On The Road In The 1970's--Part 51

Other than the occasion when my sister's old boyfriend visited with my sister, I can recall only two other visits from people who lived out-of-town, when living with my parents in "Naptown" during the summer of 1963. On one weekend, my mother's younger sister, her husband and her two boys, who were both a few years younger than me, drove down from where they lived near Chicago, in Skokie, to spend the afternoon and early evening with my parents and me.

But I can't recall now much how we spent the day, other than vaguely thinking that we must have driven around Indianapolis's Monument Circle area downtown and then eaten an early evening dinner at our rented house, that my mother cooked for us, before they started their drive back up home to the Chicago area.

On Saturday on another weekend, which was an extremely hot and humid one, in August of 1963, my mother's parents came down from their Chicago slum apartment on a Greyhound bus to visit my parents, my sister and me for the first time in Indianapolis. The original weekend plan was for my grandparents to spend the night in our Indianapolis home, before then getting on the bus on Sunday afternoon, the following day, to return to Chicago.

But after my parents, my sister and I met them at the early 1960's Greyhound bus terminal in Downtown Indianapolis, drove my grandparents back to where we lived near 52nd Street and College Avenue on the northeast side of the city, arrived at our rented house, walked into our living room and immediately turned on the living room air-conditioning unit, my grandmother, who was then apparently in her late 60's, quickly decided she wanted to go back to her slum apartment in Chicago, immediately.

My grandfather, who was more good-natured and assimilated into the U.S. labor force as a loader of morning newspapers onto Chicago Tribune newspaper delivery trucks on the night shift at the Tribune's printing press facility in Downtown Chicago, would have wanted to stay for the night (especially after the air-conditioning unit that was turned on cooled the living room so much that he exclaimed "M'chaya.'"), because he was eager to spend some time with his daughter and her children.

But neither my mother nor my grandfather were successful in persuading my grandmother--who by that time in her life seemed to have a personality that was totally opposite of my mother and her younger sister's jovial, good-natured, easy-going personalities ( and apparently by then my grandmother could only feel comfortable when she was staying inside the four walls of her own slum apartment)--to stay over for the night, especially after having already been on the bus for four hours that day on the trip down from Chicago.

But my grandmother--who, as an immigrant daughter of an orthodox Lithuanian rabbi who did not emigrate, had arrived in the USA as a teenager shortly after the Titanic (which had originally been the ship she was going to sail on) sank--stubbornly insisted that she wanted to go back to Chicago immediately. So, despite my grandfather being disappointed that their visit to his daughter's home in Indianapolis was to be such a short one, we all quickly got them in the car again with us, drove back downtown to the Indianapolis Greyhound bus station and put them on a late afternoon bus that was heading to Chicago.

In retrospect, my grandmother, by that time in her life, probably no longer wanted to travel anywhere or go out of her apartment anytime, except to maybe shop in her own neighborhood. And it was likely that the only reason she had agreed to take the bus down to visit my mother's home at that time was because my grandfather, then in his early 70's, was still adventurist enough and Americanized enough to be eager to visit his daughter in Indianapolis, despite the weather being hot and humid in August.

Or possibly, when my grandmother again saw how much materially nicer her daughter's living situation and neighborhood in Indianapolis was than was her own living situation, she may have felt envious of her daughter; and so remaining in her daughter's home for more than a few minutes perhaps reminded her of how economically poverty-stricken, in comparison, most of her whole 20th-century  life in Chicago had generally been.

On The Road In The 1970's--Part 50

On a few Saturdays or Sundays during the summer of 1963, my parents and I drove down to Bloomington, often via the back roads that ran south parallel to State Highway 37, in order to drive through Indiana towns that we had not driven through before, to spend a few hours eating lunch out with my older sister, who was spending that summer attending classes at Indiana University. And on one weekend that summer, my sister was up in Indianapolis visiting my parents and me for a few hours with an old boyfriend of hers from New York City who (if I remember correctly after so many years) was taking some summer course at the University of Missouri's School of Journalism, before doing some required time in the U.S. military (in the period before the late 1965 U.S. military escalation in Vietnam made required service in the U.S. military for all U.S. males a more risky situation).

My sister's old boyfriend had purchased a used car that was a convertible, to drive around in while he was in the Midwest; and when my parents decided that they'd also make the one and a half-hour drive down to Bloomington at the same time my sister and her old boyfriend were driving back down to Bloomington (where after we all ate dinner there together, he would drop her off at her dorm, before eventually driving back to Missouri), it turned out that I sat in the back seat of his convertible car, while my parents drove alone together in their car behind us.

