Tag Archives: Cox, Gerry

1981-1988 Life in Rockville: Trips and Visits

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We didn’t work every day. Continue reading →

The years that we spent in Rockville were mostly happy ones, but we had neither the time nor the money to take much in the way of vacations. The two that we took were for only a week each in 1985 and 1986. They are documented here.

We also made very few exciting or life-enhancing purchases. As in the other blogs about non-business events, the timeline is shaky. I am only certain of the dates of a few events.

The most exciting news of our first year in Rockville came in a phone call in the spring of 1981 from Gerry Cox. He announced that he and a group of Wayne State debaters wanted to pay us a visit in the summer. We looked at our schedules and told him that that would be fine, as long as they could come in June, July, or August. We quickly agreed upon a set of dates. The debaters were Nancy Legge, Al Acitelli, and Mark Buczko.

They drove from Detroit to Rockville. We gave them directions to our house. I think that we advised them to get off of I-91 and take Route 83. We told them that when they could smell the cows they would be in Ellington, the town just north of Rockville. At that point they needed to watch out for the turn. We told them that they should turn uphill (left) onto Upper Butcher Road and then downhill (right) onto Park St. Both of these hills are short, but quite steep.

They found the house. They parked in back, as we directed. We helped them move in. The guys stayed in the bedroom at the top of the stairs, where we had set up bunk beds. Their room was directly above the office. Nancy slept in the waterbed in the spare bedroom, which had not yet been converted into an office for Sue.

They stayed with us for a few days. Everyone had a splendid time throughout the visit. I remember three activities.

  • We all spent one day at Rocky Neck State Park. I don’ recall any specifics.
  • We devoted one day to Dungeons and Dragons. I am pretty sure that my friend from my insurance days, Tom Corcoran, joined us for that occasion. He played a dwarf fighter. I don’t remember what the other characters were, and, even though I designed it, I don’t remember the dungeon. I also have a vague recollection of creating an adventure for Mark’s assassin character, Cnir Edrum.
  • We enjoyed a communal supper, presumably after the D&D game. Al insisted on making pasta from scratch for us. It was definitely good, but I don’t think that he convinced anyone that it was worth all of the effort. He did not insist on making the sauce from scratch. It came from a jar.
Canada Post truck.

Nancy stayed with us for another week or two. We put her to work stuffing envelopes for one of our mailings. This is when I bestowed on her the title of Executive Vice President for International Marketing. We must have included one Canadian addressee.

Gerry came back to visit us a year or two later with a friend of his. I remember much less about that occasion. They stayed with us for a night or two. They probably made additional stops in the Northeast.

I also remember that Craig Kolbitz, a good friend from my army days in Albuquerque in 1971, evidently somehow found my telephone number and address. He called and then came over and visited us one evening. I don’t remember much about the occasion. I don’t think that he revealed much about what he had been doing in the interim. I have not heard from him again in the subsequent decades.

Sue’s sister Betty and her husband Shawn (or maybe Shaun or Sean) Arrowsmith came over for supper at least once. At the time he was a sous chef at the restaurant at Bradley International Airport. That restaurant, which has been closed for decades, was outside of the secured area in the old terminal. It had quite a good reputation.

Their visit to Rockville must have been in late fall or winter. Shawn and I went searching for firewood in the nearby woods. He was a big guy; he brought back a lot more than I did. I started a fire in the fireplace.

They invited us over to their place, too. Their house was surrounded by maple trees. I have a strong recollection of hearing the sounds of the droppings of gypsy moth caterpillars on the roof.

Shawn and Betty did not stay together very long. I don’t know what happened.

The Corcorans—Tom, Patti, Brian and Casey—also came over at least once. I fixed country-style ribs and sauerkraut for them. The meal was a big hit, especially for Brian who had understandably low expectations for such a foreign-sounding meal.

We might have had other visitors, but I don’t remember them.

We made the drive from Rockville to the Corcorans’ house many times. We usually came over for supper and then played games until well after midnight. We were especially appreciative of the suppers. Throughout this period we seldom had, in my dad’s words, “two nickles to rub together”. We almost never went to restaurants. The Corcorans almost always had a special meal for us, often steak. Of course, there was plenty of beer.

This is the good version.

Among the games Trivial Pursuit was a definite favorite. We played many different editions. Careers was also a favorite, but we soon discovered that the original version, which had uranium prospecting, Hollywood, expedition to the moon, and at sea as possible careers, was a much better game than the more recent versions. Clue (regular and its expanded versions) were pretty good. When everyone got tired we played Yahtzee.

I also remember enjoying a murder mystery game based on Clue that required playing a scene on a VHS tape. We tried dozens of other games as well. Our basement is full of games, and the Corcorans had more than we did.

We also often celebrated New Year’s and several other holidays with the Corcorans. We watched Brian and Casey grow up. Casey was an acrobat, and Brian excelled at taking things apart and putting them back together. He loved to play with go-bots and transformers.

I also remember showing Brian how to do both types of Indian wrestling—standing up and lying down, the way that Andy Burnett did on Walt Disney.

The closest thing that we had to a vacation during the “anything for a buck” days was a Murder Mystery Weekend near Lancaster, PA. It was staged by some actors in and around a fairly nice hotel in the countryside. The theme was a set of killings in a mob family. My character was one of the family members. He was named Dominic (called “Nicky”), and he was newly married.

I picked up a white fedora somewhere and rented a realistic stage pistol with a shoulder holster from a costume shop in Hartford. I was really ready to get into it. After all, even by that time I had read at least a hundred murder mysteries.

The organizers made me stow the pistol away. Didn’t they know that the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun? I should have quoted Charlton Heston to them: “I’ll give you my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.” I still wore the shoulder holster.

Could you stab him in the heart with a pocketknife?

The first murder occurred pretty much in full sight of everyone at the first gathering. A fairly large Italian guy wearing a three-piece suit was found dead. He had been stabbed in the heart with a pocketknife.

It is a thoroughly documented fact that all Italian mobsters wear sleeveless undershirts.So, the knife, even if it missed the broad lapels would have needed to penetrate the suit coat, the vest, the shirt, the undershirt, the skin, and the rib cage. Maybe Andre the Giant could kill someone who was wearing all this armor with one casual blow with a pocketknife, but I didn’t see anyone in our group who looked capable of such a feat. Even if sufficient thrust was employed, I would bet on the blade breaking or sliding to one side before it penetrated all of those layers of protection..

Several scenes that involved some or all of the actors were staged. One took place on the Strasburg Rail Road. I don’t remember the details.

We were allowed to submit written questions. Mine was about some flowers that a character had reportedly ordered for some reason. I was told that the answer, which I don’t remember at all, had important information, which I should share with the other guests. I dutifully disclosed it to everyone with whom I conversed.

At the end everyone was supposed to write up a solution. The best one, as judged by the organizers, won a prize. No one got the solution right. The person to whom the prize was awarded missed out on most of the clues entirely. She had spent most of her time shopping in Lancaster.

Deadly in the hand of a small woman.

The revealed murderer was the smallest member of the cast, perhaps 5’2″ and 100 pounds. She was absolutely incapable of committing the first murder. In fact, I don’t think she could have killed him with a pocket knife if he was already unconscious and wearing nothing but his sleeveless undershirt.

In addition, she had no motive for the other crimes attributed to her. That is, the personality that we knew had no motive. She supposedly had multiple personality disorder1, and the diminutive body that she shared with two other personalities committed the other two murders. Give me a break.

