By the end of 2022 Americans were still contracting Covid-19, but very few died or became seriously ill. Most people had either contracted the virus already at least once or had been immunized with boosters. I still wore an N95 mask outside of the house for the first few months, but by the end of that period few people joined me.
January
For decades I have been an avid college football fan. New Years Day was ordinarily one of my favorite days. In 2023, however, it fell on a Sunday. The semifinals of the four-team College Football Playoff had occurred on December 31 Only pro games, in which I had little interest, were held on January 1. I was in my office in Enfield for most of the day.
On Monday, January 2, I played with Nancy Calderbank as part of the mentoring program at the Hartford Bridge Club (HBC). She had asked me to coach her through the transition from Standard American to Two-Over-One (2/1). Our results were not very good that day, but there was one memorable hand, which is shown at the right.
I had the dubious privilege of holding the cards in the East hand. When I received a miserable collection like that one, I like to add up the number of pips that are on my cards. In this case the total was 59, the second-lowest that I have ever seen.1 What made it really amazing was that more than half of the pips were clubs. Also, if deuces were aces, threes kings, etc., this hand would be worth 30 high card points. West’s monstrosity has only 70 percent of that number.
On the day after this bridge game I learned that one of my regular partners, Peter Katz, and an occasional partner of both Sue and me, Fred Gagnon, had contracted Covid-19 over the holidays. Neither became seriously ill, and both were back at the tables within a week or two.
On January 5 I sent the first email to the committee for the Weiss-Bertoni Award. The details of this project have been chronicled here.
The garbage disposal in the new kitchen had been stopped up. Apparently it was my fault. Sue said that all fat and grease must be removed with a paper towel before scraping the garbage from plates and cooking utensils into the sink. A plumber came out and fixed it on the 14th. He returned three days later to address a leak under the sink in the old kitchen. Tennessee Ernie Ford came to mind.
On the 15th I started work on a third-person autobiography entitle Cowboy Coder from Kansas. When the blog entry for this project is completed, I will link it here.
My wife Sue informed me that someone had told her years ago that we could get a break on our real estate tax because I am a veteran. That program exists, and we might have been able to use it in the first few years that we lived in Enfield, but our income, which is primarily from social security, seemed much too high.
On January 18 Sue was in a funk all day.. She played at the Simsbury Bridge Club (SBC) with Maria Van Der Ree in the evening game. Even though they came in last out of eight pairs, Sue seemed chipper at the end. She needs to be out with people much more than I do.
The infamous Tonto email went out on the 19th. The tale is told here.
Bob: Several early entries in the 2023 notes for the pandemic concern the demise of Sue’s cat, Bob, our last surviving pet. The notes for January 3 reported: “Bob drools a lot and smells bad. Sue gave him a bath of some kind, but his saliva is rancid. He sleeps most of the time, but he bothers Sue when he is awake.”
The litter box in the basement. The grey items near the box are pieces of litter that absorbed water when the basement flooded. The water later evaporated.
We had cats in Enfield from the time that they moved there. Throughout this period all of them were able to use the cat door installed in a basement window to go outside when they felt like it. They could be relied on to make use of it whenever they needed to relieve themselves. However, in 2022 it became necessary to make a litter box available to them. At first it was in the basement. By the beginning of 2023 I had to move it upstairs because Bob was no longer able to negotiate the stairs.
Bob finally died on January 28. In some ways it was a sad occasion, but neither Sue nor I thought that he enjoyed the last few months of his life the way that our other cats seemed to.
Sue and I get a reminder about Bob every evening at 8:55. Her phone announces “Eight fifty-five Meds Slash Bob”. We call this announcement “Slash Bob.”
February
The coldest day of the year, by far was February 4. It approached 0 in Connecticut, but it was much colder on Mt. Washington in New Hampshire. The temperature was 8 below but the windchill index was an incredible -109° Fahrenheit.
February 7 was the first day of the regional bridge tournament in Southbridge, MA. Sue played with Mark Aquino in the Open Pairs. They did not do well. My adventures in the tournament have been described here.
In Sue’s absence I took my car in for the emissions test at Mad Hatter Auto Repair. Afterwards I calculated that we would owed $500 in income tax for 2022. The biggest reason for this was the cost of the cruise (described here) that necessitated a fairly large distribution from my 401K.
On February 10, only six days after that extremely cold day, the temperature reached a balmy 62°.
March
The first post-pandemic limited sectional was held at the HBC on March 26. It drew an incredible fifty-seven tables. The whole story is revealed here.
“Donald, my book will be coming out soon.”
On March 30 Donald Trump was indicted by the state of New York on 31 counts of business fraud! The indictments were in regard to Trump, through his fixer at the time, Michael Cohen, paid Stormy Daniels $150,000 to Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about their affair during the run-up to the election. Trump misused corporate funds to reimburse Cohen. That is what made it a crime in New York, which was, at that time, the official location of the companies. It was being filed as a felony because it was an illegal attempt to influence an election, which was a felony in New York.
An important Zoom meeting was held for replacement of the relational database that I had designed and implemented for the district. Details of that meeting have been posted here.
April
The income tax situation worked out better than my preliminary calculation had indicated. I had to pay the IRS $181. However, we received a refund from CT of $1996 I used one of the free filing services, but I had to pay $15 to file electronically in CT.
For the 2023 National Debate Tournament, U-M’s top team of Rafael Pierry and Kelly Phil won the Copeland award and were seeded #1 in the tournament. I could hardly believe that seven assistant coaches were going to attend the tournament in Chantilly, VA. Pierry and Giorgio Rabbini had also won the Copeland award in 2022 and were second in 2021.
Pierry and Phil.
Pierry and Phil were 7-1 in the preliminary rounds with 21 out of a possible 24 ballots. The U-M second team of Rabbini and Joshua Harrington also was 7-1 with only one fewer ballot. Pierry and Phil made it to the final round, but they lost to Wake Forest. Pierry attained the final round in three consecutive years, an achievement that will probably not be duplicated in my lifetime. I was nearly as disappointed with this result as I was with my own failure to qualify for the NDT in 1970, as described here.
There was quite a bit of activity about the Weiss-Bertoni award.
On Saturday, April 8, we went to see Tom, Casey, and Brian Corcoran in Tom’s house in Wethersfield. When we came back I found a dead mouse in the toilet of the bathroom in the older part of the house. I set traps the next day, but I caught nothing. Some mysteries are never solved.
On April 13 the temperature reached 90°. I walked five miles, but I had to stop, rest in the shade, and cool off three times. The next day it reached an incredible 96°, breaking the previous record by fourteen degrees. That temperature was never exceeded in the summer months.
The first CBA sectional was held in Orange on the 21st through the 23rd. I played all three days. Descriptions of my adventures were posted here. My most memorable achievement was the 512 miles that my Honda logged on a tank of gas. It took over 13 gallons when I filled it, but it claimed that it could have gone another fifteen miles. .
May
It was about this time that I discovered Bosch on Freevee. Sue and I watched it nearly every evening, and it didn’t cost us a penny. This and other ventures into the land of streaming are cataloged here. We could not believe that Amazon, which purchased the service from IMDB, was allowing people to view this high-quality police dram for free.
It was very hot on May 1 when I mowed the portions of the lawn that face either North Street or Hamilton Court. I was not able to mow the rest until three days later.
On May 8 I volunteered to send out the HBC’s emails for the summer through MailChimp. Lori Leopold had been doing it, but she had a lot of travel scheduled for the upcoming months. I somehow also was saddled with creating the official calendar from Donna’s handwritten version.
On May 11 the national health emergency for the pandemic officially ended. For several months I continued wearing my mask wherever I was likely to be in fairly close contact with others.
The day-by-day blog entry for the rest of 2023 has been posted here.
1. The lowest total that I have ever seen was an incredible 53 at the Simsbury Bridge Club fairly early in my bridge career. Unfortunately, although I often had my camera with me in those days, I did not record this event, and no hand record was available because the SBC was not yet using a dealing machine.
