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?
