The other guest from the UM&M Homestead branch office where my father worked in Indianapolis, when my family lived there, who came over by himself for dinner, was the sales manager and executive who headed UM &M's branch office in Indianapolis; whose last name was Crater.
Crater was a white, well-dressed, crew-cutted guy, who appeared to be in his mid-to-late 40's; and who was an ex-Marine who seemed proud to be an ex-Marine. He seemed like someone who probably had voted for the Republican candidate Eisenhower in the 1952 and 1956 U.S. presidential elections, rather than for the liberal Democratic presidential candidate Stevenson, like both my parents had done in 1952 and 1956.
My recollection now is that Crater was married and had children. But I think the reason he didn't bring his wife along, during the weekday evening he came for dinner with my parents and me, was that his wife and kids still lived in another U.S. city; because he and his wife had apparently not yet found a buyer for the house in which his wife and kids were still living in. And only after that house was sold would Crater then be able to purchase a new house in Indianapolis at which he could move his wife and children to there live with him in Indianapolis. In the meantime, when Crater was not on the road making sales calls, he just housed himself, at company expense, in some motel in Indianapolis.
Although Goldberg and Crater each spent a lot of time selling drapes and textile material for clothes and piece goods to department stores and small merchants around the Midwest, Crater, unlike Goldberg, was not of Jewish religious background. And perhaps for that reason, Crater didn't seem to feel that the Midwest was as "strange" a "territory" to be a salesman in as Goldberg apparently did.
About the only other thing I now remember about Crater (who, when not on the road selling, was the person in the UM&M Homestead office who supervised my father at work) is that my father once mentioned that Crater was the kind of guy who, in the early 1960's, would still wake up early to do push-ups each morning before heading off to work--despite apparently being in his mid-to-late 40's.
Other than Goldberg and Crater, the only other person I can remember meeting once who also worked at the office in Indianapolis where my father worked, was a white man named Kelly, who was the office manager that supervised the small number of typists who also worked in this office.
Kelly seemed to be in his early 30's. My father felt he was a friendlier person than was Crater and "a very decent chap." Kelly and his wife of about the same age, Kay, never visited the house my family rented in Indianapolis, for dinner. But one Saturday or Sunday evening, my parents and I visited Kelly and Kay for dinner at the small house in another neighborhood in Indianapolis in which they lived, alone with their child, who was less than 4 years-old at that time.
Kay and my mother seemed to enjoy chatting with each other, despite being of different religious backgrounds. But probably because Kay (who, like her husband, was of Catholic religious background) was saddled with the heavy responsibility of having to spend all her time at home caring for her child alone during the day, she probably felt she lacked enough spare time during the week to spend chatting again with my mother; and her weekly evenings and weekends were the only time that she had for being with her husband. And because my father and Kelly saw enough of each other five days of the week at work, they likely felt, especially given the likely 15 years or more age difference between them, no special desire to pal around together on weekends, rather than each just spend their weekend time with their nuclear family.
Aside from seeing Kelly and his wife at their small house that one time, I think the only time I likely saw them again was at some kind of late spring or early summer Sunday afternoon office picnic later in 1963. And the only thing I can remember now from that picnic is that I was surprised that one of the young white woman office secretaries, who appeared to be in her mid-twenties, seemed at the picnic to be more skillful at throwing a softball around than were most other U.S. women of her age in the 1960's then were.
Saturday, June 6, 2020
Monday, May 18, 2020
On The Road In The 1970's--Part 43
I can't recall now much else of what I experienced in Indianapolis-- when not inside Broad Ripple High School, not delivering the Indianapolis Times, not doing my homework, not watching television and not being driven down to Bloomington or up to Chicago--between January and June of 1963. But among the other things I do recall were two separate visits to my family's rented house for dinner of two men who worked for the same downtown Indianapolis-branch of UM&M's Homestead textile, piece goods and drape wholesaleing subsidiary, where my father was also then employed.
The first employee of that UM&M/Homestead branch office that came over for dinner, came over one evening during the week in the early part of 1963. He was a guy from Brooklyn, in his mid-or-late-20's, whose last name was Goldberg.
Goldberg was a good-natured fellow who, after being on the Abraham Lincoln High School football team in Brooklyn, and after apparently serving the required two years in the then-peacetime U.S. military (that every guy growing up in the 1950's and early 1960's in the USA automatically assumed they would be required to serve in), was now working for UM &M/Homestead in the Midwest; as some kind of drapery and piece goods wholesale traveling salesman, who was being paid a salary and a commission on whatever sales he made in his assigned territory, and who had an expense account.
Because Goldberg didn't strike me as being that intellectual, he also didn't strike me then as someone who had graduated from college--although it's possible he had. But in the early 1960's, a white guy could get hired by corporations like UM &M to be a traveling salesman without having a B.A. in either the liberal arts or in "business administration" or "merchandising" from some U.S. college; as long as he had a high school diploma, was willing to dress in a suit and tie each weekday, had short hair and was beardless and well-groomed-looking, knew how to drive a car and had the kind of outgoing, friendly "sales personality," that Goldberg certainly had.