For Halloween of 1981 or 1982 Sue and I drove to Brooklyn for a costume party thrown for her friend Eddie Lancaster from Brothers Specifications in Detroit. Sue dressed as Peter Pan. I came disguised as a college professor who never got tenure. It was a long drive, but no drive was too long for Sue if friends were at the other end. She loved to sit and talk with old friends, and she made new ones very easily.

We also drove up to Vermont to see Sue’s friend Diane Robinson at least once or twice. I met her husband Phil Graziose, one of the Air Force guys from the Alaska adventure. He seemed like a nice guy. He set up a small business in the St. Johnsbury area as a locksmith. They lived in a trailer park, a new experience for me. There were things that I could talk about with Phil, even football! I had nothing in common with Diane and her myriad relatives, almost all of whom stayed close to home. Sue absolutely adored this family. I have never quite understood this. Maybe she appreciated the way that they all got along.

In 1981 or 1982 we were invited to Dave Tine’s house. His television had a huge rear-projection screen. It was the first “home entertainment center” we had ever seen. His sister (whose name I don’t remember) owned and operated a retail store name Video Land. It sold hardware as well as videos. We watched Nine to Five together. This was something of a real treat for us. We almost never went to movies. They were too expensive.

Sue’s family in Enfield held get-togethers pretty often. I usually accompanied her. I really struggled at these affairs. I had a hard time talking with most of her Enfield relations. The big exception was her youngest sister, Betty. She hosted a large party at her parents’ house most summers. She set up areas for volleyball and croquet. Also, Betty’s mother had a swimming pool. Tom Corcoran also attended most of these affairs.

Jack and his wife.

I think that it was at one of these parties that I met Jack LaPlante, the brother-in-law of Sue’s sister Karen. He worked and coached at Hartford Public High School, which over the years became a rough place. He has been inducted into the school’s Hall of Fame.

I always enjoyed talking with Jack. He was fascinated by the fact that we still played board games with other adults.

Jeffrey Campbell and our guide Jackson in Lake Manyara National Park in 2015.

Betty’s friends were much more approachable for me than the relatives on the Locke side. The lives of the latter seemed to center around trucks and cars. I liked all of Betty’s friends. Karen Shapiro, who worked with disadvantaged kids, ended up marrying Paul Locke, and so I saw her occasionally. Jeffrey Campbell, a pharmacist whom Betty has always called Pancho, was around from time to time. In 2015 he came with us on our epic trip to Tanzania, which is described in great detail here.

I also remember a friend of Betty’s named Harriet, but I don’t remember much about her.

I remember that we drove to Rhode Island once to visit Victor Barrett, with whom Sue worked at F.H. Chase, and his wife, Mary Codd2. They ran a small business called Coddbarrett Associates that developed computer-generated graphics for companies.

It was interesting to talk to another couple who were struggling as pioneers in an infant industry. Their work needed a lot more processing power than ours, and so their financial commitment was greater. On the other hand, they also had better credentials. Actually, everyone had better credentials than we did.

One thing that I remember vividly is that Victor and Mary almost never cooked. They either ate frozen dinners or something from a restaurant. Sue and I never did the first and almost never did the second.

Sue had an annual tradition of visiting her land in Monson, MA, on the weekend of Columbus Day when the foliage was at its peak, and the weather was to her liking. I accompanied her a few times. She actually built an outhouse and a tree platform up there. The outhouse was trashed by someone and the tools that she left up there were stolen.

She could sometimes talk her nephew, Travis LaPlante, and/or Brian Corcoran into making the pilgrimage with her.

Sue planned a weekend outing for us in Mt. Washington, NH. We stayed at the famous hotel5 in Bretton Woods. We took the cog railroad up to the top of the mountain, which is one of the windiest places on earth.

Sue planned on me playing golf on the links course that is adjacent to the hotel, but I did not feel like it.

I think that Tom and Patti Corcoran joined us for one day. I seem to recall that Sue and Patti played Tennis. Well, Patti played, and they both chased Sue’s errant shots.

I remember that the hotel hosted a Trivial Pursuit game in the evening. Sue and I played as a team. We really cleaned up. One of the other guests asked us if we had memorized all the answers.

Sandy Bailey, whom we knew from our installation at Harland-Tine, invited us to her house in Manchester, CT, for an evening of games. We were, as usual, late. A group of people were playing Dark Tower, the game advertised on TV by Orson Wells. It seemed like a very interesting game, but I never got around to playing it. I later tried to purchase a copy, but I could not find one.

We met Sandy’s housemate, a guy who worked for the Digital Equipment Corporation. Of course, he tried to convince me that we should convert our ad agency software to run on DEC machines. He even gave me a handbook for DEC’s version of the BASIC language.

In the fall of 1987 Sue and I decided to drive to Washington, DC, for the weekend. We left on Friday afternoon, October 9, and got as far as New Jersey. We stopped at a motel off of the Interstate. The person at the desk seemed surprised that we wanted to stay the whole night. When Sue asked for more towels, he went across the street to a store and bought some.

We laughed about it; it was not that sleazy-looking from the outside.

When we arrived in Washington we spent the day at the National Zoo. We got to see the baby pandas. A male orangutan effortlessly hurled his poop over the fence at the tourists. Overall it was a very pleasant experience, even though I was never able to spot the kiwi in its dark cage.

We stayed overnight at Howard Johnson’s. When we went to supper, the other people in the restaurant seemed somehow different. It wasn’t until later that we realized that we had chosen to come to Washington on the same day as about 200,000 gay people who were in town for “The Great March”.

On Sunday the parking was a nightmare, but the Smithsonian’s museums were not crowded at all.

In late 1985 my sister Jamie surprisingly reentered our lives She had recently married Joe Lisella. Joe, Jamie, and her daughters moved to Simsbury, CT. For the next fourteen years I spent as much time as I could with her and her family, which grew fairly rapidly after she came to New England. Those visits and trips are documented here.

1. This phenomenon is now known as dissociative identity disorder, which is a better name because of the vague nature of the word personality. I personally suspect that the kind postulated in this story occurs more often in the movies than in real life.

2. Mary Codd’s story can be read at her website, which is marycodd.com.

3. The Whalers’ last season was 1997. The Civic Center underwent drastic remodeling in 2004 and in 2021 it is called the XL Center.

4. My recollection of the event was faulty. When I have told this story to people I have claimed that neither of the teams made the playoffs that year. I apologize for the unintentional misinformation. The Whalers lost to Montreal in the first round of the playoffs.

5. Since 2015 it has been called the Omni Mt. Washington Resort.

1978-1980 Detroit: Dungeons and Dragons

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A new obsession. Continue reading →

Throughout my life I had enjoyed playing board games, especially war games made by Avalon Hill. However, it was always hard to find people to play with. I read an article about Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) in a magazine in late 1977 or early 1978. The game sounded very intriguing, but the article did not make it very clear exactly what it entailed. There did not appear to be much to it, but apparently in some locations people became very involved in the game.

On August 17, 1948, my thirtieth birthday, a day on which I was already scheduled to have a big party in the evening, I drove to a toy store, located the basic set of Dungeons and Dragons, and bought it. It was not expensive, and the box was not very heavy. When I shook it, something rattled a little.

When I got home I opened it and was a little disappointed. There was no board and no game pieces. The box contained only five dice of different shapes and colors and a forty-eight-page book of instructions. Each die had a unique number of faces: 4, 6, 8, 12, and 20. These were to be used to determine random results for different types of events. Eventually it became pretty clear that the primary purpose of the dice was to provide some substance to the “set”. All that the game really required were the rules, a great deal of imagination, and some way of generating random numbers.

