2004-2010 Members of the Simsbury Bridge Club Part 1

Who was who at the SBC. Continue reading

I started playing in the Wednesday evening games at the Simsbury Bridge Club (SBC) in May of 2004. My experiences playing there in the early years and my recollections about the people who were my partner are recounted here. This entry describes other recollection about the club, including lists of the people who participated and my memories of them, if any.

If my recollection is correct, the club charged $5 for a membership in 2004. The membership was for life; there were no annual dues. The table fee each week was also $5 for members. Non-members were charged $6. I bought a membership the first evening. At first the director had access to the kitchen that was adjacent to the Youth Room. So, free tea and instant coffee were available.

I took this and the next four photos shown here with a disposable camera at the Christmas party of 2004 or 2005. Shown here are (I think) Paula and Kathy Colket.

Paula Beauchamp was the owner/director of the club when I joined. I don’t know much about the history of the club before that. At one time there was a plaque honoring someone who had managed the club in the early nineties. I wish that I had taken a photo of it. The plaque was removed at some point before 2019.

Here are some of the people who played in 2004 and were never my partner in SBC games:

  • Louise Alvord mostly played with Carol Schaper (SHAH pur) and Clara Horn. She played once or twice a month for several years. I do not know what happened to her. The Internet (in 2021) seems to think that she might still be living in Tarriffville. She was a former nun, but she did not resemble any of the nus that I knew. She no longer had any use for anything related to the Catholic Church. Carol suggested once that Louise might be interested in my book on the popes, Stupid Pope Tricks (posted here). Louise wanted no part of it. I discovered in December of 2021 that she was still playing in the unsanctioned game at Eno Hall.
  • Carol and I played as partners a couple of times, but not at the SBC. She later played for several years with Maureen Denges. I liked Carol a lot, but she always claimed that she and Maureen were doing very badly whenever we were at the same table. Carol still lives in Simsbury, but she and Maureen stopped coming in 2019 or earlier.
  • In 2004 and for a year or two afterwards Maureen played with Pat Matthew. Pat was an extremely slow player, but they were both pretty good. I nearly lost it one time when Pat started harping on me to play faster on one hand. Pat died. I think that Maureen is still living in Granby.
  • Lila Englehart played a version of Schenken’s Big Club with Kay Hill. They also played at tournaments. I am pretty sure that Sue Rudd and I teamed up with them at least once. Lila was a large lady who drove a very large Buick SUV. She died at some point in the teens. Kay played more than Lila. For a while she partnered with Sue Rudd. She was still playing at the Hartford Bridge Club (HBC) when the pandemic caused it to close in March 2020. Kay was good at playing the cards, but her bidding was very old-school. She sometimes mentioned that she carried a gun. The story of my partnership with Sue is told here.
  • Mel Hirsch sometimes came up from Florida to play with his brother Jerry. More details of the games that I played with Jerry are provided here. Mel was a good player. He and Jerry often finished first.
  • I was surprised to see the names of Patty and Mark Howland. I did not remember them, but I played against Mark when he was assigned to play in an open game at the HBC in December 2021 with Jeanne Striefler. More about Jeanne can be read here.
  • Jerry Hudson (female) played regularly at the SBC with Jeanne Striefler. I think that she died a few years after I started playing. I remember only that she was astounded when I took off my game face and put on my silly tie at the Christmas party. She said, “You’re like a whole different person.”
  • Bob Nuckols‘ wife died the week before I started playing at the SBC. Everyone was talking about it. Bob returned to play with Bill Moody and a few other people including, for one game, me. He then played for a few years on a regular basis with Mary Lou Pech. I don’t remember too much about Bob except that his coffee mug had the black and gold colors of Purdue. He died in 2012. His obituary is here. Mary Lou was not a great player, but she was an awfully nice person. I remember that I made my first actual Endplay against her. She died in 2019. Here obituary is here.
  • I would have liked to get to know Joanna Overbaugh better. She only showed up a few times a year to play with Dorothy Clark. She spent the rest of her time on around-the-world cruises! I played with Dorothy once when Joanna was cruising. I wrote about it here. Dorothy was also one of the judges in the Hartford Courant’s story contest that I entered in 1989. That event is described here.
  • Helen Pawlowski was a very good player. I never played as her partner, but I got to know her pretty well when she took over as owner-director of the SBC. She was also the tournament manager for District 25 of the ACBL. In that role she found sites for our regional tournaments, negotiated the contracts, and dealt with the hotels in which we played. Soon after she took over the club in 2008 she began giving free classes before the games at Eno Hall. They were very popular. I always tried to show up early enough to listen to the lesson.
  • Laurie Robbins played a few times at the SBC, always with Paul Pearson. I don’t recall any occasion on which they finished below first. I never played as her partner, but I often played against her with almost uniformly bad results. In 2021 she is a teacher and director at the HBC. Much more about Paul can be read here.
  • David Rock is another exceptionally good player. He played in tournaments for several years with Sonja Smith. David was also very active in the administration of the district. He was vice-president of the New England Bridge Conference (NEBC) and was instrumental in setting up the smooth operation of the North American Bridge Championships held in Providence in 2014. David teamed up with Sally Kirtley to run the SBC in the teens. That period is described here. David moved to West Brookfield, MA. After that he only attended one game at the SBC.
  • Sonja played with Jean Seale at the SBC for many years. After Jean moved to Colorado Sonja came to only a few games at the SBC, usually playing with her son Steve. Much more about Sonja is posted here.
  • Shirley Schienman often played with her son, John Schienman. I never got to know Shirley—who always reminded me of Shirley Jones in her Partridge Family days—very well, but I had some good conversations with John. After John stopped coming to the SBC Shirley played with a variety of partners. Shirley died in 2017. Her obituary is here.
  • The North-South seats at table #1 at the SBC were usually occupied by Ellen and Tony Tabell. When the subject of Moysian fits came up during one hand, they told me that they had known Sonny Moyse in New York. They moved to Exeter, NH, and, for a time ran a bridge club in the area. Tony died in 2020. His obituary is here.
  • Claire Tanzer played almost every week with a few regular partners. I recall the details of only one conversation with her in December of 2009. It is recounted here.
  • Don Verchick and Nancy Campbell played a strong club system that they called “Precision”. C.C Wei would not have recognized it. They never opened 1NT! Nancy played with various partners at the HBC through 2020.
  • I was surprised to see that Mary Witt played at the SBC at least once with Tom Gerchman. Much more about Tom can be read here. Mary was the tournament coordinator for the Connecticut Bridge Association (CBA), which meant that she found sites, negotiated contracts, and brought the predealt boards to the sectional tournaments. Once she asked me to perform the last task for her. I was very flattered. Mary moved to Cary, NC. I have corresponded with her via email a few times.
  • I don’t have any clear recollections of any of the following players whose names appeared on at least one results sheet in 2004.
    • Robert and Ruby Cheah played together several times.
    • Roger Evarts played once with Don Verchick.
    • Dick and Joan Harris played together several times.
    • I should remember Clara Horn, who played with a number of partners, but I don’t.
    • I cannot place Maryann Joyce.
    • Jean Marecki played with Lila Englehart.
    • Alice Rowland played with Claire Tanzer.
    • Ruth Schwartz played with Marylou Pech. Ruth played quite a bit, but I cannot picture her. I discovered in December of 2021 that she was still playing in the unsanctioned game at Eno Hall.
    • Marcia and Norman Samuels played together.
    • Martha Stout played with Claire Tanzer: I get Martha and Alice Rowland mixed up.
    • Carl and Dorothy Suhre played together several times.
Russ is at the far right. Paula is by the door. I think that Nancy Campbell is seated near the wall.

Below are listed people who began to play at the SBC in 2005. Paula was still the director.

  • Fred Bird played regularly with Jean Little. They were married. After Fred died in 2011 Jean played at the SBC and the HBC with Max Horton and others. Jean died in 2018. Her obituary is here.
  • Rita Bowlby played at the SBC only once. I don’t remember her. Her partner that evening was Dick Benedict, whom I remember very well. Those recollections are posted here.
  • I am sure that I conversed with Jim McGarr several times, but I don’t remember any details. I can picture him pretty clearly. He died in 2015. His obituary is here.
  • Jay and Luetta Gould owned a residence in Torrington, CT. They rarely came to the SBC, but I remember their visits were in different years. Jay also ran a game in the Berkshires in the summer. In 2021 they appear to live in Delray Beach, FL.
  • Roger Holmes played with Dick Benedict for several weeks. Then they had a falling out. Dick once told me what they argued about, but I don’t remember.
  • I was surprised to see Ausra Geaski’s name on the results sheets. I played as her partner in one pairs event at one tournament in 2014. I have played against her innumerable times. She was president of the New England Bridge Conference (NEBC) when I became the district’s webmaster in 2013, and she chaired the B’s Needs committee that helped revitalize the tournaments.
  • I don’t have any clear recollections of any of the following players whose names appeared on at least one results sheet in 2005.
    • Frank and Jean Catudal played together several times..
    • I have no recollection of Ray and Sym Gallucci.
    • Jack Gensheimer played with Jim McGarr once;
    • Dick Kronk played with Bill Moody.
    • Barbara Lynyak played with Dorothy Clark.
    • Phyllis Martin also played with Dorothy Clark.
    • Dennis McVickers played with Roger Evarts.
    • Marcia Scarles played with Lila Englehart.
    • Lou Urban played with Bill Moody.
    • Rita Wolak played with Ausra Geaski.
On the left are Dorothy Clark and Shirley Schienman. On the right are Mary Witt and Helen. The other woman at their table might be Margie Garilli.

Below are listed people who began to play at the SBC in 2006. Paula was still the director.