Having grown up in Brooklyn during the decades when large numbers of assimilated New Yorkers of Jewish religious background lived there, Goldberg seemed unused to being in a city like Indianapolis and a state like Indiana, in which people of Jewish religious background were such a small percentage of the general population. But Goldberg, himself, wasn't particularly religious and, like my father, was the kind of assimilated U.S. citizen who would now only attend a religious service in a synagogue on Rosh Hoshanna and Yom Kippur, or if invited by one of his relatives to attend their son's bar mitzvah service in a synagogue.
The main memory I still have of the evening Goldberg came over for dinner in early 1963 when my parents and I lived in Indianapolis is of how Goldberg brought with him his copy of the My Son, The Folk Singer vinyl record album, on which Allan Sherman had recorded. himself, his humorous parody versions of folk songs; wherein his parody lyrics reflected the humor of different aspects of daily life within communities of various types of Jewish background in the USA. during the post-World War II late 1940's, 1950's and early 1960's era.
After dinner, Goldberg, because he thought Allan Sherman's My Son, The Folk Singer album was very funny and witty, was eager to play the record album for us and listen to the album with us. He apparently thought both my parents and I would also find the My Son, The Folk Singer album as entertaining as he did.
Because I was still mostly into just listening in 1963 to the vinyl albums with the melody-emphasized songs of "hit" Broadway musicals and even "flop" Broadway musicals, I did not expect to have much interest in listening to My Son, The Folk Singer album as much as Goldberg then seemed to have. Also, before moving from New York City to Indianapolis in late 1962, a member of the Queens boy scout Troop 363 had played some tracks from his copy of this same album once at one of our monthly boy scout troop meetings; and I hadn't then previously thought the My Son, The Folk Singer album was worth listening to over and over again, myself.
But, surprisingly, after listening again more carefully and attentively to the My Son, The Folk Singer album with Goldberg and my parents that evening in Indianapolis in early 1963, I found it more entertaining and interesting to listen to than I had when I half-listened to parts of it the first time in New York City; and I purchased a copy of Allan Sherman's My Son, The Folk Singer album the following week.
In 1963, like many U.S. music fans, I listened more to the melody and rhythm of a song's music than to the lyrics of a song. And although the more I played and replayed the My Son, The Folk Singer album on my family's cheap hi-fi record player in 1963, the more I started to notice how clever and witty the lyrics of Allan Sherman's parodies were, I think it was actually the melodies of the songs parodied which Allan Sherman had recorded that led me to replay his album a lot in 1963.
Not having heard much Irish folk music or Irish rebel folk music or heard any Clancy Brothers records played on the radio prior to 1963, the melody of Allan Sherman's "Shake Hands With Your Uncle Max" parody of an Irish folk song, for example, was what caused me to want to listen to the song again and again, rather than the funny parody lyrics which I listened to less attentively.
And although I had watched Harry Belafonte perform some of his songs on television and had heard his 45 rpm hit single records on my transistor radio during the 1950's, because I had never purchased a vinyl album like Harry Belafonte at Carnegie Hall, (seemed to expensive for me) that contained a lot more other songs that Belafonte sang, I actually heard first the melody of the "Matilda" song only after listening to the parody of "Matilda" that Allan Sherman sang on his My Son, The Folk Singer album.
Of course, if you had told me in 1963 that I would end up writing so many folk songs myself and that, by the early 1970's, my mother might have legitimately characterized her son in conversation with others as "My Son, The Folk Singer," I would have thought you were out-of-your mind.
Although I wrote a few songs in 1963 and began to think that getting into writing Broadway musicals might be a long-range possibility, it wasn't until 1965 and 1966 that I began to both write a lot of a cappella folk songs and purchase some albums of folk music; and it wasn't until the summer of 1966 that I taught myself to play basic open chords on a guitar and started writing folk songs with guitar chord accompaniment.
But once I got more into listening to the folk song repertoire, from which Allan Sherman had taken the folk song melodies he used for his clever parodies, I pretty much no longer played his My Son, The Folk Singer album and his follow-up album that included his "Hello Muddah, Hello Fadda" hit single novelty song, after 1966.
The first employee of that UM&M/Homestead branch office that came over for dinner, came over one evening during the week in the early part of 1963. He was a guy from Brooklyn, in his mid-or-late-20's, whose last name was Goldberg.
Goldberg was a good-natured fellow who, after being on the Abraham Lincoln High School football team in Brooklyn, and after apparently serving the required two years in the then-peacetime U.S. military (that every guy growing up in the 1950's and early 1960's in the USA automatically assumed they would be required to serve in), was now working for UM &M/Homestead in the Midwest; as some kind of drapery and piece goods wholesale traveling salesman, who was being paid a salary and a commission on whatever sales he made in his assigned territory, and who had an expense account.
Because Goldberg didn't strike me as being that intellectual, he also didn't strike me then as someone who had graduated from college--although it's possible he had. But in the early 1960's, a white guy could get hired by corporations like UM &M to be a traveling salesman without having a B.A. in either the liberal arts or in "business administration" or "merchandising" from some U.S. college; as long as he had a high school diploma, was willing to dress in a suit and tie each weekday, had short hair and was beardless and well-groomed-looking, knew how to drive a car and had the kind of outgoing, friendly "sales personality," that Goldberg certainly had.
Having grown up in Brooklyn during the decades when large numbers of assimilated New Yorkers of Jewish religious background lived there, Goldberg seemed unused to being in a city like Indianapolis and a state like Indiana, in which people of Jewish religious background were such a small percentage of the general population. But Goldberg, himself, wasn't particularly religious and, like my father, was the kind of assimilated U.S. citizen who would now only attend a religious service in a synagogue on Rosh Hoshanna and Yom Kippur, or if invited by one of his relatives to attend their son's bar mitzvah service in a synagogue.
