2010-2019 Partners at the Simsbury Bridge Club Part 2

Posted on December 10, 2021 by Mike

Further adventures in and out of the SBC. Continue reading →

My adventures playing with members of the Simsbury Bridge Club (SBC) before I became a Life Master at the end of 2009 are recounted here.

I met Jeanne Striefler at the SBC in my first few weeks there, but I don’t think that we ever played as partners there until much later. She seldom played with anyone besides Jerry Harrison during that period. We did play together at the Hartford Bridge Club (HBC) a few times, mostly when her regular partner and my regular partner were not available. I have no vivid memories of any details of those occasions.

I definitely do recall the holiday parties that she and her husband Fred held at their house in West Simsbury. Since we had played together seldom, if at all, I was flattered and surprised when she invited Sue and me to join the celebration. I particularly remember the one that celebrated her achievement of Silver Life Master (1,000 masterpoints), a party that she shared with Susan Seckinger, who had recently become a Gold Life Master (2,500 masterpoints). Susan remarked that it was not a big deal; it just meant that you had been playing a long time. That is not precisely accurate. In most cases it meant that you had played a lot in tournaments—and done fairly well. It has always been very difficult to amass thousands of points in club games, even if you usually finish at the top of the list.

Jerry, Jeanne, CJ, and me. In the photos that I took at tournaments I NEVER cut off a head.

I have a pretty strong recollection that the biggest thrill that Jeanne and I had experienced was as teammates in a Swiss Teams game at the regional tournament in Cromwell. However, I was unable to locate such a result. On the other hand, I did discover that we won a Compact Knockout in 2011. I played with Jerry Hirsch, and Jeanne played with CJ Joseph. Someone even took our photo¹.

I have also played with CJ once or twice at the HBC. She attended the University of Michigan; I think that she graduated two years before I did. She does not live in New England any more. In 2021 she has a house in Florida. I seem to remember that she also had one in the Chicago area.

Jeanne is my age, and she grew up in the state that is just north of where I did. She met her husband Fred at the University of Nebraska. Fred was a professor at the University of Hartford.

I am not sure that I ever played opposite Donna Lyons at the SBC, but I have included her in this section because she has played there for a long time, and she still supports the club. In December, 2021, in fact, she was driving up from her winter home in Florida with the intention of playing in a few games in December at Eno Hall. I am sure that this was not the only reason that she was making the trip, but I like to think that our little game was the focal point.

I was disappointed to receive the following email from her on December 11:

Had to turn back after 6 hours, little dog not doing well. Sorry, won’t be there till May games, happy holidays, Mike!

I learned some time ago that Donna formerly taught Latin at Enfield High School. She actually knew my Italian teacher, Mary Trichilo (TREE key low), as well as one of the other continuing ed students who also formerly taught languages in Enfield. How big of a coincidence is that?

I can’t remember the first game in which Donna was my partner. Before that she had been playing with Michele Raviele, among others. I do remember playing with Donna in both games of a Connecticut sectional. We did not do very well, but I remember that one of our opponents, a guy from the Worcester area, later asked me about her. She must have made a strong impression.

Donna made a great impression on me because she obviously read—or at least looked at the photos there—one of my travel journals. I wrote about the star-crossed tour that Sue and I took in 2011 of South Italy that began with a few days in Rome². Donna liked a couple of the photos that I took in Rome and Paestum. She asked me if she could use them for a project that she was doing for an association that promotes the study of classical periods. I enthusiastically agreed. She later gave me a SWAG bag that contained the resulting notebook and cards and a few other things. I still have all of these.

Donna was not a great player when she started. I have the feeling that she did not spend enough time in college at the bridge table. For some reason she seemed to consider me something of a guru. Over the years she sent me questions about various aspects of the game, mostly bidding. I always answered them, and she seemed very appreciative.

Whenever I could not find partners for tournaments, I sent out emails to people whom I enjoyed playing with. I had an opening in my schedule for the 2019 Ocean State Regional in Warwick, RI. Donna volunteered to drive all that way just to play with me for one day, August 28, in the Mid-Flight Pairs.

We had a pretty good session in the morning. We were definitely among the leaders. We also got off to a good start in the afternoon session. With only a couple of rounds to go we faced a husband-and-wife team from Vermont, Steve and Karen Hewitt Randle. We all took out our cards from the first board and started to bid the first hand. Before we got very far Karen announced that she did not feel well and needed to be excused. She left the room, and Steve went with her. When the round was almost over, and they had not yet returned, we called the director, who gave us a “No Play” on all three hands.

Not long after that the Randles returned. Not only did they finish the round, but they also had the best score of all the pairs and vaulted up among the leaders.

When we finished playing the last hand, I checked our score on the Bridgemate. Our percentage was about the same as what we had scored in the first round. I told Donna that that should be good enough to finish first or second.

I was stunned by her reaction: “I don’t want to be second. I’ve never been first at anything. Since I made Life Master playing with Margie, I haven’t even won any gold points.”

Donna got her wish. We won by a very narrow margin. I wondered how we would have fared if we had actually played the three hands against the Randles. Their score in the second round was considerably better than ours.

The Ocean State Regionals in 2020 and 2021 were canceled. If Donna wants to defend her title in this event in September 2022, she will need to find another partner. I now have too many points to play in Mid-Flight games.

In the summer of 2021 I played in one face-to-face game at the HBC with Donna as my partner. We did pretty well, but Donna told me that she preferred to play online. One reason was that it was safer, but she also disclosed another one that might have been nearly as important to her. “I don’t have to put on lipstick.”

After Dick Benedict told me in 2010 that he did not want to play at Simsbury any more, I looked around for a new partner. I decided to ask Sue Rudd. Sue was ten years older than I was and had played a lot more bridge than I had, but she was not yet a Life Master. So, I resolved to help her get the gold and silver points that she needed. We went to quite a few tournaments together. We had some success, but we never won an event together, at least not that I can remember. Come to think of it, I think that those years that I played with Sue were the only ones in which I failed to win at least one flight or strat in an event at a tournament.

I learned that Sue formerly worked for the Massachusetts Department of Revenue. She had two sons. One lived in Boston, the other in Minnesota. Sue lived in an apartment in West Springfield that was not far from the house occupied by my sister Jamie’s family. Later Sue moved to a condo complex that was only about two miles from our house in Enfield.

Sue was in good shape. She was an avid tennis player and cyclist. She told me that she had skied all over the US and Europe when she was younger. She also took several international vacations.

Sue insisted on driving half of the time. I agreed, but I never felt comfortable when she was driving. If there was snow, I drove. On one occasion the trip began with a light drizzle. It got heavier, and the visibility was not too good. She was driving at first, but when it began to get a little difficult, she agreed to let me finish the drive.

It is strange to say, but I cannot remember ever eating supper with Sue. I know that we went to at least a few overnight tournaments, but I cannot remember going to a restaurant together. Sue usually stayed with Helen Pawlowski, who by then was the Tournament Manager for the district. Maybe they ate together. I was still working. So, we must have gone to regional tournaments—the only ones that pay gold points—on weekends. Therefore, there would have only been one supper per tournament.

There was almost always ice or snow on the sidewalk and parking lot in Cromwell.

I remember only a few specific incidents. We were in Cromwell playing in a compact knockout event. that required us to play twelve hands against the same pair. One of the opponents on the other team was a little bit rude, especially to Sue. Sue got flustered and played badly. We lost the match.

I mentioned this to Helen. She immediately knew whom I was talking about. She said that she wished that she had heard about it earlier. She also said that I needed to protect Sue from people like her. This gave me pause. I wasn’t ready for that role. At that point of my life I had pretty much abandoned the tactic of arguing with anyone about anything. I would make my case, but if they could not accept my point of view, I almost never pressed the point. The reason was that my voice had a tendency to get much louder than I realized in situations like this, and the scene quickly became uncomfortable for everyone.

I remember encountering Harold Feldheim³ in the men’s room at a tournament. He asked me how I was doing, and I frankly replied that I was frustrated with my partner. He said that in his years of experience he had concluded that whenever someone felt that way, he should look for a new partner.

Sue and I won a few gold points together. She was getting very close to what she needed for Life Master. I am not sure which tournament it was, but we were playing in the last round of a bracketed Swiss teams event. We were in contention to finish first or second in our group. The bidding on the last hand of the last match had convinced me that my spade support and runnable club suit provided a good chance for a slam in spades that I did not think that most people would bid. It was risky, but I decided to bid 6♠. It turned out to be a good contract. The only problem was that Sue had to play it.

She had to begin by drawing trump, which she did. Then she had to take her ♣K, which she did. Then she needed to lead a low club to the board and take the ace and queen. She made both of those plays. I could see that the clubs split 3-2, which made the three remaining clubs good, guaranteeing the needed twelve tricks. At this point she could have tabled her cards and claimed. The opponents would have conceded without an objection.

But she didn’t claim. She thought about the situation for what seemed like a very long time. Then she started leading red cards and fell short of the contract.

As I suspected would happen, our counterparts at the other table had only bid 4♠, but they made six. So, instead of getting a positive swing that would assure us of winning gold points, we suffered a double negative swing that dropped us out of contention—all because she could not count the clubs.

This was not a mistake of inexperience. There were no distractions; it was early in the play of the hand. There were only two possible explanations. Either she did not count the clubs, or she forgot that every suit had thirteen cards. I was completely exasperated. The situation was so perfect, and I had analyzed it correctly! I could not hold back my frustration, and my reaction was so intense that even the opponents castigated me for it.

After the long mostly silent drive home I sent her an email in which I apologized for the way that I acted and stated that we should not play together any more. It was just too frustrating for me. Years later she told me that she was very tired that afternoon because she did not sleep well the night before. Fine; that is why coffee is always available at tournaments.

Sue did not give up. Some months later she won enough gold points for her Life Master playing with Sally Kirtley. I don’t think that they ever won anything in the “overalls”, but they did finish first in their section a couple of times. Those two awards were enough to push her over the threshold. I don’t think that she ever won any gold points⁴ at all after that.

Since then I have driven Sue to games in Simsbury almost every Wednesday before the pandemic and after the club reopened in the fall of 2021. I have even played with her a few times at the HBC. I also gave a little speech at here LM party there. Here is the text.

Sue sometimes rides with me to bridge games at local clubs, and almost always I have remembered to bring her home. During one those rides some years ago she confided to me that her goal was to have “Life Master” in her obituary. So I looked in the Hartford Courant’s Future Archives for her obituary. It took quite a while, but I found it.

Susan F. Rudd–I’ll skip the dates–worked in the Collections Section of the Massachusetts Department of Revenue, where she was known as Rudd the Ruthless. After retirement she divided her time between her family and her many hobbies. She is survived by her sons Paul and David, eight grandchildren, twenty-seven great-grandchildren, forty-two great-great-grandchildren, and one great-great-great grandson.

Susan is best known as being the only woman to win the American women’s super-senior tennis championship as an octogenarian, a nonagenarian, and a centenarian. However, her proudest accomplishment was to become a Life Master in bridge, a game without electronics that was popular in the twentieth century.