  • Betty Angel played once with Mary Witt. Betty is still an active member of the HBC. I don’t think that she ever played at the SBC again.
  • Sue Gerchman was Tom’s mother. She played off-and-on with her son, who picked her up and drove her to the games. She also played once with her sister, whose first name was, I think, Benvenuta (Beni) Lostocco. I am pretty sure that they played in the same 299er game at the regional in Cromwell in which Dick Benedict and I played. A few years later, when I was playing with Tom, Sue died. I drove out to Avon for the wake. Some of Tom’s golfing friends were there, but I did not see any other bridge players. Beni died in 2014. Her obituary is here.
  • I don’t remember the occasion, but on one evening in 2005 Stan Kerry played with Bob Tellar at the SBC. Their better halves, Sandy Sobel and Carol Tellar also played together. I think that Bob and Carol played together a few times at the SBC. They also played at the HBC, Carol more often than Bob. Stan is best known as the director and owner of the West Hartford Bridge Club, which directly competed with the HBC. I played there a couple of times, but I did not enjoy it much. In 2012 Stan and Sandy went on the same Larry Cohen Regional-at-Sea Cruise that my wife Sue and I took. My journal for that trips is posted here. Sandy died in 2017. Her obituary can be found here.
  • Sally Kirtley made her debut at the SBC (at least to my knowledge) in 2005. We played together a few time, but not at the SBC. Sally became the director of the club in _____. She also directed in 2021, as was documented in considerable detail here.
  • Judy Larkin played fairly regularly with Lisa Audolensky for a number of months. They were both new to the game and eager to learn how to play better. They invited Dick Benedict over to coach them. In exchange they agreed to cook supper for him. Dick readily agreedJudy has been playing again in the reborn SBC of 2021.
  • I don’t have any clear recollections of any of the following players whose names appeared on at least one results sheet in 2006.
    • Norman Hargett played one night with Ruth Schwartz; I don’t remember him.
    • I have no memory of Matt Perry, who played with Roz Sternberg and Dick Benedict.
    • Robert Wise played with Russ Elmore. Much more about Roz, Dick, and Russ can be read here.
I am not sure of any of these people.

Below are listed people who began to play at the SBC in 2007. Paula may have started as the director, but early in the year Helen Pawlowski took control. Helen continued the policy of guaranteeing a partner for everyone. Eventually she quietly abandoned the $5 charge for membership and raised the table fee to $6. Attendance reached ten tables on several occasions.

  • Ida Coulter began playing with various partner, one of which was my wife Sue. Ida has been playing with Judy Larkin in the 2021 version of the club.
  • Trudi Brown usually played with her husband, Lou Brown. I played with Lou in the afternoon Open Pairs game at a CBA sectional in Hamden. His partner from the morning went home at lunch time, and my partner stood me up. We finished roughly in the middle, but we might have done better if Lou had not revoked even after I warned him that he was not following suit. Lou was serving his two-year term as president of the CBA at the time. He treated Trudi brutally whenever she made a mistake at the table. I asked Trudi whether I should say something to him about behavior that violated the ACBL’s zero-tolerance1 guidelines. She asked me not to and indicated that it was like water off of a duck’s back to her. Lou told me in 2010 that he could not attend my Life Master party because he had to call numbers in a bingo game in which his mother played. Trudi made Life Master in 2012 in a knockout at the regional tournament in Cromwell, CT. I played on the opposing team. My description of the match is posted here. Lou and Trudi moved to Delray Beach, FL, shortly thereafter.
  • Dan Finn played with Richard Finn, who was Dan’s brother (or maybe father) in one of the biggest games that we every had at the SBC. Dick and I played against the Finns at a card table that had been set up in the lobby. I also played with Dan at least twice, once at a tournament (described here) and once at the SBC.
  • I don’t have any clear recollections of any of the following players whose names appeared on at least one results sheet in 2007.
  • Dot Horton played with her husband Max. They were not great players, but they were very nice people. I remember that they took a river cruise in the south of France. They said that they had a great time. Dot once confided that when they started playing at Simsbury she was afraid of me. She died in 2015, but not from fright. Max continued to play with several other people at the SBC and the HBC. I almost got him to go to a tournament to play in a Pro-Am game once. Max died in 2021. I could not find an obituary.
  • Karen Largay played with Sheila Gillin at the SBC pretty often until the Largays moved to the Cape. They also played with their husbands occasionally, but the ladies were more serious about the game. Dick Benedict and I teamed up with them for tournaments a few times. I also played as Karen’s partner once at the Senior Regional on Cape Cod. I warned her before the first hand that if the opponents had bid and raised a major suit that I might bid any weak hand with a five-card suit. She forgot and raised my bid. The opponents doubled and we got a bad score.
  • I don’t know Steve Noble and his wife Chris Noble very well, but I have seen them at the HBC once in a while. I don’t know why they stopped coming to the SBC. I think that my wife Sue played with them in team events.
  • Art and Marylin Noll played together at the SBC at least once. Marylin was a good player and a semi-regular at the HBC, but I have not seen her since the pandemic hit.
  • Susan Pearson played with her husband Paul a few times.
  • Jan Potts played with a few different partners. In the late teens she was a frequent partner for Jan Rosow.
  • I had no recollection of Joan Brault playing at the SBC, but she attended several sessions. Her partner the first time was Beth Rotko, whom I do not remember at all. I played with Joan fairly often at the HBC. Those games are described here.
  • Arline Small played frequently at the HBC. She occasionally played with her husband Stuart at the SBC.
  • I don’t have any clear recollections of any of the following players whose names appeared on at least one results sheet in 2007.
    • Janice Boyko played with Ida.
    • Lillian Clark finished first out of ten pairs the evening that she played with Maryann Maikowski. They also finished at the top on at least one other occasion, but I don’t remember them.
    • Bill and Lenore Davis played together a few times.
    • Mary Fanette played with Helen once.
    • Art Marglies and Hannah Marglies played at least once, but don’t remember them.
    • Gladys McFetridge played with Dorothy Clark several times.
    • Margaret Milch played with Ida.
    • Rosa Shields played with Roz.
    • It seems like I should remember Donna Summer, but when I try to visualize her, all that I can see is the disco singer.
    • Barbara Steckler and June Rosenblatt don’t ring any bells either.
    • Elena Thompson played once with Carol Soucy.
    • Lisa Woods played once with Ida Coulter.
I think that the couple might be the Catudals. The woman on the right is Jeanne Striefler. Helen and Mary Witt are in the background.

Helen’s second year of directing was 2008. Listed below are some of the new players.

  • Michael Dworetsky played with Dan Finn and then with his wife Ellen. I played at many tournaments with Michael and as often as possible at the HBC. Our exploits together are assembled here.
  • Linda Kessleman played with Margie Garillli. Later Linda played pretty often with Mary Witt, Dick Benedict, and a few other people. I think that she was a real estate agent. Margie ran some games in the area and filled in as a director at the SBC. She played pretty often with Donna Lyons before the pandemic.
  • Sandy Macri played with someone else first, but eventually she teamed up with Karen Sterrett. I liked both of them a lot. I had to like Karen; she was a fellow Wolverine. They are both active members of the HBC.
  • Jeff Morris and Ron Saxon were both doctors. I went to Ron once when I had a build-up of wax in my ears. He was friends with Michael Dworetsky. Jeff sometimes played with his wife, who was very intense.
  • Jeff Oakes played with Sue Rudd. I don’t remember Jeff. Details about my long and continuing relationship with Sue are posted here.
  • Alden Stock played with Michael Dworetsky. He later played at the SBC with his wife Reba.
  • Louise Sunter played with Helen and Donna Lyons. I don’t remember Louise at all, but Donna is one of my favorite people in the world. I played with her a few times at the HBC and in a few tournaments. The details can be read here.
  • I don’t have any clear recollections of any of the following players whose names appeared on at least one results sheet in 2008.
    • Mark Johnson played once with Helen.
    • Susan Lewis played with Shirley.
    • Howard Mark and Sheila Mark played together, but just once.
This and the following photos were taken at the 2008 Christmas party with my Canon point-and-shoot camera. Shown are (left to right) Helen, Sally, Sheila Gillin, Karen Largay, and Jerry Hirsch.

Helen continued as owner-director in 2009. Listed below are some of the players who first played at the SBC that year.

  • Judy Goff played with Louise Alvord. Judy later became one of my wife Sue’s regular teammates. I think that they were partners at one or two tournaments.
  • I can hardly believe that Len Helfgott played at the SBC one night with Roz. He is a very good player. I played against him on Tuesday nights at the HBC a few times. I also recognized his name from reading a question that he submitted to the column in the Bridge Bulletin written by great Eric Kokish. On one hand that I played against Len I used “restricted choice”2 to determine which way to finesse. It worked, and Len remarked that bridge players know the play, but no one else would believe it.
  • I definitely remember Anne and Paul Melvin, but I don’t have any stories about them.
  • Barbara Perez played with her sister, Donna Lyons, a few times. Barbara lives in Mexico, but she asked me to keep her apprised of developments in bridge in the area.
  • Jan Rosow played with Joan Rusconi in their debut at the SBC. Jan became a Life Master in 2014. In 2021 she came to the club about once per month. Jan is also very active in the CBA. I don’t remember Joan playing at all in subsequent years, but I often saw her at the HBC.
  • I don’t have any clear recollections of any of the following players whose names appeared on at least one results sheet in 2009.
    • Beverly Lapioli and Sharon Smith played together one evening.
    • Peter Milliken played twice with Helen and once with a few others.
    • Doris Rothe played with Donna Lyons.
    • Mike Schwefel played with Jeff Morris.
    • Helene Wade and Lil Nolan played together.
This is Jerry Harrison.

Helen was still director in 2010. Listed below are some of the players who first played at the SBC that year.

  • Tim Largay played with his wife Karen. I think that he was more interested in golf than bridge.
  • Vivian Leshin played with Nancy Campbell. Vivian was a regular in the Tuesday night game at the HBC. She was the first person who warned me there that “Getting old is not for sissies.” I did not remember her playing in Simsbury. I was in attendance when she earned Silver Life Master at the Senior Regional in Hyannis. Her partner for that event was someone she had just met at the tournament’s partnership desk. I think that that was Vivian’s last tournament.
  • I don’t have any clear recollections of any of the following players whose names appeared on at least one results sheet in 2010.
    • Tina Cheffer played with Judy Goff.
    • Caroline Collins played with Ruth Schwartz.
    • Connie Fictner played with Louise Lapioli.
    • Kay Yaznac played with Tina Cheffer. I don’t remember them.

I have lost the records for 2011 and 2012. The lists continue with 2013 here.


1. In 1998 the ACBL instituted a policy designed to make for a friendlier and more pleasant environment at all levels of duplicate play. It is posted here.