The main memory I still have of the evening Goldberg came over for dinner in early 1963 when my parents and I lived in Indianapolis is of how Goldberg brought with him his copy of the My Son, The Folk Singer vinyl record album, on which Allan Sherman had recorded. himself, his humorous parody versions of folk songs; wherein his parody lyrics reflected the humor of different aspects of daily life within communities of various types of Jewish background in the USA. during the post-World War II late 1940's, 1950's and early 1960's era.
After dinner, Goldberg, because he thought Allan Sherman's My Son, The Folk Singer album was very funny and witty, was eager to play the record album for us and listen to the album with us. He apparently thought both my parents and I would also find the My Son, The Folk Singer album as entertaining as he did.
Because I was still mostly into just listening in 1963 to the vinyl albums with the melody-emphasized songs of "hit" Broadway musicals and even "flop" Broadway musicals, I did not expect to have much interest in listening to My Son, The Folk Singer album as much as Goldberg then seemed to have. Also, before moving from New York City to Indianapolis in late 1962, a member of the Queens boy scout Troop 363 had played some tracks from his copy of this same album once at one of our monthly boy scout troop meetings; and I hadn't then previously thought the My Son, The Folk Singer album was worth listening to over and over again, myself.
But, surprisingly, after listening again more carefully and attentively to the My Son, The Folk Singer album with Goldberg and my parents that evening in Indianapolis in early 1963, I found it more entertaining and interesting to listen to than I had when I half-listened to parts of it the first time in New York City; and I purchased a copy of Allan Sherman's My Son, The Folk Singer album the following week.
In 1963, like many U.S. music fans, I listened more to the melody and rhythm of a song's music than to the lyrics of a song. And although the more I played and replayed the My Son, The Folk Singer album on my family's cheap hi-fi record player in 1963, the more I started to notice how clever and witty the lyrics of Allan Sherman's parodies were, I think it was actually the melodies of the songs parodied which Allan Sherman had recorded that led me to replay his album a lot in 1963.
Not having heard much Irish folk music or Irish rebel folk music or heard any Clancy Brothers records played on the radio prior to 1963, the melody of Allan Sherman's "Shake Hands With Your Uncle Max" parody of an Irish folk song, for example, was what caused me to want to listen to the song again and again, rather than the funny parody lyrics which I listened to less attentively.
And although I had watched Harry Belafonte perform some of his songs on television and had heard his 45 rpm hit single records on my transistor radio during the 1950's, because I had never purchased a vinyl album like Harry Belafonte at Carnegie Hall, (seemed to expensive for me) that contained a lot more other songs that Belafonte sang, I actually heard first the melody of the "Matilda" song only after listening to the parody of "Matilda" that Allan Sherman sang on his My Son, The Folk Singer album.
Of course, if you had told me in 1963 that I would end up writing so many folk songs myself and that, by the early 1970's, my mother might have legitimately characterized her son in conversation with others as "My Son, The Folk Singer," I would have thought you were out-of-your mind.
Although I wrote a few songs in 1963 and began to think that getting into writing Broadway musicals might be a long-range possibility, it wasn't until 1965 and 1966 that I began to both write a lot of a cappella folk songs and purchase some albums of folk music; and it wasn't until the summer of 1966 that I taught myself to play basic open chords on a guitar and started writing folk songs with guitar chord accompaniment.
But once I got more into listening to the folk song repertoire, from which Allan Sherman had taken the folk song melodies he used for his clever parodies, I pretty much no longer played his My Son, The Folk Singer album and his follow-up album that included his "Hello Muddah, Hello Fadda" hit single novelty song, after 1966.
Friday, April 10, 2020
On The Road In The 1970's--Part 42
In the early 1960's (many decades before drivers of cars just relied on GPS voices to let them know which highways or roads to take to reach a particular long-distance destination), I was my father's map-reading "navigator" in his car, whenever we drove from Indianapolis to either Chicago or to Bloomington, Indiana, between January and June of 1963.
So it was during these six months that I also developed an interest in collecting road maps of many of the individual states in the continental USA. And for about a year in Indianapolis, I spent some time mailing letters to various tourist boards of some of the individual states, requesting that the different state state tourist boards mail me a free road map of their state, for me to add to my "road map" collection.
By the time I was attending Columbia College in NYC, though, in the Fall of 1965, I had pretty much lost my previous interest in continuing to collect "road maps"--in the same way I had lost my previous interest in collecting postage stamps to put in my stamp collection book before, when I first entered the 7th-grade in junior high school.
Yet even as late as 1965, I was still interested enough in road maps to unsuccessfully put in an application for a summer job inside an AAA office, that used to be located in Manhattan around East 42nd Street, near Grand Central Station, on the ground floor of some skyscraper (that then housed the corporate headquarters office of some transnational oil corporation like Texaco or Socony Mobil); and which provided AAA "Trip-Ticks"/road map route guiding material for AAA members who came to this AAA office for road trip route-planning assistance.
So it was during these six months that I also developed an interest in collecting road maps of many of the individual states in the continental USA. And for about a year in Indianapolis, I spent some time mailing letters to various tourist boards of some of the individual states, requesting that the different state state tourist boards mail me a free road map of their state, for me to add to my "road map" collection.
