As of December of 2023 I had played with a gross of partners in at least one complete session of a sanctioned game. After thee reopening in 2021 all of the games that involved new partners were held either at the Hartford Bridge Club (HBC) or at a tournament.
HBC partners: Linda Starr (introduced here) was a director at the HBC. Before the Pandemic, she undertook a program of reserving the Sunday afternoon game as a high-low game, in which at least one of the participants must have less than 750 masterpoints. This was an especially good way for someone with a lot of points to play with the person whom they were mentoring. At some point in the winter of 2022-2023 my wife Sue decided that she wanted to play in the high-low game.
I enjoyed playing with Joanne Amenta, but I don’t remember the result or any of the details of the hands that we played together.
I definitely remember one hand in which she was playing in a team game at the HBC. Her partner was John Calderbank. I don’t remember who my partner was.
On the very first hand of the match I made a terrible bid that kept us from reaching a makeable slam. I immediately started whipping myself with a wet noodle.
Joanne had never played against me before. She expressed surprise that I became upset about one lousy hand. John explained that in team play some hands are much more important than others. Missing a slam would probably cause us to lose the whole match because of the difficulty in making up the difference in the other four hands.
Joanne is still an active player. She has attended both regionals and sectionals since the reopening.
I also played with David Brandwein one Sunday in the high-low game. He was a pretty good player, but the bidding system that was used by him and his regular partner, Bernie Selig, was archaic. I suggested a few things that he could add to modernize it and allow him to play more comfortably with more players.
David was elected vice-president of the HBC in 2023. That meant that he was also the chairman of the club’s long-range planning committee, of which I was a long-time member. The first meeting was scheduled for early in 2024.
For a few weeks in the fall of 2021 the Simsbury Bridge Club. (SBC) was not able to run games on Wednesday evenings at Eno Hall. I signed up to play one Tuesday evening at the HBC. Doug Deacon, who had been a regular on Tuesday evenings when I started playing in 2008, needed a partner. So, we worked on a card and played rather successfully (around 55 percent) for two or three weeks.
Paul formerly played with a man from Ukraine named Igor and then with Paul Tungatt.
At the end of 2023 Doug still was still working and playing regularly on Tuesday evenings at the HBC.
One Sunday afternoon Fred Gagnon (GAN yun, rhymes with canyon) drove down from his house in Springfield to mine in Enfield. He had asked me to play with him in the High-Low game and volunteered to drive both of us to the HBC. I had previously referred to him “Boom Boom”, but he said that he had never heard of Freddy (Boom Boom) Cannon or his biggest hit, “Palisades Park”. So, I had downloaded it to my MP3 player and let him listen to it in his car before we left. He said that the song sounded familiar, but he might have just been placating me.
Fred did not play very well that day. He might have been having health issues. He is still quite active in the bridge community.
Barb Gallagher was from Denver. She was in the Hartford area during the summer of 2023 to visit her daughter. I was lucky enough to hook up with her for a few games at the HBC and SBC. Our lists of conventions had a lot of overlap, and so we were able to piece together a rather sophisticated convention card.
I remember that we had one pretty good round, around 50 percent. I had a really good time playing opposite her. I wish that we could have worked in a few more games.
Barb left at the end of September to return to Denver.
Y.C. Hsu has played with various partners both at the HBC and, occasionally, at the SBC. I played with him once in the open game on Thursday morning. Since he sometimes played with one of my regular partners, John Calderbank, it was easy to agree on a convention card.
We had a pretty good game together, and I felt sure that I would play with him again.
Y.C. is from Taiwan. I have seen him many times at the bridge table, but I do not know much about his background.
I played with Diane Tracy in one Sunday afternoon High-Low game at the HBC. She must have enjoyed it; I overheard her singing my praises one day.
Diane is relatively new to the club, but she became a member of the board in 2022. So I have seen her at board meetings once a month. She has offered a valuable perspective because she spent a lot of time in Naples, FL. She has provided us with insights about how the other half lived.
I only played once with Andrea Yalof in the High-Low game, but I was quite impressed with her approach to the game. She and her husband David, who is also a bridge player, moved to Williamsburg, VA, in 2023. David worked at William & Mary. I have it on good authority that Andrea was still active in bridge in late 2023.
The “good authority” is Fran Gurtman (introduced here), who was Andrea’s regular partner when she lived in the Hartford area. Fran and Andrea still play together online.
Tournaments: For quite a few years John Farwell had served as the one-man partnership program for sectional tournaments in Connecticut. In that capacity I had interacted with him several times when I was in need of a partner or teammates.
The first sectional in Connecticut after the reopening was held in Orange, CT, in June of 2022. I was unable to find a partner for the Swiss event on Sunday, June 5, but I needed to attend the tournament anyway because of the board meeting before the game. I ended up being paired up with John and a pair of people I had never met before and have never seen since. Somehow we clicked together and we ended up fifth out of seventeen overall and first in the B strat. The details of the tournament have been chronicled here.
In 2023 John was still acting as partnership person at every sectional.
When he was a novice Abhi Dutta played with my wife Sue at least once. Ken Leopold and I had also teamed up with Abhi and a partner at one of the qualifying tournaments for Flight B of the Grand National Teams (GNT). Although that was not a pleasant experience I responded positively when Abhi asked me to play with him at the NABC in Providence in July of 2022. The details of that adventure have been described here.
Our next outing together was our most successful. Playing with Jim Osofsky and Mike Heider we won the Sunday Swiss at the sectional tournament in Great Barrington, MA, in August of 2022. You can read about it here.
I have played with Abhi in several other pairs and team events in both regionals and sectionals. I also played against him in a memorable knockout that was described here.
I was paired up with Phyllis Bloom for the Flight B Swiss event on Sunday, July 17, at the NABC in Providence. Our teammates were Jim Osofsky and Mike Heider, who both came down with Covid-19 a few days later. We finished slightly below average. Phyllis made a couple of very costly mistakes, but I still enjoyed playing with her.
Phyllis was married to Ken Bloom, an expert player. They lived in Sudbury, MA. Ken’s father, Irv, was an expert player. He and his partner, Bob Hoffman, invented the Blooman convention as a defense against 1NT.
I had committed to play with Jim and Mike in the Sunday Swiss event at the sectional tournament in Orange, CT, in April of 2023. I had a very difficult time finding a partner. Eventually Mike suggested that I contact Ros Abel, whom he knew from the Newtown Bridge Club. Rob agreed to play with me in that event and also the pairs event on Friday. We also arranged to play once at the HBC, which was actually closer to her house in Southington than the Newtown club was.
For a new pair we did quite well in both sessions on Friday, well over 50 percent. We also were doing well in the Swiss until the last round, which was against two players from the HBC whom I knew very well, Peter Katz and Tom Joyce. We had bid to 4♠. Ros then bid 5♥. We had not discussed what kind of control bidding we were using. In the one that almost all good players used that bid would show a first-or-second-round control in hearts, but it would deny controls in the two suits that she had skipped. So, I signed off in 5♠ and made 6, which they bid an made at the other table.
I asked Ros later what her bid meant. She said that she was showing a heart suit. So, I guess that she did not use control-showing cue bids at all.
At the end of 2023 Ros was still playing regularly at the HBC.
I have played against Jim Osofsky a large number of times, especially if you count the team events in which we were both sitting East-West at different tables. Jim and Mike usually teamed up with Ausra Geaski (introduced here) and Bunny Kliman, both regulars at the HBC.
For the 2023 Ocean State Regional in Warwick, RI, Jim’s usual partner, Mike Heider, was visiting the Fatherland with one of his sons. I also needed a partner for the four days that I intended to play. So, Jim and I paired up, intending to play in the Tuesday-Wednesday knockout and the Thursday-Friday knockout.
Abhi Dutta asked if he could team up with us for the event that started on Thursday. Later I learned that his partner would be Paul Johnson, the guy whose behavior upset me so much earlier in the year at Southbridge (documented here).
We used the partnership software to pick up partners from Florida for the first knockout. We had a very successful two days with them. The other two days were less so. The details have been posted here.
The last sectional of 2023 in Connecticut was in late October. Jim and Mike asked me to find a partner and play with them in the Sunday Swiss. I had a difficult time finding someone to play with. Eventually a fellow member of the CBA board, Linda Green, lined me up with Terry Lubman, a veteran player with more points than I had.
Terry Lubman.
Terry and I had a little trouble agreeing on a convention card. She wanted to keep it simple, but I was nervous about not having enough weapons. We got off to a disastrous start, picked up a little in the middle, and lost the last match. We finished a little below average. Terry was very frustrated because it seemed that every decision that she made turned out wrong. Also, we had a rather fundamental and embarrassing miscommunication on one bidding sequence that severely impacted our morale. The details are provided here.
I learned that Terry went to Catholic schools (but never learned about indulgences!),never throws anything away (aaaargh!), and is a bigwig in the gardening club circuit in southwest Connecticut and Westchester County, NY.