Preparation: For several years I have maintained a spreadsheet that contained one line per bridge partner. I only kept track of ones with whom I had played at least one complete session at a sanctioned game. I also had bookmarked the ACBL’s web page that contained the records of club games. However, when I started working on this entry, I was disappointed to discover that the link no longer worked. So, I have needed to rely on my memory more than I hoped.
This document contains stories about partnered with whom I played several times. Part 2 (posted here) describes the ones that I met through the mentoring program or the High-Low game on Sundays and people that I only played with once or twice.
The HBC: The Hartford Bridge Club (HBC) was founded in 1931. It is the oldest continuously operating bridge club in North America. Its headquarters since October 1995 has been at 19A Andover Drive in West Hartford. I played my first game at the club and became a member on January 1, 2008. My partner that afternoon was Dick Benedict (introduced here), with whom I had been playing on Wednesday evenings at the Simsbury Bridge Club (SBC) for several years. At the time the club was charging $30 for a membership. The table fee was $5 for members and $6 for others. At the time I had only been playing in Simsbury. I joined the HBC because I had been asked to play in the games it ran on Tuesday evenings and Saturday afternoons. So, I figured that if I kept to that schedule all year1, it would be a good dealT
Tom Gerchman.
The person who asked me to play was Tom Gerchman. In preparation for playing with him I taught myself thirteen conventions that I had found in a book by William S. Root and Richard Pavlicek. I also bought Michael Lawrence’s CD about 2/1 (pronounced “two over one”), the set of bidding principles used by most players at the HBC and at tournaments. He had played 2/1 with his previous partner, Mary Witt2, and I eventually persuaded him to play it with me as well. At this point I knew enough conventions to be comfortable playing with nearly any new partner.
Tom drove a red BMW convertible. Between 2008 and 2023 he has purchased several new cars. Each one was a red BMW convertible. The license plate was GERCH. On trips he liked to drive, but the back seat was uninhabitable. If we were playing in a team game, the BMW was not big enough to hold four people. He borrowed his mother’s car.
I soon discovered that Tom wanted to play with me because Mary had resigned from their partnership. She wasn’t angry at him; she just did not like sitting across the table from him. I learned this when Tom and I played in a knockout with Mary and Ruth Tucker3 as teammates in the regional tournament in Danbury, CT. We made it to the semifinals of our bracket. After we had been eliminated Tom kept telling Ruth, “I got you gold!”
That evening the four of us went out for supper. I learned at that meal that Ruth had been a small child in Nazi Germany during the Kristallnacht in 1938. She was surprised that I knew quite a bit about the event. I had read about it when I had researched the backgrounds of two popes4, Pius XI and Pius XII, who had both been in Germany during Hitler’s rise to power. Tom had never heard of it.
For quite some time I enjoyed playing with Tom for several reasons. The first was that he liked to go to tournaments, and so did I. In addition, he was still working5, which meant that he could only play in evening games, and on weekends and holidays. That schedule conformed to mine. However, he was an avid golfer. So, in nicer weather he played less bridge. I also like the fact that he was not averse to learning new conventions. Bidding has always been my favorite aspect of the game.
At the SBC Tom occasionally played with his mother, Sue. He was sometimes pretty hard on her when she made mistakes. Wen she died in 2012 (obituary here) I was still playing regularly with Tom, and I went to her wake. I was the only bridge player who attended, but a number of Tom’s golf buddies were there.
After the evening games Tom and a small group of the other players went to the Corner Pug in West Hartford to discuss the hands and drink. Tom might have eaten a very late supper. I don’t think that he cooked, and he was not married.
It took me a while to realize it, but Tom definitely was obsessive-compulsive in some ways. For example we played together on two separate days at the NABC held in Boston in 2008. I discovered that he had memorized in terms of minutes how long it took to get to the site of the tournament from several spots on the route. Furthermore, on the day that I drove I let him off to register us while I parked the car. He insisted that I must park in precisely the same spot that he had used on the previous day. Just to be peevish I parked in the same spot, but one floor lower.
On that occasion we played in an Open Swiss with a pair from the partnership desk. We won our first round against a team from Connecticut. After that it was one humiliating defeat after another. Our teammates were upset at us. We beat a hasty retreat after the last round.
I heard from Mary Witt that Tom read the Hartford Courant every morning and always started with the obituaries. She also said that he had a huge stack of old newspapers in his house. I never went to his house, and so I cannot verify this.
Tom was much more obsessed with the scores than I was. He was pretty hard on me at club games, but he very seldom talked during rounds at tournaments. He also stayed after club games and audited the scores. He once told me that he loved to check calculations. He confided once that he should have been an auditor.
I was still playing with Tom at the time of my Life Master parties at the HBC and the SBC in early 2010. I remember that he gave a little speech at the HBC in which he talked about my habit of sending him emails about what I thought we could have done to do better in the previous game. In my acceptance speech I thanked every single partner that I had had at that point. I thanked Tom for teaching me “that in a six-team Howell, you don’t play against the pair that you follow and the pair that follows you.”
I don’t have any great memories of playing with Tom. We did not do very well at most tournaments. Eventually, I stopped playing with him. I just could not stand the fact that he said and did the same things over and over and over and over. He also talked about the hands too much in club games while we were still playing. I found myself pounding the steering wheel while driving home after playing with him. Fifteen years later I still react negatively to the sound of his voice.
Actually, I quit twice. After the first time he persuaded me to try again. It took me very little time to realize that he was never going to change. I quit again.
I still teamed up occasionally with him for team games. We had much better results when I did not have to sit across from him.
Tom invited me and Sue to the party that he threw for himself on his sixtieth birthday. It was at a restaurant on the west side of town. He was celebrating the fact that he had survived that long. Apparently both his only brother and his father had died from heart attacks when they were in their fifties.
Michael Dworetsky.
After my partnership with Tom was dissolved, on most Tuesday evenings I played with Michael Dworetsky. He had been playing for quite a while before I returned to the world of bridge, but he had only occasionally played in tournaments. I never was quite sure why he had avoided tournaments before I began playing as his partner.
I have several vivid memories of playing with Michael. We drove to a sectional in Johnston, RI, and did well enough to finish first in the C Flight in the afternoon session of the Open Pairs. As the director read the results, I said to Michael, “Let’s see how he does with our last names.” He butchered both of them.
The most catastrophic mistake of my bridge career occurred in the penultimate round of the Flight C qualifying tournament for the Grand National Teams (GNT). We were definitely in contention when Michael made a Help Suit Game try by bidding 3♣. I needed to bid 4♠ if I thought that we could take ten of the thirteen tricks or 3♠ if not. I considered all that I knew about the hand and finally decided that we probably did not have enough. Unfortunately, I did not bid 3♠, I mistakenly passed, leaving Michael in a ludicrous club contract.
I played with Michael when he made Life Master in a sectional in Westchester County. He drove us into New York City to a deli to celebrate. I had a Reuben sandwich; he had pastrami. We had a great time, but it cost him a fortune to park the car.
He almost always drove us to tournaments. On one occasion I spilled some coffee on the rug in his car. He did not yell at me, but I knew he was upset. He had a very nice car. It was the first that I had ever been in that had a both a built-in GPS and a hand-free telephone.
One of the best calls that I ever made in bridge was when Michael and I played against two ladies, one of whom needed to win the match in order to make Life Master. I opened 1♠, the lady overcalled 2♥, Michael doubled, indicating that he had a pretty good hand with clubs and diamonds. I had six spades, five hearts that included two honors, a club, and a diamond. I passed. We took the first nine tricks. She was down four for 1100 points. She did not make Life Master that afternoon.
I gave a little speech at Michael’s Life Master party. It might have been the best speech that I ever gave. It was not as effective as Urban II’s call for a crusade in 1096, but mine got more laughs. I began by claiming that Michael was a founding member of the club in 1931. I also mentioned the hole in the sole of one of his shoes.
