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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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