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.
In 2023 the lights are always out at the Red Lion in Cromwell.
Presidential Regional: District 25, the New England states, had traditionally held its first major1 regional tournament of the year in February. The site had been in Cromwell CT for as long as I had been playing. However, the demise of the Red Lion Hotel forced it to be moved to Sturbridge MA in 2020. The name of the last four or five events had been the Presidential Regional, because it ended on the weekend of Presidents Day. The name was maintained in 2023 even the the tournament was scheduled for February 7-11, the week before its usual appearance. The site was the Southbridge Hotel and Conference Center, which had also been used for the Spectacle Regional in the previous November, as described here. The 2023 Presidential was was scaled-down tournament of only five days designed to minimize the number of directors needed.
The Southbridge Hotel and Conference Center.
I was not excited about the schedule. There were no team games at all on Tuesday or Friday; if I played. I would be in the top flight. Wednesday featured a two-day knockout. Saturday had a three-flighted Swiss. I tried to get a partner from the pairing person, Denise Bahosh, but she could not find anyone for me. Eventually, one of my regular partners, Eric Vogel, agreed to play with me in the knockout. Our teammates were Jeanne Striefler and Jim Macomber from the Hartford Bridge Club.
I had played every day at every regional tournament for quite a few years. However, I decided not to play on Tuesday, Friday, or Saturday of this one. The drive to the hotel was not likely to be difficult as long as the weather cooperated. So, I decided to commute back and forth on Wednesday and Thursday. I also needed to be at the hotel for the meeting of the Executive Committee on Friday evening. I planned to drive then as well.
Jim Macomber and Jeanne Striefler.
The weather was fine. On both days I stopped at McDonald’s in Stafford for my usual sausage biscuit with egg sandwich. Our team had just the right amount of points. We were the top-seeded team in the second bracket. Nine teams were in our bracket. We had to play an eight-round Round Robin, which we easily won. That gave us the right to choose which of the third and fourth teams we would play on Thursday. I chose to play the Sattinger team rather than the team from Vermont. Those two teams had finished with the same number of victory points, and we had defeated them both by the same margin. One of the pairs from Vermont played Precision3. I worried that if Jim and Jeanne faced them, they might have difficulty handling a radically different bidding system.
Our morning round of twenty-four hands was against Michael and Ulla Sattinger of Slingerlands, NY, a team that I have played against many times over the years. Eric and I were East-West. On the very first hand I made an overly aggressive bid that turned out to be costly. Eric also made a fairly serious mistake on a different hand. However, things must have gone better in the other room. At lunch we were ahead by twelve points, which was a reasonably comfortable margin.
Eric Vogel.
Eric and I played better in the second half, but North-South held better cards on most of the hands. Ulla and Michael bid and made a few game contracts, but the hands seemed rather straightforward. I did not see any hands on which swings were likely. I was wrong. Jim and Jeanne did not bid several of those games and settled for setting their opponents in undoubled partial scores.
This was very upsetting to me. I had expected us to play as well as on the previous day. My record in knockout matches in the past was quite good, and I was convinced that things were lined up favorably for us. In retrospect I suspect that Jim and Jeanne might have gotten tired. Neither of them had played in any tournaments since the pandemic, and they had played in far fewer of them than I had before that. They were basically club players, and they had seldom played two sessions in one day, much less on two consecutive days.
After lunch we had to play against a team captained by Abhi (AH vee) Dutta, with whom I had played in a few tournaments. They had the second-best record in the Round Robin, but they had lost to the Vermonters in the semifinal. So, this match would determine who finished third. Eric and I were East-West against Abhi and Paul Johnson, a player from Connecticut with less than 750 masterpoints. Abhi had always been a deliberate player, and, at least in this match, Paul was at times unbearably slow—taking several minutes to make some decisions. At the half they were ahead by six points.
I told Jim and Jeanne that they would switch to East-West to face Abhi and Paul in the second set of twelve boards. Eric and I played against Liv Carroll and Louis DiOrio. Since they came from different corners of the district; they probably had been paired up by the Partnership Desk. We had a very pleasant match with them. Eric and I did not make any serious errors, but neither did they. It was hard to say if we had made up the deficit.
We had been waiting thirty minutes for the other match to finish when Eric announced that he had to leave to go to a meeting. This would ordinarily not have been a big deal, but it turned out that we won the second half by six points, and so our match ended in a tie. Jeanne tried to reach Eric by phone, but he was miles away and unwilling to return to play in a four-board playoff. So, we had to concede. It was the perfect ending to an awful day.
I drove back on Friday for the meeting of the Executive Committee. According to Curtis Barton, the President of the New England Bridge Conference, everything was “fabulous”. Attendance was better than at the 2022 tournaments, and some headway seemed to be being made, but it did not seem fabulous to me. The tournament was better than nothing, but it still seemed rinky-dink to me. To me the most amazing thing was how much money the district still had after a string of disastrous tournaments. The person most responsible was unquestionably Joe Brouillard, the treasurer.
The most hilarious moment occurred after Joe proposed eliminating the stipend to the secretary (Carolyn Weiser) and treasurer (himself) at tournaments. After some bizarre discussion there was a secret ballot. The motion failed 12-1. Everyone thought that Joe and Carolyn were worth every penny. The other important argument was that, heaven forbid, we were faced with replacing them, we needed to have every incentive available.
Granite State Getaway: I could not find partners for the six-day tournament in June in Nashua, NH. That was too bad; I would have liked to play in the knockouts; I even had teammates lined up for one of them.
Sue and I drove up on the morning of Saturday, June 24. The first half of the trip was in the rain, which was particularly heavy on the Mass Pike. By the time that we reached the hotel it was sunny.
I played with Sally Kirtley, the tournament manager, in the A/X pairs. We were badly overmatched. Sue also played in a pairs game and did not do very well.
At the Executive Committee meeting we learned that this was probably the last time that a District 25 regional will be held at the Sheraton. The hotel wants to increase the rate dramatically. Sally solicited and received a large number of suggestions for places with large spaces that were not directly associated with hotels. Joe emphasized that something needed to be done to strengthen the Grass Roots Fund. Before the pandemic most units specified one of their days as Grass Roots days. The district received funds from those games.
There was some discussion about doing the GNT qualifying in person, but I was the only person who felt strongly that it was a huge mistake to award gold points for online play.
No food was served at the meeting. Sue and I ate supper at Lui Lui. I had a delicious pizza and a beer. I questioned the waitress about on of the cartoonish paintings plainly captioned in Spanish, not Italian. She said that she knew nothing about it.
On Sunday morning at the meeting of the Board of Delegates we again heard about how fabulous things were. Only four people represented Connecticut—Peter Marcus, Paul Burnham, Sue, and me. At the end I took a couple of minutes to describe the Weiss-Bertoni award (introduced here) and to present it to Joe Bertoni. He was pretty choked up about receiving it, but, in my opinion, he definitely deserved it. I just hope that he continues the tradition of presenting it to other worthy recipients.
I scheduled an email to go out at 10AM to announce the winner.
The traffic on the return trip was awful. We arrived home more than a half hour later than we expected. It felt weird not to wonder whether the cats were all right.
If it were not for the presentation of the Weiss-Bertoni aware, I would have considered the trip a complete waste of time, gasoline, and money.
Mike Heider and Jim Osofsky.
Ocean State Regional: For some reason that I do not understand the tournament in Warwick, RI, on the Labor Day weekend was scheduled for only five days beginning on Tuesday, August 29. Knockouts were scheduled for Tuesday-Wednesday and Thursday-Friday. I was fortunate to learn that Jim Osofsky’s regular partner, Mike Heider, would be in Germany with his sons that week. So, Jim agreed to play as my partner for both of the knockouts. He arranged for Abhi and Paul Johnson to be our teammates in the one starting on Thursday. In the first knockout Denise Bahosh, the Partnership Chairman arranged for us to team up with Mike Baker and Susan Swope, two players from Florida who had roughly the same number of masterpoints as Jim and I.
I had decided to play four days, attend the Executive Committee meeting on Friday evening, and skip Saturday. I was able to use my IHG Rewards points to pay for my three nights at the Crowne Plaza in Warwick.
Jim and Mike H. played Precision, but Jim played 2/1 in club games. He lived in Deerfield, MA, and Mike H. lived in southern CT. So, they only played together at tournaments. I had played against them innumerable times.Jim and I had exchanged emails about bidding issues, and we had come to pretty good agreement about the convention card. Still, there were a few issues to be ironed out. So we agreed to meet at the hotel at 9:00 on Tuesday morning.
Judy and Sue.
Sue also wanted to attend the tournament, but, as usual, she did not get any partners until the last minute. On Monday evening she had arranged to play with her friend and long-time partner, Judy Cavagnaro in the Gold Rush pairs. Sue needed gold points to become a Life Master. When I went to bed she had not decided whether she would ride with me or take her own car. I planned to leave at 7:15.
Google Maps recommended taking the back roads to the Crowne Plaza. It took a little over an hour and 45 minutes, but I stopped at McDonald’s.
At 6:30 on Tuesday morning Sue informed me that we would ride together, but she wanted to take her car. Her plan was to provide for the possibility that she might want to come home early. When I asked how I was supposed to get home, she answered that she would drive to Warwick (a trip of at least an hour and forty-five minutes) to pick me up at 7PM on Friday after the meeting of the Executive Committee. I considered this to be ridiculous, but I was wise enough not to press that opinion.