My wife Sue and I attended her eightieth birthday party in 2018. She asked me to reprise the LM speech, and I was ready to do so. However, Sue’s daughter-in-law, who organized and ran the fete, put the kibosh on the idea without telling anyone.

By the way, it was true that on one occasion I drove Sue Rudd to the HBC for a Tuesday evening game. I had a bad game playing with a different partner and left in a foul mood. Just as I reached the bridge over the Connecticut River on I-91, I realized that I had left Sue back at the club. I turned around at exit 44 and returned to the club. It was all dark and obviously empty.

I learned the next day that Sally Kirtley had driven Sue to TSI’s office in East Windsor, which is where she had left her car.

I had no difficult whatever in deciding whom I should ask to play with me at the SBC. By then Ken Leopold had been attending somewhat regularly, and he seemed like he knew what he was doing. The good thing was that he was younger than I was—his memory still functioned. The only drawback was that he wasted a lot of time on his family and his job. He and his wife Lori had six kids, a couple of whom were still living at home. He also had an unhealthy commitment to the idea of helping his patients beat cancer. He was a doctor, you see. He worked (and still does in 2021) at Hartford Hospital in the field of radiation oncology.

Ken wore a blue shirt to the Christmas party at the HBC in 2013. The two ladies at the table are Sue Rudd and Kay Hill.

So, Ken and I mostly played together just on Wednesday evenings at the SBC. I attended almost every tournament within driving range, and i always asked him to play, but I usually had to settle for his participation in the Sunday Swiss events.

On most of these occasions our team consisted of Ken, me, Dave Landsberg, and Felix Springer. Much more about Dave and Felix can be read here. Sometimes I played with Dave, and Ken played with Felix. Often we had to rearrange things to accommodate a different fourth.

We did amazingly well, and our results formed a pattern. We were almost in the lowest group, the C strat. I was on the board of the Connecticut Bridge Association (CBA), which always met before the Sunday Swiss. I would generally emerge from the meeting five or ten minutes before game time and frantically scan the playing area for the rest of “the band”. When I found them I fished some bills out of my wallet and reimbursed whoever had paid my entry fee. Then I had only a few seconds to peruse the convention card to refresh my memory about what conventions we were playing.

I almost always made mistakes in the first round, which we usually lost. We then almost always won our next two matches, which forced us to face a pretty good team in the fourth round. I am not sure that we ever won a fourth round. So, we would invariably go into the pizza break in the middle of the pack. We then almost always won two of the last three rounds to finish in the top half, which, for a C team, was good enough to win quite a few silver points⁵. It was truly remarkable how often we did this. Here is an example from the Swiss held in Hamden on March 1, 2015:

I just loved playing with these guys. Earlier in the tournament Felix had played in pairs games with both Dave and me. I am not even sure who played with whom in the Swiss. I don’t think that Ken ever played with Dave, but any other combination was possible.

My fondest memory of the four of us is from the North American Bridge Championships held in Providence in November and December of 2014. On both Sundays at the tournament some or all of us played together in the bracketed Swiss events.

I am disappointed and embarrassed to report that I can find very little documentation of those two events. I am absolutely certain that I posted detailed write-ups of them on the NEBridge.org website as part of my “View from B Low” series. Unfortunately, all of the web pages posted between January 24, 2014, and July 22, 2015, were lost during the catastrophic system failure of July 2015.

I thought that perhaps a draft copy of this work was on my desktop computer, but I could find no trace. I then looked for the photos that I took on those two weekends. I found about forty of them, but I am pretty certain that I took more than that if only to add more atmosphere to the “View” article. I suspect that I moved the best of those photos somewhere to facilitate uploading them to the NEBridge.org website. The uploaded copies are gone for good, but the originals should still be on my computer. I just can’t locate them.

So, I must rely on my fading memories and the results that I found on the ACBL website. My partner for the first weekend, November 29-30, was Ginny Farber⁶, whose last name at the time was Iannini (eye ah KNEE knee). She lived on the Cape. We had played against each other at tournaments a few times. After her husband died shortly after the Cromwell tournament of 2014, we began playing as partners at tournaments.

Ginny and I played in pairs games on Saturday, but we did not do too well. For the bracketed Swiss on Sunday we were joined by Dave Landsberg and Pat Fliakos, both of whom I had met in the Tuesday evening games at the Hartford Bridge Club.

We played well through the first six matches. We won them all. However, we could not rest on our laurels. In the last round we faced a foursome from Montreal that was only four points behind us in the standings. I don’t remember the situation precisely, but I do recall that there was one critical hand in which Ginny had reversed, a bidding sequence of two different suits showing a strong hand in which the first suit is longer than the second. An example would be 1♦ followed by 2♥ after partner has responded 1♠ or 1NT.

Somehow we ended up in an impossible slam, and the contract failed. I was certain that our counterparts at the other table probably did not bid the slam, which would provide them with a big swing. Ginny and I were extremely nervous at the end of the match when we went to the other table to compare scores. Fortunately, Dave and Pat had had a good round. We lost the match, but only by two points

Imagine our shock when the opponents came over to get us to agree that they had won the match by ten points, not two. It turned out that they had recorded a 0 on one hand in which both of our pairs had actually won three points. When we pointed this out to them, they were, of course, bitterly disappointed, and our relief was palpable.

As the results clearly show, the third-place teams were not even close. In the second weekend our team was Felix, Dave, Ken, and me. I cannot remember who played with whom on Saturday when we lost in the semifinals of a compact knockout. On Sunday we played in another bracketed Swiss. I played with Dave, and Ken played with Felix.

This time a very weird thing happened in an early round. There were repeated director calls on one hand. Then the same thing happened on a subsequent hand. Dave and I finished long before Ken and Felix. After we compared the scores they explained that the director had twice ruled against them, and they had appealed both rulings. Evidently neither appeal was successful. I don’t remember the specifics. Ken and Felix weren’t exactly angry about it, but they weren’t satisfied with the ruling either.

It hardly mattered. This time I knew that we were doing well, but I never checked the scoreboard. After the last round Ken checked the scores. He reported that “We lapped the field.”

So, the tournament had the best possible ending for “the band”, and it left us hungry for more. After that we played together whenever we could.

Ken made Life Master in July of 2015. The HBC sponsored a party for him and Felix, who achieved the rank a little earlier. It was a five-round team game using the Swiss format. Dave and I were their teammates. Ken and Felix sat North-South at table 1 in the A section. We sat East-West at table 1 in the B section. We won our first three matches, but we did not have any big victories.

Then there was a break for food and speeches. Dave said to me sotto voce, “Did you see their résumés? Why do they play with us?”

Of course, what I thought was, “What do you mean ‘us’, Paleface?”, but I didn’t say any thing. A little later I took the floor to give my little speech. I began with a trivia question:

What do the following three famous people have in common?

Champion golfer, Phil Mickelson, who can consistently hit a golf ball 300 yards.
Four-time Pro Bowl quarterback, Michael Vick, who can throw a football 80 yards.
World-class physician and Life Master bridge player Ken Leopold.

I told them to think about it. I would come back to it at the end. Meanwhile, I had a survey that Mark Aquino, the District Director, asked me to conduct:

“Are you aware of the procedure at a regional or national tournament for appealing a director’s ruling?” Most people were.

“Have you ever appealed a director’s ruling?” About half the players raised a hand to indicate that they had. I pretended to count and record the result.

“Have you ever appealed more than one director’s ruling in the same tournament?” Only Felix and Ken still had their hands raised.

“In one very short eight-board match of a bracketed Swiss event, commonly known as a Round Robin, have you ever appealed more than one director’s ruling?” Still only Ken and Felix.

“Have you ever won such an appeal?” They both sheepishly lowered their hands.

I then asked if anyone knew the answer to the trivia question. Dave, of all people, piped up, “They are all left-handed.”

“No!” I said. “Actually, they are all right-handed. Mickelson swings left-handed and Vick throws left-handed, but they both do everything else with their right hand. Similarly, Ken plays bridge left-handed, but his right hand is dominant.”

We won the fourth match, but our margin of victory left us a couple of points behind the first place team. We faced them in the last round. Our opponents were Laurie Robbins and Tom Lorch. The hands were not very exciting. The match came down to a hand in which the West player had to decide whether to accept a game try. I passed, and my counterpart at the other table bid the game. Since the tricks for game were not actually available, we won the match and the event. As I have often said, most of my best calls are green.

Donna Feir, the manager of the HBC, announced that never before in the history of the club had the players being honored ever won a team event, and never had they won all five matches..

A few years later Ken thought that we should play a weak 1NT opening. I think that he got this idea from Doug Doub, a pro who gives lessons at the HBC. I went along with the idea, mostly because I already played a different version of that approach with Peter Katz⁷ on Saturdays at the HBC. Ken sent me the link to a detailed write-up of how it worked. We have been playing that weak 1NT system ever since, and I review the manuscript before each game. Even so, I sometimes forget that we are playing it.

Ken also insisted on playing the Wolsey defense against strong 1NT openings because that was what he played with Lori, and he alleged that he could not remember two different defenses. I much prefer a more disruptive approach, especially in the balancing seat, but I have agreed to grit my teeth and play Wolsey.

Ken was one of the driving forces behind the resuscitation of the SBC in 2019. That story is told here.

The spreadsheet that contains my list of partners includes a line for Helen Pawlowski, and so I must have paired with her at least once, either when she was running the club or when she dropped in to play after she no longer did. It is also possible that I might have played with her at a tournament or at the HBC.

I find it remarkable that I have no recollection of the occasion. Helen was a very good player, and playing with her would have been a big deal at any point in my career.

In 2023 Helen lived in Bluffton, SC.

On at least one occasion before the Pandemic, when Ken could not play, I played opposite Al Carpenter. Al was not a great player, but he was very enthusiastic and gregarious. He had a hearing problem, and so he often was speaking too loudly for the size of our room.

At the time that I played with him Al was working for Enterprise Rent-a-Car. I seem to remember hearing from someone that Al died, but I could not find an obituary or any other reference on the Internet. .

Chuck Pickens played at the SBC occasionally before the Pandemic. I played with him once when Ken was not available.

Chuck died in 2022. His obituary is posted here.

Al Gee began playing regularly at the SBC after the Pandemic. His usual partner was Kathie Ferguson. On one evening Kathie had another commitment, and so did Ken. So, I played with Al.

I learned that he had taken up bridge after his wife died, and he credited the game with getting him through that crisis. He originally played at the Newtown Bridge Club, but he found the SBC after moving to the area. Al was retired from a career at 3M.

We played Al’s convention card, which was not very sophisticated. We finished last.

Al was still playing pretty consistently at the SBC in late 2023.

Shown at left is a photo of Al that I took at the Limited Sectional at the HBC on March 26, 2023. Al and his old partner from Newtown won their section in the morning session of the 199er Flight. The fellow behind Al is Howard Howard Schiller, another regular at the post-Pandemic SBC.

Allison Ryan came down from her home in Northampton, MA, to play at the SBC on an evening on which I happened to be available. This occurred before Covid-19. She was a new player at the time, but she obviously had a lot of potential. I don’t recall how we did, but I don’t think that we were last.

