On The Road In The 1970's: Part 82

 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.

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 81

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.  

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 80

 During the last few months of living in Indianapolis, I also developed a crush on the one other Broad Ripple H.S. marching band member, a white high school sophomore woman, who lived, with her older sisters and parents in a house her parents owned, on the same block where I lived in the part of the duplex house that my parents rented.

Her mother seemed to feel that, as a sophomore high school woman, she was still too tomboyish and may have feared that she might end up becoming a lesbian (in an early 1960's historical period when the U.S. mass media and many U.S. psychiatrists seemed to regard woman who were attracted to other women sexually or emotionally as being in need of being "cured" by psychiatric treatment, etc.); unless she began showing more interest in using make-up, dressing up and trying to attract boys to date; instead of then still being more interested in athletics and playing the trumpet in the band.

So one Spring morning in 1964, on a day when she happened to be driving her daughter to school while I was walking on the sidewalk to the bus stop on College Avenue, I was surprised when my "bandmate"'s mother, who seemed to be in her late 40's, pulled her car up beside me on the sidewalk; and then invited me to hop into the car and get a lift, along with her daughter, uptown to Broad Ripple High School.

Yet after we reached the high school and her mother dropped her and me off together in the front of the school building, I still didn't get any indication from the "bandmate" from my block that she was particularly interested, herself, in getting to know me better. And, although by this time I realized I had a crush on her, thought her face pretty despite her not using lipstick and make-up, and was physically attracted to her, the thought didn't even cross my mind that I might ask her if she wished to go with me to Broad Ripple High School's "Junior Prom," that year.

In New York City, the public high schools had "Senior Proms" each year for the high school seniors who were graduating that June; but not also "Junior Proms," for the high school juniors, who weren't graduating that June. Broad Ripple H.S., however, held a "Junior Prom" each year.

Yet, by the second term of my junior year in high school, attending either a high school "Junior Prom" or, during the next year, a high school "Senior Prom," was not something I felt I would enjoy doing; and in my junior year at Broad Ripple H.S., the thought of attending its "Junior Prom" was not one that I ever even considered.

So when, surprisingly, I received, in the mail at home, some kind of an invitation in late May, from one of the white high school women who had been in one of my English "G" classes, inviting me to a "pre-Junior Prom" party that she was holding, I was not glad to have received the invitation because I had never considered going to the "Junior Prom," itself. In addition, I don't think I had ever had any kind of one-on-one conversation with this particular English G classmate inside or outside school during the three terms I had attended Broad Ripple and had never felt any particular interest in getting to know her better.

But I was able to escape going to a "pre-Junior Prom" party, that I assumed I would likely find uninteresting for me, by sending her, by mail, an RSVP note which thanked her for the invitation, but indicated that I was unable to attend her party "due to other plans;" although I likely spent the evening and night of her party and the "Junior Prom" in 1964, just staying at home and watching TV.

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 79

My main memory, decades later, from April and May 1964 of my junior year at Broad Ripple High School is that, as did other members of the high school's band, I memorized my instrumental part of "The 500" song, that some composer had especially written for Broad Ripple H.S.'s marching band to play that year; when marching in the annual Downtown Indianapolis 500 Parade, which was held each year before the Indianapolis 500 Speedway automobile race on Memorial Day.

The teacher who taught the Band classes and was the Broad Ripple H.S. Band Director, Mr. Decker, had been given a copy of "The 500" song music scores for each musical instrument part by the composer; and Mr. Decker was very enthusiastic and excited about the fact that his high school band was to be the first one to ever perform this song at an annual Indianapolis 500 Parade.

Earlier in the semester, Mr. Decker had also arranged, in an enthusiastic way, for the Broad Ripple band to spend a weekday afternoon out-of-school, in order to play some band songs at the Indianapolis School for the Blind. And I found it inspiring, myself, to see how attentively and eagerly the students at that school for young people with visual disabilities listend to our school band's performance and applauded us so appreciatively.

In addition, there were two other daytime events in which I remember performing with Broad Ripple H.S.'s marching band outside of school, after the weather became warm, during April and May of 1964. One event was where our school band played with other schools' bands on a weekend day, while sitting on chairs around Monument Circle in Downtown Indianapolis.

And the other outdoor weekend day event, outside of school, that I recall, took place on a very hot afternoon in late May 1964; when our band marched into Broad Ripple Park (which was across the street from Broad Ripple High school's building) along with Broad Ripple High School's Junior ROTC unit, to provide some band music for some kind of Memorial Day-related event. At this event a white right-wing American Legion-type World War II veteran speaker, who appeared to be in his late 40's gave a speech that I remember feeling, at the time, was too pro-militaristic and too right-wing anti-communist, from my anti-communist liberal point of view at that time.

Also, in April and May of 1964, Broad Ripple's marching band began practicing its marching formations to Sousa marches and the "Hail To Broad Ripple" school song for the upcoming Fall 1964 high school football half-time shows, under the marching band leadership of Bill. The Music Department Director, Mr. Posten, and the Band Director, Mr. Decker, had selected Bill for the honor of succeeding Dick as the Broad Ripple High School's Drum Major for the 1964-1965 school year.

Because Bill had played alto saxophone a few seats away from me in Band class and at various band school performances at which I was playing tenor saxophone in the band, I was better acquainted with him than I had been with the previous band drum major, Dick. And I thought that Bill--who was enthusiastic about being selected as the next school year's drum major and as musically talented as Dick--was going to be a more popular drum major than Dick had bbeen with most members of the band. Because Bill had always related to everybody else in the band class in more interpersonally sensitive, friendlier and less authoritarian ways.

But, having moved back to New York City with my family by mid-June of 1964, I never did see what kind of a Broad Ripple High School band drum major Bill did turn out to be during the Fall 1964 high school football season in Indianapolis.  

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 77

The second occasion when I entered a Butler University campus building in the Spring of 1964 was on a sunny Saturday when, along with some of the other eventually college-bound high school juniors from Broad Ripple (and perhaps from some other local high schools), I spent the day inside a classroom in one of Butler University's academic buildings; taking the PSAT class-biased and racially-biased standardized "idiot test" exams.

In the early 1960's, the PSAT tests were standarized tests (purportedly measuring a college-bound high school junior's verbal and mathematics knowledge, aptitude and intelligence), similar to the SAT standardized tests that high school seniors took during their fall terms, in order to have SAT exam results, then required by all the undergraduate colleges, they wished to be submitted in a timely way with their applications for college admission.

The PSAT exam results one scored during the spring of one's junior years were also submitted to the colleges a junior then thought he or she would apply to. But taking the PSAT was seen in the early 1960's more as a way of practicing for the SAT exams one would take in one's senior year. Because, in determining whether or not a college would admit you as a matriculated freshman, it was the SAT scores you had which was used to help finally determine whether a selective college would admit you--not your PSAT scores.

In the Spring of 1964, I had already examined the information about various U.S. colleges and universities contained in the most recent edition of Lovejoy's College Guide and read through the college catalog of Indiana University, which my sister was then attending, before I took the PSAT exams in the academic building on Butler University's campus.

And, at the time I took the PSAT exam in the second semester of my junior year of high school, Indiana University, Columbia College of Columbia University and New York University were the three colleges that I had indicated I wanted my PSAT standardized test results sent to, at that time.