Because it was a hot summer day and the used convertible car had no inside air-conditioning, like most cars had in subsequent decades, the top of the convertible car was pulled back. So I was able to feel the pleasant cooling wind all the way driving down to Bloomington. And it turned out that this was the only time I was ever driven in a convertible with its top open in my life, despite having hitched so much on the road during the 1970's.

On The Road In The 1970's--Part 49

Aside from sometimes driving out to shopping malls like the Glendale Mall, near where Broad Ripple Avenue leads to Keystone Avenue, or going to an evening showing at one of the local neighborhood second-run movie distribution movie theater outlets, like The Vogue, on College Avenue, just south of Broad Ripple Avenue, I can't recall spending many weekday evenings out of the house in Indianapolis during the summer of 1963. But I do recall doing, on two different weekday evenings, in Indianapolis two things in that summer that one could not have done in New York City during that same summer.

The first thing to do in Indianapolis that was not available to do in the evening summer in New York City in 1963 was being able to check out the Indiana State Fair at the fairgrounds in Indianapolis. My parents and I spent an evening there walking around the fairgrounds, which was crowded with a lot of people attending the Indiana State Fair in the summer weekday evening. But I can't recall now much of what we saw or did, except that the Indiana State Fair seemed like a carnival atmosphere on a larger scale, with Coney Island-type booths and rides, as well as farm animal booths.

The second thing my parents and I did in Indianapolis in the summer of 1963, that we wouldn't have been able to do in New York City that summer, was to see Van Johnson, who was, by mid-1963, somewhat of a has-been as a big Hollywood movie star (although he was apparently still only in his late 40's at that point in his life) compared to what his status had been in the 1950's, play the "Devil"/Applegate character in a summer stock production of Damn Yankees. This production of the Damn Yankees musical from the 1950's was being performed at an outdoor theater on Butler University's campus, only about 10 to 15 blocks west away from where I then lived.

Ten years before Van Johnson had been co-starring with Hollywood super-stars like Humphrey Bogart (who was no longer alive in the early 1960's) in The Caine Mutiny and with Elizabeth Taylor (who was a still a Hollywood super-star in the early 1960's) in The Last Time I Saw Paris. But by the summer of 1963, despite being billed as "the star" of this summer stock production of Damn Yankees, he was just being cast in a mostly non-singing role of this musical. And it wasn't even a role that would enable him to sing the musical's hit song, "You Gotta Have Heart," like the minor character who plays the Washington Senators' baseball team manager gets to sing.

Ironically, the comical song Van Johnson did get to sing from his comic-villain role as the Devil to whom the elderly frustrated Washington Senators baseball fan sells his soul to, was called "Those Were the Good Old Days." But I suspect Van Johnson was probably too focused on having to remember the lyrics to the one song he had to perform before the live, mostly middle-aged white audience of his Indiana fans from the 1950's, to be thinking of the "good old days" of ten years before, when he had been a big Hollywood star.

Coincidentally, another former Hollywood film star from the 1940's, former actress Frances Farmer, lived just down the block on the same street where my parents and I lived in Indianapolis, at this time. In the early 1960's, she was hosting a late afternoon local show for one of the local Indianapolis television stations, in which (if I remember correctly after so many years) she provided brief introductions before different edited (to allow for commercials and to fit into a 90 minute show) motion pictures from the 1930's or 1940's were broadcast between 4:30 and 6 p.m., each weekday.

But (like most every other adult who lived on the block) Francis Farmer was generally visible to others for only brief moments on the street, when she walked either from her house to her car or from her car to her house.  In the early 1960's, Frances Farmer's car was a 1958 Edsel that she parked in front of her house (in an historical period when homeowners or renters of houses in that neighborhood were always able to find a vacant parking spot right in front of wherever they lived, because no shortage of on-street parking spaces yet existed for residents of that particular Indianapolis neighborhood at that time).

So during the 1 and one-half years I lived on the same block as Frances Farmer, I can only recall seeing her just a few times on that block, as she left her car or her home (while wearing the kind of women's hat that Katharine Hepburn sometimes wore in some of the 1940's Hollywood movies), probably either on her way to her job at the local tv studios or returning from her tv show, during the season when the sun set after 7 p.m., perhaps?

On The Road In The 1970's--Part 48

Besides buying the discounted vinyl record albums of mostly flop Broadway musicals at the Jubilee City Discount department store in the summer of 1963, I also bought a cheap model of a tape recorder that used 8-inch reels of recording tape. But the sound quality of the tape recorder's playback of the 8-inch tapes of some radio shows I made was of low quality, and I felt that Jubilee City had ripped me off by selling me such a defective tape recorder.