In 2023 Allison was retired or at least mostly retired from her career as a neurologist. I have seen her a few times at tournaments. My wife Sue and I had a very pleasant supper with her and her bridge partner at the tournament in Nashua, NH, that has been described here.

On many occasions I drove Maria Van der Ree from her apartment in Enfield to the games at the SBC on Wednesday evenings. On almost every occasion she played with either Sue Rodd or my wife. Once, however, she got stuck playing with me. Line most new partnerships we had a few misunderstandings in the bidding.

In 2023 Maria turned 93. She had difficulty with new bidding concepts, but she was still quite good at playing the cards. Sue Wavada saw her often at the non-sanctioned games in Somers and East Longmeadow.

1. I found this photo in the bag that contained the ones that I shot in my disposable-camera days. However, by this time I had been using my Canon point-and-shoot camera for six years, and I was too cheap to have prints made. So, someone probably took the photo with Jerry’s camera, and he gave me a print.

2. The journal is posted here.

3. Harold Feldheim died in 2019. Much better than his obituary are the comments from fellow bridge players that are posted here. After I had been working for District 25 for a few years Harold paid me one of the nicest compliments that I have ever received: “If more bridge players were like you, everyone would enjoy the game a lot more.”

4. To put this in perspective, as of the end of 2021 I had 697.41 gold points.

5. Through the end of 2021 I have amassed 548.03 silver points, almost all of which were won at sectional tournaments, and the bulk of those in the Sunday Swiss games.

6. Much more about my partnership with Ginny can be read here.

7. Details about my adventures with Peter Katz are posted here.

2005-2011 Jim Wavada’s Time in Enfield

Posted on November 19, 2021 by Mike

Jim Wavada living in New England? Continue reading →

Documentation: I found very few notes about the events described in this entry. Sue supplied a few details as well as a book of photos that she had made for my dad. I know from a note on the back of one photo that the move occurred in October of 2005, when my dad was eighty-one years old. It just occurred to me that the transition occurred around what would have been my mom’s eightieth birthday on October 2. That probably also weighed on dad’s mind as he contemplated his future. Most of the following is therefore based on my memory, which may, of course, be faulty.

I should mention in passing that during the entire period our house in Enfield was such a gigantic mess that we never invited any friends over for any purpose.

The problem: In 2005 my dad was diagnosed with macular degeneration. Since he had already lost the vision in one eye to a detached retina, his vision was quite poor at this time. He still had a car and a driver’s license, but there was no way that he could drive. His doctor had prescribe the recently authorized periodic injections that arrested but did not usually reverse the degeneration. He also certified that dad was legally blind, which was useful for tax purposes. There was virtually no public transportation in the area in which he lived, suburban Johnson County, KS. If he stayed there, he would need to depend on his friends or expensive taxis.

Six years earlier my sister Jamie had cut off contact with my dad, or maybe vice-versa. I could see no reason to involve her in the problems.

I discussed the situation with my wife Sue. She agreed that he should come to Connecticut and live near us. He could live in an apartment for a while. If and when we added on to the house (that project was described here), he could come live with us. I talked with dad on the phone about moving to Connecticut. He was surprised but pleased.

Planning the move: In 2005 I was extremely busy with several monstrous projects at TSI. At the time Sue was no longer working at TSI’s office (explained here). She spent quite a bit of time with her father-in-law, Chick Comparetto. Sue helped dad pick out an apartment. I cannot remember whether he came out to Connecticut. She might have just described the choices to him over the phone. At the time Enfield had a few rather large apartment complexes and a greater number of smaller ones. If the search was expanded to the neighboring towns of Suffield, Longmeadow, Somers, and East Windsor, the selection would be much larger.

Fox Hill was an easy drive from our house.

I was not involved in this process. I am pretty sure that dad ruled out Bigelow Commons because he could not abide the notion of living in what was formerly a carpet factory. Instead he chose Fox Hill, which was near the corner of Elm St. and Elm St.¹

My dad wanted me to come to Kansas City and drive his Ford Taurus back to Connecticut. He knew that my Saturn was pretty old, and he wanted to give me the Taurus, but I did not want it. At the time the Saturn suited my purposes. When I eventually abandoned the Saturn I wanted to pick out my own car. Furthermore, I could not afford to spend several days getting the car to Enfield. So, on my advice he sold it. I don’t know the details.

In addition to his vision problems, my dad also had mobility issues. He had had one hip replaced, and the doctor advised him that the other hip was nearly as bad. After the surgery and therapy he could walk well enough. He could even ascend and descend stairs, but he went slowly and he need a railing.

I certainly don’t remember the chandelier.

Living at Fox Hill: Someone helped my dad pack up his belongings at his apartment. He engaged movers to take them to Connecticut. He flew to Bradley by himself. Sue picked him up at the airport.

The movers did not arrive on time. So, my dad and Sue spent an entire day sitting in an empty apartment. I am not sure where he stayed that night. There are several hotels in Enfield.

My dad’s apartment was on the first floor. Since there were no elevators, he would not accept a second-floor unit.

The apartment was not fancy. It had a bedroom, a living room, and a small kitchen. I seem to remember a picture window, too. It was at least two or three steps down from his place in Overland Park.

Sue took these two photos on the day that dad’s furnishings were due to arrive.

I had not considered it beforehand, but my dad would obviously need to do laundry. He occasionally brought a load over to our house, and one of use ran them through our washer and dryer. Most of the time he did his own laundry. He mixed everything together in one laundry bag. The closest laundry room was in the basement of another building. He had to walk there, throw his bag down to the bottom of the staircase, walk down the stairs, open the door, and go inside. The hard part was returning. He had to drag his laundry bag up the stairs.

What did he do with the pants and shirts that needed to be hung? He had them dry-cleaned. Either Sue or I took him to the cleaners, probably E-Jay’s on Hazard Ave. It was about the same distance from Fox Hill as our house was, and we drove by it almost no matter where we were going.

The machines in the laundry room at Fox Hill did not accept coins. They accepted only debit cards issued by the office at Fox Hill, which was quite a distance from my dad’s apartment. So, Sue and I would often stop by the office so that he could pay his rent or boost the balance in his laundry account.

Dad stayed at Fox Hill for more than a year, but a little later he felt that the place was becoming dangerous, and he was no longer comfortable living there. He witnessed some mild violence, and he told me that he was sure that there were drug transactions going on. I don’t know if he was right, but he definitely wanted out. I remember that he wrote a letter complaining about an incident that he witnessed and posted it on a website set up for that purpose. Soon after it was posted, several letters praising Fox Hill appeared. It appeared to me that they had all been written by the same person.

Sue once again helped dad find an apartment. I know that they drove to a house in Suffield that was renting a few rooms. He did not like it, but he did like Bigelow Commons when he finally visited it. I took him there to see it before he signed the lease. He asked me what I thought of it. I told him that if this was the same price as Fox Hill, I could not believe that he ever chose Fox Hill. He assured me that it was the same price.

I don’t know what was involved in transporting his belongings to his new apartment.

Living at Bigelow Commons: Dad’s apartment was on the second floor of the southernmost building at Bigelow Commons. There was an elevator just inside the door, and his room was close to both the elevator and the laundry room. He bought a small cart that he could put his laundry in. This was a far superior approach to what he went through at Fox Hill. He also located a dry cleaner that was within a few blocks of Bigelow.

The main reason that Bigelow was not able to charge more was probably because of its location in the middle of Thompsonville. The surrounding neighborhood could be a little rough, but the compound itself seemed plenty safe. If I lived there, I would be worried about my car being broken into or stolen. The parking lot was much more easily accessible than at Fox Hill. That was not a concern for my dad, of course. He did not have a car.

The biggest problem that my dad had at Bigelow was dealing with the windows, which were old and heavy. I could push them up and pull them down without much problem, but that was fifteen years ago. I wonder if I could still deal with them as easily in 2023 at the age of seventy-five..

Dad much preferred the atmosphere and the people at Bigelow. I don’t remember him complaining about anyone there, even the management..

Getting around Enfield: My dad was reasonably independent. I visited him once or twice a week when I was in town. We sometimes ate breakfast at his favorite place, the Farmer’s Daughter Cafe on Mountain Road in West Suffield. It was located in a small strip mall more than twenty minutes from our house. Sue sometimes joined us or took him there when I was out of town.

On most Wednesdays we would eat lunch together at Friendly’s near the Enfield Square mall. We both always ordered the same thing. He had the Senior Turkey Club Super-Melt and coffee. I had the Reuben Super-Melt and a glass of Diet Coke. The waitresses all knew us and treated us like royalty. They especially loved my dad, who insisted on paying and was a big tipper.

I always drove both of us from Friendly’s to Bigelow, but sometimes when I went to pick him up he was already at the mall. He had gone there to walk from one end to the other. He was very proud of being able to do this. He often told me that he thought that he “had a stride.”

How did he get to the mall? Enfield had a free bus service for seniors called Dial-a-Ride. He would call in to make an appointment. The bus would pick him up at the parking lot near his door and take him to the doctor’s office or any other location in Enfield.

It was a terrific service for seniors, and my dad definitely appreciated it. When you called for an appointment, you could specify the time and destination, but you could not specify the driver. My dad did not appreciate one of the bus drivers, who insisted on proselytizing his right-wing political views willy nilly to all the passengers. My dad complained about this guy almost every time that we were together.

Trying to read: After he retired my dad enjoyed four pastimes above others—golf, travel, reading, and writing. He played a lot of golf in the early years with my mom or with some friends. His hip and vision problems eliminated his favorite form of exercise, and I could not name what was second.

When mom was alive they traveled some together, but after her condition deteriorated it was difficult. After she died my dad took two big trips, one to France with a group of strangers who were part of a Catholic group and one to Ireland with Cadie Mapes, his granddaughter. I don’t know how much he enjoyed either trip. What he could get out of them was severely limited by his poor vision and his mobility issues. I know only that he loved the side trip to Normandy and had trouble getting along with Cadie in Ireland. The only trips that he made when he was living in Enfield were when dad and I attended two funerals in Trenton, MO. They have been described here.

He was able to write three books after he retired, and he was a voracious reader while he still had one good eye. The one thing that he really wanted while he was in Enfield was to be able to read books, magazines, newspapers, and the labels on items at stores. A fair amount of the time that we were together were attempts to help in this regard.

I had heard somewhere about machines that helped people with poor vision by projecting on a computer screen a greatly magnified version of something printed using closed-circuit television. We made an appointment to see one of these machines at a store in, if I remember correctly, Cheshire, CT, which was a drive of over an hour from Enfield.

For some reason we had to wait for fifteen or twenty minutes before someone could help us. There was little to do while we waited. The store had some magnifying glasses and a hand-held electronic magnifier, but that was all except for the CCTV machines.

Finally someone was available to demonstrate how the system worked to my dad. He (or maybe it was a she) sat my dad in front of the machine and asked him to look at the screen. Meanwhile he had to manipulate the magazine, which was a few inches under the camera. My dad had been trying to do this for less than five minutes when he became physically ill. The combination of the reading and the maneuvering of the text for some reason made him nauseous.

