On The Road In The 1970's: Conclusion

Not long after I reached the breakdown lane between the exit and entrance of the Interstate highway that crossed the middle of Pennsylvania and took you into New Jersey, a car stopped soon after I stuck out my thumb.

The driver, a white guy, without a beard and with short hair--whom most women would have still then considered good-looking--who wasn't wearing a suit or tie, pushed the front passenger door of his compact car open and motioned for me to hop in with my knapsack.  He looked like he was around a little over 30 years of age.

After we began to converse with each other, he mentioned to me that he was a vacationing off-duty police officer, who was now returning from wherever he had spent his vacation; and that he was now driving all the way back into New Jersey and north of the Lincoln Tunnel. So I then happily realized that this was the ride that would enable me to reach the end of my journey back  to theeast coast by the early evening.

The white police officer wasn't a wannabee hippie-freak or a particularly disillusioned cop, But he also wasn't particularly right-wing politically or some guy who seemed to be into being a police officer because he enjoyed bullying, controlling or brutalizing people (such as young black men, etc.).

He apparently just worked for some small suburban or rural town or county's police department. In a place where "being a cop" pretty much just then meant only having to give speeding or parking tickets to drivers, being more like a social worker on the street or acting as a traffic director; rather than having to use your club or gun against local area civilians or arrest many people. And it seemed like he was just working as a police officer because it was a well-paying, easy job without much personal risk for him; or it could be that someone in the older generation of his family had been some kind of a cop?

Perhaps because he was now divorced, though, this apolitical, off-duty white poliice officer of the 1970's did not seem like a jovial or a loquacious kind of fellow. And my impression was that the main reason he picked me up. was that, as a cop, he was used to driving around as part of a two-person "team;" and that he also felt it would be less boring to drive across Pennsylvania with somebody to converse with that day than it would be to drive across the state all alone, listening to the car radio to music or verbal chatter that he had no interest in.

Another reason he may have picked me up was because--like the white guy who had picked me up when I was on the road leaving Los Angeles, he likely had hitched himself when he was in the U.S. military, years before. And picking me up was, for him also, seen as a way of returning the gift of the free rides that he may have received from some other drivers years before, when he was traveling on leave, to or from the U.S. military base he was stationed on.

In the car, I told him about some of my experiences on the road back from California. And he seemed to find it interesting that I had reached where he picked me up in Pennsylvania in so few days by hitching alone. And, naturally, a lot of our conversation in his car was spent discussing my vision about how a leisure-oriented society in the U.S. could be easily created in the 1970's.

While the white police officer in his early 30's who picked me up understood that U.S. society needed to be transformed--and, until it was transformed, the quality of life the USA would continue to deteriorate, compared to how it had been for most people in the placed he had lived within the affluent U.S. society during the 1950's and early 1960's--he was skeptical that much could change in the USA, at least during the Seventies.

Neither of us, however, foresaw that, by the 1980's, so many U.S. factories in the Midwest and Northeast would be shutting down. Or that the kind of economic affluence that so many white working-class people had enjoyed during the 1950's and early 1960's would vanish. And that by the 1980's, most white working-class people, along with most African-American working-class people, would again begin to experience a decline in their real income, living standards and chances of any more upward mobility under the U.S. economic system.

So many years later, I no longer can recall much else of what we discussed before finally reaching the road to the Lincoln Tunnel in New Jersey in the early evening. Perhaps because of his divorce, I have a vague recollection that--although not being particularly anti-feminist, male chauvinist or misogynist--the off-duty white police officer felt that many U.S. women were too self-centered. And, perhaps because he was a cop, I do recall that he was a skillful driver who drove slightly above the speed limit until we reached the road to the Lincoln Tunnel--where he dropped me off during the last period of the evening  rush hour.

Within 15 minutes, a beardless white guy in his early 20's, with long brown hair, who looked like a hippie-freak, stopped his VW van in front of me as I stood on the breakdown lane alongside the road in New Jersey which takes you eventually into the Lincoln Tunnel.

And after I hopped in the van's front passenger seat with my large knapsack, I discovered that, besides being a hippie-freak like me, he was also, like me, a musician. And, in addition, like me, he had grown up in Queens.

Despite the heavy Jersey-NYC traffic, we made good time as he drove towards the Lincoln Tunnel, through the Lincoln Tunnel and Midtown Manhattan and across the East River and onto the Long Island Expressway in Queens; where he eventually dropped me off at some bus stop--before he continued to drive east to the neighborhood in Queens where he lived.

Because we were both into music, we pretty much conversed the whole time I was in the car with him. And although I was into folk music and he was just into rock music--and not at all into using music to protest against the wrongs of U.S. society like I was--before he dropped me off, he wrote his name and phone number and address down on a slip of paper. And he invited me to come jam with him and his band sometime.

I actually did stop by at his house in Queens a few weeks later and jammed a bit with him and his band. But, because he was more into making rock band music than into singing lyrics of songs like I was, he didin't seem to want to attempt to work with me, as some kind of back-up band leader of a rock band that accompanied the lyrics to all the songs I had by then written.

His musical goal was more about just rehearsing with his rock band enough so that he could earn money as a musician whose band played cover songs of pop rock hit songs in clubs, where people danced with each other. Whereas my goal, at that time, was still pretty much just using music to encourage revolutionary left activism and radicalize U.S. working-class political consciousness--by getting the folk songs and lyrics I had written onto some vinyl record album distributed by a label like Vanguard Records or Elektra.

Thus ended my first coast-to-coast journey on the road in the 1970's. There would be two other coast-to-coast trips on the road hitching later in the decade with the woman I loved. But the first journey was the only coast-to-coast bus ride and coust-to-coast hitchhike on the road that I did alone in my life--many decades before the "Age of Uber" arrived..

And my first coast-to-coast hitchhike on the road took place not too many years before, as in the 1950's, U.S. drivers again became more frightened to pick-up hitchhikers. It also took place not too many years before U.S. hitchhikers began to find that a lot more of the drivers who did offer you a free ride on the road had some kind of predatory or ulterior motive.

Perhaps as a result of the way the post-late 1970's U.S. corporate mass media and Corporate Hollywood film industry programming had manipulated and perhaps dstorted some of these neurotic drivers' minds, sub-conscious or values?

 

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 88

 When I reached the first academic building I saw on Clarion College's campus, the entrance door to the building was locked up. So I sat down on the steps in front of the academic building, placed my large knapsack next to me, and began to think about where I should hide outside on the campus for the night--before one of the local town cops might notice me and order me off-campus or out-of-town or arrest me for loitering, vagrancy, trespassing or some kind of phony trumped-up drug possession-related charge, perhaps?

Luckily, however, while I was sitting on the front steps of the locked academic building on the then-deserted campus in the very late evening, a culturally straight-looking, lone white male student with short hair appeared. And, after glancing at me sitting on the steps while walking by me a few yards, he then turned around and asked, in a curious, friendly Midwestern accent:  "Don't you have a place inside to spend the night?"

"I was hoping to get into this building. But the door is locked," I replied.

The young white guy, who looked like he was around 18 or 19 years-old, then laughed and said:  "I know where there's an unlocked back door that gets you into the stairs and up to some classrooms, if you follow me."

"Far out!" I replied as I stood up while picking up my knapsack.

As we walked to the unlocked back door, the white young guy, who was around 6 feet tall, not built like an athlete but neither overweight nor thin (like me), and dressed more in a mod student style than a hippie student style, mentioned that the reason he was on the then-deserted campus at this late evening hour was because he was being initiated into one of Clarion College's male fraternities.

In order to be accepted as a full number of his college fraternity, he was required by his new fraternity brothers to prove hiss fitness for fraternity membership by sneaking into the classroom buildings late at night and writing the fraternity's Greek letters name on the blackboards in some of the classrooms.

And he was in the middle of carrying out that mission that his fraternity brothers had ordered when, after stumbling across me, he seemed to get a flash in his mind that helping a slightly older generational baby-boomer brother on the street while on his fraternity mission also reflected what the true spirit of male fraternity was about.

Once inside the academic building and up the stairs a few flights, the white frat student then led me into one of the empty classrooms at the end of the hall. And, before writing the Greek letters on the blackboard, advised me:  "Just stay here for the night and no one will probably notice you. As long as you're out of here before classes start here in the morning."

"Thanks for being a fraternity brother for me," I called after him as he quickly left the classroom to chalk up his fraternity's Greek letters on other classroom blackboards on that floor of the building.

Although the classroom floor was hard, I did manage to fall asleep for three or four hours during the night. But by the time the sun was rising, I was awake and read to leave the classroom, walk down the stairway, exit through the backdoor and get back on the road --before anyone else had arrived on Clarion College's campus.

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 87

 Being in a campus town, I only had to wait a few minutes on the road that led to the Interstate Highway entrance, before a young white woman hippie-freak, driving on her way to her day job, stopped her car and gave me and my large knapsack a short lift to the entrance of the highway that led south to the Ohio Turnpike. And less than ten minutes after she dropped me off, a van, with a guy driving, who was a long-haired hippie-freak-looking student, and two passengers, another long-haired guy who was a hippie-freak-looking student and a woman who was also a hippie-freak-looking student, offered me a ride.

