1985-1999 The Lisellas

Posted on May 28, 2021 by Mike

Jamie and her family in New England Continue reading →

Until I was almost forty years old I did not have much of a relationship with my sister Jamie¹. I remember being quite disappointed when I learned that the sibling that I knew was coming turned out to be a girl. I was in second grade at the time. The girls whom I knew there were all hopelessly stupid. THEY PLAYED HOP-SCOTCH AND PAT-A-CAKE AT RECESS!! I had no use for them at all.

I was nearly seven and a half years older than Jamie, and that half year was significant. I was a freshman in high school when Jamie was in first grade. I had graduated from college before she started high school. During her high school years I was in the Army and then working halfway across the country. We went to different kindergartens (both public), different grade schools (both parochial), different high schools (hers parochial, mine Jesuit), and different colleges (hers a small Benedictine near home, mine a huge state university over seven hundred miles away.

The Kinks on Shindig in 1965. Jamie was 9; I was 16.

So, the only times that we were together were before and after school and during the summers. I remember watching bits of Captain Kangaroo with Jamie before school and some TV shows in the evenings. Batman and Shindig in the evenings. We sat on the floor of the family room watching the tube while mom worked and dad lay on the couch reading a magazine or newspaper punctuated by an occasional “Mmm hmm”. However, I often withdrew to my bedroom to read or work on a project or to the basement to shoot pool and listen to records.

The time between returning from school and supper time was precious to me. I spent very little of it in the house. I either stayed after school to take part in some activity or came home, set down my books somewhere, and dashed back outside to play with my friends. I felt the same way about the summer. If I wasn’t earning money mowing lawns, I was probably out of the house.

So, I never really developed a close relationship with Jamie. We had no great family crises to create bonds of shared suffering. We also did not do that much together as a family. The whole immediate family went on summer vacations (as described here) together, but my only clear recollection of any interaction with Jamie on these trips was when I became very upset that our parents “could not find” the Smithsonian in Washington, DC. She tried to calm me down, which was nice (but ineffective).

SSG Barry Sadler would not have approved of our dance.

We did have a few moments. Perhaps the best was when we invented a dance to perform during the hit song “The Ballad of the Green Berets”. There were not many games that we could play together. War was no fun; Jamie always won Inspired by Sheepshead, I invented a gambling game called “Sevens and fives” and revealed the rules to her one at a time as they came up. I enjoyed that. Of course, I gave her back the money that she lost. Well, most of it.

I also remember spending an afternoon or two helping to teach Jamie how to drive my brand new Datsun in an empty parking lot. This must have been in 1972 after my own stint of heroically defending New Mexico against peace-crazed Ghandiists. Barry was two ranks higher than I was, but I never went to prison.

It was not anything about Jamie’s personality that made me limit our time together. I just enjoyed being with my friends and being by myself a lot more than being with family.

Maybe I was not a very good big brother. Decades later Jamie told me that she had been bullied (or worse) when she was on the way to kindergarten at a public school. I would have been in the eighth grade. If I had known about this, I would probably have tried to enforce the Law of the Jungle (“If you so much as touch my sister, I will …”). I would have, too. I was at least two years older than anyone at her school, and kids who attended public schools were presumably heathens. Also, I knew some moves. I watched a lot of wrestling in the eighth grade.

I don’t know how I missed this. Maybe I was just oblivious; I often am.

Jamie and I had similar senses of humor, and we were both rather tall and quite thin, but those were almost the only things that we had in common. She was always the cute one. When she was little, she had blonde hair that she evidently got from a relative that I had never met and her mother’s dark eyes. She was also a much better athlete and was tremendously more sociable than I was. I did better in school, and I was almost never in trouble.

This is Jamie on her prom night. I was long gone by then.

From 1966, when Jamie was ten and I had left for college, through 1985 I had minimal contact with Jamie. She made a mysterious visit to our apartment in Plymouth (described here), and Sue and I visited her and her husband, Mark Mapes², once in Iowa (described here).

Other than that, we might have talked on the telephone a few times, but that was it. Why didn’t I call her? It did not occur to me. I didn’t call anyone. I have always hated talking on the telephone, and in those days long-distance calls were expensive.