Michael and I played together at the NABC in the summer of 2013. I posted my recollections of this adventure here. We also flew down to the Gatlinburg Regional Tournament in Tennessee in 2013. I took notes and posted them here. We won a knockout and a lot of masterpoints there.
The house in Bloomfield in which Michael lived with his wife Ellen was struck by lightning. Eventually they moved to Palm Beach Gardens, FL, but I have seen Michael at bridge tournaments in New England a few times. He usually was playing with a teaching pro named Bob Lavin.
Dan Koepf.
The nicest person whom I ever met was Dave Landsberg. When I started playing on Tuesday evenings, Dave was playing regularly with Dan Koepf. I invited them to team up with Jerry Hirsch and me in Flight C of the GNT event one year. They accepted, and we did quite well. I then wrote to both of them to ask if either one wanted to play in a tournament with me. Dave responded positively, and we were partners and good friends right up until his death (obituary here) in 2016. In fact, he was planning on playing with me in the Cape Cod Senior Regional the week that he died. I wrote up my experiences at that tournament, including my thoughts about Dave, and posted them here.
Dave was on the HBC’s Board of Trustees, and I was not. I once asked him what the BoT meetings were like. He told me that at that time there was a big controversy over toilet paper. He said that the women on the board were complaining that the toilet paper in the ladies’ room was too flimsy. Dave informed me that his position was that we should give them better paper, but it was only fair that they should agree to pay higher table fees. I laughed for several minutes.
Dave and I won a couple of events together. The most memorable one was in Cromwell, CT, when Dave played with Kay Hill, and I played with Ginny Iannini (introduced here). I posted a photo6 of us on the District 25 website, NEBridge.org, as I did the winners of all events at D25’s regionals. When Dave’s wife Jackie saw the photo of Dave and Ginny side-by-side, she told him that he could not play with her again. When Dave told me this, we both broke out laughing. However, it made me wonder why Sue never complained about me playing with Ginny.
Pat Fliakos.
I was playing with Dave and three other people when I set the world standard for captaining a five-person team in a sectional Swiss in Auburn, MA. We were playing with Pat Fliakos,7 one of Dave’s regular partners, and a pair that we picked up at the partnership desk, Charlie Curley (introduced here) and Mike Colburn. Since Mike and Charlie were regular partners, I assigned them to play all eight rounds. Pat and Dave would play six rounds, four together and two each with me. I would play the middle four rounds. This would allow me to leave early and mow the lawn, which needed it badly. When I departed, our team’s score was slightly above average, but in my absence my four teammates won both of the last two rounds, defeating the best team in attendance in the last round. We finished third overall and first in B and C.
The accident occurred between Worcester and Springfield.
The grass did not get mowed. On the trip home my 2007 Honda was rear-ended on the Mass Pike by someone driving a rental car. I did not yet have a cellphone, but he did. He did not speak English very well, but I did. So I called 911 on his phone. After about twenty minutes a state trooper appeared. After a few minutes he told me that he had given the other man a ticket for following too closely. I already had his insurance information; he had Progressive. So, I just drove home.
A few days later a Progressive adjuster examined my car and assessed the cost to fix a small dent on one bumper at $1500. I later was contacted by someone from Avis, who had rented the car to the other driver. They said that they would accept Progressive’s assessment and asked me to settle for $2,000. I spelled my name for them, and gave them my address. The check arrived a few weeks later. Four or five years later I traded in the car. I never considered getting it fixed.
Dave’s Life Master party at the HBC was shared with Sue Rudd (introduced here). I told the above story (minus the car crash and insurance). I balanced it with the tale of the first sectional in Hamden, CT, in which Dave and I competed as partners. We finished dead last in both the morning and afternoon session. I have never heard of anyone who could match that performance.
The best time that I spent with Dave was when the two of us dined at an Italian restaurant in Hyannis, MA. I recall that I ordered the Bolognese and a glass of wine. The food was good, and the conversation was better. For some reason it was very easy to talk to and to listen to Dave. By the time that we left, we had solved the most serious of the world’s problems.
I went to Dave’s wake and the ceremony for him at Wesleyan, where he had worked. When I met Jackie, I told her that Dave really loved her. I was certain of this because he never rolled his eyes when he talked about her. I really miss him.
A photo of Dave is in the Felix Springer section of this entry.
Peter Katz and I started playing together on Saturdays and Tuesday evenings after I stopped playing with Tom Gerchman. In 2023 I still played with him whenever the HBC had a game on Saturday. We had one great showing in August of 2023, which I have documented here.
Earlier in our partnership Peter and I played together in a few sectionals that were held in the Hartford area. At one of them we happened to have the last sitout in the afternoon session, which meant that we could go home early. Before we left we picked up hand records for that session. It did not take us long to realize that some of the hands that we played did not correspond to the ones on the printout. We reported this to the director, Tim Hill. He did not tear his hair out, but I am pretty sure that I saw his bow tie spinning around.
How could this have happened? Some directors like to play “web movements” when an awkward number of pairs are playing. If, for example, thirty-eight pairs are playing, the standard way to play it would be to have two sections, one with ten tables and one with nine. Both sections would be playing nine three-board matches. Each pair would only play against nine of the other thirty-seven pairs. A web movement would allow for one very large section playing fourteen two-board rounds. This requires two identical sets of boards, and they must be handled precisely correctly, but the directors who do this are very reliable about setting them up correctly.
In this case, however, the directors were not at fault. The two sets of boards were NOT identical. I don’t know how they were able to score this, but they eventually did. The directors definitely earned their salary that day.
When I first began playing with Peter he was something of a local celebrity. He and his wife (whom I never met) attended all of the home games of the Hartford University men’s and women’s basketball teams. Peter wore outrageous wigs to the games. I never met his wife, and I only saw photos of him in his super-fan getup.
At some point in the teens the couple got divorced, and Peter stopped attending the games. The marriage must have been stressful on him. He mellowed out quite a bit after the divorce.
At first Peter and I played a version of 2/1 that was not much different from what I had played with Tom Gerchman. At some point Peter began playing on Tuesdays with one of the best players at the club, Tom Joyce. They played a version of the Kaplan-Sheinwold weak 1NT system. I agreed to learn this and play it on Saturdays with Peter. That was what we employed in our big game.
Peter served as webmaster for the HBC. In 2023 I began working with him on posting the club’s monthly calendars.
Before the Pandemic I played regularly with Felix Springer. In fact we played together (and won!) in the very last game on March 15, 2020, before the HBC closed its doors for over a year. We also played together at a few tournaments, including a week at the Fall NABC in San Francisco in 2019. We also played together on a large number of very successful teams, but I usually paired with someone else.
Felix shared his Life Master party with Ken Leopold (introduced here). They asked Dave Landsberg and me to be their teammates. Before the play started, Dave turned to me and said, “Did you read their background stories? Why are they playing with us?”
I don’t know, but it was a good idea. We won our first four rounds. In the fifth round, we faced the other unbeaten team. They had at least five times as many points as we did. It was a very close match that turned on one hand. Laurie Robbins, an excellent bridge player, and I were both West holding the same cards. We each had to make a decision similar to the catastrophic one that I had made in the GNT with Michael Dworetsky. Laurie chose to try for game and went down. I settled for the partial.
Donna Feir.
Donna Feir, the longtime club manager, said that it was the only time that she could remember that the honorees won such a game, and also the only time that they were undefeated.
Felix, as president of the HBC, guided the club through the perilous times of the Pandemic. The club had almost no income, and it still had considerable expenses. He kept everyone involved with periodic newsletter, analysis of playing bridge with robots, and walks in the park. Donna confided to me that without Felix the club probably would not have survived.
In 2022 Felix did something that I never would have expected him to do, and it hurt me deeply. The story is related here.
Ann Hudson.
Ann Hudson lived across the river form Enfield in Suffield, CT, with her husband, Randy Johnson. I thoroughly enjoyed playing with both of them. The card that they played was very sophisticated. I must admit that I had a difficult time to remember the modified Manfield responses to an opponents takeout double.
