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.
