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were not interviewed by Kirkpatrick Sale before he wrote his SDS book (usually because they were either underground, no longer active politically or keeping a low 1970's political profile).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.