Tag Archives: Behart, Kate

1991-2012 TSI: AdDept: The Whiffs

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A few notable failures. Continue reading →

We had a very good record of closing AdDept sales. Most of the whiffs fell into one of two categories:

  1. Divisions of Federated Department Stores. Our relationships with various Federated divisions are described in detail here. They are not included in this entry.
  2. Companies that did not advertise enough to justify a high-quality multi-user centralized database. We actually sold the AdDept system to a couple of these anyway.

TSI’s first efforts to market AdDept were concentrated around New York and New England. I figured that there were not very many retailers who could afford the system to keep track of advertising, but, then again, I did not really expect to justify the cost of the system at Macy’s in the very first module that we activated—ad measurement.

The strip mall in which the Enfield store was located was named after Caldor.

Our first attempt was a quintessential whiff. Kate Behart (much more about her here) had been in contact with someone in the advertising department at Caldor, a discount department store based in Norwalk, CT. Kate arranged for me to give a presentation to them at the IBM office in Norwalk. Of course, we had to make sure that the office had the BASIC program, and I had to install both the AdDept programs and some data that I had dummied up from Macy’s real data.

My presentation was flawless. The only problem that I encountered that day was the lack of an audience. No one from Caldor showed up. We never did find out why not. Kate called them repeatedly, but no one returned her calls. It may have had something to do with the fact that in 1989, the year that we installed the first AdDept system at Macy’s, the May Company sold Caldor to a group of investment houses.

Caldor went out of business in 1999.

I also paid a visit to another local retailer, Davidson and Leventhal, commonly known as D&L. Theirs were not exactly department stores, but they had fairly large stores that sold both men’s and women’s clothing. So, they had quite a few departments. The stores had a good reputation locally. The headquarters was in New Britain, CT.

This D&L ad was on the back cover of the issue of Northeast that featured my story (described here).

The advertising department only employed three or four employees. They wanted to know if they could use the computer for both D&L ads and ads for Weathervane, another store that they owned, as well. That seemed vaguely feasible to me, and so I said they could. In fact, we later did this for Stage Stores and for the Tandy Corporation, but both of those companies were much larger, and I had a much better understanding by then of what it entailed.

I didn’t even write up a proposal for D&L. The person with whom I spoke made it clear that what we were offering was way out of their price range.

D&L went out of business in 1994, only a few years after our meeting. Weathervane lasted until 2005.

I have only a vague recollection of doing a demonstration at IBM’s big facility in Waltham, MA, for a chain of auto parts retailers from Phoenix. The name of the chain at the time was Northern Automotive. My recollection is that I spoke with a man and a woman. If they told me how they heard about AdDept, I don’t remember it. After a very short time it was clear that AdDept was much more than the company needed. Although Northern Automotive had a lot of stores with four different logos, it only ran one ad per week. So there was really not much to keep track of. I had the distinct impression that the demo was just an excuse for the couple to take a vacation in New England on the company’s dime.

I don’t remember either of their names, but the experience list on LinkedIn for a guy named Paul Thompson (posted here) makes him a strong candidate. Northern Automotive changed its name to CSK Auto, Inc. not long after our meeting. In 2008 CSK was purchased by O’Reilly Auto Parts.

Won’t Paul be surprised to be busted thirty years later in an obscure blog?

Tom Moran (more details here) set up an appointment with employees of Genovese Drugs at its headquarters in Melville, NY. The two of us drove to Long Island to meet with them.

I probably should have talked to someone there over the phone before we left. The only impression that I remember getting from the meeting was that they were not at all serious about getting a system. We had a great deal of trouble getting them to describe what the advertising department did at the time and what they wanted to do. I was frustrated because I had considered this a relatively cheap opportunity to learn how chains of pharmacies handled their advertising. It was actually a waste of time and energy.

Tom tried to follow up, but he got nowhere. We did not submit a proposal.

J.C. Penney bought the company in 1998 and rebranded all the stores as Eckerd pharmacies.

Woodies’ flagship store in downtown Washington.

While I was working on the software installation at Hecht’s in 1991, Tom Moran coordinated our attempt to land the other big department store in the Washington, DC, area, Woodward & Lothrop, locally known as Woodies. I found a folder that contains references to correspondence with them. Tom worked with an IBM rep named Allison Volpert1. Our contacts at Woodies were Joel Nichols, the Divisional VP, and Ella Kaszubski, the Production Manager.

As I browsed through the file, I detected a few warning signs. The advertising department was reportedly in the process of asking for capital for digital photography, which was in its (very expensive) infancy in 1991. Tom was told that they hoped to “slip in” AdDept as part of the photography project. Furthermore, the fact that we were not dealing with anyone in the financial area did not bode well.

Someone wrote this book about Woodies.

Finally, we had no choice other than to let IBM propose the hardware. Their method of doing this always led to vastly higher hardware and system software costs than we considered necessary. I found a copy of IBM’s configuration. The bottom line was over $147,000 and another $48,600 for IBM software. This dwarfed what Hecht’s had spent. If the cost of AdDept was added in, they probably were facing a purchase price of over a quarter of a million dollars! That is an awful lot to “slip in”.

I don’t recall the details, but I remember having an elegant lunch during this period with someone from Woodies in the restaurant of the main store. It may have been Joel Nichols. It seemed like a very positive experience to me. He seemed eager to automate the department.

We lost contact with Woodies after early 1992. I seriously doubt that the advertising department even purchased the photography equipment that they had coveted. The early nineties were very bad for retailers. By 1994 the owner of Woodies and the John Wanamaker chain based in Philadelphia declared bankruptcy and then sold the stores to JC Penney and the May Company. Many of the stores were rebranded as Hecht’s or Lord and Taylor.

In some ways Fred Meyer, a chain of department stores based in Portland, OR, seemed like a perfect match for TSI. At the time they were almost unique, and we usually excelled at programming unusual ideas. Their approach to retail included what are now called “hypermarket” (department store plus groceries) stores, although they definitely had some much smaller stores as well. The one in downtown Portland was very small. I really thought that we had a good shot at getting this account, largely due to the fact that the IT department already had one or two AS/400’s. So, the hardware cost would probably be minimal.

She would be lucky to make it in nine hours; there were no direct flights.

I was asked to work with a consultant who, believe it or not, commuted from Buffalo, NY, to Portland, OR. I can’t remember her name. She knew computer systems but virtually nothing about what the advertising department did. She wanted me to tell her what AdDept could do, and she would determine whether the system would work for them. I have always hated it when a “gatekeeper” was placed between me and the users. I understand that they do not trust the users to make a good decision, but advertising is very complicated, and almost no IT consultants know much about it. I would not have minded if the consultant sat in on interviews that I conducted with people in advertising.

If I was allowed to meet with anyone from the scheduling or financial areas of the department, I do not remember it at all. I do remember spending an afternoon with the head of the company’s photography studio. AdDept had a module (that no one used) for managing shoots and another (used by Macy’s East) for managing the merchandise that is loaned to the studio for a shoot.

I remember the photo studio guy mentioning that they also did billable work for outside clients. He mentioned Eddie Bauer by name. He could not believe that I had never heard of it/him.

I probably botched this opportunity. Before agreeing to come out the second time, I should have insisted on meeting with whoever placed their newspaper ads and the person in charge of advertising finance. I did not want to step on the toes of the lady from Buffalo, but I probably should have been more aggressive.

Kate accompanied me on one of these trips. We probably flew on Saturday to save on air fare. On Sunday we drove out to Mt. Hood, where we saw the lodge and the glacier, and visited Multnomah Falls on the way back.

Freddie’s was acquired by Kroger in 1998, but the logos on the stores were maintained. There still is a headquarters in Portland, but I don’t know if ads are still created and/or placed there.

Aside from our dealings with Federated divisions2 TSI had very few whiffs during the period that Doug Pease (described here) worked for us. After one of our mailings Doug received a call from Debra Edwards3, the advertising director at May Ohio, a May Company division that had its headquarters in Cleveland. Doug and I flew Continental non-stop to Cleveland and took the train into downtown. My recollection was that we were able to enter the store from the underground train terminal.

The presentation and the demo went very well. I am quite certain that we would have gotten this account were it not for the fact that in early 1993 the May Company merged the Ohio division with Kaufmann’s in Pittsburgh. Management of the stores was transferred to Pittsburgh. Debra was hired as advertising director at Elder-Beerman Stores.

We stayed overnight in Cleveland and had time to visit the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which was right down the street from the huge May Co. building. I cannot say that I was greatly impressed with the exhibits.

A few years later Doug and I undertook a second trip to Cleveland to visit the headquarters of Sherwin Williams. Doug had talked extensively with the lady who was the advertising director there. He was very enthusiastic about the prospect of making this sale. By that time Doug had already closed a few big deals for us, and so I trusted his judgment. However, I could not understand how a company that really only sold one product could possibly need AdDept. Yes, they have thousands of stores, but how many ads do they run?

I don’t honestly remember anything about our discussion with them. Needless to say, Doug did not close this one, although he never stopped trying to revive it.

I don’t really count it as a whiff, but Doug was unable to close the deal with Liberty House in Honolulu after our epic trip to Hawaii in December of 1995. The details are recounted here.

I drove past two of the stores in Texas, but I never went inside.

Just as Marvin Elbaum had backed out of his contract with TSI for a GrandAd system in 1986 (as described here), so also one company signed an agreement for TSI’s AdDept system and, before we had installed the system, changed its mind. There was one big difference in the two situations. The second company was the Tandy Corporation, which had actually ordered installations of AdDept for all three of its retail divisions. At the last minute the company decided to close down Incredible Universe, one of the three divisions. The other two companies became TSI clients in 1997, as is described here.

It was not a big loss for TSI. IU was one of a kind. Its stores were gigantic multi-story combinations of electronics and theater. There were only seventeen stores, and only six were ever profitable. Those six were sold to Fry’s Electronics. The other eleven were sold to real estate developers at pennies on the dollar.

I did a demo for Mervyn’s California, a department store based in Hayward, CA. I think that I must have done the demo after finishing a training/consulting trip at Macy’s West in San Francisco. I cannot imagine that I would have flown out to the west coast to do a demo without spending a day or two gathering specs.

The IBM office nearest to Hayward was in Oakland. I took BART in the late afternoon from San Francisco to Oakland. There was quite a bit of excitement at the Holiday Inn at which I was staying. Someone had been murdered on the street in front of the hotel the previous night. There was one other very peculiar thing about this stay. I checked into a Holiday Inn with no difficulty, but I checked out of a different hotel (maybe a Ramada?). The hotel had been sold, and its ownership had changed while I was asleep.

The demo went fine. The guy who had contacted me—his name was Thiery or something like that—liked what he saw. However, the sale never advanced any further. This was almost always what happened whenever I got talked into doing a demo without taking at least a day to interview the potential users. At the time that I did the demo Mervyn’s was, unbeknownst to me, owned by Target. This might have explained the lack of progress. Target may have been restricting or rejecting any capital purchases at the time.

Mervyn’s was sold to some vulture capitalists in 2004. A much smaller version of the chain went out of business in 2009.

For some reason Doug and I once had a very short meeting with the president of Gottschalks, a chain of department stores based in Fresno, CA. He told Doug and me that he would get all of the other members of the Frederick Atkins Group to install AdDept. This organization (absolutely never abbreviated by its initials) somehow enabled its members to shop for foreign and domestic merchandise as a group. Nearly every department store that was not owned by the May Company or Federated belonged to it.

A few years after he made this promise he (or someone else at Gottschalks) arranged for me to speak before the members at one of their conventions in Naples, FL. I flew to Fort Meyers and rented a car from there. Naples was beautiful and reeked of new money. I gave my little spiel, but I did not have an opportunity to interact with any of the members of the audience. So, I did not get any direct feedback.

We eventually did sign up a few members of the group—notably the Bon-Ton (described here) and Elder-Beerman (described here). I don’t know whether my speech had any effect.

I think that the Frederick Atkins Group is defunct in 2021. The references to it that I could find on the Internet were all from decades past.

In (I think) 1999 Doug Pease and I made an unproductive trip to Columbus, OH, to talk with the IT director of of Value City about the possibility of installing the AdDept system for use by the advertising department. That adventure is described here.

First stop: Norfolk.

TSI got a phone call from a chain of furniture stores in coastal Virginia, Norfolk4, as I recall. As part of my crazy automotive support trip, I stopped by to talk with the advertising director at this company on my journey from Home Quarters Warehouse in Virginia Beach to Hecht’s in Arlington. I spent a couple of hours with him. When I discovered that the company had only three stores, I knew that this was a mistake. I told him that our software could address his problems, but the cost and effort would not be worth it for either of us. I advised him to hire someone who was a wiz with spreadsheets.

I think that I got a free cup of coffee out of it.

I can’t tell you what happened to the company thereafter because I don’t even remember its name.

We had two reasonably hot leads in 2000. I had to handle both of them myself. The first was at Bealls department store, which has its headquarters in Bradenton, FL. This was another situation is which I had to deal with the IT department rather than the advertising department. I am pretty sure that the company already had at least one AS/400. I have a few notes from this trip, but it is not clear whether I intended to do the demo on their system or on one at a nearby IBM office.

In any case I think that there was a technical problem that prevented a successful installation of the software needed for the demo. So, I had to improvise, and I did not get to spend much time with the people who would have benefited from the system. The whole thing made me very depressed.

I had some free time, and so I went to the beach. I stopped at a Jacobson’s store to buy a tee shirt to wear at the beach. The cheapest tee shirts in the store cost $100!

The beach was lovely, and it was unbelievably empty. The weather was pretty nice. A beach in Connecticut would have been packed in this type of weather.

All of these stores are gone.

We did not get the account, but the tale has an interesting coda. Bealls is still in business today. For years Bealls could not expand outside of the state of Florida because a different store with exactly the same name was already using it in other states. These Bealls stores were run by Stage Stores, a long-time AdDept client that was based in Houston. Stage Stores was still using AdDept when TSI went out of business in 2014.

In 2019 Stage announced that it was changing all of its stores into Gordmans, its off-price logo (which did not exist while I was working with them). When the company declared bankruptcy Bealls purchased, among other things, the right to use the Bealls name nationwide.

