With the Declaration of Independence celebrating more than 240 years, a national treasure turns forty.  McGruff the Crime Dog first appeared in July, 1980, and he has become an enduring part of American culture.  He stands as a symbol of the Declaration’s commitment to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” and the Constitution’s dedication to “domestic tranquility,” and his longevity is a reminder that the blessings of that domestic tranquility are for ourselves and our posterity.

When McGruff first came on the scene, his public service announcements told people that for more information, they could write to an address in Rockville, Maryland.  Someone with a mind oriented towards the study of history, and American history in particular, always associates Maryland with the Carroll family, in this case Charles Carroll, who signed the Declaration.  As patriotic Americans, Carroll and McGruff have some important things in common.

In order to receive a Catholic education, Carroll’s family sent him to France, where he studied the works of Saint Thomas Aquinas.  From Aquinas he learned that “peace is the tranquility of order.”  Peace and order suited Carroll’s temperament, and Bradley J. Birzer, in his biography of Charles Carroll, American Cicero (2010), wrote that “Carroll’s mind and soul were as ordered as his estate.”

Of course, there is no getting round the sad fact that what made Carroll’s estate well-ordered was the sweat of the age-old and biblically sanctioned economy of slave labor.  With gratitude we must acknowledge how we have moved beyond such barbarism, just as we humbly admit that as humans for whom the incarnate Son of God died, we are not defined by our negative traits, however atrocious.

What lasts beyond a tidy estate is an orderly mind and soul at peace.  Here Carroll and McGruff can both point the way.  “Ease may be natural to man,” wrote Carroll, “but elegance—the union of propriety with ease—must be acquired.”  Carroll knew that the Latin word for business, negotium, was a negation of otium, easy leisure.  Still, that sort of ordered peace also requires work.

McGruff made famous a phrase, “Take a bite out of crime,” and his point was that one by one, law-abiding citizens can work to reduce crime.  McGruff and his famous words came from an advertising campaign that emerged from a time of national unrest.  Racial tensions were at a breaking point, and crime ravaged many cities into looking like war-torn hellholes.

Enter the Ad Council, a public entity deriving from the War Advertising Council set up during the Second World War.  It worked with a New York advertising agency, Dancer Fitzgerald Sample (since subsumed into Saatchi & Saatchi), to address the national increase in crime.  An executive with that agency, Jack Keil, came up with the line, “Take a bite out of crime,” and then with the idea of an anthropomorphic bloodhound, wearing a tan trench coat, reminiscent of the one worn by Humphrey Bogart in 1946 when portraying a fictional private detective, Philip Marlowe.

Also in Keil’s mind was a contemporary television detective, Columbo, who in the 1970s became a popular and avuncular figure in a tan rumpled raincoat.  As Wendy Melillo, author of How McGruff and the Crying Indian Changed America (2013), told The New York Times, “Successful advertising campaigns always have somebody’s finger on the pulse of popular culture,” noting that “at the time, Peter Falk’s Columbo was a very important piece of Americana.”

In his overcoat and sometimes with a cup of coffee, McGruff appeared on television and in print advertisements either as a cartoon superimposed on a live action scene, or as an actor in a costume.  Precedent for such presentations went back to 1944, with the creation of the character Smokey Bear.  In 2011 an actor portraying McGruff was arrested for possessing a thousand marijuana plants and a grenade launcher, and probably for that reason, now only members of law enforcement may wear the McGruff costume.

For most of McGruff’s on-air ads, Keil provided the voice.  Keil died in 2017 at age 94, and his obituary in The New York Times characterized McGruff’s intonation as “the raspy sound of a detective who had just finished a long, sleepless stakeout.”  As Keil described his vision of McGruff, “He wasn’t vicious, not tremendously smart, maybe, but he wasn’t a wimp, either,” adding, “He was a father figure, or possibly an uncle figure.”

In his initial appearances, McGruff encouraged citizens to take small, practical measures, “bites,” to decrease crime.  He suggested forming neighborhood watches, as well as keeping doors locked and leaving a light on at night, preferably by the front door.  Later, McGruff addressed issues such as drug abuse and kidnapping, and he educated kids about gun safety.

Rights to McGruff belong to the National Crime Prevention Council, and even though he has come into the twenty-first century with his own Twitter account, McGruff hit his stride in the 1980s.  In 1984 McGruff was commemorated on a first-class United States postage stamp, and he went to the White House to meet President Ronald Reagan.  In 1986 he featured in an episode of a CBS sitcom, Webster, where he addressed schoolyard bullying, and he appeared in an article in the April, 1988, issue of Smithsonian magazine.

Over his forty years, McGruff has become an instantly recognized persona.  His lovability goes beyond the merry reactions of school children; after all, only criminals would be opposed to McGruff’s message.  Still, as Charles Goodrum and Helen Dalrymple wrote in Advertising in America:  The First 200 Years (1990), the Ad Council tended to aid “causes for which there was already a general consensus,” but in so doing, its “slogans became a part of the national vocabulary,” including McGruff’s “Take a bite out of crime.”

Recently, The Babylon Bee lampooned people who want to defund the police, saying they feel unsafe because McGruff talks about biting, “and we don’t need more violence like that from law enforcement.”  Such witty satire touches on a basic truth:  Peace comes from victory, and victory comes from fighting the good fight.

Goodness in the fight is what Charles Carroll meant when he wrote, “without morals a republic cannot subsist any length of time.”  Defending our republic, McGruff exhorts us to live a good life, citizens’ morals defeating crime bit by bit and making every American more prosperous and more free.

Seventy-five years ago, a short novel charmed readers and became popular enough to get made two years later into a major Hollywood film.  Twenty-one years after the film’s moderate success, the story became a weekly half-hour television show, lasting two years.  Along the way, most people seem to have forgotten the book, by R. A. Dick (pen name of Josephine Leslie), although it remains in print.

The Ghost and Mrs. Muir can come under the heading of romantic comedy, the ghost not being the scary sort menacing about in stories by M. R. James.  In early 1900s London, Lucy Muir, a thirty-something widow of an architect who has left her with two small children, surprises even herself by deciding to break free from her domineering Victorian in-laws and move with her son and daughter to a small town along the English Channel.  There she rents Gull Cottage, and it is haunted by the roaring and restless spirit of its previous owner, a retired sea captain, Daniel Gregg.

