After so many years, my memories of how I spent the summer of 1963 in Indianapolis are now also somewhat vague. During the week, I spent part of the day riding my bicycle either north towards Broad Ripple Avenue or south toward East 38th Street, on the usually deserted side streets that were located between the more major north-south streets of College Avenue to the east and Meridian Street to the west.
Usually I was the only person riding a bicycle on these north-south side streets. Sometimes I would stop by either the local public library near 42nd Street or at the local public library near Broad Ripple Avenue, and maybe check out one library book. My recollection is that in the summer of 1963 I was also beginning to think about trying my hand at writing a play. So I first checked out one of John Gassner's Best Plays of the American Theater anthology from the public library. And after reading through the Gassner anthology, I wrote a few scenes for a musical play that reflected my experience at the Ten Mile River Camp Kiowa Boy Scout Camp in New York State the previous summer, for which I wrote my first composed folk song, "Camp Wellington," in 1963.
Because I was still somewhat of a TV addict in the summer of 1963, who usually spent most evenings just watching various television news and TV news department documentary shows, old movies, variety TV shows or TV series shows that were being re-broadcast during the summer, I pretty quickly, however, lost my interest in spending much time trying to complete this play, rather than just spending my evening time mostly passively watching television in the evening.
Another way Indianapolis was unlike New York City was that, at least in the neighborhood where I lived, in Indianapolis there were no outdoor playgrounds with basketball courts near public schools, in any parks or in parking lots--where a teenage guy (in the early 1960's teenage women were almost never seen playing basketball on New York City's outdoor basketball courts) could just go alone, and either find another guy or group of teenage guys, he might have not previously known, to play basketball with, or just shoot baskets into the hoop alone, if no one else appeared on the court--like there were in New York City.
So unless you, or some other teenage guy you knew, had a basketball hoop over the garage in a house where you or he lived, there was no place outside, in the neighborhood in which I lived, to go outside and get into a pick-up basketball game in the summer of 1963. Because the rented house my parents and I lived in didn't have a garage and basketball hoop over a garage, and I didn't know any teenage guy in Indianapolis whose house did have a hoop on its garage or noticed anyone during the summer living in a house with a hoop over the garage who looked like he needed someone to play basketball with, the only basketball playing I did during the summer of 1963 was playing alone a few times, on the inside gym court of the local Jewish Community Center of Indianapolis on Hoover Road, on a few of the days when my mother and I spent part of the afternoon there, sitting by the side of the swimming pool.
Aside from bumping into Debbie once in the Jewish Community Center's gym that summer, I can't recall bumping into anyone else there during the summer of 1963 who also attended Broad Ripple High School. And while at the Jewish Community Center that summer, during the week, most of the several hours in the afternoon I spent there, in-between swimming in the pool to cool off on the hot summer days, was just spent reading some book, while sitting next to my mother, who also spent most of her time there sitting in a beach chair by the side of the pool, reading some novel or biography.
Most of the other people sitting around the pool or swimming in the pool were housewives, who probably would not have been considered as physically attractive as my mother did in her bathing suit, by most men in the early 1960's. But I do recall noticing, on a few occasions, a buxom teenage high school white woman, who probably would have been considered more good-looking in her bathing suit by most men in the early 1960's (before the Marilyn Monroe look in a bathing suit became less fashionable as a bathing beauty standard in later decades, in the eyes of more men and women, perhaps), who did not attend Broad Ripple High School, also sitting around the pool; generally surrounded by two or three other teenage high school white guys flirting with her all the time.