I remember going to Barneys New York in late 2000 to talk with someone in advertising. I also have discovered three emails that I sent to Christine Carter, who was, I think, either in charge of the advertising department or in charge of the financial side. Barneys only had twenty-two stores, and that included some off-price outlets. I don’t know how much they actually advertised.

Flagship store on 60th Street.

We never heard from them after my last email, which emphasized how easily AdDept could be adapted to differing needs even for companies the size of Barneys. By this time the very affordable AS/400 model 150 had been introduced. It would have been perfect for them.

I think that Barneys is dead or nearly so in 2021. All of the stores in the U.S have been closed, and even the “Barneys New York” brand was sold to Saks Fifth Avenue. However, the company also had a Japan division, which is evidently still operational.

I received a very unexpected phone some time in 2001 or 2002. It came from a man who had formerly worked at Saks Fifth Avenue and had taken a job as a Vice President at Sears. He knew that the advertising department at Saks had been doing things with its AdDept system that Sears’ advertising department seemed utterly incapable of. He invited me to the Sears headquarters in Hoffman Estates, IL, to investigate the possibility of installing AdDept at Sears.

At about the same time I had been in contact with the agency in a nearby town that Sears used for buying newspaper space and negotiating newspaper contracts. They wanted to talk with me about the possibility of working together. The agency’s name was three initials. I think that one was an N, but I am not sure.5

I arranged to spend consecutive days at the two places. It was cold on the day that I visited the agency. I learned that it recruited new clients by claiming that they could negotiate better rates for them because they also represented Sears. I suspected that this was baloney. Sears was a bid dog nationwide, but the amount of newspaper ads that they bought in any individual market was not that impressive. They were just in a lot of markets.

After the people explained the services that they offered to clients, I remarked that about 10 percent of what they did overlapped with about 10 percent of what we did. Privately I could not imagine that any of our clients who would benefit from their services.

I told them about AxN, our Internet product. They informed me that the papers did not want to sign on to their website for insertion orders. Of course, they wouldn’t, and they had nothing to hold over the papers.

We ended the meeting with the usual agreement to stay in touch and look for synergies, but privately I considered them the enemy.

I did not see a parking structure. Maybe I entered on the wrong side of the pond.

The next day was bitterly cold, and there was a strong wind. I located the sprawling Sears complex and parked my rented car in a lot that was already nearly full. I had to walk a long way to the main building, and I have never felt as cold as I did on that walk.

I could hardly believe it when I walked into the building. The ground floor was billed with retail establishments—a drug store, a coffee shop, a barber shop, and many more. I had to take the escalator up to get to Sears. I was met there by the woman with whom I had been in contact. She was from the IT department.

OK, now I get it. Our problem was that we did not have enough architects.

She took me up to meet the “advertising team”. Six or eight people were assembled in the room, and they all had assigned roles. I remember that one was the “system architect”, and one was the “database manager”. I almost could not suppress my amusement. What did all these people do? There was no system, and there certainly was no database. At TSI I handled essentially all the roles that everyone at the table described.

They asked me some questions about the AdDept system. When I told them that it ran on the AS/400, the system architect asked me if that system was not considered obsolete. I scoffed at this notion and explained that IBM had introduced in the AS/400 64-bit RISC processors that were state-of-the-art. I also said that, as far as I knew, the AS/400 was the only system that was build on top of a relational database. That made it perfect for what AdDept did.

I wonder how many “OS/2 shops” there were in the world.

They informed me that Sears was an OS/26 shop. I did not know that there was such a thing. In the real world Windows had already left OS/2 in its dust by that time. In all my time dealing with retailers I never heard anyone else even mention OS/2. It might have been a great idea, but IBM never did a good job of positioning it against Windows.

Besides, just because the corporation endorsed OS/2 should not eliminate consideration of multi-user relational databases where appropriate. The devices with OS/2 could serve as clients.

They explained to me that Sears’ advertising department had hundreds of employees, most of whom served as liaisons with the merchandise managers. Most of the ads were placed by agencies. I presume that the newspaper ads were produced in-house. No one whom I talked with seemed to know. The people on the committee did not seem to know anything about how the department did budgeting or planning.

The competition.

Someone talked about Sears’ competitors. The example cited was Home Depot. I don’t know why this surprised me. I must have been taken in by the “softer side of Sears” campaign a few years earlier.

After the meeting my escort took me to a remarkable room that was dedicated to the advertising project. It was a small theater that had ten or so posters on the wall with big Roman numerals at the top: I, II, III, IV, etc. There were no statues, but otherwise I was immediately struck by the resemblance to the Stations of the Cross that can be found in almost any Catholic church in the world. I asked what the posters represented. The answer was that they were the “phases of the project”. I was stunned by the assumption that the project required “a team” and that it was or indefinite duration. No one ever allowed us more than a month or two to have at least portions of the system up and running.

At some point I was allowed to give my presentation. The man who had worked at Saks attended along with a fairly large number of people. Maybe some were from advertising. I was never allowed to speak with them individually.

I never got to read the advertising department’s Wish Book.

My talk explained that AdDept was a relational database that was specifically designed for retail advertising departments. I described a few of the things for which it had been used by other retailers. I could not do much more than that. I had not been able to talk with any of the people in the department, and the IT people were clearly clueless.

When I returned to Connecticut I wrote to both my escort and the man from Saks. I told both of them that I did not know what the next step might be. I had not been given enough access to the advertising department to make a proposal. The whole experience was surreal. If someone had asked me to return, I would only have done it if I were granted unfettered access to potential users.

No one ever contacted us. I told Doug not to bother following up.

One puzzling whiff occurred during the very short period in which Jim Lowe worked for us. The strange case of Wherehouse Music is explored here.

Perhaps the strangest telephone call from a genuine prospect that I ever received was from Albertsons, a very large retailer with is its headquarters in Boise Idaho. The person who called was (or at least claimed to be) the advertising director there.

I had heard of Albertsons, but I did not know very much about the company. All I knew was that they were a chain of grocery stores in the west. Since advertising for grocery stores is basically limited to one insert/polybag7 per week, they had never seemed to be great prospects for AdDept. However, I never hung up on someone who expressed interest in the system.

The problem was that this lady insisted that I fly out to Boise to meet with her and her crew the next day. I tried to get her to explain what the situation was, but she said that she had no time to talk. She needed to know if I would make the trip. It was a little tempting for a peculiar reason. Idaho was one of the few states8 that I had never visited. Still, this sounded awfully fishy. I passed.

The incredibly bumpy road that Albertsons has traveled is documented on its Wikipedia page, which is available here. I don’t remember when the call from the advertising director came. I therefore have no way of knowing whether she was in charge of advertising for a region, a division, all of the grocery stores, or none of those. I might well have passed up an opportunity that might have extended the life of the company. Who knows? It looked like a goose, and it honked like a goose, but maybe going to Boise would not have been a wild goose chase.

Jeff Netzer, with whom I had worked in the nineties at Neiman Marcus (recounted here), called me one day in 2010. He asked me if I remembered him. I said that I did; he was the Aggie who worked at Neiman’s.

He informed me that he was now working at Sewell Automotive, the largest Cadillac dealership in the Dallas area. He said that they were looking for help in automating their marketing. I was not sure how well AdDept would work in that environment, but I agreed to visit them. His boss promised to buy me a steak dinner.

I flew Southwest to Dallas, and for the first time my plane landed at Love Field. It was much closer to Sewell than DFW would have been.

I found a great deal out about their operation. I doubted that we could do much for the agency for a reasonable amount of money. On my computer I recently found a three-page document dated September 23, 2010, in which I had listed all of the issues that I learned about at Sewell. A woman named Tucker Pressly entered all of their expense invoices into a SQL Server database. It was inefficient, and there were no programs to help them compare with budgets.

The main objective of the marketing department was to make sure that they were taking advantage of all available co-op dollars from Cadillac and other vendors. We could not help with this unless we wrote a new module. I described my reactions to their issues in a letter to Jeff.

I never heard back from Jeff, who left Sewell in 2012. Nobody ever bought me a steak dinner.

Sewell Automotive is still thriving in 2021.

In 2011 or 2012 I received a phone call from a lady from the advertising department at Shopko, a chain of department stores based in Green Bay, WI. I don’t recall her name. She said that she worked for Jack Mullen, whom I knew very well from both Elder-Beerman and Kaufmann’s. Before Doug Pease came to TSI, he had worked for Jack at G. Fox in Hartford.

I flew out to Packer Land to meet with her. They had a very small advertising department. They basically ran circulars in local newspapers on a weekly basis. As I remember, she and one other person ran the business office.

I worked up a proposal for the most minimal AdDept system that I could come up with and sent it to her. When I had not heard from her after a few weeks I called her. She said that the company was downsizing and, in fact, her position was being eliminated.

Jack also left the company in July of 2012. His LinkedIn page is here. Shopko went out of business in 2019.

1. Allison Volpert apparently still works for IBM in 2021. Her LinkedIn page is here.

2. As I write this I can easily visualize Doug stabbing a box with a pencil after a frustrating telephone conversation with someone from a Federated division.

3. I worked fairly closely with Debra Edwards when I installed the AdDept system at Elder-Beerman stores in Dayton, OH. That installation is described here. She was the Advertising Director there. Her LinkedIn page is here.

4. The “l” in Norfolk is silent, and the “ol” sounds much more like a short u.

5. I later learned that there were actually two affiliated agencies across the street from one another. I encountered the other one, SPM, in my dealings with Proffitt’s Inc./Saks Inc., which are detailed here. The agency was still around in 2023. Its webpage is here.

6. In fact IBM stopped updating OS/2 in 2001 and stopped supporting the operating system in 2006. I cannot imagine how Sears dealt with this. I pity their employees with nothing OS/2 experience at Sears on their résumés.

7. Polybags are the plastic bags that hold a group of flyers from diverse retailers. they are ordinarily distributed to people willy-nilly.

8. The others are Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, and Alaska. I am not certain of Arkansas. I might have gone there with my grandparents when I was a youngster. The only place that I have been in Utah is the Salt Lake City airport.

1991-2007 TSI: AdDept: Federated Department Stores/Macy’s Inc.

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TSI’s dealings with Federated and Macy’s Inc. Continue reading →

Let’s buy Macy’s!

For more than a decade after TSI began marketing AdDept, its software system for retail advertisers, the chain of department stores now known as Macy’s Inc. was called Federated Department Stores (FDS). The company was acquired in the eighties by Robert Campeau, a Canadian real estate magnate. For a short time it was merged with Campeau’s other stores and called Federated and Allied Department Stores. In 1992 the company emerged from bankruptcy as FDS, the same year that Macy’s filed for Chapter 11 protection. In 1994 FDS found enough cash in the cushions of the sofas in the furniture departments of its stores to purchase Macy’s shortly after Santa’s favorite retailer emerged from its own bankruptcy. Details of the takeover can be read here.

In the early nineties I was just beginning to learn about retail in America. It shocked me that a bankrupt company could stiff all of its vendors and then have the wherewithal to buy another company of about the same size. A lot of craziness like this happened in the nineties. I never did figure it all out, and the two companies involved in this transaction were a thorn in the side of TSI for the rest of its existence.

I don’t know why Val used a photo that cut off her chin.

In 1992 FDS had eight regional divisions. Each division produced and placed its own advertising from the divisional headquarters. The first FDS division that contacted TSI about purchasing the AdDept system was the Bon Marché, which was based in Seattle. I was called by Val Walser1, the Director of the Advertising Business Office there. She had received one of TSI’s mailings in late 1989 or early 1990, and she thought that the system might be what they needed. I talked with her in person twice, once at the Retail Advertising Convention in Chicago and once in Seattle. I gave Val a private demonstration in Chicago, and I showed the system to the rest of the team in Seattle. Those encounters have been described in some detail here.

No mention of Federated.

I don’t think that I knew at the time that the Bon Marché was part of FDS. Even if I did, I don’t think that I realized then that the parent company was about to declare bankruptcy. I was inexperienced; I probably made some errors in judgment. Perhaps I made a mistake by proposing a system that would only be minimally sufficient for their existing operation. Maybe we did not follow up often enough or in the best way.

Although Val informed us that she had requested funding for the system, it was never approved, and after a while we did not hear any more from her. We continued to send materials to her periodically. Until I began the research for this entry I was unaware that she had any involvement in deploying a system that was initiated by the FDS division most distant from Washington, Burdines in Florida. Val apparently oversaw the development of the administrative part of the FedAd (or whatever it was called at that time) system. By then her division was known as Macy’s Northwest, which was folded into Macy’s West, a long-time AdDept user, in 2008.

TSI’s fruitless contacts with Burdines have been documented here.

From the beginning I thought that Jordan Marsh, the Boston-based department-store chain, would be a valuable customer for TSI. Like the Bon Marché, Jordan Marsh was actually part of the Allied group before Campeau acquired Federated and merged all the stores into one gigantic chain. At one time there were also Jordan Marsh stores in Florida and San Diego, but by 1991 all of those stores had closed or were no longer controlled from Boston.

Kate Behart, whose career at TSI is described here, arranged for me to do a demo for people from Jordan Marsh’s advertising department at an IBM office. I don’t remember any of the names of employees at Jordan Marsh. In fact, the only things that I remember about our meeting with them were that Kate was very upset that I had used the word “gals” at one point and that they informed us that they wanted our system.

I am sure that Kate must have followed up on the presentation. She was very conscientious. However, nothing came of it.

Bloomingdale’s, the high-end department store with headquarters in New York City, contacted TSI several times. The last of these exchanges of telephone calls was handled by Doug Pease, whose successful marketing career at TSI is detailed here. We certainly sent them detailed materials about AdDept and the AS/400. I might have done a demo for them at the IBM office. I clearly recall that we went to their headquarters in Manhattan and gathered specs about their needs. I can still picture the Manager of the Business Office, who wore a three-piece suit and had a long pony tail. Guys with pony tails were not unusual in the creative and production areas of advertising departments, but he was the only one that I ever saw in the financial area.

Doug followed up on our visit with several telephone calls. At one point he became certain that Bloomies would buy the AdDept system. Nevertheless, not long after he had voiced his certainty, he got the telephone call that dashed his hopes. He never told me the details, but he was visibly upset about it.