All three were students at Clarion College in Clarion, Pennsylvania, who had been visiting the campus town I spent the night before in, during the previous week. And all three of the hippie-freak-looking students were already high from smoking the weed by the time they invited me to join them for free in the van on their trip back east.

Since they quickly shared a joint with me in the van, after I boarded it, and the cassette tape player in the van was playing rock music loudly during the whole time it took to reach Clarion College in Clarion, Pennsylvania by the late evening, I can't recall conversing with the three of them much during the hours of riding east in the van with them.

So my only recollection of what happened on this van ride into Ohio, and then east on Interstate 80 into Pennsylvania, is just listening while stoned to rock music as the van moved east on the Ohio Turnpike at more than 65 mph and onto Interstate 80  into Pennsylvania.

What i do remember, though, is arriving at the off-campus apartment they shared in Clarion, Pennsylvania in the late evening. And then quickly sensing that, from their point of view, the ride I htiched from them didn't include any offer for me to crash in their offcampus pad for the night.

So, after we all entered the pad they shared, still all stoned, but feeling an immediate vibe coming from the others in the living room that I was supposed to spend the night elsewhere in Clarion, I quickly snuck out of their apartment and disappeared from their scene, without them even noticing that I was leaving. They also likely didn't notice me disappearing from their apartment because they hadn't really all conversed much with me during our stoned drive to Clarion, Pennsylvania. So they still were not yet even award of my name and it hadn't really registered in their minds that I might be included in their scene for the night after arriving in Clarion.

No knowing anyone in Clarion and needing a place to hide away from any cops in the town during the night while I slept, I eventually headed for one of the buildings on Clarion College's campus. 

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 86

 When I reached the house of the last address I then had for the womanfriend who lived in this campus town, however, I was told by one of the women, who still lived there, that my womanfriend had moved out of the house earlier that month. And had gone out of the campus town to visit her parents.

So I then started to walk around town and around the campus during the rest of the day, hoping to bump into somebody else I knew in that town, who might provide a place for me to crash for the night--before I continued hitching on the road back to New York City the next morning. Because--despite still having some of the money the father of the hippie freak had given me on Broad Ripple Avenue in Indianapolis the previous day--I still didn't have enough money to pay for a room for the night at some motel in the campus town.

But I did not bump into anyone I had previously known on the campus during the rest of the daytime; and, by the early evening, most of what I had been given by the hippie freak's father on Broad Ripple Avenue had now been used by me to feed myself. So I sat down for awhile on a sidwalk in the town and said "Spare change? Spare change?" for awhile--like a few of the other white hippie freak youths in the town were also doing.

But the only money I was able to panhandle came from a hip-looking African-American man in his late 30's, who looked like he had some low-level supervisory job related to the building maintenance department at the local university, who handed me a dollar bill as he was walking out of a local restaurant with some white friends, with whom he had just eaten dinner.

So, after about a half hour of panhandling, I headed back to the university's campus to hang out there in the evening. And I assumed that I would end up just spending the warm Fall night on its grass outside--unless a campus security guard noticed me on the grass and ordered to get off the campus, despite me looking like I might be one of the hippie freak university students, if I couldn't produce some okind of student I.D. card.

Surprisingly, though, while I was still hanging out with my large knapsack next to me on the campus, when there were still a lot of students walking around and hanging out there at around 11 p.m., a short, thin,culturally straight-looking grad student with a beard--whom I had never met before--stopped in front of me and asked if I needed a place to crash for the night.

And after I said that I did need a place to crash, the grad student invited me to crash at the off-campus house where he lived and shared with a few other male grad student rommates.

It turned out he was a grad student at the university's law school, who was apparently more into sleeping with other men around his own age than into sleeping with women around his own age, like I then was. So although--when he asked me if I needed a place to crash--I hadn't realized his invitation to crash was apparently based on his interest in spending the night sleeping with me. But after we shared a few joints in his house, it turned out that I ended up in bed with him during the night, during which he came before we both fell asleep.

And after we both awoke in the morning, he left to go to his morning law school class; while I left to get back on the road and try to hitch a ride from the campus town in Michigan, that would take me to the Ohio Turnpike and back east towards New York City.

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 85

 Standing in the breakdown lane on the Interstate Highway near its Muncie, Indiana entrance, I did not have to wait too long before a white guy in his 20's, who had short brown hair and a mustache and was dressed in a suit and tie, stopped his car in front of me and opened his car's passsenger sidedoor.

And soon after I jumped into the front passenger seat of the car and told him that I was hitching into Michigan, he smiled and replied: "Looks like you're in luck, since I'm going all the way up to Detroit."

The culturally-straight-looking guy was friendly and seemed to have picked me up to break up his boredom of having to drive all alone in his car for most of the time it would take him to reach Detroit.

During the course of our conversing on the road up to Michigan, the culturally-straight-looking guy, while laughing, mentioned that he worked for the FBI and had just busted a student who was a big marijuana dealer in one of the college campus towns in Indiana; but that he, himself, actually liked the way hippie freaks like me were able to live. And once he served his time working for the FBI, which had paid his college tuition, he would likely move to some youth ghetto in some campus town himself, and then live like a hippie-freak for a few years, rather than quickly trying to find some new 9-to-5 government job or job in the corporate business world.

I can't recall much else about what we talked about before the FBI undercover agent eventually dropped me off at the Interstate Highway exit in Michigan, from which I was able to walk with my knapsack into the campus town; and eventually take a brief nap on the town's university campus for a few hours, before walking around and seeing if an old white womanfriend of mine, also in her early 20's, who lived there was at home.

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 84

After leaving the Central Public Library in Indianapolis, when it closed for the evening, I then walked downtown in the direction of Washington Street, which was also U.S. Highway 40, and, carrying my knapsack, began to walk east towards its intersection to the Interstate Highway which would connect to the Interstate 69 or other highway that led northeast through Indiana and up into Michigan.

After walking east for a few hours in the dark, a long-haired white hippie-freak in his 20's, who looked about the same age as me, passed me and then stopped the car he was driving, opened the passenger side door and asked me, with a smile on his face, as I approached the passenger door: "Which way are you heading?"

"The highway towards Michigan," I replied.

Sill smiling, the long-haired white freak then said: "Hop in! I can take you up that direction towards Anderson."

Like me, the long-haired white hippie driver giving me the ride was also unemployed. And, while we shared a joint in the car and listened to the rock music he was playing on his car's tape deck, we conversed with each other for most of the ride, in the early morning darkness.

"They just seem to want to hire the young chicks around here these days, whenever the companies are hiring," the young white freak driver said in the car at one point, with a laugh. And, still chuckling, he added: "That's what women's lib in Indiana means now. But at least being on unemployment for awhile is still more fun than being stuck everyday on the asssembly line, I guess."

 "Yeah. Wage-slavery under capitalism is a real drag for anybody who's hip to the System," I replied. "And being unemployed myself now gave me the freedom to go out to California and then hitch back towards the East like I'm doing."

So many decades later, I no longer recall much else of what we talked about, although I think he pretty much agreed with my rap that the computers and the automation should be used in the 1970's to create an economy in which everybody would only have to work 15 hours a week for 35 hours pay. But by the time he dropped me off by a breakdown lane near an exit on the Interstate around Anderson, the sun was beginning to rise as we said goodbye to each other, with stoned smiles on both our faces before he drove away.

Because there were few cars or trucks yet driving on the Interstate highway so early in the morning and the cars or trucks driving by me at this time did not offer me a ride, I had to wait in the breakdown lane by the highway exit for awhile.

Eventually, though, a car stopped in front of ma after the morning sun had completely risen and I quickly trotted towards the car with my knapsack and hopped in.

The driver was a friendly white guy in his twenties who was then clean-shaven and without long-hair. But he apparently had been a long-haired hippie freak before he had to get a haircut and shave his beard off, in order to get hired for his night-shift job at the automobile factory that he was then returning home from. So he apparently saw me as someone who, by being on the road hitching, was on the philosophical trip similar to the philosophical trip he had been on, before his need for some money forced him to get his night-shift factory job in the automobile manufacturing plant.

The short-haired, clean-shaven guy lived in a rented second-floor apartment in a 1950's built house on the outskirts of Muncie and was friendly. And he pretty much agreed with my rap in the car about our generation having outgrown the materialistic, work ethic-oriented society that the culturally straight work-freak businessmen still wanted to trap us into adjusting to--instead of allowing our generation to create a leisure-oriented society in the USA.

And because he didn't live too far from the Interstate exit near Muncie, rather than just dropping me off on the Interstate breakdown lane near his exit, he invited me to have breakfast with him in his apartment. And then, after he cooked some scrambled eggs for us both to eat while we chatted, and I continued to describe how I had managed to reach Indiana from Los Angeles in so few days despite having to hitchhike back east, he drove the short distance from where he lived back to the Interstate highway later that morning--giving me a lift back to the breakdown lane near the highway exit, where he then dropped me, and my large knapsack, off.

