On The Road In The 1970's: Part 67

I no longer recall much else of what happened historically in the world between the late November 1963 days of mourning for JFK and the end of my first term as a high school junior at Broad Ripple High School in early 1964. And about the only thing I now recall doing in December 1963 in Indianapolis, during Christmas Vacation that year, was taking a bus alone to Downtown Indianapolis; and, alone, spending an afternoon rainy day inside a downtown movie theater, watching an anti-war movie, titled "The Victors."

This movie, The Victors, reinforced my feeling that helping to preserve world peace and avoid another war was the most important thing for me to be concerned about, politically, in 1964. 

Yet after viewing The Victors film, I still believed in early 1964 that the main possible threat to world peace came from the foreign policies and actions of the Soviet Union, other communist governments and communists in non-communist "Free World" countries being willing to wage guerrilla war to establish authoritarian, undemocratic "communist dictatorships" in these countries; rather than from the foreign policies and actions of the United States government.

In 1964 I still then, mistakenly, regarded the United States government as a government whose main foreign policy motivation was to preserve world peace and defend freedom around the world against the alleged "threat" to world peace and freedom posed by "world communism." For I was still just an anti-communist liberal, politically, in 1964.

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 66

Most people, like me, who watched the Establishment television news departments' coverage of what was happening inside the Dallas police station, between the time of Oswald's arrest on Friday, November 22, 1963 and his elimination on Sunday morning on November 24, 1963, did not focus more on the possible involvement of "The Company" or former "Company"-linked people in JFK's elimination. A major reason was because none of the Establishment mass media reporters seemed to indicate to viewers that the Mayor of Dallas on November 22, 1963 was the brother of the former CIA Deputy Director, Charles Cabell, that JFK had fired, along with then-CIA Director and later Warren Commission member Allen Dulles, following the failure of the CIA-organized 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba to overthrow the Castroo-led government in Cuba.

According to Henry Hurt's 1985 book Reasonable Doubt: An Investigation Into The Assassination of John F. Kennedy, it was "known that Cabell and his associates were vehement in their rage toward what they perceived as President Kennedy's `desertion' on the morning of the invasion--the President's refusal to send in military forcee to ensure victory." And according to former New Orleans Distric Attorney's On The Trail Of The Assassins book, after JFK fired then-Dallas Mayor Earle Cabell's brother in 1961, "General Cabell's subsequent hatred of John F. Kennedy became an open secret in Washington."

In addition, when then-Dallas Civil Liberties Union President Olds and other local ACLU officials met in Dallas's Plaza Hotel in the late evening of November 22, 1963--after then-Dallas Police Captain Will Fritz had refused Old's request to be allowed to meet with Oswald--"someone suggested `Call the Mayor,'" according to Jim Bishop's The Day Kennedy Was Shot book. Yet when the then-Dallas Civil Liberties Union President "Olds got on the phone again and asked for Mayor Earl Cabell, former Deputy CIA Director Charles Cabell's brother, and "gave his name and rank," he was "told that the mayor was busy;" and he "wondered what could keep a mayor busy after 11 p.m.," according to the same book.

Then on November 24, 1963, at the very moment Oswald was silenced by Jack Ruby, "Chief Curry, ludicrously, was upstairs in his office responding to a phone call from Dallas mayor Earle Cabell, and had not checked for himself to see if orders were being carried out properly in the basement," according to the Who Was Jack Ruby? book by Seth Kantor. Yet when he testified before the Warren Commission on July 13, 1964, the former CIA Deputy Director Cabell's brother apparently falsely claimed that Dallas Police Chief Curry telephoned him at the very moment Oswald was being transferred.

But, although "in most countries, a powerful individual who also had a top position in a major espionage apparatus and had been at odds with the departed leader would be high on the list of suspects," according to former New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's On The Trail Of The Assassins book, the brother of Dallas's mayor on November 22, 1963, "who fit the description perfectly, was never even called as a witness before the Warren Commission." And none of the network television news department reporters covering JFK's elimination on TV between November 22, 1963 and November 25, 1963 seemed to inform viewers that Dallas's then-mayor was the brother of the CIA Deputy Director whom JFK had fired.

So only after Oliver Stone's JFK movie was released in the early 1990's, and it then seemed safer to personally do more research about what actually happened in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963, did I, myself, realize that Dallas's then-mayor was the brother of the CIA deputy director whom JFK had fired.

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 65

Prior to the spring of 1967 and reading Ramparts magazine's article about New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's re-investigation of what actually happened in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963, I had neither read Mark Lane's best-selling Rush to Judgement book nor seen the Rush To Judgement movie that Emile De Antonio and Mark Lane had produced, which raised questions aout the accuracy of the Warren Commision Report's assertion (endorsed by the U.S. Establishment's New York Times, CBS News and all U.S. corporate media news departments) that "Lee Harvey Oswald alone killed both JFK and Tippit." And that only irrational "JFK conspiracy theory-buffs" could doubt the truth of the Warren Commision's case against Oswald and the official U.S. Establishment story about how JFK was eliminated and why Oswald was, in turn, eliminated by Jack Ruby. 

Because De Antonio's Rush To Judgement movie in the 1960's was not broadcast on any U.S. television channel, whether corporate tv network or PBS-affiliated, and did not seem to be shown in many U.S. movie theaters in the USA during the 1960's, it wasn't until decades later that I actually watched De Antonio's Rush To Judgement movie.

But after reading Mark Lane's book in the late 1960's or early 1970's, I did come to agree with Mark Lane's assertion that Oswald's claim after his arrest, that he was just "the patsy" and hadn't shot either JFK or Texas Governor Connolly on November 22, 1963, was true. After all, if, as Lane's book indicates, Oswald was seen by a Dallas cop sitting in the second floor lunchroom of the Texas School Book Depository with a coke bottle in his hand so soon after JFK was shot, there's no way he could have been the one firing any shots from the 6th floor only minutes before; and if the shots that killed JFK came from the grassy knoll, according to the witnesses closest to the scene of JFK's elimination that Mark Lane discovered, Oswald could not have been the person who, alone and individually, eliminated JFK.

Mark Lane was sometimes seen on televisiion disputing the Warren Commission's official version of JFK's elimination in the 1960's. But, because witnesses and journalists (like Dorothy Kilgallen, for example) who too publicly raised questions about the Warren Commission Report's accuracy seemed to end up dead more frequently than the witnesses and journalists who accepted the official story, during the 1960, people like myself tended to say away from doing much independent research or writing about the "Who Killed JFK?" topic during the 1960's. It then still seemed like a personally dangerous topic to get into or a topic which, even if you were willing to risk your life to research or write about, might quickly cause you to become the victim of "conspiracy theorist-baiting" by Establishment journalists, and even by some politically left-liberal "anti-Establishment" journalists, during that decade.

By 1973 and 1974, however, when Richard Nixon was being more heavily investigated for his role in the "Watergate Scandal," and eventually forced by "The Company" liberals and its corporate mass media to resign the U.S. presidency and be replaced by former Warren Commission member Gerald Ford as U..S. president and Billionaire Nelson Rockefeller as vice-president, a lot more people, especially in counter-cultural newspaper or magazine circles were questioning the Warren Commission Report's conclusions. And it then felt personally safer to assert more publicly that Oswald had been framed and was "the patsy" for what happened on November 22, 1963.

Yet even as late as 1973, when I wrote a folk song titled "Young Oswald" (after reading all 26 volumes of the Warren Commission Report that were in one of the CUNY community college libraries in Queens), which reflected my belief that Oswald was innocent of the allegation that he had fired the shots at JFK and eliminated JFK 10 years before, I still did not then question the Warren Comission Report and corporate media's assertion that Oswald was a "leftist who supported the Cuban Revolution in 1963;" at the time he was apparently framed as being JFK's assassin by Hoover's FBI.

The biography of Oswald that the Warren Commission Report writers and FBI investigators had put togeher and my listening to a vinyl record of Oswald defending the Cuban Revolution on a summer of 1963 New Orleans radio show (when he was portraying himself as a "Fair Play For Cuba" spokesperson in New Orleans), that I had purchased, had led me, prior to 1973, to mistakenly believe that Oswald in November 1963 was (like the Rosenbergs) framed by Hoover's FBI for a crime he did not commit; in order, apparently, to blame JFK's elimination on shots fired from a building where the FBI could then falsely claim there was an authentic U.S. leftist working there who had fired the shots.

And even after JFK elimination conspiracy investigators began publicizing more evidence in 1974 that the pro-Cuban Revolution leaflets Oswald was handing out in New Orleans, when he was interfered with by anti-Castro right-wing Cuban exiles on the street there, indicated an address that linked Oswald, himself, to right-wing CIA-backed anti-Castro exiles and their right-wing U.S. supporters, I still wondered why--if Oswald was a CIA agent or asset who had been posing as some kind of Marxist and leftist, from the time he first "defected" to the Soviet Union until he was eliminated by Jack Ruby on November 24, 1963--Oswald, once he realized after his arrest that he had been set up as "the patsy" in JFK's elimination, he didn't immediately scream out to the reporters in the police station that he had been posing as a Castro supporter, on orders from the CIA?