During the late 1950's and early 1960's, I had watched on a fairly regular weekly basis, on every Sunday afternoon/early evening, "The G.E. College Bowl" television show, in which two teams of four undergraduate students from two different colleges or universities competed against each other; to see which college or university undergraduate team could answer correctly and most quickly the various intellectual/academic trivia questions that the show's moderator, Allen Ludden, would read. And, as part of the "G.E. College Bowl" television show, some film footage of campus scenes, of each of the two colleges whose schools were competing that week, were shown for a few minutes to viewers.

So, although there were no youtube videos advertising a particular U.S. college or university's campus visual scenes, in a way that might "sell" the idea to a high school student of applying for admissions to that particular school, available (like there is in the 21st-century), in the Spring of 1964 I did have a little familiarity with how other U.S. college campuses, besides Indiana University's, Butler University's or Queens College's campuses (that I had all personally been to) looked like.

Before the Spring of 1964, I had always associated going to college, after graduating from a public high school, with going away to college and living away from home while attending college; rather than just going to a commuter college for four years, while still living at home with my parents.

So when I looked through Lovejoy's College Guide, in the Spring of 1964, I don't think I even considered reading its description of Butler University; because that college was too close to the neighborhood in which I lived with my parents in Indianapolis; and, in the Spring of 1964, not just commuting when I lived so close to Butler University and, instead living in a Butler U. dormitory, would have made no sense to me. Even if I hadn't already been associating going to college with not being a commuting student.

So, for obvious reasons, if I ended up attending college in Indiana, beginning  in the Fall of 1965, Indiana University, with its in-state tuition for Indiana residents, its impressive-looking campus and its longer distance away from the neighborhood in which my parents lived and from where I attended Broad Ripple H.S., was where I was going to apply to. And that was why my PSAT scores were sent to Indiana University in the Spring of 1964.

Another reason why, if I ended up going to college in Indiana, I felt, in the Spring of 1964, that Indiana University was the university I would be applying to, was because many more young people attended a public state "Big Ten" university, like Indiana University, than the number of young people who attended smaller, private liberal colleges like Swarthmore, Oberlin or Antioch, etc. And, already seeing myself as some kind of writer, playwright or possible journalist, whose "thing" was to be an observer of people, who wrote the truth in a way that changed U.S. society in a more democratic direction, it seemed to make more sense for me to go to college where there were a lot of students; and, consequently, a greater variety of individual young people around me than a private small college, with only a limited number of young people to observe, would provide.

In addition, because the number of students attending a small private college was so much less than the number of students attending a large state university like Indiana University, I felt, in the Spring of 1964, that at IU I would be more likely to find other students to befriend and less closely noticed or monitored by either less non-conformist classmates or faculty members, than I would probably be if I attended a small private college.

Also, Indiana University had a Big Ten football team and a big football stadium, which most small private colleges lacked; and, in the Spring of 1964, I was still into being an NCAA college football fan who associated the going-away college experience with spending, at least five Saturday afternoons each Fall, sitting in your university's football stadium, with a lot of other students, and rooting for your collegel's football team. Even though, despite being in Broad Ripple High School's marching band, I don't think, by the Spring of 1964, I particularly envisioned myself as someone who would be in in Indiana University's Marching Band while attending there.

Yet, by the Spring of 1964, I also did not particularly want to attend college at a university in which most of the students were in college fraternities and sororities, and where fraternities and sororities dominated campus life. But in the early 1960's, Indiana University was still a university in which student campus life seemed to be dominated by the frat and sorority student members.

When reading through the Lovejoy's College Guide book pages in the Spring of 1964, I can recall generally checking out the information in the book which indicated the percentage of students at each college who were members of fraternities or sororities. Because, by that time, I felt that college fraternities and sororities were inherently undemocratic entities; since they allowed their members to exclude, even in a racially or religiously discriminatory way, anyone they didn't want to let into their social clubs.

So perhaps one reason I then requested that my PSAT exam score results be sent to Columbia and NYU, as well as to Indiana University (despite still then assuming that IU was where I would end up enrolling as a freshman in September of 1965), was because campus life at neither Columbia University nor NYU appeared to be as fraternity and sorority-dominated as Indiana University's campus life then was?

Yet the main reason I think I requested my PSAT exam results also be sent to Columbia College and NYU, as well as to IU, was because, by that time, I think I had then concluded that going away to college in New York City, in the Fall of 1965, would likely turn out to be a more intellectually stimulating, interesting and emotionally satisfying experience for me than just going away to college in Bloomington, Indiana would turn out to be.

In retrospect, there seemed to be two reasons for my conclusion, in the Spring of 1964, that going away to college in New York City might make more sense for me than just going away to college at Indiana University in Bloomington.

The first reason was that, after I began thinking of myself as a possible aspiring playwright in the theater world, it seemed to me that--despite Indiana University's reputation as being a university with an excellent theater arts departnet--it made more sense for me to, if I could, attend college in the city where the most Broadway, off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway theatrical productions were staged in the early 1960's: New York City. Why waste four years, after entering college in the Fall of 1965 before being able to watch live performances of plays in Manhattan and checking-out Manhattan's theater world activity on a regular basis, when, if I was attending Columbia or NYU in New York city, I would be able to begin doing the same thing as early as the Fall of 1965?

The second reason that I concluded, in the Spring of 1964, that applying to two colleges in New York City, like Columbia and NYU, made more sense for me (as a potential alternative to just attending IU) was possibly, in retrospect, that (because I was still then unaware of the history of Palestinian people or Arab people's history) I still did not question the validity of the liberal Zionist ideology I had been indoctrinated with in Hebrew School, prior to my birthday. And, as a member of a family of assimilated Jewish religious background, I then felt it would be more intellectually interesting to attend a college in which a larger percentage of the students would be of assimilated Jewish religious background than the percentage of students of assimilated Jewish religious background that there then was at Indiana University.

When reading through the Lovejoy's College Guide book, my recollection is that in that book there was some indication as to which U.S. universities or colleges had Hillel student chapters with larger number of students. So that may have been where I might have noticed that Columbia and NYU then had a greater percentage of students of assimilated Jewish religious background than did IU, in the early 1960's.

Because Columbia University's liberal arts undergraduate Columbia College catalog seemed to indicate that Columbia College offered more interesting college courses than what the courses that the catalog of NYU's then-uptown undergraduate college in the Bronx offered--and because Columbia also had a college football team, while NYU no longer had a college football team in the early 1960's--Columbia College, not NYU-Uptown was the one I was hoping to get admitted into more in the Spring of 1964, when I had my PSAT exam result scores sent there.

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 76

Although it took less than a half-hour to walk west to Butler University's campus from where I lived in Indianapolis, in the Spring of 1964 I only entered the inside of Butler University building on two occasions.

On once occasion, I walked to the Butler University Fieldhouse athletic arena/indoor stadium, where the Indiana state high school basketball teams' regional, semi-finals and finals tournament championship basketball games, as well as the Indianapolis sectional tournament basketball games, were played each spring.

Because Broad Ripple High School's basketball team had won the Indiianapolis Sectional tournament the previous year, I was hoping to, in-person in Butler University's fieldhouse, see Broad Ripple's basketball team win the Sectionals again in the Spring of 1964. But that did not happen. And after watching Broad Ripple High School's basketball team get eliminated from the Indianapolis Sectional basketball event in the Butler University arena, I never entered that particular Butler University building again in 1964, or at anytime during the following decades.

 

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 74

 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. 

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 73

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.  

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 72

After the Beatles came to the USA for the first time and first appeared on the Ed Sullivan Sunday night CBS television show in early 1964, of course, the impact of EMI/Capitol Records's "Beatlemania" media promotional campaign blitz, and the national access to U.S. television the "Brit Invaders" had received, became more evident in the hallways of Broad Ripple High School in Indianapolis.

