invited me to attend a play that his younger brother was in. This must have happened either over the Christmas break in my senior year or during one of the summers. John was driving, and for some reason his wife was not there.

At some point John was talking about the toddler. When I asked him a question, I mistakenly called the kid “your brother”. At least three of my acquaintances fathered children while I was in college, but I never actually saw any of them. I was so immature and aloof that I could not internalize the fact that people my age were reproducing.

One baby that I did see was Dr. Colburn’s youngest daughter. When the child, whose name escapes me, was baptized, I stood in for the real godfather, who could not make the trip to Ann Arbor. The event occurred in September of either 1968 or 1969. This was the last baptism that I ever attended.

In 2020 I discovered evidence of two events that I am quite certain that I never attended. I found these two football tickets among my dad’s possessions after he died in 2011.

They did not even call it the Super Bowl.

I have no recollection at all that he had attended one of the most famous football games of all time, the 1969 Super Bowl. This was the game between the New York Jets, quarterbacked by Joe Namath, and the Baltimore Colts, led by Johnny Unitas. The Colts, who had defeated the Cleveland Browns 34-0 in the NFL¹ championship game, were heavily favored, but the brash Namath guaranteed that the Jets would win, and they did.

In fact, it was not a close game. The defense of the Jets completely stymied Unitas and the Colts, who were held to a field goal in the fourth quarter. The final score was 16-3.

The game was played in the Orange Bowl in Miami, FL, on Sunday, January 12, 1969. I would have been back in Ann Arbor by then. I have no recollection that my dad went to this game. Of course, it had no effect on me; I was probably either at a debate tournament, returning from one, or busily preparing for one.

I wonder if my mom also attended this game. My dad often traveled on business, and some of those events included entertainment for the local salesmen. If this was part of the company’s annual convention, then my mom also probably came. In that case, they would have probably needed to get someone to stay at the house with Jamie, who had been a teenager for eight days when the game was played. Surely this would have been a topic of discussion over the holidays, but I have no memory of it whatsoever.

I definitely do remember the other game.

Michigan played against Southern Cal in the Rose Bowl in my senior year. I watched this frustrating nail-biter at home in Leawood. I am pretty sure that both of my parents attended, but I don’t remember if they left Jamie with me (I was twenty-one, and she was almost fourteen), or if someone stayed with us.

Southern Cal was undefeated. Michigan was coming off of its best game ever, the upset of undefeated Ohio State in Ann Arbor. I had missed that game because of a debate tournament in Chicago.

Both teams in the Rose Bowl had very stout defenses and unimaginative offenses. The game was tied 3-3 at the half. The only touchdown was a thirty-three yard pass from Jimmy Jones to Bob Chandler. Southern Cal won 10-3..

The backs of both of these tickets have diagrams of the seating in the stadiums. In both cases the tickets are on about the twenty-five-yard line, a little less than halfway up. Those are very good seats! Note that the price of the Rose Bowl ticket was only $8.

My two fondest memories of Jamie occurred, I think, during one of the breaks from college. The first one was in 1966, the year that Barry Sadler’s song, “Ballad of the Green Berets”² topped the charts. We invented a dance to accompany this song. It involved standing at attention next to one another. Then one of us would stand on tip-toes for a beat while the other squatted. Then we returned to attention. On the following beats we reversed roles, and so on until we could not keep straight faces any longer.

At some point when I was not paying attention Jamie learned to play the guitar. She had a Bob Dylan songbook that contained the words and music for a dozen or two of his early songs. A few times we made music together; she would play the chords and I would sing. I can carry a tune, the songs were in a key that stayed in my range, and I could do a passable imitation of Dylan’s voice. We should have recorded one of these songs—I had a tape recorder. It would be fun to hear what we sounded like.

1. The NFL and the AFL had not yet merged. The first four Super Bowl featured the champions of each league.

2. This horribly unimaginative song tied “California Dreamin'” as Billboard’s top song of 1966. Surely this was the worst song ever to become so popular. Sadler was a medic in Vietnam. His one hit made him a lot of money, but his life subsequently went quickly downhill. In 1979 he was charged with second-degree murder and pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in Nashville. He went to prison for thirty days. In September of 1988 he was shot in the head in a taxicab in Guatemala City. He died early the following year.

1972-1974 Connecticut: Sue and Mike

Posted on February 3, 2021 by Mike

Could a relationship between a preppy lad from Kansas and a country lass from Connecticut last? Continue reading →

For the few weeks that I worked in the Variable Annuity area of the Life Actuarial Department at the Hartford, my desk was behind Sue Comparetto’s, and we shared a phone. She was the head clerk in Bob Riley’s section. This meant that she was the only person there entrusted with an electronic calculator. Those silent marvels would soon replace the gigantic noisy Fridens, but they still required an AC connection and cost about $1,000.

I am pretty sure that Sue’s first impression of me was negative. Our only noteworthy interaction was when I was called upon to talk with someone on the phone. My desk had no phone; I had to use hers. I never called anyone, and most of the calls that I received were nerve-wracking; I perspired all over the receiver. I wiped it off before I gave it back, but it was still rather gross.

I did not know Sue well, but what I heard about her was somewhat disconcerting. She lived in East Hampton, CT, with Diane DeFreitas and, I think, another young woman. She did not have a car. A “Cuban plumber” sometimes gave her a ride part of the way to the Hartford. She hitchhiked the rest of the way. She had picked up a black Labrador puppy at a flea market and named him Siddhartha. At some point she must have realized that this situation was not sustainable, and she took the dog to the pound. Someone else may have catalyzed the decision.

I remember that one day both she and Diane decided to dress slutty for work. Sue did not like dress codes. She told me that she had been suspended from high school for vigorously protesting the dress code. Her parents were not amused by this behavior.

Oh, yeah. One other thing—Sue smoked. My dad smoked, but hardly anyone else with whom I had ever spent much time did. John Sigler also spoke, but he hardly ever lit up in my presence.

After I was assigned to the Individual Pensions area I only saw Sue in passing and at the Friday evening gatherings at the Shoreham Hotel’s bar, situated very conveniently between the Aetna and the Hartford. At some point one of the most important events of my life occurred, and yet I have no clear memory of the details. For some reason Tom Herget set me up with Sue for some event. I don’t remember when it was or even what we did. I have a vague recollection of the Aetna Diner (Sue liked their moussaka) on Farmington Avenue, but maybe that was on a different occasion. I am pretty sure that Sue told me on that occasion that I reminded her of her husband, and she was astonished to learn that my middle name was Dennis. She explained that her husband’s name was Dennis, and his middle name was Michael.