But late in the 1970's, after the Church Commitee's U.S. Senate investigation indicated the degree to which "The Company" was involved with others in illegal plots to eliminate foreign leaders like Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba, etc., however, I began to feel that Oswald might have thought that, despite being the CIA's patsy, it might still be safer for him to continue posing as a leftist/Fair Play For Cuba group supporter, until he was able to speak at length to a lawyer; rather than risk being immediately eliminated by some CIA-aligned gunman, himself, to punish him for possibly revealing his top-secret connection to "The Company"?

After his arrest on November 22, 1963, Oswald may perhaps have failed to realize that appaarently once he told reporters that he was "the patsy" and innocent of eliminating either Patrolman Tippit or JFK earlier that day, there was no way that the men who apparently conspired to eliminate JFK in Dallas on November 22, 1963 were going to risk letting him remain alive to stand trial.

 

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 64

 My vague recollection is that we in the Band class at Broad Ripple H.S., on Friday afternoon on November 22, 1963, were first informed over the school's loudspeaker system that JFK was now dead. And, upon hearing the news, nearly all the school band members seemed shocked, stunned or surprised. But I can't recall anyone in the Band class being so enamored with JFK that they began to cry or weep, after hearing the news.

I do recall, though, that when three or four of the band members, who I think were some guys who were part of the drum section of the band, began to laugh or cheer, Mr. Decker, the Band class teacher/school band director--despite having likely been someone who voted for Nixon in 1960 and who was probably some kind of Eisenhower-type "moderate" Republican in his political beliefs--reprimanded them for not responding to the news of JFK's death in a solemn way.

Like most Democrats and most Republican party supporters, as well as most political independents, in the USA in the early 1960's, before LBJ escalated the Vietnam war, Mr. Decker felt that, even if a U.S. citizen disliked an elected U.S. President's policies or political views, to not also be saddened if that U.S. President was eliminated like JFK had been, reflected an unpatriotic and excessively politically partisan mentality.

I forget whether or nor we were all dismissed early from school after news came of JFK's elimination in Dallas, Texas. But I do recall sitting next to one of the other Band class and band members, a soft-spoken, friendly guy whose parents had moved to Indianapolis from Des Moines, Iowa, on the public transit bus going back down College Avenue from the high school.

He was not as politically liberal as was I (who was then still not yet a radical leftist politically). But both he and I speculated, on the bus, that JFK likely had been eliminated by some white racist or right-wing extremist group or individuals in Dallas. And neither he nor I even considered the possibility that any U.S. government agency could have been involved in any plot to eliminate JFK in Dallas.

Of course, after I arrived home and began watching the U.S. Establishment's network television news departments' non-stop coverage of the historical events being broadcasted over the next three or four days, I--like everyone else I ever personally discussed what had happened to JFK in Dallas with, until the spring of 1967--almost immediately fell for the Establishment media's official version of how JFK was eliminated:

"An ex-Marine, named Lee Harvey Oswald, who--after becoming a Marxist and defecting to the Soviet Union and marrying a Russian wife--had become disillusioned with the Soviet system and returned to the USA. But after returning to the USA, Oswald had joined the Fair Play For Cuba Committee, to support the `dictatorial' Communist regime of Cuba; and, all alone, had eliminated JFK and wounded the governor of Texas, John Connally, by shooting a rifle from the 6th floor of the Texas Depository building in which he worked, in order to earn a famous place in history. And, after eliminating JFK, Oswald had shot and eliminated a Dallas policeman named Tippit, before being arrested by Dallas police inside a Dallas movie theater; into which he had entered rapidly, without buying a ticket, in a failed attempt to hide from police inside the movie theater."

And even though I was watching TV at home when it showed Jack Ruby eliminating Oswald in the Dallas Police Station basement on the Sunday morning following JFK's elimination, like everyone else I ever personally discussed the November 22 to November 25, 1963 events until the spring of 1967, I also fell for the Establishment media's official story that the only reason Jack Ruby eliminated Oswald was because of "his spontaneous grief over JFK's death" and "to spare Jackie Kennedy the pain of having to come back to Dallas and testify at Oswald's trial."

In retrospect, probably the main reason I continued to believe in the subsequent Warren Commission Report's similar version of how JFK was eliminated and why Jack Ruby eliminated Oswald, even after I realized, by the end of 1965, that the Establishment media's anti-communist liberal news departments' journalists were falsely asserting that the U.S. government was "defending freedom for the South Vietnamese people from Communist tyranny," by escalating its military intervention in Vietnam in early 1965, was that neither RFK nor Teddy Kennedy publicly questioned the Establishment's official story or the Warren Commission Report, during the 1960's.

I, perhaps falsely, automatically assumed, prior to the spring of 1967, that if the questions about the official story that Mark Lane, Dorothy Kilgallen, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison and others were raising about the official story were valid questions, then either RFK nor Teddy Kennedy would also be out there publicly pushing for a new investigation by 1967. 

On The Road In The 1970's---Part 63

 Outside of school, during the fall term of my junior year in 1963, my parents and I would usually drive down to Bloomington to visit my sister on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon (or drive her back to her Indiana University dormitory room from Indianapolis on a Sunday afternoon, if she had taken a bus up from Bloomington to visit us in Naptown on a particular weekend), around once a month. And, also about once a month in the fall of 1963, my parents and I continued to drive up to Chicago to visit my grandparents, my aunt and uncle and my cousins; and then drive back to Indianapolis from Chicago on the same day, after we had visited them.

Unlike during the spring of 1963, because I was now not working as a newspaper delivery boy in the fall of 1963, I no longer had to be in Indianapolis during the afternoon hours to deliver the afternoon edition of the Indianapolis Times. So my parents and I now had the option of driving up to Chicago and back to Indianapolis on a Saturday; rather than having to only visit Chicago on a Sunday, after I finished delivering the Indianapolis Times's Sunday morning edition in the darkness of the early morning hours, during the spring of 1963.

I still spent a lot of my Saturday and Sunday afternoons watching college and professional football games on television, and a lot of my Saturday and Sunday evenings watching whatever TV series shows, movies, variety shows or news-related shows were on television, in the fall of 1963. But I also do recall going to the neighborhood Vogue Theater on College Avenue near Broad Ripple Avenue one night in either the fall or spring of my junior year to see the movie version of the Gypsy Broadway musical, that Rosiland Russell and Natalie Wood starred in; and I do recall also spending a Friday or Saturday night going, with my parents, to another neighborhood movie theater, about 10 blocks south of where my family lived, either in the fall or spring of my junior year, to watch the movie version of the West Side Story, which had previously won a lot of Oscar Awards.

But, like I indicated previously, probably my strongest memory now, from the fall of 1963, was learning that JFK had been eliminated in Dallas, during my Band class period inside Broad Ripple High School, on Friday, November 22, 1963, six days before the Thanksgiving holiday.

On The Road In The 1970's--Part 62

 So many decades later, I no longer remember much of what else I experienced inside or outside of school between September 1963 and early January 1964. 

It was either in the fall or spring term of my junior year that I did an interview with the son of Izler Solomon (the then-recently hired new conductor of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra), who was also now then a student at Broad Ripple High School; for an article I wrote for the high school's student newspaper. This particular article was the only article written by me that was ever published by a student newspaper of any of the high schools I attended.

After seeing how the article appeared when edited down in the student newspaper and feeling that, writing an article based on what the person you were interviewing said, was less interesting than either creative writing or writing articles that reflected more of my own perceptions, thoughts, values and opinions (rather than writing an article which mainly sumarized or paraphrased some interviewee's quotes), the idea of becoming more involved with The Riparian school newspaper seemed more boring.

And after volunteering to spend a few hours in the afternoon after classes one day in The Riparian school newspaper office, I found myself only being assigned by one of the white high school women, who had been working on the school newspaper for a few years, to just proofread school newspaper articles written by others that I did not find interesting, my desire to work on The Riparian school newspaper anymore was quickly extinguished.

So, despite the fact that the Broad Ripple High School teacher of English whose letter of recommendation was likely what got me admitted to Columbia College in the fall of 1965 was the school newspaper's faculty adviser, I never again entered The Riparian school newspaper office during that academic year at that school.

And the only other personal interaction I had with that particular high school student newspaper during my junior year was when I sent them a letter to the editor, which asserted that having a "Key Club" at Broad Ripple High School which wasn't open equally to all students who wished to become members of the "Key Club--but only to students that the current "Key Club" members decided to invite as members--was undemocratic and discriminatory;and which The Riparian editors (who generally avoided publishing anything in the early 1960's that they felt might then spark some controversy), predictably, didn't publish.