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 83

To pass the time inside Downtown Indianapolis's main central public library building, until it closed in the evening and I would then start walking further downtown to Washington Street and east on U.S. 40, until I hitched a ride, I ended up spending three or four hours reading through parts of a hard-cover library edition of Kirkpatrick Sale's early 1970's-published book, SDS; which, before I noticed it on one of the library's shelves, I hadn't realized had been written.

Reading Kirkpatrick Sale's SDS book at this point in the 1970's, some years after former Columbia-Barnard SDS Vice-Chair Ted Gold's and National SDS's disintegration, and during a 1970's historical period when most of the white New Left Movement organizers I had known from the 1960's were either then underground or had apparently sold-out politically in some way and drifted back into a white upper middle-class careerist life style, felt like I was reading about ancient history, in many ways.

And it reminded me how differently the 1970's in the USA had turned out politically from how most Columbia-Barnard Students For A Democratic Society [SDS] hard-core organizers, who were members of the "Generation of 1968," had thought, during the months after the April-May 1968 Columbia Student Revolt, the 1970's in the USA was going to turn out politically.

Most of the SDS activists who were the most active in either late 1960's National SDS Movement circles or within 1966-1969 Columbia-Barnard inner leadership circles were not interviewed by Kirkpatrick Sale before he wrote his SDS book (usually because they were either underground, no longer active politically or keeping a low 1970's political profile). So his book's reference to Columbia-Barnard SDS's November 1966 to June 1969 internal political history reflects less accurately Columbia SDS's internal history than does my 1980's and early 1990's-written Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories manuscript. And his SDS book's perspective on National SDS's late 1960's history is more politically distorted than the later-written historical narrative contained in books like Dan Berger's Outlaws of America.

But Kirkpatrick Sale did a great job of examining as thoroughly as possible all the internal organizational documents that National SDS, some SDS regional offices and many SDS campus chapters generated during the 1960's and all the corporate media, underground press, student newspaper and previously-written books that contained references to SDS. In addition, he described accurately in great detail the 1960's historical and U.S. Movement context in which 1960's SDS was able to attract 100,000 members across the USA.

So Kirkpatrick Sale's SDS book is probably still, overall, the best book about 1960's white New Left Movement and SDS history that was ever published, despite the fact that Kirkpatrick Sale, himself, had not been a participant in any SDS activism during the 1960's.

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 82

 Now fast forwarding (to where I was dropped off in the 1970's, by the most recent hitched ride on Broad Ripple Avenue in Indianapolis, near Broad Ripple H.S.), after including the interlude of my recollections of what I experienced in Naptown a decade before as a teenager, in this On The Road In The 1970's memoir:

With my overnight hike knapsack from my Boy Scout days on my back again, I walked down the street and stopped in front of the Broad Ripple High School building (which looked smaller in size, when I was now in my twenties in the 1970's, than how I had then remembered it looking the last time I was there in the early 1960's) shotly after the 3 p.m. release time of its 1970's students.

After recalling how little of what happened in the USA, historically, and to me, personally, in the years between 1964 and this point in the 1970's was foreseen in 1964 by me, and most of my generation of post-World War II baby-boomers, I started to walk back east towards Broad Ripple Village and College Avenue.

By this time in my hitchhiking back from the West Coast, I had no change left in my pocket. So to obtain the change I needed to catch a bus going to Downtown Indianapolis, where I could hang out in the Indianapolis main Central Public Library building, when it became dark outside, until the library closed at 8 or 9 p.m., before trying to hitch a ride east on U.S. 40, I began to panhandle the people walking by me on Broad Ripple Avenue. Hopefully, a hitched ride on U.S. 40 would take me onto Interstate 469 and towards Interstate 69; which would eventually get me into a campus town in Michigan, in which an old womanfriend of mine then still lived.

Prior to the late 1970's, when most city or state government welfare departments/social services department in the Northeast and Midwest still provided home relief and found individual residential units or apartments for homeless individuals in their states who no longer lived with parents or relatives, it was actually more common for most white panhandlers on Midwest streets to be a white hippie woman or man in their late teeens or 20's than a white homeless man in his 30's, 40's or 50's.

So, when I stopped to panhandle in Broad Ripple Village on Broad Ripple Avenue in the mid-1970's, besides being the only long-haired, white bearded male hippie there at that moment, I also did not have to compete on the street with any homeless older white panhandling men to obtain the few coins I then needed. Nor, because Indianapolis's neighborhoods still seemed as racially segregated in the mid-1970's as they had been in the early 1960's, did I have to compete with any homeless older African-American panhandling men to obtain funds for my bus fare downtown.

Yet surprisingly, almost cosmically, only a few minutes after I began to panhandle, an elderly stranger approached me and gave me even more money than I then needed to pay for my bus fare to go to Downtown Indianapolis's central library for the evening. Taking out a $5 bill (which was then the equivalent of around $25 in 2021 U.S. dollars), the elderly, gray-haired white man (who looked like he was in his late 50's or early 60's, wore glasses and was dressed in a culturally straight businessman's suit), with a look of pity, said to me, in a sad tone: "My son lives the same way you do. So I'd like to give you this money that might help you out. Because I worry about my son and hope that someone helps him out, wherever he now is."

And then he handed me the $5 dollar bill.

Touched both by this elderly businessman-type's unexpected personal generosity and his concern for his white hippie or white freak son, who apparently had rejected and dropped out of white upper-middle-class society, I thanked him very much, praised him for his generosity, and also said softly to him: "There are a lot of people like your son and me living differently than our parents did these days. And people like your son and me treat each other as brothers and sisters. So I wouldn't worry too much about your son."

"I hope you're right," the elderly, culturally straight businessman replied, in a sad voice which sounded like I hadn't really convinced him that he shouldn't still be worrying about how his own son was surviving these days, as he walked away from me.

No longer needing to spend time panhandling on Broad Ripple Avenue in Broad Ripple Village, after receiving the $5 dollar bill from the generous, elderly stranger, I walked in the opposite direction of the direction he was walking, broke the $5 dollar bill by buying a candy bar in one of the stores on the block, in order to get some change in coins, and then hopped on the next College Avenue bus that was heading towards Downtown Indianapolis. And, after getting some cheap snack from one of the stores near the Indianapolis Public Library's main central library branch, I spent the evening inside the central library building, until it closed up for the night, at either 8 p.m. or 9 p.m.

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 81

By the end of June 1964, I was living back in Queens again and no longer living in Indianapolis. And, in retrospect, if U.M. & M had not been willing to let my father move back to some lower-paying job in "the Firm" in Manhattan (and I had then spent my senior year of high school at Broad Ripple H.S. in Indianapolis, instead of at Flushing High School in Queens), it's doubtful that Columbia University's undergraduate Columbia College would have admitted me--even with Mrs. Griggs's recommendation letter.

The Broad Ripple H.S. administrators apparently indicated, by correspondence to the Flushing High School administration clerks, that, under their school's letter-grading system, an "A" report card final letter grade for a class was equivalent to a "94 to 100 percent" mark; and a "B" report card final letter grade for a class was equivalent to an "87 to 93 percent" mark. So the Flushing H.S. clerks, who "translated" my class final grade letter marks from my three terms at Broad Ripple H.S. into the numerical final grade percentile number system that New York City's public school system used, magically transformed all my "A"'s at Broad Ripple into "97"'s and all my "B"'s at Broad Ripple into "90"'s.

And as a result of this numerical inflation of the final grades for each class I took at Broad Ripple, my high school academic grade average and senior class ranking status at Flushing H.S. rose much higher than what my high school academic grade average and senior class ranking would have been if I had attended Broad Ripple during my senior year and ended up graduating in Broad Ripple H.S.'s classs of 1965, rather than Flushing H.S.'s class of 1965, would have been.

So, despite Mrs. Grigg's recommendation, it's likely that the Columbia College admissions office would have considered my high school academic grade average and class ranking position, as well as my SAT verbal and math test result scores not high enough to "merit" my being admitted into Columbia College's Class of 1969, were it not for the inflation of my grades that moving from Indianapolis to New York City produced on my school record card.

Since, as it turned out historically, I was the Columbia College sophomore who, in the Spring of 1967, first discovered Columbia University's institutional connection to the Pentagon's Institute for Defense Analyses [IDA] weapons research think-tank (a discovery that eventually helped spark the 1968 Columbia University Student Revolt), my family's move from Indianapolis back to New York City in late June 1964 turned out to have some 1960's historical significance.

But if my family hadn't moved back to New York City, I likely would have spent my senior year at Broad Ripple H.S. and in Indianapolis taking a high school driver's education course, learning to drive at a younger age and getting more into cars; before likely just enrolling at Indiana University in the Fall of 1965 and spending the next 4 years at a much less politically alive and less politically radicalized campus scene than the campus scene that existed at Columbia between 1965 and 1969.  

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 80

 During the last few months of living in Indianapolis, I also developed a crush on the one other Broad Ripple H.S. marching band member, a white high school sophomore woman, who lived, with her older sisters and parents in a house her parents owned, on the same block where I lived in the part of the duplex house that my parents rented.

