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 75

There still wasn't much very visible Civil Rights Movement protest activity going on in Indianapolis in the Spring of 1964 that I was aware of. So my main recollection of what was happening, on an historical political level, in Indianapolis and in Indiana during the first six months of 1964 is that, during that period, the then-white segregationist Democratic governor of Alabama, George Wallace, came to Indiana and campaigned for the 1964 Democratic presidential nomination in Indiana's 1964 Democratic Party presidential primary; on a platform which opposed enactment of the proposed 1964 Civil Rights Act, that would legally prohibit states in the South from enforcing any of their  Jim Crow state laws allowing public accomodations like hotels, motels, restaurants, stores, etc. to discriminate against African-Americans on the basis of race.

The white segregationist Democratic Party presidential primary candidate Wallace--who had previously gained a lot of mass media publicity for defying a federal court decision that required the University of Alabama to end its institutionally racist policy of still refusing to allow any African-American college students to attend that publicly-funded state university in the early 1960's--was expected to attact a lot of white voters in the 1964 Democratic Party presidential primaries of the states in the South. Especially in those Southern states where, before enactment of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, large numbers of African-Americans were being blocked from being able to vote, by various state rules that were applied in a racially discriminatory way by local and state officials.

But what ended up surprising a lot of people in 1964 was that in the Democratic Party's presidential primaries in some states in the North, like Indiana, where legalized segregation did not exist, Wallace was also able to attract a lot of white voters in 1964; although not enough votes to win the 1964 Democratic Party presidential primary in Indiana.

Despite its only morning daily newspaper, the Indianapolis Star, being then-owned by the anti-communist, right-wing extremist publisher, Pulliam (who backed the GOP national convention's 1964 presidential nominee and opponent of enactment of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Barry Goldwater, in 1964) and being the city in which the anti-communist right-wing (and then-still politically influential) American Legion had its headquarters in 1964, the majority of Democratic voters who lived in Indianapolis in 1964 still seemed to be supporters of LBJ's wing of the Democratic Party in the Spring of 1964.

So when the then-Democratic Governor of Indiana in the Spring of 1964, Matthew Welsh (who then lived in Indiana's Governor's Mansion on North Meridian Street in Indianapolis, less than two miles southwest from the neighborhood around East 52nd Street and College Avenue where my parents and I then lived), was put on the Democratic Party's presidential primary ballot--as a "favorite son" stand-in candidate for LBJ--to make sure that the primary would not automatically be won by Wallace because he had no other opponent campaigning against him, the majority of Indiana's 1964 Democratic Party primary voters voted against the white segregationist Wallace in 1964.

The fact that a white segregationist Democratic governor from the South, like George Wallace, could come to a Northern state like Indidana and actually win as many votes (nearly 30 percent) as he did in the Spring 1964 Democratic Party presidential primary in Indiana, also surprised me, somewhat.

Yet because Wallace did not actually win the 1964 Democratic presidential primary in Indiana, despite the degree to which right-wing conservative media political influence in the state seemed much greater than it had been in the state of New York, I also thought, in the Spring of 1964, that George Wallace would always only be no more than a politician who voters of just one region of the USA, the South, would ever end up casting voters for, in any future U.S. presidential campaigns by Wallace. In retrospect, though, I think I did not anticipate in 1964 that, when Wallace did run again for U.S. president as a third-party candidate, he would be able to attract as many white voters in states outside of the Southern region, as he did in the November 1968 election.  

 

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.