One of the biggest disappointments in my career was not being able to land Liberty House, the department store in Hawaii and the Pacific, as a client. When Doug, Sue, and I flew out to Honolulu in December of 1995 to meet with Karen Anderson (detailed here), Liberty House was an independent chain of stores that included both department stores and much smaller stores in locations convenient to tourists. Those stores specialized in “resort ware”.

Macy’s on Union Square in SF.

Our presentation went very well. Karen told Doug in a subsequent conversation that she had requested funding for AdDept, but there was a freeze on capital purchases. The freeze persisted until the company entered bankruptcy in 1998 and closed most of the resort stores. When it emerged from bankruptcy it was gobbled up by FDS. At that point the remaining stores were relabeled as Macy’s, and administrative functions were transferred to Macy’s West in San Francisco, one of TSI’s clients.

So, this was as close as we came to a victory in our dealings with FDS/Macy’s Inc.. Many of the newspapers that had been used by Liberty House still subscribed to AxN in 2014.

AS/400s at FSG. I thought that I had a photo of Len, but I cannot find it.

At some point the AS/400 systems used by the three Macy’s divisions that used AdDept—Macy’s East, Macy’s South, and Macy’s West—were moved to the headquarters of Federated Systems Group (FSG) in Alpharetta, GA, a suburb of Atlanta. I flew down there to consult with Len Miller2, who was in charge of all of the FSG’s AS/400s. I don’t remember exactly what the agenda for this meeting was, but I remember that Len said that long-range plan of FDS was to replace the AS/400 systems with home-grown software running on other platforms. However, he assured me that at that point—soon after the merger with the May Company—it was a very low priority. They would still be using the AS/400s for several years.

My other vivid memory of that day was when we passed a room that contained perhaps twenty desks. At each desk sat someone working on a computer. All of the people were IBM employees who were consultants for Federated.

Len’s predictions both turned out to be true. All of the divisions except Bloomingdale’s were eventually folded into one gigantic Macy’s run from the Herald Square Building in Manhattan. The plan was apparently to use the system built for Burdines and the Seattle division, but it did not have all of the features that the people in New York needed. For several years they maintained AdDept in order to run the Loan Room (merchandise loaned to photo studio for shoots) module that TSI wrote for Macy’s East in the early nineties.

In May or June of 2005 I received a telephone call from Robin Creen3, whose title was Senior Vice-president of Macy’s Corporate Marketing. She wanted me to come to New York to discuss the AdDept and AxN systems. I made an appointment and took Amtrak to Penn Station. Robin instructed me to use the executive elevator at one of the 34th St. entrances rather than the employee’s entrance that I had always used on the other side of the building.

Robin’s office was not in the advertising department. It was on executive row. I don’t remember too much of the meeting, and I cannot locate my notes. I recall that I only got to meet with her once or maybe twice, and I never heard from her or about her again.

I did, however find a copy of a letter that I sent to her on October 7, 2005. Here is the text:

At our last meeting you told me that it was still too early to talk about the future of the existing May Company divisions. Since there have now been several definitive press releases about the makeup of the new Macy’s after the merger, I assume that those restrictions no longer apply.

Needless to say we are concerned about what effect the realignment will have on TSI. We have spent the last 17 years developing AdDept, the software product which has become the standard of the industry for administration of retail advertising departments. The May Company was our largest client.

We know that Federated Department Stores has been working with its Florida division for the last decade or so on a system which overlaps considerably with ours. I am sure that the company has by this time invested a considerable amount of time, money, and manpower in it. It may surprise you to know that I was supposed to be an integral part of the original plan. I met with Mike Rafferty and Gilbert Lorenzo in Huntsville, Alabama, back in the mid-nineties. Their plan at that time was to use AdDept for the accounting functions.

They wanted us to convert our system to run on a PC network using a home-grown relational data base and Microsoft Visual BASIC on each client. To me this seemed like a huge step backwards for us. Their approach would definitely have improved the appearance of AdDept’s front end and provided an integration with the production area, but no one could explain to me how we could possibly support such a system in many locations. The principal problem was that with their proposed architecture someone—presumably TSI—would be required to support both server software and client software. We have never had to support clients—the individual desktop PC’s and Macs. At the time networks were unreliable, Windows was not a mature product, and the Internet was in its infancy. TSI was already supporting a half dozen or more companies, including the two Macy’s divisions, which at the time were not affiliated with Federated. I honestly think that had we participated in the project at the level that they expected, TSI would not have survived as a company. Gilbert and Mike must not have liked my attitude, because we never heard from them again.

Since that time, as I wrote you earlier, most of the rest of the department stores in the country—as well as several other large retailers like Dick’s Sporting Goods—have successfully implemented AdDept in their sales promotion departments. They were able to get affordable systems tailored to their requirements. AdDept is not a sexy system, but it gets the job done.

No one in the entire country—no one—has the experience that TSI has garnered over the last 17 years in understanding the intricacies of administration of advertising systems. We are offering that experience to Macy’s Marketing. Four of the seven newly aligned Macy’s divisions—East, West, Midwest, and whatever the Marshall Field’s division is called—are long-time AdDept users. Lord & Taylor also uses AdDept. Moreover, a large number of May Company employees have considerable experience using AdDept in many different areas. If I were in your shoes, I would consider this as a valuable asset.

TSI has a very strong relationship with its users—both at the corporate and division level. If you talk with the people at the May Company, I am sure that they will verify that we have always done what they asked, that we do an excellent job of supporting our product, and that we give them a lot of bang for the buck.

There is one big additional factor. We are not on their payroll. When they wanted to spend money to make the system do new things, they used us. When they were tightening their belts, they did not have to worry about paying the salaries of programmers, system architects, data base administrators, etc.

So far in our discussions TSI has done most of the talking. What we would really like now is to learn what you and the other people in Federated’s management need to get out of the system. A goal-oriented approach works best for us. We have moved mountains for other clients, and we would definitely appreciate the opportunity to tell you how we would attack your biggest problems. We have never shrunk from such a challenge in the past. Our track record in this regard is essentially flawless. If someone will tell us what they need, we will provide it.

Do you think that we could schedule a face-to-face meeting with you and whoever else is involved in this project about this challenge? We have always been straight-shooters, and we would be eager to listen to whatever you have to say.

My last two encounters with Macy’s were both about insertion orders for newspaper advertising. TSI had developed and successfully marketed an Internet-based system for insertion orders to newspapers. Macy’s West, Macy’s South, and most of the May Company divisions that FDS acquired in the merger used it, and they all loved it. We called it AxN, which was pronounced “A cross N”.

I knew that, compared to our other AdDept clients, Macy’s East used a small fraction of the programs that comprised AdDept. Still, they were entering the ads, and, therefore, they were a good candidate to use AxN. I wrote to the Media Director, whom I had never met, and requested a meeting about AxN. He seemed very interested. We scheduled a meeting, I made a dozen or so copies of our sales materials for AxN, I packed them in my briefcase, and I boarded the 6:30 train again. I was alone because TSI had no marketing/sales person at the time.

The meeting was not what I expected. It was conducted by a man named Roman from the IT area, not the advertising department. My presentation was very well received. Roman said that it was very impressive.

He pressed me on whether TSI planned to provide a way to send the layouts for ads over the Internet. This surprised me. I thought that this was a problem that had been addressed years earlier. The market leader was the Associated Press’s AdSend service, but I also knew of several competitors. I said that TSI had no plans to enter that market. I explained that we had neither the infrastructure nor the expertise necessary to compete in that arena. Besides, none of our clients had asked for it, and they were not shy about requesting our services.

He said that we should consider it. Macy’s was looking for someone who could enable them to use the Internet for both insertion orders and the delivery of ads, “because, you know, one-stop shopping is better.”

What should I have said?

I had three hours on the train to mull this over. I had made a mistake by letting this remark go unchallenged. It seemed like such a silly thing to say. I thought that they would want expertise and experience, not fewer phone numbers.

If one-stop shopping really was the objective, then I had no chance of ever persuading them to use AxN. Therefore, nothing could be lost by asking for proof of any real value associated with having one vendor doing both tasks. I knew very well that the people who placed orders for newspaper ads were completely separate from the employees who created the actual layouts and sent them to the papers. This was true at Macy’s in New York and at every other large retailer that I had met with.

We never heard from them after that.

I learned later that Macy’s East’s advertising department had never used AdDept for insertion orders, even though they could have easily faxed the orders from the AS/400. Instead, each coordinator had developed ways to communicate with the reps at the paper. It sounded chaotic.

My last frustrating encounter with FDS (by then known as Macy’s Inc.) occurred in, I think, 2007. This one revolved around Dave Ostendorf, whom I had known quite well when he had been the liaison between TSI and the advertising department at Famous Barr, the May Company division based in St. Louis. Much more about my relationship with Dave and the installation at Famous Barr is posted here.

This is the only picture I could find of Dave Ostendorf. He is on the far left side of the table in the white shirt.

Dave called me about the use of AxN. He said that the people for whom he worked in Macy’s Corporate Advertising department asked him to find out how much we would charge for an interface between AxN and the system that had been developed internally. Dave was a very straight arrow. I trusted him (unlike everyone else mentioned in this entry) implicitly.

Of course, I asked for more details, but Dave would not provide them. He was rather sheepish about this. He advised me just to write up a proposal in our usual format with as many disclaimers as I wanted to include. He also specifically warned me not to low-ball it. So, I wrote up a quote for $20,000 that may have set a world’s record for use of phrases like “assuming that”.

A short time after I talked with him Dave resigned his job at Macy’s and moved back to his home town of Indianapolis. Needless to say, no one ever called about the quote. I have always suspected that it had been used as a justification for further investment in the corporate system.

So, my interactions with FDS and its successor Macy’s Inc. were completely fruitless. If FDS/Macy’s Inc. was the Brass Ring of our field of software, it was in sight quite a few times, but we were never able to snatch it.

My only real regret is that I do not completely understand why we continually failed. Our success with every other department store chain was close to universal, and the employees in the advertising departments at FDS and Macy’s divisions seemed enthusiastic about what TSI had to offer. However, in these situations we were up against an amorphous alternative, the system developed for Burdines and the Bon Marché, about which I knew very little.

One thing that struck me when rereading the letter that I had written to Robin Creen. I seemed to be asking for an opportunity to see the alternative. As a debater and a debate coach I was much better on the negative. I seemed to feel confident that if they just told me what they were using or planning to use, I could demonstrate what was wrong with it. Even if our software was lacking in some areas, I felt confident that we knew how to change AdDept to make it better.

Fortunately TSI found plenty of work outside of FDS/Macy’s up until the time that Denise and I were ready to dispose of the business. If some of these opportunities had gone the other way, it seems likely that we would have missed out on some of our other achievements.

1. Val Walser worked int the advertising department in Seattle until Macy’s brought all of her division’s administrative functions to San Francisco in 2008. Her LinkedIn page, which is here, says that she “directed development of a sophisticated, integrated software product, which was Macy’s premier marketing/advertising system managing all departmental functions.” I presume that this refers to the system once known as FedAd that was begun by Burdines.

2. Len Miller apparently still works for Macy’s in 2022. His LinkedIn page is here.

3. Robin Creen left Macy’s in 2008. Her LinkedIn page is here.

4. Dave Ostendorf’s LinkedIn page is here.

1990-1995 TSI: AdDept: The Installation at P.A. Bergner & Co.

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She knows there’s no success like failure, and failure is no success at all.—Bob Dylan’s “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” Continue reading →

In the early years of the marketing of TSI’s GrandAd system for advertising agencies I distinctly remember being disappointed that the second installation (at Potter Hazlehurst) was even more difficult than the first. This tendency was definitely repeated with the system for retail advertising departments, AdDept (design described here). The second installation, which was began in the spring of 1990, was much more problematic than the first.

I had never heard of P.A. Bergner & Co. I now know that the chain’s original store was in Peoria, IL. After it acquired the Boston Store chain in 1985, the company moved its headquarters to the upper floors of the Boston Store in downtown Milwaukee. In 1989 the company also acquired the Carson Pirie Scott stores. The corporate management of all of these stores, including all aspects of advertising, was handled in Milwaukee.

I was not yet familiar enough with the nature and history of American department stores to understand the importance of the timing of that last acquisition. Bergner’s advertising department was presumably given a budget to acquire a computer system to enable it to handle the absorption of the Carson’s stores. The money probably had to be spent in 1990. Any portion that was not spent vanished. Little or nothing for future years was budgeted. I came to understand these things later. I wish that the situation had been spelled out to me.

Moreover, Sue and I continually tried to portray TSI as a strong stable organization that was especially good at big projects. That was true a few years later, but in 1990 the company consisted of:

  • Me,
  • Sue Comparetto (who basically wrote checks, closed the books, and did presidential stuff),
  • Sandy Sant’Angelo, who could do simple programming, of which there was still quite a lot,
  • Kate Behart, who helped with marketing and served as day-to-day contact with some clients,
  • Denise Bessette, who worked only part time, all of which was devoted to projects for Macy’s East,
  • One or two administrative people.

The only way that the whole Bergner’s project could be implemented on time was for me to do almost all the programming work myself. The closest that I came to admitting this to Bergner’s was when I told them that Sue was terrible about time. Anything with a deadline had to come through me. Dan Stroman was quite taken aback when I said this. I was also pretty shocked when I had discovered this, but there was no sense in denying it.

Maybe I should try to grow a big white mustache.

Several IBM reps were involved in the sale of the AS/400 for the AdDept system to Bergner’s. The one whom I remember best was Sue Mueller. One of our last meetings took place shortly after the trip that Sue Comparetto and I took to England (described here). Sue brought to Milwaukee a copy of the magazine. When Sue Mueller saw my picture on the cover, she literally did not believe that it was a photo of me.

My recollection is that IBM sold Bergner’s a model B30 of the AS/400, the same machine that Macy’s was using. I think that it also had the faxing software and the modem that it required, and it definitely included OfficeVision/400, the word processing software.

Our primary contract person at Bergner’s during the negotiations was Dan Stroman1, who was either the advertising director or the production manager. He arranged for me to meet with the individual managers—production, ROP, direct mail, and business office. Either I did not do a very good job of collecting the requirements from them, or they did not do a good job of describing what they needed.