So I soon gave up attempting to record anything else on my defective tape recorder in Indianapolis and, instead, spent much more time when I lived in Indianapolis taking 8 millimetre moving pictures on my family's cheap Kodak Brownie camera; that I could then project on the Bell & Howell movie projector I had bought with some of the money I had earned from delivering the Indianapolis Times, prior to the summer of 1963.

Don't remember much else I did alone outside during the weekdays of the summer of 1963, except exploring alone a few times the park forest area north of Butler University's campus, near or in Holcomb Gardens, which was within walking distance of where I lived; and also walking alone once in Holiday Park, much further north in "Naptown," one day.

On weekday evenings, most of my time was spent either watching TV after dinner, with my parents or alone, in the living room, and then, after we all went upstairs to prepare for bed, usually reading some book in bed for awhile in my own bedroom, before getting tired enough to fall asleep by around 11:30 p.m.. Can't recall listening alone to much music over the radio in my bedroom, or even listening to the radio much at all when in my bedroom alone during the summer weeknights or even weekdays of 1963. And most of whatever saxophone practicing fro about an hour every few days that I did in the summer of 1963 on weekdays was done in the late afternoon or early evening before dinner was served. 

On a few very hot summer nights, my parents and I sat outside on the front porch at the same time that the neighbors who rented the other part of the duplex house we lived in, the Griffiths, were sitting outside on porch; on the other side of the small wooden divider that separated their side of the porch from our side.

The Griffiths were personally friendly in a Midwestern regional sort of way. They seemed to have just lived in Indiana for their whole lives and appeared to be in their late 50's or early 60's. And the daughter or daughters they had raised in their half of the duplex house in which they lived for a long time, who were sitting with them once when my parents and I were also sitting on the porch, either no longer lived with them (or were never noticed by me more than a few times during the year and a half I lived next door to the Griffiths).

So it appeared that neither the Griffiths nor my parents felt they had much in common enough for them to be able to converse on any kind of regular basis on the front porch of the house. And I have the feeling that Mr. Griffith's political views in the early 1960's pretty much reflected the right-wing conservative Republican  Party, pro Goldwater political views of the Indianapolis Star and its then-owner, rather than the politically liberal views of newspapers like the then-Dorothy Schiff-owned New York Post or the New York Times, that my parents both then had.

And since the side of the duplex house we rented had an air-conditioning unit in its living room, even if the summer nights in 1963 became excessively hot, my parents and I were able to avoid both the hot summer evenings and the risk of having to chat with the friendly, but possibly right-wing conservative Mr. Griffith, by just spending most of the hot summer evenings, not on the porch, but in our living room with the air-conditioning unit on. 

On The Road In The 1970's--Part 47

Besides riding around on my bicycle in the neighborhood on side streets, going to local libraries and spending time at the local Jewish Community Center of Indianapolis pool during the day, and still watching a lot of television in the evening on weekdays in Indianapolis in the summer of 1963, I also sometimes hopped on a bus that went downtown on College Avenue or on a bus that went east on 52nd Street towards the Jubilee City discount department store, mini-shopping mall.

In Downtown Indianapolis, I generally would spend a few hours at the Central Library and usually borrow a biography, a history book, a novel or an anthology of plays or an individual play to read. Perhaps because fewer people in Indianapolis seemed to be interested in using the central library downtown in the 1960's (long before most U.S. central libraries no longer were places that people visited to use books and were transformed primarily into computer centers, study halls for students with laptops and a place for homeless people to hang out in during the winter months, etc.), than the number of people who used the New York City Public Library in Midtown Manhattan, teenage high school students who entered the central library in Indianapolis were never harassed by any library security guards.

Yet less than two years later, when, as a teenage high school senior, I walked into the reference room of the New York City Public Library's central library in Midtown Manhattan one afternoon, an Afro-American library security guard, ironically, immediately escorted me out of the New York City Public Library central library reading room; while saying "You're not old enough to be allowed in the Reading Room."

Despite being disgusted with being forced to leave the reading room for ageist reasons, I saw no point in getting into a loud argument in the then-card catalog area for the central library's reading room with the security guard or with his supervisor at that time. So I just then quickly made my exit from the library and walked out the front entrance and past the lion sculptures, with disgust. But I imagine the 1964 or early 1965 incident in Manhattan did help increase my consciousness, somewhat, about the injustice of ageism and youth oppression in the 1960's USA society.