For a few years Ann and I were rather regular partners for the half of the year that Ann and Randy spent in New England. The other half of the year they lived in South Carolina. In 2022 they moved from Suffield to Hadley, MA.
The only times that I got to play at the HBC with Randy were when Ann had to cancel at the last minute. It only happened a few times. He was an exceptionally good player. We played together in the open pairs in the sectional in Great Barrington, MA, one year and won the afternoon session.
Randy Johnson.
I met Ann while I was working at the partnership desk at the NABC in Providence in 2014. After that we played together pretty regularly at sectional, regional, and NABC tournaments and occasionally at the HBC if she could get away from her chores on their mini-farm.
I usually stopped at the McDonald’s on the south side of Hazard Ave. on the way to either their house in Suffield or at the Hampton Inn that was about halfway between us. On one occasion I was sitting in my blue 2007 Honda in the parking lot while I ate my sausage biscuit with egg. I had turned off the Honda’s engine while I ate. I could not get the car to start, and I did not have a cellphone yet. I had to go in to McDonald’s to use someone’s phone to call Sue, and I had to cancel my game with Ann. If was embarrassing. The best thing about Hondas is their reliability. Mine was telling me that it was time for a trade-in, and I listened.
Ann had actually been born in China. Both of her parents were university professors. They brought her to the U.S. when Ann was very young.
In 2015 my wife Sue and I decided to fly to Denver to play in the Fall NABC. Randy and Ann also planned to attend. Ann and I decided to play in two NABC events: the 0-10,000 Swiss and the 5K Blue Ribbon Pairs.
Kathy Rolfe.
Before those events started I picked up a partner for the evening side game, Kathy Rolfe. I had met her at a previous NABC when we were both playing in the lowest level of the Life Masters Event. When we came to her table she asked me if I was related to Vic Wavada in Kansas City, and—get this—she pronounced my name correctly. It turned out that Kathy knew Vic’s wife Theresa very well, and she had mentioned that I played bridge.
Kathy and I finished near the middle in the side game. We probably should have done a little better.
I had arranged to play in the 10,000 Swiss with a woman from Arkansas named Ti Davis.8 I told her that I was 6-feet tall, grey-haired, and skinny, and I would have on my red and blue Barça hat. She was playing with an Asian woman whom she met at the partnership desk. Unfortunately, we were overmatched in the event and only won one or two rounds.
Leonardo Cima.
On the next day Ann and I teamed up with Randy and one of his regular partners to play in an Open Swiss event. In the second round we played against Leonardo Cima and Valerio Giubilo, famous players from Rome. We had a little time to talk with them before the match. They told me that they were both from Roma. I told them that it was “la mia città preferita in Italia.”
Valerio Giubilo.
In the match Giubilo made an incorrect bid on an important hand causing them to miss a slam. Cima gave him a severe dressing-down. During the rest of the match they both spoke impeccable English, but during this post mortem Cima filled the air with Italian curse words.
We won the match, but we did not do well in the event. Giubilo and Cima won over 100 points in the tournament.
In the Mini-Blue Ribbon Pairs Ann and I played as well as we have ever played. I was very excited when we made it to the second day. We played pretty well then as well, but not quite well enough.
I was too intense for Ann in the Super Senior Pairs and Mini-Blue Ribbon Pairs at the NABC in Honolulu, as described here. She was not angry at me; I think that she felt sorry for me more than anything. After the tournament she drove to the airport and drove Sue and me to Enfield. Ann and I have played together in less stressful situations a few times since then.
I played with Michael Varhalamas a few times at the Saturday game at the HBC. I also played with him at least once in a Swiss in a sectional somewhere in Westchester County. I remember that he drove us there in his truck. Our teammates were two women from, I think, New Jersey. I don’t remember their names. Michael made the arrangements.
Twice during the game he bid dicey grand slams that I had to play. I made the first one without too much difficulty. The second one, however, was in the last round and required a squeeze—not my specialty. However, I pulled it off, and we ended up with a very good score.
Michael and his wife eventually moved to Saint Petersburg. Sue and I went to a bridge game there, and my partner, Chris Person, and I played against him in the first round of a pairs game at the local club. On one hand Chris opened 1[Suit x=”C”]. I passed with three or four points and only one or two clubs. Chris had only three clubs; it was a bloodbath. Michael recommended bidding in that situation, but only over 1[Suit x=”C”], not over any other opening bid.
Connie Dube
Before the Pandemic I played fairly regularly at the HBC with Connie Dube ( pronounced DOO bee). I met her when she and Myrna Butler agreed to be teammates with Ken Leopold and me at a regional tournament. They were late for the first round. Helen Pawlowski and Sally Kirtley sat in for them for one or two hands. In case you are wondering, this was definitely not legal. Since Helen told me that Myrna was always late, I did not hold it against Connie.
Connie and I played at a few sectional tournaments. Her availability was quite limited because her husband was suffering from severe chronic illnesses. As of 2023 she has not resumed playing after the Pandemic.
Joan Brault.
At the HBC I have played with Joan Brault quite a few times when one of her regular partners, Mike (really Michele) Raviele or Aldona Siuta, could not play. We have never set the world on fire, but we have played together a few times in 2023.
Paul Pearson and I teamed up with Mike and Joan at a sectional Swiss in the Hartford area. I think that we did pretty well.
She was a very talented artist. She also had a grandson who was a pitcher/outfielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Over the years I have played with Mary Eisenberg both at the HBC and at a few tournaments. She asked her to help her to get her Life Master designation at an upcoming regional tournament in Danbury, CT. We played together in club games at least twice so that we could accustom ourselves to each other’s styles. One of those was a STaC (Sectional Tournament at Clubs) game that we somehow won. We earned a lot of silver points for that, but Mary still needed a small fraction of a gold point.
Mary asked me to drive us to the tournament. She had apparently been in an automotive accident a few months earlier, and she was still shaky about driving, especially at night. I picked her up at a parking lot at a supermarket near her home. I never did understand why this arrangement was necessary, but I did not question it.
We played in the Golden Opportunity Pairs at the tournament. It was a two-session event limited to players with less than 750 masterpoints. At the time I was within a few points of the limit. So, I was not afraid of any of our competitors. It was safe to say that I had more tournament experience than any of them. Gold points were awarded to players who had a good combined score (known as “overalls”) for the two sessions, but a smaller amount of gold was also awarded to the pairs that finished first (both North-South and East-West) out of the ten in each section of ten tables for each session.
We did very badly in the morning. I remember interfering against a team playing Precision. The player with the strong hand doubled my bid, and it resulted in a four-digit score in the minus column. Mary did not play very well either. Our score was bad enough that we had very little chance of getting one of the overall awards. Mary was very disappointed. She asked me if I wanted to go home. Go home? I hadn’t driven all this way when there was still a chance of achieving the objective. I said that we just had to win our section in the afternoon session, and that was (at least from my perspective) a reasonable goal. If we played as well as well as we had in the STaC game, we would prevail easily.
We did much better in the afternoon. I have always had a pretty good feel for anticipating results. I reckoned that there was a pretty good chance that we might have won. You never knew for certain; someone may have received a lot of “gifts” from their opponents.
During the last round they posted the standings after the penultimate round. We checked it when we finished playing the last round. We were in first in our section, but only by one point. I thought back on the last round. On the first hand one of our opponents had made a grievous error that should have given us a good score. On the second hand we bid to the best contract, but Mary made some mistakes in the play. The third hand was mediocre, but we did avoid possible errors.
It took the directors nearly half an hour to post the final scores. Mary was beside herself with worry. They finally posted the scores. We tied for first place, and so we had to split the gold award with the other pair. Fortunately, that was just enough for Mary to become a Life Master.
On a good day the drive the hotel to Hartford took an hour.
