The relationship went quickly nowhere, with little to show for it other than a reading list that included Rand’s novels and selected nonfiction. These carried what was at the time fairly provocative titles, like The Virtue of Selfishness. It was a philosopy ready made for the coming malaise of the 70s, and a precursor to the rightward turn the country would take in the 80s.

I was already well into by the start of classes at the old Purdue Extension building on 38th Street. The campus, across from the Fairgrounds and next door to the old Burger Chef Manager’s school would soon be acronymed out of existence by the combined IUPUI a year later.

It wasn’t long before I noticed mimeographed notices gracing bulletin boards throughout the campus:

In a rut? Try Objectivism, the fresh new approach to life!

I wouldn’t say I was in a rut, but I wasn’t sure about much of anything. Manson, Altamont, and Kent State were recent memories, Bobby Kennedy and MLK were not long in their graves, and people were dying by the thousands in Vietnam. A lot of the old ideas were starting to seem a little worn around the edges. And out of high school and away from parental influence, I was looking around. As were many, many others.

And it was hard to be liberal in Indianapolis in the 70s! Despite a long history of electing moderates, including a young Indianapolis mayor named Dick Lugar, announcing your family’s longtime affiliation with the Democratic party was a sure way to draw harassment from the revolving K-12 roster of schoolboy bullies.

Rand’s views, trending well into the conservative range, made it possible to be both conservative and a rebel. So I pulled one of the the neatly scissored little tabs off the bottom of the page, and blew a dime on a phone call from the lovely hardwood phone booths in the main building.

“Hello?”

And nearly hung up. The voice at the other end was hushed, as though someone were listening in on us. There was a vague sort of suspicion in his voice. I held onto the reciever,  and said I was interested in learning more about Objectivism. I found myself talking quietly, too…

“And you are familiar with the works and ideas of Ayn Rand?”

He pronounced it AYE-n, as opposed to “Ann,” which is how my old girlfriend had pronounced it. Score another thing she didn’t know crap about. I outlined my reading thus far. He went silent for a long moment, as though weighing my fitness.

I seemed to pass the litmus test, because he told me about a group that met on Fridays to listen to recorded lectures, and gave me directions to an apartment on the far west side of the I-465 beltway. I arranged a stand-in for my Friday night shift at the old Central Hardware on Shadeland Avenue and rolled onto I-465.

In those days of thirty-cent gas,the fifty mile circuit of the beltway was a great way to unwind. I took it north, rode it on around past the place where the Pyramids were under construction, and exited just before the I-70 interchange.

Arriving late, I found myself on the periphery of the group, next to the host, a med student at the IU med center downtown. He handed me a Miller longneck, the first of a steady supply. The mysterious mimeograph machine had been kept busy; the little notices were apparently all over both the Purdue and IU extensions, as well as the Butler U. campus. The apartment’s little living room was filled with people in the couches and mismatched chairs: university students and misfits, writers and artists, and another group, that I call the outliers, people whose nature fell outside the usual sampling range.

The notices were the work of one such outlier, the man with the hushed whisper, a small time entrepreneur involved in various multi-level marketing schemes. His latests was a line of costume jewelry that you glued to your earlobes, fingers, cheeks, whatever. A few years ahead of his time, in retrospect… When he wasn’t involved in his various business ventures and recruiting followers, he wrote letters to the editors of local newspapers on abortion (immoral but legal), the draft (also immoral but also illegal), and anything else that crossed his mind as important.

Among them was another outlier, who ate his pizza two pieces at a time, mooshed together cheese-to-cheese, who had joined something called the Libertarian Party. It would be easy to call them wackos, but they were looking for something too, in places farther off and more unusual than university bulletin boards.

It may seem odd to think of an ultra-capitalist, ultra conservative philosophy in Marxist terms, but the similarity is there. Marx took a principle from the philosopher Hegel, who cited the existence of a thesis, an existing condition, that turn spawns its opposition, the antithesis. This in turn creates a new thesis, and the process starts over again.

But that’s how it turned out.

NEXT: New Consensus

By 1968, the Indiana Theater screened films in Super Panavision 70, which enjoyed greater success. Still marketed as Cinerama, the Panavision 70 format was a single lens format that still provided a pretty good cinematic experience. The Indiana hosted premiers of a number of Super Panavision 70, including It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad World, Ice Station Zebra, and…the original roadshow engagement of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

 The Star and News started running full page ads weeks in advance, of the now-familiar scenes of the PanAm spaceliner docking with a space station, of astronaut Dave freaking out on mind bending alien special effects. At the height of the space race, and for a diehard SF fan, this was the holy freaking grail. Not until Star Wars a decade later would space science be portrayed in such scope.