We tried to emphasize to Dan the importance of having one person designated as the liaison between TSI and the users. At first he wanted the liaison to be a person from the IT department. However, everyone agreed that the person whom the IT department assigned to the project, Kee-Huat Chua, would never have worked for many reasons. So, the job was given to Sheree Marlow Wicklund2, who at the time was the manager of the merchandise loan room.

I don’t think that in 1990 TSI yet owned the tools to produce detailed design documents. If we did, we certainly did not use them for that purpose in this installation. I merely described in the proposal what we planned to do.

The project was focused on quite a few things that required significant design changes.

  • Bergner’s stores had four or five logos (the name on the store’s signs). So, a table for logos had to be created, and separate versions of each ad were needed for each version of an ad.
  • On some pages of some direct mail catalogs and newspaper inserts the merchandise varied by market. That is, one “block” on a page might show items from one department in one market and different ones in others. Bergner’s called these “swing pages”. Providing a way to handle them meant, among other things, that the entire approach to measuring books needed to be rethought.
  • Bergner’s wanted to use the system to “traffic” production jobs. We proposed to do this by defining lists of steps, which we called “production schedules” and “timetables”—date relationships to the release date (the date that the materials were delivered to the printer or the newspaper). This approach worked well for setting up the original schedule, but the traffic coordinators did not like to use it, and I never did figure out how we could make it more useful for them. Sheree was certainly of little help.
  • Macy’s newspaper coordinators ordered their space reservations by phone. Joyce Nelson3, the newspaper manager at Bergner’s, sent a schedule to each paper once per week with all the ads, positioning requests, and other notes for every ad to be run in that paper over the next week. She wanted the system to fax them all. I was very happy to add this feature.
  • Bergner’s employees wanted to be able to record comments in many places. These requests were often difficult to accommodate. I devised a trick to handle some of them. IBM’s office-vision software had the ability to run programs within documents and to display the output sent to an output queue within the document instead! The parameters for the program could even be included in the document. So, a form letter could be created for sending detailed information about an ad to a group of people. The text surrounding the report could be changed every time. I especially liked this approach because I was fairly certain that it could not be replicated on any other system.
I was signed on to our B10 all day every day.

By the time that the software was delivered, TSI had a small AS/400 in its office, and we quickly established peer-to-peer communication with Bergner’s system. This allowed us to sign on to their system from TSI’s office and to send programs directly from our AS/400 to theirs over the phone lines. I worked all day on programs in TSI’s office and installed the ones that I deemed to be working early in the morning. This was feasible because our office was an hour ahead of theirs.

I communicated with Sheree via the AS/400’s messaging system, which supported both plain text and word processing documents. Kate communicated with Sheree by telephone. I expected Sheree to interact with the users and managers personally. Instead they had weekly meetings that all the managers attended. They appear to have been mostly gripe sessions. Sheree took notes and sent me a list of the issues reported. She did not send one document per area; all areas were included on one document.

I liked the idea that we received a written record of the issues, but my responses expressed my exasperation at some of them. Often users were still complaining about things that I was positive had been fixed. In other cases they had changed their minds about decisions that they had previously made and we had implemented. I responded to all of the issues that Sheree had sent in one document. I did not anticipate that Sheree would share all of my responses with all of the managers. I guess that I should have anticipated that possibility, but I had not worked at a large company for seventeen years, and the meetings at Macy’s were usually limited to one area at a time.

At any rate, I ended up on several shit lists because I responded negatively in print to some managers’ comments, and all of the other managers got to read. It never occurred to Sheree that if I had wanted everyone to read my answers, I could easily have sent the document with the responses to each of them.

More than a scribe.

Privately I was outraged that Sheree had violated what I considered to be a special relationship between the developer and the liaison. I expected her to be a strong advocate for the system when working with the users and an equally strong advocate for the users when speaking with us. She evidently considered herself more of a project manager whose responsibility was to organize and keep everyone informed. She did this. However, for such a complex system with such a compressed timeline, this was just not enough.

I talked with Dan about the situation, and I pleaded for a different liaison. He said that it was out of his hands. Ouch.

The installation at Bergner’s should have been a great success story. Some of the areas—notably the newspaper and loan room areas—were working very well in record time. The other areas proceeded much more slowly. I felt extremely frustrated by the incredibly inefficient process upon which Bergner’s insisted.

Bergner’s put the X back in Xmas.

Nevertheless, by the time of my visit in December of 1990 the ill will had dissipated to the point that they invited me to the department’s Christmas party. I could hardly believe it. A live band was playing. There was a mosh pit! The young people who worked in the creative and production areas were going crazy. The old fogeys with whom I dealt were much more subdued.

That evening Joyce Nelson asked me to give her a demonstration of my technique of throwing playing cards. She produced a deck of bridge cards, which are not as easy to throw as poker cards. However, I was sure that I could spin one at least twenty yards. Unfortunately, the ceiling was too low. To get a card to go a long way, its flight must describe a loop. I could not possibly throw a card at high velocity without it crashing into the ceiling or floor after a few yards. I had to demur, and I never got another chance to display my prowess.

Not for jugglers.

I located in our basement a few pages of memos written by me or Sheree about the installation. Kate had written notes in the margins. At a distance of thirty years (!) I could not understand the details of what was being discussed, but it was evident that I was trying to juggle a large number of balls at once. However, the use of the test system and the attitude of some managers made it seem like the balls were all coated with fly paper.

At some point in 1991 Bergner’s agreed that we had met the terms of the contract, which, by the way, was TSI’s simple version with only a few amendments. They made the last payment and also indicated that they also wanted to prepay TSI’s software maintenance for, I think it was, a year. They asked us to send them an invoice for this, but they wanted the description to be something like “Miscellaneous programming projects”.

The proverbial wolf was at TSI’s door again, and we had never turned down a check. So we did what they asked.

Bergner’s also approved quite a few enhancements that TSI had quoted. These projects were not covered by the original contract. So, I was still very busy with writing and installing all of the new code.

We used part of the money to hire Tom Moran to help with marketing. His role at TSI is discussed here. Perhaps I should have hired a programmer instead. I was more confident in my ability to produce an abundance of good code than my skill at closing sales. Also, I could not afford to devote the time necessary to train a programmer.

Bankruptcy: By August of 1991 Bergner’s had not sent TSI any checks in several months. We learned that the company had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. My recollection is that they owed us more than $10,000. We had no experience with this; none of our previous clients had ever done this.

Our first experience.

Dan told me on the phone that Bergner’s would not be allowed to pay any invoice that was received prior to the default date and was still open. I realized immediately that they must have suspected that this was coming. That “miscellaneous” check was done that way so that we would be obliged to provide support for programming projects that they never paid for.

Maybe no letter?

I wrote them a letter that said that we intended to apply the money from the miscellaneous check to the projects that we had delivered but they had not paid for, and we would begin to bill them for software maintenance. The Senior VP of advertising, Ed Carroll3, was furious at me personally. Dan Stroman called me about the situation. He said that I didn’t know who our friends were.4 Well, he might have been a friend, but I don’t think that many people at Bergner’s qualified for that distinction. I told him that our legal advisers (Me, Myself, and I) said that money given on deposit like that could be applied to open invoices. Dan did not respond to that. Instead, he asked if he wanted us to continue as a customer. I told him that I wanted them to become a paying customer.

I don’t remember the details of the rest of this episode. We continued to support the users at Bergner’s. They asked for a few more projects. We felt compelled to bill them at higher rates to try to make up for the money that we had lost.

I learned later that much of the retail advertising community considered Ed Carroll a sleazeball. What his advertising department did with that invoice was probably illegal or at least against company policy. He resented that what I proposed would make him look bad.

Test Environment: I found a letter dated May 13, 1992 that Kee-Huat Chua sent to TSI. It began with these two sentence fragments.

As you are aware of PAB’s intention to set up separate program environments for the AS/400 system. What it entails: one environment for intensive testing by users and one environment for developer/programmer to perform units [sic] test on the program module(s).

It then describes electronic forms that we needed to fill out before we made changes to the system. After we sent the form to him, he would copy the entire production library and the entire data library to the test environment. When this would happen is not designated in the letter. It could not be done if anyone was using the system. So, presumably it would be done at night.

After the libraries were duplicated, we would be allowed to sign on and implement the changes. We were also supposed to test them and send him a memo documenting that we tested them.

I guess that the users would then test them, but the letter does not mention it. It also does not mention how the changes will get into the production environment.

However, it does emphasize (in bold print, capital letters, and underlines), “NO COMPILING OF PROGRAMS ALLOWED DURING OFFICE HOURS UNLESS UNDER SPECIAL CIRCUMSTANCES; when making program modification.” Those special circumstances are not described.

Kee also included a list or reasons why this approach would be good for “TSI/Programmer:”

– To better perform & concentrate on their development.
– Less interruption and delay for development tasks.
– Secure production application: AdDept.

Although I considered this additional requirement a breach of our contract, I did not feel that I could refuse outright. I was sure that no matter what the missing details were, it would slow down our delivery of projects that they had requested by 50 percent or more. It also pretty much excluded them from ever getting new releases of our software.

This time Dan called me. I told him that we could have done it using test libraries from the beginning, but the project would have been hopelessly behind schedule if we had. He replied that he thought that that was what I would say.

I didn’t say this to Dan, but I also knew that this approach guaranteed that we would be doing a lot of extra work for which we would not be compensated. I cannot imagine who would really benefit from this. The alleged benefits for Bergner’s were equally bogus:

– To stabilize the “live”/production system both in the short run and the long run.
– To adhere with PAB’s standard of implementing computer systems established by Management Information Systems
– To encourage more users involvement with the implementation of the application.

I was mostly thankful that they did not come up with the idea of inserting this guy from the IT department between us and their system while we were still working on the base system specified in the contract.

I made lots of mistakes, but I also fixed problems very rapidly.

This was a good example of why it always took IT departments ages to develop and install new software and why so many companies ended up outsourcing the IT department itself. My shoot-from-the-hip approach admittedly required some pain and frustration for a short period of time. However, it had worked extremely well in the ad agency environment, and it would also eventually prove effective in many other retail advertising departments.

If only it were that easy.

Documentation and Ease of Use: Macy’s East’s long and involved contract did not require TSI to provide written documentation of how the programs worked. Although they demanded a commission for any AdDept systems sold in the first year after it was signed, they considered the whole project a custom job.

I no longer possess a copy of our contract with Bergner’s, and so I cannot check on whether it specified anything about documentation or not. I doubt it. Producing a user’s handbook that covered every eventuality of every aspect of the system would have been an overwhelming undertaking that got worse with every program change or new module. Instead, I made a conscientious effort to try to make the system fairly easy to use.

  • The layout of all of the screens was consistent.
    • The top three lines of data entry screens described the purpose. The screen number was in the upper right corner.
    • If a new item was being created, the word “New” was also in the upper right corner, and it blinked.
    • If the item already existed, the user ID, date, and time of the creation and last change were displayed.
    • All binary fields required the entry of Y or N. The 5250 standards used by all of the terminals and PC’s did not support check boxes.
    • The options for all fields that would have had radio buttons on a GUI (graphical user interface)5 were listed on the screen.
    • Two function keys were available at all fields that were verified against the database. F2 produced a detailed description of the field. F4 called a program that allowed the user to list and from the existing entries. Exiting these programs returned the user to the original screen with the cursor position maintained.
    • All dates were entered in the form MMDDYY.
    • All fields were verified when the Enter key was pressed. Any entries that were not valid were highlighted, and the cursor was positioned there.
  • The format for all reports was as consistent as possible. The report number was almost always in the upper right corner.
  • A list of the names of the most important tables and their key fields was provided for querying purposes. The names of the fields was consistent from table to table.

The biggest gripes were the lack of a user handbook and that the system was not “intuitive”. I considered trying to write a handbook, but I could not figure out a way to do it. Furthermore, I could not even start on it until all the programming required in the contract had been completed.

In all honest, I have never seen a system that was intuitive. The text-based user interface, which the only thing IBM provided at the time, probably seemed difficult to people who had never learned the keyboard.

I thought of a few ways to provide better documentation later, and we provided them to both new and existing clients. By then, however, Bergner’s had decided to try to find a different system.

Camex Interface: We were not the only software developers who felt Bergner’s wrath. When the AdDept installation began, Bergner’s produced its ads using Camex software on very expensive workstations from Sun Microsystems. Macy’s East did, too. Both of them wanted Camex to work with us for a two-way interface between the two systems. The story of how this project never got off the ground is recounted here.

Epilogue: The story of the installation has at least four epilogues:

  1. I think that after the bankruptcy brouhaha Bergner’s hired Gary Beberman, who had done a fantastic job as our liaison at Macy’s East, to help them. He called me about it. I told him that they had a good system installed, but we did not get along with some of the people there. I told him about the restrictive process that IT had set up for me to use. He was sympathetic, but he had no advice about how to turn around. He also warned me not to use Bergner’s as a reference account.
  2. Bergner’s advertising department tried unsuccessfully to replace AdDept for years, maybe even decades. I went back there for something some time in (I think) 1992. Joyce told me that they now had two systems, a pretty one and an ugly one. She said that she preferred the ugly one that worked.
  3. Bergner’s emerged from bankruptcy in 1993. They paid us pennies on the dollar. In 1998 the company, then known as Carson’s, was acquired by Proffitt’s Inc., which later became Saks Inc. All of the other Saks Inc. divisions used AdDept. Carson’s was merged with Younkers and Herberger’s, which both had successfully used AdDept. The resulting entity was called the “northern division”. Saks Inc. sold the division to the Bon-Ton in 2005, which closed down all 267 stores in 2018. During that entire disastrous sequence of events Ed Carroll ran the advertising department in Bergner’s. Carson’s, the northern division of Saks Inc., and the entire Bon-Ton.
  4. Some time early in the 2000’s I unexpectedly ran into Ed and Sheree (?!) at Saks Inc. in Birmingham, AL. Steve VeZain, who was in charge of the corporate marketing group, had asked me to come there for some other reason. Sheree was cordial to me, but when Ed saw me he barked, “What are you doing here?” More about this event is documented here. I never saw Dan Stroman again. I have no idea what happened to him.