Her mother seemed to feel that, as a sophomore high school woman, she was still too tomboyish and may have feared that she might end up becoming a lesbian (in an early 1960's historical period when the U.S. mass media and many U.S. psychiatrists seemed to regard woman who were attracted to other women sexually or emotionally as being in need of being "cured" by psychiatric treatment, etc.); unless she began showing more interest in using make-up, dressing up and trying to attract boys to date; instead of then still being more interested in athletics and playing the trumpet in the band.

So one Spring morning in 1964, on a day when she happened to be driving her daughter to school while I was walking on the sidewalk to the bus stop on College Avenue, I was surprised when my "bandmate"'s mother, who seemed to be in her late 40's, pulled her car up beside me on the sidewalk; and then invited me to hop into the car and get a lift, along with her daughter, uptown to Broad Ripple High School.

Yet after we reached the high school and her mother dropped her and me off together in the front of the school building, I still didn't get any indication from the "bandmate" from my block that she was particularly interested, herself, in getting to know me better. And, although by this time I realized I had a crush on her, thought her face pretty despite her not using lipstick and make-up, and was physically attracted to her, the thought didn't even cross my mind that I might ask her if she wished to go with me to Broad Ripple High School's "Junior Prom," that year.

In New York City, the public high schools had "Senior Proms" each year for the high school seniors who were graduating that June; but not also "Junior Proms," for the high school juniors, who weren't graduating that June. Broad Ripple H.S., however, held a "Junior Prom" each year.

Yet, by the second term of my junior year in high school, attending either a high school "Junior Prom" or, during the next year, a high school "Senior Prom," was not something I felt I would enjoy doing; and in my junior year at Broad Ripple H.S., the thought of attending its "Junior Prom" was not one that I ever even considered.

So when, surprisingly, I received, in the mail at home, some kind of an invitation in late May, from one of the white high school women who had been in one of my English "G" classes, inviting me to a "pre-Junior Prom" party that she was holding, I was not glad to have received the invitation because I had never considered going to the "Junior Prom," itself. In addition, I don't think I had ever had any kind of one-on-one conversation with this particular English G classmate inside or outside school during the three terms I had attended Broad Ripple and had never felt any particular interest in getting to know her better.

But I was able to escape going to a "pre-Junior Prom" party, that I assumed I would likely find uninteresting for me, by sending her, by mail, an RSVP note which thanked her for the invitation, but indicated that I was unable to attend her party "due to other plans;" although I likely spent the evening and night of her party and the "Junior Prom" in 1964, just staying at home and watching TV.

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 79

My main memory, decades later, from April and May 1964 of my junior year at Broad Ripple High School is that, as did other members of the high school's band, I memorized my instrumental part of "The 500" song, that some composer had especially written for Broad Ripple H.S.'s marching band to play that year; when marching in the annual Downtown Indianapolis 500 Parade, which was held each year before the Indianapolis 500 Speedway automobile race on Memorial Day.

The teacher who taught the Band classes and was the Broad Ripple H.S. Band Director, Mr. Decker, had been given a copy of "The 500" song music scores for each musical instrument part by the composer; and Mr. Decker was very enthusiastic and excited about the fact that his high school band was to be the first one to ever perform this song at an annual Indianapolis 500 Parade.

Earlier in the semester, Mr. Decker had also arranged, in an enthusiastic way, for the Broad Ripple band to spend a weekday afternoon out-of-school, in order to play some band songs at the Indianapolis School for the Blind. And I found it inspiring, myself, to see how attentively and eagerly the students at that school for young people with visual disabilities listend to our school band's performance and applauded us so appreciatively.

In addition, there were two other daytime events in which I remember performing with Broad Ripple H.S.'s marching band outside of school, after the weather became warm, during April and May of 1964. One event was where our school band played with other schools' bands on a weekend day, while sitting on chairs around Monument Circle in Downtown Indianapolis.

And the other outdoor weekend day event, outside of school, that I recall, took place on a very hot afternoon in late May 1964; when our band marched into Broad Ripple Park (which was across the street from Broad Ripple High school's building) along with Broad Ripple High School's Junior ROTC unit, to provide some band music for some kind of Memorial Day-related event. At this event a white right-wing American Legion-type World War II veteran speaker, who appeared to be in his late 40's gave a speech that I remember feeling, at the time, was too pro-militaristic and too right-wing anti-communist, from my anti-communist liberal point of view at that time.

Also, in April and May of 1964, Broad Ripple's marching band began practicing its marching formations to Sousa marches and the "Hail To Broad Ripple" school song for the upcoming Fall 1964 high school football half-time shows, under the marching band leadership of Bill. The Music Department Director, Mr. Posten, and the Band Director, Mr. Decker, had selected Bill for the honor of succeeding Dick as the Broad Ripple High School's Drum Major for the 1964-1965 school year.

Because Bill had played alto saxophone a few seats away from me in Band class and at various band school performances at which I was playing tenor saxophone in the band, I was better acquainted with him than I had been with the previous band drum major, Dick. And I thought that Bill--who was enthusiastic about being selected as the next school year's drum major and as musically talented as Dick--was going to be a more popular drum major than Dick had bbeen with most members of the band. Because Bill had always related to everybody else in the band class in more interpersonally sensitive, friendlier and less authoritarian ways.

But, having moved back to New York City with my family by mid-June of 1964, I never did see what kind of a Broad Ripple High School band drum major Bill did turn out to be during the Fall 1964 high school football season in Indianapolis.  

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 78

 In the Spring of 1964, I assumed that, if I did apply for admission to Columbia College during my senior year in the Fall of 1964, it was unlikely that such a selective college would admit me. But NYU-Uptown's undergraduate college (which then had more dormitories on its campus than did NYU-Downtown's Washington Square campus did) had a reputation for being an undergraduate college for "dumb rich students," whose high school grade averages were too low to gain admittance to the then-more slective undergraduate CUNY commuter schools like CCNY or an Ivy League undergraduate college like Columbia College.

So I assumed, in the Spring of 1964, that even if I applied and was rejected for admission to Columbia College in the Fall of 1964, I would still have the option of attending NYU-Uptown's undergraduate college, if I didn't want to just attend Indiana University. Because NYU-Uptown was likely to consider me "less dumb" than the usual type of high school seniors who applied to or attended NYU-Uptown's undergarudate college in the early 1960's.

In retrospect, if I had realized in the Spring of 1964 that, despite Barnard College being across the street from Columbia University's campus, the undergraduate classes at Columbia College were generally much more "males-only" and less co-educational than the academic classes in the public schools I had always attended or the academic classes at NYU-Uptown, I probably would have just only had my PSAT exam score results just sent to NYU--even though Columbia College's catalog of course offerings looked more intellectually interesting than NYU's.

Realistically, though, if my family hadn't ended up moving back to New York City by the Summer of 1964, I likely would have just ended up enrolling at Indiana University in the Fall of 1965 (despite my desire to go to college in NYC), because my father's income would not have been high enough in the Fall of 1965 for me to be able to afford, even with the aid fo student loans, the cost of tuition, dormitory housing and travel to New York City from Indianapolis during my freshman year at either Columbia or NYU, given the lack of the $500/year New York State Regents cholarship that I only became qualified to receive by living in New York State rather than in Indiana.

In the Spring of 1964, the only particular thing I associated with the University of California-Berkeley was that its college football team generally lost more NCAA Pacific Coast League college football games than it won. So, prior to the Fall 1964 student revolt in Berkeley, the though ot possibly applying to University of California-Berkeley never even crossed my mind, despite my mother's chidless older sister and her husband then living near Berkeley.

Yet if I then had not been mainly focused on living in New York City near the world of theater during my college undergraduate years if possible, I might have been able to figure out a way to gain eligibility for California's in-state tuition to UC-Berkeley that residents of California enjoyed. By, perhaps, utilizing my aunt and uncle's California residential address when applying to the University of California-Berkeley.

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 77

The second occasion when I entered a Butler University campus building in the Spring of 1964 was on a sunny Saturday when, along with some of the other eventually college-bound high school juniors from Broad Ripple (and perhaps from some other local high schools), I spent the day inside a classroom in one of Butler University's academic buildings; taking the PSAT class-biased and racially-biased standardized "idiot test" exams.

In the early 1960's, the PSAT tests were standarized tests (purportedly measuring a college-bound high school junior's verbal and mathematics knowledge, aptitude and intelligence), similar to the SAT standardized tests that high school seniors took during their fall terms, in order to have SAT exam results, then required by all the undergraduate colleges, they wished to be submitted in a timely way with their applications for college admission.

The PSAT exam results one scored during the spring of one's junior years were also submitted to the colleges a junior then thought he or she would apply to. But taking the PSAT was seen in the early 1960's more as a way of practicing for the SAT exams one would take in one's senior year. Because, in determining whether or not a college would admit you as a matriculated freshman, it was the SAT scores you had which was used to help finally determine whether a selective college would admit you--not your PSAT scores.

In the Spring of 1964, I had already examined the information about various U.S. colleges and universities contained in the most recent edition of Lovejoy's College Guide and read through the college catalog of Indiana University, which my sister was then attending, before I took the PSAT exams in the academic building on Butler University's campus.