Mostly freshman and sophomore white high school women students--who usually weren't in the "G" classes of the more academically-higher-achieving students--could now be seen wearing buttons with pictures of the individual members of the Beatles or overheard chattering about "how cute Paul is" or "how cute John is," etc.

Initially, in early 1964, though the "Beatlemania" that the corporate mass media helped create, didn't seem to have much impact on most of the high school guys at Broad Ripple, most members of the high school band, most of the junior and senior class members or most of the students in the classes of the more academically-higher-achieving students.

And initially, in early 1964, the guys who were on the school's sports teams, involved most actively in the school clubs or in the school's orchestra, singing groups or band did not all immediately purchase electric guitars and begin forming their own Beatles-imitation group rock bands, that spent hours of time after school practicing.

Over the next few years, however, as the AM radio stations continued to play regularly Beatles' hit vinyl records again and again and Beatles movies like "Hard Day's Night" and "Help" hit the movie theaters, I imagine that large numbers of the guys at schools like Broad Ripple High School did, however, soon eventually end up buying electric guitars and forming Beatles-imitation rock bands.

I liked folk music, had seen Peter, Paul and Mary perform on television and had occasionally watched the Hootenanny folk music show on ABC-TV that Jack Linkletter hosted (which did not allow Pete Seeger to appear on the show, for political reasons), prior to The Beatles first arriving in the USA in early 1964.

But in early 1964, I had still never heard of either Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez or Bob Dylan, because I hadn't been following what was being written about early 1960's folk music "commercial boom" in either newspapers or magazines; and had also never heard of publications like Sing-Out magazine or Broadside magazine before the Brit Rock invasion happened.

Yet because I was still into Broadway musical songs a lot and had, by then been developing some consciousness about the power of mass media to articially create the instant popularity of entertainers like The Beatles, I pretty much didn't listen too much to or check out the recordings they were making, until 1965. And the only thing I felt was particularly different about The Beatles group, compared to the pop singers whose 45 rpm records I had listened to in the late 1950's, was that they were individual guys who let their hair grow much longer than the 1950's singers, as a gimmick to make them appear more unusual than the previous pop singers.

And even in 1966, when I was again living in New York City, and just happened to be on the same IRT #7 subway train that was transporting a lot of junior high school and high-school white women teeny-boppers, wearing "Beatlemania" buttons, out to Shea Stadium in Flushing Meadows, Queens, to scream during a live Beatles outdoor concert there, I still tended to feel that, most of The Beatles' fans were much less intellectually, culturally or politically hip than were most of Dylan's pre-1966 folk music fans.

On The Road In the 1970's: Part 71

The second memory I still have of my experience in Mr. Posten's Boys Chorus I class during my junior year at Broad Ripple High School is that, before class, while we were all waiting for Mr. Posten to eventually appear in the classroom to lead the mostly sophomore students (who were mostly not very interested in singing and music), there was a lot of discussion about the initial Sonny Liston vs. "Cassius Clay" heavyweight champion boxing match of early 1964. Both before the professional fight and after "Cassius Clay"'s 7th-round upset victory.

Living in New York City in the 1950's and early 1960's, while attending elementary school and junior high school in Queens, I was--like most of the other guys in school--a TV addict who watched a lot of television professional boxing matches each week that were then on either network television or the local New York City television stations. On shows like the Gillette Friday night "Fight of the Week" and a local TV show that televised professional boxing matches from St. Nicholas Arena in New York City.

My parents weren't as into watching the Friday night shows or the St. Nicholas Arena boxing matches on television as I was in the late 1950's and early 1960's. But our family had two black and white television sets, one with a 24-inch screen in the living room, that my parents would watch, and one, with a 12-inch television screen in my room, which I could watch when I wasn't interested in what my parents were watching in the living room. So I was generally able to go into my own room and watch the televised boxing matches whenever I wanted to, when at home.

In addition, when I was in elementary school and junior high school in the 1950's and early 1960's, I was heavily into reading current and back issues of Sport magazine and reading the sports pages of two or three daily and Sunday newspapers of New York City, on a regular basis. In addition, I was also into reading many public library book biographies or autobiographies of sports figures, like professional boxing champions or historical books about sports like professional boxing, fictional books for teenage readers with sports themes written by writers like John Tunis and book anthologies of "The Best Sports Stories" from a particular year, that had previously been published in different U.S. magazines or U.S. newspaper sports sections.

So, although I had never had any interest in, personally, spending any portion of my time outside of public school learning to box (so I could compete in amateur contests like the Golden Gloves, etc.) as a teenager before I was in high school, in 1964 I probably still knew as much about the past and current professional boxers and professional boxing history as most other professional boxing fans.

And, despite having read in the newspapers about how Benny "Kid" Paret and Davey Moore were killed in the boxing ring in the early 1960's, it wasn't until after I entered college that I came to feel that professional boxing should be legally banned in the United States. Although before Muhammad Ali retired in the late 1970's, I retained some interest in watching matches in which he participated on television, whenever I lived in an apartment in which there was a television set.

Prior to his first fight with Liston, all the guys in Mr. Posten's Boys Chorus I class, including me, didn't think "Cassius Clay" had a chance to win. Yet most of the other guys in the class spoke about the upcoming Liston-"Clay" boxing match with exciting anticipation. Mainly because, in the years between the time he won his gold medal in boxing for representing the USA in the 1960 Olympics and early 1964, "Cassius Clay" had been seen on television interview shows a lot, rapping and claiming that he was "the greatest," in a poetic, bragging way; at the same time he seemed to be defeating all the other heavyweight boxing opponents he had been matched up with, prior to facing Sonny Liston.

What I, myself, did not realize, before Muhammad Ali fought Liston for the first time in early 1964, was that--besides being a skillful boxer and athlete who also seemed to be, somewhat, like an entertaining clown--Muhammad Ali was apparently, even then, more intellectually hip than he had let on to being, despite probably not being much of a reader at that time. And he had, shrewdly, apparently realized that, if he imitated the braggart personality of some of the 1950's professional white wrestlers like "Gorgeous George," that he had watched on TV as a child and acted, somewhat like a clown, the promoters of professional championship boxing matches would consider him a more "colorful" and entertaining personality than the other potential challengers for Sonny Liston's title.

And, therefore, they would likely then more quickly give him a chance to fight Liston in a professional heavyweight championship title bout.

Having rooted for "Cassius Clay" more because he was the underdog (rather than because I had been particularly impressed with "Cassius Clay"'s pre-publicly-announced conversion to Islam's "rap poetry" and braggart, pre-1964 persona), I was happy that he defeated Liston in 7 rounds in early 1964. At first, though, I didn't understand in 1964 why he had decided to become a Nation of Islam religious adherent.

But after he refused to serve in the U.S. military a few years later, during the Vietnam War Era, I did come to agree that Muhammad Ali was, indeed, "the greatest person," morally, politically and athletically, to ever win the world heavyweight professional boxing championship in 20th-century professional boxing history.

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 70

 I no longer remember whether I was in a Boys Chorus I class that Mr. Posten taught during the second semester of my junior or during the first semester of my junior year. This Boys Chorus I course was one of the music or art-related coures that Broad Ripple required its male students to take in order to receive a diploma. And it was a course I was not particularly interested in taking. But I still have a few particular memories related to being in Mr. Posten's Boys Chorus I class in one of those semesters of my junior year, in which I think most of the other high school guys in the class were still sophomores.