In late 1985 Jamie was living in the Chicago area with her two daughters, Cadie³ and Kelly⁴. How they got there is a long story, and I am ignorant of most of the details. Cadie was, by my calculation, eight years old, and Kelly was a couple of years younger. Jamie was working at O’Hare airport for American Airlines. There she met Joe Lisella Jr.⁵, a fellow employee. I think that they got married in 1985. Jamie has told me a few stories about the travails of working in baggage claim. She may have had other responsibilities there, too.

In 1985 the newlyweds moved to an apartment in Simsbury, CT. For a time both Joe and Jamie worked for American Airlines at Bradley Field in Windsor Locks, CT. Their family grew rather rapidly. Gina⁶ was born in 1988, Anne⁷ in 1989, and Joey⁸ (Joseph III) in 1991.

During the fourteen years that Jamie lived in New England I worked at least seventy hours per week. Sue and I found time to visit Jamie and Joe a few times in Simsbury. I remember that we ate supper with them at least once at Antonio’s Restaurant near their apartment.

Joe and I played golf together quite a few times, first at a course in Southwick, MA, called Edgewood and then, after they had moved to a house in West Springfield, at East Mountain Country Club in Westfield, MA.

I had a good time, but I still took golf too seriously to have many enjoyable conversations with Joe. Another problem was that we both sliced the ball. He was, however, left-handed. His ball was therefore usually in the rough to the left. Mine was usually pretty far to the right. Talking is, of course, discouraged on the greens and tees.

Joe’s brother played with us a few times. I have forgotten his name. Jamie was a very good golfer when she was a teenager, but she never played with Joe and me. It never occurred to ask her why not.

We always played very early in the morning. I sometimes stopped at McDonald’s on the way to the Lisellas’ house and bought Sausage Biscuit with Egg sandwiches for them. Once I evidently messed up about whether we were scheduled to play. They were sleeping in. Someone with bleary eyes came to the door. I apologized when the situation was explained to me, left the McDonald’s bag for them, and drove back home.

At left is a satellite view of the Lisellas’ house on Lancaster Ave. in West Springfield. In the nineties a basketball goal occupied the space where the big white truck in the photo is.

When we visited the Lisellas’ house, there was often a half-court basketball game there. I declined to participate. My skills at basketball were limited to running, jumping, disabling opponents with my sharp joints, and drawing fouls. My jumping days were behind me, running was of no value in a half-court game, and my other abilities were under-appreciated.

The most memorable of these game was the one in which my dad, who at the time was at least pushing seventy, tried to play. He lost his balance, fell down, and broke his arm. He had to be rushed to the emergency room.

The only photo that I could find of Joe Lisella is this one from 1973 on Gina’s sixth birthday.

The menu at the Lisella house was usually hamburgers and hot dogs on the grill. Joe had a Weber “kettle” grill, and he used a lot of charcoal. I never asked him about this, but I have never understood how anyone could control the temperature of one of these grills. I have always strongly preferred the ones that allow either the fire pit or the grill to be raised and lowered.

Joe watched a lot of sports on television. In fact the TV always seemed to be on in their house, and it was always set to a sports broadcast. His favorite teams were the Red Sox, the Green Bay Packers, and Notre Dame. I am not sure which team he rooted for in basketball.

When I was at their house I spent most of my time playing with the kids. Jamie always seemed to be cooking, cleaning, or collapsed from exhaustion. Occasionally she took a break for a cigarette.

I did not talk much with Jamie. On the sidelines at the kids’ soccer games she would sometimes keep me apprised of the their progress. I seldom had much to contribute to these conversations. In those days TSI was definitely the focus of my life. Unless I could think of an amusing story, I did not say much.

I clearly remember doing one thing with Jamie. She had somehow scored some tickets for a WWE wrestling card at the Hartford Civic Center, and she invited me. This must have been in 1990. I think that Gina and Anne were there. I am not sure whether the other girls or Sue attended. The girls were really into it. They cheered and booed at all the right places.

The only match that I remember at all was between André the Giant⁹ and Jake the Snake Roberts¹⁰. Although André was way past his prime, he was still enormous and powerful. He could probably have defeated Jake from his hospital bed. However, every move he made seemed to cause him pain, and his back was bent over at a 45° angle when he lumbered from one place to another.He even had difficulty entering the ring. I found the performance rather sad, but I enjoyed the experience of being with the kids.