Taking the bus alone that went east on 52nd Street until it reached Keystone Avenue and the Jubilee City discount department on some weekdays in the summer of 1963, I would usually spend my time in the store mainly examining which long-playing vinyl records were on sale that week. In the summer of 1963 I was still mainly into buying vinyl records of Broadway musicals or Hollywood movie musical versions of Broadway hit musicals, to listen to on my cheap, single speaker, hi-fi vinyl record player.

But because the original cast albums of the hit Broadway musicals usually cost $3.98 or $4.98 in 1963, which was a price that I considered too expensive for me at that time, most of the original cast albums of the Broadway musicals that I bought that summer were either the albums of flop Broadway musicals that sold for a cheaper sales price or "non-original cast" cover versions of the hit Broadway or movie musicals that were being sold for the cheaper "on-sale price." I also sometimes spent some money at Jubilee City that summer purchasing some all-music movie soundtrack vinyl albums that were on sale and some only-music big band music albums that were on sale.

Surprisingly, although I was still into practicing my saxophone at home on a regular basis during the summer of 1963, to, in part, keep me "in shape musically" for being part of Broad Ripple High School's marching band during the 1963-1964 academic year, I can't recall purchasing any vinyl jazz records that featured saxophonists to listen to. Could be that Jubilee City's discount record department didn't sell many jazz saxophone records or that the jazz saxophone records Jubilee City did sell were never on sale, perhaps?

In retrospect, I think I was probably still more into John Philip Sousa-type marching band music, with respect to the saxophone, than into Illinois Jacquet or saxophonists who played jazz or even dance band music, at this time. And insofar as I ever thought of possibly earning a living in the music field, the only idea I toyed with in the summer of 1963 was maybe becoming some kind of high school music teacher.

Of course, again in retrospect, I probably should have focused more during the summer of 1963 on preparing myself to possibly play jazz or to play in dance bands at hotels, in the summers that lay ahead during the rest of the 1960's. But, for me, playing the saxophone was always seen as just a fun hobby in high school, that also enabled me to be part of a high school band, which was a school activity that both still interested me personally and also seemed to be useful to be involved in, when applying to some college. Since it would show I wasn't just someone who only just tended to do well academically, but  that I was also a "well-rounded" college applicant.

From starting to occasionally read Lovejoy's College Guide by the end of my sophomore year, and from what some of my junior high school teachers and guidance counselors had indicated, I probably had realized by this time that it "looked good on your college application" if you showed that you were involved in some school extra-curricular activity like "Band" in high school. (Although, like I may have written earlier, in the summer of 1963 I still just assumed that, like my sister was then doing, I would just be attending Indiana University in Bloomington--with the in-state tuition cost advantage I was now eligible for, after my then expected graduation from Broad Ripple High School in June 1965; and I had no thought at all, at least in the summer of 1963, of even considering applying to an Ivy League school like Columbia University. 

On The Road In The 1970's--Part 46

After so many years, my memories of how I spent the summer of 1963 in Indianapolis are now also somewhat vague. During the week, I spent part of the day riding my bicycle either north towards Broad Ripple Avenue or south toward East 38th Street, on the usually deserted side streets that were located between the more major north-south streets of College Avenue to the east and Meridian Street to the west.

Usually I was the only person riding a bicycle on these north-south side streets. Sometimes I would stop by either the local public library near 42nd Street or at the local public library near Broad Ripple Avenue, and maybe check out one library book. My recollection is that in the summer of 1963 I was also beginning to think about trying my hand at writing a play. So I first checked out one of John Gassner's Best Plays of the American Theater anthology from the public library. And after reading through the Gassner anthology, I wrote a few scenes for a musical play that reflected my experience at the Ten Mile River Camp Kiowa Boy Scout Camp in New York State the previous summer, for which I wrote my first composed folk song, "Camp Wellington," in 1963.

Because I was still somewhat of a TV addict in the summer of 1963, who usually spent most evenings just watching various television news and TV news department documentary shows, old movies, variety TV shows or TV series shows that were being re-broadcast during the summer, I pretty quickly, however, lost my interest in spending much time trying to complete this play, rather than just spending my evening time mostly passively watching television in the evening.

Another way Indianapolis was unlike New York City was that, at least in the neighborhood where I lived, in Indianapolis there were no outdoor playgrounds with basketball courts near public schools, in any parks or in parking lots--where a teenage guy (in the early 1960's teenage women were almost never seen playing basketball on New York City's outdoor basketball courts) could just go alone, and either find another guy or group of teenage guys, he might have not previously known, to play basketball with, or just shoot baskets into the hoop alone, if no one else appeared on the court--like there were in New York City.