Four years before Mrs. Muir rented the cottage, Captain Gregg, a bachelor living alone, had been found dead there, asphyxiated by a gas line left open.  A coroner’s inquest delivered a verdict of suicide, a slander on his good name infuriating the late captain, and frustration at that besmirching of his character drove him to haunt his old house.

It gives nothing away to say that Captain Gregg becomes something of a guardian angel to Mrs. Muir, advising her and guiding her through tough spots.  During his visits to her each evening she uses him as a sounding board, and he coaxes and coaches her to grow out of her shell.  Also, they collaborate in a way that gives new meaning to the term “ghost author.”

Subtle cinematic romance between a widow and a ghost required good writing and better acting.  As Bob Dorian put it in Bob Dorian’s Classic Movies (1990), “As far as the censors were concerned,” this movie “was the ideal love story, one that contained no language of love, no lingering kisses, and absolutely no bodily contact.”

In its review, The New York Times called the film, “a jolly caper,” that was “gently humorous and often sparking good entertainment.”  Rex Harrison, who played Captain Gregg, recalled in his memoirs, A Damned Serious Business (1991), it was “a delicate and unusual love story,” and “the mood of it was genuinely romantic but not cloying.”

While the film stays faithful to the novel, it necessarily streamlines the story.  For example, wisely and mercifully, the screenwriter, Philip Dunne, focused on Mrs. Muir’s vivacious daughter, Anna, and left out her prig of a son, Cyril, who becomes a clergyman.  Cutting out Cyril thus removed scenes of him toadying to his bishop and his household, such self-righteous pomposity concentrated around one dining room table that the reader cannot blame poor Mrs. Muir for fainting.

Most notably, the film glosses over the Christian themes touched upon in the book. 

Mrs. Muir is understandably curious about what the next world is like, and for all her middle-class respectability, it is always the boisterous and profane Captain Gregg who quotes Scripture.  Notwithstanding his unhappiness over how his reputation has been ruined, Captain Gregg is closer to the Word.

When Mrs. Muir asks Captain Gregg to tell her what the afterlife is really like, he is silent for a while and then says, “No.”  He adds, “It’s as if I were asked to explain navigation to a child sailing a celluloid duck in its bath,” meaning, “there aren’t earthly worlds to fit this other dimension, just as there weren’t earthly words to fit telegraphy and electricity till the scientists worked their way up to these things.”

Some time later she asks him about his age now, and he tells her there is no aging where he is:  “There is just being—no age and no time, no height and no depth—only immortality and eternity and vision.”  When she says it strikes her as “frightening and rather dull,” he says again that there are no words to describe where he is.

All the same, he tries to give her a glimpse, even though superlatives fall short.  “It’s all the beauty and serenity and nobility you have ever experienced on earth,” he says, and that is including “all your grandest and most generous feelings, and the finest sunsets and greatest music—and then you’re only on the fringe of understanding.”

Although Mrs. Muir comes across as a conventional Anglican, at one point the narrator tells us that the years flew by, “like beads told by nimble fingers on a rosary, smooth and round, full of interest.”  A couple of times the captain refers to his youth in Dublin, and without using the word, he tells Mrs. Muir about Purgatory.  “There’s a dimension,” he explains, “that some spirits have to wait in till they realize and admit the truth about themselves.”

He explains that someone who is “spiritually deaf,” such as her sister-in-law, cannot hear him, because “she’s only tuned in to earth and herself”  Later on, he elaborates, “It’s only those with one-track minds, who never can see or feel anyone’s point of view but their own, who are spiritually deaf.”  Along with the spiritually deaf, he regrets the lukewarm:  “It’s the saints and the sinners that are much the closer to first things, not the half-and-halfers with their negative sins of spite, malice, and uncharitableness.”

Though often blunt and impatient, Captain Gregg encourages Mrs. Muir to see that she was right to live her own life and get out from under the thumb of self-important people who need to help others.  After all, people who need to help (read, control) others lack self-control and need psychiatric help.  “What would the world be like,” she muses after a bullying letter from her sister-in-law, “if everyone minded his own business?”

When The Ghost and Mrs. Muir moved to television, the setting moved as well, from the south coast of England to the coast of Maine.  Also, it moved from the first half of the twentieth century to what was then the present day, that is, roughly, 1970.  This adaptability of the tale shows that it hovers within the realm of myth, its timeless elements of love and loyalty, of family and faith transcending the limits of any era and place.

Monastery Run bubbles up from a spring by some trees in western Pennsylvania and meanders through woods and fields northeast to the Loyalhanna Creek, itself a tributary of a tributary of the Allegheny River.  It gets its name from flowing for much of its length past a Benedictine monastery. Strolling along that stream, a modern monk can renew his affinity for Gilbert White, an eighteenth-century Anglican parson who pioneered writing sketches about a small place’s flora and fauna.

In 1788 White published a collection of essays, what he called letters, The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne.  Selborne is a village in Hampshire, England, maybe fifty miles southwest and a world away from London.  Not much changes there, but White had an eye for how one season turns into the next.

White wrote that he was “of the opinion that if stationary men would pay some attention to the districts on which they reside,” and would take notice of “natural productions and occurrences as well as antiquities,” publications resulting from such observations would fill in gaps in knowledge of local history.

Monastery Run is just the kind of setting White spent his free time paying some attention to, and frequent visits to it confirm White’s maxim from Letter 20, “all nature is so full, that that district produces the greatest variety which is the most examined.”  Driving past it, the stream goes unnoticed, its surrounding vegetation blurring as just generic trees and weeds.

Along part of Monastery Run’s length near the monastery is a gravel path, like the stream itself about ten feet wide, and walking along it on the day after Easter takes on special significance.  In 1846 monks from Bavaria founded the monastery overlooking the run, and they brought with them a custom still practiced in southern German-speaking lands, taking a walk on Easter Monday. Ein Emmausgang, an Emmaus Walk, is an occasion to recall the two disciples who walked to Emmaus and encountered the risen Jesus.

In Gilbert White’s tradition, he would have begun and ended Easter Monday with a collect from the Book of Common Prayer.  “We humbly beseech thee,” White would have prayed, “that as by thy special grace preventing us thou dost put into our minds good desires, so by thy continual help we may bring the same to good effect.”