I don’t think that I previously knew that she had been married. This explained why she did not look even vaguely Italian. I certainly did not know that she was still legally married. I had to make a snap judgment whether being with her was a mortal sin or a venial sin. It was a tough call, but I was pretty sure that any further contact would move the needle over the line. For twelve years I had attended Catholic schools, and I had never missed going to mass on Sunday. Not once. I probably confessed more impure thoughts than I actually had. You have to confess something.

I somehow quieted my conscience and had a good time that night, and Sue and I started “seeing each other.” By this time she had moved to Rockville and rented a room in the basement of a house owned by a female employee of the Hartford named Jackie. She also had somehow persuaded a bank to finance her purchase of a 1972 Dodge Colt.

During this period Sue was also, at least in theory, studying for Part 1 of the actuarial exams. She was at a huge disadvantage compared with others taking the test in Hartford. Most of them got study time and took classes in the subject. She did not pass.

It must have been on an evening in October that Sue offered to fix a steak supper for John Sigler and me. Jackie must have let Sue use the kitchen; Sue’s apartment barely had room for a bed and a couple of chairs. We all sat around after dinner drinking Mateus, talking, and listening to Leonard Cohen records. Finally John departed. I spent the night with Sue on her small waterbed, a totally new experience for me.

Over the next few months Sue and I went to numerous places together. A bunch of us walked down to Constitution Plaza together to attend a noontime rally for George McGovern. 1972 was the first time that I was allowed to vote in a national election. In 1968 the voting age was twenty-one, and I was only twenty. Sue, who was born in 1951, was barely old enough to vote this time. I really hated Nixon. I suspected (correctly, as it was later revealed) that he had deliberately scuttled the peace talks in Paris about Vietnam. Never mind his secret war in Laos and his part in the overthrow of the democratic government in Chile. I never had to serve in Vietnam, but I blamed Nixon for stealing two years from me when I was in my prime.

Sue and I both voted for McGovern. I even put a McGovern-Shriver¹ sticker on Greenie’s bumper. I felt as if I had gotten McGovern one more vote than he would have otherwise received. Of course, it made no difference. Most Americans believed Tricky Dick really had a “secret plan” to end the war, they were afraid of the godless communist menace, and for some reason they did not like McGovern.

Sue and I attended a couple of movies in theaters. I seem to remember that there was a theater in West Hartford that showed older movies. I am pretty sure that we saw Blow-up together and at least one Marx Brothers movie.

We ate at a few restaurants in Rockville. I am certain that we shared a ham and olive pizza a small restaurant on Main St. near Route 83. It must have been part of a chain. It had a number after its name. Sue liked to go to Friendly’s. At the time their menu consisted of overpriced hamburger, overpriced cheeseburgers, overpriced “Friendly Franks”, and ice cream. Sue focused on the ice cream.

I cooked a few meals for us in my apartment. For example, I fixed a sirloin beef roast using McCormick’s Meat Marinade², a trick that I learned from my mother. Sue was pleasantly surprised at how good it tasted. She said that she had never liked beef roasts. She explained that when her mother cooked them she left them in the oven until they were grey, dried out, flavorless, and chewy. I tried to fry a chicken, but it did not work out too well. I had to put it in the oven before serving because some parts were not done. Microwave ovens existed, but I did not have one. After that we stuck to extra-crispy chicken from the colonel. However, I bought at least three cookbooks, and I developed a few very tasty specialties.

I took Christmas very seriously in 1972. It was only the second holiday season that I had spent away from my family, and this time I was really on my own. The feeling was much different from any previous Christmas. I spent a lot of time shopping for little gifts and writing personalized Christmas cards for my friends. Sue and I attended the Carol Sing at the Hartford Times Building in downtown Hartford. The Times³ published a half-page photo of the huge crowd that was assembled. My off-white cowboy hat and fleece-lined suede coat made it easy to spot us in the photo. We showed the clipping to all of our friends.

My first New Years in Connecticut was also memorable. I decided to roast Cornish game hens for supper, and we invited Tom Corcoran and Patti Lewonczyk to join us. The four of us were also invited by Tom Garabedian and Gail Mertan to a party at Tom’s house in East Hartford. The meal was a big success. I think that Sue cooked some kind of vegetables, maybe her famous carrots Lyonaise. Of course, we also served wine.

We all probably ate too much. No one felt like going to a party. However, it was less than a mile to the Garabedian house. So, we all piled into one of the cars and drove there.

The only two people in the house when we arrived were Tom and Gail. Evidently Tom had persuaded his parents to make themselves scarce. Tom and Gail had laid out a cornucopia of food and beverages—enough for several dozen people. No one else ever came. It was not much of a party, but if we had submitted to the lethargy induced by the supper, it would have been a disaster.

Over the holidays I got to meet some of Sue’s family. Her parents, Art and Effy Slanetz, and siblings all lived in a farm house on North Maple St. in Enfield. Sue was the oldest child; she had two sisters, Karen and Betty. They were nothing alike. She also had a brother Don. I met Effy’s dog, Queenie, and a bevy of Sue’s uncles, aunts, and cousins, all of whom lived within a few miles of the Slanetz’s house⁴. Many of them seemed to make a living by driving trucks in one way or another. Their favorite sport was NASCAR. I did not contribute much to the banter.

Behind the house was a fairly large field that was actively farmed by the Polek family that lived in the house that was between the Slanetz’s house and a warehouse in which Art stored all kinds of old mechanical junk. Sue told me that that the field was their family’s land at one time. When she was little they raised potatoes.

The winters in the seventies were brutal. Early in 1973 (I think) I was driving Greenie, and Sue was riding shotgun after a snowfall of a couple of inches. We were headed south on I-91 through Hartford. I was driving at a very reasonable speed in the right lane, and, thank God, there were no cars nearby. All of a sudden my car’s rear wheels began moving to the left, but the front wheels did not. The car performed a spin of about 315°, and my left front bumper whipped into the guardrail on the left, which brought us to a halt.. Neither of us was injured. We were both wearing seat belts—I never let anyone ride in my car without a seat belt. It was amazing that my car suffered only a negligibly small bump, and the vehicle was positioned so that I could quickly steer back onto the highway. This scary event made me realize that I had to be very careful with this car in dicey road conditions.

Sue had a very large number of friends. My favorites were Bob and Susan Thompson. Bob worked in a small factory. He complained about the smell of the chemicals there. His job might have had something to do with linoleum. I think that Susan was a teacher. They had a house in Coventry and an extremely amorous dachshund. Once he gained purchase on a pants leg he was difficult to detach. Bob owned a Plymouth that saw its best days in the Eisenhower administration, or maybe earlier. In snowy weather he liked to take it into an empty parking lot and make it spin donuts.

When we had not seen Bob and Susan for a few months, I asked Sue why. She said that she had loaned them some money, and she was pretty sure that they were avoiding her because they could not afford to repay her.

On Valentine’s Day 2013 I bought Sue a present and a card. She had forgotten about it, and therefore she did not reciprocate. I took it a little hard.