2. The principle of restricted choice is explained pretty well in the Wikipedia article that is posted here.

2004-2009 Partners at the Simsbury Bridge Club Part 1

Partners at Eno Hall. Continue reading

I vividly remember my first night at the Simsbury Bridge Club. Paul Pearson had given me contact information for the director of the club, Paula Beauchamp (pronounced BOW shahmp). I told her that I would like to play on the following Wednesday, which was, I think, May 19 or perhaps May 12, 2004. She told me that the games were held at Eno Hall, located on the main street in Simsbury (Hopmeadow Street better know as Route 10/202). Parking was in the back, and the game, which was in the basement, could easily be reached from the parking lot via a handicap ramp. She told me to arrive a few minutes before the 6:30 starting time, and she would pair me up with someone.

I consulted MapQuest to try to figure out the best way to get there. I think that I may have driven on Route 20 all the way to the intersection with Route 202. There are three or four better routes, but I allowed plenty of time.

Roz Sternberg.

I located Paula, and she assigned me to play with Roz Sternberg. I had only played a few hands of bridge in the previous twenty-four years, and I remembered very little. I had relearned Stayman and Blackwood, and the course that Paul had taught at Fermi had familiarized me with five-card major openings, transfers, and negative doubles. Roz was accustomed to playing with rookies. She told me that jumps were weak, and everything else was mostly natural.

I also did not know how to keep score on the travelers. So, Roz had to sit North. We were assigned to table #3, which was right in front of the air conditioner that blasted away all evening. My South seat was directly before the fans. Cold air blew on my neck all evening as I sat there shivering. The opponents at the first table had to show me how to use the bidding box. I remember nothing about the hands; I was concentrating all my attention on following suit and bidding or leading only when it was my turn. I was proud that I had successfully avoided any director calls. I was unable to turn up a copy of the results, but I seem to remember that Roz reported that we finished about in the middle.

After that I played with Roz a few times and against her countless times. I don’t have any great stories about her play. For some reason she never came to Eno with a partner. That was a little strange because after she retired she mostly played at the Hartford Bridge Club (HBC) with a few steady partners.

Roz was employed as the IT director for the New Britain Public School System, which had one or two AS/400’s. Nobody there really knew too much about them. Several years after our initial game she found out that I had a lot of experience with AS/400’s. She asked me to come to her data center to see if I could help her with a problem. I can’t remember exactly what it entailed, but it was something rather tricky that I had previously encountered. Furthermore, I had documented my work-around. So, I went there, implemented the fix, and explained what I had done.

Actually she sent a check.

Roz then had me look at a few connectivity issues. I was less certain of my abilities in these areas, but when I left, everything seemed to be working the way that they wanted it. I considered this just a favor for a friend, but she insisted that TSI send her an invoice for my time. So, we did. It was for $100 or maybe $150. She probably had a budget for this sort of thing.

I was afraid that Roz would start calling me for technical support whenever they encountered a problem, but, in fact, she never asked again. My recollection is that within a year after my visit the school system replace the AS/400’s with a different system.


Peg Corbett1 also never came to Eno with a partner. On the second or third Wednesday that I attended at the SBC I played with Peg, and we actually won a fraction of a masterpoint from the ACBL. Here is the published scoresheet:

Open Pairs Wednesday Eve Session May 26, 2004
 Scores after 24 boards  Average:   48.0      Section  A  North-South
 Pair    Pct   Score  Rank   MPs     
   4   57.81   55.50   1    0.60     Jean Seale - Sonja Smith
   3   56.77   54.50   2    0.42     Peg Corbett - Mike Wavada
   1   49.48   47.50                 Ellen Tabell - Tony Tabell
   2   46.88   45.00                 Don Verchick - Nancy Campbell
   5   39.06   37.50                 Carl Suhre - Dorothy Suhre
 Open Pairs Wednesday Eve Session May 26, 2004
 Scores after 24 boards  Average:   48.0      Section  A  East-West
 Pair    Pct   Score  Rank   MPs     
   2   55.00   52.80  1/2   0.51     Claire Tanzer - Alice Rowland
   5   55.00   52.80  1/2   0.51     Dorothy Clark - Roz Sternberg
   1   51.25   49.20                 Jerry Hirsch - Mel Hirsch
   4   50.63   48.60                 Maureen Denges - Pat Matthew
   6   50.63   48.60                 Marylou Pech - Russell Elmore
   3   37.50   36.00                 Louise Alvord - Carol Schaper

I am pretty sure that I played with Peg a handful of times. Most of them were not memorable, but on one occasion she seemed to be on another planet. She explained to me that she had taken her prescription allergy medication, and it made her a little loopy. Both her bidding and her play of the cards were abominable. We finished last.


Winning points with Peg was exciting. However, it was nothing compared to the thrill that I ever felt came a month or so later after I had been assigned by Paula to play with Russ Elmore a couple of times. He asked me to be his regular partner!

My first game with Russ was a unique experience. He handed me a one-page typed sheet—not a convention card—and informed me that this is what we would be playing. It was close to Standard American, the system popularized by Charles Goren, but there were a few significant differences. I remember that we did not open 1NT if we had a worthless doubleton in one of the suits.

I did not complain about the eccentricities. Russ had played much more bridge experience than I had. Maybe his approach was outdated, but at least we would agree on what we were doing. Besides, Russ was cool. He was much older than my fifty-six years, but he often came to the bridge games on his motorcycle!

I realized that the primary motive for Russ wanting me as a regular partner was to avoid being assigned to play with Roz or Peg, who would argue with him about using his sheet of paper as the basis for bidding and playing agreements. Ordinarily these are negotiated with both sides willing to give in on some things. Even so, I was ecstatic that someone actually agreed to play with me on a regular basis.

At the Christmas party in December of 2004 or 2005 Russ confided to me that he intended to open every hand with a bid of 1. Yes, this was a party, but no one was drunk. I, for one, still took the games at the SBC very seriously. Those Wednesday evening games were the only time that I got to play all week, and I was very conscious of how many masterpoints I had accumulated. So, I asked Russ to just bid his hand as usual, and he respected my request.

When I played with Russ I got in the habit of analyzing every hand afterwards. Since we did not have hand records (sheets of paper that shows the location of all fifty-two cards on deal), I could only go by how well we did when I played a hand vs. when Russ was declarer. We did much better when Russ played. I told this to Russ, and he laughed.

I bought a book called How to Play a Bridge Hand by William S. Root. It had hundreds of examples with quizzes at the end of each chapter. I converted these quiz question into 4×6″ cards—problem on the front and answer on the back—that I could study during lunch breaks at work. It did help; I got a little better.

I later made an interactive web page that included all of these problems for declarer play and included other interesting ones that I encountered over the years. I posted a link to it on the web site that I designed for the SBC. The problem page is located here.


If an odd number of people showed up on a Wednesday, Paula Beauchamp3 played with one of the players who came without a partner. Since she was a very skilled and experienced player, everyone who came without a partner—usually three to five of us—hoped to get to play with her. She had many chances to play with me, but she only picked me once.

I made few obvious mistakes, maybe even none. No, that was not likely. Let’s just say that I did not notice any errors. If Paula did, she did not mention it. We finished first with a very good score, and after I played one hand she said, “You played that like a surgeon!” My buttons were busting.

I once was surprised to see Paula in the terminal at Bradley International Airport. She had apparently just returned from a vacation, and I was on my way to visit a client. I don’t remember the date, and it is hard for me to place the time, too. I generally left very early in the morning, before any flights had arrived. I do remember that she was wearing a pair of those rubbery shoes with holes in them, Crocs.

Paula’s favorite movie was Life is Beautiful (La Vita è Bella) with Roberto Begnini. I had also seen this film. I sometimes called Paula Principessa, the term of endearment used by Begnini’s character for his wife. She liked the way that I pronounced it.


I persuaded my friend Tom Corcoran to play with me at the SBC five or six times. He worked in Simsbury at the time, and so it was not much of an inconvenience for him. He had not played at all since he graduated from Brown in 1972.

I was surprised to find when researching this entry that we actually finished first at least twice. However, those occasions are not the ones that stand out in my memory. Once Tom opened 2, which showed a very powerful hand with more than half of the aces and face cards. In contrast, an opening bid at the two-level in any of the other suits show a weak hand with six cards in the bid suit. Tom had intended to show a weak hand with clubs. Unfortunately, I had a pretty good hand, and I did not give up on the possibility of bidding a slam (committing to win twelve or thirteen tricks) until he passed my 5NT bid. We ended up five or six tricks short for a big penalty.

Tom, who was only two years younger than I, stopped playing after a few months. The only remark he made was “Those people are sure old.”


When Russ moved away I had to find a new partner. I had noticed that in 2015 two guys, Roger Holmes and Dick Benedict, began playing and did pretty well. After a month or two Roger seemed to stop attending, and Dick played much less frequently and with different partners. I sent Dick an email that explained my situation and asked him if he would consider playing with me. I told him that I knew all of the conventions on the Yellow Card4, and I was willing to learn new ones. He responded enthusiastically.

June 9, 1953 could have been Dick’s last day.

Dick and I played together for several years at the SBC, at the HBC whenever I got a chance on a weekday, and at tournaments that were within driving distance. We got to be pretty close. I learned about his two ex-wives, one dead and one divorced, his two daughters, and the father with whom he had played cribbage. I learned a lot about the tornado in Worcester from which Dick’s father rescued him. I also learned from Dick that New Hampshire was the best place to buy liquor. Dick stocked up on The Famous Grouse whenever we drove up to Nashua for a tournament.

Dick and I played on many teams together. In team games5 four people form a team. One pair plays East-West and the other plays North-South. You play a match against another team. Your East-West pair plays a set of hands against their North-South pair and your North-South plays the same hands against their East-West. Two types of team games were bracketed. Between eight and sixteen teams with similar masterpoint totals played against one another in either a knockout or Swiss format. Our foursome concentrated on these bracketed games so that we did not encounter the really good players.

Usually Dick and I played together. He was good at convincing people to play with us at tournaments. Our best results came when playing with Robert Klopp6, who lived at the Duncan Hotel in New Haven, and Brenda Harvey7 from Orange, CT. I remember sending email to my dad in Kansas City from the Panera Bread in Nashua, NH, when we had won two knockouts in a row. I think that Robert Klopp may have already been a Life Master when we started, but both Dick and Brenda Harvey achieved that rank at tournaments in which our foursome played as a team.