So unless you, or some other teenage guy you knew, had a basketball hoop over the garage in a house where you or he lived, there was no place outside, in the neighborhood in which I lived, to go outside and get into a pick-up basketball game in the summer of 1963. Because the rented house my parents and I lived in didn't have a garage and basketball hoop over a garage, and I didn't know any teenage guy in Indianapolis whose house did have a hoop on its garage or noticed anyone during the summer living in a house with a hoop over the garage who looked like he needed someone to play basketball with, the only basketball playing I did during the summer of 1963 was playing alone a few times, on the inside gym court of the local Jewish Community Center of Indianapolis on Hoover Road, on a few of the days when my mother and I spent part of the afternoon there, sitting by the side of the swimming pool.

Aside from bumping into Debbie once in the Jewish Community Center's gym that summer, I can't recall bumping into anyone else there during the summer of 1963 who also attended Broad Ripple High School. And while at the Jewish Community Center that summer, during the week, most of the several hours in the afternoon I spent there, in-between swimming in the pool to cool off on the hot summer days, was just spent reading some book, while sitting next to my mother, who also spent most of her time there sitting in a beach chair by the side of the pool, reading some novel or biography.

Most of the other people sitting around the pool or swimming in the pool were housewives, who probably would not have been considered as physically attractive as my mother did in her bathing suit, by most men in the early 1960's. But I do recall noticing, on a few occasions, a buxom teenage high school white woman, who probably would have been considered more good-looking in her bathing suit by most men in the early 1960's (before the Marilyn Monroe look in a bathing suit became less fashionable as a bathing beauty standard in later decades, in the eyes of more men and women, perhaps), who did not attend Broad Ripple High School,  also sitting around the pool; generally surrounded by two or three other teenage high school white guys flirting with her all the time.

On The Road In The 1970's--Part 45

By early June 1963, I pretty much lost forever my interest in just working for money, and I began to feel that having to be responsible for delivering the Indianapolis Times each day of the week tied me down too much. Also, I realized that if I was going to be free during the summer to spend some hot weekday afternoons swimming in the Jewish Community Center of Indianapolis's pool, or to spend time between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m.in the afternoon, late in the summer and in the fall, practicing with the Broad Ripple High School marching band, that I would then be a member of, I could not also have time to continue delivering newspapers.

So in early June 1963, I quit my newspaper carrier job and I was no longer earning my own money. And between June 1963 and mid-July 1965, the only money I had to spend just came from the small allowance my father continued to give me, during my junior and senior years of high school--except for some money I earned once babysitting one evening for two children of my father's cousin--until I began earning some money on my own from the summer clerical job I had at UM & M's 1407 Broadway corporate office in Manhattan; before I entered Columbia University in September 1965.

Another way that public high school life at Broad Ripple in Indianapolis was different than public high school life at Bayside H.S. and Flushing H.S. in New York City is that more students at Broad Ripple H.S. attended summer school than students did at Bayside H.S. or Flushing H.S.

In New York City, the only high school students who attended school during the summer were the ones who had flunked the required high school regents exams in one of the courses they heeded to have passed, in order to receive an academic high school diploma. In Indianapolis, however, it was much more common for high school students who wished to get their driver's license at 16 years-of-age to eagerly spend their summer mornings taking the driver's education course, that high schools like Broad Ripple provided for free, to prepare themselves for quickly passing their road tests as soon as they reached their 16th birthday.

Also, if, like high school students in New York City who weren't permitted to get a driver's license until they were 18 years-of-age, you or your friends were mostly not yet into spending your summer driving around or making out with a steady date in your own car or one you borrowed from a parent, there were less interesting things on weekdays available to do during the day in Indianapolis in the summer than there was in New York City on summer days in the early 1960's. So, if you were a high school student not yet "on wheels," who wasn't yet into getting a summer job, taking a morning high school summer course at a school like Broad Ripple might also be a way that you'd be more likely to be interacting with teenagers your own age during the summer months, than if you just slept late and spent much of the day just hanging out alone in your own house or backyard or going shopping, perhaps?

Having grown up in Queens in New York City, of course, the notion of spending a summer going to school still seemed like an alien one to me, during the summer of 1963. So once I lost interest in making money by delivering the Indianapolis Times and quit that job in early June 1963, I did not even consider the possibility of taking a summer morning course at Broad Ripple during the summer.