Eventually I learned that Sue and time just did not get along. She regularly forgot holidays, birthdays, and appointments. She also could not gauge the passage of time. She might think that events occurred a week ago actually happened two months earlier. If she said that something would take fifteen minutes, it usually took an hour or more. If any food (e.g., beef or lamb) needed to be cooked for a specific amount of time, I had to do it. In retrospect I marvel that she had chosen to grill steaks for John Sigler and me. I cannot remember how they turned out. I was not paying too much attention to the food that night.

Sue was always late. I adopted the habit of carrying a book around with me for the inevitable waiting periods.

The fridge that we moved wasn't wrapped. — The fridge that we moved wasn’t wrapped.

I recall that in February of 1973 Sue and I helped one of her many friends move to a new place. The woman who was moving might have been one of Sue’s roommates in East Hampton. I remember that I was one of the people assigned to get an old refrigerator up the staircase. We succeeded, but I could not describe what technique was employed beyond brute force. At one point the woman who was moving asked what day it was. I said that it was Saturday the 24th (or whatever it actually was). She said “No. I mean, what month?”

I decided that Sue’s twenty-second birthday on March 2 should be Sue Comparetto Day. I offered to buy her anything that she wanted. She wanted to shop for a camera. We drove to a camera shop of her choosing, and she selected a thirty-five-millimeter camera with a leather case. I would have inserted a photo of it here if I knew where it was. I guarantee that it is in the house somewhere. Sue would never have thrown it out. I did find the case, which still had one of her combs in it.

We went to two concerts together in March. The first was at the Bushnell Auditorium in Hartford on Tuesday March 6. The headliners were Loggins and Messina, whose only real hit “Your Mama Don’t Dance” was very popular at the time. Sue and I must have attended in hopes of seeing the advertised opening act, Jim Croce. Neither Sue nor I can remember him appearing. Apparently he canceled for some reason. Almost everyone in the audience was at least five years younger than we were, and they enjoyed the L&M performance a lot more than we did. By the end of the show we really felt like old fogeys.

The other concert was at the Palace Theater in Waterbury. Pink Floyd had just released “Dark Side of the Moon”, which is widely considered their masterpiece. There were huge speakers blasting out sound from all four corners of the theater, and there was an abundance of strobe lights and other dramatic flashes. The crowd went crazy, but I was definitely ready to leave after fifteen minutes. You can listen to the whole two-hour concert here.

On April 1, 1973, Sue’s husband Dennis committed suicide. Sue went to the funeral. He had attempted suicide at least once in the fall. Sue had visited him in the hospital on that occasion.

When the weather got warmer Sue and I enjoyed a very pleasant trip to Gillette Castle, a bizarre structure that overlooks the Connecticut River. It was built of local fieldstone by the actor William Gillette. He is most famous for his portrayal of Sherlock Holmes more than 1,300 times on the stage, once in a silent film feature, and twice on radio programs. The estate is now a state park. I found it to be a very interesting place. The grounds were very relaxing. There was even a small train that had been used by Gillette himself. We had a very nice picnic.

We also spent some time in the interior⁵ of the castle. The extremely ornate inside was at least as fabulous as the grounds and the view. This was one of my favorite days in my first trip to Connecticut.

At some point Sue decided to quit her job at the Hartford. She found a new line of work at Travelers Equity Sales. She had to take a test to become a registered rep. She passed on the first try and worked there through the spring and most of the summer. While she worked at the Travelers she became a close friend of Diane Robinson, who originally came from Passumpsic VT, and Karen Peterson.

Around the same time that she changed jobs Sue moved to an apartment on Jefferson St. (or maybe Washington St.) in Hartford. I don’t remember much about it. My only clear recollection is of the only time in my life that I ever ran out of gas. I was about two blocks from her house and perhaps one hundred feet from a gas station. Even though it was slightly uphill I was able to push Greenie up to the pump all by myself. I was only a little stronger then; Greenie was very light and easy to push.

During her time at T.E.S. Sue and I started to grow apart. She was a whirlwind of activity, and I often felt left out. She had a gazillion friends of both genders, and sometimes I became jealous. She probably started to think of me as too clingy.

When I met Sue, she already had a boa constrictor named Puca, but he was barely six feet long and skinny. She did not feed him much, and when she did, all that he got was a dead mouse heated over a light bulb to fool his heat-detecting senses. One evening we visited her friends Stan and Pat Slatt in Marlborough. They had a ten-foot boa constrictor that Stan fed live rats and a thirteen-foot python that regularly ate a full-grown rabbit. I had no fear of Puca, but these two monsters gave me pause.

In the summer of 1973 Sue moved to an apartment complex on Wales Rd. in Andover. Her apartment was right across the street from the one that Scott and Cindy Otermat lived with their huge dog Cinders. I saw her only a few times before her big trip.

Sue, Diane, and Karen decided to quit their jobs and drive to Alaska. I am not sure that their plans were any more specific than that. I don’t know what they used for money. Maybe they knocked over a bunch of banks in those states along the Canadian border, or they might have found a big nugget of gold in the Klondike. They did not take Sue’s car. She left it at her apartment, which she “sublet” to a guy who worked on roofs for a living. I am pretty sure that they were “involved” before she left. He also was supposed to take care of Puca, but the reptile escaped from his cage either just before Sue left or just after.

This was the greatest adventure in Sue’s young life, but I was absolutely miserable. I felt sorry for myself. It was hard for me to face all my friends. I took a lot of long walks.

During the trip the three ladies all hooked up with Air Force guys stationed in Alaska. Diane ended up marrying Phil Graziose. They lived in a trailer park in northern Vermont for a number of years and then bought an old house in St. Johnsbury with a storefront in which Phil ran a locksmithing business.

On the trip Sue became seriously involved with an Air Force guy name Randy, who came from, of all places, my home town of Kansas City. I refused to listen to the stories of her adventures, but I could not help overhearing that there was one incident in which someone nearly drowned.

This matchbook cover is the only trace of Fast Eddie’s that I could find on the Internet.

Meanwhile, back in the lower forty-eight Friday, August 17, 1973, was a memorable day. Since it was my twenty-fifth birthday, I invited everyone to help me celebrate. At least eight or ten of us went to Fast Eddie’s bar on the Berlin Turnpike. I had never been drunk in my life, and I had no intention of overindulging that evening. The problem was that we were drinking beer by the pitcher, and people kept refilling my glass without asking me. I never asked for a second glass. My mother had drilled into us that if there was food on our plate or beverage in our glass, we were expected to consume it. If there was a possibility that we might not want it later, we were not to put it on the plate. Once it was there, however, …

At any rate, this was the only time in my life that I have driven a car when I definitely should not have done so. Fortunately, Greenie pretty well knew the way back to my apartment, and there were no incidents. The next day I awoke with my first hangover and played my epic tennis match with Jim Kreidler. It is described here.

