A day or two after I telephoned the now-defunct Indianapolis Times' office, Mr. Evans, a very friendly white fellow in his mid-twenties, who was responsible for training and supervising the teenagers who delivered the newspaper to homes in my neighborhood each day, arrived at my family's rented portion of the duplex house in the afternoon, after 3:30. Only a few years after graduating from the all-male student-bodied (and still all-male student-bodied in 21st-century) Wabash College in Charlottesville, Indiana, Mr. Evans had gotten married in his early 20's; and in early 1963 was now responsible for supporting both his wife and their newly-born child.
Mr. Evans's friendly and warm Midwestern-accented personality seemed much more genuinely friendly than the personalities you'd tend to find in most New York City white men of his age with similar jobs on the East Coast, who tended to relate in a more gruff and impatient way to people they worked with in the 1950's and early 1960's. And besides relating to me in a very and friendly way, Mr. Evans also seemed to enjoy conversing for awhile in a non-sexist but warm and friendly way with my mother; before he, afterwards, led me outside and into his car, to show me how I should go about picking up my bundle of Indianapolis Times newspapers that the firm's newspaper delivery truck dropped off at the corner of College Avenue and North 52nd Street each afternoon and before dawn on Sunday mornings.
In her early 40's at this time, still considered very pretty and physically attractive by most men she encountered and, having grown up in Chicago, also possessing both a Midwestern accent and a friendly personality, my mother was probably someone whom Mr. Evans found both pleasant and interesting to converse with for awhile during his workday; and my mother seemed to also enjoy conversing for awhile with the younger man, since he was the type of man in his 20's who was able to converse with an older married woman he found attractive without making her feel uncomfortable and sexually harassed, or that he was flirting with her in an inappropriate way.
Besides driving me, on the first weekday afternoon we met, up and down College Avenue, Carrollton Avenue, Guilford Avenue and Winthrop Avenue, between North 49th Street and North 52nd Street (and across 49th, 50th, 51st and 52nd streets between these four avenues), and pointing out the houses on whose front porches I was to deliver the Indianapolis Times newspapers to each afternoon, Mr. Evans also drove me around on my newspaper route two other times.
The second time Mr. Evans drove me around in his car was when he showed me how to collect the weekly newspaper subscription payments from the folks to whom I delivered the newspapers on my route. And the third time Mr. Evans drove me around in his car was, before dawn, on the first early Sunday morning that I delivered the Sunday morning edition of the Indianapolis Times.
Many decades later, my most vivid memory of being driven around by Mr. Evans during my time as a newspaper delivery boy is of that initial Sunday morning time in Mr. Evans's car. For most of the hour that it took to deliver the Sunday newspapers to the homes of the 60 or so customers on my route, Mr. Evans's car was the only vehicle that was being driven on the completely deserted streets; and I was the only person walking on the street in the neighborhood during that whole hour I took copies of the newspaper in and out of Mr. Evans's car and dropped the newspapers in front of the subscribers' homes.
In the car during the hour, Mr. Evans kept the car radio on to make the time for him go by faster, while I went in and out of the car or while he drove me near the next house delivery destination on my newspaper route. And I can recall that the two pop hit songs that were played most during that morning in early 1963 were Steve Lawrence's 45 rpm vinyl recording of "Go Away Little Girl" and Peter Paul and Mary's recording of "Puff The Magic Dragon," in which Peter Yarrow's voice sung the lead on the song he had written.
But if anyone had said to me in early 1963 that, by the end of the decade, I would be writing the kind of protest folk songs, topical folk songs and love songs that Peter, Paul and Mary were recording and singing in the early 1960's, I would have looked at that person in disbelief. Although I played the tenor saxophone in early 1963, I had not yet developed any interest in learning how play the guitar. Nor had I yet discovered that I possessed any ability to create original folk song melodies and original protest folk song, topical folk song and love song lyrics similar to the kind of folk songs that Peter, Paul and Mary were then singing.
In early 1963, I still assumed that I would likely just spend my life just working as either a non-academic historian, a high school history teacher, some kind of newspaper journalist or some kind of writer of fictional novels someday; and the notion that I would end up spending so much of my leisure time during my life writing original folk songs, myself, had never ever crossed my mind.
After Mr. Evans quickly saw that I was a rapid learner, who could be relied on to both deliver the Indianapolis Times each day in a timely fashion and collect the money from the newspaper subscribers on my route with no problems, I did not have much more personal contact with him during the first 6 months of 1963, when I was a newspaper delivery boy in the second term of my sophomore year in high school. I no longer recall what the procedure was for me to transfer the portion of money each week that I collected which was due the Indianapolis Times to Mr. Evans; or how I informed Mr. Evans whether or not I needed more or less newspapers to be dropped of in the following week for my newspaper route.
It could be that he came by in his car while I was delivering the newspapers at an arranged regular late afternoon time on Thursday or Friday to quickly pick up the money I collected and find out if there were any changes in the number of newspapers I required for the following week. Or it could be that I just telephoned him at the Indianapolis Times office each week and mailed him a check equal to the percentage of what I had collected which the Indianapolis Times took, after I deducted my weekly salary and tips from the money I had collected.
During the six months I worked as a newspaper delivery boy in my neighborhood, 7 days a week, I used my bicycle while making deliveries by myself, rather than just delivering the newspapers while on foot. Filling up a newspaper delivery sac that draped over the rear of my bicycle and being able to get the newspapers onto the front porch and/or front doors of some houses by just heaving the folded-up newspapers, while still on my bicycle, was a much quicker way of getting done with my day's delivery task than delivering the newspapers by foot.
Over 50 years later, I can only recall the faces of just a few of the newspaper subscribers I collected from, because collecting money from newspaper subscribers on my route each week was like going around to houses or apartments in your neighborhood as a child on Halloween and saying "Trick or treat." You usually just spoke to the person who answered the door that you collected subcription money from for only a minute; and in some cases, if the subscriber paid you by the month for 4 weeks of deliveries, you might only see that subscriber for 6 minutes during the whole 6 months you delivered newspapers to that subscriber.