On The Road In The 1970's--Part 61

In the two terms of third-year Spanish that I took in the "G" class during my junior year at Broad Ripple H.S., my teacher during both terms was a friendly and non-authoritarian white woman teacher, who seemed to be in her 40's, named Mrs. Diaz, who was also a very good teacher. Of course, one reason Mrs. Diaz seemed to enjoy teaching the third year of Spanish to the "G" class I was in was because there were only about 10 students in this "G" class during both terms of the 1963-1964 school year.

So many years later, I also can't recall much of what I particularly experienced during the fall of 1963 in Mrs. Diaz's class, except that, unlike my Spanish language teachers in New York City, Mrs. Diaz spoke Spanish with the pronunciation that was used in Mexico and other Latin American countries, rather than speaking in the Castillian pronunciation that was used in Spain; and that in her class we used some more recently-published Spanish language textbook than the El Camino Real textbook that had been used by teachers in my first two years of Spanish language classes.

And the only other paricular things I now remember, related to being in the Spanish "G" language class is that, except for me, the other 8 or 9 students in the class were white women students in the fall of 1963; and, like the other high school students in this "G" class, I scored high enough on Mrs. Diaz's multiple-choice tests, and on the homework exercises that she assigned us to turn in, so that my final grade in the first term of late 1963 was probably either "A" or "A-minus."

After I started watching the "Mr. Novak" weekly series on television in Indianapolis around this time in the early 1960's, my then-interest in eventually becoming a teacher of African-American working-class students in some public high school was reinforced. But because I also saw myself by my junior year in high school as a would-be playwright. or maybe as some kind of future newspaper journalist, it was during my junior year at Broad Ripple H.S. that I took either one or two terms of a typing class. After all, how could I be a writer of plays, or possibly work on a newspaper after college and completing the required two years of U.S. military service (that I then both expected to be doing and had no moral objections to doing at that time) if I didn't know how to type rapidly?

If I did take only one term of typing class, by now I can't recall whether I took the typing class in the fall of 1963 or in the spring of 1964 term. And the only things I now recall about the typing class I took  is that, of the about 30 students taking the typing class, nearly all the other students in the class were white high school women, most of whom were preparing to become secretaries after graduating from high school, if they didn't, after graduating, get married immediately to a steady boyfriend; and that the white woman high school student who sat behind the typewriter, on the seat in the classroom closest to my seat and the typewriter I was using, wore lipstick and make-up each day and seemed pretty to me--although I can't recall ever chatting with her, either before or after the typing class.

Ironically, if you had told me in either the fall of 1963 or the spring of 1964 that, from the point of view of making money in the 9-to-5 capitalist work world during the decades before I finally retired, the touch-typing skills I acquired in this typing class would end up being the most useful work-related economic survival skill the U.S. public school system gave me, I would have thought you crazy.

Yet were it not for the fact that, until I finally retired, whenever I needed money quickly to pay my rent in the 1970's, 1980's, 1990's and early 20th-century, I was able to often get some daytime menial wage work quickly, by dressing-up in a culturally straight way, going to some office work temp agency, typing over 60 wpm and accurately on a 5-minute typing test, and getting some kind of low-wage clerk-typist, secretarial, data entry, statistical typing, medical typing, or dictaphone-typing menial 9-to-5 office work assignment.

And, in addition, the typing skills I acquired in this Broad Ripple H.S. typing class also were financially useful when I worked as a typesetter for a weekly newspaper for awhile. Before the human typesetters who typeset newspaper reporters's articles on perforated computerized typesetting machines became victims of technological unemployment; after new computer programming and computer technology were developed in the 1980's, that enabled newspaper reporters to get their stories edited and typeset directly onto the newspaper pages, without the use of skilled working-class people, who, prior to the late 1980's could still find jobs as typesetters.

In retrospect, of course, from the point-of-view of making money in the 9-to-5 work world during the decades before I finally retired, it probably would have made more sense for me to have taken a class in auto mechanics, electronics, short-order cooking, carpentry, print-shop, or computers in the early 1960's--instead of in typing--during my junior year at Broad Ripple High School, perhaps?

  

 

On The Road In The 1970's--Part 60

In both the fall term of 1963 and the spring term of 1964, I took no science course at Broad Ripple High School. But during the same two terms, I did take two terms of English, two terms of Spanish, and two terms of Intermediate Algebra in "G"/"honors"-type classes, with the more higher-academic achieving students at Broad Ripple.

Despite getting a low grade in my Geometry II class during my sophomore year, apparently because I had received either a 90 or 95 final grade for each term of my 9th grade Elementary Algebra class in New York City, I was still assigned to Mr. Mahin's "G" Intermediate Algebra I class in the fall of 1963. 

But aside from vaguely being able to picture how Mr. Mahin's classroom looked, vaguely recalling that I must have received either a B-plus, A-minus of A as my final grade that semester (because I pretty much spent time at home doing the assigned homework on a daily basis-- and didn't just wait until the night before a scheduled test in class to try to cram into my brain all the intermediate algebra lessons' content we were supposed to be tested on), and also vaguely recalling that a white high school woman student with short hair, who always wore glasses, named Sandy, seemed to be the smartest mathematics student and most grade-oriented student in the class, I now remember nothing else about what I experienced in this class during the fall of 1963.

I also cannot now recall very much what kind of literature, in my English "G" class, I was assigned to read, during the fall term of my junior year, by the white woman teacher who taught this class, Mrs. Deering, who then seemed to be in either in late 30's or early 40's.

Most men likely then considered Mrs. Deering to be prematurely overweight for a woman of her relatively young age; and she didn't seem as intellectually, politically, or philosophically liberal as the older English "G" class teacher I had during the second term of my sophomore year, Mrs. Griggs--whose latter of recommendation likely led the Columbia College's admissions office to admit me into Columbia University in the fall of 1965.

But Mrs. Deering was a fair marker and good teacher, and she seemed to like the short story I handed to her to fulfill one of her homework assignments that fall, in which I satirically described the parasitic business activity of a funeral director; which was written after I watched a television documentary on the "CBS Reports" show that was based on Jessica Mitford's early 1960's best-selling The American Way of Death book.

Besides recalling that I wrote and handed in this short story, the only particular thing I remember about this class was that it was in this class that I noticed that one of the high school white woman, Mary, who sat in the individual desk-chair stool seat next to mine in the classroom and put on lipstick each morning before attending school, was someone I felt attracted to physically.

But Mary, whose mother apparently was either seeking election or re-election to the Indianapolis School Board that fall, never showed any particular indication that she might have welcomed it if I asked her for a date during either the fall or spring term when we shared the same English class high school teacher; and I can't recall ever even conversing with her at all even once, either before or after class during my junior year at Broad Ripple.

By the fall of my sophomore year at Columbia, three falls later, I was then tending to be more physically attracted to women who didn't wear lipstick than to those who did. But, like I've indicated before, in high school, like most of the other high school guys in the school, I tended to still feel the high school women who put on lipstick and make-up each morning, before coming to school each day, were prettier and more sexually desirable than the high school women who did not use lipstick and make-up.   

On The Road In The 1970's--Part 59

With respect to what happened in my academic classes at Broad Ripple High School during my fall 1963 to spring 1964 junior year there, after so many decades I now have relatively few memories.My most vivid memory is what I experienced in a U.S. History I class that was taught by a right-wing white woman teacher, who appeared to be then in her 50's, named Mrs. Woods.

In elementary school and in my first term as a sophomore at Bayside H.S., I had usually scored the highest mark on my class social studies or history multiple choice tests; and I was usually the student who most often responded inside the classroom most quickly with the answer to any of the oral social studies or history-based questions a teacher would ask. Yet Mrs. Woods's U.S. History I class at Broad Ripple turned out to be the only social studies or history class in junior high school or in high school in which I didn't receive either a 95 or an "A" final grade.

There seemed to be two reasons why the right-wing Mrs. Woods ended up only giving me either a B-minus, a C or a C-minus in the U.S. History I class I took with her in the fall of 1963. Because the class was not a "G" class in history of more academically high-achieving students (similar to an "honors" class in history in a NYC public high school), all the other students in this history class pretty much sat silently in the class, looking bored and never raising their hands to ask a question, in response to whatever 1950's-type right-wing conservative view of pre-U.S. Civil War history Mrs. Woods happened to be presenting to us in her classroom. And so I seemed to be the only student in Mrs. Woods's class who was interested enough in U.S. history to raise my hand and sometimes ask her a question, in this class.

Yet because my questions reflected the early 1960's anti-communist liberal corporate media's late 1950's "You Are There"-type historical television show's view of U.S. history more than the anti-communist, Joe McCarthy-type right-wing Freedom Foundation-1950's conservative-type perspective, that Mrs. Woods was into, Mrs. Woods apparently felt I was challenging her intellectual authority and her qualification to teach the class, if I asked a question that she was unable to provide a convincing answer to.