At 7:03 Sue informed me that I should leave at 7:15 by myself. She would drive her own car. I decided not to stop at McDonald’s in Stafford. Instead I set as my destination on Google Maps the McDonald’s on Route 2 in Warwick. I picked up my sandwich there and arrived at the hotel at precisely 9AM.
Jim was already there, talking on his cellphone. His mother, who suffered from Alzheimer’s, was receiving memory care at a place very close to the Crowne Plaza. He was negotiating whether she needed a private nurse. I got a coffee and ate my breakfast.
At 9:30 we met our teammates, Mike and Susan. We had enough time to converse a little. Mike had a house in Rhode Island. Susan lived in Florida throughout the year.
For some reason the official schedule called the event in which we were playing the “Premier Knockout”. It was limited to players with 4,000 or less masterpoints4. Sixteen teams registered. The directors split it into two eight-team sections. Four of the eight teams in the top bracket had more total points than we did.
Jim and I played pretty well throughout the seven matches. We lost two close matches, including the last one to Abhi’s team, but our total of 91 victory points was much higher than that of any other team.
As in February I was allowed to choose our opponent in the semifinal on Wednesday from the third and fourth teams. This whole scene was eerily similar to what had occurred in Southbridge. On this occasion, however, we had blitzed the fourth-place team Mullin), and the other team included an extremely talented young player named Ethan Wood. It seemed like an easy call to pick Mullin.
Meanwhile Judy and Sue had done very well in the Gold Rush Pairs. They finished fourth out of thirty-six pairs and won 2.32 gold and 0.65 red masterpoints. Sue decided to accept the invitation from Sally Kirtley to play in the evening side game. Apparently she was having a great time and did not want it to end. Also, she seldom turned down an invitation to anything.
You pick up orders at that little red area.
I drove to KFC and picked up an eight-piece family meal. I ordered a large Diet Coke as well, but for some reason the person who took the order and got everything else right, did not include the drink. I had to pay $3.50 for a 10-oz. bottle at the hotel. We were also annoyed to discover that they had neglected to include any napkins or sporks. In my suitcase I discovered some napkins and silverware from a previous trip. Sue ate a chicken wing before the side game started.
While she was gone I ate supper and watched the ninth (penultimate) episode of the first season of Sneaky Pete on Freevee. I loved the show, but the plot was so complicated. I was dying of curiosity to find out the resolution in episode 10, but watching it on the hotel’s free Wi-Fi was almost intolerable. It kept timing out, and I needed to restart it.
After taking a shower I read a chapter of Holy Orders, the sixth of the quasi-mysteries written by Benjamin Black. Black’s style5 is exceptionally good. The plots are intricate, but they do not follow any of the traditional forms for crime fiction. The central character, an Irish pathologist named Quirke does not solve the mysteries. His friend, a police detective who is more Inspector Plodder than Sherlock Holmes, explains the situation at the end.
I went to sleep early. Although I was wearing my eye-mask and earplugs, I was still awakened when Sue returned to the room. I managed to get back to sleep, however, and I was well-rested in the morning.
We went to the Jefferson Diner for breakfast. I had a ham and Swiss omelette. It was good, and the home fries were better than they looked.
The Jefferson Diner.
The Mullin team consisted of a pair of ladies, Susan Mullin and Sheila Middleton, and two men, Steven Colman and Mark Sunderlin. Although Sheila, Steven, and Mark were all from Massachusetts, neither Jim nor I had previously played against any of them. They had the most points of any team. So, they must have been playing for a very long time in club games. We were not impressed by the ladies’ performance in the match in the previous day’s event. The two men were apparently long-time partners. They both lived on Cape Cod.
They opted to switch their chairs so that Jim and I played against the men. They announced that they were playing Precision. I had invented a defense against strong club systems. I called it WavaDONT. I had to explain it first to Jim and then to the opponents:
Overcalls of the 1♣ bid at the one and three-levels were natural—showing five and seven pieces respectively.
With a six-piece suit bid 1NT, which is a relay to 2♣ to be passed or corrected.
With a two-suited overcall bid the lower suit as in DONT.
With a very strong hand double.
Our opponents called the director, Tim Hill, to ask whether it was legal for us to use such a complicated (?) defense against their system in a game at “this level”. Tim said that he was “99.9 percent certain” that we could use whatever defense that we wanted. It turned out to be immaterial. In twenty-four hands they never opened 1♣!
The two guys seemed much better than the ladies. In the first half there were two consecutive swing hands. On the first one our teammates made 3NT. Our opponents went down in 4♠. In the other I went down in 3♠. At the other table our teammates did not defend well and let them make 4♠. In total we had a flimsy lead of one imp.
I thought that we had won the second half easily. One of our opponents had revoked on a vulnerable hand that he might have made or gone down one. However, in the first six hands we found ourselves down by six imps. It was a great relief when we won the last six by eleven. So, we won the match by six imps.
In the finals we played Ethan Wood’s team. His partner was not very good, and we easily won both halves. So, we won the premier Premier Knockout and 20.13 gold points. The Mullin team won third place over a team of guys from Maine.
Jim, Sue, and I decided to eat at the Crow’s Nest, a seafood place that was only a few minutes south of the hotel. Sue and Jim, both from New England, consumed some kind of water-dwelling insects. I tried “The Burger”. which was described in the menu as “1⁄2 lb of all-natural free-range beef topped with cheddar, lettuce, pickles, secret sauce, brioche bun, fries.” The secret sauce tasted a lot like the sauce on a Big Mac, which must have been the intent. The problem was that there was so much slippery stuff that the meat kept falling out the bottom of the buns, and when I did get a taste of meat, it was overwhelmed by the other ingredients.
All in all, we had a good time. After winning a knockout I probably would have had a good time if they served me dog food, and I got ptomaine poisoning.
The drive back to Route 1 featured a body of water on the right. We did not even notice it on the way there, but on the return trip the road was pretty severely flooded. The discussion in the car concerned what has the biggest effect on tides. I was even asked my opinion. As a native of Kansas I had none.
On Thursday morning I ate a piece of leftover chicken, and Sue consumed one of her spherical “crab cakes” for breakfast. I consumed one of the coffee pods in the Keurig and secreted one in my suitcase in hope that the cleaning person (who only came on Tuesday and Thursday)6 might refill the empty slots in the pod holder.
Steve Lister.
Sue had obtained a partner for Thursday’s Gold Rush Pairs game at the partnership desk. His name was Steve Lister. I found a photo of him that was taken at the 2019 event in Warwick when he won a couple if 299er pairs games.
I was not too sanguine about our chances in the Thursday-Friday Knockout, which had the same format as the one that we won. Our team had about 3,000 less points than our victorious foursome. Nevertheless, we were the fifth-seeded team in bracket #1 again. This time there were only seven teams per bracket. We therefore played six rounds of eight boards.
We did not do very well. We barely avoided last place. We got clobbered in the last two rounds by the team that won the event and the team that was in last place. I was slightly upset about the last result. Our teammates missed bidding two slams. On one they settled for a game and made seven. On the other they let the other team play in hearts.
The first of those hands was a comedy of errors at our table. The North-South team was Ulla and Michael. Ulla opened 1[suite x=’H’]. Michael bid 2NT to show a game-going hand with four pieces. Ulla rebid 3♠, which was supposed to show a singleton or void in spades—she actually had a doubleton. Michael cued the club suit; Ulla cued diamonds; Michael bid 4NT, asking for key cards. Ulla showed two of the five key cards (four aces and the king of trumps) without the queen. Michael bid 7♥ even though he knew—or at least should have known—that they were off a key card. If it was an ace, as certainly was likely, the contract was impossible. If it was a 50% play. In short, it was a terrible bid.
Ulla could not believe that he went to seven with only two key cards, but the one that they were missing was the Jim’s king of trumps, which could easily be finessed. So they made it. This was the first hand of the match. I knew that we were doomed. My play during the next five hands was uninspired.
So, on Friday we had to play in the Open Swiss or a pairs game. We decided to play in the Swiss.
Sue and I went out to eat with three people from the Northampton, MA, Yan Drabek, Rich McClure, and Allison Ryan. I really needed to get away from Jim O. for a while. He talks during every break between the hands, and I grew tired of listening to him. I was also down on Abhi and Paul after the last two rounds.
The parking lot was full when we visited The Shanty.
Our destination for supper was the Shanty, a small restaurant on Route 1 not very far south of the Crow’s Nest. It was another seafood place. We had two appetizers, yam fries and sweet soy chicken wings. The service was slow and Yan was very hungry. Everyone else liked them a lot. I thought that they were OK, but I would have preferred the wings without the sauce.
I ordered the baby back ribs, which were described as “honey glazed ribs, patatas bravas, corn, sriracha mayo, Parmesan, cilantro.” The last four were all mixed together and also covered with the glaze. I must say that this was the first time that I have ever been disappointed with the way that a restaurant prepared baby back ribs. I ate all the meat, but I barely touched the other stuff. I also had a beer.
The conversation, however, was great. I really perked up when Rich first asked about how to defend against Precision and then how to bid when the opponents play a Weak 1NT system. Everyone also laughed at my impression of Jim explaining things. He was a nice guy and a good player, but he just talked and talked. Yan, Allison, and Rich know him well; they all play in the Northampton Bridge Club.
The most amazing thing about this meal was that the other three participants seemed to have no idea how to split a check. I had to step in and do the arithmetic for them.
I went to sleep shortly after we arrived back at the hotel. I awakened at 3:30, and I never did get back to sleep. I finished up the chicken for breakfast. The rest of the day I stayed awake by imbibing caffeine.
