On The Road In The 1970's: Part 69

In 1964, after the first semester of my junior year of high school in Indianapolis inside Broad Ripple H.S. between February and June, I continued to be in the "G" class for the more academically-oriented high school junior students in English, that Mrs. Deering still taught and in the third-year Spanish class that Mrs. Diaz still taught. But in a "G" class for the more academically-oriented students in Intermediate Algebra II that I continued to be in, my teacher was now a tall guy named Mr. Morgan, who seemed about 15 to 20 years younger than my Intermediate Algebra I "G" class teacher in the previous semester, Mr. Mahin, had been.

As in the fall term, the high school woman student named Sandy still seemed to be the highest-achieving student in this "G" Intermediate Algebra II class that Mr. Morgan taught. But, so many years later, I can't recall anything about what happened inside Mr. Morgan's class during that term. Since there was never any classroom disruption of Mr. Morgan's classroom lessons by any students during the whole term, and because I pretty much did the assigned Intermediate Algebra II homework every day and studied a bit before each scheduled classroom text or quiz, my recollection is that, as in Intermediate Algebra I, I received a final grade of either A or A- from Mr. Morgan in this Intermediate Algebra II course.

In my memory, my second term of 3rd-year Spanish in Mrs. Diaz's "G" class pretty much blends in with the first term. In both terms, I think Mrs. Diaz gave me a final grade of either A- or B-plus, becuase I usually scored around 90 percent on the written Spanish tests and handed in all the homework assignments; although I don't think I was that good at learning to speak the language well enough to have much of a conversation with a native Spanish-speaker.

I now have only two particular memories related to my spring 1964 term in this Spanish language class. One memory is that Mrs. Diaz tried to interest me and my "G" Spanish classmates in joining her during the summer of 1964 in some kind of Spanish language immersion course for U.S. high school students in Mexico City; which would include visiting some Mexican tourist sites, as well as Spanish language study in a country where everyone spoke Spanish.

In later decades, I think it became more common for public high school students to spend their summers studying in a foreign country or at a talent, arts or music-oriented summer camp. But in 1964, most of the high school students I had known who ever spent their summers taking a course (unless the course they were taking was drivers' education) were only doing so because they needed to retake a course they had flunked, in order to eventually qualify for their high school diploma.

So there was no way in 1964 that someone like me--who, as early as first grade, had always disliked the authoritarian aspects of being compelled to attend school during the fall, winter and spring--would consider giving up a portion of a summer vacation from school in order to study and do school work in Mexico City. Especially since none of the other nearly all high school women classmates in this Spanish class had shown any particular interest in getting to know me better either before or after each Spanish class session (in which a lot of time was spent reading excerpts from a Spanish language edition of Don Quijote by Cerventes), during either the Fall 1963 or Spring 1964 semester.

The second particular memory related to Mrs. Diaz's Spanish "G" class I have from the spring semester of 1964 is of bumping into by chance, unexpectedly, one of my classmates in this class, Suzi, at the Glendale Shopping Center one weekday evening, near the end of the school term.

Suzi was then a senior who would be graduating from Broad Ripple High School in less than a month; and she was someone who was likely to have been considered very pretty and physically attractive by most of the high school guys in the school. And my assumption in the spring of 1964 was that Suzi, who had been one of the school's "homecoming Queen" candidates in either the fall of 1963 or fall of 1964, had no difficulty attracting guys at Broad Ripple in her senior class, like the athletes or the various school activity club student leaders, who most of the high school women in the school would feel were the guys most then worth dating in 1964.

Suzi was about 5 foot-2 and seemed to always put on make-up and lipstick and dressup in a fashionable way for each school day. And-- because, as I've indicated previously, in high school I hadn't yet come to regard women who wore make-up and lipstick, and were into dressing-up, as less attractive and more plastic than women who didn't use make-up or lipstick--I also then considered Suzi to be a physically beautiful woman.

Suzi did say "hello" to me and smiled in a friendly way when we bumped into each other, outside of school, at the Glendale Shopping Center. But I realized that, since inside school during the 1963-1964 school year she had never indicated any particular interest in getting to know me and probably already had a lot of senior class guys asking her for dates, her friendliness towards me at the shopping center did not mean that whe was inviting me to ask her for her telephone number or for a date.

In addition, like most high school guys who were juniors in 1964, I automatically assumed that a high school woman who was a high school senior would not be interested in ever dating a guy who was only a high school junior; and, if you were a guy who was a high school junior, the only high school women you should be asking out for dates would be other high school juniors or high school sophomore or freshman class women.

Ironically, in doing some background research for these recollections of my experiences in Indianapolis in 1963 and 1964, I noticed that, like me, Suzi was apparently of assimilated Jewish religious background. But because her family had a last name that was not as easily identified as being a "Jewish" last name as mine, in 1964 I did not realize that Suzi was also of "Jewish" religious background.

Still, because Suzi was a popular senior class student, as well as much less of an alienated, "isolato," outsider and internally non-conformist student at Broad Ripple than I was in 1964, I don't think there would have ever been any likelihood that Suzi would have ever been interested in dating me in 1963 or 1964--despite our common assimilated family religious backgrounds. 

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 68

In 1964 I still spent a lot of time, in the evening and on weekends at home, watching the corporate media TV programs; and, like most people in the USA, I was still somewhat of a TV addict. So, not surprisingly, I probably spent all day and early evening on January 1, 1964 in Indianapolis watching the televised Orange Bowl, Sugar Bowl, Cotton Bowl and Rose Bowl college football games on television. And I probably spent a lot of weekend time, when I was at home, during the early months of 1964, watching some kind of televised sports event each afternoon.