The second reason Mrs. Woods seemed to want to punish me with a low final grade was because I also raised a question in class one day about the method she was using to "teach" us U.S. History I. In all of my previous social studies or history elementary, junior high school and high school classes (and in all my subsequent high school history or social studies classes), all the social studies or history teachers would spend at least 90 percent of all the classroom periods in a school term presenting a summary of the topics we had read in our history or social studies textbooks, and answered homework questions about, and leading discussions in class about these topics.

In Mrs. Woods's U.S. History I class, however, around 90 percent of all the classroom periods in the school term were periods in which Mrs. Woods had us spending nearly the whole period just watching a 16mm movie, often produced by a right-wing anti-communist organization like the Freedom Foundation, about the particular U.S. history topic we had been previously assigned to read about in our textbook. And she would spend no time in the classroom discussing the topic of the film or the historical topic we had read about in our history textbook.

So after it appeared to me that (unlike all the other social studies or history teachers I had previously had or would subsequently have) Mrs. Woods was having us watch movies in our U.S. History I class in practically every period during this term, in order to be able to avoid having to do any teaching of history during each period when she was supposed to be teaching, I asked her in class why she was haing us watch a movie nearly every period in class, instead of leading a discussion of what we had read in our history textbook?

And, again, Mrs. Woods seemed to apparently feel that I was questioning her right to collect a history teacher salary in the fall of 1963, when all she was mostly doing in the classroom was turning on the 16 mm projector each period and sitting in the back of the classroom, in the darkness, while her students spent the 40-minute period watching a movie nearly every day in class.

Luckily for me, however, I was not stuck with Mrs. Woods as my U.S. History class teacher again in the spring term of my junior year at Broad Ripple High School. And because, as usual, I always answered over 90 percent of the multiple-choice questions correctly on the social studies-related test forms the teacher periodically gave us, and was also the student in this non-"G" class who most frequently and quickly answered whatever in-class history book textbook-related question this second history teacher asked, not surprisingly, I ended up receiving an "A" in this U.S. History II spring term class.

 

On The Road In The 1970's--Part 58

The early fall of 1963 was the first time that I was attending a public school where at least 50 percent of the students in the class didn't also not attend classes in school on the Jewish New Year two-day religious High Holidays of Rosh Hoshanah and the one-day Yom Kippur Day of Atonement for people of Jewish religious background; if any of those three days fell on a weekday school day. 

 Prior to moving to Indianapolis in late 1962, over 90 percent of all my classmates in elementary school and junior high school were students of assimilated and non-Orthodox Jewish religious background; and during the one term I attended Bayside High School in the fall of 1962, over 50 percent of my high school classmates were also of assimilated, non-Orthodox Jewish religious background.

But in Indianapolis , at Broad Ripple High in the fall of 1963, nearly all the students in that school attended classes on the Jewish High Holy Days and Yom Kippur, if they occured on a school day; because I think less than 20 of the 1,600 students in the then-over 99 percent white high school seemed to be of Jewish religious background. Yet aside from my vague recollection that the usual classwork was going on inside a public school I attended, while I was at home or in a synogogue observing Rosh Hoshanah or Yom Kippur in some way, I don't recall much about how I observed the High Holy Days and Yom Kippur in Indianapolis in the fall of 1963.

What I do recall is that, unlike in Queens, my father had to drive himself and me in a car to the Beth-El Zedek synagogue, rather than being able to walk to the local conservative Jewish congregation's synagogue; like we had both been able to do previously when were living in Beech Hills in Queens. And also, the Beth-El Zedek synagogue seemed fancier-looking and more modern than the Marathon Jewish Community Center synagogue I had been bar-mitzvahed from in Queens. But I now have no memory of who the rabbi there was in 1963 or what he said in his sermons, in part, because neither my father not I ever went to that syagogue again after the fall 1963 High Holy Days, during the time we lived in Indianapolis.

My only other vague memory related to the fall of 1963 Jewish High Holy Days in Naptown was that when, for some reason, the few students of Jewish religious background (who needed to fill out some kind of form to be excused from attending classes on one of the religious holidays) were gathered together in one of the school offices, I first noticed that one of the woman students there, who would have been considered among the most attractive woman students by most of the Broad Ripple male students, was also of Jewish religious background. But I can't recall ever bumping into her afterwards, during the rest of my junior year at Broad Ripple, probably because she wasn't in any of my classes that year. 

On The Road In The 1970's--Part 57

 Over five decades after the first term of my junior year of high school at Broad Ripple in Indianapolis, in the fall of 1963, my memories are obviously now very vague. The major historical event that term, of course, was on November 22, 1963, when JFK was eliminated in Dallas, Texas. But probably what was interesting me most on a daily basis, during both the first and second term of my junior year at Broad Ripple was being in the Broad Ripple High School band and marching band; and also rehearsing and being part of the pit band for the student production of the "Bells Are Ringing" Broadway musical from 1956 that Broad Ripple's Music Department head, Mr. Posten directed, during my junior year at that school. .

Playing tenor saxophone in the marching band at Broad Ripple H.S. meant that every Friday night during the fall term I'd be wearing my band uniform and cap and, along with the other high school band members, march on the football field in various formations during half-time, before hundreds of cheering high school football fans, under the bright night game lights of either our home high school football field/mini-stadium or, if it was an away game, under the bright night game lights of the opposing high school football team's field/mini-stadium--while playing some marching music for about 10 minutes.

In addition, we usually marched on and off the football field in formation at the beginning and end of the football games, and sat in the grandstands as a group while watching the four quarters of the football game; only playing there the music of our high school song together, whenever Broad Ripple's football team happened to score a touchdown or won a football game. In the fall of 1963, however, I can't recall Broad Ripple's football team either scoring many touchdowns or winning many of its football games that year.

I then found it exciting and fun during the time the band marched onto the football field in the various formations and played our music in front of the football fans; and watching a football game live from a statdium seat was still something I found interesting in the 1960's. But I can't recall conversing much with any of my other bandmates while we sat in the football field stands. Nor, when we rode on buses wearing our uniforms and carrying our instruments, before marching and playing at night at the home fields of the Indianapolis teams our football team was playing against, can I recall conversing much with any of the other band members; except maybe occasionally exchanging some pleasantries with Bill, Paul and Steve, who played the alto saxophones, and Jerry, who played the baritone saxophone.

And, aside from being impressed by the size of Arsenal Tech's football stadium on the Friday night we marched on that field, I can't recall much now about any individual football games. It all just vaguely blends in now into a vague blur of all the different games becoming one game.

One thing I do still recall more now is that, by the time I was a junior in high school, I was as interested in watching our marching band's physically attractive high school women baton twirlers in their shorts and Broad Ripple High School's physically attractive high school cheerleaders, moving around acrobatically while leading cheers on the football field, as I was in watching the high school football teams play each Friday evening in the fall of 1963.

A short high school senior guy, who seemed to have, in some ways, a slightly Napoleonic, slightly authoritarian personality leadership tendency, named Dick, was the drum major of Broad Ripple's high school marching band in the fall of 1963. In some ways, being selected as the high school band's drum major by Mr. Decker, the Broad Ripple High School's Band teacher/Band director, was, for a non-jock student who was into music, the equivalent in status to being selected by a high school football team's coach to be the starting quaterback of the school's football team.

And Dick, in addition to being named the drum major of Broad Ripple's high school band in his senior year, also was a member of the school's National Honor Society chapter, one of the team members on Broad Ripple's "It's Academic" team, that competed on a local Indianapolis television station against other local high schools' "It's Academic" teams. The "It's Academic" television show was one in which, similar to CBS's late 1950's and early 1960's nationally-televised "G.E. College Bowl" show,  teams of intellectually quick students from different local high schools competed with one other team each week to see which team could answer correctly and more quickly the moderator's intellectual quiz show or triva-type questions.

And besides being the high school band's drum major, a National Honor Society chapter member and a member of Broad Ripple's "It's Academic" team, Dick was a also a member of the high school music department's Madgirgal Singers group and, unless my recollection is wrong, had a role in the student musical production that the high school music department produced during my junior year and during his senior year.

So, not surprisingly, the well-rounded Dick gained admittance to Columbia College in New York City from Indianapolis the year before I did (mainly because, without realizing that my second semester sophomore English "G" class teacher at Broad Ripple, Mrs. Griggs, was apparently a Columbia College Admissions "scout" in Indianapolis, I had, by chance, after my family had moved back to Queens before my senior year in high school, selected her as the teacher I wrote to in Indianapolis to ask to write a letter of recommendation to Columbia College, on my behalf).

Yet, although Dick had been such a prominent student in his senior year at Broad Ripple H.S. in Indianapolis, by the time I bumped into him during my freshman year at Columbia once, eating dinner in the John Jay Hall campus dormitory cafeteria in Manhattan, when Dick was a sophomore, Dick seemed to be less happy and a much less prominent student within the Columbia University scene than he had been at Broad Ripple.

