Ela Alvy House – By Daniel Farber

Over the subsequent year our connections flowed and ebbed. Living down the hall for a quarter or two, meals and conversations that went into the night were random and delightful. We stayed in touch with some folks more than others, but a year later when some of us decided to leave the dorms, five agreed to rent a house on Sherman Street, in Olympia’s Westside.

Car-Nation – By Pat Holm

I was a puppeteer for many years, an art form I used in teaching to engage, entertain, and educate. In the late 1980s I worked at the Department of Ecology as a transportation coordinator to get people to drive less, take the bus more, walk more, and bike more to work. With this in mind I came up with the idea to do a giant puppet show

How a Data Report on Racial Bias in Corrections Affected My Career – By Pat Holm

I am proud of that work. It took discipline to stay with it and finish the paper. This paper and the story in the Seattle Sun pretty much destroyed my ability to ever get another job in the DOC research shop, however. I had tried getting the attention of my supervisor and the bosses above him about what I had discovered. But unequal treatment of minorities was not anything they were interested in, that is until I went public. So, in many ways I do not regret that I did what I did.

The Communist Party in 1970s Olympia – Ann Vandeman – By Bethany Weidner

“The Party people were the only ones who consistently linked race and class and I was attracted to that. Those people and their ideas helped me answer big questions I had at that age: why aren’t people nicer and what about fairness? I found them sympathetic because their values were consistent with the ones I had come to.”

Moldy Mansion: Tales of Dumpstering and Billboarding – By Regon Unsoeld

There were in fact two such households. The first, appropriately called the Moldy Mansion, was located on the water side of West Bay Drive within a few hundred feet of Harrison Avenue. It was a two-story structure with a beautiful view of Mount Tahoma (Rainier) at Steh-Chass (Budd Inlet) near the southernmost point of the Salish Sea. A jungle of dense blackberry vines wove around the house and all the way down to the water.