I marveled at how different this experience was from the other match that the high-school version of me had seen in person. It is described here. In the match in Hartford there was a lot of flash, but very little in the way of wrestling. Vince McMahon had not yet admitted that his events were scripted, but 90 percent of the people over five in the arena could predict the outcome (barring disqualification) of every match. It was kind of like a circus with trained over-developed humans.

In the fall of (I think) 1986 or 1987 Sue and I drove Cadie and Kelly to the Catskill Game Farm¹¹, a private zoo in New York state. This had always been one of our favorite day trips, and it was more fun with the kids. Fall was the best time to go there. The weather was ideal. The deer were in rut, and the cries of the stags could be heard all over the park.

We spent a fair amount of time in the petting area of the park, which was loaded with immature animals that had been handled by humans since birth. That did not in any way mean that they were tame. I had never noticed this in previous visits, but they formed a herd of six or seven species and walked around the petting area as a group.

An priceless trading card from her soccer days autographed by Kelly.

Kelly had been petting one of the fawns, and she did not notice a baby donkey behind her pitching forward on its front legs and aiming a two-legged kick at her back side. Fortunately, the hooves missed by an inch or two.

I also remember feeding the giraffes. The girls got a figurative kick out of that.

I attended at least one of Cadie’s softball games. I don’t remember too much about it. She was not a star. She was more of an intellectual than an athlete. More than anything else she has always been very artistic. I seem to recall that she studied art at Hampshire College for one year. I don’t know what happened after that.

For my mom’s seventieth birthday in October of 1995 Cadie flew with me to Kansas City. I gave a little speech to a gathering of my parents’ friends about my relationship with my mom. I am sure that my mom, who was already experiencing some dementia, appreciated that we both came. However, it was obvious that Cadie was uncomfortable throughout the entire trip.

My dad took Cadie with him on his trip to Ireland. They both enjoyed the trip, but my impression was that their personalities did not blend too well. No blood was spilled.

My most vivid memory of Kelly is from the day that she helped plant flowers around a tiny pine tree in our yard on Hamilton Court. The tree, which is now more than thirty feet high, was only a little taller than Kelly at the time.

Kelly was a good soccer player. I remember watching her in at least one game. She was a defender. I don’t know too much about soccer, but the other team never came close to scoring. Her team’s goalie need not have attended.

Kelly had trouble with math in high school. Jamie once asked me if I would be available to help her with it. I said that I would, but I never heard about this again.

Sue and I were invited to attend Kelly’s graduation at the horse show building at the Big E in Agawam. We went, but I don’t remember any details except that I was surprised that the students were mostly wearing casual garments (even shorts) under their graduation gowns. I also recall at the subsequent get-together at the Lisellas’ house. Gina and her classmates humiliated me on the basketball court.

Kelly left West Springfield shortly after finishing high school. I knew that she moved to a western state, but I did not know what she was doing there. I haven’t had any contact with her since then.

This is the oldest photo that I could find of Anne and Gina. If I had waited much longer to ask them to pose with me, I would not have been able to lift them.

I tried to see Gina and Anne as often as I could. One weekend day they stayed with us for a few hours in Enfield. They were delighted to discover that we lived right behind a school that had monkey bars and other athletic equipment.

I usually bought the kids some kind of board game at Christmas. When I was at the Lisellas’ house in West Springfield, I spent most of my time on the floor. In retrospect I wonder if the games were a good idea. Some of them had a lot of pieces.

I bought a Foosball table for them one Christmas. I probably should have asked if it was OK to do so. They seemed to enjoy playing it that day, but I noticed the next time that we went to their house that it was on the front porch and positioned so that it could not possibly be used. If I had been considerate enough to ask ahead of time, Joe or Jamie might have mentioned that there was no possible place to keep it.

This is the West Side girls’ soccer team for 1997. Anne is on the far right in the front row. Gina is second from the right in the back row.

In the team photo for 1998 Anne is second from the right in the front row. Gina is in the middle of the back row.

Sue took this excellent photo of Gina, Anne, Joey, and snow.

I watched Gina and Anne play soccer several times. Anne was a fast runner, but Gina made up for lack of speed with determination and grit. No one ever called Anne gritty. In fact, no one ever called her Anne either. It was always Annie, Princess, or Prinnie.

