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.