The trip back to Hartford was in a downpour. However, my Honda had good tires, and so I was not much concerned with the water, and I still had pretty good vision for night driving. So, I was going the speed limit. I nonchalantly passed trucks that were going slower. Mary had to hide her face for most of the ride. She was terrified of another accident.
When we got to Hartford Mary could not remember how to get to the parking lot when coming from the west. We drove around for five or ten minutes before she got her bearings. Since I still had a half-hour drive to Enfield, I was annoyed by this.
Some months later the club sponsored a Life Master party for Mary. I gave a short speech that highlighted two aspects of her activities. At the time she often brought baked goods or other goodies to the club. She also cooked professionally. She even cooked for the Archbishop of Hartford for a while!
The other aspect was her fear of driving. I claimed that she had taken up racing on the Formula 1 circuit, and I held up a large picture of her alleged Ferrari. This reference went right over (or maybe under) Mary’s head, but a few people in the audience understood what I was talking about.
I may have played with Eric Vogel at the HBC more often than any other player. He started playing a few years after I did, and he amassed a terrific record. After I played with him a while I realized that he shared my interest in conventions. Together we put together a good card.
We also have played together in tournaments. We won one session of the open pairs at a sectional in Connecticut. That story has been told here. At the Presidential Regional in Southbridge, MA, in 2023 we played in Bracket 2 of the knockout. We won the qualifying Swiss very easily but only finished a very disappointing fourth. That tale of woe can be read here.
Eric is another talented artist. He also became the club’s treasurer in 2022. He has not had an easy time with accrual accounting.
Eric unobtrusively became a vegetarian at some point during our partnership. He certainly was one in 2023, but I remember that he complimented me on my chili at one of the pot-luck lunches at the HBC.
Eric’s daughter died in 2022. I went to the service at his church. His wife gave a very nice tribute.
Partab.
Prior to the Pandemic I was playing at the HBC nearly every Tuesday with Partab Makhijani. I expected to resume playing with him when the club reopened, but he did not return to play. I think that he, like many others, might have health issues.
His LinkedIn page (here) said that he was on the adjunct faculty at the University of Hartford.
Buz.
I met Buz Kohn (LinkedIn page here) when he was playing with his mother Joan occasionally on Tuesday evenings. We have played together several times at the HBC both before and after the club closed for the Pandemic.
Although Buz was as good at playing the cards as anyone he was not very tolerant of conventions. I had trouble getting him to even use a convention card.
Buz was still playing at the HBC in 2023, but I think that he also had a house in Florida.
Sonja Smith was Steve’s mother, and she also had triplet girls. When I began playing at the SBC in 2004, Sonja played there regularly with a partner who subsequently moved away.
We played together at the HBC several time before the Pandemic and once or twice afterwards—including one of the sectionals in 2022—before she and her family moved to the South.
Sonja attended the 2018 NABC in Honolulu. Afterwards she and her husband Chris spent a few days in Maui, as did my wife Sue and I. Sonja, who was staying at a resort hotel a few miles north of our base of Lahaina, invited us to join them on Monday, December 3, for an expensive sunset cruise of Maui’s west coast. I described it in detail here. It turned out to be a booze cruise with very loud music. I did not enjoy it at all.
Jeanne Striefler and her husband Fred invited Sue and me to their house in West Simsbury several times before the Pandemic. Jeanne and I also played together at the HBC several times and played at teams events at nearby sectionals and regionals. She was part of our ill-fated team at the Presidential Regional described in Eric Vogel’s section. She served as the club’s secretary for many years.
Jeanne also played regularly at the SBC both before and after the closure for the Pandemic.
Jeanne was from Omaha, Nebraska. She grew up closer to my old stomping grounds than anyone else in the HBC.
Ron Talbot.
Ron Talbot, who attended Notre Dame, was the president of the HBC for two years. Before the Pandemic I played with him fairly often at the HBC as well as at a few sectionals in Rhode Island. If his partner was male. he wore a baseball cap while he was playing. If female, he was bareheaded.
Ron told me that he walked three miles every morning. I much preferred to do my walking in the evening. He also walked fifty miles in three days on the Appalachian Trail with his children and/or grandchildren. I don’t know if I could have done that.
Ron moved to Naples, FL, before the Pandemic. He has returned to the HBC once or twice.
Trevor Reeves.
Trevor Reeves served as president and then treasurer of the HBC. He implemented the budgeting system that was instrumental in helping to get the HBC through the Pandemic.
I played with him a few times at the club and at tournaments, including an open pairs game at the Summer NABC in Toronto in 2017 in which we were first in our section in the evening session.
Trevor was involved in the GNT difficulty that I described at the end of Felix Springer’s section.
The player with whom I have played for the longest time is my wife Sue. W have played together at the SBC, the HBC, at tournaments, on cruises, and clubs while we were traveling.
Sue’s HBC photo.
Sue had never played bridge when we met in 1972, but she had played a lot of setback, a much simpler trick-taking game, with friends and family members. She had no trouble learning the rules of bridge, but she had a difficult time understanding even the basics of the strategic principles concerning bidding and play.
I vividly remember one of the first times that we played as partners. It was at the house in Wethersfield of friends of ours, Jim and Ann Cochran, who were introduced here. I may have had a gin and tonic or two. It was a friendly game of rubber bridge. Nothing was at stake.
Sue and I got the bid in a suit contract, and Sue had to play it. The hand was not very challenging; all she had to do was to lead a few rounds of trump and then take her winners. Unfortunately, she neglected to take out the trumps before taking her high cards. So, the Cochrans were able to ruff several of her winners, and the contract went down.
Ann helpfully provided Sue with a way of remembering the importance of drawing trumps before attacking side suits. She taught her the old adage, “Get the children off the street!”
A few hands later Sue played another suit contract. She once again forgot about her opponents’ children, and they once again made enough mischief to set the contract.
On the third hand that I witnessed from across the table in my role of dummy, Sue’s failure to draw trumps led to another failed contract, I lost my temper, slammed my fist down, and broke the card table. I would have offered to buy them a new one, but at the time we were, as the British say, skint.
Nearly forty years passed before Sue and I played together at a sanctioned game. She joined the ACBL in 2011, seven years after I did. By the time that she started to play, I was already a Life Master. She blamed me for not warning her that the ACBL had changed the requirements for that rank on January 1 of 2011. The organization increased the number of required points, but they also made available new opportunities for obtaining them.
Over the years Sue and I played together at a few NABC tournaments, two bridge cruises, and at a few clubs in New England and Florida. At first I tried to get her to go over the hands with me after a session of bridge, but she really hated to do so. Our games together did not improve much over the years.
Sue has a lot of trouble with time, and in competitive bridge only seven minutes are ordinarily allotted for each hand. Contributing to this difficult are the facts that she plays—and does every other thing—rather slowly, keeps a very detailed score, and insists on playing North, the position that maintains the official results.
Mary Petit
I remember one Sunday in which we played in the High-Low game at the HBC. By chance I declared more than my usual share of contracts. We finished first! I cannot remember any other occasion on which we enjoyed even a modicum of success.
Sue would like to do better, but she does not have the drive that I have always had to improve one’s game. In short, she never reads books or bridge articles. She sometimes goes over a result sheet, but never with a critical eye.
She participated in the mentoring program once. Her mentor, an experienced player named Mary Petit, offered her some tips. Later Mary asked me why Sue did not use any of them. I knew the answer, but I could not explain it in a way that anyone else could understand. So, I just said, “That’s the way that Sue is.”
Document here are more of my partnerships at North America’s oldest bridge club before it closed for the Pandemic . Partnerships after the reopening are described here.
1. I naturally thought that I had twelve months of play. In fact, however, the year started on October 1 at the HBC. So, I needed to play 25 times in nine months, which I did.
2. I never got a chance to play with Mary Witt before she moved to Cary, NC. I have occasionally communicated with her by email.