What I do recall is speaking to a white housewife, by the front door of a house on Carrollton Avenue, who seemed to be in her late 40's, who found it interesting that I had just moved to the neighborhood from New York City; since she, her husband and he daughter, who was in high school like I was, had just recently moved into the neighborhood from Cleveland, Ohio. In retrospect, I think she also spent some time conversing with me because she wanted to determine whether or not I might be the type of neighborhood high school guy her daughter might be interested in getting to know. But since I can't recall ever bumping into her daughter in school or in the neighborhood when I lived in Indianapolis, I don't know what was her final determination about me in early 1963.
I also recall a brief chat I had through the front doorway of a house on College Avenue, while making a collection, with an elderly white woman, who seemed to be in her late 60's, named Mrs. Schmidt, as well as collecting from a young married white woman, who seemed to be in her 20's, who was breastfeeding her newly arrived baby; and who lived with her husband and child in a small cottage in the backyard of the house that was adjacent to Winthrop Avenue. But that's all I can now remember of which people I delivered the Indianapolis Times to during the first 6 months of 1963. (end of part 24)
Monday, June 17, 2019
Friday, May 31, 2019
On The Road In The 1970's: Part 23
Within a few days after I moved into the rented house with my family on Indianapolis's north side, I eagerly telephoned the office of the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain's now-defunct local afternoon Indianapolis Times newspaper; and I expressed my interest in working for them as a newspaper delivery boy.
Given the fact that I pretty much lost any interest in devoting much of my life to the goal of individual money-making--rather than devoting most of my life to the goal of just helping humanity, artistic and creative expression, working for peace, justice and equality and giving to and sharing love with other people--by my junior year in high school, it's surprising, in retrospect, to recall how eager I was to begin working as an Indianapolis Times newspaper boy as a high school sophomore after I arrived in Indianapolis in late December 1962.
In my sixth grade class at P.S. 221 in the Little Neck-Douglaston neighborhood in Queens, south of the Long Island Expressway on Marathon Parkway, my non-authoritarian and lenient teacher, Mr. Smith, had appointed me to be the student in charge of of ordering by telephone each week's bundle of discounted, Monday-to Friday daily New York Times newspapers that were to be delivered to the school each morning.
So I was also the 6th-grader who was responsible for going around to each 5th and 6th grade class teacher every week, to record the number of daily New York Times newspapers they and their 5th or 6th grade class students had ordered for the next week, collecting the money from these teachers each week for the number of newspapers ordered and walking to P.S. 221 forty-five minutes before class started at 9 o'clock; in order to bring the bundle of New York Times newspapers, that the Times' delivery truck had dropped off in front of the school, into P.S. 221 and place the appropriate number of daily newspapers ordered on the floor in front of each 5th and 6th grade classroom door.
Mr. Smith was responsible for mailing the money I collected as payment for the delivery of each week's daily bundle of discounted New York Times newspapers by the New York Times Company's school distribution department. But I was the 6th-grade individual who briefly spoke personally by phone each week to the New York Times male employee responsible for making sure, in a serious businesslike way, that P.S. 221 would receive the right number of copies of newspapers in the following week.
Because, in 6th grade, I found it interesting being P.S. 221's "New York Times monitor," the thought never even crossed my mind (or even my parents' mind) that maybe I should have also been given some kind of monetary compensation by either Mr. Smith or the New York Times Company for doing this kind of newspaper distribution, order-taking and collection work for them in the 6th grade. But by the time I was a sophomore in Indianapolis, I had previously observed that the teenage newspaper delivery boys who brought my mother her copies of the Long Island Star-Journal and Newsday daily newspapers to read each day were earning some extra spending money each from this activity.
So I now realized that working as a newspaper delivery boy, besides being an activity that I still expected to be inherently interesting to me, was also a job from which I could earn some extra personal spending money for myself, in addition to the small amount of personal spending money that the weekly allowance I received from my father, as a teenager, then provided me with.
Even as a then-high school sophomore, I had no interest in spending money on clothes; and I didn't then yet need money to pay for an early 1960's date with a high school female classmate, because I wasn't dating anyone during my sophomore year in Indianapolis. So as it turned out, I ended up using most of the extra money I earned from being an Indianapolis Times afternoon edition and Sunday morning edition newspaper delivery boy to buy a Bell & Howell 8 mm home movie projector, to buy a cheap tape recorder (that quickly stopped working well after I purchased it) and to buy a lot of long-playing 33 1/3 rpm vinyl record albums of both Broadway hit musicals and Broadway flop musicals (since I still was more into Broadway musicals than into rock'n'roll or folk music during the first 6 months of 1963).
Given the fact that I pretty much lost any interest in devoting much of my life to the goal of individual money-making--rather than devoting most of my life to the goal of just helping humanity, artistic and creative expression, working for peace, justice and equality and giving to and sharing love with other people--by my junior year in high school, it's surprising, in retrospect, to recall how eager I was to begin working as an Indianapolis Times newspaper boy as a high school sophomore after I arrived in Indianapolis in late December 1962.
In my sixth grade class at P.S. 221 in the Little Neck-Douglaston neighborhood in Queens, south of the Long Island Expressway on Marathon Parkway, my non-authoritarian and lenient teacher, Mr. Smith, had appointed me to be the student in charge of of ordering by telephone each week's bundle of discounted, Monday-to Friday daily New York Times newspapers that were to be delivered to the school each morning.
So I was also the 6th-grader who was responsible for going around to each 5th and 6th grade class teacher every week, to record the number of daily New York Times newspapers they and their 5th or 6th grade class students had ordered for the next week, collecting the money from these teachers each week for the number of newspapers ordered and walking to P.S. 221 forty-five minutes before class started at 9 o'clock; in order to bring the bundle of New York Times newspapers, that the Times' delivery truck had dropped off in front of the school, into P.S. 221 and place the appropriate number of daily newspapers ordered on the floor in front of each 5th and 6th grade classroom door.
Mr. Smith was responsible for mailing the money I collected as payment for the delivery of each week's daily bundle of discounted New York Times newspapers by the New York Times Company's school distribution department. But I was the 6th-grade individual who briefly spoke personally by phone each week to the New York Times male employee responsible for making sure, in a serious businesslike way, that P.S. 221 would receive the right number of copies of newspapers in the following week.
Because, in 6th grade, I found it interesting being P.S. 221's "New York Times monitor," the thought never even crossed my mind (or even my parents' mind) that maybe I should have also been given some kind of monetary compensation by either Mr. Smith or the New York Times Company for doing this kind of newspaper distribution, order-taking and collection work for them in the 6th grade. But by the time I was a sophomore in Indianapolis, I had previously observed that the teenage newspaper delivery boys who brought my mother her copies of the Long Island Star-Journal and Newsday daily newspapers to read each day were earning some extra spending money each from this activity.
