By early June 1963, I pretty much lost forever my interest in just working for money, and I began to feel that having to be responsible for delivering the Indianapolis Times each day of the week tied me down too much. Also, I realized that if I was going to be free during the summer to spend some hot weekday afternoons swimming in the Jewish Community Center of Indianapolis's pool, or to spend time between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m.in the afternoon, late in the summer and in the fall, practicing with the Broad Ripple High School marching band, that I would then be a member of, I could not also have time to continue delivering newspapers.
So in early June 1963, I quit my newspaper carrier job and I was no longer earning my own money. And between June 1963 and mid-July 1965, the only money I had to spend just came from the small allowance my father continued to give me, during my junior and senior years of high school--except for some money I earned once babysitting one evening for two children of my father's cousin--until I began earning some money on my own from the summer clerical job I had at UM & M's 1407 Broadway corporate office in Manhattan; before I entered Columbia University in September 1965.
Another way that public high school life at Broad Ripple in Indianapolis was different than public high school life at Bayside H.S. and Flushing H.S. in New York City is that more students at Broad Ripple H.S. attended summer school than students did at Bayside H.S. or Flushing H.S.
In New York City, the only high school students who attended school during the summer were the ones who had flunked the required high school regents exams in one of the courses they heeded to have passed, in order to receive an academic high school diploma. In Indianapolis, however, it was much more common for high school students who wished to get their driver's license at 16 years-of-age to eagerly spend their summer mornings taking the driver's education course, that high schools like Broad Ripple provided for free, to prepare themselves for quickly passing their road tests as soon as they reached their 16th birthday.
Also, if, like high school students in New York City who weren't permitted to get a driver's license until they were 18 years-of-age, you or your friends were mostly not yet into spending your summer driving around or making out with a steady date in your own car or one you borrowed from a parent, there were less interesting things on weekdays available to do during the day in Indianapolis in the summer than there was in New York City on summer days in the early 1960's. So, if you were a high school student not yet "on wheels," who wasn't yet into getting a summer job, taking a morning high school summer course at a school like Broad Ripple might also be a way that you'd be more likely to be interacting with teenagers your own age during the summer months, than if you just slept late and spent much of the day just hanging out alone in your own house or backyard or going shopping, perhaps?
Having grown up in Queens in New York City, of course, the notion of spending a summer going to school still seemed like an alien one to me, during the summer of 1963. So once I lost interest in making money by delivering the Indianapolis Times and quit that job in early June 1963, I did not even consider the possibility of taking a summer morning course at Broad Ripple during the summer.
