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").