Like the seasons, languages change, and although now “prevent” means to stop, in White’s day it meant to help.  For White, God’s special grace went before him to help him put to good effect the good desires God gave him. Especially on an Emmaus Walk, it is interesting to reflect on following in the wake of trailblazing grace.

A road curving up to the monastery and its college and seminary cuts across Monastery Run.  A concrete pavement borders the road’s south side, and fifteen stone steps lead from the pavement down to the gravel path.  On the north side of the road and along the eastern bank of the run stands an acre of cat tails, where in autumn a half dozen white tail deer can briefly rustle the khaki stalks and then suddenly disappear.  On the south side and perpetually sluicing over the run’s eastern bank is a swampy area aglow in autumn with goldenrod.

In that swampy area is a tiny island, about ten feet by three feet.  Each April, a Canada goose nests there, and while she broods on her eggs, Father Goose is on guard in the tall marsh grass a few yards away.  He sits in the shallow water as still and as formidable as an anchored battleship. In the water around the little island, two mallards paddle about and chatter laconically to one another.

Red-wing blackbirds perch on spindly tips of treetops and call back and forth.  Cardinals hop and flutter from twig to twig, and robins are much in evidence, flitting around the staghorn sumac.  Locust trees looming along the stream’s west bank seem to be the special haunt of a fierce-eyed blue jay. In summer a couple goldfinches dart around the swamp and up and down the stream, while wheeling above the trees are numerous swifts.

Those autumnal deer seem to be transients, their foraging leading them from nearby woods onto the edges of Monastery Run.  Other mammals are year-round residents, and one summer evening a raccoon was busily washing something. A groundhog scurries around, and it is fun to give a short, sharp whistle and make it stand up and look around, earning it again its other name of whistle pig.  On the grassy verge, a couple cottontail rabbits munch away, at times catching sight of a human, and then they twitch an ear, blink, and bolt in the other direction.

An unusual absence of squirrels leaves walnuts to ripen on the tree.  A century and more ago people used walnut hulls for brown dye, just as they used the drupes of sumac for red dye.  Nearby grow bushes of pokeberries, and people used to squeeze the juice from the berries to make ink.

The days after Easter are too early for nuts or berries, not to mention the mint tea, thistles, and Queen Anne’s lace that flourish along the stream.  A few buds appear, but mostly bare branches of elms and hackberry trees arch over the path and the stream. The stream rushes cold with recent rains.

Along with natural history, White wrote about his village’s antiquities.  Roughly eighty pages, or about one-fifth of his book, recounts the history of Selborne Priory.  Chartered in 1233, it closed in 1485. White noted that the priory’s “situation was retired, with a stream running by it, and sequestered from the world, amidst woods and meadows.”  Even by White’s day, none of it survived above ground, and pacing along Monastery Run it is worth meditating on a monastery lasting some 250 years and eventually vanishing without a trace.

A hymn written by Isaac Watts, an older contemporary of Gilbert White, reminds us, “Time, like an ever-rolling stream,/Bears all its sons away.”  Monasteries may someday close, but Monastery Run goes on. White would have agreed with Andrew McKean, writing about Willow Creek, Montana, in the Spring, 2020, issue of Outdoor Life, “On a live stream, every moment is distinct from the one just before it, or the one yet to come,” adding, “It’s the unrepeatable moment that matters.”

Monday of Holy Week the reading at Mid-day Prayer at our Benedictine monastery happened to be from Lamentations 1.  “How lonely sits the city,” the young monk read, “that was full of people . . . The roads to Zion mourn, for none come to the appointed feasts.”

A monastery that runs a college and a seminary can seem like a small town.  Day in and day out a few thousand people of different generations and vocations make their various rounds, whether to class or to the library, to the bookstore or to the post office, to the gym or even to church.  All tidy and self-contained, with a cemetery and grist mill, gardens and swaying trees; it’s a monastic Mayberry.

Then suddenly, amidst fear of deadly contagion, students are sent home, hourly employees are laid off, and professors are told to self-isolate and figure out how to teach on-line.  Then another shock hits the system when the local bishop closes all churches and chapels in the diocese.  The once bustling monastic city does sit lonely, and none come to the appointed feasts.

It was eerie timing for that reading from Lamentations, and since the cycle of readings was set long ago, it is easy for a person of faith to see a providential dimension to that particular reading occurring at that particular time.  While the campus takes on the air of a ghost town, with multi-colored posters merrily announcing to vacant corridors events that now will never happen, the liturgies still go on, even as masters of ceremonies puzzle over how exactly to proceed.

This situation had its universal summing up a few days earlier, when one evening Pope Francis delivered a special Urbi et Orbi address.  It was a sad scene, the Bishop of Rome making an important speech from his famous balcony overlooking Saint Peter’s Square, but by decree of the civil authorities, people were ordered to stay home.  It was dusk when the Pope spoke, and his words went forth as cold rain fell on deserted cobblestones.

Meanwhile, humans do what humans do, asking why bad things are happening to them.  Time and again, the answer to a natural calamity is supernatural:  God, like a cosmic Queen Victoria, is not amused.  Divine wrath befalls us because of our sins; but take heart, God does not give us more than we can bear, and He chastens us because He loves us.  Just turn back to the old-time religion, and all will be right with the world.  Cold comfort for someone humiliated at having to apply for unemployment or facing the loss of a business or of a loved one.

Whether the Spanish Flu a century ago or a Chinese virus today, it might not be on the same level as that green mist seeping all around ancient Egypt in the movie The Ten Commandments.  Has God visited a pestilence upon His people to scourge them for their sins and drive them to repent and turn again to Him?

If so, there is no shortage of people eager to offer lists of sins for which we are being afflicted.  For example, is God sending us a cataclysmic thunderbolt message about using clerical celibacy as camouflage for clerical sodomy, or about the widespread sin of divorce and remarriage?  Or does stuff just happen, and there are no reasons or patterns to life, just random particles bumping into one another?

One way of looking at these questions is to think biblically about the roles of sin, faith, and doubt.  Regarding a man born blind, Saint John’s Gospel tells us that people asked Jesus, “Who sinned, this man or his parents?,” and Jesus answered C, None of the above.  Rather, Jesus said, the man’s blindness was a way to show how God works.  Jesus then healed the man by using basic elements near at hand.