Dick had apparently continued to involve himself in a Madrigal group of singers as an exta-curricular activity while at Columbia College. But he did not become involved much in either the Columbia College Citizenship Council scene or in the campus student anti-war movement/New Left/Columbia SDS sub-culture scene between 1965 and 1968, like I did.

So, ironically, it turned out that, what no one at Broad Ripple High School could have ever anticipated in the fall of 1963: that the then- tenor saxophone player in Broad Ripple's marching band would end up making more of an historical impact, accidentally, on the college scene he entered than its then-marching band drum major would. But, of course, no one at Broad Ripple High School at that time could have also ever anticipated that another member of my junior class in 1963, David Letterman, would end up hosting a New York City television network studio-based late evening television show, similar to what Johnny Carson and Jack Paar had hosted, for so many years, later in the 20th-century and early 21st-century.  

On The Road In The 1970's--Part 56

My main memory from the beginning of my junior year of high school at Broad Ripple in Indianapolis in the fall of 1963 is, starting in the last two weeks of August, practicing with the high school's marching band members, in preparation for our half-time performances each Friday night at our high school football team's home and away games. But I think it may have also been during the early fall of 1963 that my father, with me as his "navigator", made the three hour drive from Indianapolis to Cincinnati, Ohio on one Saturday.

During that same weekend, my mother had taken a Greyhound buss down to Bloomington, the previous day, to participate in a "Mother's Weekend" with my sister, that Indiana University's administration was sponsoring. So she wasn't with us when my father and I visited Cincinnati for the first time.

On the Interstate Highway drive down to Cincinnati, I took some 8mm motion pictures of the passing scenery from the car with my cheap Kodak brownie moving picture camera, as we entered the city outskirts. And before attending a Cincinnati Red Sox vs. San Francisco Giants professional baseball game on the Saturday afternoon at Crosley Field, my father and I drove past the Union Station railroad building in Downtown Cincinnati and also looked over the whole city from the outdoor observatory area of one of Cincinnati's then-tallest skyscrapers.

Yet because we only spent one day in Cincinnati, mostly attending the Crosley Field baseball game, and didn't spend any time walking around the fairly deserted on weekend days Downtown or in any of the other Cincinnati neighborhoods, I can't provide much in the way of memories which would indicate how Cincinnati in the 1960's, when its population was slightly larger than it is in 2020, was different or similar to how Cincinnati became in the 21st-century. 

On The Road In The 1970's--Part 55

 In early 1960's, the national television network shows that I watched gave broadcast time to some white liberal news commentators or white liberal academic "experts" who sometimes claimed that one of the reasons many Afro-Americans who lived in the northern states, where there wasn't legalized segregation like in the South, were economically impoverished was that, in addition to still being the victims of employment and housing discrimination, they also were "culturally deprived." And these white liberal commentators and white liberal academic "experts" seemed to be sending out the message to the anti-communist, but anti-racist, white liberal youths (like myself at that time), that the best contribution we could personally make, to help free Afro-Americans from economic impoversihment in the North, was to work as teachers in the Northern ghetto public schools; and, thus, provide a quality education to the future generations of supposedly "culturally deprived" Afro-American public school students.

Of course, within a few years, as I became more politically aware and politically radicalized, I came to regard the characterization of the Afro-American community in the USA as being a "culturally deprived" community as a white liberal racist characterization. But by the end of the summer of 1963, the only career aspiration I then had (besides possibly being a playwright or a journalist) was, after fulfilling my then-expected two years of military service, after going to college, in a peacetime U.S. military (which I then still mistakenly assumed protected freedom around the globe) was to just be a social studies or history teacher in a Northern public high school that was predominantly attended by Afro-American students.

And neither before the summer of 1963 nor after the summer of 1963 during my life have I ever had any personal ambition or any personal desire to be particularly involved in the world of U.S. upper-middle-class or upper-class U.S. electoral politics and political office-seeking. In addition, although I had been the Senior Patrol Leader of the boy scout Troop 363 in the neighborhood of Queens in which I lived, for a few months before my family moved to Indianapolis, by the end of the summer of 1963, I had no real personal desire to be "a leader" of any kind of group.

By the end of the summer of 1963, I pretty much felt my social role in life was to mainly only just observe the people and society around me, just honestly write, speak and teach the truth as I perceived it and--when required--just fight collectively with others as a rank and file, volunteer "foot soldier" and grassroots activist in a U.S. movement for equality, justice, freedom and peace.

So, in retrospect, I think that, by the end of the summer of 1963, I likely had completely ruled out the spring of 1963 occasional thought that it might be "interesting" to major in "police administration," when I then expected to enroll at Indiana University  a few years later, and eventually become some kind of "honest police detective." But by the end of of the summer of 1963 I now just assumed that, after finishing college and fulfilling my U.S. military service obligation, I would just earn my living by being some kind of high school teacher or some kind of writer/playwright (despite, vaguely, then also still toying with the idea of possibly majoring or minoring in journalism, when I attended IU).

And although my assumption, by the end of the summer of 1963, was still that my future writing might include writing Broadway musicals, the notion that I would ever be writing protest folk songs and folk love songs that I could sing myself by the late 1960's, while accompanying myself on an acoustic guitar, had still not yet been envisioned by me at the end of the summer of 1963. 

 

On The Road In The 1970's--Part 54

In the early 1960's, Civil Rights Movement activists were interviewed on a daily basis and on many weekend news interview television shows; especially before the Jim Crow laws in the South, that perpetuated legalized segregation in that region and legalized the special, caste and national oppression in the USA which Afro-Americans experienced, were finally legally prohibited by passage of 1964 Civil Rights Act.

So if you were a corporate TV news show junkie, like I then was in the early 1960's, who was always especially passionate about ending racial discrimination against Afro-Americans in the USA, it was easier to find out what was happening in the Black Liberation Movement than it later became in the decades after 1970. And if you had told me in the summer of 1963 that in 2020 institutional racism would still be existing in the USA, I probably would have thought that you were crazy with regard to what U.S. society would look like in the 21st-century.

Yet at the same time, whenever I took a late Sunday evening bath on the second floor of the part of the duplex house my parents rented in the summer of 1963, and listened to my AM transistor radio while I was taking a bath, and often heard far-away AM radio stations transmitting from some of the stations in the South--in which one of the rabidly white racist and anti-Semitic Southern radio evangelist-types might still be demagogically defending Jim Crow and characterizing the early 1960's Civil Rights Movement as an "Un-American Communist Conspiracy"--I sometimes wondered whether I was overestimating the pace in which U.S. racism, in the South at least, would be quickly ended by the Civil Rights Movement and my generation, by the early 1970's.

Liberal Democratic politician/president JFK, however, by this time had made a TV speech, after Birmingham police attacked with police dogs Civil Rights Movement demonstrators, in the spring of 1963, promising that the U.S. federal government would do more to end racial discrimination in the South; and the national TV network news shows also seemed supportive then of the Civil Rights Movement's campaign to end racial discrimination in the South. So by the end of the summer of 1963, what I sometimes heard on the AM radio channels on a Sunday night being broadcast from the South (perhaps on radio shows or broadcasts that were being funded by right-wing billionaire H.L. Hunt's right-wing radio propaganda broadcasting apparatus) did not end up bothering me that much or decrease my optimism about how quickly U.S. racism throughout the whole nation would be ended.  

On The Road In The 1970's--Part 53

I was still an anti-communist Stevensonian liberal in the summer of 1963 (who had only heard of Eugene V. Debs slightly, because I had, by that time, read a biographical novel about Clarence Darrow, by Irving Stone, which included some description of how Darrow had defended the unpopular "radical" Eugene V. Debs, at one of Debs's trials). So I did not suggest to my parents that we drive out to visit the Eugene V. Debs house/memorial site in Terre Haute, Indiana in 1963 (or at any time before my family moved back to New York City).

But by watching the corporate media network TV corporate news shows each weekday evening during the summer of 1963, I was able to follow, somewhat, what was then happening historically in the early 1960's Civil Rights Movement during this period; and what was happening politically in the USA, less than 6 months before JFK was eliminated in late November 1963, during the summer of 1963.

Early in the summer of 1963, Mississippi's NAACP leader, Medgar Evers, was assassinated in Mississippi. But because there didn't seem to be much of a visible movement of Civil Rights Movement supporters in 1963 in a city like Indianapolis (that only 40 years before was apparently controlled politically by KKK or pro-KKK folks and whose dominant daily newspaper, the Indianapolis Star, was then editorially opposed to supporting the 1960's Civil Rights Movement demonstrators), Medgar Evers's assassination didn't seem to impact much on daily life in Indianapolis; and the Indianapolis Star newspaper gave it much less front-page publicity on its front page than it had given the Civil Rights Movement protests for awhile in Birmingham, Alabama, after Bull Connor used police dogs and tear gas to break up peaceful civil rights demonstrations (when the photograph of dogs attacking Black demonstrators in Birmingham was spread around globally).