Some of our results were spectacular. I remember that in one Bracketed Swiss at a regional tournament we won our first six rounds by such lopsided margins that we had built up an insuperable margin. We actually could have gone home without playing the final round, which we also won. However, we did not always do so well. At an Open Swiss at a sectional in Auburn, MA, we finished dead last out of twenty-five or thirty teams. Neither Robert nor Brenda played with us on either of these occasions.

Helen Pawlowski.

Dick was not sitting across from me when I made Life Master. At the time the requirement for that rank was 300 total masterpoints that had to include some number of silver and gold points that could only be won at tournaments. In late December of 2009 I had enough silver and gold, but I was a small fraction of a point short of 300. I informed Helen Pawlowski (pahv LOFF skee), the director of the SBC game at the time, about my status before the game on December 23. She immediately declared the game a “club championship”, which meant that extra points would be rewarded.

Unfortunately, both Dick and I played poorly; he was bad, but I was worse. I made a really stupid bid when playing against Claire Tanzer, who never said a bad word about anyone. She remarked that if I played like that I did not deserve to make Life Master. She was right.

However, deservedly or not, I was awarded the necessary points at the last Saturday game in December at the HBC after playing with Tom Gerchman. In those days it took the director a few minutes to enter all the scores in the computer. Everyone else had already left by the time the results were posted, and it was confirmed that Tom and I had scored well enough to earn the needed points. There was no one to celebrate with.

There was a game scheduled for that Sunday at the HBC, and, because I had set a goal of making Life Master before the end of the year, I was scheduled to play. However, the Sunday game got snowed out. So, I achieved my goal at the last possible game of the year.

Dick was, however, my partner for my Life Master parties at both the SBC and the HBC. At the SBC he gave a little speech in which he announced that I had called him up and told him something—I don’t remember what. I Immediately denounced that as a damnable lie, and asked the group whether I had ever called any of them on the phone. No one spoke up. Of course, I probably did say whatever it was that he claimed that I had said, but I never talked with Dick on a telephone. Dick and I corresponded only by email and in person. In fact, I have almost never called anyone about bridge.

My LM party at the HBC was a unique occasion for at least three reasons. In the first place it was held on a Friday evening in March 2010. I know of no other Friday evening game ever held there. Although I sat North across from Dick in the “throne” reserved for the honoree, he was only there for three hands. The format used that night involved individual scoring. Everyone played with seven or eight different partners. Only the Norths stayed at the same table. I know of no other occasion in which that format was used at the HBC.

There was one other odd thing about it. I won! Well, officially I tied with Cecilia Vasel, but I discovered later that on one hand I had made a mistake in scoring8 in the opponents’ favor. The honoree almost never does well in this game; there are too many distractions. Perhaps on that evening everyone was distracted by the weird format.

Dick and I stopped playing together later in 2010. I made a sarcastic comment when he passed what was—-to my way of thinking—clearly a control-showing cue bid. He took offense, which was not unreasonable. There was no great rancor. In fact, we did play together occasionally after that. He moved to Bradenton, FL, at some point in the teens. When he came back to Connecticut to visit we usually paired up at least once.

Inge Schuele.

Dick introduced me to tournament bridge. Four of us went to the District 3 tournament in Danbury, CT. I played with Dick, and Inge Schuele played with Virginia Labbadia. The team that we played in the first round had more than ten times as many points as we did. The guys we played against used the Mini-Roman convention. I had never heard of it, but using the 2 opening bid to describe a hand with three four-card suits and 11-15 points seemed to me like a great idea at the time. In fact, however, it is one of the few well-known conventions that I have never played.

I thought that Dick and I had performed reasonably well against the guys, but we lost the match by a lot. So, we needed either to drive back home or find another event for the afternoon session.

On the schedule we found a 199er game in the afternoon. Inge and I qualified to play in it, but Dick and Virginia had too many points. They played together in some kind of unlimited game.

Things went very well for Inge and me. We ended up in first place, and it was not even close. Our photos were printed in the tournament’s Daily Bulletin, and we each got a small trophy, the first bridge trophy that I ever won, and the only one that they let me keep.

I have a couple of other very vivid memory of playing with Dick. I remember that I earned my final gold points in one of the first Gold Rush Pairs events ever held in New England. In the afternoon session we bid and made 7NT on the first hand and held on to win our section.

The other memory is literally painful. We were playing in a pairs game in Danbury, and something was wrong with my neck. Every five or ten minutes I would—without any warning—experience a sharp pang there. I took some Advil for it, but it did not seem to help much. I found it very difficult to concentrate. We finished the event, but we did not do well.

The plan had been for me to stay overnight at Dick’s house in Avon and ride back with him to Danbury for another event on Sunday. I told him that I did not want to play again until the neck pain ceased. He agreed that that was a good idea. I rested the next day, and the pain disappeared, never to return.

Folded traveler in board and traveler with scores.

Over the years I have often told people that the most important thing that I learned from playing with Dick Benedict was the preferred method of folding the “travelers”, the score sheets that traveled with the boards that contained the cards from one table to the next. The only really important thing was for the board numbers (and almost nothing else) to be visible, but Dick’s method was definitely the easiest, most reliable, and most esthetically pleasing.


Mass Mutual in Springfield.

In 2009 I teamed up with a young guy named Steve Smith. I knew his mother Sonja, who was a fine tournament player and the best regular player at the SBC. Steve worked at Mass Mutual as an actuary. He was an FSA, but his main interest was finance, not insurance. Steve and I were a good match. I learned that he had been a successful debater in high school, but he did not participate in the rigorous type of policy debate that I did.

Steve lived in the area just north and west of the park.

Steve owned a house in the Forest Park section of Springfield. He rented out two of the bedrooms to other guys. It was not quite the Animal House, but I never knew what to expect when I picked him up to go to a tournament. He often forgot to bring cash, which was the only form of payment most tournaments accepted.

Playing with Steve was nothing like playing with Dick. Dick was the model of stability; Steve was up for anything.

Steve and I played together on a regular basis at the SBC and also in tournaments quite a few times. Considering how little experience we had, we had an extraordinary record . The highlight was the afternoon-evening of Saturday October 10 at the Sturbridge Host Hotel in Sturbridge, MA. Steve and I were playing in the qualifying tournament for Flight C of the North American Pairs, a national championship with three separate divisions, called “flights”. Three teams would qualify from our C Flight to represent New England in the national finals in Reno in March of 2010.

We played fairly well in the first session. I think that our score was a little above 50 percent. We ate supper at the Oxhead Tavern, which is adjacent to the hotel, with Steve’s mother Sonja, her partner David Rock, and two guys from New Hampshire, Bruce Downing and Mark Conner. Sonja, David, and the NH guys were playing in the B or A flight.

We needed to make up quite a bit of ground in the evening session to have any chance of qualifying. Fortunately, we caught fire in the second session. We actually turned in the best score of any pair.

In those days the directors still tabulated the results from scores recorded on pieces of paper. Therefore, it took them a fairly long time to enter and check the results. When they finally posted them, we had finished third. We were qualified for the North American Bridge Championships (NABC) in Reno!

Actually there was still one hurdle. Mark Aquino, who was the district’s NAP/GNT coordinator, called me and asked if Steve had qualified at a club game. I told him that he had done so at the HBC; I even provided him with the date and time. He said that it did not appear that Steve had won any points. I agreed that he had not, but he did earn a “Q” on the results page. I knew where to find it on the Internet and sent Mark a copy.

As it turned, out the team with the best score in our flight in Sturbridge—a couple of guys whom I had never seen at a tournament—participated even though they had not qualified at a club game. They were disqualified, and we moved up to second place. As I recall, the district paid us $100 each to play in the tournament in Reno.

Not the best bridge book ever.

Steve and I both were still working. In fact, he had been in college at the University of South Carolina just a few years earlier. So, we could only play one or two sessions per week to try to get better by the time that we played in Reno. I thought that it would be a good idea if we played a system that was somewhat different from what most people played. I bought two books on playing systems based on weak 1NT opening bids. We settled on an approach outlined in one of them. In those days my memory still worked, and Steve, as I mentioned, was very adaptable.

Steve and I had a great time in Reno. On Wednesday March 17 we boarded our Southwest flight to Las Vegas and changed planes. On the last leg—the short flight from Las Vegas to Reno—-I sat in the window seat and studied (or at least pretended to study) my Russian flash cards9, and Steve sat on the aisle. The middle seat was not occupied until the plane was almost ready to take off. A woman of about Steve’s age (or even younger) with enormous gazoingies settled there. Steve chatted her up a bit. I must admit that I listened; her answers to most of his queries were completely off the chart. Steve was remarkably adept at keeping a straight face during the interview.