Miscellaneous: Here are a few things that I remember about the installation:

Lovable Bucky?
  • Dan and his wife had Sue and me over for supper on evening. She was a big University of Wisconsin fan. I remember her saying “How could you not love Bucky Badger?” I thought that Bucky Badger was ridiculous then. I have subsequently learned to hate him. The Stromans’ house was on a large pond. Dan had a boat. I don’t know why, but he revealed to me that he had had a vasectomy.
  • Bergner’s insisted that I stay at the Mark Plaza Hotel when I was in Milwaukee. It had a doorman. He held the door for me even though I always had a free hand. I guess that that was his job, but it annoyed me. I have always hated it when people offered an unsolicited service and then expected a tip.
  • One evening I tried to get some work done in TSI’s office, where I had “passed through” to Bergner’s system. After a while I became too drowsy to be productive. So, I intended to end my remote session. Unfortunately I keyed in PWRDWNSYS on a command line rather than ENDPASTHR. I accidentally shut down their system! I had to call the IT support line in Milwaukee and talk someone through starting it up again from the system console.
  • The German food in Milwaukee was unbeatable.
  • One day Dan Stroman, a guy from production whose name I don’t remember, and I went to lunch at a Thai place. I didn’t think much of it.
  • I had fun jogging down by Lake Michigan in the evenings.

Failure: This entry has made me think about the nature of failure.

For about thirty-five years I designed, wrote, implemented, documented, and supported software systems. In the fifteen-year period that we actively marketed AdDept, we had thirty-five installations. Of all of those, the only one that I would characterize as a failure was the one at P.A. Bergner & Co.

I probably made mistakes. I tried to work on everything at once. I wanted to provide each stakeholder in the department with something to show that we were making progress.

Perhaps I should have insisted on doing one media at a time. Would Bergner’s have accepted that strategy? Who can say? They put a lot of pressure on us to get the entire project delivered. They seemed to have underestimated how much new programming they wanted. I am certain that I never said that we had already written software that was not actually working, but we were definitely trying to be optimistic. We desperately wanted the job. Maybe some statements that we made got misinterpreted.

I often took the “one area at a time” approach in other installations. We usually started with ROP and quickly achieved successful faxing of insertion orders and printing of schedules. That served as a confidence booster. If we had achieved important objectives quickly, perhaps no one would have suggested that wretched test environment. That approach would probably have also eliminated the weekly committee meetings. If my reports had been to one manager at a time, I would have been more careful in my comments.

In some future installations I designed one-time programs to help with the initial loading of tables by reading in user-supplied spreadsheet files. It did not occur to me to try this at Bergner’s, and no one suggested it. I am not sure that they actually had any files that I could have used.

I learned my lesson. In all subsequent AdDept presentations, I emphasized what I called “our dirty little secret”, to whit, the biggest factor in determining the success of an installation was the person who acted as liaison. I also took pains to specify what precisely the liaison’s responsibility and traits should be.

I also recognized that I should never have put in writing anything even slightly derogatory about a third party. Thereafter I always assumed that everyone would read every word that I wrote.

I learned one other lesson from this experience. I needed to investigate prospective clients more closely. From then on I asked prospective clients why they had decided to pursue automation of their advertising department at this point in time.

I can’t be too hard on myself, however. I don’t know of anyone else who managed to automate two advertising departments of large retailers. Over the years I installed thirty-five AdDept systems.

1. I never saw Dan Stroman again. I have no idea what happened to him. I suspect that he must fallen out of Ed’s favor. He may have been blamed for selecting TSI to design and implement the administrative system and for the collapse of the Camex interface project.

2. Sheree (pronounced like Sherry) Wicklund now goes by Sheree Marlow. Her LinkedIn page is here.

Ed
Joyce

3. Joyce Nelson worked for the company until 2004. Her LinkedIn page is here.

4. Ed Carroll, one of the very few people in my life who really hated me, died in 2016. His obituary is here.

5. IBM did not provide OS/400 with a real GUI until more than a decade later, and even then what they suggested was slow, resource-intensive, and lame compared to what people were accustomed to on PC’s and Macs. TSI’s screens maintained the same format throughout the history of the company because we never found a way to convert the hundreds of screens that we had to produce something that was reasonably attractive. The approach that came closest was to write everything over in a language that used CGI for HTML files. That was how AxN worked.

1990 A Memorable Fortnight in Search of Camelot

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Innocents abroad again. Continue reading →

If I had read The Innocents Abroad, I might have brought a notebook on the trip to London. I definitely brought at least one to Milwaukee.

In December of 1989 I had won a story contest (described here) held by the Hartford Courant. The prize was a two-week trip for two to England!

I should mention at the outset that neither Sue nor I took any notes on the trip to England. I think that Sue must have brought her camera, but I have not located any of her photos. I definitely took no photos. So, all of the following content was based on our memories, and the photos that are include, with the sole exceptions of the tattered notebook on the right, the shot of Rocky perched on the toilet, and our souvenir coaster, were all taken by others.

I might have made a mistake in the dates, but the schedule worked out so perfectly that my confidence level is rather high, especially considering that the events happened more than thirty-one years ago.

My preparation for my first trip across the Atlantic was, by necessity, greatly inferior to my efforts for our twenty-first century vacations. Research was much more difficult in 1990. The Internet sort of existed, but there was no Google or Wikipedia. We had Cox cable in our house, but Cox did not offer Internet services until the last half of the nineties. Even AOL dial-up was still three years in the future.

Moreover, I had no time to research. The installation of TSI’s AdDept system at Macy’s in New York was entering phase two (as described here), and, at the same time, we were desperate to sign up a second large retailer to use the system that we had worked so hard to develop for Macy’s. TSI was in a rough spot. We no longer had a dedicated marketing person, and we were also quite short on cash.

The Enfield Public Library.

We obtained a guidebook somehow, probably from the library. Sue and I decided that we wanted to see as many famous sights as possible, but, despite what I had said to Lary Bloom at the Courant, on the way we would also try to investigate some places that were related to the Arthurian legends.

Sue worked with the Jameson Travel people that the Courant had hired to handle the details of trip. The newspaper provided enough money to cover all transportation costs (including auto rental) and lodging. We had to pay for food and anything else that we wanted. Our basic plan was to eat big breakfasts at the hotels and either lunch or supper at a restaurant. The other meal would be snacks that we picked up at whatever store we chanced upon.

We had a pretty good plan with four bases of operation:

  • London for three nights. Starting with our arrival early in the morning on Thursday, February 22, 1990, and ending with a car rental on Sunday the 25th.
  • Wells for three nights with side trips to Glastonbury Tor, Stonehenge, Wookey Hole, and Cadbury Castle. We drove through, or at least very near to, Bath (BAHTH) on the way.
  • Plymouth for two nights with a side trip to Tintagel (tin TAH gehl) and a stop in Bristol on the way to York to enable Sue to shop for miniatures on her thirty-ninth birthday.
  • York for three nights with a drive through the Dales and, on the return trip to London, a short stop in Barnsley so that Sue could see Locke Park as well as an afternoon stop in Warwick Castle.
  • Back to London for two nights. Since we gained five hours flying west, we would arrive in Boston at lunch time or even earlier.

The story of my trip actually begins on a February flight from Bradley not to London but to Chicago. It was an early morning United flight on Monday the 19th. For some reason most of my airplane horror stories have involved flights on United airlines. The one to Chicago, however, was quite uneventful.

One IBM Plaza.

From O’Hare I took a cab into town for a meeting at One IBM Plaza with some IBM sales reps who specialized in the retail sector. Some really big retailers had headquarters in Chicago. Sears and Walgreens came to mind. Marshall Fields still had its headquarters in Chicago at that point, too. I tried to explain AdDept to them, but they had trouble understanding it. I am not sure that they even realized that retailers had advertising departments.

From IBM regional headquarters I took a cab to the train station, where I bought a ticket on the next Amtrak train to Milwaukee. The schedule said that it was a ninety-minute journey. Unbeknownst to me, this train happened to be the famous Empire Builder, which went from Chicago all the way to Seattle and Portland. Union Station in Milwaukee was its first stop.

When I boarded my car, it was rather empty. I found a seat by a window, lifted my suitcase up to the overhead rack, and sat down to read.

To my surprise, a man who may have been in his sixties approached me and asked if he could sit next to me. Here was my chance. All that I had to do was to utter the word “No.” I, however, chose politeness. This would be a better story if I had introduced myself and asked the gentleman his name, but I was not that polite.

I didn’t say that it was an express train.

My unexpected companion explained that he and his wife were traveling together to Oakland, CA, to visit their daughter. They liked to take trains, but on long trips like this one they soon tired of each other’s company. So, they each sought out other people to sit with and engage in conversation.

The gentleman was certainly friendly. He asked me where I was getting off and, after I responded, what I was going to do in Milwaukee. Nobody could explain TSI’s unique business in just a few minutes, and my activities that day would seem confusing to anyone. I did my best, and he listened politely.

The cars were a little sleeker, but this was still the Milwaukee Amtrak Station in 1990.

Then, without being asked, he told me that he was from a small town south of Chicago. He may have also worked the price of corn into the conversation at some point as I glanced longingly at the mystery novel balanced on my lap.

Somehow the topic worked its way around to his daughter’s marital status, which was evidently “divorced”. She had moved to the west coast and was living by herself “because, you see, he turned out to be one of them gay fellows.”

Fortunately, this revelation came just as the train was pulling into Milwaukee’s Union Station. Some other passenger would undoubtedly get to hear the rest of the story. Actually, probably several unsuspecting people would be subjected to it. In the cab from the station to my first appointment it occurred to me that the idea of sitting with strangers on the train was probably the wife’s.

My destination in Milwaukee was the office of an ad agency, the name of which I don’t remember. I met there with some people to discuss the possibility of the agency purchasing an AS/400 and running ADB, the version of TSI’s ad agency system designed for that computer, on it. The employees at the agency treated me very nicely and seemed quite interested in what the system had to offer.

The Mark Plaza is now a Hilton.

At the close of the business day I took another cab to the Mark Plaza Hotel in downtown Milwaukee, which was within walking distance of the Boston Store. P.A. Bergner and Company owned that store and a large number of other department stores in the north-central states. The advertising department for the entire chain was located on one of the top floors of the store.

Before going to bed I called Sue and told her about the two meetings as well as my encounter with the long-distance rail traveler.

At Bergner’s I met with the production manager, Dan Stroman, and the loan room manager, Sheree Marlow Wicklund. Their loan room was much simpler than Macy’s. The merchandise seldom was sent to outside photo studios. One person could really run it without a computer.

We had not written a system for keeping track (called “trafficking”) of the status of the various aspects (copy, layout, art, photography, etc.) of production jobs yet. So, what Dan was interested in was a new area for me. I also met with the finance and newspaper people. More details are here.

In 1990 a small restaurant in the Milwaukee Airport sold these delicious brats.

After an entire day gathering system requirements, I left with a lot of notes in my spiral notebook, a folder full of sample reports, and my suitcase. I took a cab to the airport. I bought two Usinger’s brats for supper, spent a few minutes in the airport’s used book store, which, as I recall, had a set of Goethe’s complete works that was short a couple of volumes.

Nobody made this drive in an hour in the evening on February 13, 1990.

It was snowing lightly when I boarded the plane. My journey home went through Chicago. That first leg was always so short that the seat belt light was never turned off.

We had barely taken off when the pilot announced on the intercom that O’Hare Airport had just closed because of an ice storm. So, the plane was being diverted to the nearest available airport, General Mitchell International Airport, the same one from which we had just departed.

When we had landed, an agent proudly informed us that United had hired buses to transport all the passengers to O’Hare. So, evidently the airport itself was still open, even if all of the runways were closed. I was a little fearful of a bus ride in a storm that was ferocious enough to frighten the airport that was a hub for two of the nation’s largest carriers, but I really needed to get back to Enfield to attend a meeting scheduled for the next day.

The rest of the trip went as smoothly as could be expected. The bus that I was on made it to O’Hare. I had to wait in line to speak with a United agent, but I was then booked on a flight to Hartford that was scheduled to depart early the next morning.

Since the cancellation was due to the airport’s decision, United did not offer to put me up at a hotel. I had no credit cards and too little cash remaining from all of those cab rides to pay for a room on my own. So, I snatched as much sleep as I could in one of the seats that were specifically designed to prevent people from nodding off and missing their flights. I had a lot of company.

For the next two decades I was a regular at Executive Valet Parking.

The flight the next morning left on time and arrived in Hartford on time. I took the shuttle to the airport parking lot, ransomed my car, and then drove back to Enfield.

I arrived at our house a little before noon. I called the office and told them that I would take a shower, grab an hour or so of sleep, eat lunch, and then come into work. I did not sleep much, but otherwise I followed that plan.

In the afternoon a couple from New Jersey appeared at our office. I don’t remember the details of this meeting. I seem to recall that it had something to do with our pitch for Paramount, which is described here. These people had experience with UNIX, the operating system preferred by Paramount. “UNIX” had always been sort of a dirty word in our office.

After they left I formalized my notes from my three meetings in Chicago and Milwaukee and sent letters to the people with whom I had met. That is what you had to do in the days before email. Because we were scheduled to depart for London the next evening, I left it up to Kate Behart to follow up on the phone with them.

I did not feel hopeful about the meeting in Chicago and the meeting at Bergner’s. The last meeting in our office was just a flyer. On the other hand, my hopes for the ad agency in Milwaukee were pretty high. If someone from the agency called our references, I thought that we could get it. Our clients loved us, and they always praised our work.

After supper I packed. I remember bringing along several books by Jack Vance. Chick Comparetto1 had volunteered to take care of our cats, Rocky and Woodrow, while we were absent. It was not a weighty responsibility. They had their own door. I had purchased plenty of Cat Chow. If Chick forgot to give them water, they were not shy about helping themselves to the toilet. If they got hungry, Woodrow was adept at ripping open the bag of food. They probably also had two or three survival tricks that I had not yet discovered.

We must have brought either travelers’ checks or a lot of cash on the trip. I am quite sure that we had no credit cards.

Someone drove us to Logan. I have a vague recollection that it might have been Sue’s sister Betty.

I remember nothing about the experience in the airport in Boston. Our plane did not leave until late in the evening. We must have eaten something in the airport, but it was not memorable.