Sue decided that she would not play on Friday. Steve L. was required to be home to celebrate his birthday. If he had been willing to play, she probably would have stayed. Her plan was to use the pool after all of the bridge players were busy playing and then check out of the hotel.
I woke up at 3:30 and never got back to sleep. This happened to me on a fairly regular basis. By the time of the first round I had been up for 6.5 hours. I had consumed plenty of caffeine in the interim, but I was still groggy in the first round. I failed to recognize a splinter and identified it as a weak bid. This resulted in a big swing that cost us the first match. I righted the ship after that shocking mistake.
We bumped around in the middle for most of the day, but we had a couple of big wins. We lost the last match on a hand on which I opened 1NT with a flat 15 and everyone passed. I went down one. Somehow our teammates lost 200 points even though neither side was vulnerable. I did not even ask how they did it.
I rushed off to the Executive Committee meeting with out checking our results. It turned out that we had 84 victory points, which was good enough for fourth in B and 2.66 gold points.
Hardly anyone was there when the Executive Committee meeting was schedule to begin. Someone decided that we should have food again, but we had to order from the sandwich menu. My Reuben sandwich was on the counter with a silver cover that bore my name on a tag. The French fries were surprisingly good. but the sandwich was cold. The sodas were brought in halfway through the meeting.
Curtis.
Curtis Barton, the president, called the meeting to order and, as usual, announce how fabulous everything was. He mentioned the fact that Mark Oettinger had resigned as vice-president, and he had appointed Sue Miguel as temporary vice-president.
Mark Aquino, the Regional Director, said that Bridge Base Online (BBO) was sold to a French company with no concern for the state of bridge. They were only interested in money. The ACBL’s contract runs out in 2025.
The table rate for youth players was set, as was a new rate for online NAP and GNT games. This was done to help boost the balance in the Grass Roots Fund.
I suggested that the Tournament Scheduling Committee should consider offering the Pro-Am game in the evening. After some cajoling I volunteered to manage it for the tournament scheduled for Southbridge in February of 20247.
I took a can of Diet Coke and consumed it on the drive home. I arrived at exactly 9 PM, and the miles-per-gallon read 40.1, but I have long suspected that it overstates the car’s actual mileage by about 5 percent.
The last tournament of the year, which was called “The Return of the Gala“, was held in Marlborough8, MA, from October 31 through November 5. The original Gala was held at the same site in May of 2022. I missed it because I was on the European cruise that was described here.
I planned on playing for five of the six days, but I had a very difficult time finding partners and teammates. I was fortunate that Eric Vogel agreed to play as my partner in the two knockouts held the first four days, but he could not play on Saturday. More than a month before the tournament started I submitted electronic forms to the partnership person, Denise Bahosh, for teammates for the knockouts and for a partner for Saturday. I had to pretend that I wanted to play in the open pairs on Saturday. If I could find a partner, I would try to convince him/her to switch to the Swiss.
The playing area was on the ground floor on the far right.
Sue Miguel had sent an email in early September that claimed that the hotel, a Best Western (BW) property called the Royal Plaza Hotel and Trade Center, was only recognizing the tournament rate until the end of September.9 So, I made reservations for one double room for four days.I planned to drive home after the Executive Committee meeting on Saturday evening. I had forgotten that there would be a meeting of the Board of Delegates on Sunday, and I was unaware that the Executive Committee meeting had been scheduled for Friday.
Denise tried to match Eric and me up with Alan Godes (introduced here) and an unknown teammate. I was somewhat reluctant to commit us to join up with them, but it turned out not to matter. Alan did not respond to my email for some time. In the interim Denise proposed that we play with Carol Seager and Michelle Blanchard (introduced here) in the first KO. I had played with them before and had a reasonably good experience. So, I agreed to teaming up, and so did they.
Meanwhile Alan wrote me to say that he had teammates for the Thursday-Friday KO, but he needed to find someone for the first one. I explained that we had just found teammates for that event. I don’t think that Alan ever found teammates.
Just before the tournament Denise informed me that she could not find a partner for me for Saturday. So, on the eve of the tournament I had big gaps in my dance card.
Sue could not find partners either. She wanted to attend the Board of Delegates meeting on Sunday, but it did not make much sense for her to drive up just to attend. It would be about a seventy-five-minute drive even on a Sunday morning.
On the morning of Tuesday, October 31, I set off in my Honda for Marlborough by myself. The drive was relatively easy. The only problem was that the first leg of the journey was due west on Route 190. In a few places the sun was directly in my eyes. I had my sunglasses on, but even so it was blinding. Still, even though I made my customary stop at McDonald’s in West Stafford, I made excellent time. I arrived at about 8:45, much earlier than I expected.
The only difficult part of the drive was finding the hotel. On I-495 the exit for the hotel was labeled Route 20 west. The street’s local name was Boston Post Road.
The hotel was located on a road that went north from the Post Road called “Royal Plaza Drive”, which was really more like a driveway. There was no street sign that I could see. Later I noticed a large “Best Western” sign, but on my first pass I was searching for a street sign, not a sign with five or six logos on it. Because the Post Road had a median I had to continue to the next stoplight and then make two U-turns to return to the spot where Google Maps had told me to turn.
I definitely did notice the sign for the Hampton Inn, which was located right on the Post Road. I definitely took mental not of the fact that the Hampton and a lot of other more modern hotels were quite close to the BW.
The road to the hotel had one striking feature—an oversized speed bump that was quite jarring if taken at more than 5 mph. The hotel’s parking lot was gigantic. It was mostly empty when I arrived, but at night a large number of big trucks parked there. I don’t know whether the hotel charged them for this privilege.
I parked on the right near the door to the exhibition center. Many of the people who were already there had on costumes. Gary Peterson (introduced here) had by far the most elaborate one. He was dressed as the King of Hearts, complete with crown and mace. One woman wore a long bathrobe; I think that she intended to be a geisha. I thought that all of the costumes seemed creepy. I had on my black trousers and shirt and my Halloween tie. The neck on my shirt must have shrunk. It had become too small for me. I was uncomfortable all day.
Sally Kirtley was wearing some kind of semi-costume, but what caught my attention was the fact that she had on her Tournament Manager badge. That reminded me that I had accidentally left my Goodwill pin and Executive Committee name tag at home. I remembered getting them out of my backpack. What I did not remember was that I had also put them back in the pack. Later I decided that I did not need to bring the pack.
When I arrived the playing area was very cold. For the first half hour or forty-five minutes there was no coffee. I sat by myself and shivered even though I was wearing the jacket that I had bought (and almost never needed) for my European cruise eighteen months earlier. A few people dropped by to say hello to me.
At about 9:30 I located Carol and Michelle. I expected Eric to be there at any minute. He was still missing ten minutes later, and, in fact, there were very few people around the table where they sold entries for the two knockout events. Carol gave me her credit card, and I used mine for Eric and me when I bought the entry. Our preliminary number was 102, which meant that only one other entry had been sold.
I had my phone in my hand to call Eric at about 9:50, but I saw him before I could find his name in the contacts. He reported that he had arrived early, and the hotel let him check in. So, this was my first clue that our group constituted the vast majority of the hotel’s guests.
Unused knockout enty.
I asked the director, David Metcalf, how many entries they had sold. He replied that four teams were in the top bracket and four in the 0-4,000. Carol insisted that we drop out and play in the pairs, and I agreed. Two of the original four teams played in the open KO and were given handicaps.
Eric and I won some points in both sessions of the open pairs, but we did not set the world on fire. There were about twenty-two tables in each session. None of the hands stood out for me.
I am not sure why so few people chose to play in the knockouts.
The lunch break was more than an hour. After I ate my roast beef sandwich and chips, I checked in and went to the room that I had been assigned, #263. I discovered when I opened my shaving kit that I had forgotten my toothbrush. I used one end of a Q-tip to paint my teeth with toothpaste. I also used a proxabrush and floss.
Eli had a beard in Marlborough.
I sent an email to Eli Jolley, who had filled out a card looking for teammates for the Thursday-Friday KO. He had 3,000 masterpoints, and his partner had 2,000. A few minutes later he replied that he would like to team up. I said that I would be around the partnership desk at 9:30 on Thursday morning, and many people would know me.
In the second session we played two hands against a couple who played the Polish Club, which has a three-way 1♣, Kris and Dorota Jarosz. I decided that we would play the defense that I had devised against what I called faux club systems. It involved using a 1♦ bid to make a two-suited overcall. We did well against them.
Sue Miguel kept interrupting the bridge to give awards for costumes. There were also gift cards given as door prizes. She must have used the word “fabulous” ten times. I was ready to puke.
Eric and I got points in both lackluster sessions. If I had had my druthers, I would have just driven home after we found out that there would be no KO.
When I got back to the room after the second session I phoned my wife Sue at home to tell her about the fiasco in the KO.
On Tuesday evening Eric, who is a vegetarian who sometimes eats fish, and I went out for supper. He wanted to try a place called Atlantic Poké. He tried to figure out how to get there from a map that was available near the welcome desk. We finally found it, but it was just a small place that seemed to specialize in takeout. The accent on the “e” made me think that it was probably sushi, the one thing that I have always refused to eat.
So, Eric said that the Longhorn Steakhouse was acceptable. I dialed it up on Google Maps, and we found it rather quickly in the corner of a strip mall. Eric had salmon, and I ate the baby back ribs. We talked about our careers. I learned that after Eric had been laid off from Pratt & Whitney he went to CPI and learned to program. He spent the rest of his career in IT at insurance companies.