1. Jim and Mike were at least as odd a couple as Oscar Madison and Felix Unger. Jim was easily the most talkative person whom I have ever met. One of the bridge players called him Chatty Cathy. Mike, in contrast, had a good sense of humor, but hardly ever talked. While Jim was chatting up Donna Lyons, my partner at the NABC in Providence, Jim confided to me that “Jim seems to be coming out of his shell a little bit.”
This entry describes my partners who participated in the mentoring program of the Hartford Bridge Club (HBC) and the ones with whom I have only played once or twice. The regular partners can be found here. Those I encountered outside of the HBC mentoring program after the pandemic have been posted here.
Mentoring: The HBC’s Board of Trustees established a mentoring program several years after I became a Life Master. I cannot think of a way to set the date. The purpose was to allow newer players to pick up a few tips from more established players by playing together as often as possible over a three-month period. The incentive for the mentors was that one game per month was free. I always participated. I am not certain of the order of my partners, but I have put them in chronological order as closely as possible.
My technique varied little from year to year. I asked my partner what they wanted to focus on. I then asked them to send me a copy of the convention card that they were currently using. I wrote up a series of questions about the card/ After they answered we scheduled our play at mutually convenient times.
I communicated very little during the play. I generally try not to watch my partner’s play very closely because I do not want to make them nervous. If we had time after the round I might fo over anything that I noticed. Afterward I went of
My first partner in the mentoring program was Susan Glasspiegel1, who was already a pretty good player. At the time she played mostly with her husband Bob on holidays, in night games, and occasionally at the SBC. I also encountered them sometimes at nearby tournaments, where they often teamed up with Ru Cole and Silvia Szantos. I remember losing my temper when my team lost to them. I did not mind losing, but Ru was late turning in the score—for no good reason. That meant that both teams received the dreaded red dot. Two red dots would result in a loss of a victory point. My team never got the second dot, but theirs did.
I don’t think that playing with me had much effect on Sue’s bridge game. At the time she was pretty set in her ways. Bidding has always been my favorite aspect of bridge, and she made it clear that she needed to continue bidding the way that she did because Bob was unlikely to change.
I remember that Sue played Standard American rather than 2/1, her sparse set of conventions included the Brozel defense against 1NT openings. She also insisted that if she was responder after a one-level opening in a suit, and her right-hand opponent overcalled, that a 1NT response did not necessarily imply a stopper in the overcaller’s suit.
In later years Sue played at the HBC quite a lot with Lee Wilcox and a few other people. By then I think that her bidding was more sophisticated.
Sue suffered a very bad accident in 2022. However, when she heard that we had two and a half tables in Simsbury, she told Bob that she wanted to play so that we could have a reasonable game. That was very nice of her.
JoSue Coppa: JoSue usually played with her husband, Gene, described below, both in tournaments and at club games. I was a little surprised to learn that she had signed up for the mentoring program.
I cannot remember any memorable occurrences during our partnership. I don’t think that she advanced a lot.
Gene and JoSue moved to Fairfax, VA, during the Pandemic or shortly thereafter.
I also don’t have a lot of memories of playing with Linda Erickson. The main one is that I was scheduling games for her at the time that I had scheduled a game with Linda Starr. It was the first and (so far) last time that I double-booked. The other Linda was very gracious about the situation, although she admitted that she had placed a curse on us. Linda E. and I had a horrendous result.
I remember that Linda said that in her house she was the CEO of the kitchen. She evidently did not appreciate her husband messing around with culinary paraphernalia.
Linda served as vice-president of the HBC for a while. I guess that she was in line to become president, but for some reason she decided not to. My wife Sue, who was on the nominating committee speculated that her reluctance was because of the fact that she and her husband were moving to Charlotte, NC. However, she was still playing locally in 2020, so she must not have moved before the Pandemic.
Fran Weiner2 was a member of the HBC long before I returned to the world of bridge, but she did not have a lot of masterpoints. We only played together a couple of times. In fact, I ended up owing her
At the time, Fran’s daughter Jennifer, a novelist was involved in some kind of promotional event in California for one of her novels or screenplays or something. So, Fran went out to the West Coast to help her or to babysit or something. I expected Fran to get in touch with me when she returned, but she never did.
Bridge was not a very important part of Fran’s life. She was in the ACBL for twenty-nine years, and she only amassed 282.19 masterpoints. I doubt that she got much out of our association. Nevertheless, I was quite disappointed that she seemed to disappear from the HBC after that. I wanted to learn more about how her daughter managed to break into the world of publishing.
I often say that everyone in bridge has an interesting backstory. Hers certainly qualified.
John Calderbank came to the mentoring program with a specific objective, to learn the 2/1 bidding system. I wrote up a description of the differences between the Standard American that John had always played and 2/1. The differences were not insignificant, but there were not a lot of new things to learn.
John probably got more out of our partnership than any of the other people with whom I worked. When I wrote this entry in 2023 I was still playing with him in the morning game at the HBC nearly every Tuesday. I subsequently have taught John a few new conventions, but he mostly has wanted to take it slowly.
John and Mary Sullivan (below) took over management of the mentoring program in 2022. Their oversight was far superior to the previous coordinator’s.
In 2023 John was still doing a lot for the club behind the scenes. In addition he and his wife Nancy (below) were running an unsanctioned game in their home town of Glastonbury. He also took and passed the ACBL’s directorship test. His first assignment for the club was to direct the Sunday afternoon High-Low game. My wife Sue and I played in it regularly.
Of all of my mentoring partners3, Mary Sullivan was the most conscientious. She always responded to my emails, which she shared with her regular partner, Xenia Coulter, and she usually had additional questions.
Xenia was already a Life Master when I started playing with Mary It did not surprise me at all when Mary achieved the same rank in 2022.
In 2023 Mary was still running the the club’s mentoring program with John Calderbank (above). She also was assisting several of the other programs aimed at helping newer players.
Mary has hearing difficulties and macular pucker, scar tissue in the macula that can distort vision. Through my first seventy-five years I avoided the first of those, but I was still struggling with the latter in my left eye.
In 2022 Nancy Calderbank asked me to be her mentor. Like her husband, John, she had been playing bridge for a long time, but she wanted to learn how to play the 2/1 bidding system. We only got to play together a few times, but I am pretty sure that she had mastered 2/1 by the time that the mentoring period was finished.
I also worked with Nancy for three years on the HBC Board of Trustees. She and John, whom she called a “busy-body”, also ran an unsanctioned bridge game in Glastonbury, CT.
In the summer of 2023 I got to meet and play with Fran Gurtman, who had much less experience than any of the other players whom I had mentored. She was still a practicing physician when we started playing together.
Fran had taken online lessons. The first convention card that we played was very unsophisticated. It had no defense against 1NT openings, and it also lacked Jacoby 2NT, New Minor Forcing, Drury, and other conventions used by most of the mid-level players at the HBC. We only played together, but she felt comfortable adding most of them.
On November 8, 2023, Fran was driving from her home in Avon to play with my wife Sue in the weekly Wednesday evening game at the Simsbury Bridge Club. A deer jumped in front of her car. The collision killed the deer and damaged the auto. She called Sue to ask if she was still needed. Sue told her that we would not be able to have a game if she dropped out.
So, after filing a police report Fran drove the car, which was difficult to steer, to her house and drove a different car to the game. She arrived only a couple of minutes late.
A new mentoring session started in January of 2024 and ran through March of the same year. I was assigned by the mentor program to work with Mike Kaplan, who had even less experience than Fran did. Our convention card contained a lot of blankness. I taught him New Minor Forcing, Fourth Suit Forcing, and the two-suited bids.
Unfortunately, we had to play in the open pairs games at the HBC. Our results were therefore not very good, but I think that Mike learned quite a bit. I wrote up all of the hands on which we did poorly as I always did. I could have played for free in three of the games, but I donated the money to the HBC, which got reimbursed $30 by the CBA.
Playing with Mike on March 7 I was dealt the following hand: ♠A5432 ♥A653 ♦A5 ♣62. This hand had no face cards and only forty-four pips, an incredibly low number. The lowest possible number is twenty-eight. Mike had a very good hand, which got a lot better when blended with my three aces. He took all the tricks, but we only bid 4♥. We got a bad score.
At the same time I served with Mike on the HBC Planning Committee.
One-time partners: For quite some time I have maintained a spreadsheet with one line for each person with whom I have played at least one entire session in a sanctioned game at a club or tournament. Below is a list of the ones with whom I played only one or two games at the HBC. They are listed in alphabetical order, mostly just to make things easier for me to make sure that I did not skip anyone.
A guy whose last name was Balasubrama played on Saturdays a few times one summer at the HBC. He asked everyone to call him Bala, but the spreadsheet also has KC in the First Name column. On at least one of those occasions I played with him. He was pretty good, and he liked to play with me.
I could find no trace of Bala either online or in my database of players. Perhaps he dropped out of the ACBL before I began downloading the rosters in 2013. It is also possible that I have his name wrong. Unfortunately, in 2023 there is no longer a way to look up HBC results on the Internet.