3. Several years later Ruth asked me to play with her at the HBC. I remember that I made a mistake of some kind on one hand that prevented us from getting any points. She mentioned that she knew that I was going to do that. Ruth was a good player, but she never made Life Master because she did not like tournaments. She died in 2020 at the age of 86. Here obituary can be found here. Her parents brought her to the United States in 1940.
4. An abbreviated recounting of my long obsession with papal history has been posted here. The chapter of my book about papal history that makes reference to Nazi Germany is posted here.
5. Tom was an actuary, but he never made FSA. In 2023 he was still working part-time at a pension consulting firm called PCI.
6. This photo was unfortunately lost when the server on which NEBridge.org ran had a catastrophic system failure in 2015. I also had a copy of the photo, but I cannot find it.
7. Pat still plays bridge, but she moved to Charlottesville, VA.
8. As it happened, we played against Ti’s team in the semifinals of the Summer NABC in Washington in 2016. Her team won the match and the event. I did not play against her. She and her partner played the same direction as Felix and me.
Shortly after my arrival in Hartford I, as well as all of the other actuaries and actuarial students, was invited to a party at the home of Don Sondergeld, Vice President and Actuary of the Hartford Life. In those days everyone in the corporate world knew that parties thrown by actuaries rapidly morphed into raucous bacchanalia. They were rivaled only by accountants and undertakers in this regard.
In my whole life I had attended only a few parties, and I had most certainly never been to a fairly elegant one sponsored by my boss’s boss. I was clueless about behavior at such functions. I definitely made at least one gigantic faux pas. Mrs. Sondergeld asked me where I was from, and I answered, “The Kansas City area.” She then asked me if we could see the Rocky Mountains from there.
Having suppressed a chuckle, informed her that KC was about six hundred miles from the Rockies. So far, so good. I then asked her if she thought she would be able to see from Hartford a mountain range in the Detroit area. I don’t recall her answer, but Ithe expression on her face is indelibly etched in my memory.
In my defense, I had not yet come to appreciate how geographically challenged people in the northeastern United States were. When I arrived in Ann Arbor, I had been shocked to hear Michiganders referring to themselves as Midwesterners. When they asked me where I was from, I said the southeast. After all, I lived all my life in the Kansas City area, which is east and a little south of the geographic center of the contiguous states (a couple of miles north of Lebanon, KS).
In 1972 I had not yet seen Steinberg’s New Yorker cartoon, which makes it clear that from the perspective of residents of New York (and, I would add, New England) Kansas City is no farther from the towering Rocky Mountains than Jersey is from Manhattan.
Also, let the record to show that my societal debut in New England was not an abject failure. I spent the entire evening in the Sondergeld abode without spilling any wine on the carpet. I also did not break any precious china or figurines. I started no fights with other actuaries, and I set no fires.
My dad visited me in the Fall of 1972. He had been in New York City for business, and he took the Amtrak train to the Hartford station. It must have been on a Friday. I picked him up in the evening, and he stayed at my apartment for a night or two. I remember that I tried to fix Steak Diane for him. It was not horrible, but I was a little disappointed.
This photo is from 1957. One would expect me to remember that snazzy jacket, but I don’t.
I was often nervous around my dad, but so was everyone else. He had many habits that made people uneasy, including looking at his watch every ten or fifteen minutes—usually while someone else was talking. If you asked him, he would deny it, but he also seemed quite judgmental to me.
I knew about this visit ahead of time, and I had been dreading it. I took him for a ride in Greenie in order to show him something. Maybe we went to a restaurant for lunch. I stopped at the Gulf station on Main St. in East Hartford. After the attendant filled the tank, I swear that I carefully looked both ways before attempting a left turn while exiting the station. Nevertheless, Greenie plowed into the left side of a passing grey sedan that I had somehow missed.
I had handled a few automobile accidents as an MP in the Army and had filled out the paperwork on dozens of others. I knew that in a minor situation where no one was hurt, the first priority was to get the cars pulled over to allow traffic to flow. I made sure that the road was clear before I called the police. The collision was clearly my fault, but the officer who handled the accident did not even issuee me a warning. I was grateful but shocked. The policy of the MP Company at Sandia Base had been to issue at least one ticket in every accident. I have no idea why this cop let me slide.
Somewhere in this photo is at least one bent tie rod.
I had insurance, of course, that paid for the body work on both cars. However, when, a few months later, I brought Greenie to the DMV for the inspection required to transfer its registration from Kansas to Connecticut, it did not pass. I never experienced a problem, but the machine reported that something was wrong with the steering.
I drove Greenie to a local garage on Christmas Eve. I don’t remember whether I had an appointment, but I know that for several hours I waited for my car to get to the front of the line. It was past closing time, but the manager was aware that I had been there for a long time. All the employees had gone home when he put Greenie on the lift and determined that the tie rod on the right side was bent. The people who fixed the car originally evidently did not notice this. He informed me that he would have to order the part.
I told him that I needed to get this fixed quickly to get my car registered, and I needed my car for work. He said “OK. Give me a minute.”
When he came back he told me that he had carefully hammered it back into position. He also told me not to tell anyone what he did. I was greatly relieved. When I asked him what I owed him, he just replied “Merry Christmas.” It definitely was.
Commuting to and from my apartment in East Hartford to work at the Hartford was very easy. In the morning I just got on the Governors St. entrance to I-84, stayed to the right1, and got off at the Asylum St. exit. Parking was free (or at least cheap) at the Hartford, and it was rather easy for early arrivals like myself to find a good spot. The return trip was almost as easy as the morning drive, but sometimes the traffic would back up on Broad St. near the entrance to the highway.
The Greaseman was 6’2″ and only 150 lbs. when he was in Hartford.
On February 1, 1974, my morning commutes became a lot more pleasant. I really enjoyed listening to the Greaseman on WPOP for the last six months that I was working at the Hartford. I tried to interest others in his morning show, but he never became a big star in Hartford. WPOP changed its format to news/talk in 1975 and sent the Greaseman packing.
If the pair is playing western cue bids, the 3H bid in this auction asks partner to bid 3NT if he/she has a stopper in the opponent’s suit. If they are not playing western cues, it shows a stopper. There is a BIG difference.
Most of the time that I was in Hartford I had quite a bit “on my plate”, but I definitely would have preferred to play more bridge. As I recall, the Hartford sponsored a weekly sanctioned game in the evening. John Sigler and I played in it once or twice. I think that we finished second once. The director played in the game. When we played against him, I asked him about one of his partner’s bids, he said that it was “probably sort of a western cue bid.” This explanation would not suffice in the twenty-first century, but what was my recourse? Call the director?
The Hartford Bridge Club2 existed in 1972. Quite a few actuaries played there, but I never found out about it. Donna Feir, the club’s manager in the twenty-first century, assured me that I would not have liked it because many players were quite rude. I am not sure that that would have deterred me at all. If I could have found a place to play with high-level competition and a partner who was willing to work with me to develop a bidding system, my subsequent life may have changed drastically.
Most of the social life among my friends in the Hartford area revolved around sports. These activities are covered rather thoroughly here and here. There were also regular gatherings at a few local watering holes3 . I remember a few of them pretty well.
The bar at the Shoreham Hotel was the default gathering spot every Friday after work. Its main attraction was its convenient location right across Asylum St. from the Hartford. They served strange little puffy things to munch on. They came in various colors, none of which was commonly found in nature. Occasionally one of the bosses, Don Sondergeld or Don Francis, would join us. I remember that Sondergeld once regaled us with a tale about a group of actuaries on a expense accounts who ordered an outlandish meal in New York City. I don’t recall the details, but the punchline was, “Why such a niggardly tip?”
The White Swan Café on Park Street was another favorite hangout. Every table was provided with an endless supply of free peanuts. Customers were required to throw shells on the floor. If you set any down on the table, the waitress would unceremoniously brush them off.
I can only remember going to Fast Eddie’s on the Berlin Turnpike a few times. The most memorable one was August 17, 1973, my twenty-fifth birthday, which is described here.
