Besides usually spending most of my lunch hour during th workweek browsing in or taking out books from the New York Public Library's Donnell Library branch on West 53rd Street, across from the Museum of Modern Art, when I was working as a New American Library [NAL] publicity clerk in the 1970s, I also often spent time in the evening during the workweek, after work, taking the IRT Flatbush subway line from work, out to the last stop on that subway line, near Brooklyn College.
And I would then walk onto the Brooklyn College campus and into the Brooklyn College library. Despite being a non-student, during the 1970s, Brooklyn College, at least, did not--unlike some other U.S. colleges or universities today--instruct any campus security guards to block non-students and "non-affiliates", like I was in the 1970s, from entering buildings like the Brooklyn College library, unless they were profiled in an objectively racist way by the (often even Black) campus security guards as being "suspicious Black males."
Once inside the Brooklyn College library, I would then spend a few hours reading the various Old Left periodicals from the 1950s that were still on the open shelves; before then heading back to my cheap slum partment by the Brooklyn waterfront, near the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel entrance in Red Hook, to eat some food, play a little guitar and sleep.
And often on weekends around this same time, I would spend portions of my Saturday or Sunday afternoons either walking up the hill towards the Brooklyn Public Library's Grand Army Plaza central library building ot taking a subway into Manhattan to the New York Public Library's Lincoln Center library branch, to find some guitar music songbooks that I could borrow and bring home for free.
When you're over 50 years-of-age, historical and political events that happened two decades ago don't feel to you like they happened that long ago; and, to you, such events seemed to have happened in recent years. But when you're only in your 20's in chronological years--like I was during the 1970s--what had happened two decades before then felt to me like it had happened very long ago and was almost like ancient political history.
So on the evenings after work during the 1970s, when I spent some time sitting in the Brooklyn College library reading issues of various Old Left journals like Masses and Mainstream, that had been published during the 1950s McCarthy era, I felt that the 1950s historical situation which the various Old Left writers were analyzing or commenting upon was a historical situation of long ago; and had happened long before the historical situation that the 1960s New Left Movement and Columbia SDS chapter organizers had responded to in the late 1960s or the 1970s historical situation I then found myself trapped in at the time.
And so despite finding it interesting to read what 1950s Old Leftists wrote about and thought about during the then-long ago-seeming decade when I was growing up in Queens, reading the Old Left group journals and magazines from the 1950s did not seem to me to then provide much relevant ideas on what collectively could be done effectively by counter-cultural, bohemian or hippie New Left antiwar revolutionaries from the 1960s, in order to bring about a political and economic Revolution in the USA by the 1980s.