So I now realized that working as a newspaper delivery boy, besides being an activity that I still expected to be inherently interesting to me, was also a job from which I could earn some extra personal spending money for myself, in addition to the small amount of personal spending money that the weekly allowance I received from my father, as a teenager, then provided me with.
Even as a then-high school sophomore, I had no interest in spending money on clothes; and I didn't then yet need money to pay for an early 1960's date with a high school female classmate, because I wasn't dating anyone during my sophomore year in Indianapolis. So as it turned out, I ended up using most of the extra money I earned from being an Indianapolis Times afternoon edition and Sunday morning edition newspaper delivery boy to buy a Bell & Howell 8 mm home movie projector, to buy a cheap tape recorder (that quickly stopped working well after I purchased it) and to buy a lot of long-playing 33 1/3 rpm vinyl record albums of both Broadway hit musicals and Broadway flop musicals (since I still was more into Broadway musicals than into rock'n'roll or folk music during the first 6 months of 1963).
Wednesday, May 22, 2019
On The Road In The 1970's: Part 22
The half of the rented private duplex house in Indianapolis my family moved into in January 1963 was located near North 52nd Street, in the area between College Avenue and Meridian Street, but closer to the less affluent College Avenue side of this area. As I've previously mentioned, in the early 1960's Indianapolis real estate firms didn't allow African-Americans to live north of 38th Street on that side of the city. So the neighborhood I lived in was a lily-white Northern neighborhood.
What immediately struck me about the neighborhood streets between the College Avenue and Meridian Street major thoroughfares, where traffic flowed heavily south to north and north to south, was how much more deserted and dead daily life in front of the houses seemed than what daily street life was like on most of the streets in Queens, where I had grown up, had been. The only time you usually saw any individual people walking on the street was when they walked in and out of the front of their private homes, to get in and out of their cars, that were parked on the street or in their garages.
Even in spring, summer and autumn weather, you never saw many people walking around on the neighborhood sidewalks or sitting in front of their homes as they sometimes did on streets in front of private homes or garden apartment buildings in Queens. Apparently the vast majority of neighborhood residents, many of whom may have grown up in houses with front porches on which they sat on in the spring, summer and fall, seemed to prefer to just sit in their backyards, away from being viewed from the street or from being able to look out at the street, whenever they felt like sitting outside near their homes in spring, summer or autumn.
One difference between the private houses in the Indianapolis neighborhood I lived in and private houses in Queens, however, was that in Indianapolis some of the garages of the houses had basketball hoops attached atop their closed garage doors; for the boys in the nuclear family to practice their basketball shots or free throws on or to play one-on-one basketball games with a friend or each other. In Queens, there were many more outdoor schoolyard playgrounds, apartment development playgrounds and city public playground with basketball courts and basketball hoops on backboards; where boys and men (or the extremely unusual girl or woman in the early 1960's) who wished to practice shots and free throws or play one-on-one or team basketball games with their friends, or anyone else whom they happened to meet on the playground basketball court that day, could freely play. So there was no need for the private house owners, whose sons might be into basketball, to attach basketball hoops above their private home's garage, in a place like Queens.
Not too long after my family arrived in Indianapolis, I saw the campus of Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, when my father and mother drove my sister and her trunk of clothes south from Indianapolis, on State Highway 37, down to Stempel Hall on IU's campus for her orientation, prior to her beginning her first term as an Indiana University student. What most impressed me about Indiana University's campus was the number of academic and dormitory buildings it seemed to have, how large its campus was and how much more it looked like a separate city than did the only campus which I previously had seen, Queens College's campus, had looked like. Indiana University seemed like it would provide a student who attended college there with a much more exciting and authentic 4 year-college experience than what a student might have who was only attending a college for commuters that had no dormitories on campus in New York City, like Queens College or CCNY.
What immediately struck me about the neighborhood streets between the College Avenue and Meridian Street major thoroughfares, where traffic flowed heavily south to north and north to south, was how much more deserted and dead daily life in front of the houses seemed than what daily street life was like on most of the streets in Queens, where I had grown up, had been. The only time you usually saw any individual people walking on the street was when they walked in and out of the front of their private homes, to get in and out of their cars, that were parked on the street or in their garages.
Even in spring, summer and autumn weather, you never saw many people walking around on the neighborhood sidewalks or sitting in front of their homes as they sometimes did on streets in front of private homes or garden apartment buildings in Queens. Apparently the vast majority of neighborhood residents, many of whom may have grown up in houses with front porches on which they sat on in the spring, summer and fall, seemed to prefer to just sit in their backyards, away from being viewed from the street or from being able to look out at the street, whenever they felt like sitting outside near their homes in spring, summer or autumn.
One difference between the private houses in the Indianapolis neighborhood I lived in and private houses in Queens, however, was that in Indianapolis some of the garages of the houses had basketball hoops attached atop their closed garage doors; for the boys in the nuclear family to practice their basketball shots or free throws on or to play one-on-one basketball games with a friend or each other. In Queens, there were many more outdoor schoolyard playgrounds, apartment development playgrounds and city public playground with basketball courts and basketball hoops on backboards; where boys and men (or the extremely unusual girl or woman in the early 1960's) who wished to practice shots and free throws or play one-on-one or team basketball games with their friends, or anyone else whom they happened to meet on the playground basketball court that day, could freely play. So there was no need for the private house owners, whose sons might be into basketball, to attach basketball hoops above their private home's garage, in a place like Queens.
Not too long after my family arrived in Indianapolis, I saw the campus of Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, when my father and mother drove my sister and her trunk of clothes south from Indianapolis, on State Highway 37, down to Stempel Hall on IU's campus for her orientation, prior to her beginning her first term as an Indiana University student. What most impressed me about Indiana University's campus was the number of academic and dormitory buildings it seemed to have, how large its campus was and how much more it looked like a separate city than did the only campus which I previously had seen, Queens College's campus, had looked like. Indiana University seemed like it would provide a student who attended college there with a much more exciting and authentic 4 year-college experience than what a student might have who was only attending a college for commuters that had no dormitories on campus in New York City, like Queens College or CCNY.