I went to the House of Zodiac (a.k.a. the “Zoo”), a nightclub on Farmington Ave. in West Hartford, exactly once. Herget and a few other guys liked to go there on Fridays after the mandatory appearance at the Shoreham. On the way to the Zoo Tom generally stopped at a liquor store (locally called a “packy”) to purchase some cold beer in bottles. He always chose a brand that they sold at the Zoo. When he arrived at the club, he bought a bottle of the same brand at the bar and asked for a glass. Thereafter he refilled the glass from his private supply stashed in various pockets. This place was noisy and crowded. The only reason to go was if you were hoping to pick someone up. Conversation was impossible.
I was never at the Zoo when this band was providing the music, but you can listen to their version of “Six Days on the Road” here.
The other major social activity that I remember was helping people move from one house or apartment to another. I am pretty sure that I helped Chris and Carolyn DesRochers move into a new house. Those organizing the moving were expected to provide beer and pizza to the laborers. I seem to remember that the DesRochers set the gold standard for treating the helpers right.
I don’t remember how big Scott’s truck was.
I also helped Scott Otermat when he moved from Andover to Bristol. I was in the U-Haul truck when Scott picked it up. Our first stop was at a Dunkin Donuts drive-through window where Scott bought some donuts. The truck scraped against something—a sign or concrete awning, I think—before we got one stick of furniture into it. I confess that my first reaction was relief that Scott had been driving and not I. It also brought to mind the “Adventures in Moving” slogan, which I have long thought was the worst catchphrase of all time.
Scott hardly ever got upset, and this was no exception. I don’t know how much he had to pay for the accident. Maybe the U-Haul place did not really care. Would you care if a truck you were moving furniture in was scratched? I wouldn’t. It’s not as if you plan to take it to the prom.
I have twice been accused of putting scratches on passenger cars that I rented (once on Maui on vacation and once in Pittsburgh on business), but in neither case did the rental company insist on me or my insurance company paying. In fact, Avis wrote me a letter to apologize about the accusation in Pittsburgh. On the other hand, I am pretty sure that Sue’s friend from her dancing days, Sandy Tsiartas, told us that she was charged several hundred dollars when she got in an accident with a rental from an off-brand company in Florida.
I probably attended several parties after the fiasco at the Sondergeld home during those two years in Connecticut, but I only remember a couple. One was a fête sponsored by a female actuarial student who passed the last exam to become a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries—Barb Bednarz or Pat Adams (I don’t remember which). The honoree lived with her husband way to the East of Hartford. The only thing that I remember is that I led a game of Scissors4 which went on a lot longer than one would think among such smart people.
Perfect accommodations for three guys.
In August of 1973 I moved into the house at 345 Middletown Ave. in Wethersfield—the legendary 345 Club. Tom Corcoran and Tom Herget were my housemates. I had my own bedroom on the second floor. Somehow I obtained a used box springs and mattress that, thank goodness, had no bed bugs. I don’t recall that my bedroom had any other furniture.
At that point in my life I could still pack everything that I owned into Greenie. I didn’t even ask for help in moving. So, one Saturday morning I resided in East Hartford. By noon that day I was fully moved into the 345 Club. It was the best possible place for three young guys to live.
There was plenty of yard space for parking cars. Corcoran had “parked” his yellow Barracuda fastback on the right side not far from the front door. I don’t know what was wrong with it. Although it was not drivable, its gigantic rear window made it a great greenhouse. Herget planted gourds in it, and they thrived, even in the winter.
The entire front yard was considered a parking lot. It was not unusual to see six or seven cars in it.
Tom C. had a pet beagle named Cory. While Tom was at work or just out, Cory stayed on the back porch. Tom laid down papers for him in case he had to do his business, which was every day. Everyone but Tom avoided that porch.
Each of us had a bedroom upstairs with a door that had a working latch.
There were at least two refrigerators, one in the kitchen and one upstairs. Each was reliably stocked with beer. The one on the second floor had been painted by Tom C. in the manner of a lusty adventure featuring swordplay and sorcery .
On the first floor were a living room, a dining room, the kitchen, and maybe another underused room or two. Tom H. had furnished the place from second-hand stores on Park St. Except for the TV and stereo, the style might be described as Early Grandmother.
The back yard was pretty large. A railroad track that was no longer used. There was a shed back there that made for some interesting shots in the obstacle croquet games.
Best of all, the landlord was blind!
There was one small drawback to living in the 345 Club. For some reason the electricity would fail for short periods of time. Since it seldom went out long enough for the beer to get warm, it was not considered too big a deal.
The one problem was the electric clock in the kitchen. I wore a watch at all times, and I was obsessive about keeping it accurate. So, the state of the clock was immaterial to me. The other guys were more dependent on it, but it was a nuisance to take it down, reset the time, and remount it. So, Herget simply made a sign that gave the formula for the necessary adjustment: “Add 12 minutes”, “Add 31 minutes”, “Add 2 hours and 10 minutes”, etc. He then taped the sign to the clock—good as new.
You can pick up one like this on eBay for less than $16,000.
One day Cory was on the loose in the house. Somehow he got into my bedroom and made a beeline for the closet. I can’t remember if the closet had a door—probably not. Cory found my posters of the Russian revolution. His capitalist upbringing impelled him to desecrate them. He also found a baseball that my dad had given me that Ty Cobb had signed in green ink. I don’t accuse Cory of disrespect for Cobb’s batting and baserunning skills. He probably would have chewed up a ball that was signed by Honus Wagner or Cy Young just as readily.
Tom C. holding Cory.
I did not get upset. I must have been careless about keeping the door completely closed. Besides, material things have never meant that much to me. Aside from when I lived in Detroit, I did not worry too much about the security of my belongings.
At the end of the summer of 1973 Tom H. invited me to join a group of people for tubing on the Farmington River. By the twenty-first century this has become a highly organized activity. A company rents large inner tubes at a spot pretty far upstream. They also have a downstream location where the renters return the tubes. From there a van driven by a representative of the company takes everyone back to the starting point.
They now charge $25 per person for this service. I cannot imagine Herget paying anything close to that amount. I suspect that he rustled up some inner tubes from a farmer or trucker somewhere, and we just parked one car at the ending spot. I am pretty certain that our tubes were plain black and had no handles. I also don’t remember life preservers. The river was only a few feet deep where we were tubing.
I had a really great time. The sun was out, and in those days I could sit and bake in the sun all day long with no repercussions. For most of the journey we just sat on our tubes and drank beer from cans balanced on our bellies while moving very slowly downstream. The whole trip can take up to three hours, depending on the strength of the current. I only remember one rather scary “rapids” near the end. My knees got a little scratched up, but that did not detract much from my enjoyment.
Neither of my housemates at the 345 Club cooked much, but at some point in the autumn I felt like fixing my mother’s recipe of chicken breasts with bacon, mushrooms, and a sauce made from cream of chicken soup. It would be senseless to do this just for myself, and so I informed the two Toms in advance that I would be cooking dinner. All three of us enjoyed the meal, which also included rice and cauliflower. The chicken, mushrooms, and cauliflower were all consumed that evening. Five or six strips of uncooked bacon went back into the refrigerator, which normally contained only various beverages and a wide assortment of condiments, with a lot of duplication.
The next time that I looked in the fridge I did not see my bacon, but I thought nothing of it.
I don’t remember eating out very often. There were lots of cookouts in the warm weather. I remember being invited to Mel’s family home in New Britain, where I met her father, the chef du jour. I think that we probably had hamburgers, but the main attraction was the sweet corn. Mr. Majocha did not husk the corn. He soaked the ears and husks in water. Then he threw them on the coals. They taste OK this way, but a few edges were scorched. Boiling the ears in a huge pot would take longer and would not have been as festive, but I think that the result would have been tastier.
Silver Queen is my favorite.