We lost five hours in the flight across the Atlantic, and so it was rather early in the morning when we landed at Heathrow. We had no trouble with our luggage or with customs. That aspect of travel was much easier in those days.

We also had no difficulty finding the driver who had been hired to meet us. I don’t remember his name or what he looked like, but I recall him being very welcoming in a reserved, British manner. He asked about the contest, and he recommended that we invest £5 each in the double-decker bus tour of London.

I am pretty sure that the Camelot was somewhere on this map.

He drove us right to the Camelot Hotel2, our home for the next three nights. It was located on or near Sussex Place quite near Hyde Park. As soon as we entered the hotel, Sue and I had the same thought: “We are staying at Fawlty Towers!” Manuel was missing, and the details were all different, but the feel was remarkably similar. I suppose that at one time there were small urban hotels run by amateurish entrepreneurs in the United States, but by 1990 they were pretty much extinct.

We had to sign the guest registry, which was a huge book lying open on a desk, not a counter. A television was on behind the desk, and—I am not making this up—an episode of Fawlty Towers was playing.

My recollection is that the hotel comprised eight or ten nondescript rooms.We found ours and unpacked. We were both tired, but adrenaline overpowered the jet lag.

The person at the desk told us where we could catch a double-decker bus. We left our oversized key at the desk, walked to the location described to us, mounted to the second level of a bus, and took the tour. It was, as our driver had promised, a good way to get a feel for the city.

I don’t remember where we ate lunch, but afterwards we took a stroll in Hyde Park. It was very relaxing. I was surprised to see that people still used the Speaker’s Corner as a public pulpit. At some point an interesting thought popped into my head. I looked at my watch and then remarked to Sue, “Do you remember that guy on the train to Milwaukee that I told you about? I just realized that he is still on that same train.”3

That evening we walked a few blocks over to Baker St. I don’t remember what our motivation was originally, but when we arrived there we naturally tried to locate 221B. It didn’t exist. Moreover, there was no 221 at all.

We did find a steakhouse near that location, and, although we knew that the English were not famous for their cuisine, we gave it a try. The restaurant had a sound system that played pop tunes. The one that was playing as we walked through the door was “Baker Street” by Gerry Rafferty, which had been released twelve years earlier. The coincidences on that day were truly unbelievable. The food was OK, and Sue and I had fun trying to name the other songs. “Baker Street” never came up on the sound system again.

I only remember one other restaurant that we patronized in London. It was a Greek restaurant4 that was a block or two from the hotel. My recollection is that it was in the basement of some building, but I may be wrong. I distinctly remember that the food was absolutely delicious, by far the best of any of the food that we ate in England. I also remember that there were only two other people in the restaurant. They were seated at a table as far from us as was possible. They seemed to be just chain-smoking, drinking coffee (or something in coffee cups), and speaking in Greek. I struggled to hear a familiar word or phrase, but since the only Greek I knew then was thousands of years out of date, the task was hopeless.

In London we walked and/or took the tube everywhere. I thought that London’s Underground system was wonderful. It was so easy to figure out. I was used to the mass transit systems in New York and Boston. They were both haphazard and uncomfortable by comparison. I even bought a tee shirt advertising the London Underground. Here are things that I remember Sue and me doing in London:

  • We definitely went to the British museum. I was thrilled to see the real Rosetta Stone there. It was right out where you could touch it. They had lots of other stuff, of course, but the most memorable for me were handwritten lyrics by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Those were definitely kept in cases where no one could touch them. I also remember the pigeons on the steps. There must have been a thousand of them.
  • We spent the better part of a day at the Tower of London. I was very impressed by the armory and the Yeoman Warders in their fancy dress. I had no use for the massive collection of shiny rocks, but others stood in line for a chance to adore them. One of the few souvenirs that we bought on the entire trip was the coaster shown on the right.
  • We walked to Buckingham Palace, but we did not watch the changing of the guard. It was chilly that day. While we were in the vicinity, we went to Westminster Abbey and were a little grossed out that so many people were entombed there. I guess that they have to put the cadavers somewhere. We also saw Parliament, #10 Downing Street, Big Ben, and the Thames.
  • Sue wanted to visit St. Catherine’s House in London to look up information about some of her ancestors on her mother’s side, the Lockes and Kings. I didn’t go in with her. I don’t remember what I did, but just looking in windows is quite entertaining in London. I think that I might have found a bookstore.
  • We were very impressed with the retail on Oxford St., which I found much more exciting and dynamic than the stores on Fifth Avenue in New York.
  • The ducks in the ponds in Hyde Park were very striking. They had complicated and beautiful markings. Neither of us had seen the like, not even in zoos. I also really liked the coots. Their oversized feet impressed me.
  • From Hyde Park we could see both Kensington Palace, which at the time was the home of the Prince and Princess of Wales, and Royal Albert Hall. We didn’t visit either one. It probably would not be cool for someone from the Colonies just to drop in on Chuck and Di, and we already knew how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.

We did not find that being a pedestrian in London was too difficult. At the enormous intersections there were usually pedestrian subways. The hardest part for us was remembering to look to our right first when attempting to cross a side street.

On our very last night in England we went to see Agatha Christie’s play, The Mousetrap, at St. Martins Theater. It was very enjoyable. Maybe we should have tried something a little more daring, but I am very happy to say that I viewed this play when it was only in the thirty-eighth year of its record run.

The worst part of our entire trip began when we picked up the rental car. I think that the travel agency provided us with transportation to the car rental agency. It was only then that Sue revealed that she had specified a standard transmission car, and she was afraid to try to drive it. So, I needed to learn how to shift with my left hand on a perilous journey from the very heart of London to the M4 during the morning rush hour.

I made many mistakes. Other motorists even honked at us a few times, probably the only horns that I heard while we were in the U,K. The British seemed more reluctant than their American counterparts to draw attention to bad driving. Embarrassed and frustrated, I did manage to get the car onto the freeway without causing any accidents.

A little west of Reading Sue suddenly announced, “There he is! I just saw a bear!”

Intent on my driving, I dared not gawk. I took a quick peek in the direction that she pointed. I saw nothing. At the time I did not know that bears had been extinct in England for fifteen hundred years. It probably was just an ordinary Bigfoot.

We took the M4 almost all the way to Bristol. Driving on the M roads in England was no more challenging than driving on interstates in the U.S. However, when we exited from the M4, the rest of the drive was on the A roads, which were very narrow by American standards. I remember that when we drove through the outskirts of Bath I was fearful of scraping against the stone walls that formed the border of the road. Fortunately, we encountered very few cars coming in the opposite direction. When we finally reached our destination in Wells, I was happy that the trip was over and more than a little anxious about the next nine days on the road.

In Wells we stayed at the Red Lion Hotel, which is described here. I think that the building at some point was converted to other uses. I remember that our room had a four-poster bed. I had seen them in movies, but I don’t think that I had ever slept in one.

We spent the rest of that first day in Wells exploring the town. The focus of attention was definitely the huge Gothic cathedral that is dedicated to St. Andrew the apostle. Although it is now the see of the Anglican Bishop of Bath and Wells, it was constructed in the late middle ages when England was a Catholic country. It seemed totally out of place. Wells is little more than a village, and the cathedral is actually set apart from the town. I would have expected the town to have grown up around it.

The Bishop’s Palace was equally awesome or perhaps even more so. His Lordship George Carey5 evidently was not apprised of the arrival of the esteemed visitors from across the pond. We saw his home from a distance, and we were even treated to the sight of some episcopal long-johns hanging out to dry. However, we were not invited into the palace grounds where, according to Wikipedia, croquet games are rather common. I would have loved to hear someone explain the rules of the English version of the game.

Rand’s jump.

A word about the weather: Although all of England is well north of New England, the weather in late February and early March was much nicer than what New Englanders would expect. It seemed more like mid-April. Flowers were out, and the grass was green. We wore jackets every day, but we were seldom cold. We also were lucky not to encounter much rain.

For me the most interesting feature in the town of Wells was the memorial on the sidewalk to Mary Rand, a resident of Wells who won the gold medal in the women’s long jump in the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo. The plaque measured out the exact distance that she jumped.

What I remember most about those days was the driving. No matter which of us was at the wheel, both of us became irritable. For some reason the roundabouts gave us the most difficulty. It was bad enough to have to remember to go clockwise. The big problem, however, was the signage. The highway numbers were seldom provided at the exits. Instead a sign displayed the name a town that was somewhere on that section of road. This was, I am sure, useful for people who knew where all of those towns were, but they did not help us at all. Furthermore, it seemed as if at least half the time the name on the sign was “Taunton”, and visiting Taunton was not on our agenda

I am not sure where we went on which days, but I am sure that we went to all of the following places:

Our guidebook described a place called “Cadbury Castle”. It was supposedly someone’s idea of where Camelot (or maybe Camalet) was. We had a lot of trouble finding it. Finally we came upon the village of North Cadbury. We asked someone at a pub where Cadbury Castle was, and they directed us down a one-lane road that was actually just two tracks. Those were the last humans that we encountered on this adventure.

We went as far as we could by car. We stopped the vehicle, locked it, and set off on foot.

Ahead of us were two troughs, a lot of thick underbrush, and a formidable grassy mound. We made our way through the underbrush for thirty or forty yards. Sue got attacked by stinging nettles and was forced to retreat in agony.

In those days if there was a hill in front of me, I climbed it. I made it to the top of this so-called “hillfort”, but I saw no trace of a fort. On the top of the hill a dozen or so cows were peacefully grazing. They ignored me. I could also see Glastonbury Tor in the distance. That was something, I guess.

Nettle.

To be fair, I should add that the sun was out. The legend is that on a misty day you can see the Once and Future King and his famous knights.

Dock.

When we arrived back at the hotel, Sue asked someone what to take for stinging nettles. They informed us that the best treatment was a plant called “dock”, which always grew near the nettles. That was not in our guidebook.

We also drove to Glastonbury Tor, another ancient hill in Somerset. A lot of people think that this is a magical place. it certainly has an unusual shape. Evidently in the middle ages a monastery was there. Legends abound about it being associated with King Arthur, but there is a dearth of evidence.

A paved path now leads to the tower atop the tor. I don’t think that it existed in 1990.

I don’t remember a lot about our visit here. I don’t clearly recall the tower at the top of the hill at all. Therefore, I was skeptical as to whether I climbed to the top. Sue, however, has told me that I did. Evidently I don’t remember the tower because no one was allowed to enter it. Therefore, its distinguishing feature—no roof!—was not visible to me.

Sue also reported that a dozen or so New Agers were busy absorbing Glastonbury’s vibes.

The good thing about it was that the town of Glastonbury was actually fairly easy to find. I can’t say that about most of the other sights in Somerset. We had a devil of a time finding Stonehenge. Surely, there must have been a lot of tourists who wanted to see these big old rocks. Nevertheless, there was precious little signage to indicate their location.

We were not allowed as close to the stones as the people in this photo are.

We did find it, but it was probably the biggest disappointment of the entire trip. At the time no one was allowed to approach, much less touch the stones. I don’t recall that we ever were within one hundred feet of them. I honestly think that we would have gotten more out of a film about the place.

By this time we were getting rather tired of driving around Somerset searching for legendary hills and ancient inanimate objects.

Our last stop in Somerset, however, was delightful. Wookey Hole is a set of caves that are located just a few miles to the northwest of Wells. We knew about the caves from the guidebook, but we were surprised by the fact that there were actually other really enjoyable things to see and do nearby.

The caves were quite interesting. We took a little tour with a local guide. The best part of it was the way that she pronounced Wookey Hole. The first syllable was at least a fifth higher than the rest of the name. Since we had heard no human speech anywhere near any of the other attractions in Somerset, it was nice to have someone explain the geology of the caves.

In addition to the natural formations, someone had constructed a small museum6 that emphasized a few diverse elements of the culture in and around Wookey Hole.

Cheddar Gorge.

The paper-making demonstration was the most educational. Until then I had absolutely no idea how trees and rags were turned into paper. The penny arcade machines were also something that I had never seen before. Visitors could even play the games using old-school pennies that they could buy there. The carousel section had complete carousels (going clockwise, of course), as well as stunning individual statues. I remember seeing a beautiful lion, but I was unable to find a picture of it on the Internet.

Sue and I found our visit to Wookey Hole both fun and relaxing. We then undertook the drive up to Cheddar Gorge. I am not sure why we did not stop here. Sue absolutely loves cheese. In retrospect I have trouble understanding how she could have resisted the temptation to stop and sample one of her favorite cheeses.

Our next destination was Plymouth, which is a genuine city on the south coast. On the way there we took a slight detour to drive through Exmoor, which includes some really diverse and beautiful areas.

Our hotel in Plymouth was not as memorable as the first two. I have a vague recollection that it also had a restaurant. We took a short pedestrian tour of the city, mostly so we could say that we had seen the spot from which the Pilgrims departed.

I remember that at the restaurant I was served some Devon Cream. I had never had this before and remarked about it to Sue. My face must have registered disgust because the waiter rushed over to ask me if there was something wrong. This, by the way, never happens to me in the U.S.

The main reason that Sue and I bothered to come this far west was to have somewhere to stay while we ventured to Tintagel, the ruins of a real castle in Cornwall on the Atlantic coast.

  • Tintagel ruins.
  • A different angle.
  • Merlin’s Cave.

Tintagel7 was definitely worth visiting. However, it was a difficult drive from any direction. Furthermore, a fairly long walk was (and evidently still is) required to reach the ruins from the parking lot. We went there in February, and a very cold wind was blowing in off the Atlantic. We did not get as much out of this experience as we might have if the weather had been nicer or we (i.e., Sue) had been in better condition. We did get a look at the castle ruins and Merlin’s cave. The view of the ocean was stunning.

I am not sure about this, but I think that we decided not to drive directly back to Plymouth. Instead we headed to Barnstaple, a city with which we were familiar from playing the British Rails game. All of the cities in this section are at the base of a very high cliff. This accounts for the peculiar fact that all of the rivers flow to the south.

On Sue’s birthday we left from Plymouth with the intention of reaching York by supper time. I asked Sue what she wanted for her birthday. She said that she wanted to shop for miniatures at a store she knew about in Bristol. So, that is what we decided to do.