The salesperson and I had to help him to another chair away from the machine. It took him more than fifteen minutes to regain his equilibrium. The salesperson insisted that he would get used to it, but there was no sale on that day. Dad later purchased one of those hand-held magnifiers. He brought it with him to stores

On the way back to Enfield my dad confided to me that he had never vomited in his life. What? He was in the army in the Pacific. He must have gotten some bad food or bad hooch, right? And he worked in advertising for decades. He must have had one too many at least once, right?

No, I believe him. He was a unique person. He also told me that he had never had a dream, or at least he had never awakened remembering his dream. That may have been true when he told me, but I am almost certain that he had a real doozy later.

I knew how important newspapers and magazines were to my dad. I contacted an agency that provided special radios that had someone reading articles and stories from newspapers all day long. I got one for him, and he used it for a while. I also purchased some audio books for him and kindle books that he played on his computer. I remember that I came up with a trick on Kindle that worked until they upgraded the software. I complained about it, but whoever I dealt with insisted that the feature that I employed was unintentional and would not be added back. I don’t remember the details.

Writing was another story. He had never learned to type. So, even when his vision was not too bad, he struggled with typing on a computer. I adjusted the font size of his screen so that when he wrote something it was very large. However, he was also not adept at moving the cursor around on the screen. There really was no way for him to write much or to edit what he had written on the computer. Mostly he just sent me emails. He was definitely frustrated by this.

Errands: I don’t think that I ever took my dad to see any of his doctors. He generally took the Dial-a-Ride bus or asked Sue to take him. However, I often brought him to other places. Our first stop was usually the ATM at Webster Bank to withdraw cash. This was the only use that he made of his debit card. He had plenty of spending money. He had a good pension from BMA in addition to Social Security and interest on bonds. His expenses were low, and he had excellent health insurance to supplement Medicare. When he died in 2011 I discovered that his financial situation was better than I had guessed.

If I came to see him in the morning, which I did every Sunday, I stopped at McDonald’s and picked up a sausage biscuit with egg sandwich and a senior coffee for him.

We almost always stopped at Stop and Shop. He liked the salad bar there. Although he seldom consumed anything that was green besides string beans, he filled up a large container with fruit. He always paid cash, and he never bothered with coins. When he got back to the apartment he put all the change in a big bowl.

Another common stop was CVS to pick up extra-strength Tylenol for his arthritis. I tried to convince him that Tylenol had only one active ingredient, acetaminophen, which could be purchased much more cheaply under the store’s label. He would have none of it. He was loyal to brands that worked for him. I am like that to some extent, but when it comes to drugs that must list all of the active ingredients, I go for the cheap ones that do not waste money on advertising. Especially if there is only one ingredient.

My dad printed out emails that were sent to him because it was too difficult for him to read them on the screen. I set it up for them to be printed using a very large font. Consequently he went through quite a bit of ink for his HP inkjet printer. The ink cartridges for these printers were nearly as expensive as the computers themselves. I discovered a place on the Internet where one could purchase ink for the cartridges. It was possible—but not easy—to refill empty cartridges. I did this for him for a few months. Eventually it upset him to see me spending time doing this, and he asked me to just buy him new cartridges.

After his Kansas driver’s license expired he needed to obtain an official Connecticut ID. I think that Sue helped him with this. It involved as much rigamarole as obtaining a driver’s license, maybe more.

I took dad to church every Sunday. When he lived at Fox Hill, although other churches were closer, he went to Holy Family church² on the south side of town.

After he moved to Bigelow Commons he went to St. Adalbert’s, which was just a few blocks away from his apartment. Quite a few steps led from the sidewalk to the church. After a while he needed to use the elevator.

I would let him off, do something for a half hour or so, and then drive back to the church to pick him up. He never tried to persuade me to join him.

Every so often my dad sent me a list of groceries to order for delivery to his apartment. At first we used Pea Pod to order from Stop and Shop. When Geissler’s expanded its delivery area to Enfield, we switched to them.

Finances and taxes: Dad wrote his own checks, but he was utterly incapable of balancing his checkbook. I had to take over that responsibility before he even moved to Connecticut. I don’t remember how he provided the information to me. Maybe I did it on his computer.

I also did his taxes. They were very easy except for the first year in which he had to file in both Connecticut and Kansas. He always paid on time. I remember that for some reason he had a dispute with the IRS about his pension, which had been passed from one insurance company to another after he retired. He was upset at the insurance company more than the IRS. He was greatly relieved when the whole mess was straightened out in his favor.

I don’t know if he worked with a lawyer on this, but his personal affairs were in excellent condition at the time of his second fall.

Visits to the Lisellas: My dad naturally wanted to visit his grandchildren, all of whom were living in nearby West Springfield, MA, as much as possible. My sister Jamie was living elsewhere (explained here), but her ex husband Joe Lisella and his new wife Jenna (who was thirteen years younger than Jamie), seemed happy to involve dad, as well as Sue and me, in holidays and other events.

I don’t know if my dad enjoyed these occasions or not. He was much more sociable than I ever was, but the whole thing was awkward for him. Divorce was unheard of in his family, he did not know any of the other adults in attendance, he could hear but not see what was going on, and once he parked himself in an easy chair, it was hard for him to get up. The kids, especially Gina, treated him well, but he was obviously uncomfortable. I was, too.

I don’t remember any of them visiting my dad until his last days after the second fall.

Miscellaneous memories: My dad and I sometimes watched college football games together on his plasma-screen television³. He actually listened more than watched. I remember that he used the television for several months before we realized that it was not set to show high-density programs. A simple adjustment greatly improved the viewing, at least for me.

Sue tried to involve dad in the senior social life in Enfield as she had for Chick Comparetto. Dad did not think much of Chick, but he liked some of the other people.

My dad was not much of a cook, but he used his George Foreman grill to cook steaks and chicken fillets. He loved it when we took him to a restaurant for supper. He could not read the menu, and so he usually ordered Chicken Alfredo.

Dad and I had a long-standing argument about who was the worst president of all time, Richard Nixon or George W. Bush. He said that it was Bush because he had attacked Iraq even though Iraq had done nothing to the U.S. I claimed that it was Nixon because of his needless extension of the Vietnam War, his secret war in Laos, and his overthrow of the democratically elected government in Chile.

I may have been prejudiced because Nixon was president when I was drafted. I always suspected that dad had voted for Tricky Dick in 1972 and was therefore sheepish about criticizing Nixon’s presidency. I admit that I had no direct evidence, but I remembered how vociferous he was about Nixon’s deviousness when he ran in 1960, and I know that dad supported the War in Vietnam until the publication of the Pentagon Papers,

The first fall: I think that the first fall happened in late 2010 or early 2011. My dad was in his bedroom. He might have been going from his bed to the bathroom, a distance of a couple of yards, when he fell. The lights must have been off because he was not able to get to his feet and he was disoriented enough that he ended up in the closet.

At some point on the following day the delivery man from Geissler’s knocked on the door. When no one answered, he contacted someone at the office. They did a wellness check and found my dad in some sort of pitiable position. An ambulance took him to Johnson Memorial Hospital on the far west side of Stafford. They called me to tell me what happened.

I visited him in the hospital several times. I never was certain what exactly was wrong with him. He could not walk, but when I asked the doctor what was preventing him from walking, he just said that that was a good question.

The doctor was most concerned about dad’s mental state. My dad had told him that he had been in Milwaukee with some friends of his. The doctor, of course, thought that he was hallucinating. I told him that a more likely explanation was that he had dreamt about being in Milwaukee, he remembered the dream, and he was unable to disassociate it from real experiences because he no practice at doing so. I do it almost every morning, but he claimed that he had never had a dream.

The doctor also asked if he was reckless. He was afraid of releasing a man with poor vision and mobility to live by himself. I assured him that he was the most careful person whom I knew, and, if anything, he was paranoid about fire, getting mugged, and other potential hazards.

After a few days he was walking behind a walker. He never did regain the ability to walk without one. The doctor told me that he would release him, but they wanted him to go to a nursing home for a while. They asked me to select the one that they would release him to. I picked Blair Manor⁴ on Hazard Ave., a few miles from our house. I knew nothing about nursing homes. I just picked the one that was closest to our house.

My dad’s stay at Blair Manor was not a happy one. On my first visit he was having paranoid hallucinations. He informed me that the nurses were trying to kill him, and instructions to them were being broadcast over the television. At the time Meet the Press was on someone’s set within earshot. I tried to calm him down, but he just got frustrated that I—of all people—would leave him in this perilous situation.

I talked to the nurse about this episode. She said that he had been taking some drugs that could cause such symptoms. She said that she would report it to the doctor. She did, and he altered the dosage, and dad was all right after that. It shook me up pretty thoroughly.

Dad later asked me if he had made a fool out of himself. I said, “No, powerful drugs prescribed by your doctor made you act like that. The nurse said that it happened frequently.” Even so, he hated the place and wanted to depart as soon as possible. They finally let him depart. I brought him to his apartment. The people at Bigelow Commons were very happy when he was able to return.

I don’t know how long the period was during which he needed his walker to get around. I remember going to Friendly’s quite a few times.

The second fall took place in August of 2011. It was shortly before his 87th birthday, which was on August 25. On this occasion he fell down in the laundry room. He used his wheeled laundry cart as a walker when he did his laundry. Someone found him there unconscious. An ambulance took him to Hartford Hospital.

Early the next Sunday morning I got a phone call that we should hurry to the hospital. Sue and I rushed there. The nurse said that she did not know why the doctor had ordered that such a notice be sent. Dad was still unconscious, but the nurse said that there was no imminent danger of him dying.

A few days later the doctor in charge told me that his systems were “just worn out”, and he should receive palliative care. It could be at the hospital, at a nursing home, or at a house. I told them that we would not be able to do it, and I could see no reason to move him to a nursing home. So, he stayed at Hartford Hospital. I visited him every day, but he never communicated.

Some of the Lisellas came by on September 12. They were shocked and saddened by his appearance. He died on September 13, 2011.

The story of his funeral and other arrangements has been posted here.

1. This looks like a typo, but it isn’t. Westbound Elm St., a major four-lane road (CT 220) north of Enfield Square Mall, makes not one, but two right turns at intersections where the road itself continues onward. It then strangely transforms itself into North St. where the latter appears on its left.

2. In 2017 St. Bernard’s and Holy Family merged to form one parish called St. Jeanne Jugan Parish. In 2022 St. Martha’s and St. A’s also joined. I guess that the administrative offices are at Holy Family. The schools are at St. Bernard’s. There was also a church in Thompsonville called St. Patrick’s. It had previously merged with St. A’s. I think that all five churches are still open in 2023.