Ah, but the rules. The basic concept of the game was simple. One person served as the referee (called the Dungeon Master or DM). Before the players arrived, the DM needed to spend some time drawing a map on graph paper and creating an outline of the adventure. Many adventures were traditionally underground, but they could just as well be in a castle, a ship, or anywhere else.

I was hoping for weightless +10 mithral armor in XXL.

The various rooms (or caverns or holds or whatever) might be empty, might contain innocuous items, or might contain treasure. Some of the valuables might even be magical (or cursed, for that matter). However, danger lurked everywhere in the form of monsters, evil-doers, and traps. The DM would most likely need to make on-the-spot decisions about unexpected activities from the players, but the more details that were planned in advance the better. It was also a good idea for the DM to have some “random” events ready in case the adventurers dawdled.

To get the adventure going the players need some way of learning about the dungeon. Non-playing characters created by the DM could often fill this role, or it could be arranged that they could find an ancient scroll or something.

Not this kind of elf.

Players had to prepare, too. Each controlled one or two characters. The characters’ abilities (strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity) could be generated using six-sided dice. Their endurance, measured in “hit points”, was also determined by rolls of the dice.

Dwarves were short, tough, and cheap. Negotiating a price was called “dwarfing him down”.

Players were allowed to choose the class (fighter, magic-user, cleric, or thief—more came later) and race (human, elf, dwarf, half-elf, half-orc, or halfling) and alignment (lawful or chaotic, good or evil) of their characters. Magic users and clerics could memorize a spell or two. Some races had special abilities or limitations. Every character was born with a little money with which to buy some weapons, armor, and supplies.

Nobody won an adventure, but it was possible to achieve a goal that made some or all of the characters stronger. It was also possible for characters to die.

Spells were definitely useful, but the magic-users’ aversion to armor led to a high mortality rate.

Players were not required to disclose any of their characteristics to the others, but every character had to persuade the others that he/she would be a valuable addition to the party. Recalcitrant characters could and sometimes did say no.

So far, so good. I constructed a little dungeon, and I invited Sue, Vince Follert, and the Benoits to play it. I tried my best to decipher the rules on movement and battles, but it just seemed like the monsters—even the ones that were just powerful humans—moved in slow motion while the party members dashed around and slaughtered them. After a few adventures the players were so powerful and rich that they could take on almost anything,

After the first few games, I knew that something was wrong. The players enjoyed the games, but the battles were not close to realistic. Outcomes were never in much doubt. I read and reread the rules. You can read them yourself here. Take a look. The rules for time and movement are on p. 9. Can you figure them out?

These were helpful.

I started to frequent a hobby store on Gratiot Avenue. It sold inch-high lead figurines as well as issues of Dragon magazine and some pamphlets containing details of dungeons or whole campaigns that experienced players had designed. I invested in all of these. The purchases of the magazines and pamphlets were a good idea, but the figurines were a mistake. Anyone who spent a lot of time painting figurines wass going to be very upset if the character died, and a crucial element of the game is the belief of the players in the mortality of the characters. It is what gives the edge to the game.

The first edition of the Player’s Handbook was published in June of 1978. I was not able to lay my hands on one until several months after that. The confusion about movement and how battles (called “melee” in D&D) should be refereed was cleared up by this work. I read it from cover to cover many times, and I had at least a dozen pages tabbed for quick reference.

The quality of the writing in this book was much better than the rules for the basic set. The illustrations were also marvelous.

The Dungeon Master’s Guide was published in 1979. I preordered a copy and picked it up the day that it arrived at Comic Kingdom. The clerk told me that all of their copies were sold the first day. I don’t remember what the book cost, but it was definitely worth it. Everything about the game now made sense. The quality of the adventures that I designed improved enormously.

The Dungeon Masters Guide was also great fun to read. At least twenty pages of mine were tabbed for easy reference.

There was still one problem. The original characters that played in our early adventures were were much too powerful. Their participation in those “Monte Haul” games had left them so rich and powerful that they could no longer sensibly play with inexperienced characters. Superman never took Jimmy Olsen on adventures.

The Monster Manual was useful mostly for generating ideas. A DM who used one could show the illustration instead of trying to describe it.

I did not set out to solve this problem, but … In one of the games in late 1978 or 1979 I designed a White Dragon named Frix. For some time I spread fables and stories about his enviable treasures and his awesome super-cold breath. One day a group of the rich and powerful characters assembled a small party and decided to go after Frix.

The adventure started in the usual way. Once in the cave complex, the party ran into a few squads of orcs and the like. They quickly disposed of them and made their way down to the fourth level, which their informant had told them was the abode of the great white dragon. The party found the lair and then burst in without taking any precautions.

I rolled a die to see whether they had surprised Frix. It wasn’t likely. At least one of them was clanging around in plate mail a hundred feet beneath the ground and they talked to one another constantly. So, Frix struck first with his frigid breath. They rolled saving throws, but, alas, they all were frozen to death.

The maps of the city and its environs were about thirty inches on a side.

None of them took this well, but a couple of weeks later Vince, one of the participants, asked me if they could have avoided the peril if they just had asked their cleric to memorize the Resist Cold spell instead of the Cure Light Wounds spell that clerics always used. When I admitted as much, he conceded that they were all idiots and deserved to die.

In a way they became legendary, not for their accomplishments in previous dungeons but for their arrogance and lackadaisical preparation in the last one.

Every building was numbered on the detailed map of the city

I came across The City State of the Invincible Overlord, a publication of the Judges Guild, at Comic Kingdom, and I bought it. It had detailed maps and descriptions of the contents of nearly every business in the city. I bought a lot of 5″x8″ index cards and a box to hold them. I made one card for each business so that I could rapidly find them. From that point on, I started every adventure that I created with the characters at an inn in the city. After the original encounter with the proprietor, another customer, or an employee they could walk to other buildings to purchase gear or ask for information. Setting all this up took a lot of time, but it worked well.

My file had a card for every building in the city.

The next major step was a gigantic one. At some point in late early 1979 Sue obtained an IBM 5120 computer for her business, TSI Tailored Systems. How she managed this is explained here. I took advantage of this to write a few BASIC programs that really enhanced the experience of D&D get-togethers both for the players and for the DM.

The fist program automated the process of generating a new character. The player entered a number. The program used the number as the seed for the built-in random number generator and produced a list of the character’s ability scores. The player could save or reject them. If the scores were accepted, a permanent record was made. This program greatly accelerated the process of getting a new player ready for the first adventure.

The next step was to allow the editing of the player record to reflect advancement to higher levels and other important changes. A sheet of green-bar paper that contained almost all of the personal information needed for an adventure could then be printed out for each player.

The final step was the program to assemble a party. When all of the characters had been entered, a printout was created that had information that the DM needed for each player in an easy-to-read format. This dramatically reduced the time spent paging through the handbooks looking for tables.

The last program was the simplest. It just provided a way of printing up a set of rumors to distribute randomly to the characters.

D&D was a lot more fun with these programs. They cut down on the drudgery and left more time for the adventures. No one ever complained about them.

Our basement was an ideal location for an adventure. The DM sat on a stool behind the bar. Their were couches (well, actually one was the back seat of an old Mercedes) and chairs aplenty for the players. People brought their own drinks and snacks.