At the very end of the Gospel according to Saint Matthew, when the eleven disciples go up a mountain in Galilee and see the risen Lord, we learn, “And when they saw him, they worshipped him; but some doubted.”  If some of the original disciples had doubts, we can as well.

Just as Jesus did not bask in their adoration, He did not argue with their doubt, and if nothing else, here we see that John Henry Newman was wrong when he declared that “ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt,” since the correlation is instead one to one:  one difficulty, seeing the risen Christ, can lead to precisely one doubt.

Whether they were inspired to worship or inclined to doubt, Christ told them, “All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me,” and so, as with the question about sin causing blindness, He cut through passing human reactions and emotions and told them to buck up and go make disciples everywhere, baptizing them and teaching them what Jesus had taught.  How we go about it, Jesus leaves the details to us, even in a time of exotic plague, when churches are closed and no one will be at an Easter Vigil to be baptized.

While it might be entertaining to figure out why we are in this mess in a messed up world, smug finger pointing takes time away from turning again and again from ourselves and towards God.  It also distracts us from living our two great commandments.  Love of God and love of neighbor are what Jesus calls us to do, and when we need to improvise, God sees to it that we have a way.  As Saint Paul wrote to Timothy, “God did not give us a spirit of fear, but of power and love and a sound mind.”

To translate the Greek word dynamis, “power,” the Vulgate has virtus, and as our shoes and prayers echo across empty churches during Holy Week, it is worth remembering that whether worshiping or doubting, what God has given us sinners to work with is virtue, love, and our own solid wits.  Even without a crisis, we do well to use those gifts as best we can where we are right now, or people will see our religion as just like an old man at twilight, mumbling alone into the rain.

With Lent approaching, it is time to think again about how to answer the annual question, “So, what are you giving up for Lent?”  Or, its variation, “What are you doing for Lent?”  Often, the emphasis is on you; the person asking the question is poised to use your answer as a springboard for talking about what the questioner is giving up or doing.

Of course, Lent is not a roaring beast we need to placate by human sacrifice.  Lent was made for us; we were not made for Lent.  Although one use of Lent can be as a kind of pause button between the self-indulgence of Mardi Gras and its resumption forty days later, a more spiritually edifying use of Lent is for beginning a new chapter in one’s life.

Here, let me propose a most challenging form of asceticism, a daring, even daunting, kind of self-discipline to begin in Lent before trying it out year-round.  Think of it as learning a new language; Lent will be the immersion period, lessons where it is all right to make mistakes but start over.  After forty days, some fluency should emerge.

This Lenten penance is simple, but far from easy:  Avoid beginning sentences with the first person.  To put it another way, train the mind to rethink speech patterns so that the subject of each sentence is not oneself.

For example:  “I like that lamp.”  Well, really, who cares?  As if my liking that lamp confers some special honor upon it.  All the same, “I like that lamp” means that the rest of the conversation centers around me and what I like about lamps.  Even if the catalyst were something other than lamps, the conversation soon becomes boring, none of us being all that fascinating.

Instead, try:  “That’s a good lamp.”  The focus then turns from me to that lamp.  It’s a much more interesting statement, subject to discussion, since it begs the question, “What makes a lamp good?”  Then we can consider what others, maybe Aristotle or Augustine, Russell Kirk or Roger Scruton, used to say about things and about being good.

This challenge of verbal fasting from oneself goes double for the clergy, since to whom more has been given, more is expected.  As one’s Lenten homilies are leading the faithful closer to God, try not to lose one’s flock by shepherding them through a forest of personal pronouns.  After all, especially during Lent, someone must decrease and Someone else must increase.

In 1963 Andy Williams recorded a new song, “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” meaning the Christmas season, and the lyrics included the lines, “There’ll be scary ghost stories/And tales of the glories of/Christmases long, long ago.”  Most likely the reference is to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, but it points to a tradition going back at least as far as William Shakespeare’s play, The Winter’s Tale.  First performed around 1611, the play has two mentions of ghosts, as well as what ranks among the strangest stage directions of all time.

One of Shakespeare’s later plays, The Winter’s Tale is called a Romance, although its happy ending may be why in the First Folio (1623) it comes under Comedies.  In any case, it delves into the realm of fairy tale, and, as G. Wilson Knight observed in The Crown of Life (1948), it “may seem a rambling, perhaps an untidy, play; its anachronisms are vivid, its geography disturbing.”  For example, literalists balk at the play giving landlocked and wooded Bohemia a seacoast and a desert, and one of the characters consults an oracle of Apollo on the non-existent island of Delphos.

Such fussiness misses the play’s larger point.  Frank Kermode, in his introduction to the Signet Classics edition, explained that it “deals with sin and forgiveness, and with the triumph of time—also a Christian theme.”  The sin here is jealousy, and forgiveness comes through a kind of resurrection.  At the start of Act IV, Time himself appears as the Chorus, and he concludes his setting of the scene with the kind words, “Of this allow,/If ever you have spent time worse, ere now;/If never, yet that Time himself doth say,/He wishes earnestly you never may.”

In May, 1611, Simon Forman, a London alchemist and medical doctor, saw The Winter’s Tale performed at the Globe theatre, and afterwards he wrote a brief summary of the plot.  “Observe there,” noted Forman, “how Leontes, King of Sicilia, was overcome with jealousy of his wife with the King of Bohemia his friend,” and so on, yet leaving out two elements most characteristic of this play:  the seemingly magical resolution at the end, and earlier on, the chase by a bear.

Alec Guinness, in his memoir, My Name Escapes Me (1996), wondered if “a real bear was borrowed from the adjacent bear-baiting pit to chase Antigonus near the end of Act III:  ‘Exit, pursued by a bear’—every actor’s favourite stage direction.”  Off stage the bear mauls and eats Antigonus, who had just explained to baby Perdita (and thus, the audience) why he was abandoning her on the desert shore of Bohemia.  Antigonus’ “ungentle business” was to dispose of the child somewhere remote, and in a dream the ghost of her mother, Hermione, came to him and told him to take Perdita to far-off Bohemia and leave her there.

Much critical speculation has focused on that bear.  Whether it was a real bear or an actor in a furry costume, Shakespeare’s audience would at once have got the allusion to 2 Kings 2:23.  There forty-two rowdy lads are attacked and killed by two bears, their punishment called down upon them by the prophet Elisha for mocking his baldness.  A just end, any bald man like Shakespeare would agree, but like those yobs, Antigonus, in obeying such a wicked order, mocks the right order of the world and sets it askew, such disordering symbolized in that scene not only by the avenging bear, but also by the eruption of a fierce storm.