Myrna Butler lived in Southwick, MA. She came down to the HBC to play occasionally. I played with her at least once at the HBC. I am pretty sure that she answered one of my mass emails soliciting partners.
I remember that some time after we played together I found a card filled out by Myrna at the partnership desk at the regional tournament in Cromwell. My team had been eliminated in an early round of a knockout. We planned to play in the next day’s “Loser Swiss”, but one of our team members was not feeling well. Since we had already played together, I assured the remaining members of the team that I would play with Myrna. However, I was unable to get in touch with her. I later learned that she had gone home and had neglected to remove her card from the partnership desk. I don’t recall how the team dealt with the situation.
I played in a Swiss team event at a tournament in (I think) Hyannis, MA, with Myrna and her partner, Connie Dube (introduced here). They were late for the first match. Helen Pawlowski, the tournament manager, and Sally Kirtley, who at the time was learning Helen’s job, sat in for the first match. After she learned whom she was replacing Helen said, “Oh, Myrna’s always late.”
Myrna has played a few times at the HBC since it reopened after Covid-19.
Gary Cohen played bridge for only a little more than a year, but what a year it was! He played mostly at Stan Kerry’s West Hartford Bridge Club (WHBC) game at the temple in West Hartford3. During his first year of play Gary amassed more masterpoints at club games than any other rookie in all of North America. That earned him the national Ace of Clubs award, as well as the district and unit versions. Since I was still playing with Dick Benedict, that must have been in 2008.
I am pretty sure that I played at the temple with Gary once. He made a joke about getting out the big (circumcision) knife. Although we did pretty well, I did not enjoy the experience much. Stan’s laissez faire style of directing was not appreciated by serious players like myself.
I am certain that I played with Gary at the HBC. It was on December 31 of, I think, 2009. Gary asked me to play in hopes of augmenting his chances of winning the award. We did win a fraction of a black point, but, as it turned out, he didn’t need it.
I remember playing on a team with Gary at the Cromwell tournament the next year. We had to play against Y.L. Shiue’s team. Gary did not think that it was fair for us rookies to be matched against “the best card-player” at the club.
Gary, who was a professional photographer, often went on vacations with both his wife and his ex-wife—at the same time! He insisted that he could get away with this because he was “a catch”. His LinkedIn page is here.
Gene Coppa and his wife JoSue (introduced above) joined the HBC a few years after I did. I played with Gene at least once at the club. We played together at a limited game on Wednesday afternoon that was designated as an NAP qualifier. There were at least ten pairs. Gene and I were the only people in the B strat. All of the other players were in the C strat and had considerably less experience than we did. So, we should have easily been able to qualify; in fact, we should have won.
Instead I got the worst result that I had ever received at the HBC. We finished dead last, and we did not earn our Q.
I was playing East that day; prior to that time I had always sat in North, South, or West. For quite a few years thereafter I refused to sit East in that building. When I began playing with Joan Brault (introduced here), she insisted on playing West when we were assigned to sit East-West, I reluctantly discarded the superstition.
Gene served a term as HBC president. He also served as hospitality manager for Unit 126 before the Pandemic. He and Jo Sue moved to Fairfax, VA, in 2022.
Phyllis Crowley
Phyllis Crowley was a fairly new player when I was paired with her for some reason. She was, in my recollection, somewhat overwhelmed by the event.
I think that she still plays in limited games in 2023. I have not seen her in any open games, but she was still on the email list.
Lucie Fradet.
I remember playing with Lucie Fradet once at the HBC, but I do not remember the circumstances. I remember, too, that Felix Springer and I helped her to win some gold points at a regional while playing in a Swiss event of some sort.
In 2023 she was still a member of the HBC , but she mostly played at the WHBC.
In real life Lucie had been a French teacher, and she still loved to speak in that language.
Marsha.
I am certain that I played with Marsha Futterman only once at the HBC. She was a very good player at one time. She even won the Governor’s Cup at a sectional, but she refused to take the very large trophy home.
Carl.
Marsha often played with Peter Katz. She told me that she thought that she was a better bidder than Peter, but Peter played his cards better. That may have been true then, but Peter’s bidding improved, and Marsha’s play did not.
Marsh directed the Saturday games at the HBC. Her husband, Carl, often came with her, helped set up and clean up, and filled in at the bridge table when necessary. When Marsh played with him (to avoid a sitout), she was constantly frustrated by the way that he played. I suggested that she could play with my partner, Peter, and I would play with Carl, but she did not want to do that.
Marsha gave up bridge after the Pandemic. I don’t know why.
Carl Futterman died on November 12, 2023, while I was composing this entry. His obituary can be read here.
Margie Garilli
Margie Garilli has for year run one or two games in the northeastern suburbs of Hartford. She has played at the SBC quite a few times, mostly with Donna Lyons. She seldom came after the Pandemic because she could not drive at night.
Margie, who is a pretty good player, asked if I would play a game with her at the HBC. I quickly agreed. I don’t know if she got a great deal out of it, but she seemed to have a good time.
Marilyn Goldberg.
Marilyn Goldberg was an exceptionally good player with much more experience than I had. She asked me to play with her very late in her career. I made a mistake—I don’t remember the details—and she remarked that she knew that I would do that. That hurt.
Marilyn died in 2022 at the age of 93. Her obituary can be read here.
Judy Hyde.
I played with Judy Hyde quite a few times before she moved from the Hartford area to Northampton, and I played with her a couple of times at the Northampton Bridge Club before she paired up with Bob Sagor.
On one occasion at a regional tournament in Nashua, NH, my wife Sue and I went out for supper with Judy (my partner at the tournament) and Judy Cavagnaro (Sue’s partner). The unusual aspect was that Judy C. was married to Jud H.’s ex-husband, Tom Hyde. There was not a bit of animosity between the two Judys.
On her eightieth birthday Judy bought herself one lesson and game with a local pro, Doug Doub.
Judy served as the representative of Unit 186 (Western Massachusetts) on the committee that I formed to determine the first winner of the Weiss-Bertoni award. That process was described here.
C.J. Joseph.
C.J. Joseph‘s first name was Carolyn, but absolutely nobody called her anything other than C.J. I only played with her once.
C.J. met her husband, who was (to the best of my recollection) a hospital administrator while they were both attending the University of Michigan. So, most of our conversations were about the Wolverine football team.
She left the Hartford area for a seaside home they built in Englewood, FL She scoffed when joked about her house being washed away. I don’t know; the Ross Ice Shelf is several hundred meters thick and the size of France. Nothing but friction is holding it back.
In 2023 C.J. was still a member of the ACBL, but she did not appear to be playing any more. A lot of that happened during the Pandemic
Joel Krug.
Joel Krug was still a regular at the HBC as I wrote this in late 2023. I only played with him once, but I recognized him on an old photo of an annual meeting, and none of the other members looked familiar.
The only thing that I remember about our game was that he was surprised that I knew how to play the McCabe Adjunct as well as the Brozel 1NT defense.
Joel was one of the best players at the club. He may have lost a step over the years, but he was still formidable.
I played at least one round with Pam Lombardo, when she was just a novice. Maybe it was during one of the first sessions of the Sunday high-low game before Covid-19.
Pam has had significant health issues that seemed to affect her ability to play, but in 2023 she was still an active member of the club.
A friend of hers named Butch Norman was one of two recipients who objected to me using the name Tonto in one of my emails. I discussed this incident in detail in the blog entry that I posted here.
At one time Donna Feir planned to hire Pam as a director, but that plan never came to fruition.
Jim Macomber (MAY cum ber) was a regular player in the Tuesday evening games when I first started playing at the club in 2008. I may have played against him more times than against anyone else.
One of Jim’s regular partners at the HBC morning games was Jeanne Striefler. I asked Jeanne and Jim to team up with Eric Vogel and me for the knockout in the Presidential Regional in Southbridge in February of 2023. We did very well on the first day, but terrible on the second. The saga has been recorded here.
Later in 2023 I finally got to play a round as Jim’s partner. I had long respected him a great deal. Our result was uninspiring, but it left me hoping for a second chance.
When Jim had his cataracts removed in the late summer of 2023 he was left with double vision, something to which I could relate. He was unable to drive until he got a pair of glasses to address the situation.
Partab Makhijani was my regular partner on Tuesday mornings at the HBC before Covid-19 caused the club to close. We played a fairly sophisticated card. I remember that he criticized one of my bids once, but I don’t recall the details.
Partab did not return to the club after it reopened in 2021, and I have not heard any explanation for his absence. His LinkedIn page, which is posted here, in 2023 listed him as part of the adjunct faculty of the University of Hartford.
Lesley Meyers was (and still is in 2023) one of the best players at the club. We only played together once. There must have been something about my style that she did not like. She never responded to any of my emails after that.
Lesley (LEZ lee) notices things about people. She was the only person who noticed the golf-ball-sized lump on my left elbow that was presumably caused by the effort required to extract gallons and gallons of water from the basement of our house in Enfield after Hurricane Ida in September of 2021. That episode is recounted here. I am glad that she noticed the problem. I saw a doctor about it, and he gave me a wrap that eventually reduced it to nothing.
