Within a few days after I moved into the rented house with my family on Indianapolis's north side, I eagerly telephoned the office of the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain's now-defunct local afternoon Indianapolis Times newspaper; and I expressed my interest in working for them as a newspaper delivery boy.
Given the fact that I pretty much lost any interest in devoting much of my life to the goal of individual money-making--rather than devoting most of my life to the goal of just helping humanity, artistic and creative expression, working for peace, justice and equality and giving to and sharing love with other people--by my junior year in high school, it's surprising, in retrospect, to recall how eager I was to begin working as an Indianapolis Times newspaper boy as a high school sophomore after I arrived in Indianapolis in late December 1962.
In my sixth grade class at P.S. 221 in the Little Neck-Douglaston neighborhood in Queens, south of the Long Island Expressway on Marathon Parkway, my non-authoritarian and lenient teacher, Mr. Smith, had appointed me to be the student in charge of of ordering by telephone each week's bundle of discounted, Monday-to Friday daily New York Times newspapers that were to be delivered to the school each morning.
So I was also the 6th-grader who was responsible for going around to each 5th and 6th grade class teacher every week, to record the number of daily New York Times newspapers they and their 5th or 6th grade class students had ordered for the next week, collecting the money from these teachers each week for the number of newspapers ordered and walking to P.S. 221 forty-five minutes before class started at 9 o'clock; in order to bring the bundle of New York Times newspapers, that the Times' delivery truck had dropped off in front of the school, into P.S. 221 and place the appropriate number of daily newspapers ordered on the floor in front of each 5th and 6th grade classroom door.
Mr. Smith was responsible for mailing the money I collected as payment for the delivery of each week's daily bundle of discounted New York Times newspapers by the New York Times Company's school distribution department. But I was the 6th-grade individual who briefly spoke personally by phone each week to the New York Times male employee responsible for making sure, in a serious businesslike way, that P.S. 221 would receive the right number of copies of newspapers in the following week.
Because, in 6th grade, I found it interesting being P.S. 221's "New York Times monitor," the thought never even crossed my mind (or even my parents' mind) that maybe I should have also been given some kind of monetary compensation by either Mr. Smith or the New York Times Company for doing this kind of newspaper distribution, order-taking and collection work for them in the 6th grade. But by the time I was a sophomore in Indianapolis, I had previously observed that the teenage newspaper delivery boys who brought my mother her copies of the Long Island Star-Journal and Newsday daily newspapers to read each day were earning some extra spending money each from this activity.
So I now realized that working as a newspaper delivery boy, besides being an activity that I still expected to be inherently interesting to me, was also a job from which I could earn some extra personal spending money for myself, in addition to the small amount of personal spending money that the weekly allowance I received from my father, as a teenager, then provided me with.
Even as a then-high school sophomore, I had no interest in spending money on clothes; and I didn't then yet need money to pay for an early 1960's date with a high school female classmate, because I wasn't dating anyone during my sophomore year in Indianapolis. So as it turned out, I ended up using most of the extra money I earned from being an Indianapolis Times afternoon edition and Sunday morning edition newspaper delivery boy to buy a Bell & Howell 8 mm home movie projector, to buy a cheap tape recorder (that quickly stopped working well after I purchased it) and to buy a lot of long-playing 33 1/3 rpm vinyl record albums of both Broadway hit musicals and Broadway flop musicals (since I still was more into Broadway musicals than into rock'n'roll or folk music during the first 6 months of 1963).
Friday, May 31, 2019
Wednesday, May 22, 2019
On The Road In The 1970's: Part 22
The half of the rented private duplex house in Indianapolis my family moved into in January 1963 was located near North 52nd Street, in the area between College Avenue and Meridian Street, but closer to the less affluent College Avenue side of this area. As I've previously mentioned, in the early 1960's Indianapolis real estate firms didn't allow African-Americans to live north of 38th Street on that side of the city. So the neighborhood I lived in was a lily-white Northern neighborhood.
What immediately struck me about the neighborhood streets between the College Avenue and Meridian Street major thoroughfares, where traffic flowed heavily south to north and north to south, was how much more deserted and dead daily life in front of the houses seemed than what daily street life was like on most of the streets in Queens, where I had grown up, had been. The only time you usually saw any individual people walking on the street was when they walked in and out of the front of their private homes, to get in and out of their cars, that were parked on the street or in their garages.
Even in spring, summer and autumn weather, you never saw many people walking around on the neighborhood sidewalks or sitting in front of their homes as they sometimes did on streets in front of private homes or garden apartment buildings in Queens. Apparently the vast majority of neighborhood residents, many of whom may have grown up in houses with front porches on which they sat on in the spring, summer and fall, seemed to prefer to just sit in their backyards, away from being viewed from the street or from being able to look out at the street, whenever they felt like sitting outside near their homes in spring, summer or autumn.
