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.