Lesley was also the only person who asked me about the fingernails on my left hand. They apparently got severely bent and bruised when I fell in Budapest in May of 2022. That misadventure has been described in detail here.
When I first started to play at the club, no one intimidated me as much as Lesley. She was not tolerant about novices who took excessive times concocting their bids.
I remember distinctly that Nancy Narwold told me that one day that she would surprise me and respond positively to one of my emails soliciting one-time partners. Her name is on my spreadsheet, and I have a convention card for her. Therefore, it must have happened, but I don’t remember it. It seems strange that I remember the off-hand comment more than the 3.5 hour game that it resulted in.
I do recall that before she became a Life Master Nancy played almost exclusively with another woman whose name has escaped my memory—Karen Somebody, I think. The HBC held a party when the two of them achieved Life Master status. I attended. The other lady told tales about their efforts to attain the rank, including something about answering a knock on the door of their hotel room in a nightgown. I always considered Nancy a much better player than her partner.
After that event I don’t think that they ever played together again. From then until the closing for the Pandemic Nancy played mostly with Joel Krug. She also ran an unsanctioned bridge game at one of the country clubs on the west side of town.
I have deduced that in 2023 Nancy teaches business at Manchester Community College. If so, her LinkedIn page is here. She is still winning masterpoints; she probably plays online.
Val Orefice was not as serious about bridge as most of the people on this list. Although she joined the ACBL in 1994 (ten years before I did), she only made Bronze Life Master in 2012, a year after I did. She dropped out in 2018.
I remember only two things about Val. The first was that she did not seem to be familiar with several of the conventions that nearly all the accomplished players used. The other was that she pronounced her last name the same as the common word “orifice”. The Italian word orefice means goldsmith and is pronounced oh RAY fee chay.
I played with Pam Palmer a few times when her main partner, Aldona Siuta, could not play. Pam. They played a much simpler system than I was accustomed to. They very seldom made mistakes, and both of them were very good at playing the cards.
In 2023 Pam was still playing, but at a much reduced rate. She seemed to be very frightened of Covid-19, perhaps on account of her partner.
Both Pam and her partner were quite active in the same church attended by the Calderbanks.
Susan Pflederer, who was (and still is in 2023) one of the best players at the HBC, once told me that she wanted to play with me because she had a hard time playing against me. This astonished me because I did not remember having particularly good results when I played against her.
I know very little about Susan. She had been playing bridge for a long time when I started. I seem to remember that our results were mediocre. I probably made some mistakes that she noticed and I didn’t. We never played again.
After the Pandemic Susan has played less than she did before.
Trevor Reeves has the unique distinction of playing with me without making it onto my spreadsheet. When we were scheduled to play together a second time, he was able to show me the results from our first partnership. I cannot imagine how it could have happened, and I took no notice of it.
Trevor learned to play bridge in England, which explains why his BBO handle is ACOLyte. Trevor is a very good player. Although in late 2023 I still have more masterpoints than he does, the people in the club obviously consider him a better player than I am.
Trevor formerly played as a teammate of mine at many tournaments, and we did quite well. He also played with me in a pairs event at the Summer NABC in Toronto in 2017 (no notes?). We won our section in the evening session.
I would like to play more with Trevor, but he obviously prefers other partners. He asked me to play with him in the sectional in Orange in August of 2023, but I had to turn him down because of a previous commitment to play in the sectional in Great Barrington, MA.
Trevor’s primary partner at tournaments has been Felix Springer. They have a great record together and even made it to the semifinals of Flight B of the Grand National Teams in 2022.
Trevor served as both the president and then treasurer of the HBC. He was responsible for implementing the accounting changes that allowed the club to do accurate budgeting during and after Covid-19.
Joan Salve.
I cannot say that I enjoyed the one time that I played with Joan Salve. Her world view was just too different from mine. I don’t remember any details, but I was happy when the session was over.
Carol Schaper.
I met Carol Schaper at the SBC. She was a regular there when I first started playing. I liked her a lot.
She played with a former nun named Louise Alvord. Carol was interested in my book on the popes (posted here). She especially liked the title, Stupid Pope Tricks: What St. Mary Immaculata Never Revealed About the Papacy. Louise, however, did not want to hear anything about Roman Catholic clergy, good, bad, or just unusual. Carol tried to defend me, but Louise did not want to hear it.
I played with Carol only once at the HBC and never at tournaments or, for that matter, the SBC. I thought that she had the potential to be a pretty good player, but she did not want to put in the effort.
Carol was one of the thousands of people who let their membership in the ACBL lapse during the Pandemic or shortly thereafter. She had enough points for Life Master, but she must have been short some gold and/or silver.
Susan Seckinger has long been a key person at the HBC. She was hired as a director and Donna Feir’s right-hand person. Before that she was a critically important official for Unit 126. She had the formidable responsibilities of being both the treasurer and the tournament manager at the same time. She did a good job in both roles.
Susan’s husband Gary was considered one of the best players in Connecticut. He often played with Deb Noack at sectionals. He died in 2014, just as I was becoming active at the district and unit levels.
I only played with Susan once. I think that we both enjoyed it, but we never played again. She has long had a small group of women with whom she played regularly.
Mike Smith almost always played with his wife Susan. They became a formidable pair during their stay in the Hartford area. They even won a pair of national championships. Mike was a Life Master when they moved to God’s country. I spoke at Susan’s Life Master party and complained that she had never once agreed to play with me and that they had stolen my favorite teammates, Bob and Shirley Derrah.
I never got to play with Susan Smith, but on one occasion Mike asked me to play with him on a Tuesday evening when Susan was busy elsewhere. I jumped at the chance. I really enjoyed it, but he was an intimidating figure (both physically and at the table). I made a mistake that kept us from having a good round. It was embarrassing.
Mike was still working full-time while the couple lived in the area. So, his presence at the HBC was pretty much limited to evenings, weekends, and holidays. Susan, however, became a rather active member. I an pretty sure that she participated in the mentoring program.
In the post-Pandemic period the Smiths moved to Alexandria, VA. I have not encountered them since they did.
Linda Starr.
I first met Linda Starr during the Tuesday evening games. She usually played with Mike Carmiggelt in those days. They—and many other players in those games—were good enough that they intimidated me. Once Mike accused my partner and I of something unethical. When I responded with a one-word interrogative: “Ethical?” Linda immediately responded by saying that Mike was just crabby because he was hungry. I am not sure why, but Linda has not played with Mike for a few years.
I have paired with Linda a few times at the club and at least once at a sectional in Orange. That experience has been recorded here.
Shortly before Covid-19 struck Linda passed the director’s exam and was hired by the HBC. At my suggestion the club bought a subscription to MailChimp to send emails about news of the club. Linda took over the project of maintaining the database and composing emails. Her emails throughout the closure helped maintain a sense of community among club members.
Doug Eitelman.
Linda came up with the idea of the High-Low game on Sunday as a way for experienced players could help the less experienced. She has unofficially mentored Doug Eitelman and greatly improved his game.
Linda and I worked together on the fantastically successful Limited Sectionals that were sponsored by the HBC in 2023. Documentation of those events begins here. At the time she was a member of the board of the Connecticut Bridge Association (CBA). She became very upset at the handling of the notorious “Tonto Scandal” that has been documented here. After a short sting on the CBA board she resigned. At the HBC’s annual meeting in October of 2023 she became the first director ever elect to the Board of Trustees.
Gary Cohen put together a team for a Swiss event at the HBC. I don’t remember the date. I was assigned to play with Merrill Stein, whom I barely knew. I don’t remember any more details. I think that Merrill died in 2018. An obituary for someone with that name has been posted here.
Jeanne Striefler has been an active member of both the HBC and the SBC for longer than I have. We have played on teams together at tournaments quite a few times and we have paired up at least once or twice.
On a few occasions Jeanie (as everyone called her) invited my wife Sue and me to the house in West Simsbury that she shared with her husband Fred4. One of those occasions was when she celebrated making Silver Life Master, and Susan Seckinger celebrated making Gold Life Master. She probably would have invited us more often if we had reciprocated. Fat chance.
Fred Striefler.
Jeanie served as the HBC’s secretary for many years.
Jeanie and Fred went on a Viking cruise in France at the same time that I took the European cruise (described here). She contracted Covid-19 near the end of the cruise and was unable to leave Paris for several days. She reported that she had had a terrible experience. She was surprised that I enjoyed my journey and thought that Viking did well under the circumstances.
I learned when I played with Rowna Sutin at the HBC that she had been a professional opera singer in Pittsburgh. She appeared as Musetta in Puccini’s La Bohème. I immediately remarked that she must have sung the show-stopping aria, Quando me’n vo’5. I then asked her if she wore a red dress. She said that her dress was not red, but it did have a very long slit in the skirt.
I also discussed with Rowna about the version of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin that was performed on television and is available on YouTube here. Rowna did not like the cuts that were made. I felt that the cuts made it a much better television show and highlighted the talents of the wonderful choir and dancers.