One difference between the private houses in the Indianapolis neighborhood I lived in and private houses in Queens, however, was that in Indianapolis some of the garages of the houses had basketball hoops attached atop their closed garage doors; for the boys in the nuclear family to practice their basketball shots or free throws on or to play one-on-one basketball games with a friend or each other. In Queens, there were many more outdoor schoolyard playgrounds, apartment development playgrounds and city public playground with basketball courts and basketball hoops on backboards; where boys and men (or the extremely unusual girl or woman in the early 1960's) who wished to practice shots and free throws or play one-on-one or team basketball games with their friends, or anyone else whom they happened to meet on the playground basketball court that day, could freely play. So there was no need for the private house owners, whose sons might be into basketball, to attach basketball hoops above their private home's garage, in a place like Queens.
Not too long after my family arrived in Indianapolis, I saw the campus of Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, when my father and mother drove my sister and her trunk of clothes south from Indianapolis, on State Highway 37, down to Stempel Hall on IU's campus for her orientation, prior to her beginning her first term as an Indiana University student. What most impressed me about Indiana University's campus was the number of academic and dormitory buildings it seemed to have, how large its campus was and how much more it looked like a separate city than did the only campus which I previously had seen, Queens College's campus, had looked like. Indiana University seemed like it would provide a student who attended college there with a much more exciting and authentic 4 year-college experience than what a student might have who was only attending a college for commuters that had no dormitories on campus in New York City, like Queens College or CCNY.
What immediately struck me about the neighborhood streets between the College Avenue and Meridian Street major thoroughfares, where traffic flowed heavily south to north and north to south, was how much more deserted and dead daily life in front of the houses seemed than what daily street life was like on most of the streets in Queens, where I had grown up, had been. The only time you usually saw any individual people walking on the street was when they walked in and out of the front of their private homes, to get in and out of their cars, that were parked on the street or in their garages.
Even in spring, summer and autumn weather, you never saw many people walking around on the neighborhood sidewalks or sitting in front of their homes as they sometimes did on streets in front of private homes or garden apartment buildings in Queens. Apparently the vast majority of neighborhood residents, many of whom may have grown up in houses with front porches on which they sat on in the spring, summer and fall, seemed to prefer to just sit in their backyards, away from being viewed from the street or from being able to look out at the street, whenever they felt like sitting outside near their homes in spring, summer or autumn.
One difference between the private houses in the Indianapolis neighborhood I lived in and private houses in Queens, however, was that in Indianapolis some of the garages of the houses had basketball hoops attached atop their closed garage doors; for the boys in the nuclear family to practice their basketball shots or free throws on or to play one-on-one basketball games with a friend or each other. In Queens, there were many more outdoor schoolyard playgrounds, apartment development playgrounds and city public playground with basketball courts and basketball hoops on backboards; where boys and men (or the extremely unusual girl or woman in the early 1960's) who wished to practice shots and free throws or play one-on-one or team basketball games with their friends, or anyone else whom they happened to meet on the playground basketball court that day, could freely play. So there was no need for the private house owners, whose sons might be into basketball, to attach basketball hoops above their private home's garage, in a place like Queens.
Not too long after my family arrived in Indianapolis, I saw the campus of Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, when my father and mother drove my sister and her trunk of clothes south from Indianapolis, on State Highway 37, down to Stempel Hall on IU's campus for her orientation, prior to her beginning her first term as an Indiana University student. What most impressed me about Indiana University's campus was the number of academic and dormitory buildings it seemed to have, how large its campus was and how much more it looked like a separate city than did the only campus which I previously had seen, Queens College's campus, had looked like. Indiana University seemed like it would provide a student who attended college there with a much more exciting and authentic 4 year-college experience than what a student might have who was only attending a college for commuters that had no dormitories on campus in New York City, like Queens College or CCNY.
Tuesday, May 14, 2019
On The Road In The 1970's: Part 21
Getting into Indianapolis, Indiana in the late afternoon in late December 1962, I spent my first night in that city in a Holiday Inn motel room, near north 38th Street, on the east side of Indianapolis's Meridian Street, with my family. It was the first time either my father, my mother, my older sister or I had ever spent a night in a Holiday Inn; in a decade when the Holiday Inn Corporation's motels seemed more modern and newer than most of the other motels that drivers, who found the big city U.S. hotel rates either too expensive or too lacking in parking spaces, had generally stayed at while on the road during the 1950's.
