Cleveland and the Great Racial Facial Divide

Perhaps it was the pressures we had been through in the previous year or perhaps it was we had fallen into a rut, but something began to bend in 1964, something was reshaping our little suburban Harriett and Ozzie World. I was gradually entering a new phase of my life. It did not happen overnight. It takes a bit to change a nice suburban couple into Hell-bent hedonists, more than just getting your car smashed by a rogue rock. (By the way, we were driving up to my parents that night with our wash because our basement was full of water.)
You know, it's interesting people use "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriett" as some representative icon of the 1950s. That show was about as realistic to its time period as Jules Verne's A Flight to the Moon and a Trip Around It was representative of space travel. Here is this cozy little family living in this nice home where Harriett is a housewife and Ozzie is a...what? It was never said what Ozzie did, but he seemed to hang about the home wearing argyle sweaters and mooning about Rocky Road Ice Cream most days. My life at no time resembled Ozzie and Harriett's. And in fact, neither did the real Ozzie & Harriett resemble their TV fiction.

The rock hit us on January 23, 1964. February and March passed in the usual mundane way of everyday life. I took the car in for service on February 1. We both had routine physicals at Dr. Mann’s on March 1. We were up to my parents a lot. We were up to my folks’ house 15 times between January 25 and March 25, mostly bumming a meal, although I was bringing our trash up there to dispose of. I had probably cancelled our trash collection to save the cost now that Lois had left her job and money was tight. The rest of my life was get up, go to work, go to evening college, come home, take care of any needs about the house, do my homework, try to write for an hour or two and then talk or you-know what with my wife into the wee hours. It was a somewhat typical and dull life punctuated with much stress over our finances and an incredible lack of sleep.

And so we decided to take a little ride to Cleveland. That is a picture of Cleveland in 1964 at the top of this chapter.  It was Easter weekend and we headed out on Thursday night. I must have been given Good Friday off, not so unusual then; rarer now. When I was growing up everything used to close between noon and three o’clock. Those were the hours Christ hung on the cross, so everything shut down out of reverence and respect. Today people don’t respect anything and reverence is pretty much a thing of the past.

Why Cleveland?

Why not?

We didn’t really plan it you know, we just said, “Let’s take a ride to Cleveland.” We’d never been there. It was straight across the state, not far over Pennsylvania’s western border, about a total of 410 miles as the crow flies. The one caveat in our spur of the moment trip was I had no spare tire. I’m not sure why I didn’t, but I didn’t. Perhaps a tire was damaged by the runaway rock and I had not replaced it, who knows? Oh well, what are the odds I would get a flat? I was a lot more daring in those days, so spare or not, we went.

I barely recall anything about the journey. I remember driving through the tunnels on the turnpike and that they made Lois nervous. She is claustrophobic. I recall actually being in Cleveland, traveling through its blocks and how the streets kept going up in number, 100 Street, 150 Street, 168 Street. I thought this was a small city, how can it have so many streets?

The other thing I remember, and this is the one that made the biggest impression upon both of us, was going over some rumble strips. This was the first drive I ever took and went across rumble strips. Brum-be-brum-be-brum! Scared me to death, what in the world is that? Again, Brum-be-brum-be-brum! We had never heard anything like this before. I thought the drive shaft had fallen out of the car. I pulled off the side , got out and looked underneath. Everything looked in place, so we drove on, wondering what was wrong with the car.

We were safely home by Easter Sunday, car apparently intact, we had heard no more of those strange noises, and no flat tires. Life went back to routine again, trips up to my parents bumming meals, borrowing the lawnmower and dropping off my trash. By June I started to “borrow” money from my parents to supplement our needs.

The only break in the everyday action was on May 2. That was the day I reported in at a

classroom at temple  with about 15,000 other young hopefuls and finally took my SATs. I don’t remember my scores, but I did well enough to be accepted as a matriculating student; Sociology Major, English Minor.

On June 18 we were on one of our regular begger’s visits to my parents when Lois complained of being ill. The next day she was sick enough I took her to the doctor in Philadelphia.
She was pregnant.