Sue sometimes played. Her principal character was a cleric named Sr. Mary Chicos, named after a former nun who worked at Brothers Specifications. She also did some work on an adventure featuring Massai warriors, but I don’t think that we ever played it.

A lot of students from Wayne State’s Forensics Union played. In addition to the people mentioned above, the group included Mike Craig and a friend of his who ate an enormous amount of snacks. In other circles the players “crawled” dungeons, but Mike introduced the phrase, “Let’s dunge” to our group. Jo Anne might have come once or twice. Nancy Legge, Gerry Cox, and Mark Buczko were definitely regulars. Kim Garvin came once. I think that Scott Harris also played at least once.

I am sure that there were other participants. A professor in the speech department attended one adventure, and he brought his son. They chose not to play, but they observed for hours.

I don’t remember too many details of the dungeons that I created. I remember one in which the players discovered a space ship. It was not much fun.

I spent a lot of time on the one that the speech prof attended. The characters needed to arrange passage on a ship to get to an island owned by a witch. Fortunately they did not select the boat with the lowest charge. They might have spent the rest of the time looking for Davey Jones’ locker.

When the party arrived at the island, the witch gave them a quest and promised to reward them handsomely if they succeeded in killing her rival, a frost giant. There were two possible approaches to the cave in which her enemy lived; The Path of the Forlorn was full of traps, and the Path of the Misbegotten was subject to attacks from monstrous creatures. The party chose the monster route. The witch, however, insisted that the group’s most fit participant (as measured in hit points) stay behind with her to keep her company. She was SO lonely. So, the party’s best fighter missed the most importantUr part of the adventure.

My favorite part of the dungeon was the entrance to the giant’s lair. It was a sheet of ice thirty feet long at a forty-five degree angle. It was not easy to escape from this place in a hurry. The group did a good job of dealing with the obstacles, and they won the prize. The poor guy who was left with the witch had to be carried to the awaiting ship by the exhausted adventurers.

I liked to play in the adventurer’s groups occasionally. I had six characters that I remember. My original character was Prufrock the cleric. I think that he had a magic hammer. I had two female characters. Kithra was obviously based on Wonder Woman. Her first purchase was high hard boots. Tontonia was a half-elf with a much less dynamic personality. Urgma was very stupid but a strong fighter who was comfortable taking orders. Pslick was a magic user who also had some “psionic” powers. He was also a wise guy. Gubendorf was a thief. He was so obnoxious that he was killed by his own party at the end of his first adventure.

A teenager named James Dallas Egbert III was in the news in 1979-80. He was described as a “genius” or “child prodigy” who was majoring in Computer Science. For some reason he was living in his dorm room at Michigan State in the middle of August in 1979. Then he “disappeared”.

His parents back in Dayton, OH, somehow heard about D&D and the steam tunnels. They thought that he might have been killed by a D&D cult acting out fantasies in the tunnels. They told their theory to the newspapers and hired a private detective.The news reports emphasized two things. 1) JDE3 played D&D; 2) He and some friends explored the steam tunnels in East Lansing. They speculated that he and his friends were acting out an adventure, and he was killed either accidentally or as a sacrifice to Asmodeus (do NOT say the name out loud or you will immediately summon him, and he is NEVER in a good mood).

Suedomsa backwards.

The detective never found him (but he did find a book deal). JDE3 eventually called the detective and told him that he had taken a bus to New Orleans, where he was NOT developing a D&D campaign based on voodoo or Mardi Gras. The detective tried to talk JDE3 into returning home to Dayton, but that was never going to happen. Instead JDE3 tried unsuccessfully to kill himself twice. He succeeded the third time when he used a gun.

I smelled a rat in this story from day 1. First of all, if he was a computer genius, why was he going to a state-run ag school? What was wrong with MIT or Cal Tech?

Second, why did he not go home for the summer after his freshman year? Most students are eager to compare experiences with their old high school buddies.

A great place to stage an adventure.

Third, I knew a group of guys who messed around in the steam tunnels in Ann Arbor. If I had been running a D&D campaign in those years, a few might have played in it. However, we would never have played in the tunnels. The reason is simple. There is no light. D&D requires lots of reading and mapping. The two activities are totally incompatible. I have never been in the steam tunnels of East Lansing, but I doubt that they are large enough for bugbears, much less giants, djinn, or dragons. Students might have discussed what an adventure in a tunnel would be like, but they would never act it out in such an unwieldy environment. A hero needs room to swing that two-handed sword and enough light to identify his foe.

Finally, it just seemed obvious to me that he had run away. Something must have been going on at home. It turns out that he was gay. When I was a freshman at U-M, my parents suspected me of being gay or on drugs or something because of the way that a friend (without my permission) answered my phone in the dorm. My mom and dad flew up to Ann Arbor to check out the situation. I would bet anything that JDE2 made some kind of threat that caused JDE3 to think that East Lansing would no longer be far enough away from his parents.

A similar take on this sordid tale can be read here.

After we left Detroit I played D&D a few times. When it appeared unlikely that I would have any further use of my materials, I gave them to Sue’s nephew, Travis LaPlante.

1979-1980: Wayne State Debate Tournaments, etc.

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Debate at Wayne. Continue reading →

The resolution for 1979-1980 was: “Resolved: That the federal government should significantly strengthen the regulation of mass media communication in the United States.” Once again the resolution was much more limiting than the ones of the middle 1970’s. In the fifteen elimination rounds at the NDT the affirmative teams won eight debates, and the negatives won seven.

The coaching staff was quite different. Vince Follert left for Western Illinois. The Benoits also moved on. Jack Kay earned his PhD and accepted a job at the University of Nebraska. I don’t remember if Sheri Brimm was still around. Tuna Snider, Ron Lee, and Gerry Cox joined the staff.

As in the other years, it was all hands on deck for the first couple of months. We spent a great deal of time working with the inexperienced novices in order to find compatible partners and to get them reasonably well prepared for the novice tournament sponsored by the Michigan Intercollegiate Speech League.

I think that Gerry Cox mostly worked with the novices. The only one with significant high school experience was Dennis Corder.

We also reprised the trip to Ann Arbor to research in U-M’s libraries. I don’t remember who came, but the productivity matched the standard set in the previous year.

Varsity: Kent Martini and Chris Varjabedian graduated. Kevin Buchanan returned to the team, and George paired him with Scott Harris. I don’t know why George skipped over Mike Craig, who had had an excellent year in 1978-79 and had also displayed a great attitude. Maybe it was because neither he nor Scott had been a second negative at Wayne State. At any rate, Mike debated with Dave Debold all year.

Someone entered the ZSR library to study and left with a new (to him) cowboy hat.

I do not remember many specifics from this year. I remember only one tournament that I definitely attended, Wake Forest. I do not remember how we did. What I do remember is that I left my cowboy hat in the Z. Smith Reynolds library there.

I don’t remember what specific cases the Wayne State debaters defended during the year. I do, however, remember the one run by the Sutherland twins who debated for Louisville. Their case was about free speech and the cable television industry that was still in its infancy. I judged them on their affirmative several times. and I always voted for them. So did a lot of other judges; no one was surprised that they received a first round bid to the NDT.

I noticed that the second affirmative for Louisville always gave heavy emphasis in the 2AC to a piece of evidence that had seemed innocuous when it was read in the opening speech. Someone on the Wayne State team found the original source for this quote, and I worked with them to develop a sophisticated block of arguments about it. This foiled their strategy. We never lost to Louisville again.

