Sunday, March 15, 2015

Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (17)

I don't remember much about the Korvette's customers or other Korvette's workers I interacted with during my Christmas Season working at Korvette's. Some of the customers were impatient, but most of the Korvette's customers were pleasant (and were more eagerly into consumerism rather than intellectualism, art, political radicalism or free love, I suspect). And some of the customers who lived in the nearby Beech Hills and Deepdale garden apartment developments looked vaguely familiar to me because I had lived in the Beech Hills garden apartment development myself as a child, for nearly 10 years in the 1950's and early 1960's, and I may have encountered some of them before at one time--although they now looked 10 to 20 years older.

The other Korvette's workers on the store's parking lot-level first floor in which I worked in the 1970's were nearly all white and in their 20's or early 30's and seemed culturally straight and mostly non-college-educated and non-intellectual, but cheerful. None seemed very concerned about things like the war in Indochina or institutional racism in the United States; and few seemed to expect more out of their work lives than being able to get a needed paycheck for buying food, clothes and perhaps raising families if they were married and had kids. The "habo" department's supervisor was a very well-groomed and well-dressed/fashion-conscious, culturally straight white guy in his late 20's or early 30's who didn't appear to have ever attended college; and who seemed to like working for Korvette's in an eager-beaver sort of way.