Meanwhile, back at Atlantic Refining, I was still in Addressograph. Granted I was technically the boss of the unit, but I was beginning to fear the curse of the Service Department, that like Ron Paul I would languish in this job until time made me obsolete. It had only taken me 8 months to move from my Junior Clerk in Sales Accounting position to the job in Addressograph. That meant I had been in this unit since July of 1960 and here I was still there in June of 1964. I was coming up on the four-year anniversary of cutting plates and stamping envelopes. I had gotten the unit running smoothly to the point each day was routine, meaning each day was boring.

I think I should explain how the addressing machines operated. Metal plates were cut on a graphotype and stored in long trays in alphabetic order (in our case). When I began in the unit the plates after being cut were unreadable since they were sort of upside down and backward. You cut the plate, slid it into a metal frame, printed out these strips of stiff yellow paper , snipped out and slid the printed piece into slots atop the frame. This allowed you to read the information on the plate.

On the original machine that I operated you did it all manually. The tray fit down into a hopper on top. You hit a foot petal and one plate (or frame actually) was fed into and through a track. When the plate was centered beneath a cutout on the top of the machine and beneath an ink ribbon, you would place an envelope there and hit a foot petal that brought a heavy roll of metal, called a platen, down hard against it. This imprinted the address on the envelope. You would then place the envelope aside in a box and feed in the next plate and so on and so forth. Get a bit out of sync and kerboom, you’d smash a finger or two.  The used plates would continue down the track and line up inside an empty tray. Once your initial tray was empty you’d put the now full tray of printed plates away in a cabinet, move the tray that once held plates to that location and drop in a new full tray. This went on and on until a specific job was finished.

The Speedaumat looked and worked essentially the same, except it was a smaller footprint and more importantly, you could read the plate, meaning no frame and no label was required. Where the Speedaumat really differed was it had an envelope feeder. It was a long framework on wheels with a series of feeder rollers on top. You could stack a couple or so boxes of No. 10 envelopes up on the feeder and they would automatically go under the series of rollers and line up beneath the platen. You could drop a couple trays of plates in the hopper on top of the machine and they would also automatically feed through and then drop out into empty trays on the other side. This feeder worked very well with the standard envelope, but if you had oversized envelopes not so well and things like gummed labels, well forget it, jam up city. For anything a little oddball it was back to manual hands-on operation; just watch those fingers because the Speedaumat was faster, thus its name.

This last photo has absolutely nothing to do with the write up. It is just here to see f you are still awake and paying attention.

Dave Claypoole had posted out in the Spring and now worked in Payroll, which put him back into a clerical department where there was opportunity for advancement. (On the right is another sketch I did of Dave.) It fell to me to hire his replacement and I choose a young man named Ed.

Ed was a piece of work. He was a Black man, something Atlantic had not many of, but was now considering hiring more as the Civil Rights Movement heated up around us. He was very dapper and very fastidious about his dress, always checking the cut of his jib and the shine of his shoes; however, he immediately had a problem. As nicely as he dressed, it was wrong for our Unit. Ours was a dirty job. We spent our day in printer’s ink and sometimes blood, very bad stuff to get in your clothes, plus neckties were strictly forbidden since they could easily get caught in the equipment and strangle you.

On the first day he reported for work, all spit and shine and perfect creases, I handed him a packet holding two Atlantic Service Station uniforms. These were generously provided to us by our employer to allow us to preserve our own civilian wear.  Actually they were a little nicer looking than those on the right. The pants were a deep blue and the shirt was a lighter blue shade. It had a patch over the right pocket that said Atlantic. We didn’t need nor get the hat and bowtie. We got two uniforms so we’d have one to wear when the other was in the wash.

I wore mine to work each day. I never felt embarrassed about riding the commuter train in it.  Hey, I was working an honest job, I wasn’t ashamed of it. I’ve never been very fussy about my clothes anyway. For Ed it was a different story. At first he refused to take them, but when I put the emphasis on the danger to his own clothes he acquiesced. He never wore the uniform outside of the building. Each morning he showed up as natty as ever and went in the men’s room and changed into the uniform, carefully hanging his clothes up on a hanger out of the danger zone. In the evening he would reverse the procedure and take off the uniform before showing himself in public.

I had not much contact with Black people up to then. I had my secret friend back in grade school into junior high when I lived in Downingtown. It was a secret because mixing of White and Black people at the time in that area was not encouraged. Actually, my other friendships were not so socially acceptable either. My two non-secret best friends were Stuart, whose family was the lone Jewish one in the town, and Ronald, who was a homosexual. I didn’t know that at the time, no one did, because Ronald kept it secret since that was not a particular welcome thing to be either.