By the time I was attending Columbia College in NYC, though, in the Fall of 1965, I had pretty much lost my previous interest in continuing to collect "road maps"--in the same way I had lost my previous interest in collecting postage stamps to put in my stamp collection book before, when I first entered the 7th-grade in junior high school.
Yet even as late as 1965, I was still interested enough in road maps to unsuccessfully put in an application for a summer job inside an AAA office, that used to be located in Manhattan around East 42nd Street, near Grand Central Station, on the ground floor of some skyscraper (that then housed the corporate headquarters office of some transnational oil corporation like Texaco or Socony Mobil); and which provided AAA "Trip-Ticks"/road map route guiding material for AAA members who came to this AAA office for road trip route-planning assistance.
Wednesday, April 8, 2020
On The Road In The 1970's--Part 41
Once we reached Chicago's North Side, my father would end up parking his 1959 Pontiac car in some spot near the 1920's-built, rundown, slum apartment building, in which my mother's parents and my grandparents lived, near Humboldt Park and Division Street. By the early 1960's, most of the residents of this slum apartment building and the neighborhood in which my grandparents lived seemed to then be mostly white, Spanish-speaking people from the U.S. colony/"commonwealth" of Puerto Rico.
My grandfather used to leave his slum building apartment each evening and walk through the neighborhood to take a bus downtown to the Chicago Tribune newspaper printing facility; where he then spent the night and early morning hours loading newspapers onto newspaper delivery trucks, in exchange for union wages (until he was in his mid-70's), before returning back to his apartment to sleep during the day in the late morning and until the early afternoon hours. But I can't recall ever walking around this neighborhood, myself, either alone or with my mother, father or sister during any of our one-day, Sunday visits to my grandfather's apartment in this neighborhood.
Usually, we would all just walk from our family's parked car on the street, from a spot that was usually close to the apartment building in which my grandparents lived, enter the unlocked door of the building which had no elevator and then walk up one or two flights of stairs to my grandparents' very small 1-bedroom apartment. Then, after two or three hours in the apartment--in which most of the time was spent sitting around the kitchen table listening to my mother talk to her parents in English about how all their relatives, most of whom I had never met, who still lived in Chicago were doing--my parents, my sister and I would then say goodbye, leave the apartment building and just walk back to my family's car.
Afterwards, my father would then drive us all further north to the 1920's-built two-family house in Skokie that my mother's younger sister and her husband had only purchased a few years before; after selling their 1920's-built house near North Kedzie Avenue, not far from Wrigley Field, that they had previously owned during most of the 1950's. Arriving in Skokie, maybe a half-hour later, we would then usually spend three to 4 hours in the more Americanized, more inwardly modernized house of my aunt, uncle and my two younger boy cousins; and we would all converse with each other and eat dinner together there, before my own nuclear family drove back to Indianapolis from Chicago at around 7:30 or 8 p.m. on Sunday evening.
My grandfather was a good-natured fellow who--despite being brought up in Russia (but speaking mostly Yiddish and only a bit of Russian)-had learned to speak enough English to converse in English with people in a Russian-Yiddish accent and read portions of Chicago's. daily newspapers, during the over 50 years that he had spent living and working in the USA, prior to 1963. He was a member of one of the unions at the Chicago Tribune/Tribune media conglomerate where he had worked since World War II; and, at least verbally, expressed strong support for his union's leadership and shop steward. But he was the type of union member who had no interest in either attending any union membership meeting or following the union's internal politics. And although he was of Russian-Jewish religious background, he had no interest in Zionism, the Zionist movement, the fate of Israel or what was happening in the Middle East during the 1960's.
Having lived and worked in the United States for over 50 years, my grandfather probably would have thought that any Zionist movement supporter who suggested that he consider moving from the USA to Palestine in the 1960's was suggesting a crazy idea. And like most other elderly U.S. working-class people who had immigrated to the USA from Eastern Europe, Russia or Italy in the early 20th-century, in the early 1960's neither my grandfather nor my grandmother in Chicago had much interest in talking about U.S. electoral politics or how the capitalist economic and political system might need to be changed; especially since they felt, despite still living in a slum apartment building, that they were much less economically impoverished personally in the early 1960's than they had been during the Great Depression of the 1930's.
In 1963 both my grandfather and grandmother still seemed fond of my mother. But my grandfather then seemed to be sadder than my grandmother that my mother had moved from Chicago to New York City after she had married my father in the early 1940's. And although, twenty years later, she now lived in a city much closer to Chicago than New York City, my grandfather still seemed to miss my mother in 1963 and regret that she wasn't then living in Chicago again.
My grandmother was, in 1963, less Americanized than was my grandfather and more religiously orthodox; perhaps because her own father had apparently been some sort of a rabbi in Lithuania. But despite being less good-natured than my grandfather, when in their 70's in 1963, both my grandfather and my grandmother in Chicago, with the three daughters they had raised married and living with their husbands by now for over 13 years, still seemed devoted to each other.
My mother's younger sister (who was in her late 30's in 1963 and was probably still considered physically beautiful by most men during the 1960's) and her husband in Skokie, like both my parents, were also not that interested in talking much about U.S. politics or changing the System in 1963; now that they all seemed to have gained more economic security and working-class affluence after World War II than what their immigrant parents had had during the Great Depression of the 1930's.