Tuesday, May 14, 2019
On The Road In The 1970's: Part 21
Getting into Indianapolis, Indiana in the late afternoon in late December 1962, I spent my first night in that city in a Holiday Inn motel room, near north 38th Street, on the east side of Indianapolis's Meridian Street, with my family. It was the first time either my father, my mother, my older sister or I had ever spent a night in a Holiday Inn; in a decade when the Holiday Inn Corporation's motels seemed more modern and newer than most of the other motels that drivers, who found the big city U.S. hotel rates either too expensive or too lacking in parking spaces, had generally stayed at while on the road during the 1950's.
The reason my father could lodge his family in this large Holiday Inn room, before moving his family in early January 1963 into the half of a two-family house near Northeast 52nd Street, that he and my mother had agreed to rent when they had flown out to Indianapolis alone a few weeks earlier, was because the firm he worked for provided him with an expense account to cover the cost of moving.
What I didn't realize, until after I had lived in Indianapolis for a few months, was that Indianapolis's white racist real estate firm executives and local bank executives had apparently decided before 1963 that no houses would be sold or rented, and also no apartments would be rented, to any African-Americans who wished to buy or rent a house or rent an apartment above Northeast 38th Street in Indianapolis. So in the early 1960's, the neighborhoods north of 38th Street on the east side of Indianapolis were as lily-white as South Boston in Massachusetts still would be during the 1970's.
Having only lived in just a South Bronx apartment building, a Whitestone, Queens apartment building and a Douglaston-Little Neck, Queens garden apartment development complex prior to moving to Indianapolis, I was excited to now be living in half of a two-family private house that my parents had rented. The private house was probably built in the early 1920's.
The house had no grass backyard or garden, but only a front porch , which my family shared with the Griffith family that rented and lived in the part of the duplex that was attached to where my family lived. Renting our side of the house, however, gave my family a private, unfurnished basement, a first floor living room, dining room and kitchen, a second floor of three bedrooms and a bathroom without a shower, and a large attic on the third floor. So the amount of indoor space I had access to at home in Indianapolis was much larger than what the 5 and 1/2-room second-floor garden apartment my family had lived in during the previous 9 1/2 years in the Beech Hills apartment complex development in Douglaston-Little Neck, Queens had provided me with.
Much of the space in the rented house's unfurnished basement was taken up by the oil heating furnace that provided the needed winter heating for all the rooms in the house and for its hot water. Because the monthly rents or limited equity co-op maintenance fees of apartments that my father had always lived in after World War II always included the cost of heating, my father had not previously realized that the rent for a private house in the Midwest did not also include a hefty cost to heat the house. So that, besides paying a monthly rent, you also would end up spending a lot of money paying off your rented house's heating bill.
So when, after the first few months of living in Indianapolis during the winter of 1963, the bill from the Indianapolis utility company that provided oil for our rented house's heating fuel arrived, my father was surprised at how much it was, on top of the monthly rent, costing to heat the house. And he and my mother then became very cautious about turning on and up the thermostat on the basement heater, during the rest of the time my family lived in this rented house.
In the 1950's and early 1960's it was still not common for most apartments in Queens or the Bronx to have air-conditioning units in their living rooms. So on hot and humid summer evenings, many apartment residents in the Bronx and Queens would try to escape the heat and humidity in the evening by sitting outside on benches in local parks or in front of their garden apartments or apartment buildings. The private house my family rented in Indianapolis, however, provided an air-conditioning unit in its living room. So whenever I watched TV shows on summer evenings, while living in Indianapolis, the hot and humid summer temperatures never caused me any discomfort while watching television (like the evening television addict I was until my last few years of high school, after I read a politically liberal critique of corporate commercial television programming, that had a title like "The Great Time Killer").
The reason my father could lodge his family in this large Holiday Inn room, before moving his family in early January 1963 into the half of a two-family house near Northeast 52nd Street, that he and my mother had agreed to rent when they had flown out to Indianapolis alone a few weeks earlier, was because the firm he worked for provided him with an expense account to cover the cost of moving.
What I didn't realize, until after I had lived in Indianapolis for a few months, was that Indianapolis's white racist real estate firm executives and local bank executives had apparently decided before 1963 that no houses would be sold or rented, and also no apartments would be rented, to any African-Americans who wished to buy or rent a house or rent an apartment above Northeast 38th Street in Indianapolis. So in the early 1960's, the neighborhoods north of 38th Street on the east side of Indianapolis were as lily-white as South Boston in Massachusetts still would be during the 1970's.
Having only lived in just a South Bronx apartment building, a Whitestone, Queens apartment building and a Douglaston-Little Neck, Queens garden apartment development complex prior to moving to Indianapolis, I was excited to now be living in half of a two-family private house that my parents had rented. The private house was probably built in the early 1920's.
The house had no grass backyard or garden, but only a front porch , which my family shared with the Griffith family that rented and lived in the part of the duplex that was attached to where my family lived. Renting our side of the house, however, gave my family a private, unfurnished basement, a first floor living room, dining room and kitchen, a second floor of three bedrooms and a bathroom without a shower, and a large attic on the third floor. So the amount of indoor space I had access to at home in Indianapolis was much larger than what the 5 and 1/2-room second-floor garden apartment my family had lived in during the previous 9 1/2 years in the Beech Hills apartment complex development in Douglaston-Little Neck, Queens had provided me with.
Much of the space in the rented house's unfurnished basement was taken up by the oil heating furnace that provided the needed winter heating for all the rooms in the house and for its hot water. Because the monthly rents or limited equity co-op maintenance fees of apartments that my father had always lived in after World War II always included the cost of heating, my father had not previously realized that the rent for a private house in the Midwest did not also include a hefty cost to heat the house. So that, besides paying a monthly rent, you also would end up spending a lot of money paying off your rented house's heating bill.
So when, after the first few months of living in Indianapolis during the winter of 1963, the bill from the Indianapolis utility company that provided oil for our rented house's heating fuel arrived, my father was surprised at how much it was, on top of the monthly rent, costing to heat the house. And he and my mother then became very cautious about turning on and up the thermostat on the basement heater, during the rest of the time my family lived in this rented house.
