Wednesday, March 30, 2016

Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (60)

When I worked during the week at the Council on International Educational Exchange [CIEE] student travel agency in Manhattan in the 1970's, I would sometimes spend a few hours on Saturday or Sunday shooting some basketballs on the basketball court near Jamaica High School, which was located just a few blocks up the hill from the basement apartment in which I lived, in the late Spring and early Summer. And sometimes, I would get involved in a one-on-one pick-up half-court basketball game with one or two of the African-American high school students who might also be shooting basketballs on the same basketball court on weekends. The playground basketball court near Jamaica High School in the 1970's was more like the basketball courts in Riverside Park in Manhattan, in that the pick-up games were sometimes inter-racial--as opposed to the pick-up games in the Queens playground basketball courts in Whitestone, Douglaston, Little Neck, or Glen Oaks which were then only filled with white guys playing basketball.

Yet although I spent some of my weekend Spring and early Summer time when living in the Jamaica basement apartment playing basketball in the playground and, on a few weekends, taking buses that drove their riders from Jamaica to the boardwalks of either Far Rockaway or Long Beach, most of my time at home during the Spring and Summer was spent writing my unpublished 1970s's "Generation In Chains" novelette.