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.
