Fortunately for me, the post-Thanksgiving Christmas shopping season was beginning and department stores in the New York City area were still hiring temporary help for the Christmas season in the days following my winter coat mix-up incident. So I quickly landed a temporary part-time sales clerk/packing job in the haberdashery or "habo" department of the now-defunct Korvette's discount department store in Douglaston, Queens--in the same neighborhood where I had spent most of my childhood growing up in during the 1950's and early 1960's.
In the 1950's and the early 1960's, the area across 61st Avenue and just south of the Beech Hills garden apartment development in which I then lived and west of a then-private golf course--the North Hills Country Club--was called "the pit." And above "the pit," adjacent to the west fence of the private golf course, was the edge of a wide hill that was called "the cliff" by neighvorhood kids.