The other popular case that I remember was one that banned billboards. They supposedly caused “blight” and traffic accidents. I thought back on how much I loved Burma Shave billboards and the countless roadside signs for Wall Drug. Also, we would never have made that pleasurable stop at Reptile Land in the previous year if those ads were banned.

These advantages certainly seemed as real to me as the alleged problems, but I could think of no persuasive way to turn them into debate arguments.

Scott and Kevin had a great year, from start to finish. They earned the distinction of being the first Wayne State team to receive a first round bid1 to the National Debate Tournament, which was held at the University of Arizona. Going into the tournament they were the ninth-ranked team in the country.

Mike and Dave also had a good year. They became the fourth consecutive team from Wayne State to qualify for the NDT at the District 5 tournament. So, in my six years of coaching at U-M and Wayne State, seven of my teams qualified for the NDT, and five teams made it through districts. The one team that did not qualify barely missed after going 0-8 the year before. I was definitely a better coach than I was a debater.

I got to attend the tournament, too. I had seniority, but I had been in the doghouse academically for several months. I knew that George would go, but if he brought anyone else, I thought that it would be Tuna or Ron. At this nationals I spent a lot of time judging.

The adventure of flying to Tucson is described here.

This photo is from 1970 at UA.

We had a great time in Tucson. The weather was fantastic, and the atmosphere at the university was invigorating after nine months in the cold in Detroit. Young men and women were playing Frisbee in shorts and tee shirts on the lawn of one of the buildings. One morning I went on a jog with Scott and Dave. We even persuaded George to take us to an authentic Mexican restaurant for supper one evening.

Scott and Kevin qualified for the elimination rounds with a 6-2 record. Scott was the #8 speaker in the tournament. Unfortunately, the guys were upset in a 3-2 decision by two ladies from Southern Cal even though Wayne State was on the affirmative. I don’t remember Mike and Dave’s record, but I think that they finished near the middle of the field.

I don’t know how George finagled it, but Scott (partnering with Dave Debold) also won a first-round bid to the 1981 tournament. He and Dave were again 6-2, and Scott was the #2 speaker. Wayne State won its octafinal round, but fell to Pittsburgh, the eventual champions, in the quarterfinals.

I was very happy to read in the NDT book for 1981 that Kim Garvin and Nancy Legge also debated at the NDT that year. I wonder what happened to Mike and Kevin. Kim and Nancy also attended the 1982 edition of the tournament.

1. In two consecutive years, 1967 and 1968, Wayne State was exempted from qualifying for the NDT because its team had debated in the final round of the previous year’s tournament. First round bids were first implemented in 1973.

1978-1979: Wayne State Debate Tournaments, etc.

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The debate topic for 1978-1979 was: “Resolved: That the federal government should implement a program which guarantees employment opportunities for all United States citizens in the labor force.”

My recollection of this entire year is spotty. I don’t even remember any specific cases that debaters were running. That word “guarantee” was pretty constraining. Anyone who did not like economics was in for a long year. The national unemployment rate at the time was about 6 percent, but it was slowly decreasing.

As in the previous year all of the coaching staff (except George) spent the first few months working with the novices. I don’t remember any details at all.

The varsity team largely remained the same. Debbie McCully did not exactly graduate (as explained here), but she was no longer associated with the team. Kevin Buchanan was still in school, but he decided not to participate in debate. Chris Varjabedian rejoined the team. George paired him with Scott Harris, and they were clearly the top team all year long. However, Mike Craig and Kent Martini also had a very good year.

All of the debate coaches returned from 1977-1978. Sheri Brimm was added.

The top novice team was Dave Debold and Kim Garvin. They were also quite an “item” for most of the year.

The team did not go to Camp Tamarack in 1978. I am not sure why not. I don’t remember anyone discussing it. I offered to organize a research trip to U-M for the varsity debaters. George deemed it a great idea. I drove a group of the debaters to Ann Arbor. It was probably on a Sunday; Saturday in the fall is devoted to football at U-M. I showed everyone where the libraries were. We then split up, researched for a few hours, and then gathered for lunch. Afterwards, people changed locations and continued researching. Everyone had a pretty good time, and a lot was accomplished. The debaters were a little overwhelmed by the amount and quality of materials available at U-M. I knew very well that there was a lot more within a mile or two, but I did not rub it in.

The social side of Tamarack was replaced by a Halloween party. It is described here.

Varsity: I must have gone to other tournaments during the course of the year, but the only one that I specifically remember is when I accompanied the two top teams on the “Florida Swing”. Scott, Chris, Mike, Kent, and I piled in a van supplied by the university’s motor pool and set off on I-75 for Tallahassee, the home of Florida State University. My recollection is that George made arrangements for us to stay overnight in his favorite “ma and pa” motel in Tennessee.

Everybody on the trip was quite serious about the upcoming debates. Quite a bit of productive work got done. Even so, it was an awfully long time to sit in the car.

Despite the backbreaking drive the debaters did well at FSU. I think that Scott and Chris made it to the final round. Mike and Kent also qualified for the elimination rounds. I have a vague recollection that they may have even been scheduled to face each other in an elimination round, and I had to decide who should advance.

The second tournament was at Central Florida University in Orlando. We had a free day in between tournaments. Unfortunately, there was not nearly enough time available to stand in line at Disney World or any of the other major tourist attractions in the Orlando area.

Fortune shone on us when we were just about halfway to our destination. I spotted a billboard for an interesting place called Reptile Land on state highway 301 near the town of Lawtey, FL, southeast of Jacksonville. We decided to give it a try.

By the time of our visit it was a little bigger than it appears in the photo. It also actually had more than just snakes and alligators. As I recall, their was at least one chimpanzee and diverse other birds and mammals. And there were no lines!

Reptile Land was obviously a tourist trap, but we all had a good time thee. I regret to tell readers that readers that Reptile Land closed forever not long after our visit.

UCF was not yet known for football, but it had a very good debate team in 1978-1979.

After that nice little break we were all business for the rest of our time in the Sunshine State. In the Central Florida tournament both teams again qualified for the elimination rounds. This time they landed on different sides of the bracket. Both teams won their octafinal rounds. Both teams won their quarterfinal rounds. Both teams also won in the semis.

So, for the first time in the long history of the Wayne State program, two of its teams closed out the finals of a varsity tournament. We brought home both the first and second place trophies. It was quite an accomplishment, and we were all super-pumped. We could not wait to call George and tell him the news. The trip back to Detroit was much longer than the drive down to Florida in terms of miles, but the time flew by.

It seems strange to report that that jubilant return trip is my last clear memory of the 1978-1979 debate season. I remember that Scott and Chris cruised through districts, but I don’t even recall whether I attended with them. Kent and Mike were awarded a second-round bid. So, for the first time ever Wayne State had two teams at the 1979 NDT at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. George did not bring a second coach, even though the team drove. I don’t remember why not.

At the NDT Scott and Chris qualified with a 6-2 record. This was the first time that Wayne State had qualified for the elimination rounds at NDT since 1967. Kent and Mike won five and lost three. They were the only 5-3 team that missed the elimination rounds. They persevered through a very tough schedule; and when their fate was announced, the crowd applauded their performance. I am sure, however, that it was a tough moment, especially for Kent, who was a senior.

Scott and Chris lost in the octafinals to Harvard on a 3-2 decision. Thus ended one of the greatest varsity debate seasons in Wayne State’s history. Wayne’s teams reached the quarterfinals of various tournaments twenty-seven times, the same number as in the previous year, but the close-out and the NDT performance made this year even better.