In all his writings, Shakespeare drew upon biblical and classical themes, and often upon British history.  Some critics then and since have deplored his limited learning, but Daniel J. Boorstin, in The Creators (1992), saw the benefit of Shakespeare’s small-town schooling:  “The narrow scope and traditions of his elementary education focused his imagination.”  From Plutarch Shakespeare knew about ancient Greeks consulting an oracle of Apollo, and from the Bible he knew about a witch in Endor conjuring up the ghost of King Saul.  From such basic bits Shakespeare could create a masterpiece.

Just as Antigonus dreams about a ghost, so does another character, young Prince Mamillius, tell a ghost story.  Or, rather, he begins to tell it.  “There was a man dwelt by a churchyard,” the boy begins, only to be interrupted by Leontes and his nobles breaking in to accuse Mamillius’ mother, Hermione, and try her for adultery with a foreign king, and therefore also for treason.  Before long, the young prince takes ill and dies, and Hermione is sentenced to death.

As Joseph Pearce reminds us in The Quest for Shakespeare (2008), when writing about a boy dying young, Shakespeare would have recalled his own son, Hamnet, who died in 1596 at age eleven.  Family grief broods over the traumas in Shakespeare’s final plays.  In Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets, being true to one’s vows stands paramount, along with the importance of family, so that a fresh reading of his sonnets will be open to the famous “dark lady” being none other than the poet’s wife, for whom he longs as he works in London and she stays home in Stratford.

With Mamillius never getting to finish his story, we are forever left in suspense.  In 1924, the master of English ghost stories, M. R. James, used Mamillius’ opening line for the title of a brief tale that could fill in for what the prince might have had in mind.  James’ story takes place in an English village in Shakespeare’s day and features a hag who dies and is buried and a miser who lives beside a churchyard, which necessarily contains a cemetery, and he would have done well to heed local reports of strange sightings in the churchyard at night.

In a parallel to Mamillius’ haunted churchyard, The Winter’s Tale concludes with a scene in a chapel, and a chapel implies a churchyard.  There Leontes sees what he takes to be a statue of Hermione and soon thinks that it has the breath of life.  In 1940 C. S. Lewis imagined the scene from Hermione’s perspective; his poem, “Hermione in the House of Paulina,” has her addressing the spirit who was “Coloring with life my paleness, with returning power,/By sober ministrations of severest love.”  With those five last words, Lewis put his finger on the Christian faith of William Shakespeare.

 

There is fitting irony that Matt Cvetic (1909-1962) died while waiting to renew his driver’s license.  For nine years as an undercover informer for the federal government, and then as a public speaker, he had dedicated much of his life to fighting a bureaucratic vision of society, advocated by men and women who, as Ludwig von Mises put it in Bureaucracy (1944), “promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office.”  Endless, soul-sapping hours waiting in drab official rooms while, under the demands of efficiency and equality, an individual is reduced to a number and processing by a machine:  Cvetic believed society must stand for life more expansive and expressive.

Cvetic’s brief life went from obscure son of Slovenian immigrants in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to national celebrity, with decades of smoking and drinking taking a fatal toll.  Vitiating his cloak and dagger reputation are reports of marital infidelity and spousal abuse that caused his wife to file for divorce.  As a friend of his put it in the racy slang of the day, Cvetic had a weakness for “booze and babes.”

An alcoholic has been described as an egomaniac with an inferiority complex, and Cvetic’s self-importance and insecurity drove him to claim more for himself than was his due.  His sometimes exaggerated, sometimes vague autobiographical assertions became easy prey for cross-examination in courtrooms and Congressional hearings.  Equally skeptical have been historians unsympathetic to Cvetic’s covert work against the Communist Party in the United States.

In 2000, the late Daniel J. Leab published a biography of Cvetic, arguing that Cvetic was an unreliable witness to the history of the domestic front of the Cold War.  According to Leab, Cvetic was a loathsome cad who “lived a deceitful, generally unattractive life, marred by alcoholism, womanizing, and emotional instability,” while Communists in America “put themselves unstintingly and heroically on the line for a wide variety of admirable causes.”  Leab made a point about Cvetic’s limited formal education, notably Cvetic attending what Leab called “St. Vincent’s (a parochial high school).”  What follows adjusts and supplements Leab’s description of Cvetic’s time at Saint Vincent.

As a result of his fame for exposing Communist infiltrators, in the 1950s Cvetic was in demand throughout the country as a public speaker, and one of Cvetic’s speaking engagements was at Saint Vincent College.  A leafy place with red brick buildings, it is a small liberal arts college that still stands just outside Latrobe, Pennsylvania, about forty miles east of Pittsburgh, and it is on the extensive grounds of a Benedictine monastery founded there in 1846 by monks from Bavaria.  In Cvetic’s day, the school was all male, and most of its administrators and professors were priests from the monastery.

When Cvetic first made headlines for his patriotic service, the college underscored its connection to him.  In March, 1950, editors of The Saint Vincent Journal reported that Cvetic had studied at Saint Vincent College from 1922 to 1924.  “Although not officially listed in the Alumni Directory,” the editors wrote, “several older members of the [monastic] community remember ‘small and high-strung’ Matt,” and they also remembered one of his brothers attending Saint Vincent.

The following year, on 8 February, 1951, Cvetic spoke at Saint Vincent as part of the college’s Sociological Forum.  He talked about his life of intrigue as a mole within the Communist network of western Pennsylvania, and he alarmed the audience by declaring that the country harbored some half a million Communists.  Five years after Winston Churchill told college students in Fulton, Missouri, that an Iron Curtain had descended across Europe, Cvetic depicted the international conflict between Communism and the free world as a spiritual struggle, and The Saint Vincent Journal reported that “he stressed the importance of education in combating the forces of materialism.”  The Journal also described Cvetic as “famous FBI undercover agent and St. Vincent graduate.”

As the Journal had mentioned in 1950, Cvetic did not appear in the college’s alumni directory, and for good reason.  Academic records published in Saint Vincent’s annual bulletins for the early 1920s listed him and an older brother, Louis Cvetic, as enrolled at the college’s prep school, but there is no trace of them graduating.