It wasn't until the summer of 1964, after reading a book called The Great Time-Killer, which was critical of the cultural quality of what was now being broadcast on "post-Golden Age of TV" by the CBS, NBC and ABC networks, that I started to become less of a TV addict than I still was in January 1964, at least with respect to watching television shows (other than each day's evening news, weekend evening news shows or tv series shows like The Defenders or weekend evening variety shows like The Jackie Gleason Show or Sunday morning discussion shows like Meet The Press and Face The Nation or Sunday night discussion shows like The David Susskind Show or weekend sports shows) that much, until I entered college in the fall of 1965.

And although I had been heavily into listening to AM hit records radio stations in NYC on my transister radio in the late 1950's, in Indianapolis during the first six months of 1964 I didn't listen to AM hit records radio stations. By that time, I was into mainly still listening to the vinyl records of the Broadway musical hits and flops, movie soundtracks and 1940's big band records that I had purchased the previous year with the money I had earned from delivering the Indianapolis Times; and, by then, I felt the lyrics of the songs that were being played on AM radio (in an era before most people, like me, had FM radios and could listen to FM radio stations) were intellectually shallow and uninteresting.

So I really didn't start listening to pop hits on the radio in the 1960's on a regular basis, for awhile, until I was living in a single dorm room in Livingston Hall on Columbia University's campus in the fall of 1965; where I listened each day, for a bit, to each week's top-40 hit records that WABC-AM DJ's and WMCA's "Good Guys" DJs played, whenever I happened to find myself spending some time in the dorm room during the day or evening.

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 67

I no longer recall much else of what happened historically in the world between the late November 1963 days of mourning for JFK and the end of my first term as a high school junior at Broad Ripple High School in early 1964. And about the only thing I now recall doing in December 1963 in Indianapolis, during Christmas Vacation that year, was taking a bus alone to Downtown Indianapolis; and, alone, spending an afternoon rainy day inside a downtown movie theater, watching an anti-war movie, titled "The Victors."

This movie, The Victors, reinforced my feeling that helping to preserve world peace and avoid another war was the most important thing for me to be concerned about, politically, in 1964. 

Yet after viewing The Victors film, I still believed in early 1964 that the main possible threat to world peace came from the foreign policies and actions of the Soviet Union, other communist governments and communists in non-communist "Free World" countries being willing to wage guerrilla war to establish authoritarian, undemocratic "communist dictatorships" in these countries; rather than from the foreign policies and actions of the United States government.

In 1964 I still then, mistakenly, regarded the United States government as a government whose main foreign policy motivation was to preserve world peace and defend freedom around the world against the alleged "threat" to world peace and freedom posed by "world communism." For I was still just an anti-communist liberal, politically, in 1964.

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 66

Most people, like me, who watched the Establishment television news departments' coverage of what was happening inside the Dallas police station, between the time of Oswald's arrest on Friday, November 22, 1963 and his elimination on Sunday morning on November 24, 1963, did not focus more on the possible involvement of "The Company" or former "Company"-linked people in JFK's elimination. A major reason was because none of the Establishment mass media reporters seemed to indicate to viewers that the Mayor of Dallas on November 22, 1963 was the brother of the former CIA Deputy Director, Charles Cabell, that JFK had fired, along with then-CIA Director and later Warren Commission member Allen Dulles, following the failure of the CIA-organized 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba to overthrow the Castroo-led government in Cuba.

According to Henry Hurt's 1985 book Reasonable Doubt: An Investigation Into The Assassination of John F. Kennedy, it was "known that Cabell and his associates were vehement in their rage toward what they perceived as President Kennedy's `desertion' on the morning of the invasion--the President's refusal to send in military forcee to ensure victory." And according to former New Orleans Distric Attorney's On The Trail Of The Assassins book, after JFK fired then-Dallas Mayor Earle Cabell's brother in 1961, "General Cabell's subsequent hatred of John F. Kennedy became an open secret in Washington."

In addition, when then-Dallas Civil Liberties Union President Olds and other local ACLU officials met in Dallas's Plaza Hotel in the late evening of November 22, 1963--after then-Dallas Police Captain Will Fritz had refused Old's request to be allowed to meet with Oswald--"someone suggested `Call the Mayor,'" according to Jim Bishop's The Day Kennedy Was Shot book. Yet when the then-Dallas Civil Liberties Union President "Olds got on the phone again and asked for Mayor Earl Cabell, former Deputy CIA Director Charles Cabell's brother, and "gave his name and rank," he was "told that the mayor was busy;" and he "wondered what could keep a mayor busy after 11 p.m.," according to the same book.

Then on November 24, 1963, at the very moment Oswald was silenced by Jack Ruby, "Chief Curry, ludicrously, was upstairs in his office responding to a phone call from Dallas mayor Earle Cabell, and had not checked for himself to see if orders were being carried out properly in the basement," according to the Who Was Jack Ruby? book by Seth Kantor. Yet when he testified before the Warren Commission on July 13, 1964, the former CIA Deputy Director Cabell's brother apparently falsely claimed that Dallas Police Chief Curry telephoned him at the very moment Oswald was being transferred.

But, although "in most countries, a powerful individual who also had a top position in a major espionage apparatus and had been at odds with the departed leader would be high on the list of suspects," according to former New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's On The Trail Of The Assassins book, the brother of Dallas's mayor on November 22, 1963, "who fit the description perfectly, was never even called as a witness before the Warren Commission." And none of the network television news department reporters covering JFK's elimination on TV between November 22, 1963 and November 25, 1963 seemed to inform viewers that Dallas's then-mayor was the brother of the CIA Deputy Director whom JFK had fired.

So only after Oliver Stone's JFK movie was released in the early 1990's, and it then seemed safer to personally do more research about what actually happened in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963, did I, myself, realize that Dallas's then-mayor was the brother of the CIA deputy director whom JFK had fired.

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 65

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 64

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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