In early 1963 Broad Ripple High School's band director was a white music teacher named Mr. Decker, who seemed to be in his early 40's. Mr. Decker was a short and stocky guy, who was also a much friendlier guy inter-personally, in relation to his students and the concert band members he conducted, than the teacher who directed and conducted the school band at Bayside High School had been. When they made fun of him behind his back in a good-natured way, in and out of class, some of the band members usually referred to him as "Wally."
Mr. Decker had apparently been teaching band classes and directing Broad Ripple's band for nearly 20 years by 1963, but he still seemed to lead his classes and conduct the school concert band in an enthusiastic way. In addition, he seemed to possess the ability to play a variety of band instruments himself, like most other high school band class teachers did in the 1960's.
Yet despite his friendly Midwestern personality, I suspect that Mr. Decker was just a moderate Eisenhower-type Republican who had automatically accepted as true, without much thought, most of the Cold War Era myths about how democratic and moral U.S. society, the U.S. military and the U.S. government's foreign policy were during the McCarthy Era; which both the national corporate liberal mass media and the local Indianapolis newspapers still propagated in early 1963.
But since I, myself, was still just an anti-communist liberal Stevensonian Democrat in early 1963, even if I had then realized that Mr. Decker might have been an Eisenhower Republican, at that time it wouldn't really had mattered to me what Mr. Decker's personal political beliefs might be; especially since he was such a friendly and good-natured teacher, on a personal level.
On the first day I entered the Broad Ripple band classroom, for my last period of the day band class, Mr. Decker greeted me with a smile; and, before we began rehearsing a band march-piece, welcomed me and briefly introduced me to the rest of the band class members and band members, mentioning that I was from New York City. As a result, one of the clarinet players in the band, a tall guy named Fred (who also acted in the musical that Broad Ripple's music department staged with students during my junior year at Broad Ripple), nicknamed me, in a good-natured way, "Bronx." Especially after he realized that my Eastern accent differed from the Hoosier regional accent that most of the other students at Broad Ripple High School then still had.
What I remember most about my first few days of being in Mr. Decker's last period band instruction class that played jointly with the school band that played alone each day in the next-to-last period, is meeting the two white students, Bill and Steve, who played alto saxophones and sat next to me in my band classes for the next year and a half; and also noticing a white woman student named Ginny, who played clarinet, while she sat in the clarinet section of the band on the opposite side of the band rehearsal classroom.
Because of the way I had been socialized growing up in 1950's anti-feminist U.S. society, in high school I was generally more attracted by how the high school women who put noticeable lipstick and makeup on their faces before going to classes looked, than by how the high school women who didn't noticeably use lipstick and makeup looked. And it really wasn't until I became a big fan of Joan Baez in college and also began being attracted to Movement women (who mostly didn't noticeable use much makeup and lipstick) later in the 1960's, that I tended to start associating women around my age who still used lipstick and makeup in a very noticeable way as being "plastic" and physically unappealing to me.
In addition, in high school in the early 1960's, high school women whose facial features appeared most "pretty" to me were generally the ones whom I regarded as most desirable. Thus, during the first term of my sophomore year, when I was at Bayside High School, a classmate in both my first term biology class and my first term geometry class, named Ellen, was the high school woman whom I felt most like getting to know eventually at that time. Because she seemed to me to have the "prettiest" face of the women who were in all my high school classes at that time.
The clarinetist named Ginny that I noticed on my first day in my Broad Ripple High School band class, had both a "pretty" face, in my view, and used make-up and lipstick. But although Ginny also seemed to me to be a friendly, gentle and non-snobbish person, despite possessing a physical beauty that attracted men easily, I can't recall ever conversing with her individually; because she wasn't in any of the other classes I ever attended while I was a Broad Ripple student and she didn't live in the same Indianapolis neighborhood that I lived in.
In the early 1960's it wasn't unusual for high school women like Ginny to be more interested in possibly just getting some kind of office secretarial or receptionist job, or just finding a man she loved to get married to after finishing high school; rather than being interested in having to spend yet another 4 years as an unpaid student in a classroom at some college. So it could be that, despite both being in the band together at Broad Ripple High School, even if we had conversed, it would have been unlikely that she would have felt that there was any real basis for getting to know each other better outside of school; especially if her post-high school life aspirations were too different than what mine were in the early 1960's.