Tom Corcoran and Tom Herget had been living in a large old house at 345 Hartford Avenue in Wethersfield. The third housemate had been a guy named Monty. Herget had furnished the house from items he picked up at second-hand stores on Park St. in Hartford. In August of 1973 Monty had to leave for some reason. They asked me if I wanted to take Monty’s place. It was a no-brainer. The rent was less, and life would surely be more interesting. In addition, I would be rid of a lot of scenery that connected with memories that now seemed bitter to me.

In August of 1973 I bought and read the popular book I’m OK—You’re OK by Thomas Anthony Harris. It described the research on hemispheric separation in the brain that showed that under certain circumstances people clearly have two (or more) relatively independent decision-making mechanisms. We identify with only one of them, the one that can read and talk. When something happens that this portion of the brain did not order, we are likely to say “I don’t know why I did that.” Understanding that the first “I” and the second “I” in that sentence are largely independent agents really helped me to understand people, including myself, better.

During this period I was being paid to study for Part 5 of the actuarial exams. The subject matter was indescribably boring. Can you think of anything more tedious than studying the history of mortality tables? I liked my work, and I had made some great friends in Connecticut, but there was one aspect that I really missed—debate tournaments and the thrill of competing at the highest level. I began to think about going back to college to coach debate. I wrote to Bill Colburn at the University of Michigan to inquire if that was feasible. He replied that I needed to apply to graduate school. He thought that he could arrange for financial assistance for me. I also did a little bit of research on my veterans’ benefits.

I heard that Sue had come back from Alaska, but I did not see her for quite some time. Finally she came over to the “345 Club” one evening. For some reason I was up in my bedroom. I think that the two Toms tried to talk her out of it, but she came up to see me. I don’t exactly remember what happened, but she ended up staying the night with me.

I learned that Sue had landed a new job at the “Little Aetna” section of Connecticut General. When she returned from Alaska she discovered that the roofer had not been paying the rent. My recollection is that her car was also repossessed. She eventually found Puca—alive—between two towels in a linen closet.

So, Sue and I began what I think of as the “toll bridge” section of our relationship. In those days the Charter Oak Bridge and the Bissell Bridge had toll booths in both directions. The fastest way from the 345 Club to Sue’s apartment was via the Charter Oak Bridge and I-84⁶. One could save a little money by buying a book of prepaid tickets, and that is what both Sue and I did.

The worst ice storm that I have ever seen hit central Connecticut on December 16-17. More details are provided here. The storm affected Wethersfield much worse than it did Andover. So, like my housemates, I abandoned the 345 Club, brought some clothes to Sue’s apartment, and stayed there for a while.

One morning during that winter—I don’t remember if it was before or after Christmas—I was driving from Andover to Hartford. Greenie was headed westbound on the portion of I-84 between Manchester and Bolton. It was early in the morning; the sun had just come up. The road conditions did not seem too bad, and I was going a moderate speed in the right lane. This time my rear wheels decided to go to the right. My car did a 180° spin before coming to a stop in the breakdown lane on the right side of the highway. I waited for traffic to clear and then, taking advantage of Greenie’s extremely small turning radius, executed a tight U-turn. I then continued on my journey. My mantra was the same as that of every male in his twenties: “No harm; no foul.”

I had decided to fly to Kansas City at Christmas to visit my family. Sue was somewhat shocked when I asked her whether she wanted to come with me, but she said yes⁷. We were only there for a few days, but she got to meet a lot of my family, including Fr. Joe and my grandfather, John Cernech, who by then had become very nearly deaf. She must have slept on the roller bed in Jamie’s room. My recollection is that Jamie had a date on most of the evenings while we were staying there.

Mad Murphy’s was in this building on Union St.

Another event that I remember clearly during the subsequent few months was the night that Sue and I and a group of friends grabbed a table at Mad Murphy’s, a bar near the train station in Hartford. We came there to listen to Sue’s neighbor, Carl Shillo, and his band. We stayed until the closing time, and we had a great time. The highlight was when they played “Ob-la-di Ob-la-da” just before closing. Everyone marched around in a long conga line and sang along.

Passumpsic is an unincorporated village in the town of Barnet. The community is located 3 miles south of St. Johnsbury, the last civilized outpost on I-91.

By April or May I had arranged to coach debate at U-M. I asked Sue if she would come with me. She, who was in those days always ready for an adventure, agreed.

Sue and I drove up to Passumpsic to see Diane and her many siblings at least once. I don’t remember when. Tom Herget came with us. I don’t think that Phil had arrived yet. The Robinsons held a barn dance, which I cannot say that I enjoyed much; dancing is definitely not my thing. My favorite memory of this trip was when Diane’s father claimed that he had always wondered why he and his wife had so many more offspring than the other couples until someone explained to him what caused it.

I am pretty sure that Sue made other trips without me. She considered the three-hour drive an easy one, and she was enthralled by the simple lifestyle of Diane’s family.

In 1972 the Hartford recruited three single guys named Tom. The next year two married actuarial students named Jim were hired—Jim Cochran and Jim Hawke. Their wives were Ann and Lesley respectively. The Cochrans were from Wisconsin. The Hawkes were from Texas, although Jim had a bachelor’s degree in math from UConn. I don’t know how they ended up in the Land of Steady Habits.

I remember at least one evening spent at each of their houses, although I cannot say when either event happened. The Hawkes lived in a house in Manchester and a son named Ethan⁸. Sue and I had supper with the Hawkes and spent most of the evening enjoying Jim’s renditions of rags by Scott Joplin.

A short time after that Jim and Ethan joined Sue and me on an excursion to her property on “Bunyan Mountain”⁹ in Monson, MA. We parked well below Sue’s property and climbed up. I think that we had some sandwiches and toasted marshmallows.

Sue took photos of this occasion. If she can locate any of them, I will post something here.

Jim and Ann Cochran lived in a house in Glastonbury. They invited us over to play the state card game of Wisconsin, Sheepshead. Neither Sue nor I had ever heard of it. I don’t think that anyone outside of the state of Wisconsin has ever played it more than once. Jim and Ann patiently explained all of the rules to us. Then on the first hand something—I don’t remember what—occurred. As a result both Jim and Ann triumphantly yelled out “It’s a leaster!” They then introduced a whole new set of rules as to how this particular hand would be played.

A brief glance at the Wikipedia page for this game lists some of the “variants” to the rules and hints at many others. Even though tournaments of games are allegedly held in Wisconsin, I suspect that the real purpose of this game is to lure unsuspecting non-cheeseheads into playing the game under a small subset of the rules. The Wisconsinites can then introduce new rules often enough to make the foreigners so confused and frustrated that they leave. Then the Wisconsonites can enjoy their fondue in peace.