3. We still have that television in 2023. Sue watches it in bed when I have gone to sleep.

4. Blair Manor was closed in 2017. It was subsequently converted to “assisted living” apartments.

2017-2021 Patellofemoral Arthritis

Posted on October 11, 2021 by Mike

Knee problems. Continue reading →

Background: I broke the patella (kneecap to you and me) of my right leg in 1974, the final year of my employment in Hartford. This event and its aftermath are described here. For twenty-four years the knee bothered me very little. When I got up from a chair I sometimes walked like Walter Brennan on The New McCoys¹ for a few paces, but otherwise I managed quite well. I took up jogging in the following years. At one time I was able to run eighteen miles in a little more than three hours.

In 1998 or 1999 something happened to my knee. I don’t remember injuring it, but it became quite swollen, and running produced a good bit of pain. I knew that Denise Bessette’s son Christopher had once had difficulty with his shoulder. She told me that Christopher² was very happy with the outcome of the treatment by an orthopedic specialist who had an office in Enfield. I asked her for the physician’s name³ and made an appointment.

I told the doctor my symptoms, and I admitted that I was worried that he would advise me to give up running. He took x-rays and told me that he thought that the doctor who did the surgery on my knee had missed one of the fragments of the patella, and it had fused to a bone or something. He surprised me by asking me if my hip sometimes hurt. I said that it did, but I never suspected that it could be related.

He thought that my problem was tendinitis in the iliotibial (IT) band that connects the knee and hip on the outside of the knee. I later learned that IT band syndrome is rather common in distance runners. He gave me two prescriptions—one for pills to bring down the swelling and one for a few appointments with a physical therapist. It took a few weeks, but the pills worked.

I remember that the young lady who supervised my PT was very cute, but I don’t recall her name. The office that I went to was on the part of Route 5 that I often have driven past on the way to southbound I-91. It no longer is a clinic for physical therapists. At some point a podiatry clinic took over the building.

She taught me some exercises for strengthening the muscles around my knee and especially to stretch the IT band. What worked the best for me was one in which I held onto something with my right hand, stepped over my right foot with my left, thrust the hips to the left, and leaned a little to the right.

I performed the stretches before every time that I went for a run or, after I gave up running in 2008, a walk. I also used the step-over stretch when I felt a pain on the side of my knee or anywhere near my hip. This sometimes occurred when I rose and walked around after being in a sitting position for an extended period. As soon as I exited from an airplane I almost always did the step-over stretch before leaving the waiting area at the gate. It also came in handy for the European bus tours that Sue and I took in the twenty-first century. I probably looked silly, but that simple movement always decreased the pain and in most cases eliminated it.

Easter Sunday 2017: By 2017 my life had changed dramatically in many ways. TSI had been shut down for good for a few years. Sue and I had been on quite a few European vacations and one fantastic African safari trip to Tanzania (described here). I had established for myself an office in one of our spare bedrooms.

On Sunday morning, April 16, 2017, I was in my office working on the computer, probably on something related to bridge; by then I was both webmaster and database manager for the New England Bridge Conference. I arose from my chair to go to the bathroom. I got as far as the door to the office—about six feet—when my right leg gave out. I did not fall; I was able to grab the door frame to steady myself. I experienced a sharp pain in my knee, but it soon subsided.

The weather that Easter Sunday was quite nice. I was enthusiastic about the prospect of getting in a long walk around the neighborhood. In those days I made a circuit of about two miles walking on School St., Hazard Ave., Park St., and North St. I hoped to do two or three circuits that afternoon.

I was less than a quarter of a mile from the house when my leg gave out again. I fell flat on my face on the sidewalk. I got to my feet without difficulty and limped slowly and carefully back home. This seemed more serious than IT band syndrome.

I searched the Internet for information about dealing with knee pain. I learned about RICE: rest, icing, compression, and elevation. For the next month or two I stayed off of my leg as much as possible. I wore my knee brace and iced my knee after exercise. I brought a small chair into the office so that I could elevate it, and I put an ice pack on it until the swelling went down.

Even after the swelling subsided I did not feel comfortable about trying to walk several miles on it. It still felt very shaky. Eventually I decided to make an appointment at the Orthopedic Associates clinic in Glastonbury. I was amazed at the place. It was much larger than I anticipated. There were dozens of people—maybe a hundred—waiting to be seen. Most were older and much less ambulatory than I was. There was no way to tell how many patients were on the other side of the many reception desks.

They took x-rays of both knees, and then I met with Dr. Mark Shekhman, who specialized in hips and knees. He compared the x-rays of my two legs and showed me that there was much less cartilage in my right knee than in my left. He said that he thought my difficulties were due to arthritis, rather than either my fractured patella or the IT band syndrome.⁴ He prescribed more physical therapy, and told me that if I still had pain to call him. Injections could be used to address the problem.

I asked Dr. Shekhman if I could increase my mileage after I completed the therapy. I explained that I was getting fat. He assured me that I could.

The physical therapy that I received this time was overseen by two people at the Hartford Hospital office at 100 Hazard Ave. in Enfield. I don’t remember their names. I went once a week for five weeks in October and November. The prescription required me to attend twice per week, but the guy who worked with me the first week said that my problems were not that serious.

The staff there seemed to be better organized than the therapist with whom I had previously dealt. I usually started with an eight-minute warmup on a stationary bicycle. On the first visit the fellow who worked with me noticed that when I bent my leg I slanted my right knee in. He advised me to slant it out, as I already did with my left knee. He said that I had been favoring my left leg, and the muscles in my right leg needed strengthening. Both he and the female therapist also worked on getting the “knots” out of the muscles and ligaments surrounding the knee.

They also gave me exercises to perform every day. The list grew to include nine exercises, all of which were performed from a prone position. Three of them were stretches—four sets of holding the position for thirty seconds. These were basically prone versions of stretches that I had been doing since my first session in the nineties. The other seven were designed to build strength. They consisted of twenty repetitions of the designated movement.

After the second or third session I was provided with a paper that showed the exercises that I was to be doing. At the last session I was given a new paper that supposedly illustrated all of them. I saved both of these sheets of paper, although they were both badly wrinkled. I discovered recently that the second set only contained eight exercises, and one of those was shown twice. So, for the image shown above I created a composite that included all nine exercises.

I usually did these exercises before I went for a walk—either outside if the weather permitted or on my treadmill. I added one more exercise to stretch my calf muscles to reduce the likelihood of cramps. I found an old brown exercise or yoga mat in my garage. I laid it in the hallway, one of the few places in the house in which I could stretch my six-foot frame. It was a little tight, but I managed.

When I performed these exercises at the clinic I used two pieces of equipment. The first was similar to a dog’s leash. One end was looped around my foot. I grabbed the other end to pull my stiff leg toward my face. Then I pulled a straightened leg across the other leg to the side. The “leash” was also used it to pull a bent leg back to the rear, but I could just reach back and grab my foot for that one. I have good flexibility in that respect. At home I repurposed an old Donald Duck tie as a substitute for the “leash”.

The second instrument was a length of stretchy fabric that had been knotted into a loop. This one was used for the “clamshell” exercise depicted on the sheet, and they let me keep it. After a month or so it snapped in two; I did not replace it.

The left one: I exercised my right leg using this routine nearly every day for almost two years. I felt pretty good about the progress that I had been making until the day on which my left leg almost collapsed while I was walking on School St. I limped back to the house. By the next day the left knee was swollen. I used what I had learned with my right leg to try to address it. Eventually the swelling went away, but the pain still occurred occasionally.

I expanded my exercises to include both legs. I revised the order so that I did not need to change positions so often. I started on my back with the straight leg raise—right and then left—and the bridging. I then did the three exercises lying on my right side followed by the two that required me to be face down—left and then right.

Next I did the three exercises while lying on my left side. I then rolled over to my back again and attached the tie to my right foot for the stretch that pulls the leg back and the ITB stretch. I then transferred the tie to my left foot and did the same two stretches. I finished with the calf stretch that is not shown on the sheet. The whole set took about half an hour.

My left leg was still bothering me when I attended the fall North American Bridge Championships in San Francisco (described here). Quite a bit of walking was required there. It felt very strange to be limping on a different leg. I did my exercises on most mornings, but I was still uncomfortable most of the time that I was there. My right leg did not bother me at all.

Recovery: By the time of the worldwide shutdown due to the pandemic my left leg had fully recovered. Over the spring and summer of 2020 I walked at least five mile nearly every day. On several days I did 7½ miles and at least twice I walked ten miles. I almost never had any pain in my legs. The most likely location of discomfort was in my right lower back. However, I was usually able to stretch this away.

I often rested on the cast-iron bench in front of Dr. Cummiskey’s office.

Over the fall and winter I walked on the treadmill⁵ more often than outside. A new development was a pain on the top of my right foot that spread to the ankle. At first it only occurred when I walked outside. Later a much milder version plagued me on the treadmill as well. I could usually walk for about 1¼ miles before it became difficult to tolerate. After I rested for a couple of minutes and stretched the leg, it went away. However, it usually came back after about the same distance.

We were scheduled to take a European river cruse in October of 2021. My goal was to be able to participate in all of the excursions without leg pain. Since we decided to postpone this cruise until May of 2022, whether I can achieve that still remains to be determined.

1. If you are unfamiliar with Grandpappy Amos’s gait, you can view a short demonstration here.

2. Christopher Bessette’s LinkedIn page is here.

3. I can picture the doctor in my imagination, but I have forgotten his name.

4. In retrospect, I am sure that Dr. Shekhman was correct in his diagnosis of arthritis. However, I think that he was a little too dismissive of my two previous experiences. It was likely that the arthritis was precipitated by the original fracture. Also, the IT band syndrome never really went away. I had rather mild symptoms both before and after the arthritis treatments. Aside from that first day when I fell I never really had much pain in my knee itself.

5. The biggest problem with the treadmill was boredom. I subscribed to the Metropolitan Opera On Demand service for about a year. I streamed operas on my Lenovo convertible PC (which is called Yoga) and watched them while I was walking. I also watched some operas and the entire series Inspector Morse shows on YouTube. Later I subscribed to MHz Choice and watched a large number of European mysteries with subtitles. February 10, 2021, was a very dark day for me. The treadmill broke. Since then I have used the rowing machine when I could not walk. On May 26 I dropped my Big Bubba mug on Yoga and cracked the screen badly. I bought a new Microsoft laptop from Best Buy a few days later.

2021 September: Hurricane Ida and its Aftermath

Posted on September 20, 2021 by Mike

Water water everywhere. Continue reading →

The remnants of Hurricane Ida¹ arrived in southern New England on Wednesday, September 1, 2001. It rained pretty heavily in Connecticut all evening and well into the morning. I was scheduled to play bridge on Thursday at 10AM. I heard on the radio of floods in Manchester and Vernon, about fifteen miles to the south of where we lived in Enfield. I could see no signs of damage in our yard, and there was no standing water in our yard.

This last bit of news was a huge relief. A few weeks earlier a weird localized storm had deluged Enfield and Suffield for a couple of hours. The rest of Connecticut seemed unaffected. For the first time in the thirty-three and a half years that Sue and I had resided at 41 North St. water had somehow seeped into the old part² of the basement. It was not exactly flooded, but there was a little water in some areas, notably the southeast corner, which was piled high with boxes and who knows what. The new part of the basement was completely dry. It took a few days, but the dehumidifier dried up the old side pretty well.