The tournament was at a resort hotel/casino a few miles south of downtown Reno. We planned to play in three events—the NAP and Red Ribbon Pairs, both of which were scheduled for afternoon-evenings, and a compact knockout that was scheduled for two mornings. The Red Ribbon Pairs were held on Thursday and Friday March 18-19. The NAP was on Saturday and Sunday. Here are a few of my most vivid memories of the tournament:

  • The first night that we were there we were invited to a social gathering sponsored by District 25 (New England) and hosted by Helen Pawlowski and Steve’s mom. This was the first time that I ever met Rich and Sandy DeMartino. Rich was the District Director, and Sandy was (maybe not yet in 2010) chairman of the national Goodwill Committee. We told Rich which events we intended to play in. He opined that our schedule might be too difficult for first-timers. We didn’t care.
  • The Red Ribbon Pairs was the first time that I ever seen a Bridgemate, the hand-held battery-powered electronic scoring device. Tournaments in New England did not use them yet. I sat North and had to figure out how to operate it. It made me very nervous. I feel certain that it affected my play. I should have just switched positions with Steve. He was much more familiar with learning how to use new electronic equipment. We were well below 50 percent in the afternoon session. We did a little better in the evening, but we missed the cut for the second day. We did make friends with a few people in our sections, however. People thought that we were a father-son team.
  • We played in a compact knockout in morning sessions on Friday and Saturday. Our teammates were a father-daughter pair from Michigan who had only played together online. They lived in the same state, but they decided to go to Nevada to play face-to-face. Our team won both of its matches in the morning. So, we qualified to play the second half on Saturday.
  • At some point I remember going for a fairly long run in the area. There was not much to see.
  • I think that on Friday Steve and I ran into Ron Briggs and Andre Wiejacki (vee YAH skee), the other pair representing New England. Ron was a little bristly, but Andre and I became pretty good friends.
  • We played in a pairs game, I think, on Friday. I seem to remember that a woman criticized me for not explaining one of our conventions properly.
  • On Saturday morning we easily won the semi-final match of the compact knockout. In the finals we faced a husband-wife team from Texas. I made a serious mistake early in the match, and I was afraid that I had blown it for our teammates. However, we ended up winning by just a few International Match Points. We each won a clear coffee mug with the ACBL logo on one side and the tournament’s logo on the other. I still have mine. In 2021 I drink tea out of it almost every day.
  • It was really exciting to play in the NAP. The directors made everyone who had a cell phone or other electronic device turn it in before play started. The competition was not as tough as in the Red Ribbon Pairs, and once again we did better in the evening, but we did not make it to the second day of this event either.
  • We decided to play in the huge B/C/D Swiss on Sunday morning. Our teammates were a pair of guys from the DC area whom we had met in the NAP. Our team got off to a strong start, which is not necessarily a good idea for a team in the lowest strat of a Swiss. Steve and I were very tired. We both made stupid mistakes for which we had to apologize to our teammates. Steve started to set his hand down as dummy twice when he was actually the declarer. My mistakes were more subtle but also more costly.
  • Helen, who had a rental car, took us into town one evening for supper at an Armenian restaurant. I can’t say that I thought too much of it.

Our flight back also went through Las Vegas. Steve and I sat a couple of rows behind superstars Jeff Meckstroth and Mark Lair. Meckstroth boarded first and sat in the aisle seat looking ferocious. Lair boarded much later and quickly settled into the adjacent seat that Meckstroth had been guarding.


The Crowne Plaza calls it “The Garden Pavilion”.

I remember one other great experience playing with Steve. It was on Sunday at the first tournament held at the Crowne Plaza in Warwick, RI. We were in the big tent playing in the bracketed Swiss with Marcia West and Paula Najarian. In the last round we played against Ron Briggs’ team, which was in first place. We found ourselves in second, but we were within striking distance. On the last hand Steve had bid an impossible 4 contract. I was dummy watching Steve futilely play the last five or six cards. I observed that Ron had absentmindedly discarded a club on one of Steve’s hearts and then followed suit on the next round of hearts. The dummy is not allowed to speak until the last card has been played. So, I unobtrusively moved that trick out of alignment by a fraction of an inch. When the hand was over, I drew attention to the revoke, and we ended up winning both the match and the event by the narrowest of margins.

I have not seen Steve since he accepted a job in New York City working for Goldman Sachs. I seem to recall that Sonja said that he got married. He and I follow each other on Twitter, but his account is not very active. I could find no photos of him on the Internet.


Photo of the 2004 Xmas party: Dorothy Clark is on the left; Shirley Schienman is in the seat in which I sat on the first night.

I played with at least five other people in those early years at the SBC. I played exactly once with Bob Nuckols, Dorothy Clark, and Sonja Smith. I don’t remember anything about the games with Bob and Sonja. I remember one hand in which Dorothy and I were on defense. I led a very low card in a suit that I knew that she could ruff. The fact that my card was low should have told her to lead the lower of the two side suits back to me, but she led the other side suit. When I mentioned it to her, she admitted that she was not good at noticing suit-preference signals.

I played several times with Sonja at the HBC and once or twice in tournaments. On one occasion I was scheduled to play with her at the HBC, but I had to cancel because of a severely upset stomach probably due to food poisoning of some sort. By lunch time I felt fine. This was one of the very few times that I missed a game because of illness.

I played two or three times with Paul Pearson. He and his wife came to my Life Master party at the SBC. Much more about my relationship with Paul is detailed here.


Jerry Hirsch started playing at the SBC in 2009 a few weeks before I did. We were partners a few times at the SBC, a few times at the HBC, and also at a few tournaments. I probably played against Jerry more often than any other bridge player. At the SBC Christmas party one year Jerry took a photo of me wearing a gigantic red Christmas bow as a tie. He had the photo blown up to poster size, and he gave it to me as a present. In 2021 it still is prominently displayed in our living room.

Jerry Hirsch.

Jerry and I played together in at least one qualifier for the NAP and the Grand National Teams (GNT). We never made it to either national event, but one year we finished third in the GNT qualifier, and in the last round of the Swiss we defeated the team that won the event. Our teammates were Dave Landsberg10 and Dan Koepf.

Jerry kept a small piece of paper in his convention card holder with one word written on it: “FUN!”. I occasionally needed to be reminded of the primary reason for which we all played at such a frustrating game for so many years.

Every holiday season Jerry took on the responsibility of taking up a collection for a gift for the directors. As far as I know, no one asked him to do it.


1. Peg Corbett, who was a regular attendee at the club, stopped playing suddenly. Tom Gerchman, who started each day by reading the obituary page in the Courant, informed me she had died.

2. Russ Elmore and I stopped playing together when he moved to New Hampshire. However, he must have moved back to the Berkshires a few years later. I saw him playing at a sectional tournament in Great Barrington, MA. This really surprised me because Russ never showed any interest in tournaments while I was playing with him. I approached him and reintroduced myself. He said that he remembered me, but at the time he did not seem to.

3. At some point Paula Beauchamp and Larry Wallowitz, a teacher and director at the HBC, moved to Bradenton, FL. I think that this occurred in the early teens. This raised a lot of eyebrows at the HBC. Most people, myself included, did not even know that they were “an item”. Larry died after they had been there a few years. I did not have many dealings with Larry, but I remember attending a talk that he gave to novices about opening leads. One thing that he said really hit home: “It’s OK to finesse your partner, but it is not OK to finesse yourself.” For example, if you have a king of a suit, and you suspect that the declarer (on your right) has the queen, it is a terrible idea to lead that suit. Paula remained in Florida, but she returned to Connecticut and played at the HBC a few times.

4. The Yellow Card is a piece of paper that was designed by the ACBL to provide a set of conventions that could be used in casual partnerships, new partnerships, or specific events such as individual tournaments. It is also used by a fairly large number of pairs who just do not like to memorize conventions.

5. Details about the mechanics of team games have been explained here.

6. Robert Klopp died in, I think 2014, not too long after the four of us stopped playing together at tournaments. He did not drive a car, and he brought his own food to tournaments to save money.

7. I played with Brenda Harvey at a sectional tournament in Connecticut at least once. She moved to Saint Augustine, FL. She remains an active bridge player in 2021.

8. In duplicate bridge North traditionally keeps score. Tradition at the HBC insisted that the new LM sat North at table #1. At the time I had almost never sat North.

9. In August of 2010 Sue and I accompanied Tom and Patti Corcoran on a river cruise from St. Petersburg to Moscow. It is described in some detail here. I studied the language pretty diligently for several months, but I was seldom able to communicate with Russians outside of the tourist industry, and all of them spoke—and preferred—English.

10. My partnership with Dave Landsberg is described here.

2004 Getting Back into Bridge

Paul Pearson led me back tp the world’s greatest card game. Continue reading

Between 1970—-when I left college—and 2003 the game of bridge was not really part of my life. However, every so often I thought about it and wondered how the game might have evolved. At the same time I was frustrated with my lack of friends locally. In fact, I really only had one, Tom Corcoran, and he was quite busy with his job and family. I wanted the opportunity to be around people with whom I could have intelligent conversations. The people at TSI sort of qualified, but I was the boss; it was difficult to become true friends with the employees.

Enrico Fermi High School.

I had already been taking classes in Italian at Enfield High School. These classes were sponsored by the town’s Continuing Education department. I enjoyed that experience, which is described here.

Twice a year the Enfield school systems mailed to its residents a flyer that described the offerings for the upcoming term. In the one for the classes beginning in January of 2004 I noticed that two bridge classes were being offered—one for beginners and one for those who had already taken the beginning class. Of course, I had not taken the beginning class yet, but I signed up for the latter one anyway. Unlike the Italian classes, this one was at Enfield’s newer and more convenient high school, Enrico Fermi1, less than a mile from my house and right on my usual jogging route.

I found this old photo of Paul giving the class at Fermi. I don’t recognize the seated lady.

At the first class I met the instructor, Paul Pearson, who at the time was, I seem to remember, a Bronze Life Master. There were six or eight others in the class—all couples. None was as serious as I was at getting back into the game. Paul was surprised to learn that I had played a little duplicate bridge2 thirty or so years earlier. I think that I may have played in one team match in the dorm at Michigan, too. The other students in Paul’s class wanted to be able to play with their friends or relatives once or twice a year. One couple even remarked that they did not need to learn how to keep score because their friends always kept score.

Paul used a pamphlet-sized book that explained how to bid using five-card major suits (hearts and spades). When I was learning to play the game people began the process of bidding by selecting their “best” suit, a somewhat amorphous way of combining length (number of cards in the suit), strength (Ace=4; King=3; Queen=2; Jack-1), and shortness (singletons, doubletons, and voids). In the modern approach bidding a major suit guaranteed—with almost no exceptions—at least five of the suit that was named in the opening bid. A-K-Q-J was no good; 6-5-4-3-2 was fine. The strength of the hand was measured separately. Minor suits and notrump had different rules.

In the sixties this rock-crusher might have been opened 2. The standard approach in 2021 recommends 2.

When I had learned to play bridge back in the sixties two-level bids were reserved for very strong hands. By 2000 most players in North America used all of these bids (except 2) to describe hands that were too weak to open at the one-level, but featured six cards in the bid suit.

By the time that I graduated from college in 1970 I had learned a different system, the Big Club promulgated by Howard Schenken. In this system all strong hands were opened with the lowest possible bid, 1. I considered this approach vastly superior to what everyone else was playing, and I felt certain that by the twenty-first century everyone would be using something similar. I was wrong. The only major changes to the basic requirements for standard bidding were the two that Paul taught us—five-card majors and weak two bids.