There was a certain amount of conformity in place at Atlantic, sometimes unofficially, but expected. Men, with the exception of those in units like mine, wore suits to work, suits and ties. Although not specified in the handbook, men pretty much wore one color shirt – white. Shoes and socks were normally black, usually laced and often Wing Tips. I wore a pair of black Wing Tips even with the uniform. God forbid a man wear shoes with tassels! Atlantic didn’t have much contact with Black people either in the early ‘sixties, but because of the public outcry for equal rights, they had begun hiring minorities. One of the odd crises of the time was facial hair. Ed, like a number of Black men, had moustaches. Part of the required look for male employees was no facial hair. You came to work clean shaven or you didn’t come to work. In the first round of hiring more minorities the company made a policy change. Black men could have facial hair, because it was part of their culture, but white men could not. This silly rule would eventually change.

I interviewed Ed. I liked him and I recommended him and he was hired. I really didn’t know about his work ethic and he didn’t have a long resume, but he was highly intelligent and we hit it off immediately. He not only replaced Dave on the machines, he also replaced Dave as my sounding board and friend. We soon were having lunch together and we did a lot of talking during the day. Addressograph was one of those jobs where you could work and chatter away with someone. Ed and I chattered away about a number of subjects, politics, religion, philosophy, history, what have you. We seldom agreed, but it didn’t matter. We could argue about subjects without getting angry and we could remin good friends no matter how far apart our opinion might be.

The only problem with Ed was his laissez-faire approach to work, not in any economic sense, but one of his favorite expressions was, “I cawn’t be bothered!”. It was in the lackadaisical way he did his job that showed me I wasn’t really cut out to be a boss. Instead of taking him to task or giving him bad reviews, I would cover for him. If need be I would step in and do his work so it met the deadline and was correct. This is not good management. A boss probably should never become friends with an employee. To indicate what extend his “I can’t be bothered,” philosophy went there was the day of the tray drop.

I was working on supplies and was behind these shelves that lined our work area. Ed was running a Speedaumat machine on auto mode. I had a clear view of him, but he could not see me behnd the shelves and boxes. There was no one else in the area at the time. He pulled a full tray off the back end of the hopper and swung about to slide it into the tray cabinet. He hit the edge instead and the the tray slipped from his hand to the floor. Many of the metal plates flew out and scattered about his feet. He should have knelt down and put these plates back in alpha order, the way they were stored, put them back in the tray and replace the tray in the cabinet. Instead, he looked around the area to see who might have seen him drop the tray. When he saw nobody he simply began kicking the spilled plates underneath the cabnet.

I was very disappointed in him, but concerned person that I was, later I scooped the plates out from under the cabinet, straightened them out and refiled them where they belonged. I just didn’t like to see anyone get into trouble, even at the cost of extra work for myself.

At the end of the year Ed left Atlantic to enter college full time. I kept in touch with him for at least another year. As for me, things needed to change, and change they would.
And as noted, Lois was pregnant.

Obsessions with Mr. Updike, Gerde's Folk City and Near Death by Toothpicks

 In December of 1962 I outlined a novel. I hadn’t written a completed full novel before. Four years earlier, when I was a heady seventeen year old still struggling through eleventh grade, the date early 1958, I attempted an ambitious apocalyptic novel I called, Breadth of the Earth, but I never finished it. It may have been too complex for me, but more likely I just got bored waiting for the blasted thing to end. I have 200 pages of it tucked away in one of my file cabinets.
You see I was use to short stuff. The Play, Ya-Ha-Whoey, was my long work, but a play is mostly dialogue. You boil it's 120 pages down and you got a long story or a short novelette.  I did write three novellas that I collected as Smoke Dream Road, but their length varied from that of a long short story to a slim novelette. Now at long last, in December 1962,  I wrote Ronald Tipton that I had a novel idea and outline I thought I could finish.

