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.