Why the Cvetic brothers never completed their studies there is now a mystery.  They were good students and were registered for the prep school’s Classical Course, and for first-year students, religious instruction focused on the Ten Commandments and Old Testament history, while Latin classes drilled the students in basic Latin grammar.  If, when he spoke at Saint Vincent twenty-seven years after having studied there, Matt Cvetic recalled his days as a prep school student, the Journal made no mention of it.

While Cvetic’s speech at Saint Vincent, as well as his two years studying there, has faded from memory, his legend lives on.  Cvetic survives as a character in American folklore thanks to film and radio versions of his exploits being available commercially and on-line.  Occasionally the film, Warner Brothers’ I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951), will appear on television, and just as Leab deplored its embellishments, he lamented that “the radio shows bore even less relationship to reality than the film had.”

However much it may be based on actual events, a radio drama must engage the imagination.  John Dunning, in Tune in Yesterday (1976), has described the radio adaptation of I Was a Communist for the FBI (1952-1954) as “packed with tension, producing plots within plots as Cvetic’s relationship with the [Communist] party changed.”  At the end of each episode, its star, Dana Andrews, stepped out of character and spoke in his own name to warn Americans of the Communist threat to their country.

As for the movie I Was a Communist for the FBI, its entertainment value is in the eye of the beholder, but historians can learn something from it.  While polishing its flawed hero, it provides a perspective on ideals and fears of the time, and the scenes filmed on location give invaluable glimpses of Pittsburgh in the early 1950s.  Still, no one should view it as historical documentary, any more than one should regard another Warner Brothers movie, PT 109 (1963), as anything other than a propaganda relic from an era when a President and his many admirers were fabricating around him an image of an American Camelot.

 

A longer, annotated version of this essay appears in the Winter 2019/2020 issue of Westmoreland History.

Aldo Leopold, in his essay, “A Man’s Leisure Time,” often printed with his A Sand County Almanac (1949), suggested that “a satisfactory hobby must be in large degree useless, inefficient, laborious, or irrelevant.”  He declared that a hobby is “a defiance of the contemporary,” and that “no hobby should either seek or need rational justification.”  Further, he concluded that a hobby “is an assertion of those permanent values which the momentary eddies of social evolution have contravened or overlooked.”

Oftentimes, a hobby means collecting.  Whether it be coins or stamps or books, fossils or baseball cards or Heisey glass, hobbyists are like the intrepid Mike Wolfe and Frank Fritz on the History Channel’s American Pickers, on a quest for their own private Holy Grail.  Like a gambler, though, it is always the next one; rather than being the next horse or the next hand or the next turn of the wheel, for the hobbyist, it is the next shilling or first edition or piece of glassware that will be what one needs.

For a model railroader, it is the next tree, the next building, the next piece of rolling stock.  When it comes down to it, a model railroader is a collector.  He (most being men) is a collector of an aesthetic.  His endless quest is really for just the right look.

In his column in the November, 2017, Model Railroader, Tony Koester wrote about what Clark Propst calls one’s “layout standard.”  Propst is a model railroader from Iowa, and by “layout standard” he means the level of detail and verisimilitude a model railroader finds acceptable for his Tolkienian sub-creation.  As with any hobby, layout standards are matters of personal temperament and taste.

Some model railroaders can become competitive, seeking to outdo one another in elaborate and intricate layouts that could rival dioramas at the Smithsonian.  Unfortunately, some model railroaders can also become snobs, looking down on their fellow hobbyists who fail to measure up to an artistic, or even an obsessive-compulsive, standard.

While it is true that a Bachmann or Lionel train set under the Christmas tree is not the same as a layout, whether, like Buster Keaton, one prefers an American Standard train set and some ready-made Plasticville buildings, or whether one fills a basement with a handcrafted re-creation of the Horseshoe Curve, in the end, as James Wright said in one of his YouTube videos in 2012, “We should be happy for each other, we should be happy for each other’s accomplishments.”

As a collector of an aesthetic, a model railroader has a sense for the past.  As with many hobbies, model railroading requires research, so that hours spent at a desk poring over books, magazines, and blogs inform the hours spent at a worktable with paint pens, tweezers, and glue.  Other times, research means visiting railroad museums or riding on tourist trains or simply walking around a small town and observing what survives from the era one is modeling.

A lesson that historical observation teaches is that real life is eclectic.  Styles vary from one generation to the next, yet they survive alongside one another.  When modeling a small town in south-central Pennsylvania in the days of President William McKinley, it bears remembering that a then new brownstone or Queen Anne house could well stand on the same block as an older brick house in a Georgian or Federal style.

As James W. P. Campbell has pointed out in his indispensable Brick:  A World History (2003), railroads and innovations in brick construction went together.  He noted that by the end of the nineteenth century “brick could be transported by rail, allowing brick of any colour to be used in any district,” so that “houses no longer necessarily matched other buildings in the local area.”

When a model railroader sets about making a miniature town, it can become something along the lines of Greenfield Village, Michigan, where Henry Ford assembled an open-air museum of buildings from across America.  As Louis Auchincloss asked in his novel from 1962, Portrait in Brownstone, “that quiet brownstone past, . . . how was it possible to bring that back?”

Charles Lockwood, in his definitive architectural study, Bricks and Brownstone (1972), wrote of “the shadowy and impressive brownstone front for dwelling houses.”  He admired their “patrician dignity, rich ornament, and dappled patterns of light and shade,” characteristics rounding out a model railroader’s steam-era layout.

In order to make model buildings that represent another era, a model railroader’s sense for weathered common brick balances with capturing the look of an elegant brownstone façade on a nineteenth-century townhouse.  Creating an illusion of brownstone and brick calls for experimentation, layering shades of brown from Prismacolor markers onto those from Liquitex paint pens.

In that spirit of Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village, with some artistic license, an HO scale townhouse kit from Woodland Scenics lends itself to being fitted out as a tribute to Nero Wolfe’s three-storey brownstone on West Thirty-fifth Street in New York City.  Purists in the Wolfe Pack fan club will notice where the kit diverges from the various descriptions of the house in Rex Stout’s novels and short stories.  Moreover, some fans would disapprove of the influence of the 1981 William Conrad NBC series, with Noch greenhouses added to the roof, rather than the skylighted plant rooms of the 2001 A & E series.  After all, moving Wolfe’s Manhattan townhouse to small-town Pennsylvania implies a less than precise re-creation of the most famous fictional detective’s residence since Sherlock Holmes’ 221 B Baker Street, London.

