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.