Roadshow engagements still retained a portion of the old Golden Age Hollywood treatment. Seats were available on a reserved seat basis. The big ads contained a clipout order form which you filled out and mailed in with your check. Being on a teenager’s tight budget, I opted for the cheaper balcony seat. A good choice, as it turned out.

Still just a little young to drive the family car downtown, I boarded an Indianapolis Transit system bus from the Northeast side of the city, where it bordered the suburban community of Lawrence. The round trip would more or less take up a full day. That was fine. The journey is the thing, after all. I remember nothing of the trip, except the anticipation.

Downtown was a heady mix of honking cars and diesel fumes, which for some reason I thought smelled good—don’t ask; I can’t explain it. I think it stinks, now. Maybe it was the extra lead content…

The first suburban “shopping centers” that present day humans call malls had already opened, but downtown was still where the cool stores, like Wasson’s and L.S. Ayers, where people of wealth and status still went for their clothes. I ate lunch at the Monument Circle Woolworth’s, which smelled of fresh caramel corn and served milk shakes in stainless steel cups. I picked up some red, leathery licorice whips for the show.

I had not been to the Indiana since that day that my Cub Scout troop got the free tickets, but it had not lost a single bit of its glory. I got a center seat, front row balcony, which gave me an up-close view of both the elaborate stucco work that framed the screen, and the Theater’s sweeping size. I’m sure once again I toyed with dropping stuff on the people sitting in the mezzanine.

When the curtains parted, and kept parting, the great 120 degree curved screen filled my field of vision. You can still get that, let the movie swallow you whole, but you have to sit really close, even in 70 mm. There, in the balcony, when I got the first view of space liner scene, it was like I was space walking…before there ever was a space walk.

Director Stanley Kubrick spared no effort to make the movie technically accurate, though a few scenes stand out as wrong. While it’s possible to briefly survive in a vacuum for a few seconds, as Dave (Keir Dullea) did, you would definitely not want to hold your breath. And who knows what would happen to your eardrums, going from earthly air pressure, to vacuum, and then back again? No matter; even today, the film’s effects and portrayals of space and space travel still stand up very well.

When the lights came up, I picked up my jaw from where it had landed on the floor, I realized that, the theater was more empty than full. The movie did not fare well at the box office, and enjoyed only mixed reviews. Roger-Ebert-the-eternal loved it; Pauline Kael hated it. At the first nationally televised Oscars, it enjoyed only minimal success, with a shoo-in win for best special effects, and nothing else. This has not stopped it from becoming timeless, and winning a spot among the greatest films ever shot.

As for Cinerama and all its widescreen formats, the energy crisis that followed in years to come made these grand movie palaces impractical; they must have been outrageously expensive to heat, and as suburbs sprawled and malls crawled, no one went downtown as much anymore.

There are currently three theaters worldwide equipped with the original 3-lens Cinerama equipment. It’s still possible to see 2001, How the West was Won, and other classics of the wide screen formats, if you know where to go. Microsoft gazillionaire Paul Allen rescued the Seattle Cinema from becoming a rockclimber’s gym and restored it to its former glory. The Cinerama Dome at ArcLight Cinemas in Los Angeles occasionally hosts festivals in which the old classics are still screened in the original 3-lens Cinerama. A screening room in the National Media Museum in Bradford, England frequently screens some of the early Cinerama travelogues.

There’s a certain classical grandeur in these old places, like the Indiana, and a crazy but empowering excess to big-big dreams like Cinerama. But today of course, there’s stadium seating, CGI, and Dolby 5.1 sound, and some places you can even buy beer, so not all is lost…movies can still leave you sitting with your jaw on the floor.

Special thanks to the following Websites for help with researching and permission to use graphics: The American Widescreen Museum at www.widescreenmuseum.com, Cinematreasures.org, and the very gracious Thomas Hauerslev at www.in70mm.com.

But then in the Fall of 1960, the Indiana Theater opened up after its remodeling for the grand unveiling of their Cinerama screen.

