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?