Between my uncle's blue-collar job as some kind of factory worker at a Bell and Howell plant and the elementary school teaching job that my aunt had obtained (after she decided to go to college in her early 30's, when both her sons had reached school attendance age), my aunt and uncle in Skokie seemed pretty much satisfied in 1963 with the economic opportunities the System in the USA provided them. And when I first became interested in taking 8mm moving pictures on a Kodak brownie moving picture camera in 1963, I was able to take advantage of having an uncle who worked for Bell and Howell; by having him buy for me, at the wholesale price, a Bell and Howell 8mm motion picture, automatic threading projector--which I paid for with part of the money I was earning on my own during my sophomore year in high school, by working between January and June 1963 as an Indianapolis Times newspaper delivery carrier in my neighborhood.
My grandfather used to leave his slum building apartment each evening and walk through the neighborhood to take a bus downtown to the Chicago Tribune newspaper printing facility; where he then spent the night and early morning hours loading newspapers onto newspaper delivery trucks, in exchange for union wages (until he was in his mid-70's), before returning back to his apartment to sleep during the day in the late morning and until the early afternoon hours. But I can't recall ever walking around this neighborhood, myself, either alone or with my mother, father or sister during any of our one-day, Sunday visits to my grandfather's apartment in this neighborhood.
Usually, we would all just walk from our family's parked car on the street, from a spot that was usually close to the apartment building in which my grandparents lived, enter the unlocked door of the building which had no elevator and then walk up one or two flights of stairs to my grandparents' very small 1-bedroom apartment. Then, after two or three hours in the apartment--in which most of the time was spent sitting around the kitchen table listening to my mother talk to her parents in English about how all their relatives, most of whom I had never met, who still lived in Chicago were doing--my parents, my sister and I would then say goodbye, leave the apartment building and just walk back to my family's car.
Afterwards, my father would then drive us all further north to the 1920's-built two-family house in Skokie that my mother's younger sister and her husband had only purchased a few years before; after selling their 1920's-built house near North Kedzie Avenue, not far from Wrigley Field, that they had previously owned during most of the 1950's. Arriving in Skokie, maybe a half-hour later, we would then usually spend three to 4 hours in the more Americanized, more inwardly modernized house of my aunt, uncle and my two younger boy cousins; and we would all converse with each other and eat dinner together there, before my own nuclear family drove back to Indianapolis from Chicago at around 7:30 or 8 p.m. on Sunday evening.
My grandfather was a good-natured fellow who--despite being brought up in Russia (but speaking mostly Yiddish and only a bit of Russian)-had learned to speak enough English to converse in English with people in a Russian-Yiddish accent and read portions of Chicago's. daily newspapers, during the over 50 years that he had spent living and working in the USA, prior to 1963. He was a member of one of the unions at the Chicago Tribune/Tribune media conglomerate where he had worked since World War II; and, at least verbally, expressed strong support for his union's leadership and shop steward. But he was the type of union member who had no interest in either attending any union membership meeting or following the union's internal politics. And although he was of Russian-Jewish religious background, he had no interest in Zionism, the Zionist movement, the fate of Israel or what was happening in the Middle East during the 1960's.
Having lived and worked in the United States for over 50 years, my grandfather probably would have thought that any Zionist movement supporter who suggested that he consider moving from the USA to Palestine in the 1960's was suggesting a crazy idea. And like most other elderly U.S. working-class people who had immigrated to the USA from Eastern Europe, Russia or Italy in the early 20th-century, in the early 1960's neither my grandfather nor my grandmother in Chicago had much interest in talking about U.S. electoral politics or how the capitalist economic and political system might need to be changed; especially since they felt, despite still living in a slum apartment building, that they were much less economically impoverished personally in the early 1960's than they had been during the Great Depression of the 1930's.
In 1963 both my grandfather and grandmother still seemed fond of my mother. But my grandfather then seemed to be sadder than my grandmother that my mother had moved from Chicago to New York City after she had married my father in the early 1940's. And although, twenty years later, she now lived in a city much closer to Chicago than New York City, my grandfather still seemed to miss my mother in 1963 and regret that she wasn't then living in Chicago again.
My grandmother was, in 1963, less Americanized than was my grandfather and more religiously orthodox; perhaps because her own father had apparently been some sort of a rabbi in Lithuania. But despite being less good-natured than my grandfather, when in their 70's in 1963, both my grandfather and my grandmother in Chicago, with the three daughters they had raised married and living with their husbands by now for over 13 years, still seemed devoted to each other.
My mother's younger sister (who was in her late 30's in 1963 and was probably still considered physically beautiful by most men during the 1960's) and her husband in Skokie, like both my parents, were also not that interested in talking much about U.S. politics or changing the System in 1963; now that they all seemed to have gained more economic security and working-class affluence after World War II than what their immigrant parents had had during the Great Depression of the 1930's.
Between my uncle's blue-collar job as some kind of factory worker at a Bell and Howell plant and the elementary school teaching job that my aunt had obtained (after she decided to go to college in her early 30's, when both her sons had reached school attendance age), my aunt and uncle in Skokie seemed pretty much satisfied in 1963 with the economic opportunities the System in the USA provided them. And when I first became interested in taking 8mm moving pictures on a Kodak brownie moving picture camera in 1963, I was able to take advantage of having an uncle who worked for Bell and Howell; by having him buy for me, at the wholesale price, a Bell and Howell 8mm motion picture, automatic threading projector--which I paid for with part of the money I was earning on my own during my sophomore year in high school, by working between January and June 1963 as an Indianapolis Times newspaper delivery carrier in my neighborhood.