Cinerama had been around since the early 1950s, screening mainly travelogues, much the way the current IMAX megaformat process has. The process involved three 35 mm projectors, each showing a separate, synchronized panel that made up a whole panorama. The Indiana, to generate some buzz, opened the facility to Cub Scout troops all over the state for a free screening.

I was the Beetle Bailey of Cub Scouts, languishing in Bobcat for the extent of my career, which didn’t stop me from being envious of little Petie (not his real name, but he seemed like a Petie, if you know what I mean) who joined the scouts and took advantage of his advanced age to get an automatic promotion to Wolf.

The concept of behavioral problems was still many decades in the future, but Petie’s late enlistment in the Scouts was one of his mother’s last, desperate attempts to get the poor kid on the straight and narrow, before he dropped off the emotional precipice that is adolescence. Petie had some problems with bullying, with stealing, disobedience, and any other trouble that an eleven year old kid living next to a cornfield could think of. I should have been more charitable, but when you’re nine, that’s hard to do.

So, Petie, Bobby, Alan, my brother and I piled into a car for the two-hour trip to downtown Indiana, all attired in our crisp, blue uniforms and strangely foppish yellow scarves and little CSA beanies. The trip was a hard one with small bladders and en route, we stopped for gas and candy.

In the chaos of young boys running back and forth in a small, understaffed gas station, Petie took the opportunity to fill his pockets with an assortment of candy items, which he was kind enough to share with us. I condemned the act, but helped eat it anyway. The station attendant, if he noticed, would tell his friends about how the Cub Scouts came in and ripped him off. Petie was admonished by our parental escorts, but we didn’t turn around. It was a long drive to downtown, and we had to hurry.

A full decade before the multiplexes began invading the suburbs, the downtown movie palaces—the Circle, Loew’s, the Indiana—had a magic about them that few theaters today can match. For one thing, they were freaking big; at its peak, with the balcony section intact, the Indiana seated 3000, and for this, the place was full of blue-suited Cubbies.

For a kid, it was like entering some kind of baroque Superdome, with the ornate tile ceilings and original sculptures. Being late, we ended up in the balcony, but that was okay. I’m trying to remember if Petie committed any other deviant acts that day; it certainly would have been tempting to drop stuff on the unsuspecting Scouts in the mezzanine…

And the screen, or screens. The biggest Cinerama screens wrapped around in 140 degrees; the biggest screen was in the Denver Cooper, which measured a whopping 105 by 35 feet! The Indiana’s screen was a more modest 67 X 25, and curved at a still impressive 120 degrees, which was plenty enough to fill the field of vision from any seat in the house. This first screening was of the original This is Cinerama feature, a series of brief pastiches strung together to fill up two hours. First up was a roller coaster ride; that stomach lurching demo was like something I had never seen, and really, haven’t since.

The process wasn’t perfect; at the juncture between the panels, there was an occasional blurring of the image, but otherwise, dazzling to the eyes and ears accustomed to small black and white TVs.

A few months later, buoyed by a rebounding economy, my father found work in the tool and die trade, and we moved back to the Big City suburbs. I lost track of Petie. Not everyone gets an automatic promotion to Bear; I hope that it was a life-changing development.

The theater went on to screen a small selection of high concept movies, such as How the West was Won, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad World, and others. I only saw one more movie at the Indiana. But it was a good one….

NEXT: 2001: A Space Odyssey

I commented that Frank Edwards might like to hear about this. “I called him,” he said.

Frank Edwards

Before Mulder wanted to believe, before Art Bell tried to convince us to believe, there was Frank Edwards. A journalist of the old school, with a clipped, to the point delivery style, he had been in radio since the 1920s, and a fixture on the WTTV late night news in the late 50s – early 60s. He wasn’t an exciting newscaster, but he had a great baritone voice and often concluded his broadcast with viewer reported sightings of the aforementioned objects, monsters, and fringe-science anomalies.

I used to hurry home for lunch in grade school to catch Edwards’ syndicated radio program, Stranger than Science. Over soup, sandwich and glass of milk, Edwards filled my head with tales of cigar-shaped objects in the sky, strange unknown monsters, and on one terrifying occasion, a guy who spontaneously combusted.

That kind of stuff sticks with you when you’re eight.

But he was known best for his series of books on the strange and uncanny: Stranger than Science, Strangest of All, Strange people. His series of anecdotes about the strange and unusual were short of facts but long on the storytelling. I ate them up like candy.

