October 15-19, 1979: User Week in Boca Raton
	August 4, 1979: A Weekend at the Parkview
	Return to Index for 1979

This month, I made a trip to the office in Boston to work on some course materials and do some training of some of the new hires. Since I get there so infrequently, I am always disposed to take lots of pictures of the people that I mostly talk to on the telephone.

Getting to Boston

I took a cab down to the Ambassador East where the airport limousine (bus) stops, and by 3PM I was at the airport for my 4PM flight to Boston, where I arrived just after 7.

In the years I've been working for Cullinane Corp. I have flown back and forth to Boston more times than I can count- at least 50 round trips (according to the United Frequent Flyer Program plaque that I have on the wall in the guest bedroom). It is always a nice flight, and the seafood meal that I usually order is pretty good.

Landing in Boston at Logan International, I picked up a rental car and headed out towards Route 128 where the new Cullinane offices are (they used to be downtown, but moved out to the burbs soon after I joined the company). I usually stay at a Holiday Inn just off Route 128/I-95 near the office, and by 10PM I was checked in there.

On the map at right, you can see where the office is, and also where the only other location is that I went this week- the new condo that Tony has bought in Newtonville.

Tony's New Condo

One of the Cullinane employees that I know best is Tony Hirsch; when he first joined the company, he and I traveled as a team very frequently- until the corporation got so busy that we had to start traveling individually.

Tony's new condo is just off the Massachusetts Turnpike (I-90) about six or eight miles from downtown Boston in the neighborhood of Newtonville.

One afternoon during the week, Tony took me over to the new condo; it was a two-bedroom, two-bath unit in a relatively new building in Newtonville, and it was quite nice. In the picture at left, Tony is standing in the condo's kitchen; oddly enough, it has cabinets and knobs very much like the kitchen in my Chicago condo (which I redid after purchasing the unit from the condo conversion company).

Tony is my best friend at Cullinane, and I have gotten to know him very well what with all the traveling we have done together. We like a lot of the same things- especially when traveling together, and that made it very easy for us to get along. He has rather more technical skills than I do, so oftentimes he would do the software installation while I would do the client training.

Tony is also much more into sports than I am; he went to Syracuse and follows their teams avidly. Through Tony, I met other of his friends, like Serge Blinder (and Linda, the woman who would later become his wife).

A couple of years ago, Tony and I played a bit of hooky from work to go see the 1977 movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind on the day it opened; both he and I were very interested in seeing it before someone spoiled it for us by spilling plot details. So we went to the first showing of the day it opened at a theatre a bit west of the office.

In the condo, we walked all through it, and we talked about what kind of furniture he would need, and how it could be arranged. I was actually one of the reasons he bought the place; Tony has seen my own Chicago condo numerous times, and has stayed there a few times as well. So he knew the experiences I had with it, and thought that it made sense for him to buy his own place rather than continue to rent.

As we have often done, Tony and I went down to Brookline a couple of times during the week to eat at one of our favorite restaurants- Sol Azteca.

At the Cullinane Offices

Of course I spent most of the week at the Cullinane offices out by Route 128. Cullinane used to be downtown, but the company moved shortly after I joined the firm, and by the time I made my first trip to Boston that required a visit to the office, they'd moved out to the suburbs.

Out at the offices, I took my camera with me, and one afternoon after my class had adjourned, I went around the offices taking pictures of some of the folks that I talk to on the phone frequently but get to see only rarely. Here are some of those pictures:

(Click on Thumbnails to View)

That last picture is the area where Tony Hirsch now has his office (taking pictures inside without a flash is tricky, and I didn't do a good job here). While I was still doing installations and training, Tony had decided to travel less and take over the scheduling requirement when Jim Baker started working on a long-term project in Washington.

At right is a decent picture of me, Tony and Tom Meurer, who at the time was responsible for sales and marketing of IDMS in the New England region. Tom is one of the very few people who have been at Cullinane longer than me. Tony came about nine months after I did.

John Cullinane was out with a client, so I took the opportunity of his absence to get Jody and Laureen Martel, John's assistant, to participate in a series of fun pictures set in his office:

(Click on Thumbnails to View)

Here are a few other candid pictures from around the office:

Mike Mikkelsen- CULPRIT Development Mike was one of the couple of people that I could always call on from the field whenever there was a tricky problem that I couldn't solve.

Dick and Randy- Shipping I never interacted with these two guys- unless a shipment was wrong, which was rare. Stacked around them is the documentation for the various products. They always had to make sure that the right stuff got sent to the right places. They used the map on the wall, and darts, as I recall.

Greg Beatty (L) and another developer. Both of them worked on the CARS package, and my contact with them was minimal, as Elayne Kalstein did most of the CARS installations.

Me in my office. Actually, I temporarily dispossessed John Cullinane (he was out of town that day) and had Jody take this picture. Here is the up and coming young executive, with a clean slate and a clear desk.

It was a pleasant week in the office, and I got to meet a lot of the folks that I don't see very often.

	October 15-19, 1979: User Week in Boca Raton
	August 4, 1979: A Weekend at the Parkview
	Return to Index for 1979