On a few Saturdays or Sundays during the summer of 1963, my parents and I drove down to Bloomington, often via the back roads that ran south parallel to State Highway 37, in order to drive through Indiana towns that we had not driven through before, to spend a few hours eating lunch out with my older sister, who was spending that summer attending classes at Indiana University. And on one weekend that summer, my sister was up in Indianapolis visiting my parents and me for a few hours with an old boyfriend of hers from New York City who (if I remember correctly after so many years) was taking some summer course at the University of Missouri's School of Journalism, before doing some required time in the U.S. military (in the period before the late 1965 U.S. military escalation in Vietnam made required service in the U.S. military for all U.S. males a more risky situation).
My sister's old boyfriend had purchased a used car that was a convertible, to drive around in while he was in the Midwest; and when my parents decided that they'd also make the one and a half-hour drive down to Bloomington at the same time my sister and her old boyfriend were driving back down to Bloomington (where after we all ate dinner there together, he would drop her off at her dorm, before eventually driving back to Missouri), it turned out that I sat in the back seat of his convertible car, while my parents drove alone together in their car behind us.
Because it was a hot summer day and the used convertible car had no inside air-conditioning, like most cars had in subsequent decades, the top of the convertible car was pulled back. So I was able to feel the pleasant cooling wind all the way driving down to Bloomington. And it turned out that this was the only time I was ever driven in a convertible with its top open in my life, despite having hitched so much on the road during the 1970's.
