On The Road In The 1970's: Part 65

Prior to the spring of 1967 and reading Ramparts magazine's article about New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's re-investigation of what actually happened in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963, I had neither read Mark Lane's best-selling Rush to Judgement book nor seen the Rush To Judgement movie that Emile De Antonio and Mark Lane had produced, which raised questions aout the accuracy of the Warren Commision Report's assertion (endorsed by the U.S. Establishment's New York Times, CBS News and all U.S. corporate media news departments) that "Lee Harvey Oswald alone killed both JFK and Tippit." And that only irrational "JFK conspiracy theory-buffs" could doubt the truth of the Warren Commision's case against Oswald and the official U.S. Establishment story about how JFK was eliminated and why Oswald was, in turn, eliminated by Jack Ruby. 

Because De Antonio's Rush To Judgement movie in the 1960's was not broadcast on any U.S. television channel, whether corporate tv network or PBS-affiliated, and did not seem to be shown in many U.S. movie theaters in the USA during the 1960's, it wasn't until decades later that I actually watched De Antonio's Rush To Judgement movie.

But after reading Mark Lane's book in the late 1960's or early 1970's, I did come to agree with Mark Lane's assertion that Oswald's claim after his arrest, that he was just "the patsy" and hadn't shot either JFK or Texas Governor Connolly on November 22, 1963, was true. After all, if, as Lane's book indicates, Oswald was seen by a Dallas cop sitting in the second floor lunchroom of the Texas School Book Depository with a coke bottle in his hand so soon after JFK was shot, there's no way he could have been the one firing any shots from the 6th floor only minutes before; and if the shots that killed JFK came from the grassy knoll, according to the witnesses closest to the scene of JFK's elimination that Mark Lane discovered, Oswald could not have been the person who, alone and individually, eliminated JFK.

Mark Lane was sometimes seen on televisiion disputing the Warren Commission's official version of JFK's elimination in the 1960's. But, because witnesses and journalists (like Dorothy Kilgallen, for example) who too publicly raised questions about the Warren Commission Report's accuracy seemed to end up dead more frequently than the witnesses and journalists who accepted the official story, during the 1960, people like myself tended to say away from doing much independent research or writing about the "Who Killed JFK?" topic during the 1960's. It then still seemed like a personally dangerous topic to get into or a topic which, even if you were willing to risk your life to research or write about, might quickly cause you to become the victim of "conspiracy theorist-baiting" by Establishment journalists, and even by some politically left-liberal "anti-Establishment" journalists, during that decade.

By 1973 and 1974, however, when Richard Nixon was being more heavily investigated for his role in the "Watergate Scandal," and eventually forced by "The Company" liberals and its corporate mass media to resign the U.S. presidency and be replaced by former Warren Commission member Gerald Ford as U..S. president and Billionaire Nelson Rockefeller as vice-president, a lot more people, especially in counter-cultural newspaper or magazine circles were questioning the Warren Commission Report's conclusions. And it then felt personally safer to assert more publicly that Oswald had been framed and was "the patsy" for what happened on November 22, 1963.

Yet even as late as 1973, when I wrote a folk song titled "Young Oswald" (after reading all 26 volumes of the Warren Commission Report that were in one of the CUNY community college libraries in Queens), which reflected my belief that Oswald was innocent of the allegation that he had fired the shots at JFK and eliminated JFK 10 years before, I still did not then question the Warren Comission Report and corporate media's assertion that Oswald was a "leftist who supported the Cuban Revolution in 1963;" at the time he was apparently framed as being JFK's assassin by Hoover's FBI.

The biography of Oswald that the Warren Commission Report writers and FBI investigators had put togeher and my listening to a vinyl record of Oswald defending the Cuban Revolution on a summer of 1963 New Orleans radio show (when he was portraying himself as a "Fair Play For Cuba" spokesperson in New Orleans), that I had purchased, had led me, prior to 1973, to mistakenly believe that Oswald in November 1963 was (like the Rosenbergs) framed by Hoover's FBI for a crime he did not commit; in order, apparently, to blame JFK's elimination on shots fired from a building where the FBI could then falsely claim there was an authentic U.S. leftist working there who had fired the shots.

And even after JFK elimination conspiracy investigators began publicizing more evidence in 1974 that the pro-Cuban Revolution leaflets Oswald was handing out in New Orleans, when he was interfered with by anti-Castro right-wing Cuban exiles on the street there, indicated an address that linked Oswald, himself, to right-wing CIA-backed anti-Castro exiles and their right-wing U.S. supporters, I still wondered why--if Oswald was a CIA agent or asset who had been posing as some kind of Marxist and leftist, from the time he first "defected" to the Soviet Union until he was eliminated by Jack Ruby on November 24, 1963--Oswald, once he realized after his arrest that he had been set up as "the patsy" in JFK's elimination, he didn't immediately scream out to the reporters in the police station that he had been posing as a Castro supporter, on orders from the CIA?

But late in the 1970's, after the Church Commitee's U.S. Senate investigation indicated the degree to which "The Company" was involved with others in illegal plots to eliminate foreign leaders like Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba, etc., however, I began to feel that Oswald might have thought that, despite being the CIA's patsy, it might still be safer for him to continue posing as a leftist/Fair Play For Cuba group supporter, until he was able to speak at length to a lawyer; rather than risk being immediately eliminated by some CIA-aligned gunman, himself, to punish him for possibly revealing his top-secret connection to "The Company"?

After his arrest on November 22, 1963, Oswald may perhaps have failed to realize that appaarently once he told reporters that he was "the patsy" and innocent of eliminating either Patrolman Tippit or JFK earlier that day, there was no way that the men who apparently conspired to eliminate JFK in Dallas on November 22, 1963 were going to risk letting him remain alive to stand trial.

 

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 64

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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