Every evening I typed away and by the end of January I had completed the book. I originally titled it Ronald Candle after the main character, but later changed it to Come Monday. It was based somewhat on the same  incident between Richard Wilson and Bob[last name withheld by choice] that I used for  my short story “Moon Was Cloudy” a few years earlier. I greatly expanded it, I mean expanded it a lot until you would not recognize the two came from one.
I patterned the main character Ronald Candle loosely on myself. He lived in the small town of Wilmillar and he felt left out of things because he didn’t have a car, especially when a tough kid named King Victor began going after his girlfriend, Sandy. Now Sandy was of course beautiful and also of course she wasn't really Ronald's girlfriend, other than in his wishes. Still he was incensed when she went off with King Victor, who not only did have a car, but had a super cool hot rod. Ronald swore he'd get revenge somehow.
Ronald's two closest friends are very different types in temperament. The one I based on Richard Wilson was named "Jerry Westfield". Jerry  had a swagger and a tough guy attitude. The other friend was Casey Scott, an idealistic version of myself. Casey was the kid I wished to be. Casey also possessed some of the characteristics of Ray Ayres, self-assurance, courage, good looks and the virtues of an Eagle Scout. Like I said, he was the kid I had wished I was. Casey also has the coolest and fastest street rod in Decket County. Jerry is good friends with Casey, but harbors some jealousy about Casey's racing superiority. The book followed these characters over a two-week period in late February until it ended with disaster on the first Monday in March.

You may have noticed some mention of “Wilmillar” previously. First of all, it was part of the official pedigree registration of my little Chihuahua, Cindy. Her American Kennel Association name was Cynthia Wilmilar (left).
As far as the litter use, I made a decision in my teens to create this mythical place called “Decket County” and much of the actions of my stories happen in the small town of “Wilmillar, Pennsylvania”.

I wrestled with this fiction often in my life. It isn’t hard to figure out that “Decket County” is just a pseudonym for Chester County, “Wilmilar” for Downingtown and “Formton” for Philadelphia. I’ve had friends, especially Ronald Tipton, who have urged me to use the actual place names and there were times I considered doing just that. However, there are good reasons why I choose to not use the real McCoys.

The original reason was privacy and a touch of vanity. A lot of my stories had strong autobiographical details and I didn’t want to become a pariah in my old home town; I didn’t what earn Thomas Wolfe's reception in Asheville and not show my face in Downingtown for fear of a lynch party. That was the my vanity part to think I'd ever reach a level of Thomas Wolfe notoriety. Actually, I expected to surpass Mr. Wolfe by eventually winning the Nobel Prize, which hasn't happened yet.
A second reason was something of vanity as well. I expected to create my own little world just as William Faulkner did with his Yoknapatawpha County. I'll tell you though, Decket County is a heck of a lot easier to say and spell. (I also had my alter ego, a la Hemingway's Nick Adams. Mine was...is Frank March.)
But the more important reason, which took me a while to realize, was it allowed me to change things without some nitpicker complaining that such and such a street or building didn’t exist in Philadelphia or wasn’t located where I placed tin Downingtown.  If I had certain government officials or the police behaving in a certain manner for the sake of my plot, I did not want some critic screaming they didn’t do it that way in Chester County. I wanted the freedom to use things as I needed them, not as reality might dictate. It is a pet peeve about these readers searching if you got every nook and cranny exactly the proper color with the exact stains as some existing nook and cranny. Can't people just enjoy a good yarn anymore?

I was feeling very confident at the beginning of 1963. For Pete’s sake, why wouldn’t I? We were living in a nice home and living what many would call the good life. We weren’t doing much good for others, but man we had it good. We ate out at “good” restaurants a couple time a month, took some “good” day trips here and there. We took in some “good” top-notch shows whenever we wished. Work was going very well. We had started the Speedaumat conversion, which would take months. There were over 40,000 plates to be converted and I was the main converter. I wasn’t happy with the lost evening from the overtime it was giving me, but my paychecks looked good. I had no idea 1963 was going to be a turning point for the country as well as me personally.

I had stumbled across his short stories and become a big John Updike fan. Let me explain something here and now. I don't know if I am particularly compulsive, but I can tell you I am rather darn obsessive. It may be a character flaw or a mental disorder, but frankly, it served me well in life. You don't tackle the task of cutting 40,000 metal Graphotype plates without some degree of obsessiveness. It is also a good trait to have as a writer. I mention this because when I say I took an interest in something I don't mean I just took an interest. It became my life for a time.
I got hooked on Updike upon reading The Same Door. So it was right on into Pigeon Feathers, his other collection of short fiction thens the short novel, The Poorhouse Fair and then  a novel that especially impressed me, Rabbit, Run. John Updike (pictured right) had grown up in the same general area as I had. I could identify with the places and people he wrote about. He quickly became another writer influencing my own work.
And being as obsessive as I am, I decided to visit his boyhood home. Why not, it wasn't that far away?