In the six weeks during the summer that were leading up to the late August 1963 March on Washington for Equality and Jobs, the then-right-wing extremist-owned Indianapolis Star printed a series of news articles or columns which created the impression among readers, including me at that time, that white people who decided to attend the Civil Rights Movement's March on Washington in late August 1963 would be placing themselves in a "dangerous situation," because such a large percentage of Washington, D.C.'s population in 1963 was "Negro;" and these "Negroes" might attack whites indiscriminately at such a gathering. And I can recall even mentioning to my  older sister during the summer that the newspapers were saying it would be "dangerous" for whites to attend the late August 1963 March on Washington.

In retrospect, of course, the Indianapolis Star was probably acting as a "friendly media" tool of J.Edgar Hoover's FBI when it warned its readers that it would be "dangerous" for white supporters of the Civil Rights Movement to attend this march, in order to help J.Edgar Hoover and the FBI in their attempt to reduce the size of the planned rally, by scaring white supporters from attending the demonstration.

Because the late August 1963 March on Washington was broadcast live on at least one of the three national television networks (and perhaps broadcast live on the two other major national television networks) on the weekday in late August 1963 that it happened, even in a city like Indianapolis, I was able to hear the speeches, by Martin Luther King, Whitney Young, Roy Wilkins, John Lewis,Walter Reuther and some others, live, by watching my television screen for a few hours.

Again in retrospect, I think, at that time, I was still anti-communist liberal enough in my politics to be somewhat influenced by some of the FBI-inspired "friendly media" columnists in the Indianapolis Star who were then claiming that SNCC was "infiltrated" by "radicals" and "communists."  So I may have then felt, to a slight degree, that the speech that John Lewis then read on behalf of SNCC at the 1963 rally was "too militant," while Martin Luther King's 1963 speech was what then reflected more my own political perspective at that time. It probably wasn't until the fall of 1965 that I actually began feeling that I was now closer to SNCC and CORE in my political beliefs than I was to Martin Luther King and the SCLC.

Ironically, although folk singers like Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary and the then-young Bob Dylan apparently performed from the podium at the August 1963 March on Washington rally, I cannot now recall seeing them perform during the few hours I watched the rally on my television set at that time. Maybe they each sang their songs earlier or later than when I had my television set; or maybe their singing then made no particular memorable impression on me that day (though I think that would have been unlikely since, although I had never yet heard of either Baez or Dylan in August 1963, I had previously seen Peter, Paul and Mary on some television variety shows and had heard their "Puff The Magic Dragon" hit record played on an Indianapolis radio station, despite not having yet heard their version of the "Blowin' In The Wind" song)?

Or perhaps, when these folk singers were performing at the August 1963 rally, the reporters on the television network whose broadcast I was watching were interviewing on TV one of the rally speakers or rally organizers or Hollywood celebrity attendees, whenever Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary, Dylan or another folk singer sang a song at the rally and the sound of these folk singers singing could only be heard vaguely in the background by viewers of the particular network tv broadcast I was watching? 

On The Road In The 1970's--Part 52

If you had told me in the summer of 1963 that, within what anti-communist liberal economists like Kenneth Galbraith then called "the affluent society," I would, after 1969, be spending most of my life as poverty-stricken as my immigrant grandparents were and be downwardly mobile in my economic status compared to my white clerical working parents after obtaining a college degree, I would not have believed you.

Because in the early 1960's, the U.S. corporate media (and even some early New Left writers) were claiming that advanced capitalist societies like the United States would certainly eliminate poverty within their economic systems within the next few decades (and certainly by the end of the 20th-century); and that a liberal arts college degree automatically provided its recipient with a permanent passport into a high-salaried career within U.S. society, which would automatically provide the college grad more upward economic mobility and economic security than his or her parents had achieved or what students who did not got to college would obtain within U.S. society.

Of course, by the mid-1970's most U.S. liberal arts college graduates from working-class backgrounds of all races realized that the corporate media had lied to us about the economic rewards getting a liberal arts degree would bring to us after graduation, within an institutionally classist, racist, sexist and ageist country; and that the early New Left writers and antii-communist liberal economists who had claimed that advanced capitalist societies like the USA would eliminate poverty in a few decades had forecast the direction of U.S. economic history wrongly.

On The Road In The 1970's--Part 51

Other than the occasion when my sister's old boyfriend visited with my sister, I can recall only two other visits from people who lived out-of-town, when living with my parents in "Naptown" during the summer of 1963. On one weekend, my mother's younger sister, her husband and her two boys, who were both a few years younger than me, drove down from where they lived near Chicago, in Skokie, to spend the afternoon and early evening with my parents and me.

But I can't recall now much how we spent the day, other than vaguely thinking that we must have driven around Indianapolis's Monument Circle area downtown and then eaten an early evening dinner at our rented house, that my mother cooked for us, before they started their drive back up home to the Chicago area.

On Saturday on another weekend, which was an extremely hot and humid one, in August of 1963, my mother's parents came down from their Chicago slum apartment on a Greyhound bus to visit my parents, my sister and me for the first time in Indianapolis. The original weekend plan was for my grandparents to spend the night in our Indianapolis home, before then getting on the bus on Sunday afternoon, the following day, to return to Chicago.

But after my parents, my sister and I met them at the early 1960's Greyhound bus terminal in Downtown Indianapolis, drove my grandparents back to where we lived near 52nd Street and College Avenue on the northeast side of the city, arrived at our rented house, walked into our living room and immediately turned on the living room air-conditioning unit, my grandmother, who was then apparently in her late 60's, quickly decided she wanted to go back to her slum apartment in Chicago, immediately.

My grandfather, who was more good-natured and assimilated into the U.S. labor force as a loader of morning newspapers onto Chicago Tribune newspaper delivery trucks on the night shift at the Tribune's printing press facility in Downtown Chicago, would have wanted to stay for the night (especially after the air-conditioning unit that was turned on cooled the living room so much that he exclaimed "M'chaya.'"), because he was eager to spend some time with his daughter and her children.

But neither my mother nor my grandfather were successful in persuading my grandmother--who by that time in her life seemed to have a personality that was totally opposite of my mother and her younger sister's jovial, good-natured, easy-going personalities ( and apparently by then my grandmother could only feel comfortable when she was staying inside the four walls of her own slum apartment)--to stay over for the night, especially after having already been on the bus for four hours that day on the trip down from Chicago.

But my grandmother--who, as an immigrant daughter of an orthodox Lithuanian rabbi who did not emigrate, had arrived in the USA as a teenager shortly after the Titanic (which had originally been the ship she was going to sail on) sank--stubbornly insisted that she wanted to go back to Chicago immediately. So, despite my grandfather being disappointed that their visit to his daughter's home in Indianapolis was to be such a short one, we all quickly got them in the car again with us, drove back downtown to the Indianapolis Greyhound bus station and put them on a late afternoon bus that was heading to Chicago.

In retrospect, my grandmother, by that time in her life, probably no longer wanted to travel anywhere or go out of her apartment anytime, except to maybe shop in her own neighborhood. And it was likely that the only reason she had agreed to take the bus down to visit my mother's home at that time was because my grandfather, then in his early 70's, was still adventurist enough and Americanized enough to be eager to visit his daughter in Indianapolis, despite the weather being hot and humid in August.

Or possibly, when my grandmother again saw how much materially nicer her daughter's living situation and neighborhood in Indianapolis was than was her own living situation, she may have felt envious of her daughter; and so remaining in her daughter's home for more than a few minutes perhaps reminded her of how economically poverty-stricken, in comparison, most of her whole 20th-century  life in Chicago had generally been.

On The Road In The 1970's--Part 50

On a few Saturdays or Sundays during the summer of 1963, my parents and I drove down to Bloomington, often via the back roads that ran south parallel to State Highway 37, in order to drive through Indiana towns that we had not driven through before, to spend a few hours eating lunch out with my older sister, who was spending that summer attending classes at Indiana University. And on one weekend that summer, my sister was up in Indianapolis visiting my parents and me for a few hours with an old boyfriend of hers from New York City who (if I remember correctly after so many years) was taking some summer course at the University of Missouri's School of Journalism, before doing some required time in the U.S. military (in the period before the late 1965 U.S. military escalation in Vietnam made required service in the U.S. military for all U.S. males a more risky situation).

My sister's old boyfriend had purchased a used car that was a convertible, to drive around in while he was in the Midwest; and when my parents decided that they'd also make the one and a half-hour drive down to Bloomington at the same time my sister and her old boyfriend were driving back down to Bloomington (where after we all ate dinner there together, he would drop her off at her dorm, before eventually driving back to Missouri), it turned out that I sat in the back seat of his convertible car, while my parents drove alone together in their car behind us.