I also watched Gina play basketball once. The opposing team had one player who was much better that everyone else. Gina’s coach assigned her to guard her even though Gina gave up several inches to her. Gina hung tough with her throughout the game. Unfortunately, it was not enough. The West Siders came up short.

I bought three tickets for the Connecticut Opera’s production of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte at the Bushnell Auditorium in Hartford. I made plans for them to attend with me. I was convinced that they had agreed to go, but somehow the plans got messed up. I ended up sitting between two empty seats for the evening. I should have called to confirm, but …

I have one memory of Gina as a teenager. She was on the computer with three or four chat windows open with her friends. She could move among them very rapidly. I was impressed.

My parents came up to visit the Lisellas occasionally. They stayed at the Howard Johnson’s on Route 5. I remember that the first time that Anne saw me beside my mom, she blurted out, “You two have the same hair!” I don’t think that she realized until I told her that her grandma was my mother.

From the time that Joey was old enough to walk, or maybe even before that, he was consumed with sports. He liked all sports, and he was quite good at them. Some of his peers caught up with him later, but I doubt that there was a more athletic four-year-old in all of New England than Joey Lisella.

Joey and I played one-on-one tackle football in the living and dining room when he was a toddler. As soon as I entered the house, he grabbed onto one of my legs and tried to bring me down. Then he picked up the football and tried to burst past me. He could not have known that that his opponent starred in 1961 as the wingback/defensive back of the Queen of the Holy Rosary Rockets, as documented here.

On August 6, 1995, Jamie brought Joey to a party at Betty Slanetz’s house in Enfield. He carried a Whiffle ball and a plastic bat around with him all afternoon. I volunteered to pitch to him. He was batting right handed. I stood about ten or fifteen feet away and threw the ball underhand to him. Rather than swing, he took his left hand off the bat, caught the pitch one-handed, threw it back, and announced, “Overhand!” My recollection, which may be faulty, is that he hit every pitch that he swung at. I was duly impressed. He was four years and zero days old.

I saw Joey play soccer several times. The first time he was on a mixed team. He was too young to play legally, or at least that was what Jamie told me. He was certainly the shortest participant on either team, but he was positioned as the striker on his team. After he scored his fourth goal in just a few minutes, the umpires (!) overruled the coach’s assignment and made him play defense for the rest of the game. The final score was 4-0.

I don’t remember this game. It is hard to believe that Anne is only two years older than Joey.

The last soccer game that I recall involved Joey’s high school team. Joey was still one of the smallest players, but he was still quite good. He did not dominate this game the way that he dominated as a youngster, but he was a force to be reckoned with.

I had the same impression the only time that I watched him play high school basketball game. His lack of size was a serious detriment in this game, but he was a good ball-handler and shooter, and he played tight, aggressive defense.

During these years Joey (and just about everyone else his age) was obsessed with sneakers. I am not sure how many he pairs he had, just for basketball.

Joey and I shared one great adventure. In the summer of 1998 (I think that it was) I drive him in my Saturn to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY. Sue and I also made this trip during most summers to attend operas at the Glimmerglass Festival.

It was a long drive. By the time that we reached our destination it was time for lunch. We stopped at the Doubleday Cafe because I knew from experience that it would be a waste of time to try to find a better place. Cooperstown is not known for its cuisine.

I had never been to the Hall, and I was a little bit disappointed. I think that Joey enjoyed it, however, and I definitely enjoyed the time with him.

On the way home I think that we stopped at Friendly’s near Albany. I have a vague recollection of a misadventure in the process, but I cannot recall the details.

Jamie arranged for a party in August of 1994 for our dad’s 70th birthday at Simsbury 1820 House. The celebration got off to a terrible start. When my dad went to sit down by the table, his chair collapsed beneath him, and he fell onto the floor. He wasn’t badly hurt, but Jamie was infuriated. She later told me that she had refused to pay the bill.

I tried something that was too clever by half. I asked a question of Anne that I thought that she could answer and a slightly more difficult one of Gina that I thought that she could answer. After the second failure, Anne rebuked me, “Uncle Mike, we’re just kids!”