I told Rowna about my favorite Tchaikovsky opera, Cherevichki. She replied “How come I have never heard of it?” I wasn’t sure how to explain why it has not gotten much attention in the U.S. I speculated that it might be because it was difficult to stage. I refused to believe that it had anything to do with the music.
That was the last time that I saw Rowna. For some reason she stopped coming to the HBC. She was still a member of the ACBL in 2023, and she had won a few masterpoints during the year.
Bill Watson.
Bill Watson became the president of the HBC shortly after I joined. As president he arranged for Michael Lawrence, a world champion and highly respected author, to visit the club and give a free presentation on takeout doubles. He even let him stay overnight in his house.
I attended the event. During a break I encountered Mr. Lawrence in the men’s room. He stumped me with a question about whether the faucet’s water ever became hot.
Michael Lawrence.
Bill was also a director at the HBC and with Laurie Robbins ran the club’s education program for new members. For six years he ran the Limited Sectional that the club hosted every October.
I played with Bill a few times before Covid-19 shut down the club in 2020. I remember that he was shocked when I said that a bid at the two-level in the fourth seat should show a minimum opening hand. The club’s experts agreed with me, but later when I played with Barbara Gallagher that the best players in Denver played that the same bid at the one-level was weaker.
Before the Pandemic Bill often was the public address announcer at football games for one of the local high schools in Hartford.
Bill and I have not played together since the club reopened. He mostly has played with Mike Carmiggelt and Larry Bowman.
Bill drove a red Jaguar that gave him a lot of grief in 2023.
John Willoughby started playing at the Tuesday evening games a little after I did. I think that I only played with him once, and I don’t remember any details about the occasion. My wife Sue played with him pretty often online during the Pandemic.
Although he and his wife had moved to North Haven in 2022 John continued as president of the HBC until his sudden and very unexpected death in the summer of 2023. Previously he had lived in Suffield. In his business life he worked as an underwriter for one of the insurance companies. His obituary can be found here.
When John was vice-president of the HBC, he was also the chairman of the Planning Committee, of which I was a member. The committee came up with many good ideas during this period.
The club held a special event as a tribute to John. Many of his family and friends attended. Over $6,000 was raised for the club.
1. In September of 2023 Bob and Sue Glasspiegel moved to Charleston, SC.
2. I was surprised to discover that Fran was still living in West Hartford when she died in 2021. Her obituary is posted here.
3. Stan had just opened his club when Gary began the year of his feat. Stan took advantage of a loophole in the ACBL rules to give extra points by designating every game as a “charity game”. In addition, although all of the games were technically open games, almost no Life Masters ever attended. So, because the games were fully rated—and then some—it was much easier to earn points at the WHBC than at the HBC, where the open games were dominated by experienced players. .
4. Fred was introduced here. His real first name was Manfred, not Frederick.
5. The long version would be “quando me ne vado”, which just means “when I go out”. I don’t know what happened to the “e” in “ne”.
Documentation: I found a folder that contained a large number of documents concerning the attempt to sell the company. Some of them were in legalese, and some were very long. In most cases when they were germane to the story, I have included links to pdf files posted on Wavada.org.
I did not find any emails or notes about meetings. I have therefore needed to rely on my memory, which never had infallibility attributed to it at the First Vatican Council or anywhere else.
The plan: I had often thought about selling TSI, but I could never visualize how it could happen. In 2005 my partner Denise Bessette (introduced here) mentioned in one of our private meetings that she was interested in trying something different, perhaps in academia. We decided to investigate the possibility of selling the business. We were by no means desperate to do so. We were both earning six-figure salaries in those days. So, we were not going to forgo them unless the money was good. Also, we had a substantial backlog of profitable approved projects, and a new product, AxN, that was doing better than we had expected.
We agreed on two primary criteria for any sale. Denise would not be an employee of the new company after she sold her shares. Since I could not imagine why anyone would want TSI without both of us, the second criterion was that my role in the company after the purchase would be temporary.
From the outset I was skeptical of the likelihood of selling the company under those circumstances. It seemed to me that unless there were some demonstrable synergy between either AdDept or AxN and a prospective buyer’s product or service, I could not see the value of what would be left of TSI after both criteria were imposed.
I had informed my wife Sue, the other share-owner of TSI, that we were planning to explore selling it. When I told her that we hoped to get over $1 million for it, she was all for the idea.
Retaining a broker: Somehow we determined that it was necessary to engage a business broker to help us find a buyer. The fact that we had experienced very little success working with third parties other than IBM contributed to my pessimism. Nevertheless, I composed a very long letter that we sent to a few brokers who specialized in businesses like ours, or at least they did not specialize in much larger companies or vastly different industries. I do not remember where we obtained a list of appropriate brokers.
I have posted here a copy of the one that we sent to Steve Pope in March of 2007. He was not the first person to whom we mailed the letter. Here is a list of the brokers that we mailed to:
The first letter was sent to William Gunville2, the president of Successions, Inc., in East Weymouth, MA, on March 31, 2006. I found no evidence that he or anyone at his company responded.
The second letter, sent on the same day, went to Kerry Dustin3 of the Falls River Group in Naples, FL. There is no indication that he responded either, but the file does have TSI’s financial statement dated April 8 in three different formats.
On April 28 I mailed four letters. The first went to Merfeld and Schine, Inc., in Boston4. We must have had some subsequent communication with them. I have a copy of a blank agreement that someone at the company evidently sent to me in August.
I do not remember ever conversing with Matthew Lerner of Newport Acquisition Services5 of Columbia, MD.
No one from the Catalyst Group6 in Boston responded to the letter.
The last of the April letters went to the Corum Goup, Ltd.7 in the state of Washington. I remember one telephone call that might have been with someone from Corum. The gist of it was that even though we might have found a niche that provided the principals with comfortable incomes, that did not mean that anyone would be interested in buying the company. The man on the phone said that this was quite common. This, of course, confirmed what I had previously thought. This same person also said that the most likely company to be interested in purchasing us would be a competitor. The fact that we had no real competition was therefore a disadvantage!
On May 2 I sent a letter to Bob Capozzi of VR Business Brokers8 of Milford, CT. If he responded, I have no record of it. He might have told us that we were too small for his company. Several brokers told us that.
On March 31 of 2009 I mailed the same letter to Robert Meyers of Marshall Business Brokers in Bloomfield, CT. By that time we had worked with Steve Pope for two years. We must have felt that we could do better.
Steve Pope.
Of all the firms that we contacted Steve Pope was the only person who thought that he could help us sell the business. We met with him a couple of times and talked to him over the telephone quite often.
We signed an agreement with him that cost us $1,000 per month for two painful years. I have posted a copy of it here. Note that our asking price was $1.5 million.
Both Denise and I found Steve to be pretty easy to work with, and he provided us with a great deal of useful information. We did not know what we were doing when we started this process.
At the time his last name seemed an unbelievable coincidence. For the previous three years I had been researching the history of the papacy (detailed here) in hopes of getting my ideas about the popes published.
Someone & George Abraham.
The valuation: Steve insisted that we hire an outsider to undertake a professional valuation of TSI. He recommended a man named George Abraham9 and provided us with a write-up of his credentials and approach, which I have posted here.
We had to put together materials for him. Almost all of the information came from our general ledger. This cost us several thousand dollars and, in my opinion, was worse than worthless. It was obvious to me that he had just run information from our G/L through a software program that basically took the retained earnings and added the value of the fixed assets. Our fixed assets were minimal, and, as a closely held company, we had distributed nearly all of our profits at the end of every year. So, he concluded that our company was worth very little.
We considered the value of our company to be in its client list, the relationships that we had established with the clients, the strength of our staff, and the fact that the clients were totally dependent on us. None of this appeared in the valuation. When I complained about this, Mr. Abraham said that all of that was considered “good will”. He could increase it, but the first thing that any prospective buyer did with a valuation was to discard or at least disparage the portion that was attributable to good will.
I felt as helpless in this situation as I did when I had to fill out a “Request for Proposal” form designed by a consultant to use to assess potential software solutions. Those forms seldom allowed me to highlight the parts of our system that would help the prospective client the most. In the same way the valuation was going to be the first thing that a prospective buyer would see, and it did not allow us to highlight what was good about TSI.
Nibbles: TSI rented box #241 at the post office in Warehouse Point for communication that we might receive from Steve or from anyone else involved in the project. I went there every couple of days, take the junk mail out of it, and throw it in the recycle bin. I very seldom brought anything back to the office.10
I remember that a couple of times over the next few years Steve tried to connect us with people who might be interested, but nothing came of any of these exchanges.
I found four documents in which I answered questions about TSI’s approach. The first was a letter that I sent to Steve on January 31, 2008, about the alleged obsolescence of the AS/400, which by then had undergone a few name changes. I have posted it here.
I also have posted answers that I provided to many very detailed questions to people that I don’t remember named Peter, James, and Len. The first two were dated February 4, 2008. The last one was sent on March 14, 2008.