Being in a public school glee club had never particularly interested me, prior to moving to Indianapolis; especially because I had previously been much more interested in both playing basketball, stickball and touch football or older teenager-organized football with the other neighborhood guys in Queens, when not inside school, and playing a musical instrument like the saxophone in a band, than in being part of some kind of school choral group, like a glee club.

Yet I had enjoyed singing songs along with others around the campfire, after each meal in the camp cafeteria, and on long-distance hikes in Boy Scout summer camp; and I also had enjoyed being one of the Boy Scout members who helped lead the other scouts in songs in Troop 363 in Queens between 1960 and the end of 1962. In addition, during the two years before my Bar Mitzvah, I used to regularly attend the junior congregation services that were held in the basement of the Marathon Jewish Community Center synagogue each Saturday morning, fairly regularly during the fall, winter and spring.

To do so, I would have to get dressed up each Saturday morning, walk up the hill to the synogogue that was located about 15 minutes by foot from my family's garden apartment in the Beech Hills Development. And, once there, I would sing the prayers, whose Hebrew texts were printed in the Conservative Jewish prayer book we used, along with the other, mainly pre-13 year-old guys, including my two closest friends at the time, Marc and Eugene.

Also, the synagogue cantor, Mr. Rackoff, who gave me Bar Mitzvah lessons, had felt that I had a good voice. So, besides singing the Haf Torah section at the Sarturday morning religious service when I was bar mitzvahed, I also was assigned to lead the congregation in some of the collective singing of the regular Sabbath service prayers.

But in Mr. Posten's Boys Chorus class, he instructed you to sing songs from the printed music song scores, not in the more natural way I would normally sing a song, but in a more artificial, voice-trained way. For exemple, if you needed to hold a particular word of a song for more than one musical beat, the vowels of the word would need to be pronounced, when singing the word, differently than how you pronounced the word when speaking or when singing naturally.

I could not foresee in my junior year of high school--when the thought that I would spend so much of my leisure time, in the decades after 1966, singing songs that I or other songwriters had written, in the various apartments in which I lived, while accompanying myself on guitar, did not exist in my mind--that  becoming a non-commercially-motivated, amateur protest folk singer-songwriter, rather than a playwright, would be the kind of artist I turned out to be during my life. But even if I had foreseen this, the kind of singing that Mr. Posten taught in this chorus class would not have been that relevant to the style of singing I ended up using in singing both my protest folk songs and songs written by other folks.

Like I may have already indicated, Mr. Posten was a tall, white guy, who seemed to be in his 30's. He had been a drum major of the Indiana University marching band, before later living in New York City for awhile, while obtaining a master's degree in music or music education from Columbia University; and eventually ending up being the teacher who headed Broad Ripple High School's music department in Indianapolis.

Mr. Posten seemed to enjoy the music program-related job he had at Broad Ripple H.S.. He was a high school teacher who seemed also to prioritize spending time working with and interacting a lot with the Broad Ripple students at school whom he considered most musically talented; rather than just seeing his high school music teaching job as being a day job he only did because he couldn't make as much money doing some other music-related job or because he wasn't able to earn a living as a professional musician, concert conductor, composer of music, professional songwriter or professional entertainer.

And, despite sometimes relating to the students in his Boys Chorus I class who weren't much into having to take a required music class in too authoritarian, too strict or too sarcastically humorous or condescending a way, Mr. Posten was a skillful music teacher.

So many decades afer being in Mr. Postn's Boys Chorus I class for a term in my junior year at Broad Ripple High School, I now have only two particular memories of what I experienced, related to taking his class.

My first memory related to his Boys Chorus class is that, besides requiring us to read and sing Irving Berlin's "Say It With Music" song from printed sheet music, Mr. Posten also required us to read and sing a religious song whose lyrics praised Jesus Christ, expressed the religiously sectarian viewpoint that Jesus Christ was the son of God and included something like the phrase "Thy Holy name, be ever blessed, praise, Lord, adoration, Oh, Christ the Lord."

In the early 1960's, however, the Supreme Court had made some court decisions to the effect that the separation of church and state provisions of the U.S. Constitution meant that religion should be kept out of the public schools; and that students should not be required to join other students in saying or listening to religious prayers that did not reflect their own philosophical or religious beliefs.

Because I had been a television daily evening news show junkie and a regular reader of daily newspaper headlines since 1960, I had some familiarity with these early 1960's U.S. Supreme Court decisions. In addition, by late 1963 or early 1964 I had read Paul Blanshard's book about the influence of the Catholic Church in the USA and elsewhere, probably because, when JFK campaigned for U.S. president, there was some discussion on the corporate television airways about whether or not democracy in the USA would be more "endangered" if someone of Catholic religious background was then elected as the first U.S. president of Catholic religious background.

So, as someone who was not of Christian religious background and who then had not yet particularly questioned the assumed conservative Jewish religious or liberal pro-Zionist family tradition I had been born into, until I was attending college, I, naturally, didn't feel it was morally or legally right for Mr. Posten to require me to sing a religious song that praised Jesus Christ, inside a public school classroom. And after Boys Chorus I class one day, I mentioned my objection to Mr. Posten about being required to sing a religious song that contradicted my own religious beliefs in his classroom.

Because I was apparently the first student of Jewish religious background that Mr. Posten instructed in a Boys Chorus class who had ever objected to having to sing a religious song in his public school class, Mr. Posten didn't seem to really comprehend why I was objecting to singing the religious song; and, in order to pass the Boys Chorus I class, I ended up having to continue to sing the religious song in class that I had objected to singing.

But perhaps because I was from New York City, I reminded Mr. Posten of him having lived in the Big Apple when he had attended Columbia University, before returning to teach in Indiana; and for that reason, perhaps, he didn't seem to go out of his way to penalize me with a lower grade for expressing my objection to being required to sing the song that praised Jesus Christ inside his public school classroom, despite the early 1960's U.S. Supreme Court decisions related to separation of church and state issues.

 

 

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 69

In 1964, after the first semester of my junior year of high school in Indianapolis inside Broad Ripple H.S. between February and June, I continued to be in the "G" class for the more academically-oriented high school junior students in English, that Mrs. Deering still taught and in the third-year Spanish class that Mrs. Diaz still taught. But in a "G" class for the more academically-oriented students in Intermediate Algebra II that I continued to be in, my teacher was now a tall guy named Mr. Morgan, who seemed about 15 to 20 years younger than my Intermediate Algebra I "G" class teacher in the previous semester, Mr. Mahin, had been.

As in the fall term, the high school woman student named Sandy still seemed to be the highest-achieving student in this "G" Intermediate Algebra II class that Mr. Morgan taught. But, so many years later, I can't recall anything about what happened inside Mr. Morgan's class during that term. Since there was never any classroom disruption of Mr. Morgan's classroom lessons by any students during the whole term, and because I pretty much did the assigned Intermediate Algebra II homework every day and studied a bit before each scheduled classroom text or quiz, my recollection is that, as in Intermediate Algebra I, I received a final grade of either A or A- from Mr. Morgan in this Intermediate Algebra II course.

In my memory, my second term of 3rd-year Spanish in Mrs. Diaz's "G" class pretty much blends in with the first term. In both terms, I think Mrs. Diaz gave me a final grade of either A- or B-plus, becuase I usually scored around 90 percent on the written Spanish tests and handed in all the homework assignments; although I don't think I was that good at learning to speak the language well enough to have much of a conversation with a native Spanish-speaker.