On the whole I was not impressed with New England food, but the sweet corn in the late summer is to die for. Both Silver Queen and Butter & Sugar corn are much better than anything that I have tasted elsewhere. The famous golfer Tom Watson, who also grew up in the KC area, scheduled himself to play in the Hartford Open just to eat the corn.
After being stationed in Albuquerque I craved some decent Mexican food. Taco Bell was all right, but I wanted something a little more authentic. Tom Corcoran found a pseudo-Mexican restaurant in Manchester called the Tacorral5. The food was passable. The establishment had no liquor license, but they allowed customers to bring their own beer. Eventually the quality of both the service and the food went downhill. The last straw was the night that they ran out of beans. A Mexican restaurant with no beans!
If I had owned or managed a Mexican restaurant, I would never have admitted to being out of beans. I would have crossed the street and entered the Taco Bell there, bought a few hundred orders of refritos, carried them back across the street, and sold them as my own.
One of my favorite restaurants was Howard Johnson’s on the Silas Deane. Most of the people went there for the fried clams, but I had a different preference. On one night per week they had a special. You could get one-half of a fried chicken at an unbeatable price. $1.29 sticks out in my memory. That may be wrong, but I am pretty sure that it was less than $2.
I could usually talk people into joining me, but if no one was interested, I went anyway.
Just before the fall actuarial exams in November of 1973 the 345 Club hosted a big “spaghettifest”. Herget did most of the preparations. He even somehow constructed a very long table. The evening was not particularly raucous, but it did go on for quite a long time.
Herg also led a pub crawl after the exam was over. We spent a brief amount of time in some really nasty spots near the train station. They all seemed to have a large jar of eggs on display on the bar. As usual, I was among the first to abandon the group. I definitely could not keep up with those guys.
I am sure that it was probably a coincidence, but Tom Corcoran was, as I recall, the only person in attendance at the spaghettifest who passed his exam, Part 5, the same one that I took. At least five or six of us failed.
The weather on the night of December 16-17, 1973, was memorable. It started with snow, and then for several hours we were treated to several hours of ice and freezing rain—the dreaded “wintry mix”. All the branches and power lines in our part of the state were coated with an inch or so of ice. The power went out almost everywhere. Then the weather turned bitterly cold.
When the roads became passable, I brought some clothes to Sue’s place in Andover, which somehow avoided most of the ice. I think that the Toms sought temporary shelter elsewhere, too. Our power was out for, as I remember it, eleven days.
When we moved back in, I cleaned out the refrigerator. I offhandedly asked who owned the unopened (but now rancid) pound of bacon. Corcoran told me that it was mine. He had bought it for me to replace the leftover strips that he had eaten. He didn’t bother to tell me that he had done so. Since neither he nor Herget ever bought anything more complicated than hamburgers or hot dogs, I should have figured out that the bacon was mine.
No, I did not eat the bacon.
Herget had returned earlier to help the landlord clean up the fallen branches and other detritus. He marveled at the nonchalant way that this totally blind gentleman wielded a chain saw. He made short work of the fallen branches. To this day, Sue strictly limits my access to power tools, and she will not let me near a chain saw.
I am not sure, but Tom may have even reset the clock this time.
We formed a car pool. Tom C. had a blue Volkswagen; Tom H.’s Volkswagen was a sort of sickly beige; Jim Cochran drove a Pinto; I had Greenie. Four strapping adults was the most that any of these cars could hold. Greenie was probably the most comfortable.
The heat in Corcoran’s Volks did not work very well, and the defroster was pitiful. He used what we all called a “hand defroster”. He placed one of his hands on the windshield to remove the fog or frost there. Then he moved the hand to an adjacent spot and peered out through the spot he just abandoned. When that hand got numb, he switched to the other hand.
Did Tom C.’s car have automatic transmission? Of course, not.
Herget’s Volks featured a fairly large hole in the floorboard in the back. Whoever sat there repeatedly had to adjust a small log that was stored there because it was roughly the same shape as the hole. Since leg room was at a premium, the rest of us were quite annoyed by this.
Jim’s Pinto seemed to be fine. It wasn’t until a few months later that the gas tanks on these models started exploding around the country.
The car pool continued after I moved to Andover. Jim Hawke, who had broken up with Leslie, took up residence in the 345 Club and assumed my slot in the car. His car was a suitable replacement for Greenie, a Chevy Nova (popularly known as “No va” in Latin America) with three on the tree.
At some point in August or September of 1973 I decided to grow a mustache. I wasn’t really too concerned about covering up the scar on my lip. Like everyone else, I was experimenting a little with my appearance. I soon realized that it made my face look more lopsided than before, and I shaved it off.
After I broke my kneecap (details are here), I let my beard, such as it was, grow. That was my look through all of my time coaching debate in Michigan and for a few years after that. History will probably call this my Jesus (with glasses) period.
I developed my famous fashion sense during my time in Connecticut. Unless I was playing a sport, I wore the cowboy boots that I had purchased in Albuquerque. When I headed outside in the winter I wore my cowboy hat and a big brown suede coat that was lined with fleece. It weighed a ton, but it was very warm.
I had to buy clothes for work. Because of the boots the pants had to be flared or at least baggy. I favored corduroy, but I also acquired one polyester sports coat. I don’t know why I bought it. Sue made me a grey wool suit. Really! I wore it once or twice, but it was too small in every respect.
That is obviously a mannequin, NOT Choo Choo. You can watch this commercial on YouTube here.
For shirts and ties I usually went to my private tailor, Mr. Ruby, who selected the merchandise for my favorite retailer, Railroad Salvage. The big store on Route 5 was one of my favorite destinations. I particularly liked their selection of dress shirts. They had quality brands like Arrow, but the styles were nothing like you might see at a department store. People still wore coats and ties to work, but nothing required the attire to be overly somber. Tom Corcoran wore a string tie most of the time. Larry Abbott did not even wear a coat to work; he kept one near his desk in case he needed to go to another department.
At Railroad Salvage I also purchased several ties, including two that looked furry. The blue one was OK (although it was close to six inches at the widest point), but the brown one was obnoxious. When I wore it, it climbed around my neck until the knot was buried under my collar. I still have thirty or so ties, but I think that all that I purchased from Mr. Ruby have been discarded.
I bought a white belt from Ruby and gave it to Scott Otermat to wear to
meetings with people from the Sales Department. I wanted to bring out
his inner Herb Tarlek.
I never bought any tennis shoes from the big bin at railroad salvage. The shoes relegated there weren’t matched up. If you found one that you liked, you still had to hunt for its mate. You also had to be careful that you did not take two lefts or two rights.
1. It is ordinarily critically important to move to the left on this highway when you cross the bridge from East Hartford to Hartford. If your vehicle is in the right lane going west, you must start merging as soon as you cross the Connecticut River. If not, you will find yourself in an exit-only lane.
The vehicles that are exiting off of I-84 (both northbound and southbound) hoping to go west on I-84 must move to the left one additional lane. Furthermore, the drivers who have crossed the river in order to go to downtown Hartford must, at the same time, move several lanes to the right. All of this lane-changing takes place in a tunnel beneath Main St.
As bad as this design is, it was even worse in 1972. Eastbound drivers on I-84 who wanted to go north on I-91 were required to exit the highway and drive several blocks through downtown Hartford.
2. Mark Horton and Eric Kokish published a book about a famous bridge player who frequented the HBC, Leonard Helman. The title is The Rabbi’s Rules: Tips and Tricks to Improve Your Bridge Game. The most famous rule is “If the opponent’s king is a singleton, play your ace.” A singleton king in a bridge hand is often called a rabbi.
3. All four have long since dried up.
4. The object of Scissors is to learn how to play. All players are seated. The player with the scissors must pass them to the player on their left and announce whether they are passing them “crossed” or “uncrossed”. The leader then announces whether the pass was successful or not. If not, the player must sit on the floor. Correct answers must coincide with the passer’s own legs.
5. A Tacorral in Manchester may still exist, but Google says that it is permanently closed. It moved to a strip mall at some point. The pandemic might have been the death blow.