Televised Debates. For a few months Wayne State participated in a weekly television program on Channel 20 called City Update. It might have been the lowest-rated program on Detroit’s lowest-rated station. I was already quite familiar with the program because the main presenter was a very good-looking young lady whose name I don’t remember. They gave the team a fifteen-minute segment to present a one-on-one debate on a topic of our choosing. Many debaters and some of the IE performers got to appear before the camera.

Fire did not kill Garth Gimble. He was impaled on a Christmas tree.

The best debate was the one in December in which the topic was something like “Is there a Santa Claus?” Mike Craig stole the show as the negative. One of his arguments was entitled “Christmas tree deaths”. He based it on a segment of the Fernwood 2Night show. However, Mike lost; Jack Kay showed up in a Santa suit to deliver the verdict.

I moderated several of these debates. All that I did was to introduce the debaters and the topic. I was surprised that the whole operation was not more professional. The set consisted of a rostrum in an empty room. Only four of us were present—the two debaters, the moderator, and the camera person. On most occasions the camera person was the attractive lady who also hosted the show. Our segment of the show was taped, but we only got one attempt. If someone flubbed something, it was aired anyway.

On one occasion, however, the rules were slightly changed. Three of us that day taped a promo for City Update—the lovely hostess, a debater (I don’t remember which one; it might have been Ruth Kay), and me standing beside one another behind the rostrum. Someone else might have operated the camera, but I think that the presenter set the focus and then just let it run.

We did six takes. I said my lines correctly the first five times, but either the hostess or the debater was not happy with it. On the sixth attempt they both were fine, but I hesitated a little at one point That was the one we used because I said that I didn’t care.

High School Tournament: Every year that I coached at Wayne State the FU hosted a tournament for high school debaters. We all pitched in. In 1979 I was in charge of the tabulation room. Kent Martini and one or two other people helped out. Kent was done with his portion of the final results before the others had finished theirs. When he announced this fact, I told him to check everything again.

Well, he didn’t do it, and George ended up announcing incorrect results. When the mistake was realized, Kent went to George and apologized. He even told George that I had told him to check everything again.

Kent felt terrible, and, as I described here, I knew exactly how he felt. At least he admitted his mistake.

High School Institute. In each summer Wayne State hosted a week-long institute for high school debaters. U-M also hosted an institute, but theirs was more of a camp. Students stayed in the dorms, and it was famous throughout the state. The U-M institute was run by a Wayne State alumna, Jayne Greco1, who was also the debate coach at Kimball High School in Royal Oak, the institution that Kent Martini, Mike Craig, and Dave Debold attended.

In the 1979 edition of Wayne State’s institute I gave a lecture on topicality arguments. I insisted that they were an important part of argumentation in competitive debates. At some point I inserted the phrase “despite what Mrs. Greco might say at the U. of M. Institute”. This got back to her, and she complained to George.

George told me that I should call her and apologize to her. My sweaty hands nearly dialed her number several times, but I never did. I did not know what to say to her. I wasn’t sorry. I chose my words carefully, and I did not say anything untrue or insulting. She was notorious for thinking that only a few cases should be allowed so that no negative team would need to argue about topicality. I strongly disagreed.

Besides, I really did not care what she thought of me.

1. Jayne Greco died in 2000. Her rather sparse obituary can be found here.

1977-1980 Part 3B: Debate at Wayne State: The Coaches

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My recollections of the other coaches. Continue reading →

My recollections of the other coaches. Continue reading →

Any treatment of any aspect of debate at Wayne State University in the second half of the twentieth century must begin with George Ziegelmueller1. During the course of my seven years of debate I had formed two opinions of him: 1) He was a mediocre debate coach; 2) He was a horrible judge. I certainly underrated him as a coach (at least on the affirmative), but not as a judge. Of course, I was (and still am) prejudiced. After my last tournament (districts in 1970, which is described here) I hated him as much as I have ever hated anyone in my life.

Nevertheless, I can usually compartmentalize. George and I had a good working relationship from the start. I did whatever he told me to do. I had great respect for his ability to deal with the bureaucracy, and I have no doubt whatever that the welfare and success of his debaters meant the world to him.

Welcome to Phoenix!

My favorite George story took place in the Detroit Metro Airport in 1980. Six of us were preparing to attend the National Debate Tournament at the University of Arizona. George and I were the coaches. The debaters were senior Scott Harris, juniors Kevin Buchanan and Mike Craig, and Dave Debold, who was only a sophomore.

We were all very excited. For three of the four guys it was the very first time that they had flown to a tournament. For me it was also very special. I had never been to the state of Arizona. Also, I knew that this might well be my last debate tournament ever.

George handed out the tickets to each of us. He informed us of the gate from which the plane would depart. Before we went through security, however, Dave noticed something amiss. “These tickets are for Phoenix,” he said. “Isn’t the University of Arizona in Tucson?”

Our tickets were indeed non-stop tickets to Phoenix on Frontier Airlines. Incredibly, George was able to exchange the tickets for ones to and from Tucson. We only had to wait in the terminal for an hour or so, and all of our luggage was also transferred to our new flight.

George did not really believe in tipping. Having been to Europe several times, I agree with him in principle. However, this is not Europe; most American restaurants paid (and still pay) their employees scandalously low wages.

The way George expressed his philosophy about tipping was this: “I pay for the meal out of the back-pocket of my pants; the tip comes from the front pocket.” That is, he paid for the bill with folding money and the tip with change.

I only accompanied George on a few trips. When I did, I would covertly pass the hat among the debaters. I would add my donation and give the total collection to one of the debaters. On our way to the car he/she would remember something left behind in the restaurant, return to the table, and supplement the tip with what we had collected.

The tournament in Denver was held at Metropolitan State College, now known as Metropolitan State University. It was an excellent venue.

I worked very hard during my first year at Wayne. I went to whatever tournaments George selected for me, and I did not step on anyone’s toes. Even before districts I asked George if I could go to the National Debate Tournament in Denver in the spring. George was taken aback by this request.

Jack Kay, after all, was his right-hand man. George said that I could accompany the team to districts, but he and Jack would judge. I replied that the team (Debbie McCully and Scott Harris) did not need me at districts. However, they had very little experience on the national circuit, and I had a lot. I knew many of the debaters on the national scene and almost all of the coaches. I even volunteered to pay my own way to Denver if and when our team qualified. George eventually agreed, and he found the money.

This helped diminish, but not erase, the memory of the round against Ohio U. at districts in 1970.

Pam and Billy Benoit2 (beh NOYT) were my office-mates in Manoogian Hall. They had both attended Ball State University in Muncie, IN, and Central Michigan in Mount Pleasant. In 1979 Billy presented a paper on philosophy at a conference in Amsterdam. Pam went with him. I don’t remember how they got away with this. They both taught several classes.

Maybe in 2021.

Sue Comparetto somehow persuaded them to allow her to join them on this trip. She enjoyed the city immensely, and has wanted to return3 for the last forty-two years.

The Benoits once invited Sue and me over for supper in their apartment, which was near the campus. The repast itself was a little skimpy by my standards until they pulled out their fondue pot and the dipping snacks.

Billy and Pam were among the first players of Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) after I had purchased the original boxed set on August 17, 1978, as a present for myself on my thirtieth birthday. In the first few adventures we took turns as Dungeon Master. These were “Monte Haul” dungeons. The player characters soon reached level 5 or 6.Outlandishly rich orcs were slain by the thousand.