I now have only two particular memories related to my spring 1964 term in this Spanish language class. One memory is that Mrs. Diaz tried to interest me and my "G" Spanish classmates in joining her during the summer of 1964 in some kind of Spanish language immersion course for U.S. high school students in Mexico City; which would include visiting some Mexican tourist sites, as well as Spanish language study in a country where everyone spoke Spanish.

In later decades, I think it became more common for public high school students to spend their summers studying in a foreign country or at a talent, arts or music-oriented summer camp. But in 1964, most of the high school students I had known who ever spent their summers taking a course (unless the course they were taking was drivers' education) were only doing so because they needed to retake a course they had flunked, in order to eventually qualify for their high school diploma.

So there was no way in 1964 that someone like me--who, as early as first grade, had always disliked the authoritarian aspects of being compelled to attend school during the fall, winter and spring--would consider giving up a portion of a summer vacation from school in order to study and do school work in Mexico City. Especially since none of the other nearly all high school women classmates in this Spanish class had shown any particular interest in getting to know me better either before or after each Spanish class session (in which a lot of time was spent reading excerpts from a Spanish language edition of Don Quijote by Cerventes), during either the Fall 1963 or Spring 1964 semester.

The second particular memory related to Mrs. Diaz's Spanish "G" class I have from the spring semester of 1964 is of bumping into by chance, unexpectedly, one of my classmates in this class, Suzi, at the Glendale Shopping Center one weekday evening, near the end of the school term.

Suzi was then a senior who would be graduating from Broad Ripple High School in less than a month; and she was someone who was likely to have been considered very pretty and physically attractive by most of the high school guys in the school. And my assumption in the spring of 1964 was that Suzi, who had been one of the school's "homecoming Queen" candidates in either the fall of 1963 or fall of 1964, had no difficulty attracting guys at Broad Ripple in her senior class, like the athletes or the various school activity club student leaders, who most of the high school women in the school would feel were the guys most then worth dating in 1964.

Suzi was about 5 foot-2 and seemed to always put on make-up and lipstick and dressup in a fashionable way for each school day. And-- because, as I've indicated previously, in high school I hadn't yet come to regard women who wore make-up and lipstick, and were into dressing-up, as less attractive and more plastic than women who didn't use make-up or lipstick--I also then considered Suzi to be a physically beautiful woman.

Suzi did say "hello" to me and smiled in a friendly way when we bumped into each other, outside of school, at the Glendale Shopping Center. But I realized that, since inside school during the 1963-1964 school year she had never indicated any particular interest in getting to know me and probably already had a lot of senior class guys asking her for dates, her friendliness towards me at the shopping center did not mean that whe was inviting me to ask her for her telephone number or for a date.

In addition, like most high school guys who were juniors in 1964, I automatically assumed that a high school woman who was a high school senior would not be interested in ever dating a guy who was only a high school junior; and, if you were a guy who was a high school junior, the only high school women you should be asking out for dates would be other high school juniors or high school sophomore or freshman class women.

Ironically, in doing some background research for these recollections of my experiences in Indianapolis in 1963 and 1964, I noticed that, like me, Suzi was apparently of assimilated Jewish religious background. But because her family had a last name that was not as easily identified as being a "Jewish" last name as mine, in 1964 I did not realize that Suzi was also of "Jewish" religious background.

Still, because Suzi was a popular senior class student, as well as much less of an alienated, "isolato," outsider and internally non-conformist student at Broad Ripple than I was in 1964, I don't think there would have ever been any likelihood that Suzi would have ever been interested in dating me in 1963 or 1964--despite our common assimilated family religious backgrounds. 

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 64

 My vague recollection is that we in the Band class at Broad Ripple H.S., on Friday afternoon on November 22, 1963, were first informed over the school's loudspeaker system that JFK was now dead. And, upon hearing the news, nearly all the school band members seemed shocked, stunned or surprised. But I can't recall anyone in the Band class being so enamored with JFK that they began to cry or weep, after hearing the news.

I do recall, though, that when three or four of the band members, who I think were some guys who were part of the drum section of the band, began to laugh or cheer, Mr. Decker, the Band class teacher/school band director--despite having likely been someone who voted for Nixon in 1960 and who was probably some kind of Eisenhower-type "moderate" Republican in his political beliefs--reprimanded them for not responding to the news of JFK's death in a solemn way.

Like most Democrats and most Republican party supporters, as well as most political independents, in the USA in the early 1960's, before LBJ escalated the Vietnam war, Mr. Decker felt that, even if a U.S. citizen disliked an elected U.S. President's policies or political views, to not also be saddened if that U.S. President was eliminated like JFK had been, reflected an unpatriotic and excessively politically partisan mentality.

I forget whether or nor we were all dismissed early from school after news came of JFK's elimination in Dallas, Texas. But I do recall sitting next to one of the other Band class and band members, a soft-spoken, friendly guy whose parents had moved to Indianapolis from Des Moines, Iowa, on the public transit bus going back down College Avenue from the high school.

He was not as politically liberal as was I (who was then still not yet a radical leftist politically). But both he and I speculated, on the bus, that JFK likely had been eliminated by some white racist or right-wing extremist group or individuals in Dallas. And neither he nor I even considered the possibility that any U.S. government agency could have been involved in any plot to eliminate JFK in Dallas.

Of course, after I arrived home and began watching the U.S. Establishment's network television news departments' non-stop coverage of the historical events being broadcasted over the next three or four days, I--like everyone else I ever personally discussed what had happened to JFK in Dallas with, until the spring of 1967--almost immediately fell for the Establishment media's official version of how JFK was eliminated:

"An ex-Marine, named Lee Harvey Oswald, who--after becoming a Marxist and defecting to the Soviet Union and marrying a Russian wife--had become disillusioned with the Soviet system and returned to the USA. But after returning to the USA, Oswald had joined the Fair Play For Cuba Committee, to support the `dictatorial' Communist regime of Cuba; and, all alone, had eliminated JFK and wounded the governor of Texas, John Connally, by shooting a rifle from the 6th floor of the Texas Depository building in which he worked, in order to earn a famous place in history. And, after eliminating JFK, Oswald had shot and eliminated a Dallas policeman named Tippit, before being arrested by Dallas police inside a Dallas movie theater; into which he had entered rapidly, without buying a ticket, in a failed attempt to hide from police inside the movie theater."

And even though I was watching TV at home when it showed Jack Ruby eliminating Oswald in the Dallas Police Station basement on the Sunday morning following JFK's elimination, like everyone else I ever personally discussed the November 22 to November 25, 1963 events until the spring of 1967, I also fell for the Establishment media's official story that the only reason Jack Ruby eliminated Oswald was because of "his spontaneous grief over JFK's death" and "to spare Jackie Kennedy the pain of having to come back to Dallas and testify at Oswald's trial."

In retrospect, probably the main reason I continued to believe in the subsequent Warren Commission Report's similar version of how JFK was eliminated and why Jack Ruby eliminated Oswald, even after I realized, by the end of 1965, that the Establishment media's anti-communist liberal news departments' journalists were falsely asserting that the U.S. government was "defending freedom for the South Vietnamese people from Communist tyranny," by escalating its military intervention in Vietnam in early 1965, was that neither RFK nor Teddy Kennedy publicly questioned the Establishment's official story or the Warren Commission Report, during the 1960's.

I, perhaps falsely, automatically assumed, prior to the spring of 1967, that if the questions about the official story that Mark Lane, Dorothy Kilgallen, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison and others were raising about the official story were valid questions, then either RFK nor Teddy Kennedy would also be out there publicly pushing for a new investigation by 1967. 

