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.