And, at the time I took the PSAT exam in the second semester of my junior year of high school, Indiana University, Columbia College of Columbia University and New York University were the three colleges that I had indicated I wanted my PSAT standardized test results sent to, at that time.

During the late 1950's and early 1960's, I had watched on a fairly regular weekly basis, on every Sunday afternoon/early evening, "The G.E. College Bowl" television show, in which two teams of four undergraduate students from two different colleges or universities competed against each other; to see which college or university undergraduate team could answer correctly and most quickly the various intellectual/academic trivia questions that the show's moderator, Allen Ludden, would read. And, as part of the "G.E. College Bowl" television show, some film footage of campus scenes, of each of the two colleges whose schools were competing that week, were shown for a few minutes to viewers.

So, although there were no youtube videos advertising a particular U.S. college or university's campus visual scenes, in a way that might "sell" the idea to a high school student of applying for admissions to that particular school, available (like there is in the 21st-century), in the Spring of 1964 I did have a little familiarity with how other U.S. college campuses, besides Indiana University's, Butler University's or Queens College's campuses (that I had all personally been to) looked like.

Before the Spring of 1964, I had always associated going to college, after graduating from a public high school, with going away to college and living away from home while attending college; rather than just going to a commuter college for four years, while still living at home with my parents.

So when I looked through Lovejoy's College Guide, in the Spring of 1964, I don't think I even considered reading its description of Butler University; because that college was too close to the neighborhood in which I lived with my parents in Indianapolis; and, in the Spring of 1964, not just commuting when I lived so close to Butler University and, instead living in a Butler U. dormitory, would have made no sense to me. Even if I hadn't already been associating going to college with not being a commuting student.

So, for obvious reasons, if I ended up attending college in Indiana, beginning  in the Fall of 1965, Indiana University, with its in-state tuition for Indiana residents, its impressive-looking campus and its longer distance away from the neighborhood in which my parents lived and from where I attended Broad Ripple H.S., was where I was going to apply to. And that was why my PSAT scores were sent to Indiana University in the Spring of 1964.

Another reason why, if I ended up going to college in Indiana, I felt, in the Spring of 1964, that Indiana University was the university I would be applying to, was because many more young people attended a public state "Big Ten" university, like Indiana University, than the number of young people who attended smaller, private liberal colleges like Swarthmore, Oberlin or Antioch, etc. And, already seeing myself as some kind of writer, playwright or possible journalist, whose "thing" was to be an observer of people, who wrote the truth in a way that changed U.S. society in a more democratic direction, it seemed to make more sense for me to go to college where there were a lot of students; and, consequently, a greater variety of individual young people around me than a private small college, with only a limited number of young people to observe, would provide.

In addition, because the number of students attending a small private college was so much less than the number of students attending a large state university like Indiana University, I felt, in the Spring of 1964, that at IU I would be more likely to find other students to befriend and less closely noticed or monitored by either less non-conformist classmates or faculty members, than I would probably be if I attended a small private college.

Also, Indiana University had a Big Ten football team and a big football stadium, which most small private colleges lacked; and, in the Spring of 1964, I was still into being an NCAA college football fan who associated the going-away college experience with spending, at least five Saturday afternoons each Fall, sitting in your university's football stadium, with a lot of other students, and rooting for your collegel's football team. Even though, despite being in Broad Ripple High School's marching band, I don't think, by the Spring of 1964, I particularly envisioned myself as someone who would be in in Indiana University's Marching Band while attending there.

Yet, by the Spring of 1964, I also did not particularly want to attend college at a university in which most of the students were in college fraternities and sororities, and where fraternities and sororities dominated campus life. But in the early 1960's, Indiana University was still a university in which student campus life seemed to be dominated by the frat and sorority student members.

When reading through the Lovejoy's College Guide book pages in the Spring of 1964, I can recall generally checking out the information in the book which indicated the percentage of students at each college who were members of fraternities or sororities. Because, by that time, I felt that college fraternities and sororities were inherently undemocratic entities; since they allowed their members to exclude, even in a racially or religiously discriminatory way, anyone they didn't want to let into their social clubs.

So perhaps one reason I then requested that my PSAT exam score results be sent to Columbia and NYU, as well as to Indiana University (despite still then assuming that IU was where I would end up enrolling as a freshman in September of 1965), was because campus life at neither Columbia University nor NYU appeared to be as fraternity and sorority-dominated as Indiana University's campus life then was?

Yet the main reason I think I requested my PSAT exam results also be sent to Columbia College and NYU, as well as to IU, was because, by that time, I think I had then concluded that going away to college in New York City, in the Fall of 1965, would likely turn out to be a more intellectually stimulating, interesting and emotionally satisfying experience for me than just going away to college in Bloomington, Indiana would turn out to be.

In retrospect, there seemed to be two reasons for my conclusion, in the Spring of 1964, that going away to college in New York City might make more sense for me than just going away to college at Indiana University in Bloomington.

The first reason was that, after I began thinking of myself as a possible aspiring playwright in the theater world, it seemed to me that--despite Indiana University's reputation as being a university with an excellent theater arts departnet--it made more sense for me to, if I could, attend college in the city where the most Broadway, off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway theatrical productions were staged in the early 1960's: New York City. Why waste four years, after entering college in the Fall of 1965 before being able to watch live performances of plays in Manhattan and checking-out Manhattan's theater world activity on a regular basis, when, if I was attending Columbia or NYU in New York city, I would be able to begin doing the same thing as early as the Fall of 1965?

The second reason that I concluded, in the Spring of 1964, that applying to two colleges in New York City, like Columbia and NYU, made more sense for me (as a potential alternative to just attending IU) was possibly, in retrospect, that (because I was still then unaware of the history of Palestinian people or Arab people's history) I still did not question the validity of the liberal Zionist ideology I had been indoctrinated with in Hebrew School, prior to my birthday. And, as a member of a family of assimilated Jewish religious background, I then felt it would be more intellectually interesting to attend a college in which a larger percentage of the students would be of assimilated Jewish religious background than the percentage of students of assimilated Jewish religious background that there then was at Indiana University.

When reading through the Lovejoy's College Guide book, my recollection is that in that book there was some indication as to which U.S. universities or colleges had Hillel student chapters with larger number of students. So that may have been where I might have noticed that Columbia and NYU then had a greater percentage of students of assimilated Jewish religious background than did IU, in the early 1960's.

Because Columbia University's liberal arts undergraduate Columbia College catalog seemed to indicate that Columbia College offered more interesting college courses than what the courses that the catalog of NYU's then-uptown undergraduate college in the Bronx offered--and because Columbia also had a college football team, while NYU no longer had a college football team in the early 1960's--Columbia College, not NYU-Uptown was the one I was hoping to get admitted into more in the Spring of 1964, when I had my PSAT exam result scores sent there.

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 76

Although it took less than a half-hour to walk west to Butler University's campus from where I lived in Indianapolis, in the Spring of 1964 I only entered the inside of Butler University building on two occasions.

On once occasion, I walked to the Butler University Fieldhouse athletic arena/indoor stadium, where the Indiana state high school basketball teams' regional, semi-finals and finals tournament championship basketball games, as well as the Indianapolis sectional tournament basketball games, were played each spring.

Because Broad Ripple High School's basketball team had won the Indiianapolis Sectional tournament the previous year, I was hoping to, in-person in Butler University's fieldhouse, see Broad Ripple's basketball team win the Sectionals again in the Spring of 1964. But that did not happen. And after watching Broad Ripple High School's basketball team get eliminated from the Indianapolis Sectional basketball event in the Butler University arena, I never entered that particular Butler University building again in 1964, or at anytime during the following decades.

 

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 75

There still wasn't much very visible Civil Rights Movement protest activity going on in Indianapolis in the Spring of 1964 that I was aware of. So my main recollection of what was happening, on an historical political level, in Indianapolis and in Indiana during the first six months of 1964 is that, during that period, the then-white segregationist Democratic governor of Alabama, George Wallace, came to Indiana and campaigned for the 1964 Democratic presidential nomination in Indiana's 1964 Democratic Party presidential primary; on a platform which opposed enactment of the proposed 1964 Civil Rights Act, that would legally prohibit states in the South from enforcing any of their  Jim Crow state laws allowing public accomodations like hotels, motels, restaurants, stores, etc. to discriminate against African-Americans on the basis of race.

The white segregationist Democratic Party presidential primary candidate Wallace--who had previously gained a lot of mass media publicity for defying a federal court decision that required the University of Alabama to end its institutionally racist policy of still refusing to allow any African-American college students to attend that publicly-funded state university in the early 1960's--was expected to attact a lot of white voters in the 1964 Democratic Party presidential primaries of the states in the South. Especially in those Southern states where, before enactment of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, large numbers of African-Americans were being blocked from being able to vote, by various state rules that were applied in a racially discriminatory way by local and state officials.

But what ended up surprising a lot of people in 1964 was that in the Democratic Party's presidential primaries in some states in the North, like Indiana, where legalized segregation did not exist, Wallace was also able to attract a lot of white voters in 1964; although not enough votes to win the 1964 Democratic Party presidential primary in Indiana.

