Anna Schlecht

Anna Schlecht showed up in Olympia with a backpack & a guitar back in 1976. With hair big enough to see from outer space, Schlecht came to the Left Coast in search of hippie radicals who were still dedicated to building community on foundations of social justice. Once in Olympia, Schlecht realized that she was really looking for the LGBTQ community. While she didn’t come for college, she did go to Evergreen a few times and collected a couple of degrees. Later on, she worked in local government, doing affordable housing & homeless services for 40 years. Schlecht was involved in the early days of the Columbia Street Food Co-op; founded Matrix, a feminist lesbian magazine; and generally raised hell on numerous political fronts. Nearly 50 years later, Schlecht still lives in Olywa and raises the kind of hell that’s easier on the knees and back. 

• Joe Tougas and the Great Wave Mural – By Anna Schlecht
  This was not a small project. The wall was over 15 feet tall by 15 feet wide. “I sketched out the image to create an outline,” said Joe, “and then I created a color chart showing where the various blues, grays and whites would go.” This made it easier to paint, and easier to get other folks to help him. “I would recruit passersby to come pick up a brush and help me paint,” said Joe. “The entire mural took about a week and a half to finish.”
• Matrix: the Rise and Fall of Olywa’s Feminist-Lesbian Magazine – By Anna Schlecht
  Everything about Matrix started small. We were a grassroots, community-based magazine, written by a handful of local women-identified people and published in a small community printshop with a circulation of less than two hundred. But we quickly realized that we were part of something much larger, and that our work to create and publish it each month followed a powerful tradition of lesbian activism via the printed word. 
• Violence and Non-Violence; A Tale of Two Tactics – By Anna Schlecht
  Crabshell Alliance was a VERY different kind of political action group for me. Up until 1975, my political experience had involved bouncing around the antiwar movement in Madison, Wisconsin, most of which was DIY, male-dominated, and raucous. But in Crabshell Alliance, I found myself part of a well-organized effort with clear strategies, effective tactics, and women in leadership. Vastly different.
• The First Lesbian Community Meetings – By Anna Schlecht
  We stood there befuddled on Columbia Street until other women began to arrive for the meeting. Many had come pumped up to argue about who should be invited, but once they heard what had happened, most of the divisions fell away. Suddenly, everyone there had the shared experience of being discriminated against as queers, whether they publicly identified that way or not. Nearly 50 women found themselves standing sullenly on the dark street with nowhere to go.
• GREENER! – By Anna Schlecht
  VIGNETTES – After a night of drinking with friends at the Rainbow, we all piled outside to catch a little night air. Standing around at the corner, we laughed at everything we said, whether it was funny or not.
• Of Eco-Terrorists and Homos–Biography of a Photo – By Anna Schlecht
  VIGNETTES – Few pictures captured the rift between local conservatives and the hippie invasion attracted by Evergreen more than a photo taken by Felicity Scott Hutsell in 1987.
• Glen Anderson Tribute – By Anna Schlecht
  Glen Anderson was a lifelong activist, never wavering in his dedication to promoting peace on all fronts. He remained a steady proponent of nonviolence in local activism. We are fortunate to have called him our friend and fellow activist. May his memory be an inspiration to continue to stand up for social justice.
• Life on a Hippie Farm By Anna Schlecht
  In the early days of Evergreen there was little housing on campus and not much rental housing available in town. Apparently, many of the first students lived in tents and lean-tos in the woods surrounding campus. When I first came to Olympia in the mid-1970s, I was enchanted by those stories and decided that was the life for me. Somehow I heard about IOCWAT Farm (In Our Community We Are Together), most likely one of the other residents rolled through my check-out line at the downtown food co-op and told me there was an opening. Or perhaps I found a flier about the farm with a tear-off number to call. However it was that I found the farm, moving to this rural commune began my chapter of living off grid.
• The Launch of the Columbia Street Food Co-op By Anna Schlecht
  Since this was the first year of operation, there wasn’t much history to go on. Process was something we made up as we went. No bosses and lots of opinions. As part of our emergent way of doing business, the early hiring decisions were done by a vote, and anyone interested in Co-op business could just show up at the meeting to vote. The night I was hired there were only two of us who wanted to become the second staffer.
• Gay Nights at the Conestoga! – By Anna Schlecht and Alexis Jetter
  After a few minutes, though, the tone changed, and the music stopped. The owner, who was at the club that night, cut us off from the bar and ordered us to leave, telling us that we’d be arrested if we returned. We were shocked—as were several people at the bar, who looked at us with a mixture of curiosity and discomfort. We refused to budge from the dance floor and demanded an explanation. The owner said he had the right to refuse service to anyone he pleased. “If you let certain types or elements, take over a place,” he later told the Daily Olympian, “you’re going to be hurting.”
• Going to the Left Coast – By Anna Schlecht
  Without consciously knowing it, I had moved two thousand miles away from my family to come out—it was other gay people I was looking for. Once I admitted that to myself, it seemed like Olympia was crawling with lesbians. In my daily flight path of looking for work and trying to meet people, I often circled by Laura’s store downtown, the Rainbow Grocery. I have no idea how she identified, but her store sure seemed to draw a lot of lesbians. They all seemed so much older and wiser, as everyone older than nineteen seems to an eighteen-year-old.