I later came to understand that most of the other holes in the standard bidding system that I had recognized when I was in college had been addressed by specific conventions. Whereas in the sixties most players thrived with only a couple of conventions, in the twenty-first century there were dozens of widely used conventions to choose from and several hundred exotic ones.

Enfield’s luxurious senior center.

I cannot remember too many details of what Paul actually taught us in class. He recognized that it was unrealistic to expect any of us to be competent at the game after only a few hours of lessons. My most vivid memory of the classes occurred once when Paul was not even present in the room. For some reason we had gathered at the Enfield Senior Center that week to play a few hands. My partner was Paul’s wife, Sue, who was also a Life Master. I don’t remember the opponents. Four of us played at card table in a small elegant room that had a functioning fireplace.

Paul had set up a few hands for the class to play that evening. On one of them I was the declarer. I remember exclaiming to anyone who would listen, “There’s an Endplay3 here, and it looks like it will work!” Sure enough, I deliberately allowed one of the opponents to capture a trick and thereby won two in return.

If North opened 1, East could use 2NT to show diamonds and hearts.

Paul encouraged us to read the Courant‘s daily bridge column. I recall that one of the answers to a bidding question that I encountered there was a 2NT bid that I did not understand at all. I asked about it in class. Paul explained that it was a convention known as the Unusual Notrump that allowed the player to show two five-card suits with just one bid. I was delighted to learn that there was such a marvelous invention. I remember telling Paul that I did not think that I could stop myself from using it.

I recalled that I had practiced back in the sixties using a contraption called Autobridge, which was endorsed and marketed by Charles Goren himself. I still had it when I took the class. However, it did not age well. The play of the hands was still instructive, but even someone who knew as little as I did could tell that the recommended bidding was not optimal.

Paul knew about Autobridge. He had used it himself back in the sixties. He said that there were now computerized systems that allowed the user to specify which set of conventions were being used—both by the player and his computerized partner and by the robotics opponents.

BB 29 is now available!

Several of these computer games were available for purchase. The one that Paul recommended, Bridge Baron, included literally thousands of hands that had been played at actual tournaments. You could compare your performance with that of the rest of the field. What a great idea!

I promptly purchased a copy of Bridge Baron 15 and installed it on my laptop. I used it to improve both my bidding and my play. I played every hand from every tournament—some of them multiple times. I also practiced the use of many new conventions in a special set of programs in BB 15 designed for that purpose. The best part was that I could use it in in the otherwise wasted hours that I spent in airports and on airplanes.


After classes I usually stayed around to talk with Paul for a few minutes. After our very last session I informed him that I felt that I needed to play some hands on a regular basis. He asked me if I just “wanted to pitch cards”? If so, there was a weekly game at the Senior Center. I said that I really wanted to play in a serious duplicate game even though I knew that I would be overmatched at first.

Eno Hall in Simsbury.

Paul said that the best games were at the Hartford Bridge Club, but that might not be a feasible option until I had a regular partner. He recommended the weekly Wednesday evening game in Simsbury, CT, which was about a thirty minute drive from Enfield. He said that the club’s director, Paula Beauchamp, guaranteed a partner for everyone who attended. If an odd number of people showed up, she would participate as partner of one of the attendees. Paul provided me with contact information for her.

He also informed me that most of the best players in the Hartford area were either actuaries or computer programmers. I told him that I had worked as an actuary for two years, and I had been a software developer for more than twenty. He told me that he had been a programmer, too, but he had learned to program using Assembler, which, as I understood it, was only one step above programming with a soldering iron.

I eagerly got in touch with Paula via email. I told her that I would like to play in her game at the SBC, but I needed a partner. I also noted that I was at that time taking Italian classes on Wednesday evenings. That spurred her curiosity. My last class would be in early May, a few weeks away. She sent me directions to Eno Hall and advice about where to park. A description of my experience that first night is posted here.


For several years I wrote to Paul whenever I encountered a puzzling bridge situation. That often happened when I began playing in the much tougher Tuesday evening games at the HBC and even more often when I began attending tournaments. Paul always answered my emails, and he always gave me good advice. He also warned me about some players at the HBC whose advice should definitely not be heeded.

Paul told me about a few approaches to bidding that I did not know from my earlier encounters with the game. He introduced me to the difficult (but absolutely critical) concept of the LAW of total tricks4. I later dug up the details on my own. I also learned that the Rule of 20 had more or less supplanted simple point counts for evaluating hands for the purpose of opening the bidding.

Over the years I played a few times with Paul Pearson both at the SBC and at tournaments. I remember that we played together in a Swiss at a Connecticut Sectional. Our teammates were Michele Raviele and Joan Brault.

The last time that I played with Paul was—by far—the best. We played together in the Open Pairs game at the Fiesta Regional in Warwick, RI, on Friday, September 4, 2015. The event had three strats, labeled A, B, and C. We were a C team, which meant that our total masterpoints placed us roughly in the bottom third of the participants. Fifty-eight teams participated. We finished fifth overall and ahead of all of the players in both the B strat and the C strat. The pairs that finished ahead of us had at least ten times as many masterpoints as we did.

We earned 13.39 masterpoints for one day’s work! I remember only two of the hands. They were against very good players who had doubled our contract. I had to declare both of them, and I made the bid both times. I can’t say that I made any brilliant or heroic plays, but I did not choke either.

My wife Sue took this photo of Paul and me after our epic game.

Paul invited me to play with him in the equivalent pairs game in 2016, but I had already committed to play in a team event on the same day. Paul died later that year. His obituary is here. My wife Sue and I attended his funeral at the Congregational Church at the corner of South Road and Route 5 in Enfield.


While I was still taking Paul’s classes or shortly thereafter I went to Barnes and Noble looking for books to help me try to catch up. The selection wasn’t great, which surprised me. The first three books that I bought were 100 Winning Duplicate Tips by Ron Klinger, an expert from Australia and two books by William S. Root—one on bidding conventions and the other on declarer play. I bought many more books over the years. The ones that I liked the best are listed here.

A few years after Paul died I received a telephone call from Sue Pearson. She told me that she wanted to donate Paul’s collection of bridge books. She said that someone at the HBC claimed that they did not have any room for more books. I assured her that I would find a good home for them.

I drove over to Sue’s house and picked up a duffel bag full of books. Ones that interested me that I had not read I put in my own library. A few I gave to my wife. The books that I already had in my own collection I brought to the HBC and placed on the shelves without asking permission. There was plenty of room for them.


1. In 2010 Enfield decided to consolidate its two high schools into one. This may have saved the town money. However, what never made sense to me was why the surviving school was Enfield High. Fermi was much newer, much nicer, and much more centrally located.It also had plenty of land available for expansion. Enfield High, on the other hand, was right next to the river, rather dumpy, and very close to the worst part of town. The explanation may be contained in a report of toxic chemicals found on the land surrounding the building, as is detailed here.

2. There are many varieties of bridge. The form that swept the world in the twentieth century and caused many people to flunk out of college was rubber bridge. The North-South pair plays against the East-West pair. The cards are shuffled, dealt, and played. The same deck is used for many hands. Usually, two decks are used so that one can be shuffled (“made” in bridge lingo) while the other is dealt. The details are described here. Duplicate bridge attempts to remove as much of the chance elements. The North-South team’s results are compared with other North-South teams playing the same cards. More details can be read here.

3. The Endplay derives its name from the fact that it usually occurs near the end of the hand. A better name is Throw-in Play. The Wikipedia write-up of the technique is here.

4. A man named Jean-René Vernes determined by researching a large number of hands that when both sides have approximately equal strength the total number of tricks available when each side plays in its longest suit is roughly equal to the number of trumps in those two suits. So, if one side’s longest suit contains eight hearts, and the opposing side’s longest suit has nine spades, the LAW predicts that there are seventeen tricks in the hand. If the first side can make nine tricks with hearts as trump, the other side can expect to take eight tricks with spades as trump.

Of course the law does not always work. Larry Cohen’s seminal work, To Bid or Not to Bid, lists three negative adjustments and three positive adjustments that encompass most exceptions.

A commonly used corollary to the LAW asserts that in a competitive auction each side should bid to the combined number of trumps held by both partners. So, if North-South suspect that they have eight spades, they should bid to at least 2 as quickly as possible. Many people thing that the corollary is the LAW. However, unlike the LAW, the corollary is an artifact of the way that duplicate bridge is scored. It is much more successful when the side using it is not vulnerable.

2000-2001 TSI: Bringing AxN to Market Part 1

Designing our flag and running it up the pole to see if anyone salutes. Continue reading

By the spring of 2000 Denise Bessette and I had pretty well outlined the steps required to implement TSI’s new Internet product and agreed on the name AxN (pronounced “A cross N”). It was a clearinghouse for insertion orders (reservations for advertising space) sent from advertisers (A) to newspapers (N). It also managed communications from both sides and allowed the newspapers to confirm the orders online. The process that Denise and I employed, including the division of labor, was described here. Details of the system design are posted here.

I should note that neither Denise nor I have a background in marketing. Most of our discussions about this project took place during the period shortly after Doug Pease, or marketing person left TSI. We had not yet replaced him.

The first non-technical question that we faced was how to fund the project. We never really thought about setting aside a pot of money, borrowing from a financial institution, or seeking investors. Instead, all of the coding made use of tools that we already had or were available at minimal cost. We knew that the company would eventually need to spend some money on marketing, but we had no idea how to budget for it in advance.

A critically important aspect was deciding how we would bill for the service. The insertion orders always originated with AdDept programs on the AS/400s used by TSI’s clients. However, for various reasons no more than twenty of them regularly produced insertion orders inside AdDept. We were already charging those companies a monthly fee for TSI’s support of the AS/400’s faxing software. How much more could we charge them? Most of them knew the limitations of faxing, but removing them was not a high priorities for any of them.

In 2022 the Tribune Company owns the Courant. The building that I visited has been abandoned.

On the other hand, the companies that used AdDept ran ads in hundreds of newspapers, and for most of those papers the department stores were by far the biggest purchasers of advertising. It was not unheard of tor some of these companies to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars per month for ads in a single newspaper. In order to assess the situation better I scheduled appointments with executives at the two major papers that were within easy driving distance, the Hartford Courant and the Springfield Union News & Sunday Republican1.

