Wednesday, June 24, 2015

Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (25)

Although Bulova operated some kind of jewelry or watch repair-related vocational school for disabled military veterans either within the same Bulova building in which I worked or in an attached building, I can't recall ever bumping into any of the disabled military veteran-students. The white, uniformed security guard in the Bulova building lobby was friendly and appeared to be in his 50's or early 60's. He apparently was hired to both greet Bulova employees and visitors each day and to make sure that Bulova workers didn't leave the building with any stolen Bulova clocks or watches each evening.

Working downstairs in the basement stockroom where Walter spent his whole day was,more interesting for me than was the time spent working in the office upstairs, not surprisingly, because Walter seemed more hip politically, culturally and intellectually to what was going on in the world than did the white office workers around me in the office upstairs.

At first, Walter was careful about indicating how politically radical and intellectually hip he was, since he assumed that I lacked anti-racist consciousness, just like all the other white workers at Bulova that he had personally encountered at his work workplace lacked anti-racist consciousness. But once Walter realized that I hated Nixon as much as he did and I was as familiar with 1960's Civil Rights Movement history and African-American history as he was, Walter felt it was cool to to make his afternoon at work in the Bulova basement more interesting and pass by more rapidly by conversing with me in an honest way.