Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (30)

The neighborhood streets in Woodside around the Bulova building at 61st Street in Queens were also much more deserted on weekdays in the 1970's than were the neighborhood streets around the skyscrapers and offices in Midtown Manhattan. Plus the local library was either closed on too many of my lunch hours or too distant from the Bulova building for me to walk to and from during my lunch hour. And I can't recall either reading books in the local neighborhood library or taking out books from the local neighborhood library very much during my lunch hours at Bulova.

So walking each weekday around the Woodside neighborhood near the Bulova building in the 1970's during my lunch hour seemed like much more of a drag than was walking around Midtown Manhattan during my lunch hours in the 1970's. And it wasn't until the 1980's that I finally realized that--instead of either browsing in a local neighborhood library during my lunch hours, or walking around streets or into nearby neighborhood parks, or sitting on a bench in nice weather reading a book, after finishing my bag lunch or purchasing a hot dog or falafel from a street vendor--a possible alternative way I could spend each lunch hour was to write a 1960's memoir or articles for underground or alternative newspapers.

So when the assistant office manager, who was in her late 50's, reprimanded me one day for mailing out some form that I apparently had mistakenly assumed should be mailed out by, in an irritating way, saying "Never assume anything!"--and when the number of more complex jeweler replacement parts and repair order forms that could not be fulfilled easily started to pile up on my desk downstairs (after the white-haired culturally straight executive in his 60's, who seemed to be just warming a seat for a few more years until he would be able to retire, kept dumping all of this more complex work into my mailbox without being willing to explain, or able to explain coherently, how the complex requests should be answered)-- I decided to leave Bulova.