In the 1950's and early 1960's it was still not common for most apartments in Queens or the Bronx to have air-conditioning units in their living rooms. So on hot and humid summer evenings, many apartment residents in the Bronx and Queens would try to escape the heat and humidity in the evening by sitting outside on benches in local parks or in front of their garden apartments or apartment buildings. The private house my family rented in Indianapolis, however, provided an air-conditioning unit in its living room. So whenever I watched TV shows on summer evenings, while living in Indianapolis, the hot and humid summer temperatures never caused me any discomfort while watching television (like the evening television addict I was until my last few years of high school, after I read a politically liberal critique of corporate commercial television programming, that had a title like "The Great Time Killer").
Thursday, May 9, 2019
On The Road In The 1970's: Part 20
Being dropped off near Broad Ripple Avenue in Indianapolis, many years after I had lived in Indianapolis in the early 1960s, naturally brought back many memories of my time living there. And since I've never really written down my memories of what it was like for me living in "Naptown" in the early 1960s, I suppose now's a good time in the 21st-century for me, many decades later, to pause somewhat now, from recalling my life on the road in the 1970s hitching back to the East Coast experiences, to sharing my memories of living in Indianapolis as a teenager in the early 1960s.
For, after all, were it not for the fact that I lived in Indianapolis and happened, by chance, to attend Broad Ripple High School for a year and a half, I think there would have been little chance that I would have ended up as the Columbia Students for a Democratic Society [SDS] sophomore student activist who first discovered, in early March 1967, that Columbia University was an institutional member of the Pentagon's Institute for Defense Analyses [IDA] weapons research think-tank, during the 1960s Vietnam War era.
And it's then likely that I would have just ended up attending CCNY between 1965 and 1969, not been politically involved in Columbia SDS chapter anti-war campus activism as an organizer and not shared an Upper West Manhattan apartment for three months with 1960s New Left Movement "heavies" like Ted Gold and Dave Gilbert, during the Fall 1966 to Fall 1968 New Left Movement historical period in New York City.
Before being driven, along with my mother and sister, by my father out to Indianapolis from New York City in his 1959 Pontiac car, during Christmas vacation in December 1962, the only part of Indiana I had ever been driven through was the area in northern Indiana adjacent to the Indiana Toll Road, that passed by Gary, Indiana and led to the city of Chicago. My mother had been born and raised in Chicago; and that's where her parents still lived in the late 1950s and 1960s in a slum apartment near Humboldt Park and Division Street. So leaving the Pennsylvania Turnpike in western Pennsylvania in late December 1962, and entering West Virginia on the U.S. 40 road which led westward to Cambridge, Ohio, Columbus, Ohio and my family's ultimate destination, Indianapolis, meant driving through an area of the United States that I had never seen before.
In the early 1960s, the modern Interstate Highway 70, that eventually completely replaced U.S. Highway 40 as the fastest way to reach Indianapolis from the Pennsylvania Turnpike, had not yet been completed. And, driving through a narrow section of West Virginia on U.S. 40 in the early 1960s, what was most morally upsetting to a teenager like me, who had grown up in an affluent white working-class neighborhood of Queens, was noticing that a substantial number of the West Virginia houses we passed still seemed to lack modern conveniences, like indoor bathrooms; and many of the West Virginia towns one passed through still looked like they had never yet recovered economically, in the early 1960s, from the 1930's Great Depression.
Besides driving through the then-impoverished-looking small city of Wheeling, West Virginia, my father drove us through a West Virginia town that the AAA "Trip-tick" booklet, which we were using to guide us west to Indianapolis on U.S. 40 in a decade many years before the GPS set-up that 21st-century cars in USA generally use instead of road maps were installed in cars, described as a speed trap. And sure enough, on the outskirts of this small West Virginia's town main street, I noticed that there was a cop car with one cop inside, by the side of the road, looking like he was preparing to immediately ticket any car with an out-of-state license plate whom he might catch entering his town above the 25 mph posted speed limit on the town's partially-hidden speed-limit sign; in order to shake the out-of-state driver for some additionally-needed small town government revenue.
But because my father had been warned in advance by the AAA "Trip-tick" booklet to beware of this particular town's speed trap, he was already driving his car at the 25 mph speed limit when he entered the town. So the local town cop apparently decided he did not have even a contrived basis to turn on his car's siren, pull us over, ticket my father and shake us down for some money, despite the fact that my father's Pontiac still had an out-of-state New York license plate. Or perhaps, because there were always a lot of other out-of-state drivers entering his town, who were actually driving over 25 mph after entering his town, the local cop at his hidden speed trap waiting place felt there was really no need to pull over my father's particular car, to obtain the town's usual amount of daily speed trap ticketing revenue?
For, after all, were it not for the fact that I lived in Indianapolis and happened, by chance, to attend Broad Ripple High School for a year and a half, I think there would have been little chance that I would have ended up as the Columbia Students for a Democratic Society [SDS] sophomore student activist who first discovered, in early March 1967, that Columbia University was an institutional member of the Pentagon's Institute for Defense Analyses [IDA] weapons research think-tank, during the 1960s Vietnam War era.
And it's then likely that I would have just ended up attending CCNY between 1965 and 1969, not been politically involved in Columbia SDS chapter anti-war campus activism as an organizer and not shared an Upper West Manhattan apartment for three months with 1960s New Left Movement "heavies" like Ted Gold and Dave Gilbert, during the Fall 1966 to Fall 1968 New Left Movement historical period in New York City.
Before being driven, along with my mother and sister, by my father out to Indianapolis from New York City in his 1959 Pontiac car, during Christmas vacation in December 1962, the only part of Indiana I had ever been driven through was the area in northern Indiana adjacent to the Indiana Toll Road, that passed by Gary, Indiana and led to the city of Chicago. My mother had been born and raised in Chicago; and that's where her parents still lived in the late 1950s and 1960s in a slum apartment near Humboldt Park and Division Street. So leaving the Pennsylvania Turnpike in western Pennsylvania in late December 1962, and entering West Virginia on the U.S. 40 road which led westward to Cambridge, Ohio, Columbus, Ohio and my family's ultimate destination, Indianapolis, meant driving through an area of the United States that I had never seen before.
In the early 1960s, the modern Interstate Highway 70, that eventually completely replaced U.S. Highway 40 as the fastest way to reach Indianapolis from the Pennsylvania Turnpike, had not yet been completed. And, driving through a narrow section of West Virginia on U.S. 40 in the early 1960s, what was most morally upsetting to a teenager like me, who had grown up in an affluent white working-class neighborhood of Queens, was noticing that a substantial number of the West Virginia houses we passed still seemed to lack modern conveniences, like indoor bathrooms; and many of the West Virginia towns one passed through still looked like they had never yet recovered economically, in the early 1960s, from the 1930's Great Depression.