On The Road In The 1970's---Part 63

 Outside of school, during the fall term of my junior year in 1963, my parents and I would usually drive down to Bloomington to visit my sister on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon (or drive her back to her Indiana University dormitory room from Indianapolis on a Sunday afternoon, if she had taken a bus up from Bloomington to visit us in Naptown on a particular weekend), around once a month. And, also about once a month in the fall of 1963, my parents and I continued to drive up to Chicago to visit my grandparents, my aunt and uncle and my cousins; and then drive back to Indianapolis from Chicago on the same day, after we had visited them.

Unlike during the spring of 1963, because I was now not working as a newspaper delivery boy in the fall of 1963, I no longer had to be in Indianapolis during the afternoon hours to deliver the afternoon edition of the Indianapolis Times. So my parents and I now had the option of driving up to Chicago and back to Indianapolis on a Saturday; rather than having to only visit Chicago on a Sunday, after I finished delivering the Indianapolis Times's Sunday morning edition in the darkness of the early morning hours, during the spring of 1963.

I still spent a lot of my Saturday and Sunday afternoons watching college and professional football games on television, and a lot of my Saturday and Sunday evenings watching whatever TV series shows, movies, variety shows or news-related shows were on television, in the fall of 1963. But I also do recall going to the neighborhood Vogue Theater on College Avenue near Broad Ripple Avenue one night in either the fall or spring of my junior year to see the movie version of the Gypsy Broadway musical, that Rosiland Russell and Natalie Wood starred in; and I do recall also spending a Friday or Saturday night going, with my parents, to another neighborhood movie theater, about 10 blocks south of where my family lived, either in the fall or spring of my junior year, to watch the movie version of the West Side Story, which had previously won a lot of Oscar Awards.

But, like I indicated previously, probably my strongest memory now, from the fall of 1963, was learning that JFK had been eliminated in Dallas, during my Band class period inside Broad Ripple High School, on Friday, November 22, 1963, six days before the Thanksgiving holiday.

On The Road In The 1970's--Part 62

 So many decades later, I no longer remember much of what else I experienced inside or outside of school between September 1963 and early January 1964. 

It was either in the fall or spring term of my junior year that I did an interview with the son of Izler Solomon (the then-recently hired new conductor of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra), who was also now then a student at Broad Ripple High School; for an article I wrote for the high school's student newspaper. This particular article was the only article written by me that was ever published by a student newspaper of any of the high schools I attended.

After seeing how the article appeared when edited down in the student newspaper and feeling that, writing an article based on what the person you were interviewing said, was less interesting than either creative writing or writing articles that reflected more of my own perceptions, thoughts, values and opinions (rather than writing an article which mainly sumarized or paraphrased some interviewee's quotes), the idea of becoming more involved with The Riparian school newspaper seemed more boring.

And after volunteering to spend a few hours in the afternoon after classes one day in The Riparian school newspaper office, I found myself only being assigned by one of the white high school women, who had been working on the school newspaper for a few years, to just proofread school newspaper articles written by others that I did not find interesting, my desire to work on The Riparian school newspaper anymore was quickly extinguished.

So, despite the fact that the Broad Ripple High School teacher of English whose letter of recommendation was likely what got me admitted to Columbia College in the fall of 1965 was the school newspaper's faculty adviser, I never again entered The Riparian school newspaper office during that academic year at that school.

And the only other personal interaction I had with that particular high school student newspaper during my junior year was when I sent them a letter to the editor, which asserted that having a "Key Club" at Broad Ripple High School which wasn't open equally to all students who wished to become members of the "Key Club--but only to students that the current "Key Club" members decided to invite as members--was undemocratic and discriminatory;and which The Riparian editors (who generally avoided publishing anything in the early 1960's that they felt might then spark some controversy), predictably, didn't publish.

On The Road In The 1970's--Part 61

In the two terms of third-year Spanish that I took in the "G" class during my junior year at Broad Ripple H.S., my teacher during both terms was a friendly and non-authoritarian white woman teacher, who seemed to be in her 40's, named Mrs. Diaz, who was also a very good teacher. Of course, one reason Mrs. Diaz seemed to enjoy teaching the third year of Spanish to the "G" class I was in was because there were only about 10 students in this "G" class during both terms of the 1963-1964 school year.

So many years later, I also can't recall much of what I particularly experienced during the fall of 1963 in Mrs. Diaz's class, except that, unlike my Spanish language teachers in New York City, Mrs. Diaz spoke Spanish with the pronunciation that was used in Mexico and other Latin American countries, rather than speaking in the Castillian pronunciation that was used in Spain; and that in her class we used some more recently-published Spanish language textbook than the El Camino Real textbook that had been used by teachers in my first two years of Spanish language classes.

And the only other paricular things I now remember, related to being in the Spanish "G" language class is that, except for me, the other 8 or 9 students in the class were white women students in the fall of 1963; and, like the other high school students in this "G" class, I scored high enough on Mrs. Diaz's multiple-choice tests, and on the homework exercises that she assigned us to turn in, so that my final grade in the first term of late 1963 was probably either "A" or "A-minus."

After I started watching the "Mr. Novak" weekly series on television in Indianapolis around this time in the early 1960's, my then-interest in eventually becoming a teacher of African-American working-class students in some public high school was reinforced. But because I also saw myself by my junior year in high school as a would-be playwright. or maybe as some kind of future newspaper journalist, it was during my junior year at Broad Ripple H.S. that I took either one or two terms of a typing class. After all, how could I be a writer of plays, or possibly work on a newspaper after college and completing the required two years of U.S. military service (that I then both expected to be doing and had no moral objections to doing at that time) if I didn't know how to type rapidly?

If I did take only one term of typing class, by now I can't recall whether I took the typing class in the fall of 1963 or in the spring of 1964 term. And the only things I now recall about the typing class I took  is that, of the about 30 students taking the typing class, nearly all the other students in the class were white high school women, most of whom were preparing to become secretaries after graduating from high school, if they didn't, after graduating, get married immediately to a steady boyfriend; and that the white woman high school student who sat behind the typewriter, on the seat in the classroom closest to my seat and the typewriter I was using, wore lipstick and make-up each day and seemed pretty to me--although I can't recall ever chatting with her, either before or after the typing class.

Ironically, if you had told me in either the fall of 1963 or the spring of 1964 that, from the point of view of making money in the 9-to-5 capitalist work world during the decades before I finally retired, the touch-typing skills I acquired in this typing class would end up being the most useful work-related economic survival skill the U.S. public school system gave me, I would have thought you crazy.

Yet were it not for the fact that, until I finally retired, whenever I needed money quickly to pay my rent in the 1970's, 1980's, 1990's and early 20th-century, I was able to often get some daytime menial wage work quickly, by dressing-up in a culturally straight way, going to some office work temp agency, typing over 60 wpm and accurately on a 5-minute typing test, and getting some kind of low-wage clerk-typist, secretarial, data entry, statistical typing, medical typing, or dictaphone-typing menial 9-to-5 office work assignment.

And, in addition, the typing skills I acquired in this Broad Ripple H.S. typing class also were financially useful when I worked as a typesetter for a weekly newspaper for awhile. Before the human typesetters who typeset newspaper reporters's articles on perforated computerized typesetting machines became victims of technological unemployment; after new computer programming and computer technology were developed in the 1980's, that enabled newspaper reporters to get their stories edited and typeset directly onto the newspaper pages, without the use of skilled working-class people, who, prior to the late 1980's could still find jobs as typesetters.