Edwards later served on the board of NICAP (National Investigation Committee on Aerial Phonomena), founded by UFO investigator Maj. Donald Keyhoe, and became a popular draw on the UFO talk circuit. In 1966 he penned what would be his last book, “Flying Saucers-Serious Business.

This included a tour, and a memorable appearance on the Tonight show. Guest host Steve Lawrence was more interested in talking about science fiction TV shows than the serious business of flying saucers. Still, there he was, bona fide, on national TV.

Even in death, the strange and unusual followed him. He died in the late hours of June 23, 1967, just hours shy of the 20^th anniversary of Kenneth Arnold’s famous 1947 UFO sighting, which he reported as flying “like a saucer if you skip it across the water.”

Which brings us back around to the curiously aligned lights in the sky. Later that night, sure enough, there was Frank Edwards wrapping up the eleven o’clock news with a report of small bright objects in the sky. Not much of a report, really.

But the cumulative effect for me was that later on I spent a lot of time looking up at the sky, and looking down at science fiction novels. My Christmas presents that year included an inexpensive telescope and a paperback guide to the stars. And it was sometime around then that I realized that in the Autumn and Winter sky was a constellation called Orion. Orion, the hunter, wears a belt in the form of an unusually symmetrical alignment of three stars.

Except…and this is where memory is a funny thing. My memory places this sighting in early Autumn, in early evening, and to the Northeast. In these latitudes and at that time of year, Orion appears only very late in the Fall, and more to the East…and they are not vertically aligned; they appear more in a diagonal pattern.

So, was it an amateur’s mistake coupled with faulty memories? Is it wanting to believe that makes it anomalous now? I don’t know….

But you simply could not beat the venue. Built in 1927 with a 3,000 see capacity, the old place was starting to feel the effect of the multiplexes sprouting in the suburbs, and no doubt booked their first-ever rock concert as a survival tactic. I had last been there in 1968, for the premier of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

My friends insisted on early arrival, and we found ourselves, literally at the front of the line, cross-legged before the magisterial stained glass entrance doors. Luckily, it was a pleasant August evening, because we sat there. And sat there. And sat some more. There was a noticeable police presence, and so banned substances remained safely in pockets, which considering what ended up happening, was possibly a mistake. People at least might have been a bit more laid back.

By forty five minutes past concert time, order had broken down. The orderly line became a crowd of impatient adolescents bunched up behind us. One panel of the double door opened , and we were the first to step through. The crowd behind us pressed to get in, and I turned in alarm at a visceral crunch and saw that the crowd’s pressure had crosshatched long cracks through the thick stained glass of the unopened door. We made immediately for the third row, dead center.

The Indiana was one of the few theaters in the country to install Cinerama, a three-screen projection technique that was supposed to revolutionize cinema. The theater had long since “downgraded” to a 75 mm screen, but the vast wall that had housed the three screens remained, cloaked in rich red velvet curtains. Both mezzanine and balcony filled to near capacity.

But the curtains remained closed. We sent Junior, the youngest of our crew of proto-headbangers, for popcorn and four molded plastic, orange-shaped bottles of sugary orange drink. And waited.

And waited more. More orange drink. Sugar buzzes for everyone. Finally the curtains parted to reveal a couple of cheap guitars with amplifiers the size of radios and a drum set. A suited manager said that the band was late, so they’d like to take volunteers from the audience to come up and play the instruments.

Plenty of volunteers, but no one who could really play. Sporadically, someone would toss one of their empty orange drink containers at the stage. Finally, some kid came on who could play a little bass, and that got the crowd going, but failed to stop the orange drink containers.

And then one of the amateur musicians decided to throw one back.

Plastic oranges rained down on the stage in an orange, sticky sheet sending both good and bad musicians diving for cover. When the barrage ceased, the suited manager shooed them off the stage and the curtains closed.

The concession stand either ran out of orange drink or stopped selling it, but it wasn’t long before the Ozman himself, svelte and still unravaged by excess, told us that he was really sorry but they wouldn’t be playing for us because their equipment got shipped to Chicago by mistake.

I ended up getting a refund in the mail five months later and to my recollection never returned to the Indiana. I hear that it is still open and home to less unruly live events by the Indiana Repertory Theater, for which I am very happy. It was a great place to be, even when it was raining orange drink bottles.