Somehow we came up with an unusual plan. We drove to a location on the outskirts of Bristol, which in 1990 had about 400,000 inhabitants. We parked the car and took a city bus downtown. Sue somehow knew which bus to take and the stop at which we needed to exit. When we got off of the bus, Sue looked around but could not see any familiar buildings or street names.

She did find a Dr. Who-type phone box (not booth in England). Somehow she figured out how to make it work. She called the store. The woman who answered asked her what she could see from the phone box. Sue told her. The woman merely said two words: “Turn around.”

Sure enough, Sue found herself looking at the miniatures store. She went in; I did not. I had enough trouble—even at that age—dealing with full-sized objects. While Sue was shopping for tiny things, I walked around and looked in windows. If I discovered a store that sold books or games, I probably went inside. I don’t think that I bought anything, but Sue definitely did. Good! It was her birthday.

We somehow caught another bus that brought us back to the car park. We fired up our vehicle and easily found our way back to the M5. Sue received one more present. We got off of the throughway at Cheltenham and drove through the Cotswold country to Bourton-on-the-Water the home of the Model Village. It took about half an hour.

I think that this is the model, not the real village.

I probably would not have made this side trip if I had been by myself. However, Sue has always felt a special attachment to the Cotswolds and particularly its thatched roofs. The Model Village itself is definitely worth seeing once. It was a nearly exact replica of the real Bourton-on-the-Water within which it resides. What I found the most interesting was that the model itself is indeed modeled at the same one-ninth scale. I naturally wondered if that model included a one-eighty-first model of the model and so on. I mean, some people write on grains of rice; what is the limit?

My attitude might help explain why, although everyone likes working with me, nobody ever asks me to go anywhere with them.

Royal York Hotel.

The remainder of the trip to York was uneventful. We stayed for three nights at the Royal York Hotel, a huge very old hotel near the train station. In one way I was glad that we did not go any further north. The people in the north spoke perfect English, of course, but the accent was so strong that it was difficult to understand.

National Railway Museum.

The other memorable supper that we ate might have been our first night in York. I don’t remember the rest of my order, but the vegetable was broccoli. It had been cooked so long that it had turned grey. The waiter, who had emigrated from Greece, noticed my horror. He told me that the English always overcooked the vegetables. I conversed with him a little. I told him that I had taken ten semesters of Homeric and Attic Greek in high school and college. He did not seem too impressed. He probably knew that these classes would not have helped me understand him. I later learned that while modern Greek grammar has not changed much through the millennia, the vocabulary and pronunciation had evolved drastically.

The view from the central tower.

I think that Sue let me do most of my exploring of York on my own. While I was out walking around the city I think that she visited the Railway Museum, which was very near the hotel.

I never pass up a chance to walk the walls of a city. York’s were probably the best.

I remember visiting the stunning York Minster, which was awesome both inside and out. It must surely be the most impressive church in England. I am quite certain that I climbed as high as they allowed in the ancient cathedral. The view of the city and the countryside was breathtaking.

I also walked around atop the ancient stone walls of the city. I cannot remember whether I made it all the way around, but I recall thoroughly enjoying this experience.

York was such a delightful old city. It was very pleasant to experience it both from street-level and from above.

Sue and I definitely visited the Jorvik Viking Center8 together. This museum emphasized the history of the area before the arrival of the Normans in the eleventh century. Many lifelike displays depicted the lifestyles of the Vikings who inhabited the area. The details were based on archeological excavations that produced thousands of objects.

We watched ACG&S the first time around.

We also went for a drive in the Yorkshire Dales that we knew from the television series All Creatures Great and Small. We stopped at a house or store for some reason. We talked with a lady there who used the word “fortnight”. I told her that no one in America ever used the word. She asked me what Americans said instead. She seemed mildly surprised when I replied “two weeks”.

Joseph Locke’s statue.

After we left York we made two stops on our way back to the Camelot Hotel in London. The first was in Barnsley, where we searched for Locke Park, named after one of Sue’s relatives, a railroad magnate named Joseph Locke. We stopped to ask for directions. We were told that it was at the corner of Locke and Park. Where else? Sue is not a direct descendant, however. Joseph and his wife Phoebe had only one child, whom they adopted.

Our second stop was at the fabulous Warwick Castle. This stop was recommended by one of TSI’s clients, Mary Lee Pointe at Avon Old Farms School. I had mentioned to her that we were going to England and wanted to see at least one castle. She said that sh had visited several of them, and Warwick Castle was the most interesting.

The castle and its grounds made a fitting end to our motoring excursions. I cannot imagine a more awe-inspiring setting that was matched by the opulent displays in the interior. As I recall, we had a picnic lunch together on the grounds.

We made a memorable pit stop on the way to London. The facilities themselves were mediocre at best. What got my attention was a sign at the entrance demanding “NO FOOTBALL COACHES.” A “coach” to Brits was a tour bus. “Football” referred to the game called soccer in the states. So, the rest area actually prohibited busloads of soccer hooligans.

We managed to locate the car rental agency in London. I don’t remember how we got ourselves and our luggage to the hotel for the last two nights.

I don’t remember which of the activities that I listed in the first London section were actually performed on our last full day in London. I am pretty sure, however, that, as I mentioned, Sue and I attended the theater on our very last evening.

“Memorable” is definitely the right word for this”‘fortnight” in England. I can hardly believe how many things we did and how vividly they have remained in my memory and Sue’s—with no notes at all. How times have changed! It is now a titanic struggle for both Sue and me to recall what we did the day before yesterday.

One thing that I cannot remember clearly is what we did about the business. In the course of the two weeks, we must have called the office at least four or five times. I cannot recall needing to deal with any pressing problems.

1, Chick Comparetto was the father of Sue’s first husband. He lived less than a mile from us. He died in 2020. His obituary is here.

2. Alas, there is no longer a Camelot Hotel in London, and I was not able to identify any hotels that might be successors. Perhaps the building was converted to some other use.

3. This is my favorite shaggy-dog story of all time, and it is 100 percent true.

4. I think that this restaurant might still be in business in 2021. A restaurant called Halepi seems to be in the right location, and everything mentioned on its website, which can be visited here, rings true.

5. His Lordship George Carey became Archbishop of Canterbury, England’s ranking clergyman, in the following year. He retired in 2002. Like most bishops everywhere he got entangled in scandals about reporting clerical sexual abuse. In 2017 he resigned his last formal relationship with the church, which meant that he was no longer allowed to officiated at services.

6. Not many people were at Wookey Hole when we visited. I remember thinking in 1990 that this place needed some good old American marketing. Maybe Ambrose could have helped. Subsequently it has been Disneyfied into a real touristy place. Check out its website here.

7. Tintagel has changed in the three decades since we were there. A visitors’ center has been added, a footbridge has been constructed, and someone was allowed to carve a gigantic image of Merlin’s face on the side of the cliff.

8. The Jorvik Viking Center is still in operation. Its website is here.

1985-1986 Life in Rockville: The Two Cruises

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Our first two cruises. Continue reading →

In the mid-eighties we finally took two real vacations, one in 1985 and one in 1986. We had such a good time on the first one that we tried to replicate the experience the next year, but, of course, it turned out to be rather different.

Sue and I discovered that we could spend a week in February cruising the Caribbean for only about $1,000. The price included air fare from Bradley to Miami. Curt Hussey had advised me that cruises were the best kind of cruises. You could do as much or as little as you wanted, and there was no hassle at all.

This plan suited me. I have always said that the only good thing about February is that it is short. We made reservations for a seven-day cruise on the Song of Norway, a ship of the Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines (RCCL), in the western Caribbean. It would start and end in Miami.

By the end of 1984 the business seemed to be doing a little better. Hiring Denise Bessette and Kate Behart had worked out well, and we actually had a little money in the bank. We notified all of the clients that we would be gone for a week. We would try to stay in touch, but it might be difficult on some days.

We did no research at all for either of these cruises. We were simply looking for warmth, pleasure, and relaxation. There was nothing wrong with that, I suppose, but on subsequent long trips I totally changed my mind about the objectives of traveling to distant locations.

Who needs these?

Neither Sue nor I had a credit card. I don’t think that we would have brought hundreds of dollars in cash. We might have bought some travelers’ checks.

It is hard for me to believe in retrospect, but at the time we had no pets! So, all we needed to arrange was transportation to and from the airport. Perhaps one of the employees drove us to the airport, and one of Sue’s sisters picked us up. We might have taken a cab. Maybe we left one of the cars at one of the parking lots that surrounded the airport. Some offered weekly rates.

It was, of course, very cold when our plane took flight from Bradley in the morning and warm when we arrived in Miami around noon. However, the differential was not as great as the time that Bill Davey and I flew there from Detroit in 1970, as described here.

I remember that we were met at the airport by a representative from RCCL. I think that they provided transportation to the port. My recollection is that we were allowed to board pretty much immediately.

A photo of the Song of Norway in 1985.

The cruise itself got off to a rocky start. Somehow our luggage got misplaced. The staff told us that they would get it for us, but we would need to do without until the next day. This was a problem because the first night’s supper, which had open seating, was the only occasion of the entire trip that was designated as somewhat formal. Everyone else was dressed up. As it turned out, our attire was a pretty good ice-breaker. Everyone was sympathetic when they heard about our problem.

Fortunately, that was our last real problem. The rest of the cruise was absolutely delightful.

Sue told me that she recalled that there were only 750 passengers, but the ship’s passenger capacity then1 was actually 1,196. There may have been some empty cabins, but I do not remember a lot of empty tables at dinner.

We did not have our luggage that first night, but our employees (or maybe it was Tom and Patti Corcoran), ordered a bottle of champagne for our cabin. I think that RCCL gave us a fruit basket, too.

We got the cheapest cabin available. It had no view, twin beds that were pushed together, a small bathroom, and a desk. It was about as small as could be imagined. I did not intend to spend much time there. Sue complained about the size of the shower, but I found everything satisfactory. She also objected to the cabin steward going through her luggage every afternoon to find something sexy to lay out on her bed. My recollection is that nearly all of the cabin stewards were Filipinos.

The ship seemed gigantic to us, totally oblivious to the puny waves below us. By twenty-first century cruising standards, however, it was a canoe.

The ship each issued each passenger a credit-card sized piece of plastic. This card served as an identity document in getting on and off the ship and as the means of payment for anything on the ship. It was possible to avoid most expenses, but even a penny-pincher like me ended up spending hundreds of dollars on excursions and tips.

Although we eventually sailed as far west at the Yucatan Peninsula, the ship stayed on Eastern Standard Time throughout the cruise.

The ship’s first stop was at a private island owned by RCCL, now called CocoCay2, where the staff put on a picnic lunch. There were a few other activities in the afternoon as well, but there was nothing very elaborate. There were plenty of picnic tables, some volleyball courts, and some trails. Basically, it was just a place to relax for a few hours and get to know a few of our fellow cruisers. I took a little hike, but there was nothing much to see.

Back on the ship there were two seatings for supper: 6:00 and 8:00. I would have much preferred to eat at six, but Sue protested that she needed to get cleaned up and dressed, and she has never liked being rushed. So we ate at the second seating. The down side was that the after-supper entertainment was too late for a morning person like myself.

We ate at the same table every evening. Some tables were larger, but ours had only four chairs. Our dining companions were a couple from Wisconsin who were about our age. The same waiter served our table every evening. Ours was from Greece. I forget his name, but all four of us rapidly became very enamored with him. The menu changed every night. There were three or four choices for the entrée. The selection was good, the quality was good, and the quantities were unlimited.

Needless to say, the couple from Wisconsin were sheepshead enthusiasts. They were excited to hear that we had played the game, an event that is described here. We agreed to play with them as well if they explained ALL the rules to us. They listed them in a couple of minutes. I protested that I was certain that there were additional rules. They insisted that it was a simple game.

This time we got to the third or fourth hand before the first undisclosed rule made its appearance. Others soon followed. I am convinced that all people from Wisconsin are given at birth two sets of rules, one that they disclose to foreigners and one to mention only when they apply.

We were surprised that there was so much to do on the ship. In the movies there only seemed to be four activities on cruise ships: dancing, shuffleboard, sitting on deck chairs, and gazing at the stars in formal attire. On most days I tried to run on the Promenade Deck, but it was very boring. A lap was only about one tenth of a mile. Also, you had to dodge strolling passengers and be on the alert for slippery spots.

I had no interest in shopping in any of the ship’s stores or losing money in the on-board casino. I spent as much time as possible in the sun by the swimming pool drinking free Diet Cokes or iced teas.

Our route to Jamaica took us between Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic) and Cuba. In fact, Cuba was visible on the starboard (or as we say in Kansas, “right”) side of the ship for most of the first part of the cruise and on the port side on the return voyage.

I don’t remember any high-rises in Ocho Rios in 1985. Unless you were looking for weed, the town was very dull.

The second stop was at Ocho Rios on the south side of Jamaica. West of the harbor was a large brick-red wooden factory that produced aluminum, which the locals pronounced with an extra syllable as the British do, from locally mined bauxite.

I don’t think that the water was flowing this fast when we were there. This looks dangerous.

Several excursions were offered. I wanted to climb the rocks at Dunn’s River Falls. I was surprised that Sue was willing to try this. She never has felt comfortable around open water. The rocks were as slippery as they looked. The suggested footwear was sneakers with no socks.

Our guide’s name for the excursion was named Philippe. His reply to almost any statement or question was, “No problem.” A group of us were driven by van from the harbor to the falls. We stopped once or twice. Philippe told us to get out and “take your lovely shots.” I did not have a camera, but I was happy to stretch my legs.

When we reached the falls, we formed a single-file line and held our neighbor’s hand tightly. Several people were to scared to try the ascent, but even Sue managed to get all the way to the top.

Sue took several photos of this and our other stops, but I have not been able to locate them.

The excursion took a few hours. After lunch Sue and I walked into town. I still had my beard and could have easily been mistaken for Tommy Chong’s younger brother. At least three times I was approached by people who offered to sell me marijuana. There were a lot of souvenirs on sale there. I might have bought a postcard or two, but no souvenirs.