Despite its only morning daily newspaper, the Indianapolis Star, being then-owned by the anti-communist, right-wing extremist publisher, Pulliam (who backed the GOP national convention's 1964 presidential nominee and opponent of enactment of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Barry Goldwater, in 1964) and being the city in which the anti-communist right-wing (and then-still politically influential) American Legion had its headquarters in 1964, the majority of Democratic voters who lived in Indianapolis in 1964 still seemed to be supporters of LBJ's wing of the Democratic Party in the Spring of 1964.

So when the then-Democratic Governor of Indiana in the Spring of 1964, Matthew Welsh (who then lived in Indiana's Governor's Mansion on North Meridian Street in Indianapolis, less than two miles southwest from the neighborhood around East 52nd Street and College Avenue where my parents and I then lived), was put on the Democratic Party's presidential primary ballot--as a "favorite son" stand-in candidate for LBJ--to make sure that the primary would not automatically be won by Wallace because he had no other opponent campaigning against him, the majority of Indiana's 1964 Democratic Party primary voters voted against the white segregationist Wallace in 1964.

The fact that a white segregationist Democratic governor from the South, like George Wallace, could come to a Northern state like Indidana and actually win as many votes (nearly 30 percent) as he did in the Spring 1964 Democratic Party presidential primary in Indiana, also surprised me, somewhat.

Yet because Wallace did not actually win the 1964 Democratic presidential primary in Indiana, despite the degree to which right-wing conservative media political influence in the state seemed much greater than it had been in the state of New York, I also thought, in the Spring of 1964, that George Wallace would always only be no more than a politician who voters of just one region of the USA, the South, would ever end up casting voters for, in any future U.S. presidential campaigns by Wallace. In retrospect, though, I think I did not anticipate in 1964 that, when Wallace did run again for U.S. president as a third-party candidate, he would be able to attract as many white voters in states outside of the Southern region, as he did in the November 1968 election.  

 

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 74

 On weekends in the Spring of 1964, my father continued to drive me and my mother (and, occasionally, my sister, if she were visiting us during some weekend) from Indianapolis up to Chicago and back, in one day, about once a month, on either a Saturday or Sunday.

And on other Sundays, about once every six weeks, my father would drive me and my mother from Indianapolis to Bloomington, via different state highway routes that I would find on my Indiana state road map (like via "Old Route 37" and State Highway 135, for example), where we would usually spend a few hours eating lunch with my sister in some Bloomington restaurant in the town; before then driving back up to "Naptown."

In additon, on one weekend day, my father drove my mother and me to the reservoir near Fort Harrison, where, because I was then still into using my 8mm Kodak Brownie camera, I took 8mm moving pictures of the scenes around the reservoir.

Only on one occasion, though, did my father drive me and my mother to some state park that was located west of Indianapolis, during the Spring of 1964. And, because I was then still an anti-communist liberal, who considered myself to be neither a socialist, a communist, an anarchist nor a political "radical" in my politics, I did not suggest to my parents that we visit where Eugene V. Debs had lived in Terre Haute, Indiana; although I had previously read in Irving Stone's novel, Clarence Darrrow For The Defense, how Clarence Darrow had defended Deb at one of Debs's trials.

Yet because I was still really into collecting tourist road maps from the states located in the U.S. West, I can recall spending a lot of time planning some kind of possible Summer 1964 "travel to the West" vacation for my family to take, during this time. According to the plan I developed, we would drive west on U.S. Highway 40, and whichever part of Interstate 70 was then completed, and spend time stopping in and exploring St. Louis, Kansas City, Denver and Salt Lake City, before returning back by the same route to Indianapolis.

Because my family ended up moving back to New York City from Indianapolis in the Summer of 1964, however, it wasn't until the coast-to-coast Greyhound bus and hichhiking trip of the following decade (that I've been writing about in this "On The Road In The 1970's" blog so far, up to the point where I was hitchhiking back east and standing on the street in front of Broad Ripple High school in Indianapolis again, before I began recalling my early 1960's experience in "Naptown," in this interlude section), that I actually did see some of the western cities like St. Louis and Salt Lake City, that I had originally hoped to check ou in the Summer of 1964.

One reason I think I was getting more of a wanderlust and a travel bug, after living for over a year in Indianapolis, is that, by early 1964, I was feeling that the particular neighborhood I was living in was too "dead" and boring a neighborhood compared, not only to most New York City neighborhoods, but possibly to other neighborhoods in Indianapolis where my parents might be able to rent a hourse for our family to live in. And I can recall sending some time in early 1964 reading through the pages of the Real Estate section of the Indianapolis Star newspaper's Sunday edition, looking to see if there were houses in some other Indianapolis neighborhoods, whose rent my father could afford to pay, in which the neighborhoods might be more interesting and lively.

But my parents ended up never bothering to look for a house to possibly rent in a different, hopefully, livelier Indianapolis neighborhood, in the Spring of 1964. Probably because, by the end of the spring, my father and mother had both decided that they preferred to live in New York City again, even if it meant my father having to accept a salary cut from UM &M for the job opening in Manhattan that they ended up offering him, because he had served the same corporation loyally for around 35 years, since he started working for "The Firm" at the lowest-paying menial job they had, at the age of 16, in 1927.

And because a few of the higher-ups in the company also still apparently realized they had been able to rise higher in the UM &M hierarchy, because some of the work assignments which they had gotten praise for doing efficiently, had actually been done by my father; during the years before he had agreed to move to Indianapolis with his family, when he was nearly 52 years-of-age. 

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 73

Decades later, the only memory I now still have related to being in Mrs. Deering's English "G" class during the spring term of my junior year at Broad Ripple H.S. in 1964 (aside from still feeling a physical attraction to the somewhat intellectual high school woman sitting just across from me in the classroom, Mary, whom I considered pretty, but who never indicated any interest in having me ask her out for a date) was researching and writing a long term paper for this class about the U.S. playwright Arthur Miller's pre-1964 life, plays and books.

Much of the research I did for this Arthur Miller term paper was done on a few Saturdays that spring that I spent at Indianapolis's main library central branch, in Downtown Indianapolis. To go back and forth to the Downtown library, where I spent the Saturdays during the research, I took the College Avenue bus each way.

Most of my research time I spent at the library involved looking up Arthur Miller's name in the Reader's Guide To Periodical Literature books that were published between 1945 and 1964, requesting from the library reference desk the issues of magazines which contained what I felt were the most interesting articles related to Arthur Miller's life and literary work, and then writing notes containing the information some of these articles included, on index cards.

Then, after filling these index cards with my notes from going through various magazine articles, I next went through the Book Review Digest index reference books, for the period between 1945 and 1964, that were in the library; and I copied a lot of quotes from the excerpts of reviews written by some of the critics of all of Arthur MIller's pre-1964 literary work, onto index cards.

And before eventually utilizing the index card notes I had made in the central Indianapolis public library in writingthe Arthur Miller term paper, I read Miller's Focus novel about anti-Semitism, his other pre-1946 book and his All My Sons, Death of A Salesman, The Crucible and View From The Bridge play texts, that had been published in individual books or an anthology of post-World War II "best" plays.

My recollection is that I likely got a B-plus or an A-minus grade from Mrs. Deering for writing the "Arthur Miller" term paper. But I think she indicated that I should have included less quotes from the review excerpts I had obtained from the Book Review Digest and more discussion about Arthur Miller's literary work that reflected my own thoughts.

Yet what probably impacted my life more, from writing the Arthur Miller term paper in the spring of 1964, is that it reinforced my assumption that, if I was going to be a high school social studies teacher, who related to his students like the Mr. Novak character did on the U.S. television series, in my spare time I would attempt to also write dramas for the Broadway theater and, perhaps, novels. And the dramas I would write would be ones with morally-oriented social themes, like Arthur Miller's plays, rather than the kind of plays Tennessee Williams wrote during the late 1940's and 1950's.

What I didn't realize in 1964, of course, was that by the mid-1960's the chance that a writer from the affluent white working-class with no family or personal connections to the theatrical world--like me--would ever be able to find some Broadway theatrical producer willing to produce his or her play (especially if it was a social drama that was too politically critical of the existing U.S. capitalist and imperialist society) was already about "zilch."

And for me to have somehow assumed in the spring of 1964 that it was a realistic possibility--if I became a white social studies teacher in a public high school within an African-American urban ghetto who also wrote plays in my spare time--that I could, like Arthur Miller, eventually have one of my plays produced on Broadway, was to have believed in some kind of Cinderalla-like fantasy. For, by the 1960's, that kind of artistic opportunity for the vast majority of white working-class people who wished to be playwrights in the USA did not exist in the commercial bourgeois theater world.  

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 72

After the Beatles came to the USA for the first time and first appeared on the Ed Sullivan Sunday night CBS television show in early 1964, of course, the impact of EMI/Capitol Records's "Beatlemania" media promotional campaign blitz, and the national access to U.S. television the "Brit Invaders" had received, became more evident in the hallways of Broad Ripple High School in Indianapolis.

Mostly freshman and sophomore white high school women students--who usually weren't in the "G" classes of the more academically-higher-achieving students--could now be seen wearing buttons with pictures of the individual members of the Beatles or overheard chattering about "how cute Paul is" or "how cute John is," etc.