Sue’s family played a trick-taking game called Setback or Auction Pitch, which has the benefit of far fewer rules. I played a few times, but there did not seem to be much to it. When someone in Sue’s family asked if anyone wanted to play cards, they meant Setback.

In June of 1974 I broke the patella (kneecap) on my right leg playing pickup basketball. The event itself is described here. I had to miss a few days of work, and I was unable to drive at least until the cast was removed. I decided to move in with Sue in Andover. This also seemed like the best time to tell my parents about that she would be taking care of me in her apartment. They were not thrilled by the idea, but at least they did not commandeer a plane and come to rescue me from her clutches. They weren’t too surprised when I told them that she was going to accompany me to Ann Arbor in a few months.

The rest of the summer was rather blissful for me. I could not play softball or golf, but I attended all of the Mean Reserves games and all the other get-togethers. I cannot remember any unpleasant occasions.

1. Senator Tom Eagleton was nominated for Vice President at the 1972 Democratic Convention. Shortly thereafter he resigned from the ticket when it was discovered that he received psychiatric treatment for chronic depression. The Republican Veep candidate, Spiro Agnew, was a crook, but his crimes did not come to light until after the election.

2. Sue and I returned to the castle in the summer of 2020, but because of the pandemic the interior was not open. We had another nice picnic, and I took some spectacular snapshots of the river beneath the castle.

3. For some reason McCormick’s discontinued this wonderful product in 2019 or 2020. Someone has started a “Bring Back McCormick’s Meat Marinade” Facebook page.

4. The Hartford Times was a moderately liberal paper owned by Gannett and published in the afternoon. In 1972, however, it endorsed Nixon. I wrote a letter to the editor in protest. They published one or two of the hundreds that they received about the endorsement, but not mine. The paper was sold in 1973. In 1976 it accepted the fate of most PM papers and ceased publication.

5. I did not realize at the time that I had only met the Lockes, Effy’s side of the family. The Slanetzes were not homebodies at all. They were widely dispersed. Only one Locke had moved away, Sue’s Uncle Bob, whose family lived in western Michigan.

6. Prior to 1984 the interstate highway that runs from Hartford to the Mass Pike just north of Sturbridge was called I-84 from Hartford to Manchester and I-86 east of Manchester. The never completed road that led from Manchester toward Providence was called I-84. Since 1984 the former highway has been called I-84, and the latter I-384.

7. Sue helped with the production of her high school’s musical Oklahoma. She strongly identified with the character of Ado Annie, the “girl who can’t say no”. I hereby affirm that I have hardly ever heard her turn down an invitation to do something, although she will sometimes cancel later when she realizes that it would be impossible for her to be in two places at once. This may be the biggest difference between Sue and me. I have almost never committed to anything unless I was certain that I was willing and able to do it.

8. The youngster grew up to be Ethan Hawke, the famous actor.

9. Evidently this “mountain” is actually part of Chicopee Mountain. Sue obtained this property as part of an agreement with her father-in-law, Chick Comparetto. There is a nice view of the valley from one spot that is either on or near her land.

1972-1974 Connecticut: Sports

Posted on January 15, 2021 by Mike

Athletic activities in the Hartford area: basketball, golf, etc. Continue reading →

Swimming: The apartment building in which I lived in East Hartford had an outdoor swimming pool. I brought a bathing suit with me to Connecticut, and I spent some pleasurable hours sitting next to the pool. I may have also entered the water for short periods once or twice.

Basketball: Tom Herget and Tom Corcoran had discovered that pickup basketball games were often held on the asphalt court near Batchelder School. After I had been working for a week or so, they invited me to join them. At first I demurred, but Herget was very good at shaming people into joining the fun. A bunch of us played there on a regular basis.

Batchelder School still exists, but the basketball court seems to be gone.

It was a good court. We played a full-court game without a ref. The court was neither as long nor as wide as a regulation court, but it was quite adequate for a three-on-three or four-on-four game. The rims were regulation-height and quite sturdy.

Sometimes so many guys were there that we had two one-basket games. As often as we could, we played full-court.

Guys would come and go. The teams were fluid. I think that we kept score, but no one cared who won. There were arguments about fouls, of course, but I can’t remember anyone getting upset enough to do anything about it.

I can’t remember the names of any of the players except for people from the Hartford. Here are my most vivid recollections:

A guy who played with us all the time had a unique shot. He was only 5’8″ or so, and he was not very mobile. If he got open, however, he would quickly bring the ball up over his head and launch a shot with virtually no arc that just cleared the front of the rim. When the ball made contact with the back of the rim it almost always dove straight down into the net. This was due to the fact that he somehow imparted an enormous amount of backspin to his shot. I was a great admirer of his shot; my attempts to emulate it were failures.
Herget also had a devilish shot. He liked to drive right into an opponent’s chest and then scoop the ball underhand toward the basket behind the opponent’s back. He beat me with this maneuver many times even after Tom Corcoran showed me how to defend it—by keeping one’s own arms down and once he started the scoop just placing the hand on that side on top of the ball. Herget usually passed the ball away if Corcoran was guarding him.
A couple of times an Emergency Medical Technician played with us a few times while he was on duty. He parked his vehicle near the court and left the radio on. I don’t think that he ever got any calls while he was playing. I wonder what he would have been doing if he wasn’t playing with us.
I remember one magical day in 1974 when, for some strange reason, I could do no wrong on the court. On most days I missed three or four shots for every one that I made, but on the magical day my shooting percentage was certainly in the eighties or nineties. I got several rebounds and made some good defensive plays, too. It never happened again.
Several times opponents—to their regret—brushed up against my very sharp elbows or knees. Once a guy’s thigh hit my knee harder than usual. I barely felt it, but he stopped playing and, as I recall, just limped to his car and drove home.
One day in late May or June of 1974 we were playing a full-court game. I had the ball, and I was running at a good speed and dribbling while looking for an open teammate. Somehow I slipped or tripped and fell forward. I landed on the heels of my hand, but the top of my right knee hit the pavement about as hard as one might knock on a door. I cried out in pain, but when I rolled up the leg of my pants to unveil a small scratch, I was ridiculed by the other guys for stopping the game. I played for a few more minutes, but then my knee gave out, and I limped to Greenie and drove home. That was my last game at Batchelder.

On the way home I had to stop to buy something for supper, cauliflower I think. By the time that I reached the apartment in Andover in which I was living my knee was so swollen that it looked like a cantaloupe was stuffed in my jeans. Sue Comparetto somehow brought me to a doctor whose name I don’t remember. He took X-rays and determined that my patella (kneecap to you) had broken into several pieces. The largest one could stay, but the others needed to be surgically removed.