Because it was a hot summer day and the used convertible car had no inside air-conditioning, like most cars had in subsequent decades, the top of the convertible car was pulled back. So I was able to feel the pleasant cooling wind all the way driving down to Bloomington. And it turned out that this was the only time I was ever driven in a convertible with its top open in my life, despite having hitched so much on the road during the 1970's.

On The Road In The 1970's--Part 49

Aside from sometimes driving out to shopping malls like the Glendale Mall, near where Broad Ripple Avenue leads to Keystone Avenue, or going to an evening showing at one of the local neighborhood second-run movie distribution movie theater outlets, like The Vogue, on College Avenue, just south of Broad Ripple Avenue, I can't recall spending many weekday evenings out of the house in Indianapolis during the summer of 1963. But I do recall doing, on two different weekday evenings, in Indianapolis two things in that summer that one could not have done in New York City during that same summer.

The first thing to do in Indianapolis that was not available to do in the evening summer in New York City in 1963 was being able to check out the Indiana State Fair at the fairgrounds in Indianapolis. My parents and I spent an evening there walking around the fairgrounds, which was crowded with a lot of people attending the Indiana State Fair in the summer weekday evening. But I can't recall now much of what we saw or did, except that the Indiana State Fair seemed like a carnival atmosphere on a larger scale, with Coney Island-type booths and rides, as well as farm animal booths.

The second thing my parents and I did in Indianapolis in the summer of 1963, that we wouldn't have been able to do in New York City that summer, was to see Van Johnson, who was, by mid-1963, somewhat of a has-been as a big Hollywood movie star (although he was apparently still only in his late 40's at that point in his life) compared to what his status had been in the 1950's, play the "Devil"/Applegate character in a summer stock production of Damn Yankees. This production of the Damn Yankees musical from the 1950's was being performed at an outdoor theater on Butler University's campus, only about 10 to 15 blocks west away from where I then lived.

Ten years before Van Johnson had been co-starring with Hollywood super-stars like Humphrey Bogart (who was no longer alive in the early 1960's) in The Caine Mutiny and with Elizabeth Taylor (who was a still a Hollywood super-star in the early 1960's) in The Last Time I Saw Paris. But by the summer of 1963, despite being billed as "the star" of this summer stock production of Damn Yankees, he was just being cast in a mostly non-singing role of this musical. And it wasn't even a role that would enable him to sing the musical's hit song, "You Gotta Have Heart," like the minor character who plays the Washington Senators' baseball team manager gets to sing.

Ironically, the comical song Van Johnson did get to sing from his comic-villain role as the Devil to whom the elderly frustrated Washington Senators baseball fan sells his soul to, was called "Those Were the Good Old Days." But I suspect Van Johnson was probably too focused on having to remember the lyrics to the one song he had to perform before the live, mostly middle-aged white audience of his Indiana fans from the 1950's, to be thinking of the "good old days" of ten years before, when he had been a big Hollywood star.

Coincidentally, another former Hollywood film star from the 1940's, former actress Frances Farmer, lived just down the block on the same street where my parents and I lived in Indianapolis, at this time. In the early 1960's, she was hosting a late afternoon local show for one of the local Indianapolis television stations, in which (if I remember correctly after so many years) she provided brief introductions before different edited (to allow for commercials and to fit into a 90 minute show) motion pictures from the 1930's or 1940's were broadcast between 4:30 and 6 p.m., each weekday.

But (like most every other adult who lived on the block) Francis Farmer was generally visible to others for only brief moments on the street, when she walked either from her house to her car or from her car to her house.  In the early 1960's, Frances Farmer's car was a 1958 Edsel that she parked in front of her house (in an historical period when homeowners or renters of houses in that neighborhood were always able to find a vacant parking spot right in front of wherever they lived, because no shortage of on-street parking spaces yet existed for residents of that particular Indianapolis neighborhood at that time).

So during the 1 and one-half years I lived on the same block as Frances Farmer, I can only recall seeing her just a few times on that block, as she left her car or her home (while wearing the kind of women's hat that Katharine Hepburn sometimes wore in some of the 1940's Hollywood movies), probably either on her way to her job at the local tv studios or returning from her tv show, during the season when the sun set after 7 p.m., perhaps?

On The Road In The 1970's--Part 48

Besides buying the discounted vinyl record albums of mostly flop Broadway musicals at the Jubilee City Discount department store in the summer of 1963, I also bought a cheap model of a tape recorder that used 8-inch reels of recording tape. But the sound quality of the tape recorder's playback of the 8-inch tapes of some radio shows I made was of low quality, and I felt that Jubilee City had ripped me off by selling me such a defective tape recorder.

So I soon gave up attempting to record anything else on my defective tape recorder in Indianapolis and, instead, spent much more time when I lived in Indianapolis taking 8 millimetre moving pictures on my family's cheap Kodak Brownie camera; that I could then project on the Bell & Howell movie projector I had bought with some of the money I had earned from delivering the Indianapolis Times, prior to the summer of 1963.

Don't remember much else I did alone outside during the weekdays of the summer of 1963, except exploring alone a few times the park forest area north of Butler University's campus, near or in Holcomb Gardens, which was within walking distance of where I lived; and also walking alone once in Holiday Park, much further north in "Naptown," one day.

On weekday evenings, most of my time was spent either watching TV after dinner, with my parents or alone, in the living room, and then, after we all went upstairs to prepare for bed, usually reading some book in bed for awhile in my own bedroom, before getting tired enough to fall asleep by around 11:30 p.m.. Can't recall listening alone to much music over the radio in my bedroom, or even listening to the radio much at all when in my bedroom alone during the summer weeknights or even weekdays of 1963. And most of whatever saxophone practicing fro about an hour every few days that I did in the summer of 1963 on weekdays was done in the late afternoon or early evening before dinner was served. 

On a few very hot summer nights, my parents and I sat outside on the front porch at the same time that the neighbors who rented the other part of the duplex house we lived in, the Griffiths, were sitting outside on porch; on the other side of the small wooden divider that separated their side of the porch from our side.

The Griffiths were personally friendly in a Midwestern regional sort of way. They seemed to have just lived in Indiana for their whole lives and appeared to be in their late 50's or early 60's. And the daughter or daughters they had raised in their half of the duplex house in which they lived for a long time, who were sitting with them once when my parents and I were also sitting on the porch, either no longer lived with them (or were never noticed by me more than a few times during the year and a half I lived next door to the Griffiths).

So it appeared that neither the Griffiths nor my parents felt they had much in common enough for them to be able to converse on any kind of regular basis on the front porch of the house. And I have the feeling that Mr. Griffith's political views in the early 1960's pretty much reflected the right-wing conservative Republican  Party, pro Goldwater political views of the Indianapolis Star and its then-owner, rather than the politically liberal views of newspapers like the then-Dorothy Schiff-owned New York Post or the New York Times, that my parents both then had.

And since the side of the duplex house we rented had an air-conditioning unit in its living room, even if the summer nights in 1963 became excessively hot, my parents and I were able to avoid both the hot summer evenings and the risk of having to chat with the friendly, but possibly right-wing conservative Mr. Griffith, by just spending most of the hot summer evenings, not on the porch, but in our living room with the air-conditioning unit on. 

On The Road In The 1970's--Part 47

Besides riding around on my bicycle in the neighborhood on side streets, going to local libraries and spending time at the local Jewish Community Center of Indianapolis pool during the day, and still watching a lot of television in the evening on weekdays in Indianapolis in the summer of 1963, I also sometimes hopped on a bus that went downtown on College Avenue or on a bus that went east on 52nd Street towards the Jubilee City discount department store, mini-shopping mall.

In Downtown Indianapolis, I generally would spend a few hours at the Central Library and usually borrow a biography, a history book, a novel or an anthology of plays or an individual play to read. Perhaps because fewer people in Indianapolis seemed to be interested in using the central library downtown in the 1960's (long before most U.S. central libraries no longer were places that people visited to use books and were transformed primarily into computer centers, study halls for students with laptops and a place for homeless people to hang out in during the winter months, etc.), than the number of people who used the New York City Public Library in Midtown Manhattan, teenage high school students who entered the central library in Indianapolis were never harassed by any library security guards.

Yet less than two years later, when, as a teenage high school senior, I walked into the reference room of the New York City Public Library's central library in Midtown Manhattan one afternoon, an Afro-American library security guard, ironically, immediately escorted me out of the New York City Public Library central library reading room; while saying "You're not old enough to be allowed in the Reading Room."

Despite being disgusted with being forced to leave the reading room for ageist reasons, I saw no point in getting into a loud argument in the then-card catalog area for the central library's reading room with the security guard or with his supervisor at that time. So I just then quickly made my exit from the library and walked out the front entrance and past the lion sculptures, with disgust. But I imagine the 1964 or early 1965 incident in Manhattan did help increase my consciousness, somewhat, about the injustice of ageism and youth oppression in the 1960's USA society.