I also learned that Eric had done quite a bit of work on Y2K. The part that he did sounded ugly indeed. He also mentioned that it was impossible to get Fortran programs converted to COBOL because they had different rounding mechanisms. He probably would have liked working at TSI, and I would have liked to have him.
I tried to watch an episode of The Bridge on my laptop, but I couldn’t get interested in it. I also tried to read from the book that I had picked up at the Hartford Bridge Club, Mexico Days by Robert Roper, but the light in the room was so dim that I gave up after about one page.
When I went to get into the shower the tub had water in it. I slipped and fell on my back on the floor of the bathroom. I was not seriously injured but I smashed my right hand against the baseboard. I put bacitracin on the small cut after the bleeding stopped. By the way, there was a handle outside of the tub, and I did grasp it as I entered the tub. Nevertheless, I could not stop the fall.
To get the water out of the tub I needed to shove a plastic Bic razor that I always brought for emergencies between the stopper and the lip of the drain.
I did not think much of my room. However, it did have a refrigerator into which I placed the two bottles of water that the desk clerk gave me when I checked in. There was also a microwave, but I did not use it. The bed was quite comfortable, and the heat worked without a problem.
Breakfast was free. I met Eric in the restaurant (which only served supper on Fridays and Saturdays) at 8:15 on Wednesday morning. They served pretty much the same thing every morning: scrambled eggs (plain and with something added), meat (sausage or bacon), French toast sticks with syrup, fruit, and yogurt. Juice and coffee were available from extremely old machines. The sausage that they served on Wednesday and Friday was much better than Thursday’s overcooked bacon. The French toast was much too chewy.
Afterwards we played with Michelle and Carol in the open Swiss. There were only twelve teams. In the first round I played 3NT two hands in a row. The first one was routine. On the second one I had eight tricks. There was also some potential for more in some suits. The problem was spades, where the dummy had only a doubleton, and I held Kx. Sure enough, the lead was a low spade. I played a card from dummy. Then the player on my right pulled two cards from her hand, the queen and ten of spades, and dropped them on the table. We called the director.
Tim Hill came to the table and explained that she could play either card. The other would be a “major penalty card”. She chose to play the queen. I scored my king. Now I only needed one trick. I crossed to the dummy in hearts and took a finesse in clubs. It lost, but I was allowed to tell the left-hand opponent not to lead a spade. In the end I was able to win ten tricks before they got their spades. If she had dropped the cards on the table, I could never have made it.
When we returned to our teammates’ table, I said that unfortunately we had probably used up all of our luck for the day in the first round. They thought that they had done badly, and they had, but the gain from my lucky 3NT game was enough for us to claim victory.
The celebration was short. We played against Mark Aquino’s team in the second round and got blitzed. That was the first of four consecutive blitzes that we endured. This was even worse than the performance in the Swiss at the NABC in Boston (described here).
I played none of the thirty-two hands in the four blitz rounds. One hand in the middle of the blitzkrieg deserved emphasis. I held KQJ10 and three little clubs, a singleton diamond, Ax in hearts and Kxx in spades. Eric opened 1♣! I wasted no time and bid 4♦, which asked him how many aces he had. His answer indicated all three! I thought for only a few seconds before bidding 6♣.
Eric had to play it. I could tell from the look on his face that it was going to be difficult, and it was. He won only my seven clubs, the three outside aces, and the ♠K. At the time I thought that it was due to an unlucky lay of the cards, but I should have known better.
Eric’s opening bid indicated that he had either three clubs or more clubs than diamonds. In any case he had four or fewer hearts and spades. Unless he had precisely one diamond and four in the other suits, he had less than 15 points. If he had had 15-17 points with a balanced hand, he would have bid 1NT. So, he was very unlikely to have either of the missing kings. I was essentially gambling that he had the ♠Q! It was possible, but not very likely.
I should have just responded 2♣ to set the trump suit. We would then bid stoppers up the line. When I was certain of stoppers in every suit, I should have signed off in thee lowest available notrump bid.
In the sixth and last round we played against Alan Godes’s team. The match ended in a tie. Somehow it seemed fitting.
At that point I considered it to have been an unspeakably bad tournament. It got a little better at supper, which we ate with Ben and Ginny Bishop. At the time Ben was the president of the HBC. One of Ben’s sons had recommended a restaurant called Welly’s in the neighboring town of Hudson.
I found a shortcut!
For some reason we took two cars. Ben knew where it was. I was confident that I had programmed Google Maps to report the directions to Welly’s Restaurant in Hudson (there was also a Welly’s in Marlborough).
Somehow I got the directions for Willy’s Steakhouse in Shrewsbury, MA. So I turned a fifteen-minute trip into one that took much more than half an hour. Ben and Ginny had to wait for us.
I don’t think that I spoiled the evening. I had a Reuben sandwich, which was pretty good. The stars of the meal from my perspective, however, were the tall glass of Guinness and the onion rings. The latter were both delicious and plentiful.
We got to learn a little about Ginny’s career in nursing. The rest of the evening was spent with Ben, Eric, and I swapping war stories about working with computers. They were both pretty impressed to learn that I had personally installed thirty-six AdDept systems.
Ben also told us about his two sons. They both had worked for the MITRE Corporation. I had never heard of a non-profit that worked with the federal government.
We found our way back to the hotel without any problem.
On Thursday morning I learned that Eli was a relatively young pro from Auburn, AL. I already knew his partner, Judy McNutt from western Massachusetts. She was wheelchair-bound.
Judy McNutt.
This time there were two brackets of eight teams in the 0-4,000 KO. We were the top-seeded team in the upper bracket. We won our first three matches rather easily. I decided to spend the break in my room resting and dining on the gifts that the lady at the front desk gave me when I checked in—a bag of chips, an energy bar, and water in a bottle. When I returned to the playing area I bought a can of Diet Coke.
Our streak continued after lunch We won the first two matches. At this point we had pretty much clinched a spot in the knockout on Friday. However, we were blitzed in the sixth round, which allowed the team that beat us to pull even with us. Both teams won blitzes in the last round. We were awarded first place based on the fractional victory point score that was in effect.
Eli asked me if I cared about whom we played. I told him that it was a difficult choice. The two teams, Page and Clay, were only one victory point apart, and we had defeated both of them in the Swiss by small margins. I picked to play the Page team because the other team seemed to me to have a stronger East-West pair. I hoped to protect Judy, who was definitely our weak link.
Eric and I ate supper with Donna Feir, the manager of the HBC, and Sally Kirtley. At my suggestion we went to Evviva, a casual Italian restaurant. Two HBC players, Tom Gerchman and Dan Finn were already seated nearby. They were going over the hands from the pairs game. I ordered the Bolognese (at Evviva they put the bowl in Bolognese) and a glass of Montepulciano.
Donna Feir.
The conversation at supper was not extremely memorable, but I enjoyed it. It was the first time in my fifteen years as a member of the HBC that I had been in a social situation with Donna. I did learn that the tournament in February would be the combination sectional and regional, and it would be held in Mansfield. The Presidential Regional had been assassinated. The tournament in Southbridge would be in April.
After we drove back to the hotel Donna and Sally played in the side game. I went to my room and watched part of the football game between TCU and Texas Tech. Texas Tech was ahead 20-7 when I turned it off at the half, and the Red Raiders held on for the victory.
I got the bright idea of dragging the pole lamp over to the side of the bed. I cocked the shade so that it produced enough light to read by. I read a chapter or so before I took a shower and then went to bed.
At 3:00 I awakened and spent an hour and spent about an hour working out the combinatorial probabilities of that slam hand that failed. I only went to sleep when I realized that it was almost impossible for Eric to have either missing king.
I wore an N95 mask the first three days. Less than 10 percent of the other players did so. However, the rigidity of the mask bothered the bridge of my nose, and I had deep gouges in the side of my face. Since I would only be at the same table as four others, I decided to leave it in room 263.
Mark Oettinger.
After breakfast on Friday I went over to the table occupied by Steve Ackerman and Sue Collinson from Vermont. I asked them if they knew what the backstory was for Mark Oettinger’s sudden and—to me, at least—shocking resignation. Steve said that Peter Marcus had called Mark and insisted that he should resign. Steve said that it was “pretty nasty”. Later that morning I met up with Joe Brouillard. I asked him if he knew what had happened. He said that he had been surprised by it and knew no details.
I thought back to an email that I had received from Sandy DeMartino asking me about Mark’s performance. I explained that he seemed OK to me, but my interaction with him had been limited by the fact that I was unable to attend three consecutive meetings of the Tournament Scheduling Committee, at which the strategy for recovery from the Pandemic was decided. I had then resigned from the committee because I was spending so much time on the HBC, the CBA, and this project.
Sandy DeMartino.
Sandy said that Peter Marcus had telephoned her and asked her to support Sue Miguel as the next president of D26. Sandy declined to do so. I think that this must have been before the call to Mark.
I found all of this to be deeply disconcerting. At the close of my conversation with Steve and Sue I asked them if they thought that I should make a stink about this at the Executive Committee meeting on Friday evening. Steve advised against it. Sue was silent.
We lost the match against the Page team. All of the swings in the first set were in the first six boards that Eric and I played. I did not think that we had played badly. We won the second set by eight, but that was not nearly enough.
I bought a salad, which was barely edible, and a Diet Coke for lunch. I ate by myself and had a hard time keeping the Oettinger affair out of my head.
