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.
- GREENER! – By Anna SchlechtVIGNETTES – 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 SchlechtVIGNETTES – 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.
- Life on a Hippie Farm By Anna SchlechtIn 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 SchlechtFOOD – I had moved out West to find my people—the hippies. And I figured the best places to look were at the co-ops and collective restaurants that sprouted up wherever hippies had settled.
- Going to the Left Coast by Anna SchlechtWithout 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.