Denise and I were encouraged at first, but after a few months we began to hear less and less. Steve still called once in a while, but there were no prospects who could be considered even lukewarm.
Tim Finney.
The buyer: Steve told us in early 2010 that an “entrepreneur” from St. Louis who had bought and sold several companies was interested in buying our company. His name was Tim Finney.11
Denise and I had a conference call with him and Steve in early March. Evidently we did an abbreviated demo of our systems via Webex.12 I don’t remember the details, but I found a letter that Tim sent to us on March 15 (beware the Ides of March!) that provided a fairly detailed analysis of what he was willing to pay us for our stock in TSI. It has been posted here. The important features were:
The total purchase price was $1,000,000 for 100 percent of the stock.
We would need to pay capital gains taxes on this amount.
I would work for another two years at a salary of $95,000. He would have the option of extending this another two years if “Tim and Mike agree that the business can or can not sustain itself at that time based on Tim’s progress with the software code/business.” In any case Mike would work for two months for nothing.
Denise would work for two months for nothing.
We were very interested. On May 7 Tim sent us a confidentiality agreement, which Denise, Sue, and I signed and returned to him. The confidentiality agreement has been posted here.
Tim sent the Letter of Intent a few days later with the specification that the closing would be by July 15, or earlier if possible. I made it clear every time that I talked with anyone involved that I needed for this either to be completed before August or postponed until September. Sue and I had scheduled a trip for August 8 through August 21.
Tim made a trip to Connecticut in early June after the LOI had been signed. I discovered an outline of what I wanted to say to him. It is posted here. Denise and I met with him on a Saturday or a Sunday. I remember two things from that visit, which seemed to go very well. The first was that Tim said that he had purchase several companies, and had resold most of them. One that he was still holding was a software company, and he mentioned some sort of difficulty with it. The other memorable event was the surprising statement that he would have no difficulties with his banks. He claimed that he had great relationships with all of them. I only had two banks, and no one at either one had any idea who I was.
Both of these should have been red flags. I was already dreading needing to work for Tim for two or four years. If he already had trouble with other coders in a similar position, it might be even worse than I had imagined, and I already imagined myself being screamed at over the telephone on a regular basis,
His mention of the banks made it clear that he had not yet obtained the financing. I should definitely have called a halt to proceeding any further until he had lined up the money. It was a rookie mistake.
The office of Andros, Floyd & Miller in Hartford.
The lawyer: Back in April Denise and I could understand that we might be in over our heads. We asked our accountant, Tom Rathbun, if he knew of any lawyers that could help us in dealing with a prospective buyer for our business. He recommended that we contact Mark La Fontaine of the law firm of Andros, Floyd & Miller. We contacted him, and he sent us an engagement letter on April 5 that stated that his billing rate was $300 per hour. He waived the retainer fee.
Denise and I drove to his office one afternoon in April. We explained our situation to him. For some reason he was most concerned about Sue’s status with the company and the fact that she was part of our group health insurance. He strongly advised us to remove her from the group. I disagreed with his assessment. I was quite sure that I could defend our approach if someone accused us of fraud.
Mark explained the process of selling the company. I did not think that I got $300 worth of advice out of the meeting. I just had to hope that he would be worth the money when the exchange of paperwork got more intense. I am pretty sure that we provided Mark with a copy of the Letter of Intent. I don’t recall whether he had asked us if Tim had said in writing that he had lined up sources for the financing.
On May 20 Tim sent me forty-one “due diligence” questions. They are posted here. I wrote up answers, and Mark reviewed them. I then sent them to Tim together with the necessary attachments on May 24. The answers are posted here. Bring a lunch; it has eleven pages and several attachments that I did not post.
A second set of twenty-one questions came on May 28. They are posted here. My answers and supporting documentation was sent on June 2. They are posted here.
The third set of ten questions arrived on June 17. These, which were more personal than technical, are posted here. By this time I was getting very antsy about whether this process could be completed before Sue and I departed for our vacation in Russia. The file of answers has the same date and is posted here. Since all my answers were reviewed by Mark or his staff, one of the dates must be wrong.
I remember one after-hours telephone call that I had with Tim. I have always hated telephone calls, and I had been spending an inordinate amount of time writing up very detailed answers to his questions. He told me that I sounded like I had “seller’s remorse”. I explained that what he heard in my voice was my lifelong aversion to negotiating over the phone.
On Thursday, August 5, Tim finally sent to me and Mark the purchase agreement (here), promissory note (here), stock pledge (here), and employment agreement (here). I immediately called Mark’s office and left word that I was leaving for vacation on Sunday and would be back in the office on Monday, August 23. Nothing was to be done until they heard from me. I asked Denise to keep me apprised of any developments, but I warned her that I was not confident about how reliable my access to the Internet would be.
The documents were long and complicated. However, they appeared to my untrained eyes as pretty much in accord with the LOI. My obligation, which previously had consisted of a definite two-year commitment and another tentative two-year commitment had been changed to a definite three-year commitment.
Russia: For many months Sue and I had been planning to take a river cruise in August in Russia from St. Petersburg to Moscow (described in great detail here). Because the arrangements had been made in conjunction with our friends, Tom and Patti Corcoran, postponing the trip was never a serious consideration. I had put in a lot of effort to get the most out of the trip including spending a lot of time trying to remember the Russian that I had learned in the sixties. I even downloaded a set of flash cards for Russian vocabulary from the Internet. I used them for at least an hour per day.
I was very excited about the prospect of seeing both the major cities of Russia as well as a little bit of the vast territory between them. I was happy that the deal with Tim seemed to be nearing consummation, but I did not like the fact that I would be on a ship in Russia while the unsigned documents were in Hartford and St. Louis.
Viking Surkov is now known as Viking Helg.
On day #11 of the cruise, Thursday, August 19, our ship. the Viking Surkov, was docked on the northern edge of Moscow. I was scheduled to take a bus tour to Sergiev Posad, which had been outrageously described to us as the Vatican City of the Russian Orthodox Church. Before breakfast I had made my way to the center of the ship, where the Internet service was the closest to tolerable. My journal has only this brief description: “I had just enough time to download my e-mail messages. A couple of the work-related ones were rather disturbing, but there was not much that I could do about them.”
The disturbing messages were from Denise. Evidently Tim’s lawyers had been communicating with Mark about details of the agreement throughout my absence. That was disturbing enough, but Tim himself had contacted Denise and had told her that his bankers had been questioning some aspects of the deal. He wanted to rewrite the purchase agreement. I was astounded to learn that the bankers were still involved. I thought that surely he must have shown his plans to them before he sent them to the lawyers and then to us. What in the world was going on?
Tim’s new plan: I don’t have any documentation of the new plan that I had to deal with when I returned to work, but I am pretty sure that I remember it in some detail. He proposed to buy only Denise’s 25 percent of the shares immediately. Sue and I would still be majority owners. I would hire him as marketing director at a salary of $50,000 per year. In three years he would buy the remaining shares if we had met the sales objectives that we had outlined. They are posted here.
I considered this proposal laughable:
Sue and I received nothing.
Since the business was not being sold, Steve Pope received nothing except salary cuts.
He wanted me to let my most valuable employee go and voluntarily terminate a relationship that I had worked hard to cultivate.
My new partner would be someone with whom I was dreading working.
TSI’s new marketing director had no credentials and no ties to either of our target markets.
He wanted to set his own hours and work from home.
If (actually when) the plan failed, it was still my responsibility.
Sue would kill me if I agreed to this.
I tried to explain why this was a non-starter. I don’t think that Denise would have agreed anyway, but our agreement with her prohibited her from selling her shares privately.
I made one more trip to St. Louis to try to persuade him. Denise thought that it was a waste of time and money, and so I had to pay for it myself. Tim picked me up at the airport in his snazzy Lexus sports car and drove us to his house/office in Chesterfield, MO. I tried to resurrect his original proposal with every argument that I could think of. He listened to me politely and said that he would think about it, but I knew that the deal was dead.
I wrote a letter terminating our contract with Mark as soon as I returned. Here is the text:
Please terminate our contract immediately. At this point, it appears that the deal is beyond resuscitation. If this transaction is somehow revived, we may want to start anew.
Thank you for your assistance. It is a shame that so much effort was wasted on such a futile endeavor.
Explanation and Speculation: Here is what I think might have happened. The banker(s) were probably not impressed with his idea. However, they must not have rejected it out of hand because he was still willing to buy out Denise. So, he must have been able to lay his hands on $250,000. I think that they probably were asking him to put up his house or some other fixed asset as collateral for the rest of the money. Either this gave him cold feet, or perhaps his wife put her foot down. In either case I blame the feet.
Could this gigantic SNAFU been avoided? I think so. I should have insisted that Tim show the Letter of Intent to the bankers. He had allegedly already bought and sold companies. I assumed that he would have lined up financing first before telling someone that he wanted to give them $1 million. Like Fllounder in Animal House, I fucked up; I trusted him.