I think that we took a second excursion in the afternoon, but this may have been in 1986. In any case we went green-water rafting on Martha Brae (MAR tuh BREE), a very slow moving stream. Our guide for this adventure was named Nigel.

The rafts were made of bamboo. They had seats toward the back for the passengers, but the “captain” stood in the front and directed the raft with a long pole. According to Sue our captain’s name was Tony.

The experience was very relaxing, but I don’t think that very many people would do it twice. On the road from Marta Brae to the harbor our guide pointed out a large dwelling by the sea. The house had belonged to Arthur Ashe, the famous tennis player who died in 1980. At least that is the way that I remember it. I could find no support for this on the Internet, but he had been dead for four decades when I googled it.

Most of the suppers had themes—Italian, French, Mexican, etc. Every meal was tasty, filling, and fun. The waiters and the other staff members dressed for the occasions. There was also music, and the waiters marched around and waved to the people at their tables. It was very festive, and, in my opinion they managed to make it fun without too much kitsch.

The third stop on the cruise was in George Town on Grand Cayman. Unlike most other islands in the Caribbean the Caymans are NOT mountainous or even somewhat hilly. They did not appear on the horizon until the ship was almost there.

The islands have an interesting history. They were discovered by Christopher Columbus on his third voyage. No evidence of an indigenous population has been discovered. For years the islands served as a haven for pirates. They have been a British territory since the middle of the eighteenth century. They have never had income, wealth, or capital gains taxes. We heard the story that the British king issued a decree that England would never tax them because he was grateful to the colonists for saving one of his family members.3 We did not learn about the slavery. When it was finally abolished in 1833, 950 Black people were enslaved by 115 white families.

In the eighties the Caymans had not yet earned renown as a place to hide dodgy funds. We were surprised to learn that the country had more teletype machines per capita than anywhere else on earth. In fact, even by then there were only two sources of income there—tourism and tax evasion.

The contrast between Ocho Rios and George Town was striking. Jamaica seemed like a very slow and backward place that had a few interesting attractions. The people all seemed devoted to selling knickknacks of no utility. Nothing had a fixed price. There were only a few stores. Transactions generally took place on the street.

George Town, on the other hand, was a clean and modern town. No one tried to sell anything on the street. I did not feel as if I had to keep my hand on my wallet.

There was not much to do in town if you were not interested in buying duty-free jewelry. I think that a snorkeling excursion was available, but it did not interest me that much. I probably would have enjoyed it, but I knew that when I left the water I would be shivering for a half hour or so.

If there is a ship in port, 7 Mile Beach is never this empty.

The spectacular beach by George Town is seven miles long. The hotels jealously protected their portions. RCCL had an agreement with one hotel that its passengers could hang around at the beach. That was good enough for me. After a once-around in the town, I parked myself on a towel on the beach and read a book.

Sue has always been averse to both sun and heat. She spent most of her time in Grand Cayman nosing around the shops.

The ship made two stops in Mexico. The first was at Playa del Carmen, which is south of Cancun. About half of the passengers departed from the ship in Playa. Of those most went up the coast to the resort town of Cancun. We joined the group that had signed up for the excursion to Tulum, an ancient Mayan city located about fifty miles to the south.

We had been warned by the cruise directors about the street vendors in Playa del Carmen. As soon as we set foot on land we were all set upon by people selling stuff, mostly extremely low-grade silver jewelry. It was a little difficult even to make it to our buses.

I have a few pretty clear memories of Playa Del Carmen. It seemed like a very poor town to me. Very skinny dogs roamed the streets. No one from our ship considered stepping into one of the stores. Based on the photos that I have seen on the Internet, I would guess that things have improved there at least a little.

The bus ride to Tulum was hot and boring. I think that they served Mexican Coke on the bus. The land was perfectly flat, and there were almost no towns at all. There appeared to be lots of trees, but none grew very tall. Only a few locals could be seen, and they all seemed destitute or nearly so. We saw very little traffic.

I don’t remember the town of Tulum at all. Apparently it has become a tourist destination in the intervening years. It certainly was not on anyone’s bucket list in 1985.

I remember the area just outside of the ruins. Flimsy booths were set up so that some of the local people of Mayan descent could sell things. I seem to remember that the main thing that they sold was cloth. There were no souvenirs.

The ruins area was, I am pretty certain, surrounded by stone walls. On the other side of the walls was jungle, not like in the Tarzan movies, but a sea of trees, none more than twenty feet high. On one side from the top of the wall you could see the sea and a lovely beach, but there was a cliff between the wall and the sea. Waves were smashing against the rocks. The beach did not look inviting that day.

We did not have a guided tour. We were told to meet back up at a particular time.

The big attraction was the temple in the middle. I climbed all the way up to the top and looked around. It was pretty impressive. We had already been told about the carvings of the “descending gods” that festooned the temple and some of the other buildings. Some people have taken this as an indication that the Mayans had been visited by extraterrestrials, who created these stone cities for them.

The ruins area was not very crowded. Almost everyone there was from our ship. That has no doubt changed in the intervening years.

From Tulum we drove up the coast to Xel-Há4 (pronounced shell-hah), which is a beautiful lagoon. I think that we ate lunch there. I don’t remember much about this place, but it had some facilities.

After lunch most people took a quick dip in the lagoon’s waters. I don’t remember if I did or not. I doubt it.

The bus then returned us to Playa del Carmen, where we took the ferry to the island of Cozumel. By that time it was the middle of the afternoon, and it was extremely hot. In those days, however, I could stand just about any amount of heat. I decided to walk by myself into the town of San Miguel, a resort town that was a mile or more from the harbor. Sue shopped at little stores on the pier.

There was not much to see in San Miguel. A goodly number of the ship’s passengers were enjoying drinks in a bar there.

I was happy that I made the journey. I got a little exercise, and I saw dozens of iguanas of all sizes. I stopped to watch them several times. Some were large enough that if they had made aggressive moves I would have been frightened. They mostly just sat on rocks, and they were all grey. Nevertheless, I felt the pure sense of joy that I have always seemed to feel whenever I unexpectedly encountered wild animals in their native habitats.

The last leg of the cruise was a long day at sea sailing past Cuba back to Miami. I am pretty sure that it took two nights and one day.

One of the highlights of the trip for me occurred on that last day. The cruise directors had announced that if anyone had purchased something at one of the stops and could no longer remember why they did so, he/she should bring the “white elephant” to the staff. They planned to hold an auction to try to regain something for the disgruntled purchaser. The auctioneer was very talented. He invented provenances and romantic attributes for each item, no matter how junky. Most of them were sold, a few at a profit.

Here are some other things that I remember from the 1985 cruise:

  • I went with Sue to a line-dancing class. She participated. Of course they taught “Achy Breaky Heart”, but there were not enough cowboy hats to go around. I watched for as long as I could stand it.
  • There was a midnight buffet every night. Since most passengers gorged themselves at all three meals and got little exercise on this cruise, I was surprised how popular this was.
  • The Viking Crown Lounge was one of the highest points on the ship. It was pretty much de rigeur to visit it, have a drink, and gaze at the horizon. We did, but only once.
  • There were very few children on the cruise. The cruise staff formed them into a club and arranged activities for them. For the most part the kids were invisible.
  • The cruise staff also organized activities and games at poolside almost all day long. I found them annoying. I wanted to read. Nevertheless, I was embarrassed that they stumped me when they asked who sang the hit song, “Winchester Cathedral”. It was the New Vaudeville Band. I should have remembered it. It was released in late 1966, when I was at Allen Rumsey House. If, God forbid, it had been on our juke box, I probably would have known it. I did not listen to Top 40 music in Ann Arbor.
  • A small newsletter was pushed under the door every day.
  • I think that our room had a TV. After we left Miami it showed only short films about RCCL, the ship, or ports of call.
  • The cruise staff conducted an orientation class about each of port of call. I went to most of them. They were not well attended. The guy giving the one on Ocho Rios emphasized that the town was a good place to purchase some straw if you needed any.
  • Sue went to some of the shows at night. She has always loved live entertainment of almost any stripe. I might have gone once.

Sue and I both had a great time. The trip itself was both relaxing and entertaining. I liked the fact that I had absolutely no responsibilities. Sue liked being able to set her own pace. She probably would have preferred cooler weather, but it does not really ever get cool in the tropics.

The timing was perfect. When we left, we were both grouchy with cabin fever. When we returned, it was almost time for Sue’s birthday and, shortly thereafter, spring. We promptly called the travel agent—another common occupation that has almost disappeared in the intervening decades—to go on essentially the same cruise in the following year.

The Viking Crown Lounge at night.

The second cruise was similar, but not identical. We flew non-stop to Miami again. We were met by the RCCL people again. They did not misplace our luggage this time. After the very first stop the schedule was almost identical.

The interior of the Viking Crown Lounge.

Over the winter two big things had happened at RCCL. The first was that the Song of Norway won all of these awards from World Ocean and Cruise Liner Society: Best Food, Best Crew, Best Housekeeping Service, Best Dining Room Service, Best Cruise Staff, Best Ship Activities, Best Shore Excursions, Best Overall, and Ship of the Year. They had sweatshirts made that bragged about that last one. Travel Holiday Magazine also named RCCL the world’s best cruise line.

The other big development was the purchase by RCCL of an isolated peninsula on the north side of Haiti5. The name was Labadie, but the company changed it slightly to Labadee. Our ship did not go to CocoCay in 1986. On the first day of our second cruise, the Song of Norway became, I think, the first cruise ship to visit Labadee.

Before we landed the ship was boarded by heavily armed Haitian soldiers. I don’t know what their function was, but they were more than a little scary. As far as I know, however, they did not interfere with any of the planned activities.

Tthe local citizens apparently knew that we were coming. A dozen or so rowboats surrounded us as we landed. Each contained two or three of the local people. They were trying to sell their art work. Their boats do not look at all seaworthy. These people were just doing what they could to survive a very bad situation.

None of that development was there in 1986. A clearing for a picnic and volleyball had been established, nothing more. The real world was on the other side of those mountains.

The time on shore was pleasant enough. There was not much to do.6 There might have been some hiking paths, but most people dared not venture too far from the picnic area.

Our experience here was remarkably similar to the one on CocoCay a year earlier. In fact it is difficult for Sue and me to distinguish between the two occasions.

We met our companions for supper after we returned to the ship and cleaned up. They were a couple from Long Island. Sue remembers that he owned a chain of garages there. I only remember that he ordered seconds of the main course at both meals that we ate with them. After that they arranged to join the first seating, and we ate by ourselves during the remainder of the cruise. I can’t say that we missed their company.

It was definitely never this bad.

The seas were a little high the night after we left Labadee. Many passengers got seasick. Sue felt a little woozy, but she did not get sick. I wasn’t bothered at all, but walking in the hallways was something of a challenge. The creaking sound that occurred whenever the ship rocked was rather spooky. By morning it was smooth sailing for the remainder of the cruise.

Sue and I decided to do something different in Jamaica this time. We signed up for a trip up in the hills to an old “estate”. I did not remember the name of it. Several of these places still offer tours, including Brimmer Hall, which is the only one that sounded at all familiar. I remember that it was a long drive through very hilly country. This was the first time that it occurred to me that islands in the middle of deep seas almost have to be mountainous.

Sky Aquarius: “We should love animals, not eat them, Jim.”

They definitely served us lunch in the plantation house. One of the offerings was goat, and I was courageous enough to try it. I would not say that it was delicious, but at least I did not get sick.

It was a worthwhile excursion if only for the fact that it got me to thinking about the geography, history, and sociology of Jamaica. The truth is that in the eighties I would never have thought of a vacation as a time to learn about other countries. I was just charging my batteries.

I knew that Jamaica had been a British colony. I did not know that in 1838 England abolished slavery, but there was never anything like reconstruction and no distribution of assets. It was more a case of “Take these broken wings and learn to fly.”

I don’t remember what we did in Grand Cayman. We might have taken an excursion. I seem to remember something about turtles.

I did not think much about Grand Cayman’s sociology either. I don’t remember seeing many Black people, certainly nothing like in Jamaica.

Ixnay on the imbingclay.

The one excursion that we repeated was the one that featured Tulum and Xel-Há. We were a little disappointed. The area of the Tulum ruins was considerably more crowded that it had been the previous year. Also, visitors were no longer allowed to climb or walk on any of the ruins. I suppose that it is only reasonable to take every effort to preserve them for posterity, but it was still disappointing.

I remember a few other things about the 1986 cruise.

  • We did not fall in love with our waiter this time. He was nice enough, but I don’t even remember his home country. The waiters (I don’t remember even one waitress or cabin stewardess on either cruise) were from all over the world.
  • I have few memories of the other passengers. I do remember one fellow with whom we talked a few times. His wife never left the ship. She shopped for jewelry in the ship’s store.
  • On both trips the official photographer took lots of photos of us. They posted them in one of the public areas of the ship. The only way to get them to remove your photo was to buy it. We bought a couple on the first cruise, but not on the second.
  • The only obnoxious part of the cruise was the semi-mandatory tipping. The maître d’ and the sommelier both appeared at our table for the first and only time at the last supper before it was tip time.

We could not afford to go on vacation in either 1987 or 1988, but in 1989 …

1 .In 1977 RCCL took the Song of Norway out of service, cut it in two, and added a large new piece in the middle. This feat increased the ship’s passenger capacity by 40 percent. The ship’s fuel consumption was only slightly increased, and the seaworthiness was not affected at all. The ship was sold in 1996 to another cruise line. Over the next few decades she changed hands and names several times before being sold for scrap in 2013.

2. RCCL subsequently invested hundreds of millions of dollars in this island and turned much of it into a gigantic water park for its customers. It is now officially called “Perfect Day at CocoCay”, which makes me think that the company pronounces the last syllable like the letter “K” rather than like the word “key”. An aerial view is shown at the right.

3. Wikipedia says that this story is not true. The evidence cited is here.

4. The area that we visited is now called Xel-Há Park. It still has the lagoon, but it also offers a water park, a buffet, a zip line, and other diversions. The website is here.

5. Haiti was in the middle of a coup. The ruler, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, had fled to France on a plane supplied by the U.S. on February 7. He had named a commission to govern in his absence.

6. In the twenty-first century there are plenty of activities available on Labadee. A list of them is in an article posted here.