I checked the cards on the partnership desk. I could scarcely believe that no one was looking for partners for Saturday’s open pairs game. I don’t know what I would have done if I had not canceled my hotel reservation.
The first set of the consolation game after lunch was easy to analyze. We did not bid three games that our opponents did. Two of those were my decisions. The games came home because on both hands Eric and I had a secondary fit in the diamond suit that, because of aggressive interference by the opponents, neither of us got a chance to show the other.
Wee came back strong again in the second set. However, we lost ten imps because Eric opened a flat hand with a 12-count, something that I would never do. I had nineteen points. I responded 2NT, which for us showed 12-14 or 18-19 points. Eric bid 3NT, which indicated that he had no short suits. I bid 3NT, which went down. If Eric had had the thirteen points that I expected, I would have made the bid, and we would have won the match. If he had opened a minor with the hand that he had, we would have fallen a few imps short.
I was pretty sure that I had ordered a roast beef sandwich for the box lunch that the hotel provided for the Executive Committee meeting. However, there was nothing but turkey and tuna. I certainly did not order tuna. So I took a turkey sandwich that had a lot of dry meat and bread. I can’t complain. An apple and a bag of chips were also provided.
Mark Aquino.
The main topic of conversation was whether we should worry about scheduling regionals the same weekend as the regional in Lancaster, PA. Mark Aquino said that he had gotten an earful from the president of District 24. Peter Marcus and Sue Miguel were adamant that the “500-mile rule” that D24 cited did not exist. Evidently they hoped to draw more pros from New York City.
The schedule for the tournament in Southbridge February, which because it was near the Super Bowl, would have a football theme. I didn’t plan to go unless someone really wanted to play with me. I would not be eligible for the regional events, and the sectional events did not include any bracketed events. Maybe they will change that.
The meeting closed with a long lecture by Sue Miguel about how we all needed to get off of our butts and to participate in her many programs to recruit people to rejoin the ACBL and play in our tournaments. I found much of this offensive and wrong-headed, but she and Peter will not brook any opposition.
I am also convinced that the basic analysis is wrong. To me the problem was not the Pandemic so much as the ACBL’s reliance on online bridge as a source of money. Maybe it was necessary for the ACBL to survive, but it has now ruined some of the tools that we had used to put on attractive tournaments that made money. The current D25 administration has abandoned most of the aspects that I judged made the events compelling. No one seemed to want to hear this. Instead we have been treating our players like kids in junior high. Costume contests, door prizes, unsharpened pencils with “Day of the dead” figures on them: give me a break! All of the incentives were provided to new players. I saw no effort at transitioning anyone into the games that the district sponsors.
Also, I was supposed to represent Connecticut. There have been no regional tournaments in Connecticut since 2021, and none have been planned. We were told that there were no hotels. Is that possible?
I came away from the meeting with a very bleak outlook. For ten years I have loved to attend regional tournaments. At this point I could barely tolerated them, and they were expensive.
The drive back to Enfield was uneventful. The Honda entered the garage at 9 p.m.
1. Until 2016 there had been an Individual Regional in Newton, MA. It was discontinued because it was unprofitable. My report from the last such event was posted here.
2. The Red Lion was the last name of the hotel in Cromwell, CT, that hosted District 25’s regional tournament in February. In 2020—just days before the Presidential Regional—the state of CT closed down the hotel for failure to pay taxes. It never reopened. The tournament was moved to the Sturbridge Host for that one year.
3. Precision is a bidding system in which the strongest opening bid is at the lowest level—1♣. The Wikipedia article about it is here.
4. I had played in the previous 0-4000 Knockout at least five years earlier. It was a fiasco. Only five teams participated. We played all day in two five-way sessions to eliminate one team. One team had much less experience than the other four; they did not do well. Our team lost in the semifinals and was relegated to the Single-session Swiss.
5. Benjamin Black was the pen name assumed by award-winning novelist John Banville when he began writing genre fiction late in his career.
6. On my previous two visits to this hotel in 2022 no cleaning service was provided at all.
7. I learned months later that there would not be a tournament in Southbridge in 2022. This is explained in the Marlborough section.
8. The name of the Massachusetts town is officially Marlborough. There is a “hamlet” named Marlboro. The town in New Jersey with the same name shortened it to eliminate the “ugh” at the end, but the one in Massachusetts did not. Nevertheless, the highway signs mostly use the short version.
9. The hotel was not actually filled to anything approaching its capacity. I had to wonder it the hotel really enforced or even announced this policy.
In one sense my mother’s death in 1998 came as a shock to my dad. In the previous few years her health had deteriorated rapidly. However, for the vast majority of their relationship, she had been the one with the longer life expectancy. She was younger and female, she had never smoked so much as one cigarette, she had very regular habits, she made sure to get plenty of exercise, she ate healthy diet, and she drank very little.
My dad, on the other hand, smoked pretty regularly for nearly fifty years. He was not a drunkard by any measure, but he spent a lot of time with salesmen and advertising people for whom liquor was considered a lubricant. He ate whatever he felt like having (including raw hamburger!), and his only exercise was golf. Furthermore, he had had some kind of incident on a vacation in Arizona that had something to do with his heart.
Throughout their marriage mom was the head of the household. She cooked, cleaned, and did the laundry. She also paid all the bills and managed the cash. If something needed to be fixed or purchased, she took care it. My dad considered it his responsibility to provide enough income for her in the present and the future, and he definitely did that. However, he had never—at least since 1947—given much thought to the little details of daily life until my mom became incapacitated and then died. He confided to me that he always thought that he would die first, and with the insurance, pension, and investments, mom would be all right.
Shortly after mom’s death dad moved into a somewhat smaller apartment that was on the ground floor. Although I can clearly picture both it and its location, I have forgotten the address. My dad had a lot of good friends. I am quite sure that they helped him through the transition. They knew that he had depended on mom, and they gave him good advice about dealing with quotidian matters. They also kept him involved in social activities. At least once a week they had regular breakfasts together, and they invited him to other get-togethers. He also kept up his golf game, such as it was. Needless to say, he kept attending church.
Near the end of this period my dad had one of his hips replaced. I was not involved in the planning or execution, but he told me that the doctor said that the other hip was nearly as bad. His friends must have helped him deal with this as well. I remember that he seemed to be able to walk fairly well after the operation.
One problem that they could not address was his vision. Somehow the retina in his right (I think) eye became detached. He had no vision in it at all. He therefore, had no depth perception. To make matters worse, a cataract was developing in his left eye, which was more than 75 years old.
My dad’s driving ability was definitely suspect. At some point he decided to stop driving on major thoroughfares. This was a good idea. Drivers on heavily used road need good peripheral vision, and his one eye was not enough. Parking was also problematic because of the need to make precise judgments of distance.
He had planned out relatively safe routes to the places that he frequented. If we were going to one of those places—such as the house of one of his friends or a nearby eatery—he drove and I sat nervously in the passenger’s seat. More than once we went to a fairly upscale Italian restaurant in a nearby shopping center. The waiters did not know how to pronounce many items on the menu.
Although I was extremely busy during these years, I stopped in to see him whenever I could. Whenever I was scheduled for a trip to the Midwest or the West Coast I tried to add an extra day or two for a stop in Kansas City. I usually took the shuttle to and from KCI airport. We used his Ford Taurus to get around when I was there.
I made one special trip to be with him when he had the procedure to fix his cataract. Since his other eye was worthless, I had been very worried that in the unlikely event that something went wrong, he would be blind. However, when he came out his vision was much improved. He told me that he had always thought that the blue street signs in the area that he lived were green. Also, he could now see the letters clearly.
Pilgrimages: During my visits we almost always went to at least one favored restaurant that could not be reached easily on side streets or had problematic parking arrangements. I drove on those occasions The establishments that I remember very clearly were the Village Inn for huge breakfasts, Dixon’s for chili, and RC’s for fried chicken. These trips were more like pilgrimages that just dining out. Each deserves its own paragraph.
The Village1 Inn was located in Mission, KS. The only reasonable way to get there was to take Metcalf, which was a very busy four-lane road. The restaurant was similar to an IHOP, but they also offered something called a “skillet”. The menu explained, “Each skillet meat is prepared with country potatoes, two eggs, any style and served with a side of made from scratch buttermilk pancakes. Egg whites or low cholesterol egg substitute available.” That may sound like to much to eat, but the “Ultimate Skillet” added all of the following: “Two hickory smoked bacon strips, two sausage links, ham, mushrooms, green peppers, onions, tomatoes and melted cheese”. My dad usually ordered a slightly less ambitious skillet, but I generally settled for an omelette. Coffee cups at the Village Inn did not stay empty long.
Dixon’s2 chili was nothing like any you have tasted. It was Harry Truman’s favorite restaurant both before and after he was president. Their chili had no beans, but you could ask for some. However, if you demand catsup, you might be thrown out. Actually, you would only be “fined” ten cents. The chili is served on a plate. It is not very hot, but hot sauce and ground peppers are on the tables, and most diners make ample use of them. The restaurant that we patronized was on 75th St., a very busy artery. So, I always drove. Dad always ordered his with tamales. I preferred mine dry. The recommended beverage was RC Cola.
My mother made good fried chicken, but when I was growing up there were still several places in the Kansas City area that made exceptionally good fried chicken. When I was growing up our go-to restaurant for this delight was Boots and Coates. Later my dad found another good one in Martin City on 135th St., RC’s3. If I was in KC for more than one day, we drove there for supper.