So, I set that aside and instead led everyone in a rendition of my dad’s favorite song, “Leaving on a Jet Plane.”¹² I am sure that that buoyed everyone’s spirits.

In 2000 Joe drove Gina, Anne, and Joey to Kansas City for my dad’s seventy-sixth birthday. Sue and I were already there.Here is what I wrote in my notes about the occasion:

We had a good time on my dad’s birthday. I brought a wrestling card game that Sue gave me for my birthday. I played it twice with Gina, Annie, and Joey. They all enjoyed it. When Gina beat Joey in the first game, he got angry, accused her of cheating, made a mad dash at her and started pulling her hair. She just laughed, and Joe broke it up.
We went to an Italian restaurant for supper. It wasn’t very good, but Annie lit up as I have never seen her do. She was animated and talkative.

I continued to drive to Massachusetts to watch the kid’s play on sports teams after Jamie left (described here). Sue and I even went to Joe’s wedding with Jenna. It was a rather strange event, held on a boat, as I recall. Joe’s father was wearing shorts and buying everyone drinks. The highlight for me was when Jenna, Gina, and Anne sang along with “Who Let the Dogs Out?”

When my dad died in 2011 he left $18,000 to each of Jamie’s five kids. I administered the will and sent the checks to them.

In 2012, give or take a year or two, Sue and I drove up to have supper with Gina in a town north of Springfield. We tried to arrange a second get-together a few times, but it never seemed to work out.

1. I think that in 2021 Jamie still resides in Birmingham, AL. I am not sure what she is doing there. Her Facebook page is here. I am embarrassed to say that I could locate only one photo of Jamie in all of our junk.

2. All indications are that Mark Mapes lives in Davenport, IA.

3. Cadie Mapes still seems to live in Massachusetts, but I am not sure where. Her business website is here.

4. Kelly Mapes went off on her own at an early age. If I had to guess, I would say that she probably lives in Tucson in 2021.

5. Joe Lisella still lives in West Springfield. He works for McDonald’s. His LinkedIn page is here.

6. In 2021 Gina Lisella lives in the Westfield, MA, area. Her LinkedIn page is here. I think that she recently bought a new house.

7. Anne Lisella lives in San Antonio, TX. She is a nurse. Her LinkedIn page is here.

8. Joey Lisella lives somewhere in the Boston area. His LinkedIn page is here. I follow him on Twitter. He posts about nothing but sports.

9. André René Roussimoff died in January of 1991.

10. In 2021 Aurelian Smith, Jr., is retired from playing Jake the Snake Roberts, but I bet that he would listen to offers.

11. The Catskill Game Farm closed in 2006. It is now reopened as a historic tourist attraction in which one can camp or stay in a Bed and Breakfast inside the compound of the old zoo. The website is here.

12. My dad was tone-deaf. He was—bar none—the worst singer that I have ever heard. He agreed with Pope Pius X that Gregorian Chant was the best music ever produced by man. He could remember some of the words of songs, but the melody he produced bore no resemblance to the original.

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

Posted on May 12, 2021 by Mike

The rest of the ad agencies. Continue reading →

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are my most vivid memories:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WordPerfect running in DOS did not look like the answer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charnas apparently went out of business in July of 1992.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. Knorr Marketing’s website is here.

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

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

8, The agency’s website is cdhm.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

19. Fern/Hanaway was dissolved in 1998.

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

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

1989 The Story Contest

Posted on April 10, 2021 by Mike

My fifteen seconds of fame. Continue reading →

Northeast magazine was a “Sunday supplement” for the Hartford Courant. In April of 1989 the magazine sponsored a contest to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, which was written when Mark Twain and his family lived in Hartford. Each contestant was asked to write a story of 5,000 words or fewer that updated Twain’s tale. The first prize was a two-week trip to England. I had never been anywhere on the east side of the Atlantic. I felt ready.

This contest appeared to be right in my wheelhouse. I was pretty sure that I had read the book when I was a kid; I certainly had seen the movie with Bing Crosby. I went to the library and checked out the book. It took me a couple of weeks to read; I was surprised by the dark tone and the carnage at the end. If I had read it in school, I was pretty sure that I would have remembered those scenes and discussed them with my friends. Young guys like to envision massive destruction. Maybe I only read the Classics Illustrated version.

