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?