Saturday, April 4, 2020
On The Road In The 1970's--Part 40
Because my father would drive me and my mother in his 1959 Pontiac car up to Chicago on a Sunday about once a month (usually leaving only a few hours after I finished delivering the Sunday morning edition of the Indianapolis Times to my newspaper route customers in the early morning darkness), between January and June 1963 I became as familiar with the drive northwest to from Indianapolis to Chicago as I became with the drive south on State Route 37 from Indianapolis to Bloomington during this same period. The reason for the usually monthly drives up to Chicago was to visit my mother's parents and her younger sister, her brother-in-law and my cousins.
In 1963, only a small section of the Interstate 65 highway, that later enabled a driver to reach Chicago from Indianapolis by only driving on divided limited access highways at 65 mph, but which bypassed most of the small Indiana towns you used to have to drive through in order to travel by car between Naptown and the Windy City during the early 1960's, had been built. So to get to Chicago from Indianapolis , most of the drive at that time was done by first driving northeast on U.S. Highway 52 about 50 or 60 miles to Lafayette, Indiana--where you drove near the campus of Purdue University; and, afterwards, continue on U.S Highway 52 until you connected to the intersection with U.S. Highway 41 in Kentland, Indiana.
Because where U.S. Highway 52 intersected U.S. Highway 41 in Kentland, Indiana was both around a 2-hour drive from Indianapolis and a 2-hour drive from Chicago, in 1963 it was then also the location of a highway rest stop with a gas station and a fairly large restaurant and parking lot; at which drivers or passengers of cars, trucks and Greyhound buses stopped to stretch their legs, eat and use restrooms, when driving or traveling in either direction between Indianapolis and Chicago. So on the early Sunday mornings and late Sunday evenings when my family's car would stop at this Kentland, Indiana rest stop and restaurant on our monthly visits to Chicago and back, between January and June 1963, the restaurant was usually crowded with customers.
Once you reached U.S. Highway 41, the highway going straight north was all divided, yet not a limited access one like the section of then-partially-completed Interstate 65 had been, until you reached the Indiana Turnpike toll road and then the Calumet Skyway leading into Chicago's Dan Ryan Expressway, near Hammond and East Chicago, Indiana.
In the early 1960's, until you reached the Hammond and East Chicago area of, Indiana, Lafayette, Indiana was pretty much the only city you drove through in Indiana after you left Indianapolis, on your way to Chicago, The rest of the time, until you reached Gary, Indiana, most of what the small portion of completed Interstate 65 and the U.S. 52 and U.S. 41 highways passed through on each side was either farms or streets of small towns. And in the early 1960's, you drove by very few strip shopping malls or Wal-Mart stores on either the U.S. 52 Highway or the U.S. 41 Highway in Indiana.
Once you reached the Hammond and East Chicago, Indiana area in the early 1960's, however, the air around you started to smell and look more polluted, and suddenly you found yourself driving past a lot of steel mills and factories; many of which, by the early 1980's, would later be shut down by the transnational U.S. corporations that owned them, throwing thousands of previously high-waged unionized industrial workers in northern Indiana out of work and into the ranks of the army of unemployed people in the USA.
Then, not too long after you passed by through this northwest corner of Indiana, you reached the South Side of Chicago and, from the expressway with many lanes, that at some point became the Dan Ryan Expressway, you could easily see a lot of high-rise public housing projects in which many African-American working-class people seemed to live and seemed to have been ghettoized; by a Chicago city government that was still controlled by the corrupt Chicago Democratic Party political machine of Chicago's long-time political boss and mayor: Richard Daley I.
In 1963, only a small section of the Interstate 65 highway, that later enabled a driver to reach Chicago from Indianapolis by only driving on divided limited access highways at 65 mph, but which bypassed most of the small Indiana towns you used to have to drive through in order to travel by car between Naptown and the Windy City during the early 1960's, had been built. So to get to Chicago from Indianapolis , most of the drive at that time was done by first driving northeast on U.S. Highway 52 about 50 or 60 miles to Lafayette, Indiana--where you drove near the campus of Purdue University; and, afterwards, continue on U.S Highway 52 until you connected to the intersection with U.S. Highway 41 in Kentland, Indiana.
Because where U.S. Highway 52 intersected U.S. Highway 41 in Kentland, Indiana was both around a 2-hour drive from Indianapolis and a 2-hour drive from Chicago, in 1963 it was then also the location of a highway rest stop with a gas station and a fairly large restaurant and parking lot; at which drivers or passengers of cars, trucks and Greyhound buses stopped to stretch their legs, eat and use restrooms, when driving or traveling in either direction between Indianapolis and Chicago. So on the early Sunday mornings and late Sunday evenings when my family's car would stop at this Kentland, Indiana rest stop and restaurant on our monthly visits to Chicago and back, between January and June 1963, the restaurant was usually crowded with customers.