The computer: My dad wrote a satirical book, Yup the Organization4, that was published in 1986. I am pretty sure that my mom typed the manuscript for him. No one else could read his handwriting, which to me always looked like rain.
He had other ideas for books. He somehow came into possession of a semi-computer made by Brother that could do word processing but nothing else. After mom died, he wanted to buy a computer so that he could send and receive emails, mostly from me. Someone else helped him buy it. It was left to me to describe how to use America Online.
It was hard for him to see the cursor. I adjusted it so that it was larger. Then I set up his account. I created an icon on the desktop for AOL.com. I showed him how he could move the cursor around by making similar movements of the mouse. I did not explain precisely how the mouse was able to cause this. Instead I had him practice double-clicking5 on the AOL icon. He finally got it to work, and the login screen appeared. He entered the user ID and the password that I had previously established. Almost as soon as he pressed Enter, the computer’s speakers greeted him with, “You’ve got mail!”
My dad was excited and justifiably proud of his accomplishments. Although I advised him strongly just to delete the items that appeared in his Inbox, he insisted on opening the first one. When he double-clicked on it the contents appeared on his screen. It was explicit pornography6 in vivid colors.
In shock he lifted the mouse off of its pad and waved it at the screen as one might use a crucifix to ward off a vampire. I despaired at the prospect of talking him through deleting the email. Instead, I wrested the mouse from him and did it myself.
Dad was eventually fairly competent in the use of text-based email. I never attempted to teach him about images or attachments.
I also tried to help my dad with word processing. He could enter and edit the text, and he knew how to save it. I tried to teach him how to copy and paste. He just could not seem to understand the concept at all, and, despite the fact that I had trained hundreds of people to do tasks much more complicated than copying and pasting, I eventually gave up.
So, he used the word processing on the computer in essentially the same manner as he used his old word processor—hunting, pecking, editing, saving, and printing.
He wrote two more books. I read them, but I did not like them. One was an insider’s look at how dad’s insurance company had gotten Senator Bob Dole to rescue them from a tax mess. The other was a fictional story about three brothers.7 Dad tried to get the Dole book published, but it never happened.
Other adventures: My dad loved to play golf. His vision limited his ability to do it. For a while a friend of his walked with him and spotted his ball for him. I don’t know how dad could have gauged the distance on putts. In all the time that I played with him, I never saw him measure a distance in number of strides, and doing such a calculation would have been foreign to the nature of someone who could not balance his checkbook.
I did not play any rounds of golf with him during this period, but we did go to a driving range together a few times. I had to describe to him how much slice he had imparted to each shot. He always said something like, “I’m not coming through the ball enough.” I had no idea what this meant.
I attended two or three of the all-male breakfast gatherings of my dad’s friends. At one of them someone asked me about my business. I explained how we installed AdDept systems to administer the advertising departments of large retailers such as Macy’s and Saks and how TSI was in the process of developing and marketing a service called AxN to process insertion orders from the retailers to their newspapers. Some of the guys were quite interested in the latter project.
I often ran a few miles in the morning. Once, on a fairly warm day, I did ten miles, and it wore me out. When I got to the apartment I lay motionless on the carpet. Dad nearly freaked out. I had overdone it a bit, but within ten minutes I was functional again. That’s what it is like to be a runner. You recover much faster than people think.
On September 18, 2004, dad and I watched the football game between Michigan and San Diego State, then coached by Brady Hoke. It was a terrible game. SDSU was ahead 21-17 at the half. As the teams left at halftime, the field announcer asked Lloyd Carr what he expected in the second half. He tersely said, “I expect a comeback.” U-M scored a touchdown early in third quarter. After that it was an excruciating duel between the two punters.
The big move: In 2005 my dad was diagnosed with macular degeneration in his left eye. He was given treatments to arrest it. They seemed to work, but he was still legally blind. He could not drive.
The area of KC that he lived in had no public transportation to speak of. I proposed that he sell his car and move closer to me and Sue.8 He wanted to give me his car, but I did not want it. I liked my car, and when I stopped liking it, I wanted to pick out my own model and color.
I expected that after he came to the area he would live in an apartment for a little while. Meanwhile Sue and I would erect an addition to the north side of our house tin Enfield to provide him with a place to stay. We did eventually add on to the house, but by then I had come to realize that the idea of him moving in with us would not work for a large number of reasons. It hurt me that I did not keep my promise, but I don’t know how I could have.
So, he lived by himself in apartments in Enfield for six years. That story is related here.
1. In 2023 The Village Inn in Mission appeared to be thriving. Sue and I also frequented the one in Clearwater, FL.
2. Dixon’s was renamed Fritz’s Chili at some point. However, no changes were made when the restaurant in Overland Park was purchased in 1967. It closed in 2018, one day before my dad’s 96th birthday, which he celebrated in another realm.
3. In 2023 RC’s was sold to a couple who announced their plan to leave fried chicken on the menu but also serve Thai food!
4. In 2023 dad’s book was still available on the Internet. He let me read the manuscript that he had submitted. It was pretty good. There was one vignette about a meeting that I particularly enjoyed. Unfortunately, the editor made him remove that item because he (or maybe she) found something potentially offensive. The end result was a work that could not decide whether it was satirical of a self-help book. The nonsensical title was also the editor’s idea; the book made no mention of Yuppies.
5. This took some time. My dad was extremely left-handed, but he used his right hand for the mouse. So, his right forefinger was challenged to perform an activity that his left hand had not yet mastered. Furthermore, to my knowledge he had never performed any kind of fine movement with his right hand. He had never learned the basics of any musical instrument. His typing was strictly hunt-and-peck, and he generally did more hunting than pecking.
6. This might have been the only pornography that my dad ever witnessed. Although he was a contemporary of Roger Sterling, he had a very different set of values. Foul language and off-color jokes or stories were not tolerated in our house. There was no mention of sex at all in my family.
7. Yes, my dad had two brothers and no sisters. He read almost fiction. The only fictional book that he read while I knew him was The Godfather by Mario Puzo, which he read on someone else’s recommendation. He could not get past the language. His own novel had no setting. He left every aspect of the background story vague. I found it almost impossible to read. In fact, I could not get through it.
8. Jamie moved to Birmingham AL in 1999, as is explained here.
Between January of 2001 and November of 2006 I met pretty often with Denise Bessette (introduced here), who was by then my partner and VP of Application Development. I found a folder of Microsoft Word files for the agendas that I wrote up for these strategy meetings. Starting in 2003 the meetings became more regular. They occurred on many if not most Wednesdays, the day that I was most likely not to be at a client’s.
We generally ate lunch together at an order-at-the-bar restaurant on the west side of the river. It had picnic tables near a small stream. I can’t remember the name of the place. I took a drive in the area that my memory associated with its location, but I could find no trace of it. I suspect that it closed, and the land was bought by a developer who put it to another use, perhaps condominiums.
The following summaries are mostly in chronological order. Almost every AdDept client is mentioned at some point. Separate blog entries with much more details have been posted for each of them. They can easily be found using the 1948 Project’s master index program, which is available here.
Many items on the agendas are repeated on subsequent agendas. A few of them persist over years. These were issues for which we never found solutions. The most obvious examples were the efforts to find additional uses for AxN that would benefit newspapers and/or advertisers.
By 2001 the nature of and name for AxN1 had been decided. Our focus was on how to roll it out to the AdDept clients and what we could do to make it more attractive both to the advertisers and the newspapers. We also discussed potential support issues and how the new model 170 that TSI had recently purchased could handle the load of handling the traffic from AdDept clients and newspapers. Occasionally we talked about personnel and other business-related matters.
By 2002 the business environment for large department stores had changed dramatically. Before listing the agenda for one of the meetings I wrote, “We need to change our attitude 180 degrees. Previously we had excess demand and were struggling to increase our capacity to meet it. Now we have excess capacity, and our customers are frugal.”
I had used Net.Data2 extensively for AxN. At the time it was the only thing available on the AS/400 that could interact with the database. By 2002, however, IBM was telling people not to use it. However, it was several years before IBM provided an equivalent tool. Java3, which I had studied extensively and had concluded was not suitable for what we wanted to do, was IBM’s solution to everything.
I was surprised to read how uncertain we were about the willingness o AdDept clients to use AxN. The meeting in March mentioned the need for a second installation. Before reading this I was pretty sure that Belk4 was the first, but maybe someone else had used it on a limited basis.
In 2003 Denise and talked a lot about what kind of programming was marketable to our clients. We investigated quite a few products that claimed to make it easier to make native AS/400 programs web-based . We also talked about what features could be added to AxN so that it would be more valuable to advertisers or newspapers. Usually one of the last items on the list was whether we should spend time converting our code from BASIC to RPG or something else.
In May Sue and I took our first vacation in Italy. I wrote a journal about that adventure and posted it here.
The meeting of November 5 was the first mention of Bob Wroblewski, who has been introduced here. The next few agendas mostly consisted of the same items.
In January of 2004 Bob and I flew to California to visit Robinsons-May and Gottschalks. Bob then started enrolling Rob-May’s papers. After that the process of getting newspapers to subscribe to AxN snowballed for several years. At about the same time our long courtship of Dick’s Sporting Goods finally paid off with a contract for AdDept. So, in only two years the outlook for TSI had improved greatly.
In February it occurred to me that there might be one dominant software company for the newspaper business. If we could create an interface with their system, it could advance the AxN project tremendously. However, I later discovered that each paper, if it had anything at all, had developed its own software or paid someone to do it. There was no uniformity. Fortunately I discovered that this was a blind alley before I wasted a lot of time, money, and energy on it.