In Auchincloss’ Portrait in Brownstone, one of the characters said she was prepared for “whatever stern lesson might have been turned up in the bricks of that ancient past,” but here portraying bricks and brownstone from more than a century ago teaches us something about the carefully proportioned world of our ancestors as we lose ourselves for a few hours each week in blissfully contemplative tedium.

All the same, a model railroader’s layout standard depicting “permanent values” is all in good fun, and as Aldo Leopold has said, “to find reasons why it is useful or beneficial converts it at once from an avocation into an industry.”  A model railroad that is set in the past may become a teaching aid, showing what life was like back then, but it starts out simply as an amusing pastime for the hobbyist.

In the late 1980s we corresponded briefly, Mr. Auchincloss kindly answering some questions I had about his writing.  From 1947 to 2010, much of his fiction, literary criticism, and histories deftly chronicled well-heeled residents of the middle and northern part of America’s eastern seaboard.  For his characters, poverty meant hitting principal, while my world was closer to that depicted in Auchincloss’s youth by Booth Tarkington, small towns where, as Tarkington said in Alice Adams (1921), with maples and sycamores lining the streets, people “sat upon verandas and stoops, . . . cheerful as young fishermen along the banks of a stream.”

Critics compare Auchincloss’ novels of manners to the fiction of Henry James and Edith Wharton, the James of Washington Square and the Wharton of The Age of Innocence.  Auchincloss conveyed the reality of Wall Street law firms populated with men who had graduated from New England prep schools and Ivy League universities, men who had served as naval officers during the Second World War; men like Auchincloss himself, but often without his sterling code of ethics.  Adultery, embezzlement, and manipulation are complications some of Auchincloss’ characters choose, while other characters, graced with more integrity, yet constrained by convention, struggle with the fallout.

One critic said of Auchincloss, “his range is narrow, but his pitch is perfect,” and unmatched is Auchincloss’ ability to take the reader inside the rarefied society of Manhattan boardrooms and private clubs, Newport “cottages” and Georgetown townhouses.  Alas, after a while, the array of beautiful, affluent, and often ruthless and narcissistic, American lawyers, brokers, and museum directors, their wives and mistresses, their clients and children, becomes a blur.  Miles of hushed burgundy velvet galleries of gilt-framed masterworks by John Singer Sargent can leave one exhausted.

A prolific writer, Auchincloss turned out at least one book a year, and along with his fictional portrayals of his contemporaries, he wrote historical novels.  His The Cat and the King (1981), is set in the court of King Louis XIV, and his Exit Lady Masham (1983) centers around the court of Queen Anne.  Auchincloss dedicated the former to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, to whom he was related by marriage, and he dedicated the latter to Barbara W. Tuchman, saying she “has made history more fascinating than any fiction.”

Whether in fiction or non-fiction, Auchincloss was at his best when writing about the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the period described in Tuchman’s The Proud Tower (1966).  Worth re-reading are his Persons of Consequence (1979), elegant and perceptive sketches of Queen Victoria, Benjamin Disraeli, and others of that age’s British upper crust, and The Vanderbilt Era (1989), polished cameo profiles of Vanderbilts and Astors and their peers.

In 2002 Auchincloss wrote a brief biography of Theodore Roosevelt, and in 2004 he edited two Library of America volumes of writings by Roosevelt.  In his novel The House of Five Talents (1960), Auchincloss had shown how, after McKinley’s assassination, other refined, brownstone families thought of Roosevelt:  “It was possible for one human being to do all things:  to ride and write, to read and hunt, to be a student of natural history and President of the United States.”

In 1976, coinciding with America’s bicentennial celebrations, Auchincloss published a collection of nine stories linked together by made-up members of one of the country’s oldest families, a family from which Auchincloss himself was descended.  The Winthrop Covenant traces generations of the Winthrop family, from the historical John Winthrop, a colonial governor of Massachusetts, to a fictional expatriate protester of the Vietnam War.  What intrigued Auchincloss was how the Puritan fervor of the first Winthrops developed and dissipated over the centuries.

From a slow beginning, two Puritan men in seventeenth-century England discussing Calvinist theology about predestination, the story proceeds through major phases of American history.  However, Auchincloss really hits his stride with Adam Winthrop, protagonist of the sixth story, “The Arbiter,” and a Gilded Age avatar of the Winthrop line.

It is 1902, and Adam Winthrop presides over the Patroons Club in Manhattan, where his official oil portrait has just been unveiled.  To an uninformed viewer of the painting, “the model might have been a sexagenarian Marcus Aurelius, heir and administrator of a golden empire beset with problems that distressed him.”

Such an interpretation suited Adam Winthrop.  “He preferred to think of himself,” explains the narrator, “as some togaed proconsul, exquisite, cultivated, broad of view, . . . a Marcus Aurelius, turning with a shudder of distaste from that shrill, Semitic sect which saw only sacrilege in beautiful statues and a second coming in every thunderstorm.”  Winthrop’s lofty detachment from the faith of his forefathers was complete, and “he eventually reconciled himself to the absence [of God] by his emulation of the agnostic Roman spirit.”  To him, “the greatest two-volume novel ever written” was “the Gospel according to Saint Luke and the Acts of the Apostles.”

For all his aloof, agnostic Stoicism, Winthrop has subtle tastes, appreciating fine art and architecture, good food and opera.  He would be the sort to approve of Theodore Roosevelt writing books, yet arch an eyebrow at Roosevelt’s hunting.  More in Winthrop’s style would be William Howard Taft, who in 1908 shrugged at voters who objected to his Unitarianism and said, “I am interested in the spread of Christian civilization, but to go into a dogmatic discussion of creed I will not do whether I am defeated or not.”

Near the end of The Winthrop Covenant, some characters discuss President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles.  At one point I asked Mr. Auchincloss if another of his characters was based on Dulles.  Auchincloss started practicing law on Wall Street in the firm of Sullivan & Cromwell, where the senior partner was Dulles.