In retrospect, of course, from the point-of-view of making money in the 9-to-5 work world during the decades before I finally retired, it probably would have made more sense for me to have taken a class in auto mechanics, electronics, short-order cooking, carpentry, print-shop, or computers in the early 1960's--instead of in typing--during my junior year at Broad Ripple High School, perhaps?

  

 

On The Road In The 1970's--Part 60

In both the fall term of 1963 and the spring term of 1964, I took no science course at Broad Ripple High School. But during the same two terms, I did take two terms of English, two terms of Spanish, and two terms of Intermediate Algebra in "G"/"honors"-type classes, with the more higher-academic achieving students at Broad Ripple.

Despite getting a low grade in my Geometry II class during my sophomore year, apparently because I had received either a 90 or 95 final grade for each term of my 9th grade Elementary Algebra class in New York City, I was still assigned to Mr. Mahin's "G" Intermediate Algebra I class in the fall of 1963. 

But aside from vaguely being able to picture how Mr. Mahin's classroom looked, vaguely recalling that I must have received either a B-plus, A-minus of A as my final grade that semester (because I pretty much spent time at home doing the assigned homework on a daily basis-- and didn't just wait until the night before a scheduled test in class to try to cram into my brain all the intermediate algebra lessons' content we were supposed to be tested on), and also vaguely recalling that a white high school woman student with short hair, who always wore glasses, named Sandy, seemed to be the smartest mathematics student and most grade-oriented student in the class, I now remember nothing else about what I experienced in this class during the fall of 1963.

I also cannot now recall very much what kind of literature, in my English "G" class, I was assigned to read, during the fall term of my junior year, by the white woman teacher who taught this class, Mrs. Deering, who then seemed to be in either in late 30's or early 40's.

Most men likely then considered Mrs. Deering to be prematurely overweight for a woman of her relatively young age; and she didn't seem as intellectually, politically, or philosophically liberal as the older English "G" class teacher I had during the second term of my sophomore year, Mrs. Griggs--whose latter of recommendation likely led the Columbia College's admissions office to admit me into Columbia University in the fall of 1965.

But Mrs. Deering was a fair marker and good teacher, and she seemed to like the short story I handed to her to fulfill one of her homework assignments that fall, in which I satirically described the parasitic business activity of a funeral director; which was written after I watched a television documentary on the "CBS Reports" show that was based on Jessica Mitford's early 1960's best-selling The American Way of Death book.

Besides recalling that I wrote and handed in this short story, the only particular thing I remember about this class was that it was in this class that I noticed that one of the high school white woman, Mary, who sat in the individual desk-chair stool seat next to mine in the classroom and put on lipstick each morning before attending school, was someone I felt attracted to physically.

But Mary, whose mother apparently was either seeking election or re-election to the Indianapolis School Board that fall, never showed any particular indication that she might have welcomed it if I asked her for a date during either the fall or spring term when we shared the same English class high school teacher; and I can't recall ever even conversing with her at all even once, either before or after class during my junior year at Broad Ripple.

By the fall of my sophomore year at Columbia, three falls later, I was then tending to be more physically attracted to women who didn't wear lipstick than to those who did. But, like I've indicated before, in high school, like most of the other high school guys in the school, I tended to still feel the high school women who put on lipstick and make-up each morning, before coming to school each day, were prettier and more sexually desirable than the high school women who did not use lipstick and make-up.   

On The Road In The 1970's--Part 59

With respect to what happened in my academic classes at Broad Ripple High School during my fall 1963 to spring 1964 junior year there, after so many decades I now have relatively few memories.My most vivid memory is what I experienced in a U.S. History I class that was taught by a right-wing white woman teacher, who appeared to be then in her 50's, named Mrs. Woods.

In elementary school and in my first term as a sophomore at Bayside H.S., I had usually scored the highest mark on my class social studies or history multiple choice tests; and I was usually the student who most often responded inside the classroom most quickly with the answer to any of the oral social studies or history-based questions a teacher would ask. Yet Mrs. Woods's U.S. History I class at Broad Ripple turned out to be the only social studies or history class in junior high school or in high school in which I didn't receive either a 95 or an "A" final grade.

There seemed to be two reasons why the right-wing Mrs. Woods ended up only giving me either a B-minus, a C or a C-minus in the U.S. History I class I took with her in the fall of 1963. Because the class was not a "G" class in history of more academically high-achieving students (similar to an "honors" class in history in a NYC public high school), all the other students in this history class pretty much sat silently in the class, looking bored and never raising their hands to ask a question, in response to whatever 1950's-type right-wing conservative view of pre-U.S. Civil War history Mrs. Woods happened to be presenting to us in her classroom. And so I seemed to be the only student in Mrs. Woods's class who was interested enough in U.S. history to raise my hand and sometimes ask her a question, in this class.

Yet because my questions reflected the early 1960's anti-communist liberal corporate media's late 1950's "You Are There"-type historical television show's view of U.S. history more than the anti-communist, Joe McCarthy-type right-wing Freedom Foundation-1950's conservative-type perspective, that Mrs. Woods was into, Mrs. Woods apparently felt I was challenging her intellectual authority and her qualification to teach the class, if I asked a question that she was unable to provide a convincing answer to.

The second reason Mrs. Woods seemed to want to punish me with a low final grade was because I also raised a question in class one day about the method she was using to "teach" us U.S. History I. In all of my previous social studies or history elementary, junior high school and high school classes (and in all my subsequent high school history or social studies classes), all the social studies or history teachers would spend at least 90 percent of all the classroom periods in a school term presenting a summary of the topics we had read in our history or social studies textbooks, and answered homework questions about, and leading discussions in class about these topics.

In Mrs. Woods's U.S. History I class, however, around 90 percent of all the classroom periods in the school term were periods in which Mrs. Woods had us spending nearly the whole period just watching a 16mm movie, often produced by a right-wing anti-communist organization like the Freedom Foundation, about the particular U.S. history topic we had been previously assigned to read about in our textbook. And she would spend no time in the classroom discussing the topic of the film or the historical topic we had read about in our history textbook.

So after it appeared to me that (unlike all the other social studies or history teachers I had previously had or would subsequently have) Mrs. Woods was having us watch movies in our U.S. History I class in practically every period during this term, in order to be able to avoid having to do any teaching of history during each period when she was supposed to be teaching, I asked her in class why she was haing us watch a movie nearly every period in class, instead of leading a discussion of what we had read in our history textbook?

And, again, Mrs. Woods seemed to apparently feel that I was questioning her right to collect a history teacher salary in the fall of 1963, when all she was mostly doing in the classroom was turning on the 16 mm projector each period and sitting in the back of the classroom, in the darkness, while her students spent the 40-minute period watching a movie nearly every day in class.

Luckily for me, however, I was not stuck with Mrs. Woods as my U.S. History class teacher again in the spring term of my junior year at Broad Ripple High School. And because, as usual, I always answered over 90 percent of the multiple-choice questions correctly on the social studies-related test forms the teacher periodically gave us, and was also the student in this non-"G" class who most frequently and quickly answered whatever in-class history book textbook-related question this second history teacher asked, not surprisingly, I ended up receiving an "A" in this U.S. History II spring term class.

 

On The Road In The 1970's--Part 58

The early fall of 1963 was the first time that I was attending a public school where at least 50 percent of the students in the class didn't also not attend classes in school on the Jewish New Year two-day religious High Holidays of Rosh Hoshanah and the one-day Yom Kippur Day of Atonement for people of Jewish religious background; if any of those three days fell on a weekday school day. 

