In 1964 I still spent a lot of time, in the evening and on weekends at home, watching the corporate media TV programs; and, like most people in the USA, I was still somewhat of a TV addict. So, not surprisingly, I probably spent all day and early evening on January 1, 1964 in Indianapolis watching the televised Orange Bowl, Sugar Bowl, Cotton Bowl and Rose Bowl college football games on television. And I probably spent a lot of weekend time, when I was at home, during the early months of 1964, watching some kind of televised sports event each afternoon.
It wasn't until the summer of 1964, after reading a book called The Great Time-Killer, which was critical of the cultural quality of what was now being broadcast on "post-Golden Age of TV" by the CBS, NBC and ABC networks, that I started to become less of a TV addict than I still was in January 1964, at least with respect to watching television shows (other than each day's evening news, weekend evening news shows or tv series shows like The Defenders or weekend evening variety shows like The Jackie Gleason Show or Sunday morning discussion shows like Meet The Press and Face The Nation or Sunday night discussion shows like The David Susskind Show or weekend sports shows) that much, until I entered college in the fall of 1965.
And although I had been heavily into listening to AM hit records radio stations in NYC on my transister radio in the late 1950's, in Indianapolis during the first six months of 1964 I didn't listen to AM hit records radio stations. By that time, I was into mainly still listening to the vinyl records of the Broadway musical hits and flops, movie soundtracks and 1940's big band records that I had purchased the previous year with the money I had earned from delivering the Indianapolis Times; and, by then, I felt the lyrics of the songs that were being played on AM radio (in an era before most people, like me, had FM radios and could listen to FM radio stations) were intellectually shallow and uninteresting.
So I really didn't start listening to pop hits on the radio in the 1960's on a regular basis, for awhile, until I was living in a single dorm room in Livingston Hall on Columbia University's campus in the fall of 1965; where I listened each day, for a bit, to each week's top-40 hit records that WABC-AM DJ's and WMCA's "Good Guys" DJs played, whenever I happened to find myself spending some time in the dorm room during the day or evening.