In 1974, Auchincloss had written about Dulles in his memoir, A Writer’s Capital, and he would do so again in 2010 in another memoir, A Voice from Old New York.  For me he took the time to use his personal stationary for a hand-written reply, saying that the character did not derive from Dulles, who “had a sly, tricky quality that jarred with his intense religiosity, and he was devoid of the smallest imagination about people—a great egotist.  Yet he was capable of kindness and courage—a strange mixture but utterly unlovable.”  Like the more sympathetic of Tarkington’s Ambersons, the best Auchinclossian characters are both magnificent and admirable.

“Okay,” he said, slowly, patiently, “now, squeeze.”  A father with a .22, teaching his son how to shoot:  A memory evoked by Frank Miniter’s The Ultimate Man’s Survival Guide, published in 2009 and now, ten years later, followed up with The Ultimate Man’s Survival Guide to the Workplace.  (In these casual times, a clue comes from the cover depicting a necktie.)  Miniter’s original Survival Guide is ever close by, like Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, reminding me of the great gift of being taught important lessons by my father and grandfather, and even now, when at the range, my father long gone, I hear his voice:  “Okay, now, squeeze.”

Now in his late forties, Miniter is a graduate of Norwich University, a private military school in Vermont, and he has edited various magazines, from Outdoor Life to America’s 1^st Freedom.  Miniter is an avid hunter and fisherman, and he learned how to box from Floyd Patterson.  His idea of fun has involved spelunking and running with the bulls.

For me, having been hit by a motor vehicle while I was walking across a street, daily small-town life can be risky enough.  Likewise, growing up in the 1970s near Three Mile Island and then being in a monastery on September 11 when Flight 93 went down not far away indicate that living a quiet life can be beyond one’s control.  All the same, it’s good to have a Survival Guide written by a man who seems to know that few things taste better than bacon fried in an iron skillet over a wood fire.

Miniter’s original Survival Guide covers six headings:  Survivor, Provider, Athlete, Hero, Gentleman, and Philosopher.  Throughout this book Miniter offers brief profiles of men illustrating his six categories.  One man is Scott O’Grady, a U. S. Air Force pilot who in June, 1995, survived being shot down over Bosnia.  Then there are more well-known figures, from Socrates to Winston Churchill, as well as some of Miniter’s mentors, like Floyd Patterson and Shingo Matsubara, a Japanese fisherman.  Among these profiles is Tecumseh, with his wise words, “Show respect to all people, but grovel to none.”

To help with the reader’s ongoing education, Miniter appends an annotated list of one hundred films to see and one hundred books to read.  Miniter’s film guide leans towards classics like It’s a Wonderful Life (1947) and Ben-Hur (1959), and his shelf of books ranges from the Bible to The Hobbit.

As a companion volume, the new Survival Guide contains seven chapters and a list of fifty films and fifty books.  Miniter recommends his previous Survival Guide and Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, while Miniter’s films come mostly from the last thirty years, with a few classics such as Citizen Kane (1941) and The Fountainhead (1949).  Once again there are short profiles of men Miniter admires, from Charlton Heston to Frank Sinatra, from Will Rogers to Ernest Hemingway.

Above all, in these two books Miniter wants to see a renewal of the ideals of chivalry, of being a gentleman, well-rounded and well turned out.  Very likely, Miniter believes, more men behaving like gentlemen will mean far fewer cases of sexual harassment.  Among Miniter’s concerns are skills he believes every able-bodied man should know, from fixing a flat to mixing a drink, from reading a map to using proper etiquette.  Along with good grooming and practical knowledge of tools, whether a pocketknife or a handgun, Miniter focuses on a man’s inner life, his growth in virtue and his code of honor.

Amidst his historical exemplars, Miniter unexpectedly features a fictional character, Raymond Chandler’s mythical hard-boiled detective, Philip Marlowe.  “He dresses well,” Miniter notes, “out of self-respect and respect for others, but he is not a dandy, and his office is spartan.”  Marlowe plays chess and is a good shot; he reads novels and has a taste for bourbon.  As Miniter sums him up, Marlowe “is a gentleman who knows how to use the gentleman’s tools” and yet “knows that the gentleman’s greatest tool, what makes him most useful to others and to himself, is having a stainless steel character.”

Miniter’s list of suggested role models calls to mind two men he somehow overlooked, William Tell and James Dozier.  From the pages of Swiss history strides the figure of William Tell, famous from an opera by Rossini (1829) and then in a classic children’s book, The Apple and the Arrow (1951).  The story goes that in 1307 William Tell stood up for Swiss liberty and against the tyranny of the occupying Austrians led by the local governor, Albrecht Gessler.  With a warped, sadistic sense of justice, Gessler claimed he would grant Tell’s demands if Tell shot an apple from atop the head of Tell’s young son.  Tell took aim with his crossbow and split the apple.

Of more recent vintage is General James Dozier.  Born in west-central Florida, Dozier graduated from West Point, served with distinction in Vietnam, and attended the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.  In December, 1981, at age fifty, Dozier was serving as a deputy Chief of Staff of NATO, when he was kidnapped by terrorists from the Red Brigade in Verona, Italy.  For more than a month the reds locked him in a room in Padua; his rescuers from Italian special forces found him shackled hand and foot, gaunt and unkempt.  Undaunted, once free, his first words were, “Get me a razor.”

Even to a fifteen year-old following this harrowing news story, the lesson was clear:  A man’s natural vanity, not to mention his atavistic barbarism, requires taming through daily discipline.  Since the days of clean-shaven William McKinley, and on through those of John Wayne and James Stewart, of Cary Grant and Robert Mitchum, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, flea-dipped shagginess was for the likes of Rasputin and Che Guevara.

Every summer, when spending a week at a cinderblock cabin in northern Pennsylvania, my father, ex-Army, still shaved every morning.  Again, the Miniter-like lesson was clear, albeit unspoken:  Even in the middle of nowhere, a man’s standards don’t get lowered.  Such a belief transferred to the seriousness and care taken with dangerous tools that could put food on the table or protect life, liberty, and property.  Our target was never an apple on top of my head, but I always knew that if need be, my father could have hit that apple.

 

Daniel J. Heisey, O. S. B., is a Benedictine monk of Saint Vincent Archabbey, Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where he is known as Brother Bruno.  He teaches Church History at Saint Vincent Seminary.  Today his father, Jacob L. Heisey, would have been eighty-five.