 Prior to moving to Indianapolis in late 1962, over 90 percent of all my classmates in elementary school and junior high school were students of assimilated and non-Orthodox Jewish religious background; and during the one term I attended Bayside High School in the fall of 1962, over 50 percent of my high school classmates were also of assimilated, non-Orthodox Jewish religious background.

But in Indianapolis , at Broad Ripple High in the fall of 1963, nearly all the students in that school attended classes on the Jewish High Holy Days and Yom Kippur, if they occured on a school day; because I think less than 20 of the 1,600 students in the then-over 99 percent white high school seemed to be of Jewish religious background. Yet aside from my vague recollection that the usual classwork was going on inside a public school I attended, while I was at home or in a synogogue observing Rosh Hoshanah or Yom Kippur in some way, I don't recall much about how I observed the High Holy Days and Yom Kippur in Indianapolis in the fall of 1963.

What I do recall is that, unlike in Queens, my father had to drive himself and me in a car to the Beth-El Zedek synagogue, rather than being able to walk to the local conservative Jewish congregation's synagogue; like we had both been able to do previously when were living in Beech Hills in Queens. And also, the Beth-El Zedek synagogue seemed fancier-looking and more modern than the Marathon Jewish Community Center synagogue I had been bar-mitzvahed from in Queens. But I now have no memory of who the rabbi there was in 1963 or what he said in his sermons, in part, because neither my father not I ever went to that syagogue again after the fall 1963 High Holy Days, during the time we lived in Indianapolis.

My only other vague memory related to the fall of 1963 Jewish High Holy Days in Naptown was that when, for some reason, the few students of Jewish religious background (who needed to fill out some kind of form to be excused from attending classes on one of the religious holidays) were gathered together in one of the school offices, I first noticed that one of the woman students there, who would have been considered among the most attractive woman students by most of the Broad Ripple male students, was also of Jewish religious background. But I can't recall ever bumping into her afterwards, during the rest of my junior year at Broad Ripple, probably because she wasn't in any of my classes that year. 

On The Road In The 1970's--Part 57

 Over five decades after the first term of my junior year of high school at Broad Ripple in Indianapolis, in the fall of 1963, my memories are obviously now very vague. The major historical event that term, of course, was on November 22, 1963, when JFK was eliminated in Dallas, Texas. But probably what was interesting me most on a daily basis, during both the first and second term of my junior year at Broad Ripple was being in the Broad Ripple High School band and marching band; and also rehearsing and being part of the pit band for the student production of the "Bells Are Ringing" Broadway musical from 1956 that Broad Ripple's Music Department head, Mr. Posten directed, during my junior year at that school. .

Playing tenor saxophone in the marching band at Broad Ripple H.S. meant that every Friday night during the fall term I'd be wearing my band uniform and cap and, along with the other high school band members, march on the football field in various formations during half-time, before hundreds of cheering high school football fans, under the bright night game lights of either our home high school football field/mini-stadium or, if it was an away game, under the bright night game lights of the opposing high school football team's field/mini-stadium--while playing some marching music for about 10 minutes.

In addition, we usually marched on and off the football field in formation at the beginning and end of the football games, and sat in the grandstands as a group while watching the four quarters of the football game; only playing there the music of our high school song together, whenever Broad Ripple's football team happened to score a touchdown or won a football game. In the fall of 1963, however, I can't recall Broad Ripple's football team either scoring many touchdowns or winning many of its football games that year.

I then found it exciting and fun during the time the band marched onto the football field in the various formations and played our music in front of the football fans; and watching a football game live from a statdium seat was still something I found interesting in the 1960's. But I can't recall conversing much with any of my other bandmates while we sat in the football field stands. Nor, when we rode on buses wearing our uniforms and carrying our instruments, before marching and playing at night at the home fields of the Indianapolis teams our football team was playing against, can I recall conversing much with any of the other band members; except maybe occasionally exchanging some pleasantries with Bill, Paul and Steve, who played the alto saxophones, and Jerry, who played the baritone saxophone.

And, aside from being impressed by the size of Arsenal Tech's football stadium on the Friday night we marched on that field, I can't recall much now about any individual football games. It all just vaguely blends in now into a vague blur of all the different games becoming one game.

One thing I do still recall more now is that, by the time I was a junior in high school, I was as interested in watching our marching band's physically attractive high school women baton twirlers in their shorts and Broad Ripple High School's physically attractive high school cheerleaders, moving around acrobatically while leading cheers on the football field, as I was in watching the high school football teams play each Friday evening in the fall of 1963.

A short high school senior guy, who seemed to have, in some ways, a slightly Napoleonic, slightly authoritarian personality leadership tendency, named Dick, was the drum major of Broad Ripple's high school marching band in the fall of 1963. In some ways, being selected as the high school band's drum major by Mr. Decker, the Broad Ripple High School's Band teacher/Band director, was, for a non-jock student who was into music, the equivalent in status to being selected by a high school football team's coach to be the starting quaterback of the school's football team.

And Dick, in addition to being named the drum major of Broad Ripple's high school band in his senior year, also was a member of the school's National Honor Society chapter, one of the team members on Broad Ripple's "It's Academic" team, that competed on a local Indianapolis television station against other local high schools' "It's Academic" teams. The "It's Academic" television show was one in which, similar to CBS's late 1950's and early 1960's nationally-televised "G.E. College Bowl" show,  teams of intellectually quick students from different local high schools competed with one other team each week to see which team could answer correctly and more quickly the moderator's intellectual quiz show or triva-type questions.

And besides being the high school band's drum major, a National Honor Society chapter member and a member of Broad Ripple's "It's Academic" team, Dick was a also a member of the high school music department's Madgirgal Singers group and, unless my recollection is wrong, had a role in the student musical production that the high school music department produced during my junior year and during his senior year.

So, not surprisingly, the well-rounded Dick gained admittance to Columbia College in New York City from Indianapolis the year before I did (mainly because, without realizing that my second semester sophomore English "G" class teacher at Broad Ripple, Mrs. Griggs, was apparently a Columbia College Admissions "scout" in Indianapolis, I had, by chance, after my family had moved back to Queens before my senior year in high school, selected her as the teacher I wrote to in Indianapolis to ask to write a letter of recommendation to Columbia College, on my behalf).

Yet, although Dick had been such a prominent student in his senior year at Broad Ripple H.S. in Indianapolis, by the time I bumped into him during my freshman year at Columbia once, eating dinner in the John Jay Hall campus dormitory cafeteria in Manhattan, when Dick was a sophomore, Dick seemed to be less happy and a much less prominent student within the Columbia University scene than he had been at Broad Ripple.

Dick had apparently continued to involve himself in a Madrigal group of singers as an exta-curricular activity while at Columbia College. But he did not become involved much in either the Columbia College Citizenship Council scene or in the campus student anti-war movement/New Left/Columbia SDS sub-culture scene between 1965 and 1968, like I did.

So, ironically, it turned out that, what no one at Broad Ripple High School could have ever anticipated in the fall of 1963: that the then- tenor saxophone player in Broad Ripple's marching band would end up making more of an historical impact, accidentally, on the college scene he entered than its then-marching band drum major would. But, of course, no one at Broad Ripple High School at that time could have also ever anticipated that another member of my junior class in 1963, David Letterman, would end up hosting a New York City television network studio-based late evening television show, similar to what Johnny Carson and Jack Paar had hosted, for so many years, later in the 20th-century and early 21st-century.