Once you reached U.S. Highway 41, the highway going straight north was all divided, yet not a limited access one like the section of then-partially-completed Interstate 65 had been, until you reached the Indiana Turnpike toll road and then the Calumet Skyway leading into Chicago's Dan Ryan Expressway, near Hammond and East Chicago, Indiana.
In the early 1960's, until you reached the Hammond and East Chicago area of, Indiana, Lafayette, Indiana was pretty much the only city you drove through in Indiana after you left Indianapolis, on your way to Chicago, The rest of the time, until you reached Gary, Indiana, most of what the small portion of completed Interstate 65 and the U.S. 52 and U.S. 41 highways passed through on each side was either farms or streets of small towns. And in the early 1960's, you drove by very few strip shopping malls or Wal-Mart stores on either the U.S. 52 Highway or the U.S. 41 Highway in Indiana.
Once you reached the Hammond and East Chicago, Indiana area in the early 1960's, however, the air around you started to smell and look more polluted, and suddenly you found yourself driving past a lot of steel mills and factories; many of which, by the early 1980's, would later be shut down by the transnational U.S. corporations that owned them, throwing thousands of previously high-waged unionized industrial workers in northern Indiana out of work and into the ranks of the army of unemployed people in the USA.
Then, not too long after you passed by through this northwest corner of Indiana, you reached the South Side of Chicago and, from the expressway with many lanes, that at some point became the Dan Ryan Expressway, you could easily see a lot of high-rise public housing projects in which many African-American working-class people seemed to live and seemed to have been ghettoized; by a Chicago city government that was still controlled by the corrupt Chicago Democratic Party political machine of Chicago's long-time political boss and mayor: Richard Daley I.
Tuesday, February 18, 2020
On The Road In The 1970's--Part 39
Rather than being some kind of academic center of political subversion or non-conformity, Indiana University in 1963, at least to me, seemed be mainly a campus in which most students seemed to still be more into fraternity and sorority life and attending Big Ten football and basketball games, in big college stadiums and sports arenas, than into either their academic work, hanging out in academic libraries or being involved in some form of political activism.
But the new and old dormitory buildings and the big student union building on Indiana University's large campus still impressed me in 1963 and caused me to feel that I was in a small city of large numbers of young people in their late teens and early twenties, whenever I visited IU's campus; and in a city that was filled with even more physically attractive female "co-ed" students than Broad Ripple High School was then filled with.
I assumed, between January and June 1963, that my family would remain living in Indianapolis during the rest of the decade and did not think, at this time, that I would develop any particular desire to apply for admission in a few years to a college in New York City like Columbia or NYU. So I also assumed in 1963 that, especially because now being a resident of Indiana would enable me to be charged the lower in-state tuition fee, after graduating from Broad Ripple H.S., Indiana University in Bloomington was where I would spend my 4 years as an undergraduate. Hence, as early as the spring semester of my sophomore year in high school, I had started looking through the IU college catalog and begun to consider which courses I intended to take, when I eventually enrolled there; and what subjects I would want to major or minor in when I got there.
What's surprising, in retrospect, is along with considering a major or minor in subjects like history, journalism, music or theater, in 1963, at least, I also was thinking, for a brief period, that "police administration" might be an interesting major or minor subject for me to get into. Perhaps I had been influenced by watching too many cops and robbers shows on television, like Dragnet, during the 1950s as a child?
So, for a brief period, I thought being prepared at IU to become a "detective" for some police department, after graduating and fulfilling the then-required two years of U.S. military service for U.S. men under 26-years-of-age, was a possible road I might follow. But by the Fall of 1963--perhaps after viewing on the television screen more images of white cops brutalizing and arresting singing Civil Rights Movement demonstrators on the streets of Southern cities like Birmingham--I had completely ruled out forever the possibility that I might want to major or minor in "police administration" when, as I then expected, I would enroll at Indiana University in the Fall of 1965.
But the new and old dormitory buildings and the big student union building on Indiana University's large campus still impressed me in 1963 and caused me to feel that I was in a small city of large numbers of young people in their late teens and early twenties, whenever I visited IU's campus; and in a city that was filled with even more physically attractive female "co-ed" students than Broad Ripple High School was then filled with.
I assumed, between January and June 1963, that my family would remain living in Indianapolis during the rest of the decade and did not think, at this time, that I would develop any particular desire to apply for admission in a few years to a college in New York City like Columbia or NYU. So I also assumed in 1963 that, especially because now being a resident of Indiana would enable me to be charged the lower in-state tuition fee, after graduating from Broad Ripple H.S., Indiana University in Bloomington was where I would spend my 4 years as an undergraduate. Hence, as early as the spring semester of my sophomore year in high school, I had started looking through the IU college catalog and begun to consider which courses I intended to take, when I eventually enrolled there; and what subjects I would want to major or minor in when I got there.
What's surprising, in retrospect, is along with considering a major or minor in subjects like history, journalism, music or theater, in 1963, at least, I also was thinking, for a brief period, that "police administration" might be an interesting major or minor subject for me to get into. Perhaps I had been influenced by watching too many cops and robbers shows on television, like Dragnet, during the 1950s as a child?
So, for a brief period, I thought being prepared at IU to become a "detective" for some police department, after graduating and fulfilling the then-required two years of U.S. military service for U.S. men under 26-years-of-age, was a possible road I might follow. But by the Fall of 1963--perhaps after viewing on the television screen more images of white cops brutalizing and arresting singing Civil Rights Movement demonstrators on the streets of Southern cities like Birmingham--I had completely ruled out forever the possibility that I might want to major or minor in "police administration" when, as I then expected, I would enroll at Indiana University in the Fall of 1965.
