It was while working at Bulova in Woodside that I began living in a basement apartment in a house near one of the IND subway stops on Hillside Avenue in Jamaica, Queens.
On one of the hallway bulletin boards in the Queens College building where the college's academic library was located, an index card had been posted by the tenant of this basement apartment, who was a white guy in his 20's named Barry, indicating that he was looking for a roommate with whom to share the rent and living space of the Jamaica apartment.
After noticing the index card, which also indicated how relatively low was the monthly rent required to share the apartment would be, I telephoned the phone number on the index card and arranged to meet Barry in his basement apartment after work on the following evening. And the following evening, after seeing that I was also a white guy in his 20's like him, was employed, could immediately pay in cash both a month's security deposit of my half of the rent and half of the current month's overdue rent, and didn't seem to be a gay man (during a 1970's decade when homophobia was much more widespread that it would later be by the second decade of the 21st-century), Barry decided that I would be an appropriate roommate for him. Especially since the index card he had posted in the hallway bulletin board at Queens College had not produced any other callers about the apartment; and he did not want to have to spend any of his money purchasing some kind of newspaper ad in the classified want ad section of the Village Voice, in order to find a new roommate.
It wasn't until the 1990's--when internet sites like Craig's List started providing a cheaper way for people in their 20's who needed a roommate to find prospective roommates in their 20's--that there developed a simpler and cheaper of finding a roommate in his or her 20's than by just posting an index card on some local campus bulletin board for free.