Taking the bus alone that went east on 52nd Street until it reached Keystone Avenue and the Jubilee City discount department on some weekdays in the summer of 1963, I would usually spend my time in the store mainly examining which long-playing vinyl records were on sale that week. In the summer of 1963 I was still mainly into buying vinyl records of Broadway musicals or Hollywood movie musical versions of Broadway hit musicals, to listen to on my cheap, single speaker, hi-fi vinyl record player.

But because the original cast albums of the hit Broadway musicals usually cost $3.98 or $4.98 in 1963, which was a price that I considered too expensive for me at that time, most of the original cast albums of the Broadway musicals that I bought that summer were either the albums of flop Broadway musicals that sold for a cheaper sales price or "non-original cast" cover versions of the hit Broadway or movie musicals that were being sold for the cheaper "on-sale price." I also sometimes spent some money at Jubilee City that summer purchasing some all-music movie soundtrack vinyl albums that were on sale and some only-music big band music albums that were on sale.

Surprisingly, although I was still into practicing my saxophone at home on a regular basis during the summer of 1963, to, in part, keep me "in shape musically" for being part of Broad Ripple High School's marching band during the 1963-1964 academic year, I can't recall purchasing any vinyl jazz records that featured saxophonists to listen to. Could be that Jubilee City's discount record department didn't sell many jazz saxophone records or that the jazz saxophone records Jubilee City did sell were never on sale, perhaps?

In retrospect, I think I was probably still more into John Philip Sousa-type marching band music, with respect to the saxophone, than into Illinois Jacquet or saxophonists who played jazz or even dance band music, at this time. And insofar as I ever thought of possibly earning a living in the music field, the only idea I toyed with in the summer of 1963 was maybe becoming some kind of high school music teacher.

Of course, again in retrospect, I probably should have focused more during the summer of 1963 on preparing myself to possibly play jazz or to play in dance bands at hotels, in the summers that lay ahead during the rest of the 1960's. But, for me, playing the saxophone was always seen as just a fun hobby in high school, that also enabled me to be part of a high school band, which was a school activity that both still interested me personally and also seemed to be useful to be involved in, when applying to some college. Since it would show I wasn't just someone who only just tended to do well academically, but  that I was also a "well-rounded" college applicant.

From starting to occasionally read Lovejoy's College Guide by the end of my sophomore year, and from what some of my junior high school teachers and guidance counselors had indicated, I probably had realized by this time that it "looked good on your college application" if you showed that you were involved in some school extra-curricular activity like "Band" in high school. (Although, like I may have written earlier, in the summer of 1963 I still just assumed that, like my sister was then doing, I would just be attending Indiana University in Bloomington--with the in-state tuition cost advantage I was now eligible for, after my then expected graduation from Broad Ripple High School in June 1965; and I had no thought at all, at least in the summer of 1963, of even considering applying to an Ivy League school like Columbia University. 

On The Road In The 1970's--Part 46

After so many years, my memories of how I spent the summer of 1963 in Indianapolis are now also somewhat vague. During the week, I spent part of the day riding my bicycle either north towards Broad Ripple Avenue or south toward East 38th Street, on the usually deserted side streets that were located between the more major north-south streets of College Avenue to the east and Meridian Street to the west.

Usually I was the only person riding a bicycle on these north-south side streets. Sometimes I would stop by either the local public library near 42nd Street or at the local public library near Broad Ripple Avenue, and maybe check out one library book. My recollection is that in the summer of 1963 I was also beginning to think about trying my hand at writing a play. So I first checked out one of John Gassner's Best Plays of the American Theater anthology from the public library. And after reading through the Gassner anthology, I wrote a few scenes for a musical play that reflected my experience at the Ten Mile River Camp Kiowa Boy Scout Camp in New York State the previous summer, for which I wrote my first composed folk song, "Camp Wellington," in 1963.

Because I was still somewhat of a TV addict in the summer of 1963, who usually spent most evenings just watching various television news and TV news department documentary shows, old movies, variety TV shows or TV series shows that were being re-broadcast during the summer, I pretty quickly, however, lost my interest in spending much time trying to complete this play, rather than just spending my evening time mostly passively watching television in the evening.

Another way Indianapolis was unlike New York City was that, at least in the neighborhood where I lived, in Indianapolis there were no outdoor playgrounds with basketball courts near public schools, in any parks or in parking lots--where a teenage guy (in the early 1960's teenage women were almost never seen playing basketball on New York City's outdoor basketball courts) could just go alone, and either find another guy or group of teenage guys, he might have not previously known, to play basketball with, or just shoot baskets into the hoop alone, if no one else appeared on the court--like there were in New York City.

So unless you, or some other teenage guy you knew, had a basketball hoop over the garage in a house where you or he lived, there was no place outside, in the neighborhood in which I lived, to go outside and get into a pick-up basketball game in the summer of 1963. Because the rented house my parents and I lived in didn't have a garage and basketball hoop over a garage, and I didn't know any teenage guy in Indianapolis whose house did have a hoop on its garage or noticed anyone during the summer living in a house with a hoop over the garage who looked like he needed someone to play basketball with, the only basketball playing I did during the summer of 1963 was playing alone a few times, on the inside gym court of the local Jewish Community Center of Indianapolis on Hoover Road, on a few of the days when my mother and I spent part of the afternoon there, sitting by the side of the swimming pool.

Aside from bumping into Debbie once in the Jewish Community Center's gym that summer, I can't recall bumping into anyone else there during the summer of 1963 who also attended Broad Ripple High School. And while at the Jewish Community Center that summer, during the week, most of the several hours in the afternoon I spent there, in-between swimming in the pool to cool off on the hot summer days, was just spent reading some book, while sitting next to my mother, who also spent most of her time there sitting in a beach chair by the side of the pool, reading some novel or biography.

Most of the other people sitting around the pool or swimming in the pool were housewives, who probably would not have been considered as physically attractive as my mother did in her bathing suit, by most men in the early 1960's. But I do recall noticing, on a few occasions, a buxom teenage high school white woman, who probably would have been considered more good-looking in her bathing suit by most men in the early 1960's (before the Marilyn Monroe look in a bathing suit became less fashionable as a bathing beauty standard in later decades, in the eyes of more men and women, perhaps), who did not attend Broad Ripple High School,  also sitting around the pool; generally surrounded by two or three other teenage high school white guys flirting with her all the time.

On The Road In The 1970's--Part 45

By early June 1963, I pretty much lost forever my interest in just working for money, and I began to feel that having to be responsible for delivering the Indianapolis Times each day of the week tied me down too much. Also, I realized that if I was going to be free during the summer to spend some hot weekday afternoons swimming in the Jewish Community Center of Indianapolis's pool, or to spend time between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m.in the afternoon, late in the summer and in the fall, practicing with the Broad Ripple High School marching band, that I would then be a member of, I could not also have time to continue delivering newspapers.

So in early June 1963, I quit my newspaper carrier job and I was no longer earning my own money. And between June 1963 and mid-July 1965, the only money I had to spend just came from the small allowance my father continued to give me, during my junior and senior years of high school--except for some money I earned once babysitting one evening for two children of my father's cousin--until I began earning some money on my own from the summer clerical job I had at UM & M's 1407 Broadway corporate office in Manhattan; before I entered Columbia University in September 1965.

Another way that public high school life at Broad Ripple in Indianapolis was different than public high school life at Bayside H.S. and Flushing H.S. in New York City is that more students at Broad Ripple H.S. attended summer school than students did at Bayside H.S. or Flushing H.S.

In New York City, the only high school students who attended school during the summer were the ones who had flunked the required high school regents exams in one of the courses they heeded to have passed, in order to receive an academic high school diploma. In Indianapolis, however, it was much more common for high school students who wished to get their driver's license at 16 years-of-age to eagerly spend their summer mornings taking the driver's education course, that high schools like Broad Ripple provided for free, to prepare themselves for quickly passing their road tests as soon as they reached their 16th birthday.

Also, if, like high school students in New York City who weren't permitted to get a driver's license until they were 18 years-of-age, you or your friends were mostly not yet into spending your summer driving around or making out with a steady date in your own car or one you borrowed from a parent, there were less interesting things on weekdays available to do during the day in Indianapolis in the summer than there was in New York City on summer days in the early 1960's. So, if you were a high school student not yet "on wheels," who wasn't yet into getting a summer job, taking a morning high school summer course at a school like Broad Ripple might also be a way that you'd be more likely to be interacting with teenagers your own age during the summer months, than if you just slept late and spent much of the day just hanging out alone in your own house or backyard or going shopping, perhaps?

Having grown up in Queens in New York City, of course, the notion of spending a summer going to school still seemed like an alien one to me, during the summer of 1963. So once I lost interest in making money by delivering the Indianapolis Times and quit that job in early June 1963, I did not even consider the possibility of taking a summer morning course at Broad Ripple during the summer.