I hadn't been in an English honors student class for the sophomore students at Bayside H.S. whose 9th grade junior high school English teachers had felt were their highest-achieving students. So for the last month of my first term as a sophomore, that I spent at Broad Ripple H.S. in January 1963, I was in a morning English class, taught by Miss Barker (in the early 1960's the women teachers were either called "Miss" or "Mrs." and the term "Ms." was not yet being used in the USA), which wasn't a "G students" class. At Broad Ripple, the "G students" classes were like the "honors students" classes at Bayside H.S.: composed of the students whose previous teachers in the same subject had felt them to be the academically best students in their classes.
I don't remember much now about what was being taught in Miss Barker's English class, except that during my month in her class we were assigned (after we finished reading Silas Marner) to read parts of Walter Scott's Ivanhoe book as homework; which Miss Barker would then discuss with us on the following morning.
Most of the students in the class seemed to find Ivanhoe as boring to read as I did at that time (although when I had seen the movie with Elizabeth Taylor as a child and read the Classics Illustrated comic book version of "Ivanhoe" in New York City before I was even 9 years old, I had found the Ivanhoe story interesting and entertaining). So most of the talking about Ivanhoe each period was just done by Miss Barker, in front of a class of students who rarely raised their hands to volunteer to make any comments about the novel.
Unlike my memory of the Classics Illustrated comic book version of Ivanhoe, the text of the original novel that we were assigned to read in this first term sophomore English class seemed to place more emphasis on Rebecca's father being a "Jewish money lender." And the white guy sitting next to me in class who, like nearly all the students at Broad Ripple H.S., wasn't of Jewish religious background like I was, seemed to feel that the "Jew money lender" character in Ivanhoe was the obvious "villain" of Sir Walter Scott's novel and was the character in the novel that he seemed to mention the most during the few occasions he spoke in class, after Miss Barker called on him to make some comment related to what he felt the novel was about.
A second thing I remember about my one month in Miss Barker's English class was that it was in that class that I wrote a fictional short story, titled "The Ideal President," after Miss Barker assigned members of this class to write some kind of fictional short story; following a lesson she gave explaining the difference between a novel like Ivanhoe and the short stories that were contained in the 10th-grade English literature textbook we were using in this class.
Apparently Miss Barker, who wore glasses and was probably not considered that physically attractive by most men around her age or most of her English class students, felt that "The Ideal President' short story I wrote was more grammatically correctly written, more imaginative and reflected a greater writing ability and willingness to put in time creating a short story than the short stories the other students in the class had handed in to her (especially since the length of "The Ideal President" short story I handed in was much longer than the length of the short stories the other members of the class had written).
So after reading "The Ideal President" story herself at home, Miss Barker summarized what the story was about to the other students in the English class and cited the story as an example of the kind of well-written short story she felt was one of the better ones that a member of the class had produced. And apparently it was because I wrote "The Ideal President" story, which she was impressed by, that Miss Barker decided that I belonged in the "G" English class with the more higher academic-achieving and more intellectual Broad Ripple H.S. sophomores who generally received "A", "A minus" and "B plus" grades; rather than in the English classes with the "average" students, who generally only attained grades of "C" and, at most "B", in the classes they took, during the second term of my sophomore year in high school.
In retrospect, of course, if Miss Barker hadn't recommended me for the "G" English sophomore class that Mrs. Griggs taught in the spring term of 1963, I likely wouldn't have ever been admitted into Columbia College in the fall of 1965. Since, as I've previously indicated, it was probably only because Mrs. Griggs, an Indiana-based "tapper"/scout for Columbia's admissions office, had written a favorable letter of recommendation for me that was part of my application to Columbia, that Columbia's admissions office decided to let me attend Columbia College. And, of course, if, historically, I had not been on Columbia's campus between 1965 and 1968, Columbia University's institutional membership in the Pentagon's Institute for Defense Analyses [IDA] weapons research think-tank might not have ever been discovered and proven before the 1970's.
"The Ideal President" story, itself, was a long fictional short story about an idealistic male teenage high school student who, worried about the terrible state of the world, the risk of a nuclear war, the denial of civil rights in the South, and the lack of world peace, places his hope for saving the world from nuclear war and changing U.S. society in a more democratic way on electing as U.S. president a white elderly person who--not being a corrupt politician or a personally ambitious political office-seeker of personal political power--would be "The Ideal President." And of how this teenage male high school student persuades a reluctant, non-politician-type elderly white man to "save the world," create world peace and personally transform U.S. society in a more democratic way, by announcing his presidential candidacy, campaigning and winning the 1964 election as a political independent.
I still saw myself as an anti-communist liberal supporter of 1952 and 1956 Democratic Party presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson in early 1963, had wanted the Democratic Party to nominate Stevenson again as its 1960 presidential candidate rather than the less historically politically liberal and less intellectual son of multi-millionaire Joseph P. Kennedy, JFK, and (despite then still believing that JFK hadn't needlessly risked provoking a nuclear war by imposing a naval blockade of Cuba and pressuring the Soviet Union to withdraw its missiles from Cuba during October 1962 "Cuban Missile Crisis"), felt that JFK hadn't been the liberal savior, "ideal president" I then felt the USA required. So the fictional character of the elderly white man in my January 1963 story, whom the teenager viewed as the person who could be "the ideal president" was probably based, somewhat, on the favorable view I still had of Adlai Stevenson, at that time.
Because of Miss Barker's praise of "The Ideal President" story, I, naively, thought it might provide a good plot for a musical (and a few months later I even wrote my own chorus for an uncompleted a cappela song, "The Ideal President," with the following lyric: "And that's our President. The Ideal President. When will he come? When will he appear? We need our Ideal President."). So I naively looked up the business address of Richard Rodgers in the most recent edition of Who's Who In America and naively mailed a copy of "The Ideal President" story (in a manila envelope that contained inside another folded up stamped manila envelope with my return address on it) to his office, with a letter saying that I thought he might be interested in adapting the story into a musical. But, naturally, the copy of my text was soon returned to me in the stamped manila envelope with my address on it, along with a polite form letter from one of Rodgers' office secretaries, indicating that Richard Rodgers' office had probably not bothered to check out the story, before mailing it back to me.