He had been a lad in Shillington, Pennsylvania. I lived a bit south of Pottstown and he had lived a bit south of Reading, about 20 to 25 miles from each other, a little more than a half hour drive. He was 9 years my senior, but that meant he wasn’t greatly removed by area or age from my own experiences. We drove up Route 100 pass my parent’s and turned left onto Route 724 toward Birdsboro. We just kept going and Route 724 became Philadelphia Avenue when you got to Shillington, which was the street he had lived on. Somewhat coincidently, I live today just off a road named Philadelphia Pike.

We parked along the roadside, Lois and I. It was more country at the time then it may be today. I walked up to the white house and took a couple pictures (pictured left, then right, then left again). We went down the road a little from his house and saw the property that was once the Alms House, the inspiration for his novel, The Poorhouse Fair.

Life on the home front was going on pretty much where it had left off. We were hardly into the new year when my car was back in Roy Miller’s garage, this time for new brakes and state inspection. As usual, my parents delivered the car back to us after the work was done. It cost me $49.57.

The car wasn’t the only thing continuing to be sickly. Lois was not feeling real great either. Whatever she had was hanging on and there seemed to be some problem in figuring out what she had.

The number one hit on “Billboard” was “Go Away Little Girl”, by Edie Gorme’s husband, Steve Lawrence, but on February 25 a single was released that began to cause a stir. It was entitled, “Please, Please Me” by some British group called The Beatles. It was their first United States single.

I had seen a photo of the group and honestly, I thought they were funny looking with those bang-style haircuts and Mod Suits. I wasn’t overly impressed with their music either. It didn’t strike me as being very innovative and I figured  they were destined to be another flash in the pan; so much for my judgement of musical talent.

Lois thought the drummer was cute.

Meanwhile her illness persisted. She spoke on the phone with my grandmother about it on both the 5 and 6 of February. On February 11 I didn’t go into work because I had to take Lois to the doctor and the Red Arrow Line was on strike, a not uncommon event. In fact, this 1963 strike was the one that broke the camel's back. Red Arrow Lines became history and SEPTA (South Eastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority)  was born.  And by the way, my car was back in for service on the 16^th. My grandmother came home with us on the 17^th and stayed overnight. On the 18^th she taught Lois how to cook a pot roast. I believe that was the recipe we still employ today. It makes a very good pot roast, although now we make it in a crock pot and not a large roasting pan. Then on February 25 I was again home to take Lois to the doctor.

These doctor visits kept going throughout the Spring, only the location changed. On March 29 she was at doctors in Philadelphia and once more on April 15. We had no diagnosis yet, but Lois suspected she was pregnant. On May 6 I took off from work to take her to the doctor. She is really fretting she might be pregnant. She was definitely gaining weight. On May 25 my mom bought Lois a shift dress to wear to her Cousin Evie's wedding because none of her other dresses would fit. Then on June 3 my mom and grandmother came to our home and took Lois to a new doctor in Malvern, a Dr. Clifford Lewis. He said she was pregnant and the due date was December 1.

On May 27 1, a fairly obscure folk singer, who had been performing mainly at Gerte's Folk City in Greenwich Village, released his second album, “The Freewheeling  Bob Dylan”. His first had been  plain “Bob Dylan” and did not have great success. The lead song in he second album was called, “Blowin’ in the Wind”

Yes, there were a lot of things beginning to blow in the wind.

I had by 1963 accumulated a good-sized record library. It was full of the Rock idols of the ‘fifties, Elvis, Fats Domino, Everly Brothers, Little Richard, what had you, certainly a wide selection of the hits and hit makers of the period, along with some more obscure people like Nervous Norvis. One of my favorites was Ricky Nelson (I know, Blandsville) and I had quite a few Johnny Mathis, who was not a Rock singer. I had a little of everything frankly. I had Sinatra, Streisand, Connie Francis and naturally a great number of Country, especially Johnny Cash. I had a fair sampling of Classical and some Jazz: Lois' Brubeck albums, Stan Kenton, Maynard ferguson, Ahmal Jamal and even Coward's Group and I was very heavy with Broadway original Cast Scores, but it was in the late 1950s I really started leaning toward the Folk Scene. I had every album the Kingston Trio had made up to that point, and I was immediately attracted to Dylan’s songs.