The agenda for the February 18 meeting made it clear that the AxN project was about to take off. Most of the long-time AdDept users had at least been contacted. Stage Stores was enthusiastic, and they had just acquired another chain named Peebles. Finally, Dick’s Sporting Goods had finally signed the contract to purchase AdDept. To deal with the expected increase in use of the Internet by the newly subscribing newspapers Denise was arranging for installation of a T-1 line from AT&T with the Cox Cable connection as backup.
The March 3 agenda closed with a mention of the NAA, which was the abbreviation for the Newspaper Association of America (changed to News/Media Alliance in 2016). I eventually talked with someone at its headquarters, but I foresaw that it would take a lot of time and effort to build a productive relationship with the organization. It might have been a good project for Doug Pease (introduced here) or Jim Lowe (introduced here), but at that point they were in the rear-view mirror. I never thought that this would have been a good fit for Bob. Besides, he was busy talking to newspapers, or at least soon would be.
It took me a few minutes to decode this entry on the entry for March 24: “Robinsons: Lower price for LANG?” LANG was the Los Angeles Newspaper Group,.5 a company that printed and distributed tabloids in Los Angeles and its suburbs. Advertising for all those papers was managed from one central location. TSI agreed to send them one bill. We treated them like one large paper with several editions.
In April we were waiting for Dick’s to begin the solicitation for AxN before we approached Macy’s West and RadioShack. The April 21 entry contained positive news about Filene’s use of AdDept for accounting, including the monthly closing process. The next week Denise and I discussed the proposed trip to talk with Hecht’s main paper, the Washington Post. I ended up visiting them on May 14. It gave me quite a thrill, but I don’t think that they ever agreed to use AxN. Apparently we also considered a press release about being in business for twenty-five years, but I am pretty sure that we never did it.
The agenda for May 26 poses this question about Filene’s: “Have they made a big mess?” Bon Ton agreed to send letters to its newspapers about AxN.
In June we discussed various methods of emailing claims. I don’t recall that we ever took any action on this. There was ominous news from Federated that they put all quotes on hold. The total number of orders in AxN exceeded 100,000. The June 30 agenda announced that Dick’s was moving into its new building over the subsequent weekend.
The first item on the July 21 agenda was “Denise’s three issues”. I wonder what they were. Item #10C talks about a follow-up meeting with the Washington Post that never happened. The next week’s agenda explained that they did not respond to my email. A second e-mail was sent on August 4. On August 25 (my dad’s eightieth birthday) I called the Director of Advertising Services.
Something distressing was evidently going on at Parisian, but I don’t remember what it was. That disclosure was somewhat offset by the following good news: “RadioShack: 34 active; 39 testing; 22 Macy’s West; 15 L&T; 4 Parisian; 56 other.” RadioShack did one of its four geographic divisions at a time. The last two entries brought up new subjects: “How can we make better use of my time and Lucia’s6?” and “5-year plan”.
The August 4 agenda was the first to mention SQL7. I used SQL for all of the AxN programs, but the AdDept programs mostly created temporary indexed output files that were populated by one program and read by another using IBM’s recommended approach, ISAM (Indexed Sequential Access Method).
Marshall Field’s (introduced here), the last big installation of the May Co. version of the AdDept system, was first mentioned in the agenda for September 8. We were very excited about the meeting scheduled for September 16 at Hecht’s advertising department in Arlington VA. By this time the work for the Peebles installation at Stage Stores was operational enough that we were ready to solicit their newspapers for AxN.
I was serious enough about contacting companies that sold software for ad agencies that I spent $35 to buy the booklet from the AAAA. I questioned whether we should write to each of them to propose an interface with their system and AxN. I don’t remember ever doing so.
The agenda for November 1 mentioned that Field’s used an ad agency for both broadcast and newspaper. My recollection was that they started using AxN almost immediately and dropped Haworth, the agency that bought newspaper space. However, later entries seem to contradict this. The same agenda mentions that TSI was carrying $55,000 in questionable receivables in the last month of its fiscal year.
I never had to make an onsite visit to our AxN client in Guam.
The November 10 agenda mentioned that—after months of foot-dragging—Federated Systems Group was finally going to “cut over” to their new AS/400 system. During this period we were worried about providing support for AxN for Macy’s West’s newspapers in Hawaii and Guam. This was needless. The papers subscribed for years without any problems. This was also the last agenda that included a mention of a press release about TSI’s twenty-fifth anniversary.
A major issue early in the year was how to handle the process for installing changes that Dick’s had forced upon us. There were other issues, too. The first agenda of the year ends with the question: “How can we get this installation on the right track?”
Two minor enhancements to AxN for the advertisers had been completed: custom emails and downloading of email addresses. However, I had apparently given up on the possibility of interfacing with computer systems used by the newspapers. There was also a process for reconciling the orders on AxN with the schedule on AdDept.
By March 10 we had a big programming backlog because of the large number of difficult jobs for Marshall Field’s. Denise controlled this process. I simply asked, “How can I help?” In the same meeting we discussed for the first time what, if any thing, we should do to forestall Macy’s from replacing AdDept with the system known then known as FedAd that had been developed by Burdines. Our contact at Macy’s West stated that “it did not exist”.
At the March 25 meeting we talked about Macy’s East for the first time in many months. For the April 28 and May 4 meetings there is separate agenda for AxN. For some reason I seemed worried about using it at Foley’s and Stage Stores.
The first item on the regular May 4 agenda was one word: “Lucia”. Lucia was able to handle much more challenging projects than our other administrative employees. The problem was trying to come up with things for her to do. Another issue on the same agenda posed some interesting questions:
We never mastered the trick of Cloud Computing.
How could we set ourselves up to manage systems for our small clients? Bon Ton, Gottschalks, Neiman Marcus
IBM (like Federated)?
TSI
Dedicated high-speed line for each user?
On the net?
Telnet? How would they print? Pdf?
VPN: AS/400 to AS/400?
VPN: PC to AS/400?
High availability?
Disaster recovery?
A third party?
We did not spend a great deal of effort on trying to provide “cloud” computing for our customers. It would have involved a great deal of expense and risk. Just seeing that term “disaster recovery?” item gives me the chills.
Later in May Sue and I took our second Italian vacation with our friends Tom and Patti Corcoran. I wrote a journal again, but this time I had a camera. The results are posted here.
The agenda for June 2 began with the surprising news that Chuck Hansen at Marshall Field’s had asked me to back off on AxN. It also mentioned the agenda for a meeting with Macy’s Marketing on 5/17. It probably intended to say “6/17”. The next agenda, dated July 8, only stated, “Follow up with …” I must have forgotten the name (Robin Creen) of the lady with whom I met at Macy’s Corporate Marketing. There is also a reference to Bloomingdale’s. I suspect that this was in response to information from Tom Caputo, who worked with AdDept at both Lord & Taylor and Saks Fifth Avenue, that Bloomies had never taken the FedAd software out of the box.
The July 11 agenda has some detailed information about a proposed newsletter publicizing how AdDept handled inserts. Some of these enhancements were done for Dick’s.
The August 26 agenda has a new and somewhat mysterious major topic called “AdDept ideas”. The two subtopics are “SpooliT8 ($9K) or other Excel” and “Service Bureau”. I think that SpooliT made .csv files out of spooled output files. It may have had a few other features.
Throughout this period there were references to The Oregonian, the major paper in the Portland area that stopped paying invoices for AxN without canceling and never responded to attempts to find out why.
The agenda for September 14 mentions the long letter that I sent to Robin Creen. Its contents are posted here.
The agenda for October 12 had several tantalizing references. It began by stating that IBM’s VPN9 product, which TSI used for communicating through the Internet, with clients’ AS/400s would be activated on the following Saturday. It also reported that a newsletter had been sent out.
Robin Creen topped the October 24 agenda, but there were no details. The second item referred to renewal of iSeries News, a magazine.that catered to the AS/400 community. It had undergone many name changes, and the content had also evolved. We kept all of the back copies in the shelves that in 2023 are in my office. When we closed down the company (details here), I threw all of them away.
The third item was “SBC Contract”. I don’t remember SBC, but I suspect that it was an IBM Business Partner that had sold more systems than we had or had somehow managed to deal directly with IBM. During this period TSI was not allowed to quote or sell any IBM products. We had to go through a Super-VAR.
The fourth item was “Lucia” with no details. The fifth was “AT&T Global: do we need it?”. I am pretty sure that this product allowed me to get my email when I was on the road. In the days before Wi-Fi I had an AT&T product installed on my laptop that allowed me to use a phone line in my hotel room to sign on to AT&T and look at my email.
We must have received an inquiry from Sport Chalet10 a chain of stores in California that was similar to Dick’s. Until I saw this entry again I had completely forgotten about them. Evidently I wrote them a letter and sent them a newsletter, but nothing came of it.
The last agenda for 2005 was dated December 6. The #1 item was the blitz to get an AdDept system for Macy’s South up and running in time for the season that started at the beginning of February. The second item was an inquiry from Circuit City11. This was another dead end.
The “My disk recovery” entry brought back some really bad memories. I think that I recovered everything on my computer’s hard drive, but it was costly and painful. The best part was that I got an external hard drive12 that made it very easy to back everything up.
There are no entries for 2006 until June. I remember being under extreme pressure to bring the two huge AdDept installations at Macy’s South and Marshal Field’s up to speed. Meanwhile we received the crushing news that Macy’s and the May Co. had merged, and Macy’s would be the dominant player.
