After the new year of 1963 began, my parents also brought me to first the Broad Ripple High School principal's office and then to the high school dean's office, on the first morning that school term continued; and, after about 15 minutes of conversing with Dean Jackson, they left the school.
Dean Jackson then quickly figured out which classes I would be put into during the last month of Broad Ripple's fall term, based on what subjects my mid-term report card from Bayside High School indicated that I had been taking in New York City. After next handing me a program card which indicated the particular class and room numbers that I was assigned to attend for each different day of the week, Dean Jackson then sent for his tall, well-dressed son, Keith.
Keith, who was both a member of the school's "Key Club" service organization (whose members were apparently selected in an undemocratic way, similar to how most fraternities and sororities selected their members, in that you couldn't become a member of the "Key Club" if the majority of members of the group didn't want you in their exclusive club for some reason) and a sophomore like I was. Shortly after he arrived in his father's office, Keith then gave me a guided orientation tour of the school's layout and showed me where my school locker would be, in a friendly way for about a half-hour; and then I began reporting to my assigned classes for the remainder of the day, after about the 3rd period of the school day.
In January 1963, along with the Indianapolis real estate industry and real estate agents' racially discriminatory unofficial policy of not allowing African-American families or individuals to rent or buy homes north of East 38th Street on Indianapolis's northeast side, there seemed to be a policy of de facto segregation with regard to which students could attend Broad Ripple High School.
Being part of a family that was white and not African-American, I was both able to live north of 38th Street on Indianapolis's northeast side in early 1963 and able to attend Broad Ripple, whose student body and teaching staff was then nearly 100 percent lily-white in early 1963. But, if my parents had not been apparently advised by the local white real estate agent, who rented them their half of the duplex private home where we lived near East 52nd Street and College Avenue, that Broad Ripple (which was located on Broad Ripple Avenue, northeast of where we then lived) was a better school academically than was Shortridge High School (which was located near 34th Street and North Meridian Street, southwest of where we lived), it's possible I would have ended up attending the more racially integrated Shortridge Hill during my sophomore and junior years of high school in Indiana in 1963 and 1964. Since high school students living on my particular block had the option of attending either Broad Ripple or Shortridge, based, officially, on the neighborhood's geographic location.
I had lived in a Northeast Queens neighborhood in the 1950's and first two years of the 1960's that had apparently been made racially segregated in an unofficial way by local real estate agents and real estate developers, whose residents (about 90 percent of whom were of assimilated Jewish religious ethnic background) were nearly all racially white, during my elementary and junior high school years. So it was only after graduating from 9th-grade at the then-nearly all white Louis Pasteur Jr. H.S. neighborhood school in June 1962, and then entering Bayside High School as a sophomore in September 1962, that I first attended a school with a more racially integrated student body, that wasn't also composed of such a high percentage of students who were of assimilated Jewish religious ethnic background.
But if my parents hadn't previously made the decision to enroll me in Broad Ripple H.S. rather than Shortridge H.S. when they first went out to Indianapolis to rent their half of the duplex house we ended up moving into in late 1962, I probably would have ended up, myself, choosing to attend the more racially integrated Shortridge High School. Especially if I had been told in advance that, unlike Bayside High School, Broad Ripple High School was still a lily-white high school in 1963.
Of course, since a major reason for me gaining admittance into Columbia College as part of its Class of 1969 was that the former Broad Ripple English teacher of mine to whom I wrote, in the first semester of my senior year at Flushing H.S. (after my family had moved back to New York City), asking her if she'd be kind enough to submit a teacher's letter of recommendation that Columbia College required all its applicants to get mailed to its admissions office, was apparently one of the Indiana "scouts" that Columbia relied on to recommend which Indiana applicants it would admit to Columbia College. Although I did not realize at this time that this English class teacher apparently then had a kind of special relationship to Columbia College's admissions office, when I asked her to submit the letter of recommendation that probably was what got me admitted to Columbia College.
So if I had attended Shortridge High School rather than Broad Ripple High School, when living in Indianapolis, the letter of recommendation that likely persuaded Columbia College to admit me to the Class of 1969 would never have been written; since I then would never have ever met Mrs. Griggs, the Broad Ripple H.S. English teacher, whose class I was in for one term during my sophomore year, who wrote the letter of recommendation. And since it turned out that I was the Columbia Class of 1969 member of Columbia SDS who first discovered in March 1967 that Columbia had secretly been an institutional member of the Pentagon's Institute for Defense Analyses [IDA] weapons research think-tank since 1960, it's possible that, if I had attended Shortridge instead of Broad Ripple in 1963 and 1964, the 1968 Columbia Student Revolt might not have happened; and late 1960's New Left Movement and SDS history might have developed in a different way, perhaps?
Yet a writer named Kurt Vonnegut had apparently attended Shortridge High School in Indianapolis years before the early 1960's. But in the early 1960's I had no awareness that, if I ever developed any literary aspirations in future years, it perhaps would have been better to attend the racially integrated Shortridge high school rather than Broad Ripple for an additional reason; since attending Shortridge might have provided me with the future possibility that I'd be able to establish some kind of networking alumni connection with a published writer like Vonnegut, at some point.