Initially, in early 1964, though the "Beatlemania" that the corporate mass media helped create, didn't seem to have much impact on most of the high school guys at Broad Ripple, most members of the high school band, most of the junior and senior class members or most of the students in the classes of the more academically-higher-achieving students.

And initially, in early 1964, the guys who were on the school's sports teams, involved most actively in the school clubs or in the school's orchestra, singing groups or band did not all immediately purchase electric guitars and begin forming their own Beatles-imitation group rock bands, that spent hours of time after school practicing.

Over the next few years, however, as the AM radio stations continued to play regularly Beatles' hit vinyl records again and again and Beatles movies like "Hard Day's Night" and "Help" hit the movie theaters, I imagine that large numbers of the guys at schools like Broad Ripple High School did, however, soon eventually end up buying electric guitars and forming Beatles-imitation rock bands.

I liked folk music, had seen Peter, Paul and Mary perform on television and had occasionally watched the Hootenanny folk music show on ABC-TV that Jack Linkletter hosted (which did not allow Pete Seeger to appear on the show, for political reasons), prior to The Beatles first arriving in the USA in early 1964.

But in early 1964, I had still never heard of either Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez or Bob Dylan, because I hadn't been following what was being written about early 1960's folk music "commercial boom" in either newspapers or magazines; and had also never heard of publications like Sing-Out magazine or Broadside magazine before the Brit Rock invasion happened.

Yet because I was still into Broadway musical songs a lot and had, by then been developing some consciousness about the power of mass media to articially create the instant popularity of entertainers like The Beatles, I pretty much didn't listen too much to or check out the recordings they were making, until 1965. And the only thing I felt was particularly different about The Beatles group, compared to the pop singers whose 45 rpm records I had listened to in the late 1950's, was that they were individual guys who let their hair grow much longer than the 1950's singers, as a gimmick to make them appear more unusual than the previous pop singers.

And even in 1966, when I was again living in New York City, and just happened to be on the same IRT #7 subway train that was transporting a lot of junior high school and high-school white women teeny-boppers, wearing "Beatlemania" buttons, out to Shea Stadium in Flushing Meadows, Queens, to scream during a live Beatles outdoor concert there, I still tended to feel that, most of The Beatles' fans were much less intellectually, culturally or politically hip than were most of Dylan's pre-1966 folk music fans.

On The Road In the 1970's: Part 71

The second memory I still have of my experience in Mr. Posten's Boys Chorus I class during my junior year at Broad Ripple High School is that, before class, while we were all waiting for Mr. Posten to eventually appear in the classroom to lead the mostly sophomore students (who were mostly not very interested in singing and music), there was a lot of discussion about the initial Sonny Liston vs. "Cassius Clay" heavyweight champion boxing match of early 1964. Both before the professional fight and after "Cassius Clay"'s 7th-round upset victory.

Living in New York City in the 1950's and early 1960's, while attending elementary school and junior high school in Queens, I was--like most of the other guys in school--a TV addict who watched a lot of television professional boxing matches each week that were then on either network television or the local New York City television stations. On shows like the Gillette Friday night "Fight of the Week" and a local TV show that televised professional boxing matches from St. Nicholas Arena in New York City.

My parents weren't as into watching the Friday night shows or the St. Nicholas Arena boxing matches on television as I was in the late 1950's and early 1960's. But our family had two black and white television sets, one with a 24-inch screen in the living room, that my parents would watch, and one, with a 12-inch television screen in my room, which I could watch when I wasn't interested in what my parents were watching in the living room. So I was generally able to go into my own room and watch the televised boxing matches whenever I wanted to, when at home.

In addition, when I was in elementary school and junior high school in the 1950's and early 1960's, I was heavily into reading current and back issues of Sport magazine and reading the sports pages of two or three daily and Sunday newspapers of New York City, on a regular basis. In addition, I was also into reading many public library book biographies or autobiographies of sports figures, like professional boxing champions or historical books about sports like professional boxing, fictional books for teenage readers with sports themes written by writers like John Tunis and book anthologies of "The Best Sports Stories" from a particular year, that had previously been published in different U.S. magazines or U.S. newspaper sports sections.

So, although I had never had any interest in, personally, spending any portion of my time outside of public school learning to box (so I could compete in amateur contests like the Golden Gloves, etc.) as a teenager before I was in high school, in 1964 I probably still knew as much about the past and current professional boxers and professional boxing history as most other professional boxing fans.

And, despite having read in the newspapers about how Benny "Kid" Paret and Davey Moore were killed in the boxing ring in the early 1960's, it wasn't until after I entered college that I came to feel that professional boxing should be legally banned in the United States. Although before Muhammad Ali retired in the late 1970's, I retained some interest in watching matches in which he participated on television, whenever I lived in an apartment in which there was a television set.

Prior to his first fight with Liston, all the guys in Mr. Posten's Boys Chorus I class, including me, didn't think "Cassius Clay" had a chance to win. Yet most of the other guys in the class spoke about the upcoming Liston-"Clay" boxing match with exciting anticipation. Mainly because, in the years between the time he won his gold medal in boxing for representing the USA in the 1960 Olympics and early 1964, "Cassius Clay" had been seen on television interview shows a lot, rapping and claiming that he was "the greatest," in a poetic, bragging way; at the same time he seemed to be defeating all the other heavyweight boxing opponents he had been matched up with, prior to facing Sonny Liston.

What I, myself, did not realize, before Muhammad Ali fought Liston for the first time in early 1964, was that--besides being a skillful boxer and athlete who also seemed to be, somewhat, like an entertaining clown--Muhammad Ali was apparently, even then, more intellectually hip than he had let on to being, despite probably not being much of a reader at that time. And he had, shrewdly, apparently realized that, if he imitated the braggart personality of some of the 1950's professional white wrestlers like "Gorgeous George," that he had watched on TV as a child and acted, somewhat like a clown, the promoters of professional championship boxing matches would consider him a more "colorful" and entertaining personality than the other potential challengers for Sonny Liston's title.

And, therefore, they would likely then more quickly give him a chance to fight Liston in a professional heavyweight championship title bout.

Having rooted for "Cassius Clay" more because he was the underdog (rather than because I had been particularly impressed with "Cassius Clay"'s pre-publicly-announced conversion to Islam's "rap poetry" and braggart, pre-1964 persona), I was happy that he defeated Liston in 7 rounds in early 1964. At first, though, I didn't understand in 1964 why he had decided to become a Nation of Islam religious adherent.

But after he refused to serve in the U.S. military a few years later, during the Vietnam War Era, I did come to agree that Muhammad Ali was, indeed, "the greatest person," morally, politically and athletically, to ever win the world heavyweight professional boxing championship in 20th-century professional boxing history.

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 70

 I no longer remember whether I was in a Boys Chorus I class that Mr. Posten taught during the second semester of my junior or during the first semester of my junior year. This Boys Chorus I course was one of the music or art-related coures that Broad Ripple required its male students to take in order to receive a diploma. And it was a course I was not particularly interested in taking. But I still have a few particular memories related to being in Mr. Posten's Boys Chorus I class in one of those semesters of my junior year, in which I think most of the other high school guys in the class were still sophomores.

Being in a public school glee club had never particularly interested me, prior to moving to Indianapolis; especially because I had previously been much more interested in both playing basketball, stickball and touch football or older teenager-organized football with the other neighborhood guys in Queens, when not inside school, and playing a musical instrument like the saxophone in a band, than in being part of some kind of school choral group, like a glee club.

Yet I had enjoyed singing songs along with others around the campfire, after each meal in the camp cafeteria, and on long-distance hikes in Boy Scout summer camp; and I also had enjoyed being one of the Boy Scout members who helped lead the other scouts in songs in Troop 363 in Queens between 1960 and the end of 1962. In addition, during the two years before my Bar Mitzvah, I used to regularly attend the junior congregation services that were held in the basement of the Marathon Jewish Community Center synagogue each Saturday morning, fairly regularly during the fall, winter and spring.

To do so, I would have to get dressed up each Saturday morning, walk up the hill to the synogogue that was located about 15 minutes by foot from my family's garden apartment in the Beech Hills Development. And, once there, I would sing the prayers, whose Hebrew texts were printed in the Conservative Jewish prayer book we used, along with the other, mainly pre-13 year-old guys, including my two closest friends at the time, Marc and Eugene.

Also, the synagogue cantor, Mr. Rackoff, who gave me Bar Mitzvah lessons, had felt that I had a good voice. So, besides singing the Haf Torah section at the Sarturday morning religious service when I was bar mitzvahed, I also was assigned to lead the congregation in some of the collective singing of the regular Sabbath service prayers.

But in Mr. Posten's Boys Chorus class, he instructed you to sing songs from the printed music song scores, not in the more natural way I would normally sing a song, but in a more artificial, voice-trained way. For exemple, if you needed to hold a particular word of a song for more than one musical beat, the vowels of the word would need to be pronounced, when singing the word, differently than how you pronounced the word when speaking or when singing naturally.