I explained our proposed approach to an executive at each publication.The lady at the Courant was not very enthusiastic about the idea, but she did say that the paper would consider whatever the customers wanted. She emphasized that the newspapers were already paying third-party services in order to receive the ads electronically.

The guy at the Republican was more engaging. He showed me the process of how his employees laid out an issue of the paper. They did not start by placing the stories in a way that would make the paper more attractive at the newsstand. They began by figuring out where the ads from Filene’s2, the May Company’s department store chain that dominated New England, would run. He said that sometimes they did not receive the ads until minutes before press time—or even later. However, they always held the space for every ad that Filene’s had scheduled.

So, both Denise and I concluded that TSI should bill the newspapers for the service and to offer it to the advertisers as an alternative to faxing at the same price, thereby bringing their net costs to zero. The big questions were how much to bill the newspapers and how to frame it. It did not seem right to bill the large newspapers the same amount as the smaller ones. The pricing had to seem both moderate and equitable.

Denise came up with the idea of five or so tiered billing amounts, where the tiers were determined not by a paper’s circulation but by its published column-inch rate. These rates were available in a publication called Standard Rates and Data to which most advertising agencies in those days subscribed. I had seen the huge books lying around at our agency customers. I asked employees at Keiler Advertising if I could have an obsolete copy. They gladly located a fairly recent one and gave it to me. I discovered that the rates3 for newspaper advertising varied wildly. As I remember it, we decided to set the floor value for the top tier of AxN rates at $150. So, any paper that with a standard rate of $150 or more per column inch would be charged $150 per month. Other papers would be charged proportionately less

This proved to be a rather easy concept to explain to the newspaper. Because the advertiser and the newspaper both benefited, the costs would be split between them. The newspaper rates were proportional to the publicly recognized value of the ads in their paper. Our fee was roughly equal to the price of one column inch of advertising space. The size of a full-page ad in a broadsheet newspaper was over 120 column inches. TSI’s fee would be a pittance to newspapers, most of which were still thriving financially in the early twenty-first century. If we could present the system as reducing the number of misunderstandings, the cost for the newspaper could easily be justified if even one free make-good were eliminated every few years.


In 2001 I made two trips to locations of AdDept clients to assess the feasibility of AxN for both the advertisers and the newspapers. The first trip was in January of 2001 to Houston, a city with two large AdDept installations, Stage Stores4 and Foley’s5. I gave fairly detailed demonstrations to the buyers of newspaper space at both locations. I showed the system to Stage Stores first. Here are some of my notes from that trip.

The AxN presentation went pretty well. Becky (Newman), the production manager, made a point to tell me that she was very interested in it. They also gave me a lot of suggestions as to what they needed, especially in the inserts area.

After the demo Becky showed me the AdDirect6 website. It is in many ways similar to ours. They list all of their clients. The only retailers are M&F8, L&T9 (who doesn’t use them), Stage, and Office Depot. The coolest thing about the site is that you can determine which fields are displayed as columns (but not the order of the columns). You can also specify up to three sorting fields. Finally, you can specify a filter to limit the list. Stage would like all of these. They would be less useful to others.

Stage pays AdDirect $10,000 per month. They plan to negotiate the charge down.

… Fort Worth(less) Star Telegram invoice for $500K. Foley’s never indicated that they thought that the papers would be reluctant to pay a little for the IO service. They seemed to think that they would do whatever they told them to do.

Foley’s was under the mistaken impression that all of the other divisions were using AdDirect.

The second trip was to Pittsburgh. I demonstrated the system to the advertising department of Kaufmann’s9, the May Company’s division that was based there. I was able to show the newspaper buyers on their own PCs that very little would be different when they began to use the AxN code that had been added to the AdDept system with which they were familiar. It was really just a matter of flipping a switch for each paper. The system did the rest.

I then signed on to TSI’s AS/400 from one of their PC’s and showed them what orders would look like from their perspective. I showed them in the AxN Handbook for Newspaper Users (posted here) what the orders looked like when the rep signed on with the newspaper’s credentials. They were very impressed.

After explaining how we planned to bill the newspapers, I asked Mary Ann Brown how difficult she thought that it would be to get the newspapers to cooperate. She said, “They’ll do whatever we tell them to do.”

I had appointments the next day with Pittsburgh’s two newspapers, the Post-Gazette and the Tribune Review. At the Trib I met with an IT guy. He found what we were doing very interesting. He verified that all the reps had access to the Internet, and he was quite pleased that our approach did not require him to purchase equipment or reconfigure what he had. The lady who was Kaufmann’s rep at the Post was more stand-offish, but she verified Mary Ann Brown’s assessment of their willingness to cooperate.

My third appointment was at the Cleveland Plain Dealer. I rented a car and drove to Cleveland for an afternoon meeting with Kaufmann’s rep. I soon discovered that we had a common acquaintance. He had just returned from a trip to Albany. He had met there with Fran Lipari, the owner of Communication & Design10, the agency that handled the Key Bank account. The rep was polite, but he was not a bit enthusiastic about the prospect of paying TSI for handling insertion orders.

I rated my success level at the three newspapers as a win, a loss, and a tie. That was not a great result, but we were still in the ball game. We were just at the stage in which we were ready to roll the product out to the first advertiser when something remarkable happened.


In 2001 TSI received a telephone call from someone at Belk11, a department store chain that was (and still is) based in Charlotte, NC. In the next few months I made many trips to Charlotte to discuss with them the use of the AdDept system. Since Belk already owned several AS/400s, the time between their approval of the AdDept contract with the accompanying design document for proposed enhancements and the beginning of the installation period was much shorter than usual. I remember that at one of those early meetings I was explaining how the AS/400 could automatically fax the insertion orders to the newspapers. Someone asked if it was possible to use the Internet to send the orders.

Guinea pigs love to whistle. Be careful; if you pick one up by its tail, its eyes will fall out.

I swear that I did not plant this question, but if I had thought of it ahead of time, I probably would have. I informed them that TSI had indeed developed just such a product, and we were about to roll it out to our existing customers. After I explained how it worked, Belk eagerly agreed to act as TSI’s guinea pig (sorry; I meant to type “Beta Site”) for AxN. This was such an ideal situation that I could scarcely believe it.


How TSI persuaded nearly all of the users of AdDept and hundreds of newspapers to sign up for AxN is explained in Part 2, which is posted here.


1. The name of the paper was changed to Springfield Republican in 2001.

2. Filene’s used AdDept for accounting functions, but only because the May Company insisted. I was never able to persuade the newspaper manager to abandon the elaborate set of spreadsheets that he had developed even though it did not produce insertion orders. The painful story of my attempts to get them to use more of the system have been chronicled here.

3. Most department stores negotiated much lower rates than the published ones. They often had complicated agreements about volume discounts.

4. The “standard rate” was the “open” rate for a black & white ROP ad in a daily edition. It did not include any discounts or premiums. I located a web page that actually included a page in one of the 2005 editions of Standard Rates and Data. It showed the complete rate card for the St. Petersburg Times, which happened to subscribe to AxN. It is on p.3 of the pdf posted here. SRDS, the company that published the physical book, now allows subscribing advertisers and agencies to view the rates on the Internet.

Becky Newman’s LinkedIn photo.

5. TSI’s long relationship with Stage Stores is recounted here. I do not have vivid memories of Becky Newman. Her LinkedIn page is here.

6. Foley’s was one of the earliest users of AdDept. The details have been posted here.

7. I have only a vague recollection of AdDirect. Apparently it was a way of entering ads for insertion orders online one at a time. The orders could be sent to the newspapers. This might be a reasonable approach for an ad agency, but retailers ran the same ad in many markets. Entering these one at a time would be unduly burdensome. If the $10,000 figure is correct, then the AdDept-AxN combination saved Stage a heck of a lot of money over the years.

8. M&F is Meier & Frank, the smallest department store division of the May Company. It was based in Portland, OR. Details of the AdDept installation at M&F have been posted here.

9. L&T refers to Lord & Taylor, the May Company division based in New York. The relationship between L&T and TSI is described here.

10. Much more has been posted about the AdDept installation at Kaufmann’s here.

11. Communication & Design (always “&”, never “and”) was one of the first ad agencies to purchase the GrandAd system. My adventures in installing and supporting that system are described here.

12. The details of TSI’s long and productive relationship with Belk are posted here.

1999-2014 TSI: Administrative Employees in East Windsor

From Nadine to Ashley. Continue reading

The resignation from TSI by my sister Jamie Lisella in the summer of 1999 (as explained here) left the company with neither an administrative employee nor a marketing director during a critical period. We were in the process of moving to a new location that Jamie had found, we had a huge backlog of programming jobs, and Denise Bessette (introduced here) and I were establishing a new working relationship (explained here) and trying to figure out how to adapt to the new world of the Internet.

More like “reasonably good pay”.

Prior to this time I never had hired an administrative person. In each of the cases in this entry I wrote a help-wanted ad and ran it in the Hartford Courant and the Journal Inquirer. I kept a record of the responses in a spreadsheet. I interviewed a few of the respondents and then picked one or started over.

In 1990 the one whom I liked best was named Michele Stewart. At the end of August I called her on the telephone and offered her the job. She told me that she was probably going to accept another job because my description of our post sounded complicated. She was most concerned about the sales tax aspect. Perhaps I did not explain that computer programs provided all the numbers. The administrative person’s role was just to see that the forms were filled out, and the payments were made on time.


So, I ended up hiring Nadine Holmes, my second choice. Se was single and in her twenties. She took longer than expected to catch on to how TSI did things, but she had a good attitude. I wrote this on October 18:

Nadine came into my office at 4PM with a very solemn look on her face. She announced that she had to tell me that she could no longer work for my company. I sighed, leaned back in my chair, and folded my hands. Then she said, “The time goes by too fast here.” She has shown remarkable progress in the last few days. She is still a little sloppy, and her spelling needs work, but she definitely is a keeper.

By February of 2000 we had moved into our new office at 7B Pasco Drive in Enfield. The first month or so was hectic because of address changes and other transition issues, but then things slowed down. A few problems began to appear.

