Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (20)

The only person I can recall ever speaking to me in the Queensborough Community College library during the 1970's was a white woman wearing blue jeans in her late teens or early 20's, who looked kind of hip and and seemed physically attractive. She approached me in the library as I was sitting behind a library desk while reading, and she said: "Excuse me. Would you like to go out with me now and have a cup of coffee together?

"Sure," I quickly replied. Then I closed my book and started to stand up.

By the 1970's, I had outgrown the notion, which I had been brought up on, that only the man should be the one to ask a woman for a date or initiate a relationship with a woman; and that a woman who asked a man for a date or attempted to be the one initiating the relationship should automatically be rejected by a man. So, by the 1970's, women around my age who were non-traditional and liberated enough to ask a man for a date tended to be the kind of women I found more interesting to get to know better.

But by the time I finished standing up, the Queensborough Community College woman student had pulled a clipboard and pen out of her pocketbook and was making a check on the paper which was attached to the clipboard, as she said: "Actually, I'm really just doing a survey for my sociology class to find out how most men respond when a woman approaches them and asks them for a date. And you're the first man who didn't seem to mind being approached and asked out by a strange woman."

"Oh," I said, feeling slightly disappointed that she was only playacting, in order to gather data for her survey. "Most of the other men you asked probably don't support women's liberation as much as I do, I imagine. But if you want, I'd still like to go out and have a cup of coffee with you." 

"Thanks for asking. But I already have a boyfriend. And thanks for helping me do the survey," she replied, as she put her clipboard and pen back into her pocketbook and began to look around the library to see if any other men to approach were sitting alone at some other library table.

Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (19)

While working at Korvette's department store temporarily during the Christmas season, I would sometimes stop off at the Queensborough Community College library after my shift ended in the early afternoon; and spend a few hours there browsing or reading there some of the college library books that I was not able to take out of the library, since I wasn't a college student anymore, before heading back home. It was there that I read an autobiography by a New York City African-American activist whose original name was Sonny Carson, for example.

Because Queensborough Community College had been a two-year commuter school for the generally less intellectual working-class and middle-class college students whose high school grades average were too low to gain admittance to the CUNY commuter 4-year colleges like Queens College, Brooklyn College, CCNY, Lehman College and Hunter College (that had been more selective in the pre-open admissions era of the 1960's), few Queensborough Community College students appeared to ever spend anytime in the school's library during late November and December. 

Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (18)

There was one woman co-worker in her 20's who worked in a different department, whom I noticed in the backroom where all the Korvette's department store workers punched their cards in the time clock, whose physical beauty attracted me. But despite expressing my romantic desire to get to know her by writing a folk song with poetic lyrics that reflected my sexual longing for her in the middle of another Christmas season, an opportunity to get to know her or speak with her within the Korvette's store never developed, since the store department in which she worked was on the other side of the store.

It was also around this time that I wrote the melody and original lyrics to the "Perhaps" folk love song, whose lyrics I later rewrote in the early 1990's, including the following lyrics:

"Perhaps it's your spirit
Perhaps it's your eyes
Perhaps it's your passion
But I'm in love with you.

"Perhaps it's your beauty
Perhaps it's your hair
Perhaps it's your strength
But I'm in love with you.

"Like the sun that's shining
Like a light that does glow
Like the people revolting
Like a flower that blooms.

"Perhaps it's your smile
Perhaps it's your wit
Perhaps it's your wisdom
But I'm in love with you.

"Perhaps it's your daring
Perhaps it's your cause
Perhaps it's your toughness
But I'm in love with you.

"Like a slave escaping
Like a released prisoner
Like a youthful dreamer
Like a twinkling star.

"Perhaps when you're lonely
You'll come visit me
Perhaps I am weary
But I'm in love with you.

"Perhaps you'll remember
The years long ago
Perhaps you'll discover
That I'm in love with you.

Like a joyful vision
Like a rainbow across the sky
Like two children playing
Like a pleasure that never dies."

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.

Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (16)

During the workday at Korvette's department store most of my time was spent either bringing stuff that the" habo" department sold from the room in the back to the shelves in the store which the Korvette customers thumbed through and messed up, straightening up the shelves with the goods that the Korvette customers had messed up, answering the inquiries of customers who came to the Korvette's "habo" department and putting all the "habo" goods they had purchased into paper bags--after the customers gave their money, charge account cards or credit cards to the department's cashier.

Because I had never been into clothes and knew nothing about haberdashery fashion, I wasn't much help to the customers who asked for my advice about what goods might be fashionable to buy at Korvette's. It probably would have made more sense for the Korvette's personnel department to assign me to work in the Korvette's vinyl records or book department in the 1970's, since I knew much more about those goods in the 1970's than I would ever know about clothing or "habo" goods. But I guess by the time I was hired for the Christmas season, the Christmas season temp job slots in Korvette's vinyl records or book departments had already been filled.

Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (15)

Working in the Korvette's department store was different than working in a skyscraper office and sitting behind a desk, shuffling papers, answering telephones, typing meaningless business correspondence or adding up meaningless numbers for seven hours a day--although not that much more interesting.

Working at Korvette's in the "habo" department meant you had to stay more dressed-up each day after the first week of work than you did when you did clerical-typist work in a skyscraper office; and that--unlike in a skyscraper office--you had to punch your time card into a time clock when you arrived at work, went to lunch and left work each day.

Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (14)

Between 1960 and 1962, when I was active in my local Boy Scout troop, I used to hike through "the pit" from time to time with other members of my Boy Scout patrol, on the way to hiking on the various nature trails in Alley Pond Park, whose forests were only a few miles away from the Beech Hills garden apartment development in which I then lived.

But between 1962 and the early 1970s, some real estate developers had apparently purchased all the land in "the pit" in order to replace the nature scenery and wildlife there with a development of plastic-looking private homes, a big parking lot and construction there of a the big Korvette's discount department store in which I was now working at during the Christmas shopping season. So by the 1970s, few people in Queens seemed to remember that "the pit" had ever been there in the 1950's and early 1960's.