Cosmetics Plus Forever
Introduction
I worked for Cosmetics Plus from June 3, 1974 until I was fired in May 1978
I worked as a truck driver, warehouse man and for a brief time, assistant warehouse manager under a man named Stanley Kalafut, whose passing away in 2010 inspired me to put together the variety of essays I wrote about my time working there.
The bulk of the original collection comes from a 1998 journal recalling those events with several earlier journal entries I wrote starting just after I started college in 1979, and a series of journals I wrote after meeting up with a fellow worker, John Telson, in early 2002.
I have left the inconsistencies alone, although I tend to trust the earlier dated material such as those written in 1981 or 82 to the later material.
In going through old journals, I have discovered other writings that I did in this regard, other versions of the original, and some other aspects of the day to day life – and biographies of the main players I am adding to this site, including contemporary journal entries.
This is not a happy story. I do not come across as a good guy in it, but it is a story of people whose lives came together at a particular time and place, and
How this changed me and them forever.
Some of us went on to live totally different lives than we expected, others remained prisoners of that time, locked into habits we could not escape, and in the end, found that our life is story was written in those years in the dust of Cosmetics Plus, a testimony to hopes and dreams that never materialized.
3 - The job I
almost never had
4 - Donald Gottheimer: the self-made man
The importance
of being Irving
9a -- A Broader
vision of Stan