Some people cringed at his singing style, but I didn’t care. I liked songs that had strong lyrics with meaning as much as I liked a melody, and Dylan supplied that. I had already begun following the Greenwich Village folk scene and collecting  Peter, Paul & Mary, Phil Ochs.,Tom Paxton, Eric Anderson, Judy Collins and Richie Havens. Most of these were still pretty obscure. Now Dylan became an obsession. (Right is Tom Paxton and Pete Seeger.)

As stated, being obsessive was good for a writer; not so much for a social life. I was an abysmal small talker and an absolute failure at schmoozing. If felt convertible with someone and we shared interests, I could chat for hours, but with new acquaintances or subjects I had little interest in, I would tune out. I was not Mr Life-of-theParty.
Socially we were visiting with Dave Claypoole over in New Jersey, but he was more my buddy than a friend to Lois. He and I were on the same wave length and so we would be happily chewing the fat, but Lois would be more or less an observer.
Then on March 14, my mom and grandma came by and they took Lois to a Jewelry Demonstration in West Chester and I rode along. Hosting it was Dottie, my old friend and babysitter from both Glen Loch and Downingtown. Her father had been a friend of my dad and they lived up the road from our house in the swamp. They moved to Downingtown not long after we moved back to Washington Avenue and had an apartment by the “Blob” diner.

She was now married and lived on Neild's Street in West Chester. My great grandfather had once owned several homes on that street. After the jewelry party, she invited us to visit and for a  couple years after that we visited. We had regular get-togethers with Dottie and Jack.  I don't know if it was ever just we two couples. These affairs were generally little dinner parties with other friends of Dottie and Jack joining in. Ones I remember were Susan Frank, a woman I had known in high school and thought was very pretty. She had very bushy black hair and sharp eyes. Of anyone else who attended, she and I could talk with each other, a fact Lois noticed right off. There was another couple we occasionally get together with at their home, Florence and Gene Bare (pictured left).  Gene was one of those guys who thought himself witty, but wasn't. He would tell somewhat offensive jokes he found hilarious and laugh so hard at them he never noticed no one else even chuckling. Florence was something of a Chatty Cathy from the "y'know" school.

Dottie was always a bit strange to be around, even in her teens. She had strange eyes. She was a bit flighty. That part of her nature was one reason my mom stopped using her to babysit me. The other reason was my grandmom considered her “boy crazy”.  Now she was married with children.

Dottie insisted upon her dinner parties, but she was a terrible cook. To paraphrase Ebenezer Scrooge, "There was more the grave about them than of gravy." Oh Heaven help you if you dipped into her gravy. Recipes were all a mystery to her. At our first get together she served a chocolate cake for dessert. Like many cooks she fastened the layers in place with toothpicks. When we began to eat she warned us to watch out for the toothpicks. I don’t know about the others, but I pulled fourteen toothpicks from my piece alone.

When she and Jack visited us she insisted on helping Lois in the kitchen. One time Lois had made some fudge, which was cooling on the counter above the open silverware drawer. Dottie took a pan of macaroni off the stove and set it down atop the still very soft fudge. The fudge then melted and dripped out of its pan to fill the silverware drawer wrapping nicely around the forks and knives and spoons. Startled by this mishap, Dottie used a dishtowel to remove the hot pan of macaroni, ignoring the fact that a burner still burned on the stove. A moment later we had a burning dishtowel to contend with. After that she somehow, which only the Lord knows, managed to get mashed potatoes up a wall clear to the ceiling. (Photo on left is Lois and me, New Year’s Eve at The Bares, 1963.)

Although I think we enjoyed our visits with the Dottie and Jack they only lasted a short time. The years since have not been kind to Dottie and her family. One of the children is dead and another is on drugs. Jack went to jail for sexual abuse of a minor and has since died. Dottie herself was committed to Embreeville (pictured right), a former Pennsylvania State Psychiatric Hospital. I believe she is still alive and hopefully healthy, but I am not certain of it.