Would the original plan have worked? It would only have worked if Tim had been able to convince two or three large retailers to buy AdDept. At that point the only ones left who did not use AdDept and also did a lot of advertising were Walmart, Home Depot, Lowe’s. Dillard’s, and chains of grocery stores and drug stores. Maybe he could have pulled it off, but I cannot imagine how. Maybe he knew how to persuade them to let me talk with the advertising managers and then give a presentation, but I had seen no evidence of it.
At the same time we probably would have needed to pivot our development to use more attractive input and output. We also probably would have needed to come up with a way to handle Internet advertising in a useful manner. Both of these tasks would be daunting.
Even if we had succeeded, I think that my life would have been hell for three years. I was absolutely and completely honest in everything that I said to him, but there were certainly things that he did not understand. For example, I seriously doubt that he understood that the AxN revenue was dependent on the AdDept clients. When an AdDept client stopped using the system, was purchased or absorbed by another retailer, or outsourced the buying of its newspaper ads, all or at least a majority of the associated AxN revenue disappeared.
Denise, who was ten years younger than I was, wanted to sell because she desired to try something else. I had no such ambitions. I wanted to sell because I could not see a way to make the business continue to be viable without a huge expenditure of time and money.
I would have done everything that I could to make it succeed, including going back to working 70-hour weeks. It would have required a herculean effort to make the business work without Denise. Keep in mind that I had celebrated my sixty-second birthday on the ship in Russia. Whom could I hire to replace Denise? I could probably find someone with the experience and skill of the Denise whom we hired in 1984, but no one in the U.S. could just take her chair and do what she was doing in 2010 without a lot of on-the-job training. My rule of thumb was that new programmers generally cost me more time than they saved during the first six months of employment, and Denise meant much more to the company than any programmer.
I would not have taken any vacations during those three years. That means that I would have missed the South Italy tour in 2011 (described here), which was our last tragic adventure with Patti and Tom. In 2012 we took a Larry Cohen bridge cruise, the famous honeymoon for one (described here). I would never have met Frank Evangelista. In 2013 I spent a few days at the Gatlinburg Regional bridge tournament with Michael Dworetsky (describe here). A lot of pleasant memories would have never been created.
Worst of all, I think that Tim would have inevitably come to blame me for the company’s failure. I can imagine awkward and even painful telephone conversations on a weekly basis. I don’t know what he would have tried to make me do to fix the situation. You can’t squeeze blood from a stone. He might have sued me. I cannot imagine what the grounds would have been, but he probably had much deeper pockets for legal fees than I did. For a guy like me that would have been a real nightmare.
Expenses: Denise and I spent a lot of money, and I took on more than 75 percent of the cost. We spent $24,000 for Steve Pope’s activities. I don’t remember what the appraiser charged, but it was much more than $1,000. Mark charged us at least $12,800. The trip to St. Louis cost $500, and our dinner with Tim was nearly $150. So, the total charge was around $40,000. I also spent a great deal of time on this project, and at the time we were billing out my services at the rate of $1,000 per day.
This was not quite as bad as it looked. The expenses were deductible, and at the time I was paying a lot in taxes. Furthermore, if the effort had been successful, Sue and I would have received hundreds of thousands of dollars. In 2009 I invested a high percentage of my savings in an indexed fund based on the S&P 500. I would presumably have augmented that with an even higher percentage of the windfall. From that time through October of 2023 the S&P 500 has increased in value by approximately 300 percent! Do the math.
1. Steve Pope was still in the business brokerage business in 2023. His company was called Pope and Associates, LLC. The website is here.
10. For a short while I placed the most current TSI backup tape in the P.O. box. The clerk quickly put an end to that. He said that it was not allowed for the owner of the box to put anything in it. The owner could take things out or leave them in the box, but only post office employees could place anything in the box. I did not argue. I think they were worried about a bomb.
11. Tim Finney’s LinkedIn page lists his occupation as CEO and Founder. It is located here.
12. Webex is an Internet product from Cisco systems. It allowed people to view on their own systems what was being displayed on remote systems. This was, of course, before Zoom existed.
My dad died at Hartford Hospital on Tuesday, September 13, 2011. At the time he had been living in Connecticut for almost six years. That period has been described in some detail here. After his death it fell to me to make all of the arrangements for his funeral, disposition of his estate, and other such tasks.
My wife Sue definitely helped, and my dad made it easy for me by making a lot of preparations. He had written a carefully worded will, and he made me its executor. He had also added me as a signatory on his bank accounts and beneficiary of his investments.
The first thing that I did was to call my sister Jamie and notify her that he had died. I asked her to attend the funeral and told her that there was enough money in his accounts to pay for her and her five children to come to the funeral that I planned to schedule in Leawood, KS, where my dad had spent the bulk of his adult life. This was the first time that I had talked with Jamie for several years, as explained here. She thanked me for taking care of him, but she would not consider coming to the funeral. She said that he would have hated her being there, which I am quite certain was not true. None of her five children attended either. I don’t have any evidence that she had anything to do with their decisions, but …
Monsignor McGlinn.
My dad and mom had been active members of Curé of Ars church. I called the pastor, Monsignor Charles McGlinn1, to arrange the funeral mass. Somehow the subject of Boy Scouts came up. I told him that shortly after my family moved to Leawood back in 1962 I had joined Troop 395 and was the troop’s first Eagle Scout. I had spent most of my scouting days in Troop 295 at Queen of the Holy Rosary. He had also been the pastor there, but well after my time.
He remembered my dad and mom, and he scheduled the funeral mass for 10AM on Friday, September 23. I told him that my dad wished to be cremated. He said that that would be fine. In fact, it was the usual practice for deaths in distant locations. This surprised me quite a bit. I had been taught that the resurrection of the bodies would occur on Judgment Day. I supposed that if you believed that, you could imagine some way that the body could be reconstituted from ashes.
I had been composing dad’s obituary in my head while he had been in palliative care at the hospital. Since newspapers charged by the word for obituaries, dad would have appreciated that I kept it short and to the point. I sent this to the Kansas City Star.
James E. Wavada, 87, died on September 13, 2011, in Hartford, CT. Mass of Christian Burial will be held at 10 a.m. Friday, Sept. 23, at Curé of Ars Church, 9401 Mission Rd., Leawood. Jim grew up in Rosedale, matriculated at Maur Hill, and served in the Army in WWII. He worked at BMA for almost four decades, starting in the mail room and ending as a vice-president of public relations. He had a great love of words, except for “I,” which he almost never used. His astounding memory could produce an apt literary quote for any occasion. After he retired, he wrote Yup the Organization, a tongue-in-cheek guide to climbing the corporate ladder. The best day of Jim’s life was when he married Dolores Cernech. The worst was when she died more than 50 years later. Jim is survived by his son, Mike, daughter, Jamie, five grandchildren, and innumerable friends and admirers.
Four decades? Where did I get that? Well, as usual, nobody checked my work. I was very proud of this little essay at the time, but given another chance I would at least remove the commas after “son” and “daughter”.
I am sure that there was some sort of reception. I think that my dad’s friends had set up something in the vestibule, and there was a reception line there before mass. I don’t remember going to a funeral home there.
I don’t remember calling anyone else about the funeral. Sue might have called the Raffertys. They probably notified their friends and others who knew dad. Two of my cousins lived in KC. One of them probably saw the obituary and notified the others. Charlie, Vic, and Cathy were certainly there. I am not so sure about Margaret Anne.
Somehow dad’s old army buddy, Jake Jacobson2, heard about it and came down by himself from Milwaukee. I think that he might have called me to say that he was coming.
I was thrilled that he was able to make the trip. I knew that he was five years older than my dad, but he seemed to be quite vigorous. However, he confessed to me that whenever he changed locations, he made sure that he knew where the nearest bathroom was located.
The other surprise was Joan Dobel3, the mother of Pat Dobel, my friend and classmate at Rockhurst High School and my very first debate partner. I had never met her, but evidently she had been A friend of my parents.
Sue and I made arrangements with Leete-Stephens Funeral Home in Enfield. We decided not to hold any gatherings in Enfield. The people at L-S took care of the cremation privately. They gave me an urn containing the ashes. I was shocked to learn that I was required to carry them on the airplane as carry-on luggage.
Sue and I flew to KCI a day or two before the day of the funeral. We certainly rented a car from Avis.
I am pretty sure that we stayed at the Hampton Inn that was near I-435 in Overland Park. We may have made arrangements for Jake to stay there, too.
I have a vague recollection that Sue and I picked up Jake at the airport, but I am not positive. If I did not, I have trouble imagining how he got around. I don’t remember him taking taxis.
The funeral mass itself was well attended. My parents had a lot of friends in the area. One of the ladies that had worked closely with him at BMA was also there. Dad sometimes talked about her when I was still living in Leawood many years earlier, but I cannot remember her name.
I did not take an active roll in the ceremony. I don’t think that anyone spoke about my dad, but I could be wrong. This was a marked contrast with my mom’s funeral as posted here.