The reason my father could lodge his family in this large Holiday Inn room, before moving his family in early January 1963 into the half of a two-family house near Northeast 52nd Street, that he and my mother had agreed to rent when they had flown out to Indianapolis alone a few weeks earlier, was because the firm he worked for provided him with an expense account to cover the cost of moving.
What I didn't realize, until after I had lived in Indianapolis for a few months, was that Indianapolis's white racist real estate firm executives and local bank executives had apparently decided before 1963 that no houses would be sold or rented, and also no apartments would be rented, to any African-Americans who wished to buy or rent a house or rent an apartment above Northeast 38th Street in Indianapolis. So in the early 1960's, the neighborhoods north of 38th Street on the east side of Indianapolis were as lily-white as South Boston in Massachusetts still would be during the 1970's.
Having only lived in just a South Bronx apartment building, a Whitestone, Queens apartment building and a Douglaston-Little Neck, Queens garden apartment development complex prior to moving to Indianapolis, I was excited to now be living in half of a two-family private house that my parents had rented. The private house was probably built in the early 1920's.
The house had no grass backyard or garden, but only a front porch , which my family shared with the Griffith family that rented and lived in the part of the duplex that was attached to where my family lived. Renting our side of the house, however, gave my family a private, unfurnished basement, a first floor living room, dining room and kitchen, a second floor of three bedrooms and a bathroom without a shower, and a large attic on the third floor. So the amount of indoor space I had access to at home in Indianapolis was much larger than what the 5 and 1/2-room second-floor garden apartment my family had lived in during the previous 9 1/2 years in the Beech Hills apartment complex development in Douglaston-Little Neck, Queens had provided me with.
Much of the space in the rented house's unfurnished basement was taken up by the oil heating furnace that provided the needed winter heating for all the rooms in the house and for its hot water. Because the monthly rents or limited equity co-op maintenance fees of apartments that my father had always lived in after World War II always included the cost of heating, my father had not previously realized that the rent for a private house in the Midwest did not also include a hefty cost to heat the house. So that, besides paying a monthly rent, you also would end up spending a lot of money paying off your rented house's heating bill.
So when, after the first few months of living in Indianapolis during the winter of 1963, the bill from the Indianapolis utility company that provided oil for our rented house's heating fuel arrived, my father was surprised at how much it was, on top of the monthly rent, costing to heat the house. And he and my mother then became very cautious about turning on and up the thermostat on the basement heater, during the rest of the time my family lived in this rented house.
In the 1950's and early 1960's it was still not common for most apartments in Queens or the Bronx to have air-conditioning units in their living rooms. So on hot and humid summer evenings, many apartment residents in the Bronx and Queens would try to escape the heat and humidity in the evening by sitting outside on benches in local parks or in front of their garden apartments or apartment buildings. The private house my family rented in Indianapolis, however, provided an air-conditioning unit in its living room. So whenever I watched TV shows on summer evenings, while living in Indianapolis, the hot and humid summer temperatures never caused me any discomfort while watching television (like the evening television addict I was until my last few years of high school, after I read a politically liberal critique of corporate commercial television programming, that had a title like "The Great Time Killer").
The reason my father could lodge his family in this large Holiday Inn room, before moving his family in early January 1963 into the half of a two-family house near Northeast 52nd Street, that he and my mother had agreed to rent when they had flown out to Indianapolis alone a few weeks earlier, was because the firm he worked for provided him with an expense account to cover the cost of moving.
What I didn't realize, until after I had lived in Indianapolis for a few months, was that Indianapolis's white racist real estate firm executives and local bank executives had apparently decided before 1963 that no houses would be sold or rented, and also no apartments would be rented, to any African-Americans who wished to buy or rent a house or rent an apartment above Northeast 38th Street in Indianapolis. So in the early 1960's, the neighborhoods north of 38th Street on the east side of Indianapolis were as lily-white as South Boston in Massachusetts still would be during the 1970's.
Having only lived in just a South Bronx apartment building, a Whitestone, Queens apartment building and a Douglaston-Little Neck, Queens garden apartment development complex prior to moving to Indianapolis, I was excited to now be living in half of a two-family private house that my parents had rented. The private house was probably built in the early 1920's.
The house had no grass backyard or garden, but only a front porch , which my family shared with the Griffith family that rented and lived in the part of the duplex that was attached to where my family lived. Renting our side of the house, however, gave my family a private, unfurnished basement, a first floor living room, dining room and kitchen, a second floor of three bedrooms and a bathroom without a shower, and a large attic on the third floor. So the amount of indoor space I had access to at home in Indianapolis was much larger than what the 5 and 1/2-room second-floor garden apartment my family had lived in during the previous 9 1/2 years in the Beech Hills apartment complex development in Douglaston-Little Neck, Queens had provided me with.