Wednesday, February 5, 2020
On The Road In The 1970's--Part 38
I still have some memories of my life in Indiana unrelated to school between January 1963 and late June 1963, during the time I spent part of each day earning money on my own for the first time, as an Indianapolis Times newspaper delivery carrier.
In 1963 the most influential newspaper in Indianapolis was the Indianapolis Star morning newspaper, which was then owned by a white right-wing anti-communist conservative publisher named Pulliam. Pulliam was a political supporter of the right-wing anti-communist "New Right" conservative and then-U.S. Senator from Arizona, Barry Goldwater, who, the following year, was the 1964 GOP presidential nominee who ended up losing to then Democratic President Lyndon Johnson in a big way in the November 1964 election.
Pulliam's newspaper publishing firm also owned and published an afternoon newspaper in Indianapolis, the Indianapolis News (which competed with the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain's Indianapolis Times afternoon and Sunday morning newspaper that I delivered), that was distributed on every afternoon except Sunday afternoon. Not surprisingly, the editorial slant of both Pulliam's more influential Indianapolis Star and his less influential Indianapolis News generally reflected his right-wing anti-communist conservative politics. So the politically influential Indianapolis Star's version of the daily news it provided its Indianapolis readers in 1963 resembled the version of the daily news provided New York City readers in 1963 by newspapers like the then-right-wing anti-communist conservative Chicago Tribune--owned New York Daily News tabloid, rather than the version of the daily news provided by the more liberal anti-communist newspapers like the New York Times in 1963.
Consequently, when a local District Attorney in Bloomington, Indiana decided to apparently attempt to prosecute or jail some of the students involved in the Socialist Workers Party's Young Socialist Alliance [YSA] Trotskyist sect group at Indiana University around this time, front page coverage of the D.A.'s case against "the Reds" at Indiana University was provided by the Indianapolis Star, to encourage this kind of 1950's-type McCarthyite red-baiting in Indiana as late as the early 1960s.
But because I was still just an anti-communist liberal in 1963 and 1964 when I lived in Indianapolis, I have to confess that I didn't realize the degree to which the right-wing extremist-owned Indianapolis Star was unfairly characterizing in its headlines what the political goals and nature of the Socialist Workers Party/YSA activists' work in Bloomington was actually about.
Yet because my parents and I spent around one Sunday a month between January and June 1963 either driving my older sister, who was then a freshman at Indiana University, back down State Route 37 thru Martinsville and back to IU's Bloomington campus after a veekend visit or driving down to visit her on campus, I also realized that the Socialist Workers Party-supporting students, that the D.A. in Bloomington was attempting to prosecute, did not reflect the then-political mood of the vast majority of IU's student body or faculty in the early 1960s.
In 1963 the most influential newspaper in Indianapolis was the Indianapolis Star morning newspaper, which was then owned by a white right-wing anti-communist conservative publisher named Pulliam. Pulliam was a political supporter of the right-wing anti-communist "New Right" conservative and then-U.S. Senator from Arizona, Barry Goldwater, who, the following year, was the 1964 GOP presidential nominee who ended up losing to then Democratic President Lyndon Johnson in a big way in the November 1964 election.
Pulliam's newspaper publishing firm also owned and published an afternoon newspaper in Indianapolis, the Indianapolis News (which competed with the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain's Indianapolis Times afternoon and Sunday morning newspaper that I delivered), that was distributed on every afternoon except Sunday afternoon. Not surprisingly, the editorial slant of both Pulliam's more influential Indianapolis Star and his less influential Indianapolis News generally reflected his right-wing anti-communist conservative politics. So the politically influential Indianapolis Star's version of the daily news it provided its Indianapolis readers in 1963 resembled the version of the daily news provided New York City readers in 1963 by newspapers like the then-right-wing anti-communist conservative Chicago Tribune--owned New York Daily News tabloid, rather than the version of the daily news provided by the more liberal anti-communist newspapers like the New York Times in 1963.
Consequently, when a local District Attorney in Bloomington, Indiana decided to apparently attempt to prosecute or jail some of the students involved in the Socialist Workers Party's Young Socialist Alliance [YSA] Trotskyist sect group at Indiana University around this time, front page coverage of the D.A.'s case against "the Reds" at Indiana University was provided by the Indianapolis Star, to encourage this kind of 1950's-type McCarthyite red-baiting in Indiana as late as the early 1960s.
But because I was still just an anti-communist liberal in 1963 and 1964 when I lived in Indianapolis, I have to confess that I didn't realize the degree to which the right-wing extremist-owned Indianapolis Star was unfairly characterizing in its headlines what the political goals and nature of the Socialist Workers Party/YSA activists' work in Bloomington was actually about.
Yet because my parents and I spent around one Sunday a month between January and June 1963 either driving my older sister, who was then a freshman at Indiana University, back down State Route 37 thru Martinsville and back to IU's Bloomington campus after a veekend visit or driving down to visit her on campus, I also realized that the Socialist Workers Party-supporting students, that the D.A. in Bloomington was attempting to prosecute, did not reflect the then-political mood of the vast majority of IU's student body or faculty in the early 1960s.
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