I remember that Sue and I rode in one of the funeral home’s cars out to the cemetery. It seemed like a long drive. We were in the same care as Monsignor McGlinn. I felt uncomfortable, but he did nothing to cause me to feel that way.
By far the highlight of the entire trip was supper at RC’s in the Martin City neighborhood of KC MO. My dad and I frequented this restaurant on my visits to KC (documented here). All my cousins and some of their kids joined Sue, me, and Jake. Cathy’s future husband, Patrick Wisor, was also there. My dad’s estate picked up the tab.
I don’t know what about the atmosphere at RC’s4 made this such an enjoyable evening for me. I don’t remember any of the details of the conversation, but I do recall that everyone seemed relaxed and having a good time. It helped to cement some relationships between me and my cousins. We had known each other for decades, but we had spent very little time together.
Disposition of the estate: This was a surprisingly easy job. My dad left his financial records in remarkably good condition. He had previously added my name to his accounts, and his will was straightforward. I was the executor. The will left everything to me, but in private conversations he told me that he also wanted to take care of Jamie’s children.
I made one or two visits to the office of Richard Tatoian, a probate attorney in Enfield. I told him that I was worried that my sister might give me some trouble about the will. He advised me that my dad made his intentions very clear, and he did not think that anyone could contest it. The total estate was worth about $180,000. I sent checks for $9,000 each to Cadie and Kelly Mapes and Gina, Anne, and Joey Lisella. After the first of the year I sent a second check for the same amount to each of them.
After Sue and I had taken the few things that we wanted (electronic equipment and mementos) from dad’s apartment Sue contacted Golden Gavel Auctions in East Windsor to pick up all of the rest of dad’s stuff at Bigelow Commons. They were able to sell some of it, but it barely covered the cost of carting away the rest of it.
Dealing with Bigelow Commons was a pleasure. They waived the right to the rent for the rest of the term of dad’s lease. They also told me how much they enjoyed having my dad as a tenant.
They didn’t even call it the Super Bow!
Many years later I discovered in my dad’s papers two very interesting tickets: one for Super Bowl III (the Joe Namath game) and one for the 1970 Rose Bowl, Bo Schembechler’s first.
1. Monsignor McGlinn was the pastor of Curé of Ars from 1986 until his retirement in 2015. Before that he had been the pastor at Queen of the Holy Rosary, our parish for eight years. He died in 2020 at the age of 78. His very revealing obituary has been posted here.
2. Jake died in 2023 at the age of 103 and a half! His truly fabulous obituary is posted here. It is by far the best that I have ever seen. The obituary contains a story written by his son Paul (introduced here). It mentioned, among many other things, that Jake was in counter-intelligence in Europe in WW II. This surprised me greatly. My dad was in the infantry in the Pacific. I wondered how the two of them met and managed to develop a relationship that lasted for so long. I could not figure out a way to contact Paul to see if he knew the answer.
3. Joan died in 2013. Her obituary has been posted here.
4. RC’s changed hands in 2023. Its history is documented here.
When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez, And it’s Eastertime too, And your gravity fails, And negativity don’t pull you through. Don’t put on any airs When you’re down on Rue Morgue Avenue. They got some hungry women there, And they really make a mess outta you.
Bob Dylan: Just Like tom thumb’s blues
The weather services predicted heavy rain in Connecticut for Wednesday, September 13, and they were definitely correct. When I left the house a little before 9:00 to play in the morning game at the Hartford Bridge Club, it was just starting to sprinkle. I generally did not let rain interfere in any activity except exercise. Walking swiftly through a shower has never really bothered me. At the time I did not even possess an umbrella. The temperature was in the high sixties. I wore only Levis and a short-sleeved shirt.
By the time that my Honda and I reached I-91 the rain was coming down pretty hard. However, the traffic on the road was lighter than usual, and I had made pretty good time when I reached Exit 32, the intersection with I-84 westbound. The next mile or so was always hectic because it required entrants from I-91 to cross four (!) lanes of traffic to the left in order to exit at Flatbush Ave.
By that point I had the windshield wipers working as fast as they could and the fan for the defogger was blasting away. Nevertheless, the visibility was still poor. I cursed the few drivers who had not bothered to engage their vehicles’ headlights.
The usual.
I drove much more slowly than I had on I-91, but I was still pretty much on schedule when my car approached the long ramp for Exit 45, Flatbush Ave. I coasted down to the stoplight, waited for it to change, and entered the mall that contained McDonald’s, where I customarily stopped for my breakfast sandwich, a sausage biscuit with egg. I was surprised to see that no cars were positioned at either window #1, where drive-through customers paid or window #2, where they received their orders.
When I circled around the building to the two drive-through lines for ordering, I was even more surprised to find them empty as well. I drove up to the station nearer the building. Someone asked me if I wanted to use the mobile app. I declined. She then asked what I wanted, and I replied with the same six words that I always used: “One (slight pause) sausage biscuit with egg, please.” Sometimes I needed to repeat it or deny that I wanted cheese, but on this occasion the correct order quickly popped up on the billboard.
By the time that I reached window #1 it was raining as hard as I had ever experienced in my seventy-five years. The lady taking payments had propped up some clear plastic sheeting at the bottom of the window to minimize the splashing. I pressed the button to lower my window and handed her my Citibank Costco Visa card, the one that paid 3 percent cash back on purchases at restaurants. I saw her grab it, and I let go. The card plummeted to the invisible area between the car and the window, a gap of no more than eighteen inches. This had happened to me before with coins, but never with a card.
I opened my door and felt around with my left hand for the card. Nothing. Noting that no one was behind me, I backed up a few feet and then pulled the car to the right so that it was farther from the window. However, I still could not open the door enough to get out. So, I climbed over the gearshift and exited by the passenger door.
With a good view of the area I felt confident that I would recover the card posthaste. I was wrong. There was no sign of it. A minute or so later someone wearing so much rain gear that I could not determine gender emerged from the store and join the search. Still nothing.
The lady at the window assured me that the card was in my car and that I would find it there. She also told me to drive to window #2. I did not believe her assertion about the card’s whereabouts for a second. That would have required one of two events: either she reached through my car’s window or she whacked my hand and knocked the card back through the window. I was quite sure that neither of those had occurred.
I proceeded to window #2 as directed. The person in the rain coat conducted a quick search before the next customer arrived at window #1.
I had great respect for the employees at this particular McDonald’s. They were always friendly and efficient, and they almost never messed up an order. I rated it the best fast-food establishment anywhere. They cemented that assessment when the person at window #2 gave me my sandwich and told me not to worry about paying for it.
I drove to the club and regaled a few people with the tale of my adventure while I ate my sandwich. Everyone who had registered overcame the downpour—people were advised to stay home—attend, and I was the only one who resembled a wet dog, a description employed by my partner, Eric Vogel. In point of fact, I almost certainly looked worse than any canine even after I dried off my face and arms with paper towels. At the end of the 3.5 hour game I was still wet beneath my shirt.
As soon as I arrived back at my house I checked to see if any strange charges appeared on the card. There were none. I then canceled the card. The website said that a new one would arrive in a few days. It actually took nine.
Denouement: I happened to be scheduled to play the next day with Fran Gurtman, who was rather new to the game. I was serving as her mentor in a program sponsored by the HBC.1
I tried to pay and lost my card at 1. I picked up my sandwich at 2. The card was found at 3.
As usual I stopped at McDonald’s and enunciated as clearly as I could my usual six-word order. The lady taking the order, whom I could not see at all, said “Is this Michael?” I pled guilty. She informed me that they had found my credit card, and I could pick it up at window #1. By the time that I arrived at that station the cashier knew that I was coming. She was the same lady to whom I had handed the card twenty-four hours earlier. She told me that someone had found the card in parking space #3, which was reserved for people who had ordered ahead on the mobile app.
Not only was this parking space across the driveway from the side of the building. It was also at least thirty feet farther down—almost directly across from window #2. I later noticed that the driveway between the restaurant and the parking spaces had a significant “crown” on it—the center is at least a couple of inch higher than either side.
So, how did the card get over there? It must have swum, but how it got past the driveway is totally inexplicable to me. Moreover, if it was near the building when I and the person in the rain gear looked for it, why did neither of us see it. The card itself was a very dark grey, but the writing on it was bright white.
Can a credit card even float? I did a simple experiment to test the hypotheses. This card in particular can definitely float. In fact, no matter what I did it popped up to the surface.
I later met the lady who found the card. She said that she was astonished that it had traveled as far as it did. By the way, it survived the voyage in perfect condition.
I wonder if anyone has ever written a murder mystery that was solved by the detective’s familiarity with the buoyancy of credit cards.
Telemachus and Mentor.
1. I cannot get myself to use the word “mentee”. Mentor was a trusted friend of Odysseus and his son Telemachus. Athena took his form to give advice to the latter. So, the word “mentor” should only be used as a noun to preserve the metaphor. Like many nouns it became a rather common verb. That does not bother me too much, but changing it to “mentee” grates on my nerves because it ruins the metaphor. I suppose that it would be too much to call a person being mentored as a telemachus.
