Stephen Charak : Laura May described how she and her husband discovered the Olympia area from her home in Wisconsin.
Laura May Booker : Andrew [Andrew Abraham 1942 – 2020] and I lived in Hurley, in the deep, dark of the coldest winter—it was like the Arctic Circle. I was from San Diego, the land of barren hills and brown grass. Hurley was a radical shock for me, culturally and geographically. But we saw on CBS First Tuesday about Evergreen. On national television, we saw people having seminars in the woods. We said, “Wow! Olympia must be a neat place—let’s go there.”  That’s why we moved here. We knew not a soul, but the feeling that was implied in the network TV show was that kind of “at The Evergreen State College, the president and the janitor danced together.” It had that kind of camaraderie, going beyond what any traditional boundaries of formal education had been.

Stephen: Laura May and Andrew Abraham came to Olympia in December of 1971.
Laura May: We chose to travel in the hard part of the year, but we made it. We stayed at a motel the first night. The next day we went out to Evergreen and there was a gentleman who let us go through their housing files. [We] located a place to live with a woman who had a nine-year-old daughter and a rabbit farm on Oyster Bay Road, about ten miles northwest of Olympia. She wanted to drive a cab in Seattle, she wanted someone to live there and breed rabbits and send her daughter to school and feed her. That’s where Andrew and I wound up.

Stephen: They found a place to live, but they didn’t find what they expected.
Laura May: In the streets of Olympia, we found a very square, ultra-conservative town. There was a lot of long hair in the late sixties and early seventies, right? There was no long hair to be seen in Olympia. That’s an abstracted way of making a judgment about the consciousness of a town, but I really think that Evergreen was the advent of culture in Olympia. [Laura May lowered her voice here] I might get shot for saying so, but it was a conservative government town. I would never have stayed here if it wasn’t for Evergreen. It really is a very beautiful town, I love its proximity to the water and mountains . . .

I would have never made it without what the school has brought to the area. The new people who moved here from all over the country really affected every part of the staid Olympia framework. That change did not come about easily, however. There was a lot of prejudice. A whole lot of prejudice. People were very protective of their old town ways. They resented New Yorkers, and there were a lot of New Yorkers at Evergreen in those days. 

Read the full transcript: Laura May Abraham—Section from Olympia: Voices © 1988 S. Charak