Twain left out the Rhonda Fleming character; so did I.

I had a month or two to write my story. Who would be the protagonist? The people from Connecticut with whom I was most familiar were in advertising or computers. I decided to go with an ad agency executive who knew just enough about computers to be dangerous.

At that time the big controversy in the advertising community was whether agencies were required to charge Connecticut’s sales tax on any or all of the billings_¹. Some did, and they bitterly resented those who did not.

I contrived the deus ex machina for moving the action from the Land of Steady Habits to Arthurian Britain by conflating the confusing roads around the north meadows, a ghastly fog that I endured one evening, and a huge tree that I had seen growing in an intersection in Canton.

LJN produced the WWF action figures available in 1989. I put the wood carvers to work on the ones for the sixth-century knights.

The WWF (now called the WWE) was a client of CDHM Advertising, one of the users of TSI’s GrandAd system. When I combined wrestling with focus groups, the plot rather quickly came together. Coming up with an ending was the really hard part. I wrote one, but I wasn’t a bit satisfied with it. Has any time-travel story ever had a satisfying ending.

I never wrote anything out in longhand. I composed it in my head while I was jogging, which I did during my customary long lunches and in the evening.

The monks made trading parchments for the kids.

I keyed the text in on the Datamaster that was sitting on a table in the entryway between the garage and the house. Attached to it was the daisy-wheel printer. I seriously doubt that anyone in 1989 had access to better equipment for writing a story. I produced at least ten drafts.

I printed out a copy of the final version, which I entitled “Sir Consultant’s Strategic Plan”. I counted the words on the first page and multiplied by the number of pages². It was about 5,000, maybe a little longer. Would they really check? I mailed it to Northeast magazine well before the deadline.

At some point in the fall, someone from the Courant called TSI’s office and asked to speak to me. She said that they wanted to publish my story, and she asked for permission to do so. Of course I agreed.

A few hours later I received a second phone call. This time Lary Bloom³, the editor of the magazine, was on the line. Chris Vegliante answered the phone and put Lary on hold. When she told me who was on the other end, she also added, “You won the contest, didn’t you?”

Lary informed me that I had indeed won the contest. He told me that there had been over two hundred entries, some from professional writers. He asked me if I had ever thought that I might win. I couldn’t lie. I had worked hard on it. I thought that it was a really good story, the best that I had ever written. Never mind that at that point in my life I had written almost nothing beyond technical manuals, TSI’s marketing and sales materials, and a few papers in graduate school. I had never even taken a single English class in my ten and a half years in school. I must have been very arrogant. I simply answered, “Yeah, I did.”

Don’t get me wrong. I was on a cloud for at least a week. I considered winning the contest one of the greatest accomplishments of my life.

Lary asked me to come into the office of the Courant on Broad St. to talk about it. When I arrived he warned me that I could not use “schmuck” or “schlub” because they were curse words in Yiddish. I looked both of them up at the library and decided that he was wrong about “schlub”. I did replace “schmuck” with “cutthroat”. I should have used the wrestling term “heel”, but no one in the wrestling world in 1989 admitted that they had assigned roles. I also didn’t know the industry term for the many wrestlers who always lose televised matches and never appear in major arenas. I subsequently discovered that the accepted description is “jobber”.

Lary emphasized to me that the voting for the prize was very close. He said that one judge, Dr. James A. Miller⁴, a professor of literature at Trinity and Wesleyan, had lobbied hard for my story, and that had ultimately made the difference. The other judges were:

Justin Kaplan, author of Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain.
David E. E. Sloan, author of Mark Twain as a Literary Comedian.
Garret Condon, arts editor (and former book editor) of the Courant.
Dorothy A. Clark⁵, president of Literacy Volunteers of America.
Kamala Devi Dansinghani, an honor student at East Hartford High School.

Lary asked me if I had counted the number of words. I told him about my arithmetic approach. He told me that I absolutely must carefully count the words of the final version before they published it. He assured me that some of the other participants would check it and would raise a stink if it was too long.

He let me make whatever changes that I wanted. I tried hard to devise a better ending, but I did not have much luck. Instead I did a lot of work on the opening scene. I was pretty well satisfied with the results. When I reread it for this blog entry, I still liked it. Needless to say, there were a few passages that I would have changed.