Much of the space in the rented house's unfurnished basement was taken up by the oil heating furnace that provided the needed winter heating for all the rooms in the house and for its hot water. Because the monthly rents or limited equity co-op maintenance fees of apartments that my father had always lived in after World War II always included the cost of heating, my father had not previously realized that the rent for a private house in the Midwest did not also include a hefty cost to heat the house. So that, besides paying a monthly rent, you also would end up spending a lot of money paying off your rented house's heating bill.
So when, after the first few months of living in Indianapolis during the winter of 1963, the bill from the Indianapolis utility company that provided oil for our rented house's heating fuel arrived, my father was surprised at how much it was, on top of the monthly rent, costing to heat the house. And he and my mother then became very cautious about turning on and up the thermostat on the basement heater, during the rest of the time my family lived in this rented house.
In the 1950's and early 1960's it was still not common for most apartments in Queens or the Bronx to have air-conditioning units in their living rooms. So on hot and humid summer evenings, many apartment residents in the Bronx and Queens would try to escape the heat and humidity in the evening by sitting outside on benches in local parks or in front of their garden apartments or apartment buildings. The private house my family rented in Indianapolis, however, provided an air-conditioning unit in its living room. So whenever I watched TV shows on summer evenings, while living in Indianapolis, the hot and humid summer temperatures never caused me any discomfort while watching television (like the evening television addict I was until my last few years of high school, after I read a politically liberal critique of corporate commercial television programming, that had a title like "The Great Time Killer").
Thursday, May 9, 2019
On The Road In The 1970's: Part 20
Being dropped off near Broad Ripple Avenue in Indianapolis, many years after I had lived in Indianapolis in the early 1960s, naturally brought back many memories of my time living there. And since I've never really written down my memories of what it was like for me living in "Naptown" in the early 1960s, I suppose now's a good time in the 21st-century for me, many decades later, to pause somewhat now, from recalling my life on the road in the 1970s hitching back to the East Coast experiences, to sharing my memories of living in Indianapolis as a teenager in the early 1960s.
For, after all, were it not for the fact that I lived in Indianapolis and happened, by chance, to attend Broad Ripple High School for a year and a half, I think there would have been little chance that I would have ended up as the Columbia Students for a Democratic Society [SDS] sophomore student activist who first discovered, in early March 1967, that Columbia University was an institutional member of the Pentagon's Institute for Defense Analyses [IDA] weapons research think-tank, during the 1960s Vietnam War era.
And it's then likely that I would have just ended up attending CCNY between 1965 and 1969, not been politically involved in Columbia SDS chapter anti-war campus activism as an organizer and not shared an Upper West Manhattan apartment for three months with 1960s New Left Movement "heavies" like Ted Gold and Dave Gilbert, during the Fall 1966 to Fall 1968 New Left Movement historical period in New York City.
Before being driven, along with my mother and sister, by my father out to Indianapolis from New York City in his 1959 Pontiac car, during Christmas vacation in December 1962, the only part of Indiana I had ever been driven through was the area in northern Indiana adjacent to the Indiana Toll Road, that passed by Gary, Indiana and led to the city of Chicago. My mother had been born and raised in Chicago; and that's where her parents still lived in the late 1950s and 1960s in a slum apartment near Humboldt Park and Division Street. So leaving the Pennsylvania Turnpike in western Pennsylvania in late December 1962, and entering West Virginia on the U.S. 40 road which led westward to Cambridge, Ohio, Columbus, Ohio and my family's ultimate destination, Indianapolis, meant driving through an area of the United States that I had never seen before.
In the early 1960s, the modern Interstate Highway 70, that eventually completely replaced U.S. Highway 40 as the fastest way to reach Indianapolis from the Pennsylvania Turnpike, had not yet been completed. And, driving through a narrow section of West Virginia on U.S. 40 in the early 1960s, what was most morally upsetting to a teenager like me, who had grown up in an affluent white working-class neighborhood of Queens, was noticing that a substantial number of the West Virginia houses we passed still seemed to lack modern conveniences, like indoor bathrooms; and many of the West Virginia towns one passed through still looked like they had never yet recovered economically, in the early 1960s, from the 1930's Great Depression.