When the Player’s Handbook appeared a year or so later, I constructed a dungeon with a style that was more verismo. Deep in that dungeon was the lair of the fiercest monster they had yet to encounter, Frix the White Dragon. Non-player characters had warned everyone that he was very powerful because of his super-cold breath. One day Pam, Billy, and Vince Follert decided to go after him.

After a few minor skirmishes they found Frix’s cave, but, alas, Frix struck first and turned the entire party all to icicles. All three players were very angry at me for not providing them with a way to resurrect their highly prized characters.

The denouement of this story is in Vince’s section of this blog.

In 2021 I unearthed my slightly warped copy the graduate student’s bible.

By the time that Billy and Pam were ready to submit their dissertations in the spring of 1980 Sue and I had an IBM 5120 computer in our house. Sue used it for her fledgling programming business. I also tinkered with it. I had written a word processing program that printed documents in the format approved by the American Psychological Association. The only printer that it could use was a dot-matrix, but that was not yet considered gauche. I called my program “Amanuensis”.

The 5120 supported this printer and no other.

The university allowed graduate students a fixed number of minutes of computer time per semester. Pam and Billy traded me their minutes for one or two semesters in exchange for my printing of their dissertations using Amanuensis. Needless to say, I had to enter the text and footnotes through the keyboard. Producing a long paper with footnotes perfectly on a manual typewriter was a daunting task.

I ran into a few problems because, of course, no one checked my work. They became very jittery as the deadline day approached, but I was able to hand the final copies over to them with a few hours to spare.

In the winter of 1978-1979 Pam and Billy invited Sue, me, Vince, and, I think, John Pfeiffer to a weekend at a family cabin near Pokagon (poh-KAY-gun) State Park4. My recollection is that we drove there on Friday evening and returned on Sunday afternoon. Two thing stand out in my mind from this event. The first was mundane. Evidently there was a shortage of water in the plumbing system. The bathroom bore a sign that read: “If it’s yellow, let it mellow; if it’s brown, flush it down.” Five of us shared that toilet.

A long line to the top.

The other memory of that trip is epic. The toboggan run in the park is long and fast. The channels for the toboggans were not particularly narrow, but Billy was a big guy, and, to put it in nautical terms, he was broad in the beam. I think that we only participated in one run. We split into two groups of three. I went with Vince and John. Sue was in the Benoit’s group. The safety precautions for the ride were minimal. A guy at the top yelled “Keep your legs in!” before he gave the toboggan a shove.

Speed up to 43 mph coming down.

Our toboggan ride was somewhat thrilling because the pace was fast, and the riders had absolutely no control. I was in front. I just made myself as small as I could. The guy behind me had his legs on both sides of me. The guy behind him likewise put a leglock on the middle man. By the time that we reached the bottom, which was a quarter mile from the launching tower, one of Vince’s legs had rubbed against the side of the track a few times. He was sore but not injured. John and I were unscathed.

The three in the other toboggan did not fare as well. All three suffered scrapes. Billy was by far the worst. He stuck out on both sides of the toboggan and suffered rather ugly burns. We did not take him to the hospital, but he could hardly walk for a day or two, and he was sore for weeks.

Sheri Brimm joined the program in the fall semester of 1978. She had just graduated from Wright State University in Dayton, OH. She knew very little about debate. If Wright State had a debate team, I never heard of it, and they were in our district.

Sheri lived in an apartment near campus with her husband David. I seem to remember that he was going to Law School at Wayne State.

I was in one class with Sheri. I think that it was with the rhetoric professor, Dr. Jim Measell. For one of our assigned papers he provided very explicit instructions for what he wanted. I knew this guy and warned Sheri that she should do it exactly the way that he prescribed. She said that she thought that what he really was looking for was creativity. She may have been kidding, but she got a bad grade on the paper.

This is hydroplaning.

I also took one trip with Sheri. We were in charge of a van full of debaters headed for a nearby tournament. Akron University comes to mind, but I may be wrong. I let her drive because I wanted to work with some of the debaters. While we were still in Detroit it began to snow or sleet, and there was a little ice on the road. Basically, it was a normal winter day in Michigan in the seventies. The van started to skid. I yelled to her from the back of the van, “Slow down.”

“The car is hydroplaning,” she explained, but she did not drive noticeably slower.

“Hydroplaning is on water. This is ice. SLOW DOWN!” I countered.

I did not have many dealings with Sheri even though she returned for 1979-80. George may have let her work with some of the novice debaters, and she kept a chair warm during practice rounds.

Gerry Cox5 was my age. George was eighteen years older than I was. Everyone else in the FU was younger than I. Gerry joined the staff in 1979 after finally earning his bachelor’s degree the previous spring. I coached Gerry in my first two years. We became good friends, even though we had almost nothing in common. I also kept in touch with Gerry after I left Wayne St. He came to visit Sue and me twice while we lived in Rockville, CT. More memories of him can be read here.

I have three vivid recollections of Gerry from that last year. For years Gerry had been associated with the department off and on. I remember well the way that he treated the departmental secretary, whose name was, I think, Janet. On one occasion Gerry approached her desk and greeted her with the following: “Why don’t we rent a room at a hotel, rub Crisco all over both of our bodies, and see what happens?”

This approach was quite a bit different from my short conversations with her.

The second strong memory is of the only time that I ever saw Gerry nervous. He was for some reason chosen to give a speech on traffic safety to members of the Detroit Police Department. It may have been a contest. I drove him there for moral support.

Gerry had seen these up close a few times.

Gerry was reluctant even to enter the room. Apparently he feared that one of Detroit’s finest would recognize him from years gone for encounters in markedly less formal encounters, probably bars. At last we entered and took a seat. Gerry kept his eyes lowered while we were so seated.

Eventually Gerry gave his speech, which argued that requiring helmets for riders of motorcycles was a bad idea. It was a terrible speech. He claimed that requiring helmets would not reduce injuries much and that in some cases it would be counterproductive. I was shocked that a former Wayne State debater would make such a claim without a whiff of evidence.

Helmets are obviously counterproductive.

The close of his speech was greeted with tepid applause. As he approached me, he said softly, “Let’s get out of here.”

In the car I asked him why he made those claims without any evidence. He was stunned. He asked me, “Are you saying that I forgot to read the evidence?”

When I confirmed it he laughed and laughed and buried his head in his hands.

Steve D’Agostino coached some of the Individual Events (IE) people in 1977-78. I hardly knew him. I think that he had academic problems and left after one year.

Vince Follert6 was a pretty good debater at Loyola in Chicago, a Jesuit university. I judged him a few times before he graduated in 1977. His partner was weak, and the coaching at Loyola was not great. Even so, they did pretty well. I was favorably impressed.

Vince had a studio apartment near the campus. I am not sure that I ever entered it. He came to supper at our house on Chelsea a few times. We became pretty close friends. We usually ate lunch together at one of a few favorite restaurants on Woodward. Woodward Coney Island is still there in 2021! Their loose hamburger sandwiches were very tasty. I don’t remember the name of the other restaurant. Vince was enchanted by one of the waitresses who never wore a bra.

Vince stayed at Wayne for two years. I taught his classes whenever he was at a tournament, and he returned the favor when I was out of town. In the fall of 1978 he made the mistake of asking me to take his very first class. Here is how I began: “My name is Mike Wavada. Don’t write it down; I am not your teacher. Your real teacher is named Vince Follert. He is away at a debate tournament today. You won’t like him. He is fat, he smokes like a chimney, and he talks too fast.”