I also walked out into the yard. I saw several inches of water in the yard that faced North St. The water disappeared when the drain in the street was cleared, but the sod remained squishy.

The feeling of relief was short-lived. Before I left for the Hartford Bridge Club on Thursday morning I checked the basement. Both the old part and the new part were dry. After I finished playing, drove back home, ate lunch, took a nap, and went for a walk, I descended the staircase to the basement to empty the dehumidifier. I was aghast to see that there was considerable water in both halves of the basement.

I could see that the cats’ litter box was sitting in a little water in the new part of the basement. My very old cat Giacomo was resting on the broken treadmill, but he was very upset about how his paws had become wet when he needed to use the litter box. I sifted the litter box and moved it, the sifting tool, and the box of Clean Paws litter to a part of the old basement that was still dry. I also dried of His Highness’s paws and carried him to the stairway, which was dry.

Meanwhile Sue made some phone calls. Someone told her that the fire department would pump out the basement if the standing water was six or more inches deep. There was probably an inch or more on the new side, but it did not look like six inches to me.

Sue also located her Craftsman Wet/Dry Vacuum, Sears’ version of what nearly everyone calls a Shop-Vac³. It had been lent to the Somersville Congregational Church. Sue made arrangements to pick it up in the afternoon. I located two long extension cords in my garage. Sue somehow got the vacuum down to the basement. Someone must have carried it down the hatchway stairs for her. I removed my socks and put on a pair of beat-up old sneakers with a few holes in them. I walked through the water to the new side and opened the hatch to try to encourage evaporation.

The GE dehumidifier did the job in the old basement.

Sue operated the machine. I made sure that the cords were kept out of the water. We filled the machine’s barrel⁴ with water, and I used a fourteen-quart bucket to transfer the water to an unused washing machine. We then put the washing machine on the last dot of the spin cycle and turned it on. This step was necessary because there are no drains in the basement. I had used this same technique to empty the dehumidifier.

Sue’s initial approach was to try to create a dry path between the base of the stairs and the washing machine so that we could avoid standing in water, a good conductor of electricity. She filled up a barrel in about twenty minutes. I emptied the barrel into washing machine. As we did this we noticed that the dry space that Sue had just cleared was covered with water again.

Our weapons against the sea of troubles: the washer, the wet/dry vac, and the fourteen-quart bucket.

I suggested that we should concentrate on the new side of the basement, which was consistently covered by more than an inch of water. We were both stunned that it t took less than a minute to fill a barrel. We then had to roll it up the ramp to the old side and empty it in the washer. We were standing in water once we left the ramp, but we were careful to keep the cords dry. We did one more barrel that way, and then stopped for supper. We planned to continue after we ate, but neither of us could summon the energy. We are, after all, old.

I walked this wet path on the old side from the door to the washing machine at least one hundred times. The cord running from the wall plug at left stayed dry.

At 2 o’clock on Friday morning I woke up and went downstairs to continue vacuuming the new side of the basement. I looped the extension cord over some boxes and cabling in the ceiling of the basement to eliminate the need to disconnect the extension cord from the machine every time. I concentrated on the new side and filled four barrels with water. It took me about thirty minutes, but there was no discernible effect on the level of the water. I went back to bed and slept like a dead man.

When I awoke again and checked the basement, both sides seemed worse. The water level on the new side was considerably higher, and the entire old side now had at least a filmy coating of water. I could see no dry spots. Where was the water coming from?⁵ I had to move the cats’ litter box upstairs. I was afraid to move the open box of litter because I could see that the bottom would fill out. I left it where it was and resolved to buy a new box at Shop-Rite.

I worked all day on the basement—not counting a few naps. In all I sucked up about forty-five barrels of water, which produced a notable difference in the level in the new side, about as much as I expected—an inch or so. I kept the hatch closed because I remembered that this was mosquito season, and I had heard warnings about West Nile virus. The mosquitoes that carry the virus like to breed in standing water.

Several avalanches blocked parts of the path from the ramp (bottom) to the hatch door (top). At this point there was at least three inches of water.

When I awoke on Saturday morning there was quite a bit more water than was there before. I checked the new side. The level was a little higher than when I started on Friday. So, more than an inch of water had seeped back in overnight. This was very discouraging. In fact, I decided to abandon vacuuming until the amount of water stabilized. I checked several times a day when I emptied the dehumidifier

I did figure out that I could move the cardboard box of cat litter upstairs if I tipped it sideways. Once I got it upstairs I split a large hold in the middle of what was now the top side. I could then scoop out dry litter with a ladle. In fact, I was able to salvage the entire contents of the box.

On Tuesday September 7 I decided that the water levels had finally stabilized. The dehumidifier seemed to be doing a good job of drying out the old part of the basement, and the newer side was no worse than on Monday evening. I therefore set to work. By 5 o’clock in the afternoon I had sucked up fifty barrels of water from my position on the ramp. I could definitely see the effect on the water level on the ramp itself.

I bought these shoes for the Hawaii trip in 1995, but I did not wear them for 26 years.

By this time I had refined my technique pretty well. I positioned the machine on the flat part of the wooden ramp with two wheels on the cement floor of the old basement. When the barrel had filled, I detached the top part of the vacuum and rolled the barrel the fifteen or twenty feet to the washer. I straddled the barrel, bent at the knees, held the handle of the bucket in my left hand, and placed my right fingertips in the indentation on the bucket. I then filled the bucket as much as possible and lifted it up to the washer. This method was the easiest on my back. It also minimized the splashing.

I could do the entire process in four or five minutes. I also saved a little time by only running the spin cycle on the washer every other time. The tub of the washer could hold a little more that two of the vacuum’s barrels. This spin cycle lasted longer than it took the vacuum to fill with water. So, I had a short break every other barrel while I waited for the washer.

On Wednesday I played bridge with Eric Vogel. Afterwards I sucked up another twenty barrels.

On Thursday I was up early enough to run the vacuum through another twenty barrels before playing bridge with Jeanne Striefler at 10 AM. Between rounds Lesley Meyers asked me what had happened to my elbow. I had no idea what she was talking about.

I did another twenty barrels when I arrived home.

Friday was an epic day. I filled and emptied thirty barrels in the morning. The water level near the end was low enough that I had to abandon the ramp for the afternoon session. I added the second extension cord and change the looping of the cords so that I could walk all the way to the hatch and still keep the cords dried.

I vacuumed up seven more barrels in the afternoon, but because the water was now not nearly as deep, it took as long as the morning session.

Most of my time in the afternoon was in two places—right before the hatch and about halfway between the ramp and the hatch. These areas, which were evidently low points, were frustrating because as soon as I would get an area dry, it would fill back up with water seeping in from areas that were filled with some kind of junk that belonged to the other resident of the house. I went back and forth between the two areas.

When I unplugged the vacuum’s cable from the extension cord, I noticed that the vacuum’s male plug was hot. I had already noticed that one of the two prongs was shorter than the other. I could now see that the short one consisted of two pieces of metal that had a slight gap between them. I reported this to Sue. She said that it was a definite fire hazard.

I went back the next two days to work on those two areas. On Saturday I was surprised to find the other cat, Bob, lying on the cement on the path in the new side. There were also a few cat prints near the puddle in the middle. I carried Bob to the staircase, and he easily made his way up. I then extracted about a half barrel.

This is the right setting on the washing machine.

Much less than that came out on Sunday. When I had finished, the new side was pretty much dry. I could see a few small puddles, but there was no way to get at them with the vacuum.

In the afternoon Sue and I were scheduled to go to a picnic for her cousins on the Locke side. As we were about to leave, she exclaimed, “Ooh! What did you do to your elbow?” I asked her what she meant. She drew my attention to a golf-ball-sized lump on the point of the left one. I had to twist my arm around to see it. I then recalled Lesley’s remark on Thursday. I must have already had it then.

The knob was twice this size on Sunday and Monday.

After the picnic Sue and I drove to the to Urgent Care clinics on Hazard Avenue. Neither was open.

On Monday morning, September 13, I drove to the PhysicianOne Urgent Care, the one on the north side of the street. I had been to this location once before, but I am pretty sure that in the interim it had closed and reopened under new management (Yale New Haven Hospital). I arrived at 10 o’clock, with hopes of being home by noon.

I did not know that one made appointments at Urgent Cares. The lady at the desk told me that it would be at least two hours until they could see me. Although most people were required to wait in their cars for a text message, she let me sit in the lobby, where there were only a few usable chairs. The rest of the chairs were Xed off to prevent them from being used. So, I did not get within ten feet of any other patients. That is a good thing because most of them were there to get Covid-19 tests or treatments. The delta variant was still quite active.

One Hispanic lady came in with two children. The boy was about 2’6″ tall. His sister was a little taller. The lady’s mother had a third infant in her arms. They never checked in or entered the treatment area. The lady seemed to be busy with some papers or something. Then the whole family suddenly departed. On the way out I noticed that she was pregnant again.

he physician’s assistant finally saw me after I had been there for nearly three and a half hours. I had spent the time proofreading and rewriting my blog entry concerning 9/11 (which is now posted here). She quickly diagnosed my problem as bursitis. Some other young ladies x-rayed my elbow and wrapped it for me. The P.A. then advised me that if the swelling had not gone down in a week that I should see a physician who specialized in joints. She provided me with the business card of one and a CD that contained my x-rays. .

By Sunday, September 17, the old side was also nearly completely dry. I opened the hatch again to try to air out the new side of the basement. The dehumidifier on the old side shows a reading of 60 percent humidity. It was consistently at 75 or 80 when the water was at its highest.

The knob on my elbow had shrunk a lot. It never did hurt or hinder me in any significant way. I did not plan to call the doctor, but a couple of weeks later the bump was still significant. I tried to schedule an appointment with the doctor recommended by the Urgent Care clinic, but he was out of the office until the end of October, and he only saw patients in Rocky Hill and Farmington, which are both more than thirty minutes away. Fortunately, his receptionist referred me to a doctor who has office hours in Enfield.

On Wednesday, October 6, I had an appointment with Dr. Nicholas Bontempo. He told me essentially what the P.A. had told me earlier. He gave me an elastic “sleeve” to wear over the elbow. It was much more comfortable, but it seemed to provide less compression. So, I applied the wrap over the sleeve.

They scheduled a follow-up appointment for me for November 3. I canceled on October 11. By then the bump was negligible.

Although there had never been standing water in the basement since we had moved to Enfield in 1988, the new (northern half) of the basement was flooded again in April of 2024. My efforts in dealing with that mess have been described here.

1. Hurricane Ida described a very unusual path. It first hit land in Venezuela. It then turned northwest, crossed the Caribbean Sea, a tip of Cuba on August 27, and the Gulf of Mexico before landing again near New Orleans on August 29 as a Category 4 hurricane.

From there it headed northeast, losing strength but dumping a huge quantities of rain everywhere it went. On September 1 it reached the New York City area and caused widespread flooding. It finally petered out in the maritime provinces of Canada.

