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.