I had lunch with Nadine Thursday. I don’t know if I got through to her, but at least I think she has a little better idea of what the company is about. She told me that it is hard for her to get used to the idea that she is the low man on the totem pole and always will be as long as she works here. I told her that we planned to hire someone to help with marketing and that when we start marketing again, we will have plenty for her to do.

The next week I sent this e-mail to Denise:

I told Nadine that I want her to become an expert at Word and Excel. My real objective is for her to become reasonably competent at them. It may be useful for her to go through some of the exercises in the book that Harry1 had. I was hoping that we would have received the book to use as the basis for a mailing, but it didn’t come yet. If you can think of anything for her to do, by all means ask her to do it. I told her that I think of you as my alter-ego.

My recollection is that this was reasonably successful. She could maintain a spreadsheet if I told her precisely what to do. However, other problems arose. I wrote this on December 27.

I discovered before anyone came in that Nadine forgot to pay the sales tax in December. I was so angry about this that I was almost out of control. I got less than four hours of sleep on Monday evening. I needed to rest for a few minutes on Tuesday morning before everyone came in, but this made me so upset that I couldn’t do it. You will be happy to know that even though I had my boots on, I did not take it out on the furniture (but it was tempting). I didn’t yell at anyone either, but I was very grumpy.

The “boots” reference was about an occasion at our Enfield office on which I kicked a dent in one of our steel filing cabinets. By the middle of January I decided that Nadine was not the solution to TSI’s administrative needs. I explained my attitude to Denise.

I think that I found a good metaphor for Monday’s conversation. In addition to the part about a new direction, I plan to emphasize to Nadine that I want to hire someone who is “on the same wavelength” that I am on (or we are). If she wants more specifics, I will have a list of things that I asked her to do, but that she didn’t do or didn’t do until I hounded her about them. You can contribute to the list if you want.

I hired a woman named Paula to replace Nadine. I don’t remember her last name. She seemed to be more than intelligent enough to handle the job. The other big factor in her favor was that she lived in East Windsor almost within walking distance of the office.

On the other hand, she had at least one young child. Paula lasted less than a week. She called in sick while I was on a business trip. Denise was furious about this. I fired her, but I did not feel good about it.

She explained that she is having a lot of problems with her husband. She said that she was hoping that the job would either provide a solution to the problems or the wherewithal to let her stand on her own two feet if it came to that. This is about what I expected. I don’t know if I am happy that she told me or not. I have not been dwelling on this subject, but I still find myself waking up worrying about her.


I really liked working with Lucia Hagan (pronounced (LOO shuh HAY gun), who started in the spring of 2001. She was, in my opinion both a very nice person and a superlative employee. Her tenure coincided with a period that required the most administrative changes. TSI was in the process of setting up a system to manage the hundreds of newspapers that were beginning to subscribe to AxN. Accounts receivable and billing records had to be set up, and, for the first time ever, we needed to keep track of contracts.

Here are some of my memories of Lucia’s time at TSI.

  • Lucia had a tattoo on one of her calves. I had never interacted for any length of time with anyone with a tattoo. Hers seemed out of place to me, but I guess that I should not have been surprised. She lived and grew up in Stafford, a town built around auto racing.
  • Lucia was into NASCAR. She was especially a fan of Jeff Gordon, who drove #24 for Team Penske. She was upset when Penske “gave all of Gordon’s best cars to the kid”, meaning Jimmy Johnson.
  • Lucia was amused that I napped in the computer room early in the morning and on weekends. She bought me a pillow and a University of Michigan pillow case that I am still using in 2023.
  • Her husband Rick worked at Leonard’s Auto Parts in West Stafford2. She once remarked, “It’s not a real job.”
  • Every year Lucia and Rick went overboard on decorations of their house in Stafford for Halloween. On two occasions I drove out to see their house just before Halloween.
  • Lucia had no children.
  • She was working at the time that we terminated Sandy Sant’Angelo’s (introduced here) employment at TSI. She asked to move to the space by the window that Sandy had occupied. I had been oblivious to the fact that she did not like sitting so close to the bathrooms. Presumably Nadine did not like it either. Needless to say, I concurred.

I never had any problems with Lucia’s work or her attitude, but I was dimly aware that something was amiss in her relationship with Denise. I arrived in my office at TSI early one morning after having returned from a multi-day trip. I was surprised that Lucia came to my office at about 7:30 and explained that she was not coming in to work. It took me a minute to realize that she meant that she was resigning immediately. I asked her what the problem was, but she did not want to talk about it. She was adamant that she could not work at TSI any longer.

I never did find out what had actually happened.

At the end of that year TSI sent Lucia a check for her share of the profit-sharing distribution, but she never cashed it. Over the years I have thought about Lucia many times when I drove on Route 190 through Stafford.


The choice to replace Lucia was easy. Eileen Sheehan-Willet (LinkedIn page here) stood out from the other applicants. She had previous experience in a small business, and she had an extremely positive demeanor. She did not catch on to new tasks as quickly as Lucia had, but each time she kept her nose to the grindstone until she had mastered every detail.

Here are some of my recollections of my second-favorite administrative helper.

  • Eileen had a green thumb. She nursed the neglected plants in our office back to health.
  • I met Eileen’s husband’s a few times, but I don’t remember his name. My most vivid memory is of the extremely overcast day on which I forgot to extinguish my Saturn’s headlights before eating lunch and enjoying my postprandial nap in the park near the Connecticut River. Eileen called him. He picked me up in his truck. When we arrived he charged the battery with a stand-alone unit. It took only a minute or two.
  • I don’t think that Eileen had any children.
  • While working at TSI Eileen was diagnosed with cancer in one of her legs. She was the only employee who ever filed a claim on the disability policy that the company maintained for two decades. I worried about her subsequent use of the stairway that was the only entry to or exit from TSI’s office, but she had no trouble with it when she returned to work. It was a very nice feeling that she could recover from such a serious issue.

After a few years Eileen and her husband decided to move to New Hampshire. I seem to recall that it had something to do with his job. She gave us several weeks notice, and so there was time for her to train her replacement.


The person whom I hired to replace Eileen was named Debbie Hlobik. She had a son who gave her some problems and a daughter. Eileen warned me that, although Debbie was certainly capable of doing the job, she worried about her attitude. This assessment turned out to be prescient. Debbie was married and had a son whose behavior gave her a lot of problems. I am not sure what she wanted to do with her life, but she eventually made it quite clear that it did not involve TSI. I finally had to fire her. When I did, she said that I had nothing to be sorry about. She immediately applied for unemployment benefits.


Perhaps the strangest few weeks in the history of the company was after I had hired Chrissy Ralph or maybe it was Chrissy Poloski to replace Debby. Chrissy seemed fine in the interview and for the first few weeks. At some point she either got married or divorced (I don’t remember which) and changed her name. After that her behavior became erratic. One day she left at lunch time and never returned. She had written and signed a letter detailing her resignation and left it on her desk next to her PC. I also found several unpaid bills in her desk drawer, including sales tax bills for a few states. TSI had to pay fines on a few of them.

Then, unbelievably, she filed for unemployment benefits and claimed that I had fired her. Denise and I contested the filing, and the state arranged for a hearing of the case. Chrissy did not appear, and her claim was terminated forthwith.


The hiring of our last administrative person, Ashley Elliott, in 2010 put an end to our losing streak. Although I spent several years working with her, I have a hard time coming up with any anecdotes at all. She certainly did a good gob. She seemed to be rather friendly with Jason Dean, TSI’s programmer during her tenure at TSI. They were both more than a generation younger than I was.

She was still employed with TSI when the company shut down in 2014 (described here). Here is the letter of recommendation that I wrote for her.

To Whom It May Concern:

I am the president of TSI Tailored Systems, Inc., a small company that has designed, implemented, installed, and supported computer software for thirty-five years. Ashley Elliott has served as our administrative person since April 26, 2010. Before that she worked for a temporary employment agency and was assigned to our account for three months. We were so pleased with her work and her attitude that we offered her permanent employment. This was the only time in the long history of the company that we have done that.

Ashley’s job at TSI involved many diverse tasks. Essentially she was responsible for almost everything except for development and support of the software. She managed both the Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable systems and used our home-grown computer systems to generate invoices, statements, and numerous reports. She was very good at interacting with both customers and vendors. She managed the cash flow in Excel, filed sales and use taxes online in many states, and did most of the work required for closing the books every month. She also was responsible for routine purchasing and other aspects of managing the office.

Ashley did very good work for TSI. It takes a special type of person to be able to execute such a large number of small tasks, some menial and some challenging, and Ashley adapted very well. My partner and I have been very impressed with her attitude and her ability to get along with everyone in the office. We came to depend upon Ashley, and she did not disappoint us. She made the trains run.

Ashley’s termination had nothing to do with her work, which was of consistently high quality. Business conditions necessitated that we close the company rather abruptly.

I wholeheartedly and unreservedly recommend Ashley for any similar position. I would be very happy to talk with any prospective employer about her work at TSI. I can be reached at Mike@Wavada.org or 860 386-0700 (through July 31, 2014) or 860 763-3694 (home).


Of all of the blog entries that I have written this one was the most frustrating to write. I worked with these people for a total of thirteen years, but I had trouble remembering any details. Furthermore, aside from my experience with Nadine, I found little in the way of notes. I recently discovered some spreadsheets dated in 2006 (Eileen?) and 2009 (Ashley?) concerning recruitment of administrative assistants. I am at a loss to explain the fact that none of the names on the list seem even vaguely familiar. There was one person named Paula. She may have been the same as the short-term employee described above, but the last name and the year did not seem right.

I also searched on the Internet for information about the women who handled the administrative functions to determine what they had done since leaving TSI. I found almost nothing about any of them.

I have had a few email exchanges with Lucia and Eileen, but otherwise no communication. It puzzles me how I could have worked fairly closely with these people for such a long time, but until I tried to put this page together, I hardly gave them a thought.


1. This was a reference to Harry Burt, a programmer at TSI who was introduced here.

2. Leonard’s was in business long after Lucia left TSI. I drove by it many times on the way to and from bridge tournaments. At some point it became Carquest Auto Parts. On my last drive past it in August of 2023 I noticed that the store appeared to be out of business. Its website was no longer working, and the Facebook page indicated that the owner had retired.

3. Debbie died in 2019 at the age of 60. Her obituary is posted here.