Because my father would drive me and my mother in his 1959 Pontiac car up to Chicago on a Sunday about once a month (usually leaving only a few hours after I finished delivering the Sunday morning edition of the Indianapolis Times to my newspaper route customers in the early morning darkness), between January and June 1963 I became as familiar with the drive northwest to from Indianapolis to Chicago as I became with the drive south on State Route 37 from Indianapolis to Bloomington during this same period. The reason for the usually monthly drives up to Chicago was to visit my mother's parents and her younger sister, her brother-in-law and my cousins.
In 1963, only a small section of the Interstate 65 highway, that later enabled a driver to reach Chicago from Indianapolis by only driving on divided limited access highways at 65 mph, but which bypassed most of the small Indiana towns you used to have to drive through in order to travel by car between Naptown and the Windy City during the early 1960's, had been built. So to get to Chicago from Indianapolis , most of the drive at that time was done by first driving northeast on U.S. Highway 52 about 50 or 60 miles to Lafayette, Indiana--where you drove near the campus of Purdue University; and, afterwards, continue on U.S Highway 52 until you connected to the intersection with U.S. Highway 41 in Kentland, Indiana.
Because where U.S. Highway 52 intersected U.S. Highway 41 in Kentland, Indiana was both around a 2-hour drive from Indianapolis and a 2-hour drive from Chicago, in 1963 it was then also the location of a highway rest stop with a gas station and a fairly large restaurant and parking lot; at which drivers or passengers of cars, trucks and Greyhound buses stopped to stretch their legs, eat and use restrooms, when driving or traveling in either direction between Indianapolis and Chicago. So on the early Sunday mornings and late Sunday evenings when my family's car would stop at this Kentland, Indiana rest stop and restaurant on our monthly visits to Chicago and back, between January and June 1963, the restaurant was usually crowded with customers.
Once you reached U.S. Highway 41, the highway going straight north was all divided, yet not a limited access one like the section of then-partially-completed Interstate 65 had been, until you reached the Indiana Turnpike toll road and then the Calumet Skyway leading into Chicago's Dan Ryan Expressway, near Hammond and East Chicago, Indiana.
In the early 1960's, until you reached the Hammond and East Chicago area of, Indiana, Lafayette, Indiana was pretty much the only city you drove through in Indiana after you left Indianapolis, on your way to Chicago, The rest of the time, until you reached Gary, Indiana, most of what the small portion of completed Interstate 65 and the U.S. 52 and U.S. 41 highways passed through on each side was either farms or streets of small towns. And in the early 1960's, you drove by very few strip shopping malls or Wal-Mart stores on either the U.S. 52 Highway or the U.S. 41 Highway in Indiana.
Once you reached the Hammond and East Chicago, Indiana area in the early 1960's, however, the air around you started to smell and look more polluted, and suddenly you found yourself driving past a lot of steel mills and factories; many of which, by the early 1980's, would later be shut down by the transnational U.S. corporations that owned them, throwing thousands of previously high-waged unionized industrial workers in northern Indiana out of work and into the ranks of the army of unemployed people in the USA.
Then, not too long after you passed by through this northwest corner of Indiana, you reached the South Side of Chicago and, from the expressway with many lanes, that at some point became the Dan Ryan Expressway, you could easily see a lot of high-rise public housing projects in which many African-American working-class people seemed to live and seemed to have been ghettoized; by a Chicago city government that was still controlled by the corrupt Chicago Democratic Party political machine of Chicago's long-time political boss and mayor: Richard Daley I.