2. In 2007 Sue and I began the process of refinancing the house and building an addition that was approximately the same size as the original house. A description of this activity was posted here. The addition also had a full basement, which could be reached through an external hatchway in the lawn north of the house. It could also be reached through a door in the northwest corner of the old basement.

3. I had never heard of a Shop-Vac until I ate lunch with Barbara Schane Jackson, TSI’s liaison for the installation at Hecht’s (described here). For some reason she mentioned that she needed to use one. I nodded sagely even though I had no idea what she was talking about. Johnson County in Kansas, where I grew up, is not exactly prone to flooding.

4. If there was ever an indication on the machine of Shop-Vac’s capacity, it had long since been lost. I estimated the size of the barrel at fifteen or sixteen gallons based on the number of fourteen-quart buckets required to empty it.

The new side of the basement was approximately fifty feet by twenty feet—one thousand square feet or 144,000 square inches. One gallon is equivalent to 231 cubic inches. So, each inch of water on the new side contained over 623 gallons. If the barrel contained fifteen gallons, about 41.5 barrels would be required to lower the water level by one inch (assuming no replacement).

5. An admittedly biased description of the process of flooding from the water table is posted here. Perhaps our contractors did not do a perfect job when they installed the new basement.

1997-2014 TSI: AdDept Client: Stage Stores

Posted on September 4, 2021 by Mike

People and events at SRI/Stage Stores. Continue reading →

Everyone with whom I dealt—and there were a great many people over the course of seventeen years—-called the large retailer based on the south side of Houston “Stage Stores”. Even their LinkedIn pages refer to Stage Stores. However, our contracts¹ were definitely with a company named Specialty Retailers, Inc. (SRI). The checks that we received were from SRI. This always seemed strange to me, but I managed to piece together from various sites on the Internet something of an explanation.

I spent many hours at the headquarters building on South Main. The visitors’ parking was perhaps thirty to the right of the palm tree.

SRI was incorporated in 1988. I was unable to discover who the original stockholders were or who ran the corporation. I also have no idea what, if anything, SRI did in its first four years of existence.

In 1992 the company purchased a Colorado-based retail company named Fashion Bar, Inc., which had seventy-one stores. The larger ones were branded as Palais Royal or Bealls². The rest were known as Stage Stores. In the nineties SRI purchased a large number of other stores. Most of them bore the Stage logo. SRI’s headquarters at 10201 South Main³ in Houston was known locally as Stage Stores, and that name, as you can see in the photo, was displayed prominently over the entrance. The only stores that were actually located in Houston were branded as Palais Royal. I recall actually purchasing a leather belt in one of them. Many people in Houston knew about Palais Royal, but Stage Stores and SRI were probably not on their radar.

In late 1996 or early 1997 Doug Pease, TSI’s Director of Marketing, received a call from Brenda Suire⁴, the Director of Finance for Stage’s Marketing Department. Doug and I flew on Continental Airlines to Intercontinental Airport in Houston to meet with Brenda and some other employees. We were somewhat surprised by the length of the drive from the airport to Stage’s headquarters.

The blue route on the map at left suggests driving through downtown Houston. That route would only be considered if the trip was in the middle of the night. We always took the western loop on I-610.

On the second day in Houston I demonstrated the functionality and design of the AdDept system at the local IBM office. It went over very well.

I recently found in my notes from January of 2001 some of the items that were included in the contract that resulted from that presentation and subsequent negotiations.

I was surprised to discover that in 1997 Stage paid us over $8,000 for the expense payables, sales, MM Plus, and AdSEND (!) interfaces. No wonder we made so much money in those days. We have no choice but to give them the assistance they need to get the first three working. They don’t use AdSEND any more, thank goodness, and I am pretty certain that no one remembers that they paid for this. I don’t remember coding an expense interface for Stage, but we clearly did it in 1998.

As part of that initial contract the programmers at TSI wrote a great deal of new code. Stage Stores had more stores and fewer merchandise departments than the first few AdDept customers. In most of their markets they operated only one store. They were therefore much more interested in the ratios of media dollars spent on each store to the amount of sales that the store generated than in sales and expenses by department. To provide this information we wrote code to accept sales by store from the corporate systems. We also wrote a set of reports that showed the ratio of advertising expenses to sales for each store.

No one at Stage Stores had previously examined the broadcast (i.e., radio and television) advertising too carefully. The buys and audits were done by a lady (I don’t recall her name) from Reynolds Communications. She used SmartPlus⁵ software to make the schedule and audit the spots that each station ran. Stage soon discovered that she had been spending much too much money on television buys, especially in one-store markets in Louisiana. She knew that the company had a store in those markets, but she had no access to sales data.

As often seemed to happen in AdDept installations, this unexpected revelation allowed Stage Stores to save enough money on an inefficient use of funds to justify most of the cost of the entire system.

Brenda, Floyd, and Denise Bessette at TSI’s office.

Training and installation: In 1997 Stage sent three employees to TSI’s office in Enfield for several days of intensive training: Brenda, Floyd Smith⁶, and Hugo DuBois⁷. The emphasis of the training was on how to get the most out of the AdDept software in their environment.

Floyd was Brenda’s right-hand man in the business office. For the first few years—which (for reasons unrelated to the system) were rather chaotic—Floyd was the liaison between TSI and Stage. Hugo, a native of Belgium, managed the department’s local area network. He mainly worked with the production and creative people. I am not sure why he came to Enfield. Hugo’s only role in the project was to connect the network to the AS/400 and to install and configure the software on individual PC’s and Macs so that the department’s employees could access the AdDept system.

After the AS/400 had been delivered, and the network was connected to it, I flew to Houston to install the AdDept software and configure the database. Over the next few months I returned to help them deal with problems, to show them how to use new features, and to gather ideas about further development. I soon discovered that there was a better way to get from Connecticut to Stage. On most trips I flew on Delta or American and landed at Houston’s smaller airport, Hobby. Not only was it much closer to Stage, but there was usually a better choice of flight times.

Denise, Floyd, Hugo, the top of Brenda’s head, and Steve Shaw at TSI’s office.

Within a year or so the system was running fairly smoothly. Then in 1998 Brenda left Stage Stores, and for a while Floyd ran the advertising business office. His primary assistant was Toni Young⁸. One of the primary AdDept users was Renee Mottu⁹, who managed the expense invoices.

Fortunately for TSI, for the next year our involvement with Stage was reduced to answering phone calls and resolving mundane issues. I say “fortunately” because even though Stage Stores declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1999, the effect on TSI’s bottom line was minimal. The effect on daily life in Stage’s advertising department was for a considerable period much more severe. My notes after a visit to their headquarters in January of 2000 stressed that “Those poor people spend half of their time trying to persuade newspapers to run their ads.”

Karen is in the red jacket. The man who is obscuring Floyd is, I think, the Advertising Director.

Brenda was replaced by Karen Peltz, who had held a similar position at Foley’s¹⁰, the chain of department stores owned by the May Company that was also based in Houston. At the time Foley’s had been using AdDept to solve various problems in its advertising department for five years. I had worked with Karen at Foley’s, but only a little. Eventually Floyd moved to another position at Stage Stores, and Toni Young managed the day-to-day operations of the marketing business office thereafter.

I had only a few interactions with Joanne Swartz¹¹, the Senior VP of Marketing, and the guy who was Advertising Director. I do not remember his name. I think that Karen reported directly to Joanne.

I dealt with two people in the media area. The woman’s name was Deidre Prince¹¹. I do not remember the guy’s name, and it is not in the notes. I also remember Sandra Green, who used AdDept for buying newspaper space. She seemed to have a lot more difficulty using the system than anyone else did.

My notes: I discovered quite a few email messages that I sent back to TSI’s office from Stage. They are dated between October 1999 and January 2001. I’ll start withe the earliest one

The New Skin bottle and the shaving/ medical kit that I kept it in.

Not a great start today. I woke up at 6 AM. I got up and stumbled around the hotel room for a few minutes. I ironed some shirts and pants. At 6:55 I shaved. I looked in the mirror and saw Dracula. The blood was pouring from my lip. It took over 40 minutes for it to stop bleeding. I painted the New Skin on it. I got dressed and went to Stage. The New Skin held until almost 5 PM. Then I bled all over my shirt and pants, but this time I got it to stop in only about five minutes. Life on the road is so glamorous.
Renee Mottu is looking for suggestions as to how to remove two possums that have taken up residence beneath her mobile home. She rejected my idea of sending in a dachshund. She said that the possums would eat a dog.
I didn’t get to run tonight. Toni Young told me about a good trail. I put on my running duds, followed her directions, and drove around for about 25 minutes looking for the place. I never found it. I drove back to the hotel, got some food, and settled into my room to watch “Norm” and “The Drew Carey” show.

I am pretty sure that the woman with the big hair to the right of Floyd is Renee Mottu. I don’t remember the names of the other two ladies.

The first paragraph refers to a blue-black circle that appeared on my left lower lip in the nineties. It has never caused any pain, and it has not bled in the last decade or so. The story of Renee and her possum continued for a few visits. Before reading the above I had totally forgotten that for a while Norm McDonald had a network television show.

The following are from the subsequent two days on the same trip.

It was in the 80’s here yesterday, but it felt cooler. There was almost no humidity, which is rare for Houston. Floyd’s office was freezing. He has an electric heater in his office. We had it running most of the day even though we had six people crowded around his PC all day long. I brought sweaters, and I will wear one today.
Stage has network printers. We sent a 40-page report to Floyd’s printer about noon. It was still in SND status when I left at 6 PM. Floyd said it will sometimes not print until the next morning. Have they ever complained about this? I think the culprit may be the faxing. They were faxing all day yesterday.
I noticed at Stage that their floors must not be very level. The pieces of their desk units come together at angles. I also noticed that some units were raised off the floor as much as an inch on one side.
I don’t think that I could possibly in good conscience approve more than five months for the palm tree research project at this time.
How much do you think is the monthly fee that Reynolds Communications charges Stage to handle (including auditing and approving invoices from stations) their broadcast advertising?

I don’t remember the precise answer to the last question, but I am pretty sure that there were two digits to the left of the comma. The next set of emails came from the trip that began on January 11, 2000.

This Silver Medallion card expired many years ago.

I was dreading the flight to Atlanta. I envisioned myself standing in line with the common people now that my silver medallion card has expired. I was delighted to discover that my ticket still says “Silver Medallion.” Half of the flight got on with the medallion status group.
The phone on my seat on the flight from Hartford to Atlanta has a little LCD display. It discloses the NASDAQ closing price every few minutes along with advertisements for various ways to spend your money on the phone.
A lady on the Atlanta flight has striped hair. Not streaks, stripes. She has brown hair intermixed with ½” blonde stripes. I guess it is a look.
The flight from Atlanta to Houston sat in the gate for about 20 minutes. Then we got in the usual long line to take off. It must have been over 100 degrees in the cabin by the time we hit the skies. The guy in the seat in front of me pushed his seat all the way back. I have therefore had to turn 45 degrees and put my laptop on my lap. Even so it is uncomfortable to type. Thankfully there is no one next to me.
Listening to Kiri Te Kanawa sure beats listening to salesmen. On my last few flights the planes were full of families and college students. The passengers on both of Tuesday night’s flights have been mostly middle-aged men.
I still have a 45 minute drive ahead of me after this flight, which won’t get in until about 11:00 central time. I need some caffeine.
I used the air conditioner in the car all the way from the airport to the motel.
… Renee Mottu asked me to hire her. I told her that we needed experienced, or at least trained, programmers. She pressed me on this. She said that she was sure she could learn programming and that Floyd would give her a good reference. By the way, she said all of this in front of Floyd.