I could not foresee in my junior year of high school--when the thought that I would spend so much of my leisure time, in the decades after 1966, singing songs that I or other songwriters had written, in the various apartments in which I lived, while accompanying myself on guitar, did not exist in my mind--that  becoming a non-commercially-motivated, amateur protest folk singer-songwriter, rather than a playwright, would be the kind of artist I turned out to be during my life. But even if I had foreseen this, the kind of singing that Mr. Posten taught in this chorus class would not have been that relevant to the style of singing I ended up using in singing both my protest folk songs and songs written by other folks.

Like I may have already indicated, Mr. Posten was a tall, white guy, who seemed to be in his 30's. He had been a drum major of the Indiana University marching band, before later living in New York City for awhile, while obtaining a master's degree in music or music education from Columbia University; and eventually ending up being the teacher who headed Broad Ripple High School's music department in Indianapolis.

Mr. Posten seemed to enjoy the music program-related job he had at Broad Ripple H.S.. He was a high school teacher who seemed also to prioritize spending time working with and interacting a lot with the Broad Ripple students at school whom he considered most musically talented; rather than just seeing his high school music teaching job as being a day job he only did because he couldn't make as much money doing some other music-related job or because he wasn't able to earn a living as a professional musician, concert conductor, composer of music, professional songwriter or professional entertainer.

And, despite sometimes relating to the students in his Boys Chorus I class who weren't much into having to take a required music class in too authoritarian, too strict or too sarcastically humorous or condescending a way, Mr. Posten was a skillful music teacher.

So many decades afer being in Mr. Postn's Boys Chorus I class for a term in my junior year at Broad Ripple High School, I now have only two particular memories of what I experienced, related to taking his class.

My first memory related to his Boys Chorus class is that, besides requiring us to read and sing Irving Berlin's "Say It With Music" song from printed sheet music, Mr. Posten also required us to read and sing a religious song whose lyrics praised Jesus Christ, expressed the religiously sectarian viewpoint that Jesus Christ was the son of God and included something like the phrase "Thy Holy name, be ever blessed, praise, Lord, adoration, Oh, Christ the Lord."

In the early 1960's, however, the Supreme Court had made some court decisions to the effect that the separation of church and state provisions of the U.S. Constitution meant that religion should be kept out of the public schools; and that students should not be required to join other students in saying or listening to religious prayers that did not reflect their own philosophical or religious beliefs.

Because I had been a television daily evening news show junkie and a regular reader of daily newspaper headlines since 1960, I had some familiarity with these early 1960's U.S. Supreme Court decisions. In addition, by late 1963 or early 1964 I had read Paul Blanshard's book about the influence of the Catholic Church in the USA and elsewhere, probably because, when JFK campaigned for U.S. president, there was some discussion on the corporate television airways about whether or not democracy in the USA would be more "endangered" if someone of Catholic religious background was then elected as the first U.S. president of Catholic religious background.

So, as someone who was not of Christian religious background and who then had not yet particularly questioned the assumed conservative Jewish religious or liberal pro-Zionist family tradition I had been born into, until I was attending college, I, naturally, didn't feel it was morally or legally right for Mr. Posten to require me to sing a religious song that praised Jesus Christ, inside a public school classroom. And after Boys Chorus I class one day, I mentioned my objection to Mr. Posten about being required to sing a religious song that contradicted my own religious beliefs in his classroom.

Because I was apparently the first student of Jewish religious background that Mr. Posten instructed in a Boys Chorus class who had ever objected to having to sing a religious song in his public school class, Mr. Posten didn't seem to really comprehend why I was objecting to singing the religious song; and, in order to pass the Boys Chorus I class, I ended up having to continue to sing the religious song in class that I had objected to singing.

But perhaps because I was from New York City, I reminded Mr. Posten of him having lived in the Big Apple when he had attended Columbia University, before returning to teach in Indiana; and for that reason, perhaps, he didn't seem to go out of his way to penalize me with a lower grade for expressing my objection to being required to sing the song that praised Jesus Christ inside his public school classroom, despite the early 1960's U.S. Supreme Court decisions related to separation of church and state issues.

 

 

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 69

In 1964, after the first semester of my junior year of high school in Indianapolis inside Broad Ripple H.S. between February and June, I continued to be in the "G" class for the more academically-oriented high school junior students in English, that Mrs. Deering still taught and in the third-year Spanish class that Mrs. Diaz still taught. But in a "G" class for the more academically-oriented students in Intermediate Algebra II that I continued to be in, my teacher was now a tall guy named Mr. Morgan, who seemed about 15 to 20 years younger than my Intermediate Algebra I "G" class teacher in the previous semester, Mr. Mahin, had been.

As in the fall term, the high school woman student named Sandy still seemed to be the highest-achieving student in this "G" Intermediate Algebra II class that Mr. Morgan taught. But, so many years later, I can't recall anything about what happened inside Mr. Morgan's class during that term. Since there was never any classroom disruption of Mr. Morgan's classroom lessons by any students during the whole term, and because I pretty much did the assigned Intermediate Algebra II homework every day and studied a bit before each scheduled classroom text or quiz, my recollection is that, as in Intermediate Algebra I, I received a final grade of either A or A- from Mr. Morgan in this Intermediate Algebra II course.

In my memory, my second term of 3rd-year Spanish in Mrs. Diaz's "G" class pretty much blends in with the first term. In both terms, I think Mrs. Diaz gave me a final grade of either A- or B-plus, becuase I usually scored around 90 percent on the written Spanish tests and handed in all the homework assignments; although I don't think I was that good at learning to speak the language well enough to have much of a conversation with a native Spanish-speaker.

I now have only two particular memories related to my spring 1964 term in this Spanish language class. One memory is that Mrs. Diaz tried to interest me and my "G" Spanish classmates in joining her during the summer of 1964 in some kind of Spanish language immersion course for U.S. high school students in Mexico City; which would include visiting some Mexican tourist sites, as well as Spanish language study in a country where everyone spoke Spanish.

In later decades, I think it became more common for public high school students to spend their summers studying in a foreign country or at a talent, arts or music-oriented summer camp. But in 1964, most of the high school students I had known who ever spent their summers taking a course (unless the course they were taking was drivers' education) were only doing so because they needed to retake a course they had flunked, in order to eventually qualify for their high school diploma.

So there was no way in 1964 that someone like me--who, as early as first grade, had always disliked the authoritarian aspects of being compelled to attend school during the fall, winter and spring--would consider giving up a portion of a summer vacation from school in order to study and do school work in Mexico City. Especially since none of the other nearly all high school women classmates in this Spanish class had shown any particular interest in getting to know me better either before or after each Spanish class session (in which a lot of time was spent reading excerpts from a Spanish language edition of Don Quijote by Cerventes), during either the Fall 1963 or Spring 1964 semester.

The second particular memory related to Mrs. Diaz's Spanish "G" class I have from the spring semester of 1964 is of bumping into by chance, unexpectedly, one of my classmates in this class, Suzi, at the Glendale Shopping Center one weekday evening, near the end of the school term.

Suzi was then a senior who would be graduating from Broad Ripple High School in less than a month; and she was someone who was likely to have been considered very pretty and physically attractive by most of the high school guys in the school. And my assumption in the spring of 1964 was that Suzi, who had been one of the school's "homecoming Queen" candidates in either the fall of 1963 or fall of 1964, had no difficulty attracting guys at Broad Ripple in her senior class, like the athletes or the various school activity club student leaders, who most of the high school women in the school would feel were the guys most then worth dating in 1964.

Suzi was about 5 foot-2 and seemed to always put on make-up and lipstick and dressup in a fashionable way for each school day. And-- because, as I've indicated previously, in high school I hadn't yet come to regard women who wore make-up and lipstick, and were into dressing-up, as less attractive and more plastic than women who didn't use make-up or lipstick--I also then considered Suzi to be a physically beautiful woman.

Suzi did say "hello" to me and smiled in a friendly way when we bumped into each other, outside of school, at the Glendale Shopping Center. But I realized that, since inside school during the 1963-1964 school year she had never indicated any particular interest in getting to know me and probably already had a lot of senior class guys asking her for dates, her friendliness towards me at the shopping center did not mean that whe was inviting me to ask her for her telephone number or for a date.

In addition, like most high school guys who were juniors in 1964, I automatically assumed that a high school woman who was a high school senior would not be interested in ever dating a guy who was only a high school junior; and, if you were a guy who was a high school junior, the only high school women you should be asking out for dates would be other high school juniors or high school sophomore or freshman class women.

Ironically, in doing some background research for these recollections of my experiences in Indianapolis in 1963 and 1964, I noticed that, like me, Suzi was apparently of assimilated Jewish religious background. But because her family had a last name that was not as easily identified as being a "Jewish" last name as mine, in 1964 I did not realize that Suzi was also of "Jewish" religious background.

Still, because Suzi was a popular senior class student, as well as much less of an alienated, "isolato," outsider and internally non-conformist student at Broad Ripple than I was in 1964, I don't think there would have ever been any likelihood that Suzi would have ever been interested in dating me in 1963 or 1964--despite our common assimilated family religious backgrounds.