An ambulance took me to the Windham Community Memorial Hospital in Willimantic. I was assigned to a room with three older men, all of whom were there for hernia operations. One at a time, they each went to the OR before I did. The scenes were similar. The anesthetic was administered. The patient counted backward from 100. The first two were out buy 97. The third guy, however, was down into the seventies when they told him he could stop. I am not sure how they ever knocked him out. Maybe they just gave him something to stick between his teeth.

I, who have a mortal dread of needles, was much more apprehensive about the injection of the anesthetic than of the carving of my leg. They gave me the shot, and the next thing that I knew was that I was back in the room with a cast on my leg. The surgeon came to see me a little later. He asked me to lift the leg. I couldn’t do it. He said that I could not leave until I could lift it by myself.

In the day or two it took me to find those muscles again I had a few visitors. I am sure that Sue came. So did Jim and Ann Cochran.

I had a view of downtown Willy from my bed. I could either see a sign for Kentucky Fried Chicken of one of the colonel’s stores. In either case it gave me a strong incentive to raise my leg. I really wanted some fried chicken. I was released before any of the hernia guys.

My injury had a good side and a bad side. The benefit was immediate. I had been called up for summer camp by the Army Reserve. I called the phone number on the notice to report that I had broken my kneecap and could not come. The guy who answered—I took down his name, but I don’t remember it—assured me that I did not need to come. Since 1974 was the last year that I was eligible, I never had to atten reserve camp. I was not dreading the duty, but I did not want to return to work at the Hartford with a military haircut.

The bad side was that the surgeon missed one small piece of bone, and it eventually adhered to my femur. It did not bother me much for twenty-five years, but in 1999 I was diagnosed with tendinitis of the IT band. The doctor attributed it to that tiny piece of my patella. Some stretching exercises made the condition manageable, but in 2017 I got arthritis in that knee. This in turn has made it more difficult to keep the IT band from bunching up. I am not complaining. I have averaged walking five miles per day in the ten months starting in March of 2020, but I need to do a lot more stretching.

Golf: I started playing golf with John Sigler late in the summer of 1972. We played together every chance that we got, and we tried nearly every public course in the area. He was better than I was at every aspect of the game, but I enjoyed our outings together immensely. In 1973 we even took off many Wednesdays during the summer to play golf.

On one of those days in the summer of 1973 we drove down to Cromwell to play the Edgewood Golf Club. The layout was later redone to suit the pros, and the name was changed to TPC River Highlands. It was the most difficult course that I had ever played then, and they made it much tougher when they made it a Tournament Players Championship course in the eighties.

In 1973 John and I also played together at the annual outing of the Actuarial Club of Hartford in Moodus, CT. I did not remember the name of the course, but the only one in Moodus seems to be Black Birch Golf Club. It was a miserable day for golf—or anything else. The rain started halfway through our round, and it was also very windy. I seem to remember that John played well enough to win a dozen Titleists. I think that I won three Club Specials as a kind of booby prize. The highlight of the round for me was watching Mike Swiecicki ride merrily around in a cart and swatting at his ball with little care about the results. I also enjoyed playing bridge with John and a cigar-smoking Tom Corcoran. I don’t remember who was our fourth.

At some point John and I added Norm Newfield and Bill Mustard to our golfing group. Norm, who was a star quarterback and pitcher at Central Connecticut and the Navy¹, worked in the Personnel Department. I think that Bill worked in the IT Department. Norm was a big hitter, and Bill was an absolute beast, but neither of them could control the ball’s flight like John could. I was definitely the wimp in this foursome. Most of the time we played at Tallwood in Hebron.

In 1974 John and I signed up to play in the Hartford’s golf league. The nine-hole matches were on Fridays at Minnechaug Golf Course in Glastonbury. I have always been better at team sports than individual ones, and it proved true again. Of course, John always played against the opponent’s better player. Still, we played seven or eight matches, and I tied won and won the rest. We were in first place in the league with only one or two matches remaining when I broke my kneecap. Our proudest achievement was defeating Norm and his partner, whose name was, I think, Bill Something. He probably worked in HR with Norm.

I remember one match pretty clearly. We were playing against two guys whom we did not know at all. I think that I had to give up six strokes, and John had to give up seven in only nine holes. John’s opponent had a new set of really nice-looking clubs. My opponent was from India, or at least his parents were. When I told this story to friends I usually called him “The Perfect Master”. We were afraid of a setup. Because of the handicap differentials, if they played at all well, we would have no chance.

On the first tee John’s opponent exhibited a monstrous slice, but the ball stayed in play. My opponent then hit the shortest drive I have ever seen. He did not whiff, but the impact was much less than Lou Aiello’s swinging bunt (described here). The ball stayed in the tee box less than a foot in front of his left shoe.

Neither John nor I could take the match seriously after that. We both played worse than we would have thought possible. Going into the eighth hole, the match was in serious jeopardy. However, the eighth, a short island hole, was always good to us. We both put our iron shots on the green. The opponents both plunked their tee shots into the water. The last hole cinched all three points for us when both of our opponents found the water again. We survived our worst match ever and, of course, enjoyed a beer afterwards.

Jim Cochran stepped in to take my place for the last few matches. Alas, John and Jim lost the championship match.

Buena Vista's swank clubhouse. — Buena Vista’s swank clubhouse.

There was one other interesting golf adventure. Tom Herget arranged for John, Tom Corcoran, and I to join him for nine holes at the Buena Vista Golf Course in West Hartford. Par for this course is only 31 or 32. It is much easier than Minnechaug.

Herget evidently wanted to try out the golf clubs that he had purchased (or perhaps found in an alley) somewhere. They were at least six inches too short for him, and he is not tall. When he went to hit the ball, his hands were at knee level. Danny Devito is too tall for these clubs.

The round itself produced few memories. I do not remember the scores, but I do remember that Sigler shot in the thirties, I scored in the forties, Corcoran in the fifties, and Herget in the sixties.

Baseball/Softball: I remember that several of us drove up to Fenway for a game between the Red Sox and the Yankees. Somehow we got box seats in the upper deck right even with third base. I have been to games in four or five stadiums. This was by far my best experience. I remember eating peanuts, drinking beer, and yelling at the players and coaches. We were unbelievably close to them. It was more intimate than a Little League game.

Dick Howser was third base coach for the Yankees for ten years!

I channeled my inner Bob Anderson to loudly rebuke New York’s third-base coach, Dick Howser², for mistakenly waving a runner home. He actually looked up at us. I remembered him as a so-so shortstop (after his promising rookie season) for the KC A’s. He had a goofy batting stance with his legs spread wide and his head about four feet off the ground.

I later felt a little guilty about my boorish conduct at Fenway when he became the Royals’ manager and in 1985 guided them to the my home town’s only World Series win. One must understand that people who grew up in KC in the fifties and sixties REALLY hate the Yankees.