I did not mention it, but he also went through several six packs of Diet Pepsi every day.

Vince was as fond as I was of Dungeons and Dragons. He played every chance that he got. He was even more angry than the Benoits were at the instantaneous demise of his beloved characters when they stormed into Frix’s lair. I think that Vince’s main character was named Guelph the Elf.

Several months later he confronted me about the incident. “Resist Cold is a first level clerical spell, isn’t it? We were just idiots. We deserved to die.” He was right. They probably could have absconded with Frix’s fabulous treasure horde if they had bothered to prepare for cold weather with spells that any rookie cleric would know.

Vince and I attended a convention of the Central States Speech Association7 in the spring of 1979. We both presented papers there.

I don’t remember why we did not take Greenie. Instead, we rented a car from Budget. We got a good deal. There was a modest daily charge, but there was no mileage limit. My recollection is that we drove to St. Louis, went to the convention, and then drove back within twenty-four hours. That seems almost incredible. Maybe the trip took two days. In any case the man at Budget was astounded when he looked at the odometer.

I did not witness Vince’s presentation. His panel occurred at the same time as mine. Walter Ulrich, a very fine coach at the University of Houston, presented the first paper in our room. He argued that the value of the proposition should always be from the perspective of the collective interest of the people of the United States. There was time for questions after the evaluations. I asked Walter what he thought of propositions that were stated at a different level. For example, one of them that I debated in high school said that nuclear weapons should be controlled by an unspecified international organization. He opined that those resolutions were illegitimate.

The approach I called unfair is based on Archbishop Whately’s view of presumption.

My paper, which was the last one in our session, was on causality. I posited was not a useful construct in argumentation. Debates should focus on necessary conditions and sufficient conditions. I also argued that the negative teams had the responsibility to defend something in every debate. It was perfectly OK to defend what currently existed or what the government might do, but arguing that a case should be rejected because Congress could just pass a law to solve the problem or provide the benefit was an unfair reliance on the concept of presumption.

The two reviewers hated my paper. Dave Ling, the coach from Central Michigan (and a Wayne State alum), was at least nice about it. The other reviewer was from Washington University of St. Louis, a guy who was renowned as the worst judge on the circuit. He made fun of me. The time allotted was exhausted by the time that they finished. I did not get a chance to rebut what they said.

Most top coaches would have agreed with every word that I said, but they did not often attend conventions like this one.

One last memory of Vince popped into my head. One day in 1979 he came into Manoogian with a hickey on his neck. He made no attempt to hide it, but he would not talk about it.

Vince received his masters degree in the spring of 1979. He coached debate for Dale Hample at Western Illinois in 1979-1980.

Ken Haught might have been on the staff in my last year, 1979-1980. I remember him, but only vaguely

Jack Kay was George’s right-hand man when I arrived. He was still a graduate student, but he had an office of his own. I came to learn that Jack had been a member of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in his younger years. Reportedly he had actually met Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda.

Jack married Ruth Colwander, who was just a sophomore in my first year at Wayne State. Jack had been the coach of Ruth and the other novices in the previous year. They had done very well.

I don’t know why, but I interacted very little with Jack. I remember only two fairly innocuous incidents. The first occurred at a staff meeting. George told us that some financial assistance had become available for one debater. I don’t remember the amount. George asked for suggestions as to who should get it. I immediately recommended that Ruth, who was the only serious debater who had a job, should be considered. Jack, who was involved with but not married to Ruth, was astonished at my suggestion. I guess that he thought of me as a foe. If so, it was not mutual.

The second event occurred at the National Debate Tournament in 1978 in Denver. Wayne State sent one team (Debbie McCully and Scott Harris) and three coaches to this tournament.

Wayne State’s team met (I think) one of the teams from Redlands in the eighth round. The whole tournament knew that both teams from Redlands were running a case that had something to do with infanticide. I had never heard it, and I no idea of the substance of Redlands’ plan.

Jack ran into the library. I don’t know if he found anything. I kept out of his way.

Jack had, however, heard the case in a previous round. When he saw that our team was facing Redlands, he rushed to the library to try to photocopy something. He then spent the little remaining time lecturing Debbie and Scott on how to attack the cse.

I wished that he had shared his ideas with us earlier—there were fairly long breaks for power-matching after every round. I said absolutely nothing at the time; he might have had an inspired argument.

Scott and Debbie lost 3-0. If Jack had not taken over, I would have advised them to relax and avoid the temptation to twist any of their prepared arguments to fit this case. Instead, they should just try to challenge everything, make reasonable claims of their own, and watch for mistakes. They should then concentrate on finding one decisive argument that they could win and sell it dramatically in the last rebuttal.

Of course, they still probably would have lost to a team with more high-level experience.

Jack was a big guy. He was also, unless I am mistaken, the only Jewish member of the staff. He was, I guess because of his size, recruited to play Santa Claus at the FU Christmas party. However, his “ho-ho-ho” was worse than pathetic. So, I made the big laugh from off-stage while he was entering.

Ron Lee joined the staff in 1979-80 wife his wife Karen. She was my age and debated at either Southern Illinois or Illinois State. She might have done something with the team at Wayne, too.

Ron debated at Wayne State, at times with Jack Kay. The only thing that I remember about his coaching technique was that he insisted that the team eat at restaurants that had waiters and/or waitresses. He hated going to counters for his food.

It was probably better on skates.

John Pfeiffer came from Florida He was at Wayne State for my first two years. In the second year he was the IE director.

John had an interesting background. He had worked at Disneyland as a strolling bear character. He said that it was the worst job in the world. He had also appeared as a character on roller skates in Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona.

Donaldson’s Covenant books were my favorites.

Tuna Snider10 came to Wayne State in 1979-80, my last year, and was installed in Jack’s old office. I had known him a little when he was the coach at Boston College. I never heard anyone call him anything but Tuna.

I don’t think that I went to any tournaments with Tuna. In fact, the only interaction with him that I remembered was when he noticed that I was often sitting around the debate lounge reading a paperback book. One day he asked what kind of fiction I liked, and I answered, “Swords and sorcery”. He made a positive noise and returned to his office. In truth I read most of these fantasy books just to get ideas for D&D dungeons.

For some reason Tuna did not attend the NDT with us in Arizona in 1980, and my memories of his involvement with the program seemed to be minimal. Perhaps he had a falling out with George.

1. George died in 2019. A press release from the university can be read here.

2. In 2021 the Benoits are on the faculty of the communications department of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Billy’s Wikipedia page is here. His boss’s career is described on this webpage. Click on her photo or the blue text.

3. Sue and I have a river cruise scheduled for October of 2021. It departs from Amsterdam, and we have also scheduled one extra day there.

4. The toboggan run at Pokagon State Park remained open through the pandemic winter of 2020-2021. Its website is here.

5. Gerry died in an automobile accident in, I think, the eighties. At the time he owned a company that produced machined parts for auto dealers. It was located in his family’s home town in Kentucky.

6. Vince died of colon cancer in the early eighties.

7. In the twenty-first century it is called the Central States Communications Association.

8. In 2021 Ken is the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Dickinson State University in North Dakota.

9. Jack died in 2015. A tribute to him can be read here.

10. Tuna Snider got his PhD from Kansas, not Wayne State. He died in 2015 after spending more than thirty years at the University of Vermont. His Wikipedia page is here.