I have always thought that this shot came out quite well.

Lary gave me three additional assignments before the article was published in December. The first was to go to the studio of a designated professional photographer (whose name I don’t remember) for the cover shot. I was told to bring a keyboard with me. He stuck a fake white mustache on my upper lip and fitted a white ball cap that he must have obtained from a BMW dealer. He wanted me to light a cigar and smoke it, but I balked. The idea of putting lighted weeds in my mouth has always been abhorrent to me. I agreed to hold it after he lit it.

While I was engaged in this, a friend and client of mine, Putt Brown, came into the photographer’s office. I had spent quite a bit of time with Putt a few years earlier, and I recognized him immediately. He did not recognize me at all, and he was astounded when I told him who I was and what I was doing there.

For the second assignment I had to drive to the studios of Connecticut Public Radio. There I met Phyllis Joffe⁶, whom I had heard on the radio many times. She interviewed me about my story, and she asked me to read a couple of passages, including the “all-knighter” section that does not work on radio at all. The thing that I remember the most from her interview was that she thought that my style was more reminiscent of Raymond Chandler than Mark Twain.

I had read every word that Raymond Chandler ever wrote. I took what she said as a compliment. I loved his style, but I did not try to emulate it. I tried to write the way that a smart-aleck ad executive would in the eighties. When making a pitch to a client he took on a totally different persona. When he was disclosing his private opinions of those around him, he was often sarcastically dismissive. It wasn’t my style⁷; it was Ambrose’s.

The interview aired on National Public Radio on Sunday, December 10, the same day that the story appeared in the magazine. I think that it was on Weekend Edition, but I could be wrong.

The third assignment, to which Sue was also invited, was to appear at the Mark Twain House one evening in early December. It was a special meeting of the Samuel Clemens Society, which promotes the activities of the museum on Farmington Ave. The attendees were there to witness Lary announcing the winner of the story contest.

Before the event began I was somewhat surprised to see Frank Lord⁸, who was, as I recall, the president of the society at the time. I knew Frank quite well from the two years that I had worked at the Hartford Life, as described here.

When, after fifteen plus years, Frank saw me and Sue, he blurted out, “What are you doing here?”

When I told him that I had won the story contest, he was certainly stunned. He did not even know that Sue and I were back in Connecticut.

At some point in the event Lary introduced me to Dr. Miller. I may have met one or two of the other judges as well. I don’t recall any of the small talk.

The story was published in the Northeast magazine dated December 10, 1989⁹. We subscribed to the paper. As soon as I awoke, I retrieved the paper from the driveway, extracted the magazine and read the story. I found two mistakes. I have footnoted them in the copy that is posted here. They bothered me, but they did not really disrupt the story.

I remember the reaction of my best friend, Tom Corcoran, after he had read the story in the Sunday paper. “I didn’t think that you had it in you, Mike. I don’t know why.”

Sue’s sister Betty asked me to do a dramatic reading for her and her friend, Jeffrey Campbell. Others may have also been sitting at the table with them. Everyone seemed to laugh in most of the right places.

Sue and I flew to London in February of 1990. That adventure is described here.

1. While I was writing the story for the contest, the state clarified the law. You can read the notice here.

2. It never occurred to me at the time that the Datamaster may well have had a word-counting feature. Does anyone still have one with IBM’s word processing software? Could you check for me?

3. Lary Bloom retired from the Courant in 2001. His LinkedIn page, which can be viewed here, says that he lives in Chester, CT.

4. Dr. Miller died in 2015. His obituary is here.

5. Beginning in 2006 I played bridge with Dorothy Clark many times at the Simsbury Bridge Club, once as a partner and many times as an opponent. I did not recognize her name at the time, and she apparently did not recognize me. She died in 2018. Her obituary is here.

6. Phyllis Joffe died in 2002. Her obituary is here.

7. My other substantial piece of fiction, which can be read here, would remind no one of Raymond Chandler.

8. Frank Lord died on July 3, 2020. His obituary is here. His LinkedIn page, which lists most of his roles in Hartford, is here.

9. The Courant let me have ten copies. I still have two or three.

Wavablog

Memoirs, bridge, popes, travel, and other stuff

Tag Archives: WWE

1985-1999 The Lisellas

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

1989 The Story Contest