Besides driving through the then-impoverished-looking small city of Wheeling, West Virginia, my father drove us through a West Virginia town that the AAA "Trip-tick" booklet, which we were using to guide us west to Indianapolis on U.S. 40 in a decade many years before the GPS set-up that 21st-century cars in USA generally use instead of road maps were installed in cars, described as a speed trap. And sure enough, on the outskirts of this small West Virginia's town main street, I noticed that there was a cop car with one cop inside, by the side of the road, looking like he was preparing to immediately ticket any car with an out-of-state license plate whom he might catch entering his town above the 25 mph posted speed limit on the town's partially-hidden speed-limit sign; in order to shake the out-of-state driver for some additionally-needed small town government revenue.
But because my father had been warned in advance by the AAA "Trip-tick" booklet to beware of this particular town's speed trap, he was already driving his car at the 25 mph speed limit when he entered the town. So the local town cop apparently decided he did not have even a contrived basis to turn on his car's siren, pull us over, ticket my father and shake us down for some money, despite the fact that my father's Pontiac still had an out-of-state New York license plate. Or perhaps, because there were always a lot of other out-of-state drivers entering his town, who were actually driving over 25 mph after entering his town, the local cop at his hidden speed trap waiting place felt there was really no need to pull over my father's particular car, to obtain the town's usual amount of daily speed trap ticketing revenue?
Wednesday, March 6, 2019
On The Road In The 1970's: Part 19
The driver who picked me up in St. Louis on the Interstate 70 break-down lane, just before it crossed the Mississippi River and entered Illinois, was a young, culturally straight-looking white guy with short hair, who was dressed in a suit and tie. He was in his mid-to-late 20's and was apparently driving from St. Louis to Indianapolis for some kind of corporate sales-related meeting.
Despite seeming to be fairly straight culturally, he apparently was the kind of guy who, when having to drive on straight job-related long highway trips, preferred to have some company in the car with him; rather than having to drive the whole way all alone in his car to his final destination. He had already picked up two other hitchhikers in St. Louis, a hippie-looking teenage white woman and her hippie-looking teenage white boyfriend (whose parents lived in a St. Louis suburb), only a short distance away from where I was holding out my thumb, just before he also picked me up.
So when he invited me to hop in the car's front passenger seat, the hippie teenage woman and her teenage hippie boyfriend, who were also heading for Indianapolis, apparently to visit some friends or relatives who lived there, were already sitting in the car's backseat.
The culturally straight-looking, but good-natured, young driver who took me and the hippie teenage couple to Indianapolis didn't smoke any pot as he drove down the highway. But during the whole ride on Interstate 70, until we reached the Downtown Greyhound station in Indianapolis, near where he dropped all three of us off, he had his car radio turned on loudly to one of the current 1970s hit radio FM rock stations.
So, during the less than 4 hours it took us to get from St. Louis to Indianapolis while surrounded by light early morning 1970's highway traffic, nearly the whole time in the car was pretty much spent just listening to the 1970s rock music hits at the time, rather than conversing with each other about any philosophical issues.
After the two other hitchhikers and I were all dropped off a block or two from Indy's Downtown Greyhound station and, together, walked to the Greyhound bus station to use their public restrooms, I wished them both luck and started walking east towards Monument Circle, towards College Avenue; to see, if I could hitch a lift north, up to Broad Ripple Avenue, near where the Broad Ripple High School, that I had attended for a year and a half in the early 1960s, was located.
By this time on my trip back from the West Coast on the road in the 1970s, I was nearly so totally penniless that I felt I couldn't even afford the price of the fare on a city bus that would take me from downtown Indianapolis up north to Broad Ripple Avenue.
Like I've indicated before, on a certain level at this point in my life, I doubted that I was going to figure out a way to survive many years and live a very long life within the U.S. capitalist system, unless there was some kind of 1970's anti-capitalist Revolution in the USA. So by this time in the 1970's, with the probability of a 1970's Revolution in the USA now appearing to be less likely, I was beginning to expect that I was going to die at a young age.
Without having a white middle-class or white upper-middle-class background to retreat to (and no longer even having my less class-privileged affluent white working-class family background anymore to retreat to), I felt that, as a person still having politically dissident leftist politics in the USA, I was now destined for an early death. But, just like I had ended up going out to the West Coast, because I wanted to see California in person before I died, I also wanted to, before I died, revisit at least once in the 1970s the neighborhood around the Indianapolis high school I had attended in the early 1960s.
Not too long after I stuck my thumb out near College Avenue in downtown Indianapolis, an old car from the 1960s, driven by a friendly, long blond-haired teenage white woman that most men would regard as physically attractive, whose white teenage boyfriend was seated next to her in the car's passenger seat, stopped and offered to give me a lift in the direction I was going; and, smiling, I quickly jumped into the back seat of their car with my large knapsack and started chatting a bit with the two teenagers.
The white teenage couple who picked me up were both children of some impoverished small farm owners near one of the towns south of Indianapolis, in southern Indiana; and, apparently, they had both decided to leave their homes on farms and drive to some city in northern Indiana, where they intended to live and get married. Since both of the teenagers seemed bored with life in rural Indiana and uninterested in spending their days sitting in school classrooms anymore or going to college, I didn't feel like saying anything that might make them feel that they should wait until they were a few years older before splitting from their parents' impoverished farms.
Yet after I wished them both luck and said goodbye to them, when they dropped me off on Broad Ripple Avenue on Indianapolis's north side, I felt that their expectation of how easy it might be to live independently of their parents' support in the 1970s, as a married teenage couple, seemed somewhat unrealistic.
Despite seeming to be fairly straight culturally, he apparently was the kind of guy who, when having to drive on straight job-related long highway trips, preferred to have some company in the car with him; rather than having to drive the whole way all alone in his car to his final destination. He had already picked up two other hitchhikers in St. Louis, a hippie-looking teenage white woman and her hippie-looking teenage white boyfriend (whose parents lived in a St. Louis suburb), only a short distance away from where I was holding out my thumb, just before he also picked me up.