I remember going to watch Patti Lewonczyk play softball a couple of times. I do not recall whether the Hartford had a team in a city-wide league or an entire league of teams like the men’s. Patti was a good hitter, and she did not throw like a girl. I am pretty sure that Sue took photos on at least one occasion, but I don’t know where they are, and I dasn’t ask.

Football: On September 23, 1973, a group of us went to a football game between the Patriots and the Chiefs at Schaefer₃ Stadium in Foxborough. I could not believe what a dump the place was. I don’t remember any details. The game was a real snoozer. The Chiefs held the Pats to only one touchdown, but they only scored ten points themselves, which was enough for a W. After that one magic season in 1969-70, the Chiefs quickly became an also-ran team for the next five decades!

I also attended several college games. The most entertaining one was on October 20, 1973. I rode to Providence in Tom Corcora’s Volkswagen for the game between Brown and Dartmouth. Dartmouth entered the game with an 0-3 record, but they beat the Bears 28-16. The Big Green went on to win all the rest of their its (their?) games that year. Brown finished 4-3-1, which was very good for Brown teams of that era.

I guess you could see the band’s formations from the Brown side. We were in the visitor’s bleachers.

The game was fairly interesting. There were no NFL prospects, but the Ivy League schools were famous for their trick plays. That is my kind of football.

Even more interesting was the rascally atmosphere that shocking for a deadly serious Michigan fan to experience. For example, one guy in the stands had brought a keg of beer as a date. The keg was wearing a dress and a blonde wig. This would never happen at Michigan Stadium. Alcohol was strictly forbidden at the games, and seats were precious possessions; nobody got two.

Dartmouth had never had an official mascot, but for decades most people called them the Indians. In 1972 the Alumni Association advised against this in favor of another nickname, the Big Green. The teams embraced this, but a set of alternate cheerleaders attended this game. They sat in the stands and wore identity-concealing costumes. One was a gorilla; I don’t remember the others, but none were Indians. Whenever the official cheerleaders finished a cheer for the Big Green, the alt-leaders rushed to the sidelines to lead the same cheer for the Indians. This went on without objection. It did not seem strange to anyone but me.

The Brown band played at halftime. Their uniforms were brown turtlenecks. Most people wore nondescript pants, but several had evidently played for the soccer or rugby team that morning. Their legs were muddy, and they wore shorts. A few of them also had comical hats.

The band formed itself into various formations, but our seats were too low to make sense of them. The stadium was not big. I doubt that many people could decipher them. The band members just ran to their spots for each formation. They did not march in the orderly fashion that I was used to. I think that the primary purpose of the entertainment was to make fun of Dartmouth.

This is the only picture I could find of Eric Torkelson in a UConn uniform.

The very next Saturday I drove to Storrs by myself to watch a game between UMass and UConn. Both at the time were 1AA schools and members of the Yankee Conference. I did not know exactly where the stadium was. I expect to see crowds of people walking toward the stadium. After all, this was their rivalry game. UMass had won last year, but UConn had a pretty good team in 1973. The star, as I remember, was fullback Eric Torkelson⁴. The conference championship was on the line. The weather was beautiful.

In fact, however, two-thirds of the seat were empty. Very few students showed up. The closest people to me were a guy and his young son. UConn won 28-7 and won the conference championship.

I also tried to play a little flag football. I bought some cleats at G. Fox in downtown Hartford. Norm Newfield was on a team in New Britain. Tom Herget and I went to their tryouts. I played pretty well; I caught every pass that I got a hand on. However, they were looking for blockers and rushers, and I did not fit their plans. Tom did.

I went to several of their games. Once I ended up sitting with Mel, Tom’s girlfriend at the time. I soon discovered that she knew surprising little about football. I explained about the first-down yardage markers and what Tom’s role was on every play. I was just mansplaining, but she seemed to appreciate it.

I played in one pickup game with Tom and some of his acquaintances. It might have been on a field near Batchelder School. Because no one could guard me when I wore my cleats, I had to take them off and play in sneakers.

I watched college football on television every Saturday. In those days I could even bear to watch when Michigan was playing. Jan Pollnow invited me over to his house to watch the Wolverines one Saturday. Michigan won easily. The Big Ten was then better known as the Big Two and the Little Eight.

I felt a little uneasy at his house, as I did the time in Romulus, NY, when the lieutenant in the Intelligence Office had me over for dinner.

Tennis: I brought my tennis racket with me from KC, and I actually played one game of tennis. It was on Saturday, August 18, 1973. My opponent was Jim Kreidler. I was “under the weather” from overindulgence on my twenty-fifth birthday the night before. Nevertheless, I was ahead in the match by a game or two when Jim twisted his ankle.

He wanted to quit. I argued that we should continue the match. I would not require him to stand on his ankle. He could just sit there and wave at the ball with his racket. I would retrieve all the shots on both sides of the net. We could probably finish in a half hour or less.

He stubbornly refused this most generous offer. So, I fear that I must report that I have never actually won a tennis match.

In New England there are three types of bowling.

Bowling: At least once I went duckpin bowling with Tom Corcoran and Patti Lewonczyk. It does not feel at all like tenpin bowling, and I have no idea what it takes to be a good duckpin bowler. It seemed like you just grabbed any old ball and let it fly.

On TV I also watched candlepin bowling from Springfield. In this version you get three shots, not two, and they do not sweep away the toppled pins until the third ball has been rolled. So, you can use your “wood” to help pick up spares. I never tried this version.

1. Norm is in CCSU’s Hall of Fame. His page is here. In 2021 his FaceBook page says that he lives in Winsted, CT.

2. Dick Howser died in 1987 of a brain tumor only two years after managing the World Series winners and one year after managing the winners of the All-Star game.

3. Schaefer was a popular beer in the northeast in the seventies. Its slogan was “Schaefer is the one beer to have if you’re having more than one.” No one that I knew liked it. We reformulated it to “Schaefer is the one beer to have if you’ve alreadh had more than one.”

4. Torkelson, although not drafted until the eleventh round, played seven seasons for the Green Bay Packers.

1972-1974 Connecticut: Actuarial Exams

Posted on January 14, 2021 by Mike

Studying and taking. Continue reading →

The official title of my job at the Hartford was “actuarial student”. I had two responsibilities—helping with the actuarial work assigned by my bosses and studying for the actuarial exams sponsored by the Society of Actuaries (SOA). It is more complicated now, but in 1972-74 there were ten exams (called “parts”). To become a Fellow of the SOA one needed to all ten. Passing the first five granted one the title of Associate.

I can hardly believe than an associate (ASA) would have the temerity to sell advice to other test-takers.