Besides driving through the then-impoverished-looking small city of Wheeling, West Virginia, my father drove us through a West Virginia town that the AAA "Trip-tick" booklet, which we were using to guide us west to Indianapolis on U.S. 40 in a decade many years before the GPS set-up that 21st-century cars in USA generally use instead of road maps were installed in cars, described as a speed trap. And sure enough, on the outskirts of this small West Virginia's town main street, I noticed that there was a cop car with one cop inside, by the side of the road, looking like he was preparing to immediately ticket any car with an out-of-state license plate whom he might catch entering his town above the 25 mph posted speed limit on the town's partially-hidden speed-limit sign; in order to shake the out-of-state driver for some additionally-needed small town government revenue.
But because my father had been warned in advance by the AAA "Trip-tick" booklet to beware of this particular town's speed trap, he was already driving his car at the 25 mph speed limit when he entered the town. So the local town cop apparently decided he did not have even a contrived basis to turn on his car's siren, pull us over, ticket my father and shake us down for some money, despite the fact that my father's Pontiac still had an out-of-state New York license plate. Or perhaps, because there were always a lot of other out-of-state drivers entering his town, who were actually driving over 25 mph after entering his town, the local cop at his hidden speed trap waiting place felt there was really no need to pull over my father's particular car, to obtain the town's usual amount of daily speed trap ticketing revenue?
For, after all, were it not for the fact that I lived in Indianapolis and happened, by chance, to attend Broad Ripple High School for a year and a half, I think there would have been little chance that I would have ended up as the Columbia Students for a Democratic Society [SDS] sophomore student activist who first discovered, in early March 1967, that Columbia University was an institutional member of the Pentagon's Institute for Defense Analyses [IDA] weapons research think-tank, during the 1960s Vietnam War era.
And it's then likely that I would have just ended up attending CCNY between 1965 and 1969, not been politically involved in Columbia SDS chapter anti-war campus activism as an organizer and not shared an Upper West Manhattan apartment for three months with 1960s New Left Movement "heavies" like Ted Gold and Dave Gilbert, during the Fall 1966 to Fall 1968 New Left Movement historical period in New York City.
Before being driven, along with my mother and sister, by my father out to Indianapolis from New York City in his 1959 Pontiac car, during Christmas vacation in December 1962, the only part of Indiana I had ever been driven through was the area in northern Indiana adjacent to the Indiana Toll Road, that passed by Gary, Indiana and led to the city of Chicago. My mother had been born and raised in Chicago; and that's where her parents still lived in the late 1950s and 1960s in a slum apartment near Humboldt Park and Division Street. So leaving the Pennsylvania Turnpike in western Pennsylvania in late December 1962, and entering West Virginia on the U.S. 40 road which led westward to Cambridge, Ohio, Columbus, Ohio and my family's ultimate destination, Indianapolis, meant driving through an area of the United States that I had never seen before.
In the early 1960s, the modern Interstate Highway 70, that eventually completely replaced U.S. Highway 40 as the fastest way to reach Indianapolis from the Pennsylvania Turnpike, had not yet been completed. And, driving through a narrow section of West Virginia on U.S. 40 in the early 1960s, what was most morally upsetting to a teenager like me, who had grown up in an affluent white working-class neighborhood of Queens, was noticing that a substantial number of the West Virginia houses we passed still seemed to lack modern conveniences, like indoor bathrooms; and many of the West Virginia towns one passed through still looked like they had never yet recovered economically, in the early 1960s, from the 1930's Great Depression.
Besides driving through the then-impoverished-looking small city of Wheeling, West Virginia, my father drove us through a West Virginia town that the AAA "Trip-tick" booklet, which we were using to guide us west to Indianapolis on U.S. 40 in a decade many years before the GPS set-up that 21st-century cars in USA generally use instead of road maps were installed in cars, described as a speed trap. And sure enough, on the outskirts of this small West Virginia's town main street, I noticed that there was a cop car with one cop inside, by the side of the road, looking like he was preparing to immediately ticket any car with an out-of-state license plate whom he might catch entering his town above the 25 mph posted speed limit on the town's partially-hidden speed-limit sign; in order to shake the out-of-state driver for some additionally-needed small town government revenue.
But because my father had been warned in advance by the AAA "Trip-tick" booklet to beware of this particular town's speed trap, he was already driving his car at the 25 mph speed limit when he entered the town. So the local town cop apparently decided he did not have even a contrived basis to turn on his car's siren, pull us over, ticket my father and shake us down for some money, despite the fact that my father's Pontiac still had an out-of-state New York license plate. Or perhaps, because there were always a lot of other out-of-state drivers entering his town, who were actually driving over 25 mph after entering his town, the local cop at his hidden speed trap waiting place felt there was really no need to pull over my father's particular car, to obtain the town's usual amount of daily speed trap ticketing revenue?
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