So when he invited me to hop in the car's front passenger seat, the hippie teenage woman and her teenage hippie boyfriend, who were also heading for Indianapolis, apparently to visit some friends or relatives who lived there, were already sitting in the car's backseat.
The culturally straight-looking, but good-natured, young driver who took me and the hippie teenage couple to Indianapolis didn't smoke any pot as he drove down the highway. But during the whole ride on Interstate 70, until we reached the Downtown Greyhound station in Indianapolis, near where he dropped all three of us off, he had his car radio turned on loudly to one of the current 1970s hit radio FM rock stations.
So, during the less than 4 hours it took us to get from St. Louis to Indianapolis while surrounded by light early morning 1970's highway traffic, nearly the whole time in the car was pretty much spent just listening to the 1970s rock music hits at the time, rather than conversing with each other about any philosophical issues.
After the two other hitchhikers and I were all dropped off a block or two from Indy's Downtown Greyhound station and, together, walked to the Greyhound bus station to use their public restrooms, I wished them both luck and started walking east towards Monument Circle, towards College Avenue; to see, if I could hitch a lift north, up to Broad Ripple Avenue, near where the Broad Ripple High School, that I had attended for a year and a half in the early 1960s, was located.
By this time on my trip back from the West Coast on the road in the 1970s, I was nearly so totally penniless that I felt I couldn't even afford the price of the fare on a city bus that would take me from downtown Indianapolis up north to Broad Ripple Avenue.
Like I've indicated before, on a certain level at this point in my life, I doubted that I was going to figure out a way to survive many years and live a very long life within the U.S. capitalist system, unless there was some kind of 1970's anti-capitalist Revolution in the USA. So by this time in the 1970's, with the probability of a 1970's Revolution in the USA now appearing to be less likely, I was beginning to expect that I was going to die at a young age.
Without having a white middle-class or white upper-middle-class background to retreat to (and no longer even having my less class-privileged affluent white working-class family background anymore to retreat to), I felt that, as a person still having politically dissident leftist politics in the USA, I was now destined for an early death. But, just like I had ended up going out to the West Coast, because I wanted to see California in person before I died, I also wanted to, before I died, revisit at least once in the 1970s the neighborhood around the Indianapolis high school I had attended in the early 1960s.
Not too long after I stuck my thumb out near College Avenue in downtown Indianapolis, an old car from the 1960s, driven by a friendly, long blond-haired teenage white woman that most men would regard as physically attractive, whose white teenage boyfriend was seated next to her in the car's passenger seat, stopped and offered to give me a lift in the direction I was going; and, smiling, I quickly jumped into the back seat of their car with my large knapsack and started chatting a bit with the two teenagers.
The white teenage couple who picked me up were both children of some impoverished small farm owners near one of the towns south of Indianapolis, in southern Indiana; and, apparently, they had both decided to leave their homes on farms and drive to some city in northern Indiana, where they intended to live and get married. Since both of the teenagers seemed bored with life in rural Indiana and uninterested in spending their days sitting in school classrooms anymore or going to college, I didn't feel like saying anything that might make them feel that they should wait until they were a few years older before splitting from their parents' impoverished farms.
Yet after I wished them both luck and said goodbye to them, when they dropped me off on Broad Ripple Avenue on Indianapolis's north side, I felt that their expectation of how easy it might be to live independently of their parents' support in the 1970s, as a married teenage couple, seemed somewhat unrealistic.
Monday, March 4, 2019
On The Road In The 1970's: Part 18
The St. Louis, Missouri gasoline station where I was dropped off at was still one of the 1970s Mid-West gas stations in which a gas station attendant had been hired to fill-up the car tanks of drivers who needed to purchase gas for their cars. But what was interesting about the white male gas station attendant, in his late teens or early 20's, who was filling up customer gas tanks, was that he also was apparently selling psychedelic drugs of some sort and/or bags of pot to some of the drivers who drove in front of the gasoline pumps, at the same time he filled up their tanks.
Only a few minutes after the pick-up truck that had driven me from Oklahoma City to St. Louis left the gas station, a bearded white freak-looking man with long hair, who looked like he was in his late 20's or early 30's, drove his car into the same St. Louis gas station, purchased some gas and some drugs from the attendant and, noticing me standing in the gas station with large knapsack, drove his car towards me, pushed open the front seat passenger door, and motioned with his hand for me to hop into the car.
I can't now recall what words we exchanged with each other after he passed me the joint of pot he was smoking, which had apparently made him already high before he had arrived at the gasoline station. But after driving through some impoverished St. Louis white neighborhood for a few blocks, we arrived at the rundown, two or three-room rented, shack-like, slum house in which he lived; and he then invited me to join him inside to "have some dinner."
When we entered his shack-like house from the sidewalk that led, without any intervening steps, directly into the living room of his "house," I noticed that it looked like he lived alone and kept his living room even more messy than most 1970's freak apartments were generally kept during that decade. Clothes and papers and crumbs of unfinished meals were scattered on the floor.
Soon after we both entered his living room, the bearded and long-haired white freak put some vinyl record on his living room stereo, which played music from a rock group that I wasn't familiar with. Then, all of a sudden, he pulled out some drug-taking paraphernalia, which he then asked me to hold, before he then injected some kind of drugs, perhaps heroin, into his right arm.
Not being that eager to hang out with a freak who seemed like he might be some kind of junkie, when I was then more into continuing on the road towards Indiana, I began to feel that it might be a good idea for me to split from the bearded freak's house as soon as I could escape.
So when, about 5 minutes after he injected himself, the bearded St. Louis freak started tossing vinyl records, dishes and plates around his apartment in a crazy way, and began running around his living room and into his bedroom in a kind of crazy way, while his mind seemed to be in some kind of hallucinating world, I quickly grabbed my knapsack. Than I quickly fled out-the door of his shack-like house, before sticking around to see whether or not the noise the bearded freak's running around inside and throwing of plates might have made would cause any of his neighbors to call the cops; and thus place me at risk of being arrested there with him on some illegal drug possession-related charge.
And when I glanced back for a few seconds after putting a 20-yard distance between me and the front door of his shack-like house, I noticed that the bearded junkie had, by then, opened his front door; and he was standing in front of the door, gazing at me with a glaze-eyed and puzzled expression. But I then quickly turned my head away from him and kept again walking away from where he lived in as fast a way as I could.