For actuaries advancement at insurance companies depended much more on success on the exams than on performance at the workplace. Becoming a Fellow was a big deal. At least one person at the Hartford immediately after passing the tenth exam got a vanity plate for his car with his initials and “FSA”. Some people hired tutors for difficult tests. It could easily be worth the expense; at the time surveys ranked actuaries as the highest-paid occupation in the United States. For decades the number of actuaries increased by over 6 percent per year, and in the seventies demand still exceeded supply.

The actuarial exams were held twice a year—in May and November. The first four were offered both times. Some of the other six were offered in May; the rest were scheduled for November.

Everyone who has taken them agrees that the exams are very challenging. A few people have taken more than one at a time, but most thought that one was enough. Less than 50 percent of the people pass each test. Many people, myself included, dropped out along the way. The ones taking the higher level exams were by no means a random sample; they had shown the ability and determination to outdo some really smart people again and again.

The Hartford, as well as most other insurance companies, granted actuarial students time during work to study for exams. I think that we got thirty hours for each exam period. Most people took the hours in increments of an hour or two at a time. I always studied in the morning. I came in early and then used an hour and a half of study time. My recollection is that to maintain this privilege one needed to pass at least one exam per year.

The study room on the twenty-first floor was between the elevators and an exterior wall. It consisted of a conference table and, if memory serves, six or eight chairs. For the most part everyone took advantage of the time to study silently and diligently. Occasionally, of course, someone (usually Tom Corcoran) would doze off. We just let them sleep unless the snoring got too loud.

I remember two unusual occurrences. The first involved Pat Adams, an exceptional student who never made any noise in the study room. [This is a good story, but it would be better if I could somehow act it out.] One morning Pat clearly needed to sneeze. She inhaled sharply and then let the breath out. She inhaled sharply again and then emitted something much closer to “Pfft” than “Ahchoo” (or, in my case, a Category 5 blast of AHCHOOOOOO repeated up to eight times).

Upon hearing Pat’s timid sneeze I felt compelled to break the monastic silence of the study room in order to declare that hers was the most pitiful sneeze that I had ever witnessed.

The other occasion of note occurred when Mike Swiecicki and Damon Panels became embroiled in an argument over who was on third base in the ninth inning of a baseball game from a decade or so earlier. It was the kind of dispute that could be solved with Google in less than a minute, but, of course, that was not possible in the seventies. Mike and Damon went on and on, each adding details from his own recollection to try to persuade the other to cede the point. I don’t remember if either of them was ever proven right. It is important to not that no one reported them for breaking the vow of silence because everyone judged that the strictures of l’omertà applied.

UConn offered evening classes at its Hartford campus for the first four exams. I took two of these classes, and I seem to remember that the Hartford paid the tuition.

Marking C for every question is a bad strategy.

Over the years I took the first six exams. All the questions on the first five tests were multiple choice. The multiple choice questions were very carefully designed so that all of the answers seemed reasonable. To discourage guessing, a percentage of wrong answers was subtracted from the number of right answers.

Each exam was scored on a scale from 0 through 10. The minimum passing score was 6 on each test. Here is a description of my experience with each exam:

Part 1: The topic was “general mathematics”. Most of the questions involve algebra and/or calculus. I took the exam in my sophomore year at U-M. I did not study at all. My score was a 6. I thought that I had done much better than that. I probably guessed too much.

Sue Comparetto took this exam several times, but she did not pass. Of course, she also did not have the benefit of study time or free classes.

I took a chance when I was young and answered only the probability questions. It worked out better for me than it did for Og Oggilby.

Part 2: The topics were probability and statistics. The first time that I took it was in November of 1969 right after I had taken classes at U-M in both subjects from Cecil Nesbitt. I was too busy with debate and other extracurricular activities to study. More details can be read here. I was not worried about passing, but I should have been. I only received a 4.

I took the test again in May of 1970 in Ann Arbor. Once again I did not study even for a minute, this time out of ennui and disillusionment with the world in general. I was especially shaky about statistics. As the tests were being distributed, I decided to skip all statistics questions except the ones that I was absolutely certain of. In actuality, I answered every probability question and no statistics questions at all. I assumed that I had flunked, but I somehow squeaked through with a 6.

Part 3: The topics were finite differences (about which I remember absolutely nothing) and compound interest. I took this exam in November of 1972 in Hartford. During the previous few months I had attended classes in these subjects at UConn/Hartford. The subject matter seemed rather simple, and I used all of my study time, but I still only managed a 6.

Jordan's textbook was our bible. — Jordan’s textbook was our bible.

Part 4: The topics was life contingencies. I took the test in May of 1973. Many actuaries considered this the most difficult exam. Once again I attended the classes in Hartford. This time I supplemented my study time with some additional time, but the weather was starting to get very nice in late April and May. By then I also had something of a social life. I counted myself lucky to score a six.

Part 5: There were four exceptionally boring topics: 1) demography (the study of individuals moving in and out of groups over time); 2) principles underlying the construction of mortality and other tables; 3) elements of graduation of mortality tables and other series; 4) sources and characteristics of the principal mortality and disability tables. If the choice had been mine, I would never have considered studying any of these topics. I hated every second that I spent in all four areas.

I took this test in the fall of 1973, a very bad period for me. There were no classes. I studied as hard as I could at the Hartford, and I tried to make myself study at home. However, there were many distractions, and by then I had pretty much decided that I wanted to abandon the world of insurance and return to U-M if possible to coach debate. At the end of the exam, I was pretty certain that I had failed, and I was right. I got a 4.

Part 6: There were three topics: 1) actuarial aspects of life insurance accounting; 2) valuation of liabilities; 3) investment of life insurance funds. I took this test in the spring of 1974. By then I had already been offered the coaching job at U-M, and I accepted it. I planned to leave the Hartford forever in August.

I really wanted to pass this test. I knew that I would never use any of the knowledge that I was cramming into my skull, but I did not want people to think that I was quitting because I could not pass the exams. As it happened, however, my social life had improved by that point. That factor, my excitement about the adventure that awaited me in the fall, and the fact that the accounting aspect was insufferably boring made it difficult for me to keep my nose to the grindstone.

The first part of the exam was short answer/essay. I felt pretty good at the break about my performance. However, I did not feel at all good about the multiple choice questions in the afternoon. I was therefore not surprised when I received another 4.

The investment part of this exam was ludicrous. The Society still used a horribly dated textbook that recommended that companies concentrate their investments in downtown real estate properties occupied by department stores like F.W. Woolworth and S.S. Kresge. A few typewritten pages were provided to students to replace these comical suggestions.

After I left the Hartford area, the thing that I missed the least was studying for and taking the tests. The math was not as difficult as what I encountered at Michigan, but at least half or the material was, for me, horribly boring.

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Tag Archives: University of Michigan

1974-1976 U-M: Academics

1966-1970 Miscellaneous Events

1972-1974 Connecticut: Sue and Mike

1972-1974 Connecticut: Sports

1972-1974 Connecticut: Actuarial Exams