On The Road In The 1970's: Part 26

Besides not at least being somewhat racially integrated like Bayside High School had been in the Fall of 1962, Broad Ripple High School differed from Bayside H.S. in other ways. So the experience of attending Broad Ripple, as a high school student in 1963 and the Spring of 1964, differed from the experience of attending Bayside in the Fall of 1962.

Compared to Bayside, Broad Ripple was much less crowded with students, despite it being a 4-year high school of 9th-grade freshmen, 10th-grade sophomores, 11th-grade juniors and 12th-grade seniors. Within the Indianapolis public school system in the early 1960's, students attended a grammar school until the end of the 8th-grade and then began attending high school in the 9th-grade as freshmen. In New York City's public school system in the early 1960's, however, you usually only entered a real public high school as a 10th-grader and just spent only three years as a public high school student.

Unless you maybe went to one of the specialized elite public high schools (like Brooklyn Tech, Bronx High School of Science, Stuyvesant High School, Hunter High School or Music and Art), a Catholic parochial high school or a public vocational high school in New York City, you first attended an elementary school until the end of the sixth grade and a junior high school until the end of the ninth grade. So if you were seeking either an academic high school diploma (that you needed to get if you planned to apply to college), a commercial high school diploma (if you just planned to enter the 9-to-5 skyscraper business office work world without looking to go to college) or a general high school diploma (if you just planned to get some kind of blue-collar factory job or join the U.S. military if you were a man, or just get married and have children rapidly if you were a woman), you usually only entered a real public high school as a 10th-grader.

Yet even though Broad Ripple H.S. included a freshman class of about 400 students, as well as sophomore, junior and senior classes of about 400 students each and Bayside H.S. only included sophomores, juniors and seniors, because Bayside was located in a much more heavily populated area of the United States--New York City's borough of Queens--than Indianapolis, in the early 1960's it had so many students attending the school that it was a "triple session" school.

What Bayside H.S. being a high school on "triple session" meant in the early 1960's was that some of Bayside's students began their school day at 8 a.m. or 8:15 a.m. in the morning in what was called "zero period," a second group of Bayside students began their school day at 9 a.m. or 9:15 a.m. in what was called "first period" and a third group of Bayside students began their school dat at 10:30 or 10:45 a.m. in what was called "third period." As a consequence, if you began your school day at zero period, your school day would end after 7th period at around 2:15 p.m., If you began your school day at first period, your school day would end at the end of the 8th period, at around 3 p.m. And if you began your school day at 3rd period, your school day wouldn't end until after the "10th period" at around 4:30 p.m..

In contrast, at Broad Ripple H.S., all students just reported at the same time to their first period class at 8:15 a.m. each day; and at Broad Ripple all the students were released from classes at the end of the 8th or 9th period by 3 p.m., at the same time.

Another difference between Bayside H.S. and Broad Ripple H.S. was that Bayside was so overcrowded with students in the early 1960's that a portion of each year's entering 10th-grade sophomore class at Bayside was assigned to attend classes as a group not inside the Bayside H.S. building, but in a different, separate building a few blocks away, that was called "The Annex."

Were it not for the fact that the Bayside H.S. administration clerks assumed that, since I had been enrolled in a group music class as a 9th-grader at Jr. H.S. 67 learning to play the cello, I also was going to want to be in a group music class at Bayside H.S. as a sophomore learning to play the cello well enough to become a member of the high school orchesta by my junior or senior year, I would have ended up spending my first term as a high school sophomore in Bayside's annex, and not in Bayside's main building.

So even though, by the time I entered Bayside H.S. as a sophomore in September 1962, I was now into the saxophone and not the cello, I felt happy that the assumption by the school administration clerk that I wanted to be still studying a string instrument in high school had enabled me to avoid being assigned to attend "the annex;" which I felt would just provide a sophomore year high school experience too much like still being in junior high school. And which would deny me the opportunity of having an individual program of classes, where I would have a greater chance of having different classmates each period than I would, if I just mostly moved from classroom to classroom each period with the same group of 30 classmates in "the annex."

Of course, as soon as I received my program card on the first day of high school, I got my program changed, in a way I no longer can recall. So, instead of being in a morning music group class studying cello, I was in a group band class practicing saxophone.

Yet, unluckily, during my first term as a sophomore at Bayside I was still one of the 10th-graders who began school at the 10:30 or 10:45 hour third period class and whose last 10th period class didn't end until around 4:30 p.m.. So starting to attend Broad Ripple in early 1963, where I reported for class at 8:00 or 8:15 a.m. each day and got freed from school by 3 p.m. each was was what I liked more; although the 10:30 or 10:45 start of my Bayside High school day did allow me to sleep an hour longer in the morning. Since I didn't have to catch one of the crowded NY Transit Authority city buses that picked up the Bayside H.S. sophomores, who lived in the Beech Hills and Deepdale garden apartment developments in my Douglaston-Little Neck neighborhood, for the 30 minute bus ride to Bayside H.S., until around 9:30 or 9:40 a.m..

At Bayside H.S., daily attendance was marked for each student during their 15-minute homeroom period; and when I attended Bayside the 15-minute sophomore homeroom period for all the sophomores who began classes in the third period, was located in the school's auditorium, rather than in a classroom. Each "homeroom teacher" was assigned to take the attendance of 4 or 5 rooms in which their "homeroom class" of around 30 students sat.

While I no longer can recall whether or not students had to report to a "homeroom" for attendance taking each day at Broad Ripple, I recall having to attend homeroom at Bayside for a reason other than it was in the school auditorium and not in a classroom: A white guy of Italian-American background named Alfred, whose assigned auditorium seat was next to mine because his last name also began with "F", who ad apparently attended Catholic parochial school for 8 years before entering Bayside H.S., apparently tried to ridicule me and another guy sitting in our row, who was also of Jewish religious background, by repeating our names aloud in an imitation stereotyped Yiddish accent a number of times. In a way that made me feel he was somewhat anti-Semitic on an inter-personal level.