At night, during the next few hours, I kept walking east, carrying my knapsack, on one of the deserted St. Louis streets that seemed to be going in the direction of the Mississippi River, without encountering either any other freaks or hippies on the street to exchange conversation with; and without being noticed, profiled, harassed or stopped by any St. Louis cops. Not having enough money in my pocket, of course, to afford to sleep anywhere but outside during the night, except on the street or in some city park, I figured my best option was to just keep walking east towards Mississippi River as far as I could get during the night; and then try to hitch a ride going east through Illinois to Indiana near an Interstate 70 or U.S. 40 interchange as early in the morning as possible.
Eventually, I arrived at the big deserted park near the Mississippi River, where I noticed this big structure that's called the "Golden Arch." In the 1970's in St.Louis there apparently were still few homeless people in that city; and so I seemed to be the only person in either the darkened park or near the Golden Arch in the very late evening who seemed to be there looking for a place to sleep for the night, without being observed by any cops who might harass or arrest me for either vagrancy or for illegally sleeping in the park.
Glancing at the area around the Golden Arch, I noticed that there was some deserted space next to one of its sides, where you could lay down to sleep and be shielded enough in the darkness, so that any cop car that might be driving around or making sure no one was around there at night would likely not see you. And that's where I lay down and slept for about 4 or 5 hours during the one night I ever spent in St. Louis during my life: in a safe park hiding place adjacent to the Golden Arch by the Mississippi River's West Bank.
During the night, I was only briefly awakened once by the distant headlights of some cop car that apparently patrolled the park a few times in the dark early morning hours. But my sleeping spot near the Golden Arch did prove to, indeed, be shielded enough so that I had been able to get some hours of sleep time there, without being noticed by any cops, prior to awakening at dawn and walking towards one of the entrance ramps to Interstate 70 , near the Mississippi River; where I was quickly able to hitch an early ride into Illinois, that took me into Indiana, and eventually dropped me off in Downtown Indianapolis. Just a few blocks from "Naptown"'s post-1964-built Greyhound bus station.
Only a few minutes after the pick-up truck that had driven me from Oklahoma City to St. Louis left the gas station, a bearded white freak-looking man with long hair, who looked like he was in his late 20's or early 30's, drove his car into the same St. Louis gas station, purchased some gas and some drugs from the attendant and, noticing me standing in the gas station with large knapsack, drove his car towards me, pushed open the front seat passenger door, and motioned with his hand for me to hop into the car.
I can't now recall what words we exchanged with each other after he passed me the joint of pot he was smoking, which had apparently made him already high before he had arrived at the gasoline station. But after driving through some impoverished St. Louis white neighborhood for a few blocks, we arrived at the rundown, two or three-room rented, shack-like, slum house in which he lived; and he then invited me to join him inside to "have some dinner."
When we entered his shack-like house from the sidewalk that led, without any intervening steps, directly into the living room of his "house," I noticed that it looked like he lived alone and kept his living room even more messy than most 1970's freak apartments were generally kept during that decade. Clothes and papers and crumbs of unfinished meals were scattered on the floor.
Soon after we both entered his living room, the bearded and long-haired white freak put some vinyl record on his living room stereo, which played music from a rock group that I wasn't familiar with. Then, all of a sudden, he pulled out some drug-taking paraphernalia, which he then asked me to hold, before he then injected some kind of drugs, perhaps heroin, into his right arm.
Not being that eager to hang out with a freak who seemed like he might be some kind of junkie, when I was then more into continuing on the road towards Indiana, I began to feel that it might be a good idea for me to split from the bearded freak's house as soon as I could escape.
So when, about 5 minutes after he injected himself, the bearded St. Louis freak started tossing vinyl records, dishes and plates around his apartment in a crazy way, and began running around his living room and into his bedroom in a kind of crazy way, while his mind seemed to be in some kind of hallucinating world, I quickly grabbed my knapsack. Than I quickly fled out-the door of his shack-like house, before sticking around to see whether or not the noise the bearded freak's running around inside and throwing of plates might have made would cause any of his neighbors to call the cops; and thus place me at risk of being arrested there with him on some illegal drug possession-related charge.
And when I glanced back for a few seconds after putting a 20-yard distance between me and the front door of his shack-like house, I noticed that the bearded junkie had, by then, opened his front door; and he was standing in front of the door, gazing at me with a glaze-eyed and puzzled expression. But I then quickly turned my head away from him and kept again walking away from where he lived in as fast a way as I could.
At night, during the next few hours, I kept walking east, carrying my knapsack, on one of the deserted St. Louis streets that seemed to be going in the direction of the Mississippi River, without encountering either any other freaks or hippies on the street to exchange conversation with; and without being noticed, profiled, harassed or stopped by any St. Louis cops. Not having enough money in my pocket, of course, to afford to sleep anywhere but outside during the night, except on the street or in some city park, I figured my best option was to just keep walking east towards Mississippi River as far as I could get during the night; and then try to hitch a ride going east through Illinois to Indiana near an Interstate 70 or U.S. 40 interchange as early in the morning as possible.
Eventually, I arrived at the big deserted park near the Mississippi River, where I noticed this big structure that's called the "Golden Arch." In the 1970's in St.Louis there apparently were still few homeless people in that city; and so I seemed to be the only person in either the darkened park or near the Golden Arch in the very late evening who seemed to be there looking for a place to sleep for the night, without being observed by any cops who might harass or arrest me for either vagrancy or for illegally sleeping in the park.
Glancing at the area around the Golden Arch, I noticed that there was some deserted space next to one of its sides, where you could lay down to sleep and be shielded enough in the darkness, so that any cop car that might be driving around or making sure no one was around there at night would likely not see you. And that's where I lay down and slept for about 4 or 5 hours during the one night I ever spent in St. Louis during my life: in a safe park hiding place adjacent to the Golden Arch by the Mississippi River's West Bank.
During the night, I was only briefly awakened once by the distant headlights of some cop car that apparently patrolled the park a few times in the dark early morning hours. But my sleeping spot near the Golden Arch did prove to, indeed, be shielded enough so that I had been able to get some hours of sleep time there, without being noticed by any cops, prior to awakening at dawn and walking towards one of the entrance ramps to Interstate 70 , near the Mississippi River; where I was quickly able to hitch an early ride into Illinois, that took me into Indiana, and eventually dropped me off in Downtown Indianapolis. Just a few blocks from "Naptown"'s post-1964-built Greyhound bus station.
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