On The Road In The 1970's--Part 39

Rather than being some kind of academic center of political subversion or non-conformity, Indiana University in 1963, at least to me, seemed be mainly a campus in which most students seemed to still be more into fraternity and sorority life and attending Big Ten football and basketball games, in big college stadiums and sports arenas, than into either their academic work, hanging out in academic libraries or being involved in some form of political activism.

But  the new and old dormitory buildings and the big student union building on Indiana University's large campus still impressed me in 1963 and caused me to feel that I was in a small city of large numbers of young people in their late teens and early twenties, whenever I visited IU's campus; and in a city that was filled with even more physically attractive female "co-ed" students than Broad Ripple High School was then filled with.

I assumed, between January and June 1963, that my family would remain living in Indianapolis during the rest of the decade and did not think, at this time, that I would develop any particular desire to apply for admission in a few years to a college in New York City like Columbia or NYU.  So I also assumed in 1963 that, especially because now being a resident of Indiana would enable me to be charged the lower in-state tuition fee, after graduating from Broad Ripple H.S., Indiana University in Bloomington was where I would spend my 4 years as an undergraduate. Hence, as early as the spring semester of my sophomore year in high school, I had started looking through the IU college catalog and begun to consider which courses I intended to take, when I eventually enrolled there; and what subjects I would want to major or minor in when I got there.

What's surprising, in retrospect, is along with considering a major or minor in subjects like history, journalism, music or theater, in 1963, at least, I also was thinking, for a brief period, that "police administration" might be an interesting major or minor subject for me to get into. Perhaps I had been influenced by watching too many cops and robbers shows on television, like Dragnet, during the 1950s as a child?

So, for a brief period, I thought being prepared at IU to become a "detective" for some police department, after graduating and fulfilling the then-required two years of U.S. military service for U.S. men under 26-years-of-age, was a possible road I might follow. But by the Fall of 1963--perhaps after viewing on the television screen more images of white cops brutalizing and arresting singing Civil Rights Movement demonstrators on the streets of Southern cities like Birmingham--I had completely ruled out forever the possibility that I might want to major or minor in "police administration" when, as I then expected, I would enroll at Indiana University in the Fall of 1965. 

On The Road In The 1970's--Part 38

I still have some memories of my life in Indiana unrelated to school between January 1963 and late June 1963, during the time I spent part of each day earning money on my own for the first time, as an Indianapolis Times newspaper delivery carrier.

In 1963 the most influential newspaper in Indianapolis was the Indianapolis Star morning newspaper, which was then owned by a white right-wing anti-communist conservative publisher named Pulliam. Pulliam was a political supporter of the right-wing anti-communist "New Right" conservative and then-U.S. Senator from Arizona, Barry Goldwater, who, the following year, was the 1964 GOP presidential nominee who ended up losing to then Democratic President Lyndon Johnson in a big way in the November 1964 election.

Pulliam's newspaper publishing firm also owned and published an afternoon newspaper in Indianapolis, the Indianapolis News (which competed with the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain's Indianapolis Times afternoon and Sunday morning newspaper that I delivered), that was distributed on every afternoon except Sunday afternoon. Not surprisingly, the editorial slant of both Pulliam's more influential Indianapolis Star and his less influential Indianapolis News generally reflected his right-wing anti-communist conservative politics. So the politically influential Indianapolis Star's version of the daily news it provided its Indianapolis readers in 1963 resembled the version of the daily news provided New York City readers in 1963 by newspapers like the then-right-wing anti-communist conservative Chicago Tribune--owned New York Daily News tabloid, rather than the version of the daily news provided by the more liberal anti-communist newspapers like the New York Times in 1963.

Consequently, when a local District Attorney in Bloomington, Indiana decided to apparently attempt to prosecute or jail some of the students involved in the Socialist Workers Party's Young Socialist Alliance [YSA] Trotskyist sect group at Indiana University around this time, front page coverage of the D.A.'s case against "the Reds" at Indiana University was provided by the Indianapolis Star, to encourage this kind of 1950's-type McCarthyite red-baiting in Indiana as late as the early 1960s.

But because I was still just an anti-communist liberal in 1963 and 1964 when I lived in Indianapolis, I have to confess that I didn't realize the degree to which the right-wing extremist-owned Indianapolis Star was unfairly characterizing in its headlines what the political goals and nature of the Socialist Workers Party/YSA activists' work in Bloomington was actually about. 

Yet because my parents and I spent around one Sunday a month between January and June 1963 either driving my older sister, who was then a freshman at Indiana University, back down State Route 37 thru Martinsville and back to IU's Bloomington campus after a veekend visit or driving down to visit her on campus, I also realized that the Socialist Workers Party-supporting students, that the D.A. in Bloomington was attempting to prosecute, did not reflect the then-political mood of  the vast majority of IU's student body or faculty in the early 1960s.