The agenda for June 13 began with the word Corum. I am pretty sure that it referred to broadcast buying software. Based on the date it was probably associated with Macy’s South.
That agenda also contained a major item that simply stated “Modernizing and marketing AdDept”. We never did find a feasible way to transform the AdDept screens into something that looked modern. We made more marketing attempts after this, but they did not amount to much. This was the peak period for AxN. More than four hundred papers had subscribed. TSI’s administrative person spent a good deal of time printing and mailing invoices and depositing checks from newspapers.
The agenda for October 11 was startlingly different. It mentioned two AS/400 models, a 170 and a 270. My recollection is that we did development and ran the business on the 170, and the 270 was devoted to AxN. It also mentions recruitment. I am not sure whether that referred to the administrative position or programming. The agendas have gotten shorter and shorter.
This agenda also mentioned the C compiler for the 270. Denise was upset at me for even investigating the possibility of converting TSI’s code to C, which was widely used in the Unix world.
In the agenda for October 18 the scary term “Macy’s North” appeared several times. It referred to the company that was formerly called Marshall Field’s. Evidently the marketing (never called “advertising”) department there had never bought into using AxN for insertion orders. They may have still been using Haworth.
“Maintenance” was often mentioned in the agenda for November 1. We probably never charged as much as we could have for the kind of service that we provided our clients. I was evidently still spending quite a bit of time at Belk.
I was surprised to see Circuit City mentioned again on the agenda for November 8. We must have received another phone call. The term “Foley’s project” also appeared. I am pretty sure that that was the code name for the long and frustrating effort that Denise and I undertook to sell the company.
The last agenda that I have was dated July 10, 2007. It contained only four items:
Trip to Macy’s West
515
Dick’s quotes
Foley’s
Never even a nibble.
Denise and I continued to meet, but not on a formal basis. By then I had almost given up on selling more AdDept systems. There had been so much consolidation in retail that the number of good prospects for the system had shrunk to almost nothing. Nordstrom and Dillard’s would have looked nice on our client list, but it was hard to think of anyone else that was worth pursuing.
We still did quite a bit of custom programming during the next five or six years, but managing the list of open jobs did not require the juggling act that had characterized the previous decade.
The AxN business decreased for a few reasons. The big stores no longer trusted newspaper ads to bring in customers as they once did. Newspaper readership was way down. Some of the AdDept clients outsourced their buying to agencies or media services. That always meant a drop in the number of papers.
I enjoyed those meetings immensely, and I miss them.
1. The history of the development of AxN is posted here. The system design is outlined here. The description of the process by which it was brought to market begins here.
2. Net.Data was a scripting language written by IBM for the AS/400. It was quite popular, but IBM for some reason decided to drop it in favor of the open source scripting language php, which required implementation of the Zend php engine.
3. Java is an object-oriented language that was developed by people at Sun Microsystems. The company released an open-source version. Java was almost the only thing that IBM talked about at the PartnerWorld convention that Denise and I attended in 2000. It is described here. On the AS/400 applications written in Java required a lot more resources than programs written in the native languages. If run on the same box the Java programs were slower, a lot slower.
4. The history of the AdDept installation at Belk is posted here.
5. In 2016 LANG merged with the Orange County Register and a few other papers. The new organization was called the Southern California Newspaper Group. The third item under the Federated topic was “AxN letter to four divisions”. Since “Bloomingdale’s” was the second item it mus refer to Macy’s East, West, South, and Florida (Burdines).
6. Lucia Hagan was TSI’s administrative person during this period. She was introduced here.
7. SQL stands for Structured Query Language. It was invented by IBM, but the company did not endorse its use on the AS/400 until 2004.
8. SpooliT is still on the market in 2023! Its website is here.
9. VPN stands for Virtual Private Network. The Wikipedia entry is here.
10. Sport Chalet was sold to Vestis Retail Group in 2014 and was liquidated in 2016.
11. The sad story of Circuit City ended with its liquidation in 2009.
12. I still have that hard drive in 2023. However, I recently discovered that I no longer can find the cable that was used to attach it to a computer, and the company that made it was no longer in business.
Virginia Meyer1, the VP of Advertising at Cato Corporation2, called me one day in early 1995 to ask about the AdDept system. I flew to Charlotte, NC, and made a presentation. Somehow she persuaded the company’s IT department to buy AdDept for her on an AS/400 that they were using for some other purpose. I installed the system in July of 1995. Over two decades later I still do not understand why they bought the AdDept system and used it for five years.
Cato was definitely unlike any other AdDept client. During the first visit Virginia explained that the company had about six hundred stores. They generally ran only one sale per month, and they timed it to start just after welfare checks were likely to be received. This way of thinking was not prevalent at Saks or Neiman Marcus. For a while Cato had left purchasing of broadcast ads to the individual store managers. However, several of them spent their budgets on Christian stations with extremely poor ratings. The advertising department eventually brought the buying in-house.
No Cato stores in Maine or Montana.
Virginia’s motivation for wanting the system was primarily because I said that we could provide her with sales data about the stores. Most of the work that TSI did was to construct an interface with the corporate sales recording system and to produce a report called Volume by Market. Many new fields had to be added to the store table in order to produce it. The one that I remember most vividly was one that designated whether the store was near a military base.
What, you may ask, did this have to do with advertising? Not much, but Virginia had been trying for years to get the IT department to provide her with sales information so that she could tell whether the company was spending its money wisely. The IT people had never addressed the request.
The people: I got to know a few people in the IT department. I remember that we went somewhere for lunch at least a couple of times. Aside from them and Virginia, the only person with whom I worked was Lisa Nutter3, who managed the advertising business office. She was our liaison during her short career at Cato.
Memories of Charlotte: I remember going to Charlotte with Doug Pease, who was introduced here. So, we must have done a demo for them either on their equipment or at IBM. I remember that I was very impressed by the airport in Charlotte (now called Charlotte Douglas International Airport in 2023). It had a very nice selection of restaurants in its central court and a large collection of rocking chairs positioned along the windows. It was a hub for US Air at the time. I could fly there directly from Hartford.
Near the exit from the terminal was a large statue of Queen Charlotte, the wife of King George III, the monarch whose behavior so upset the American colonists. She gave birth to fifteen children. Mecklenburg County was also named after her duchy. I have not researched why she was so popular in this remote corner of North Carolina.
Traveling from the airport to Cato—or anywhere else in Charlotte—required driving on Billy Graham Parkway. I guess that I should not have been surprised that the people and politicians in Charlotte were proud of his legacy as Richard Nixon’s moral compass.
I recall little about the demo or the first meeting. The thing that I do remember is that Doug and I spent most of a day at Carowinds, an amusement park that was on the south side of Charlotte. Actually part of it was in South Carolina. A brick sidewalk marked the boundary. I was not sure at the time whether I had ever been in South Carolina, and so I made certain that I crossed the border at least once.
50 mph.
Doug and I challenged each other to ride on the stand-up roller coaster called Vortex. I won’t say that I really enjoyed the experience, and I would not do it again. However, I am glad that I tried it once. Important note: neither Doug nor I got sick. If you are interested in what it was like, you can watch this video.
We stayed at a Holiday Inn that was at the far end of the parking lot for a strip mall on Woodlawn Road just west of I-77. The primary attraction of the strip mall was The Gentlemen’s Club of Charlotte. I learned that “gentlemen’s club” is a euphemism commonly employed in the South for what northerners would call strip clubs or girlie bars.
I am pretty sure that I stayed in this hotel, which at some point before 2023 was converted into a Holiday Inn Express, for all of my trips to Cato. I did not patronize the GC of C, but I did manage to run a few miles on several evenings in the residential area behind the hotel. The nearby KFC was my primary source of nourishment on most of those evenings. I also liked a Mexican restaurant named Azteca4 near there.
On one of my visits I came across a Cato store in a strip mall. I took a short circuit around the store. I saw enough to know that it was not for me.
Lost but not gone forever.
I ate lunch with the IT guys on a different visit. Somehow I lost my American Express card, the only credit card that I had at the time. I had to cancel it and get a new one. It was a bother, but no one tried to use it.
For some reason I was invited to a meeting at Cato that was attended by the president of the company. His name was, not surprisingly, also Cato. He was not impressive. The other executives at the meeting seemed to need to explain everything to him.
There are still plenty of these.
Epilogue: Early in 2000 I received a phone call from Virginia. She told me that they were canceling the AdDept maintenance contract and the open programming projects. Denise Bessette (introduced here), who by then was TSI’s VP of Product Development, took this news very hard because one of the issues that Virginia mentioned was that some of the open projects had been open for several months. Shortly thereafter Lisa resigned.
I suspected that the company must have instituted austerity procedures. Almost never did a client cancel its maintenance contract and continue to use the AdDept system. In fact, when I started this project, I expected to learn the Cato was no longer in business. Nothing could be further from the truth. According to Wikipedia in 2023 it had 1,372 stores with five logos.
1. Virginia Meyer worked at Cato until 2002, but her influence seemed to vanish in 1999. Her LinkedIn page is here.
2. Despite the fact that Cato has always been a family-run business that was named after its founder, it’s logo is in capital letters, which gave me the impression that it was an acronym.
4. A restaurant called Plaza Azteca opened in Enfield, CT, in a location that had already been the home of several failed restaurants. Parking was difficult, and many other restaurants with established clientele were nearby. Sue and I went there once and were not impressed.
It closed after only a few months.I don’t know if it was affiliated with the one in Charlotte.