I remembered to ask Renee what happened to the possums living under her trailer. She said they were still there. I repeated my recommendation about the dog. She said she didn’t have one. I said she should borrow one. She asked me (!) if I knew anyone who had a dog she could use. Later I heard her walking around intoning “Does anyone have a dog I can borrow?”

I think that by 2001 Stage Stores must have been emerging from bankruptcy and resuming their strategy of expansion by purchasing other chains. The biggest of those was the acquisition of Peebles, a chain of 125 department stores based in South Hill, VA.

For some reason the management at Stage wanted to keep track of all expenses and co-op income of the Peebles stores separately. This was the first, but not the last, time that I installed a second AdDept database on the same AS/400. There was still only one set of programs, but each user had two AS/400 user ID’s. Their profiles determined which database would be used.

Here are some of my notes from January of 2001:

Leaping Lanny Poppo became one late in his wrestling career

The meeting in the afternoon went well. Joanne, the advertising VP introduced me as “the resident genius.” The project has been scaled down. We need to be able to do accruals at the store level for media and production at the store level. We also need to be able to do prepaid to expense. One unusual wrinkle is that they do not want to allocate creative costs to stores. They want to be able to get ratios of advertising expense to sales from AdDept, but we must be able to reconcile this with what is in the G/L.
I was glad that I was an outsider at this meeting. The politics was just barely below the surface. Chuck, who I think is the CFO, put Joanne on the spot about something that was not even on the agenda. Their explanations were not at all impressive. The experience had the happy effect of reminding why I did not like working at a larger company.
Toni Young says that she thinks that Renee Mottu never got rid of her possums.
It turns out that what Stage really wants to do most is to start using what they have and what we have previously proposed—SmartPlus interface, sales interface, and expense payables interface. They spoke of the SmartPlus interface as if it were a done deal. I don’t recall them purchasing this module. I brought back the file layout for the expense interface. I did not come back with a lot of specs for new projects. Believe it or not, they want another week of my time. Both Karen and Joanne (the Senior VP) seriously asked me to stay over the weekend and spend next week in Houston. I didn’t tell them this, but I don’t think that I could have lasted for 24 days.
01/07/01: I was surprised to discover that in 1997 Stage paid us over $8,000 for the expense payables, sales, MM Plus, and AdSEND (!) interfaces. No wonder we made so much money in those days. We have no choice but to give them the assistance they need to get the first three working. They don’t use AdSEND any more, thank goodness, and I am pretty certain that no one remembers that they paid for this. I don’t remember coding an expense interface for Stage, but we clearly did it in 1998. I will write up a quote to change it to work the way that the new documentation states.
Toni Young said that she thinks that Renee Mottu had not solved her possum problem.
I saw a sign at Stage Stores offering a $3,000 bonus to any employee that refers someone hired as a senior analyst in IS. The candidate must have five years of COBOL or Oracle experience.

Evidently I had already scheduled most of the rest of the month of January 2001 to travel to other clients so that if I had agreed to stay in Houston over the weekend and the following week, I would have been on the road for twenty-four days in a row! In those days we were charging $1,000 per day for my time. If Stage had still been in Chapter 11, I doubt that they would have proposed spending another $7,000 for another week of my presence. The bankruptcy court would have needed to approve the expense.

AdSend was a service offered by the Associated Press for sending the images of ad layouts to the newspapers. Hugo once told me that the company had twelve T-1 lines (TSI had one), and, according to him it was not nearly enough.

The neighborhood: Stage seemed to be a nice place to work. The headquarters was a fairly nice building located on the south side of Houston. They always provided me with a comfortable place to work, and there was ample parking in spaces reserved for vendors. The building also had a cafeteria that offered good food at very reasonable prices. I always ate lunch there, usually by myself. Many employees arrived at work early and ate breakfast there.

I took this photo of Enron Field under construction. It is now called Minute Maid Park.

It was not too easy to reach by a car driven from the south. Just north of the building Main Street became a divided highway with restricted access. Since I always stayed in a hotel north of the building, I had to drive my rental car to the first exit, drive under the highway, and then take the access road back to Stage’s driveway.

Most of Houston’s explosive growth had been in other directions. There was not much south of Stage’s location. However, just north of the building were the medical centers for which Houston was famous and Enron Field, which is where the Houston Astros played after the Astrodome was abandoned in 1999. I got to see (and photograph) the construction of the new stadium.

According to Yelp Marco’s is closed, but it still has a website.

I usually stayed in a Hampton Inn a few blocks from the stadium. My favorite restaurant was a Mexican place called Marco’s. Located in a hard-to-reach strip mall near my hotel, it was where I first became acquainted with tacos al carbon, one of my favorite dishes. Marco’s had ridiculously low prices. I often told the manager that they should open restaurants in the northeast. They could have doubled their prices and still filled the place every night.

During a couple of multi-day trips to Stage I met up with Sue’s cousin, Mark Davis, for supper. He worked for Exxon Mobil. We usually at an Olive Garden. The conversation was better than the food.

I jogged on the streets near the hotel nearly every evening when I visited Stage. I worked out a route that kept me on streets that had very little traffic.

Eventually I discovered a delightful dirt track that surrounded a golf course in Memorial Park. I drove there every chance that I got. A loop around the track was a little less than three miles. I usually did two loops. There is no chance that I would ever move to Texas. However, if I did, it would be to Houston, and the primary motive would be to gain access to this track every day.

The people: I was quite surprised by the LinkedIn pages of the people with whom I worked at Stage. We had not done much work for the company after 2008 or so. Consequently, I really had no idea who was still working there after that. I discovered that many of them remained at Stage Stores quite a long time after I last saw them or talked with them.

TSI’s initial contact, Brenda, departed in 1998. I don’t know why she left Stage so soon after we did the installation. There might be a story there. I don’t recall ever hearing her name mentioned again.

I have many memories of Floyd. He was definitely a family man. He was always cheerful and business-minded. He always ate lunch at his desk. His office was not very large, but it had two doors, which he kept open. Some people used his office as a shortcut to get from one part of the marketing department to another. I was surprised when he and Toni seemed to switch jobs after Karen arrived. That was never explained to me. Floyd was employed by Stage Stores until 2011.

I was acquainted with Karen from her days at Foley’s. When she arrived at Stage, she made it clear to me that one of her top priorities was for the department to make better use of AdDept. A Republican, she assured all of us in January of 2001 that George W. Bush “will not be that bad.” After his two incredibly stupid wars and an economy that totally tanked while he and his cronies watched helplessly, most historian vehemently disagree.

Karen was, to my amazement, an avid biker—not mountain bikes, Harleys. She and her husband rode up to the big gathering in Sturgis, SD, at least once. I have always told people that if you saw me on a motorcycle, you can be certain that I will also be smoking a cigarette and showing off my piercings and tattoos.

Karen worked at Stage until 2013, twice as long as her stint at Foley’s. Her LinkedIn page lists no jobs after she left Stage Stores.

I remember that Hugo drove a Saturn—as did I during that period. His, however, was a coupe. If I had known that Saturn sold two-door cars, I would have bought one. Hugo stayed until 2017.

I did not really have much personal contact with Joanne, aside from that one meeting that they asked me to attend in 2001. I do remember that on one occasion I overheard Renee accosting her in the hallway. Renee said, quite loudly, “Joanne, I need a raise!” If Joanne replied, I did not hear the answer. Joanne left Stage Stores in 2012.

Toni apparently never left Stage Stores. The more that I worked with her the more that I respected her.

When I met Deidre I asked her if she was related to Diana Prince. She did not know whom I was talking about. I guess not everyone was a fan of Wonder Woman on TV and in the comic books.

I think that Deidre was our main contact when I showed the A^xN¹² system to the department in 2003 or 2004. They enthusiastically endorsed it and used it until they outsourced the buying of newspaper space to an outside company. Deidre left Stage in 2011.

Epilogue: I think that our last major dealings with Stage were the implementation of A^xN and the Peebles project. Nevertheless, they were still using AdDept when TSI went out of business in 2014.

Unlike most retailers Stage Stores continued to expand in the twenty-teens by acquiring other chains. In 2017 Stage acquired the assets of the Gordman’s chain of department stores and quickly converted all of them to sell off-priced items. This worked so well that they began to convert most of their other stores to the same format. In the November 2019-February 2020 quarter sales were up 19 percent¹⁴.

Then the pandemic struck and Stage Stores was stuck with a lot of debt and 738 stores that could not be expected to generate any revenue in the immediate future. The price of the company’s stock plummeted. In May of 2020 Stage entered Chapter 11 again, and in August it announced that it was liquidating all of its holdings.

1. For some reason SRI insisted on a new contract every year. We had contracts with all of our AdDept clients, but all of the others were open-ended.

2. There is also an unrelated chain of department stores with the Bealls moniker that is based in Florida. My unsuccessful pitch to that company is detailed here.

3. Years after TSI was closed SRI moved to an office building at 2425 West Loop South. I tried to use Google Maps to find the Main Street building with which I was so familiar, but I failed. I think that it must have been demolished.

4. Brenda’s LinkedIn page is here. I had trouble remember her last name. I sent an email to Floyd Smith asking if he knew it. He replied, “Sure. She is also on Facebook..” Confused, I asked again. Floyd wrote, “Suire is her last name. Sorry about that spell check changed it last time.”

5. The Media Management Plus product was renamed SmartPlus. I think that this may have happened when the company was purchased by Arbitron, the rating service. On the Internet I found a very detailed description of what SmartPlus did. It is posted here.

6. Floyd’s LinkedIn page is here.

7. Hugo’s LinkedIn page can be viewed here.

8. In 1997 I was only 49. I was shocked that year to learn that Toni Young, who was younger than I was, had a grandchild who was by no means an infant. Her LinkedIn page is here.

9. I found no LinkedIn page for Renee Mottu. Her Facebook page is here. I was surprised to discover that it contained even less than mine does.

10. A great deal more has been written about the AdDept installation at Foley’s. The account is posted here.

11. Joanne Swartz’s LinkedIn page can be viewed here.

12. Deidre Prince’s LinkedIn page is here.

13. A^xN was the name that I gave to TSI’s Internet program for management of insertion orders that AdDept users sent to newspapers. Its system design is explicated here. The marketing history is described here. Stage’s use of the system was one of the main reason that the number of subscribing newspapers grew so large—at one point over four hundred!

14. The Philadelphia Inquirer picked up this story from the Washington Post and posted it here.

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