Prior to sitting next to Alfred in my 10th-grade homeroom class at Bayside, I had never personally experienced even any hint of inter-personal anti- semitism during a day in the local public schools. Maybe because, until I entered the 10th grade, about 90 to 95 percent of the students in the public schools I had attended were also of Jewish religious background.



     

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 25

After the new year of 1963 began, my parents also brought me to first the Broad Ripple High School principal's office and then to the high school dean's office, on the first morning that school term continued; and, after about 15 minutes of conversing with Dean Jackson, they left the school.

Dean Jackson then quickly figured out which classes I would be put into during the last month of Broad Ripple's fall term, based on what subjects my mid-term report card from Bayside High School indicated that I had been taking in New York City. After next handing me a program card which indicated the particular class and room numbers that I was assigned to attend for each different day of the week, Dean Jackson then sent for his tall, well-dressed son, Keith.

Keith, who was both a member of the school's "Key Club" service organization (whose members were apparently selected in an undemocratic way, similar to how most fraternities and sororities selected their members, in that you couldn't become a member of the "Key Club" if the majority of members of the group didn't want you in their exclusive club for some reason) and a sophomore like I was. Shortly after he arrived in his father's office, Keith then gave me a guided orientation tour of the school's layout and showed me where my school locker would be, in a friendly way for about a half-hour; and then I began reporting to my assigned classes for the remainder of the day, after about the 3rd period of the school day.

In January 1963, along with the Indianapolis real estate industry and real estate agents' racially discriminatory unofficial policy of not allowing African-American families or individuals to rent or buy homes north of East 38th Street on Indianapolis's northeast side, there seemed to be a policy of de facto segregation with regard to which students could attend Broad Ripple High School. 

Being part of a family that was white and not African-American, I was both able to live north of 38th Street on Indianapolis's northeast side in early 1963 and able to attend Broad Ripple, whose student body and teaching staff was then nearly 100 percent lily-white in early 1963. But, if my parents had not been apparently advised by the local white real estate agent, who rented them their half of the duplex private home where we lived near East 52nd Street and College Avenue, that Broad Ripple (which was located on Broad Ripple Avenue, northeast of where we then lived) was a better school academically than was Shortridge High School (which was located near 34th Street and  North Meridian Street, southwest of where we lived), it's possible I would have ended up attending the more racially integrated Shortridge Hill during my sophomore and junior years of high school in Indiana in 1963 and 1964. Since high school students living on my particular block had the option of attending either Broad Ripple or Shortridge, based, officially, on the neighborhood's geographic location. 

I had lived in a Northeast Queens neighborhood in the 1950's and first two years of the 1960's that had apparently been made racially segregated in an unofficial way by local real estate agents and real estate developers, whose residents (about 90 percent of whom were of assimilated Jewish religious ethnic background) were nearly all racially white, during my elementary and junior high school years. So it was only after graduating from 9th-grade at the then-nearly all white Louis Pasteur Jr. H.S. neighborhood school in June 1962, and then entering Bayside High School as a sophomore in September 1962, that I first attended a school with a more racially integrated student body, that wasn't also composed of such a high percentage of students who were of assimilated Jewish religious ethnic background.

But if my parents hadn't previously made the decision to enroll me in Broad Ripple H.S. rather than Shortridge H.S. when they first went out to Indianapolis to rent their half of the duplex house we ended up moving into in late 1962, I probably would have ended up, myself, choosing to attend the more racially integrated Shortridge High School. Especially if I had been told in advance that, unlike Bayside High School, Broad Ripple High School was still a lily-white high school in 1963.

Of course, since a major reason for me gaining admittance into Columbia College as part of its Class of 1969 was that the former Broad Ripple English teacher of mine to whom I wrote, in the first semester of my senior year at Flushing H.S. (after my family had moved back to New York City), asking her if she'd be kind enough to submit a teacher's letter of recommendation that Columbia College required all its applicants to get mailed to its admissions office, was apparently one of the Indiana "scouts" that Columbia relied on to recommend which Indiana applicants it would admit to Columbia College. Although I did not realize at this time that this English class teacher apparently then had a kind of special relationship to Columbia College's admissions office, when I asked her to submit the letter of recommendation that probably was what got me admitted to Columbia College.

So if I had attended Shortridge High School rather than Broad Ripple High School, when living in Indianapolis, the letter of recommendation that likely persuaded Columbia College to admit me to the Class of 1969 would never have been written; since I then would never have ever met Mrs. Griggs, the Broad Ripple H.S. English teacher, whose class I was in for one term during my sophomore year, who wrote the letter of recommendation. And since it turned out that I was the Columbia Class of 1969 member of Columbia SDS who first discovered in March 1967 that Columbia had secretly been an institutional member of the Pentagon's Institute for Defense Analyses [IDA] weapons research think-tank since 1960, it's possible that, if I had attended Shortridge instead of Broad Ripple in 1963 and 1964, the 1968 Columbia Student Revolt might not have happened; and late 1960's New Left Movement and SDS history might have developed in a different way, perhaps?

Yet a writer named Kurt Vonnegut had apparently attended Shortridge High School in Indianapolis years before the early 1960's. But in the early 1960's I had no awareness that, if I ever developed any literary aspirations in future years, it perhaps would have been better to attend the racially integrated Shortridge high school rather than Broad Ripple for an additional reason; since attending Shortridge might have provided me with the future possibility that I'd be able to establish some kind of networking alumni connection with a published writer like Vonnegut, at some point. 

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 24

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)

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).

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.

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").

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?