Another difference between Broad Ripple High School and overcrowded Bayside High School was that at Broad Ripple every student was assigned their own individual hallway locker. So they all didn't have to carry all their textbooks at once when shifting from classroom to classroom during the school day.
At Bayside, you were assigned a locker in the band room in which you could store your musical instrument during the week, like the locker in which I kept the saxophone I individually practiced on during my daily Band class periods each day, as a first-term sophomore. But students at Bayside did not have individual hallway lockers assigned to them like the Broad Ripple students did in the early 1960's.
The number of students who had previously played in their previous lower schools' bands before entering Bayside High School or who were newly interested in being in Bayside's school band was greater than the number of students who wished to be in Broad Ripple's band in early 1963. So there was a much greater need for a student who could play tenor saxophone in Broad Ripple's band than there had been in Bayside's band in the fall of 1962. And since I had shifted from taking weekly alto saxophone private lessons to taking tenor saxophone private lessons out of school during my 9th grade in Queens, one gain for me from transferring to Broad Ripple was that I was able to become part of my high school band more quickly than I would have been able to have done if I had continued to attend Bayside in 1963, 1964 and 1965.
Between the last month of my first term as a sophomore and the end of my second term as a sophomore at Broad Ripple, I was able to spend the last 45 minute period of the day playing tenor saxophone with the band; prior to finally officially becoming a full member of both Broad Ripple's marching band and its concert band between August 1963 and June 1964, during my junior year of high school.
Had I not been in Broad Ripple's high school band and, during my senior year, in Flushing High School's band, there's a good possibility that, even with Mrs. Griggs's letter of recommendation, Coulumbia College's admissions office would not have accepted me into its Class of 1969. I probably would not have then seemed "well-rounded enough;" and would probably not have been seen then as a Columbia College student who would probably be able to eventually fill one of the tenor saxophone player positions in Columbia College's undergraduate marching band and concert band.
Because the person who interviewed me on Columbia's campus, prior to Columbia's decision to admit me, was both from Indiana and some kind of a music department instructor (whom I never bumped into again afterwards while attending Columbia), my impression is that the Columbia admissions office just expected me to mainly spend my time outside of class on Columbia's campus playing tenor saxophone in its band for four years. And, after graduating in 1969, just enrolling at Columbia Teachers College for a year, so that I could then teach high school social studies in the inner city public schools to support myself, at the same time I tried to "make it" as a playwright or writer (which is what I indicated on my admissions application were then my post-B.A. career plan).
Instead, of course, once I was on Columbia's campus as a freshman, I had no interest in being in Columbia College's marching band or concert band; and, also instead, in the second term of my sophomore year at Columbia College just discovered that Columbia University had secretly become an institutional member of the Pentagon's Institute for Defense Analyses [IDA] weapons research think-tank in 1960.
No comments:
Post a Comment