Olywa Days of Change

Progressive Changes at Lincoln Elementary Influenced the Community – By Steven Kant

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In 1984, alternative-thinking parents worked with the school district to create an elementary options program, and in 1995, the program was moved to Lincoln School and renamed Lincoln Options. The alternative programs were expanded in later years to another elementary school and two middle schools. The influence of these programs was also felt in many other schools.

Recollections on the Founding of the Gay Resource Center By Don Orr Martin

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The first phone call I took (that wasn’t a crank call) was from a lesbian in Lacey. It was 1973 and I was the founder and sole staff person answering the phone at the Gay Resource Center, a new student group at Evergreen. She and her partner had both been divorced from men, and between them they had five kids living in a double wide trailer. She wanted to know if I could offer them any help regarding child custody issues.

A Small Town’s Sex-Positive Response to AIDS – By Don Orr Martin

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I worked in public health at the height of the AIDS pandemic. Powerful Republican congressmen and President Reagan’s agency heads put in place serious limits on what federally-funded educational programs could say about safe sex. Federal laws required that all the materials we produced about condom use and HIV testing had to include the message that the only ways to prevent AIDS or other sexually transmitted infections were by: 1) Abstinence; or 2) Fidelity in a heterosexual marriage. These were not messages that resonated with the men in the woods by the railroad tracks.

Cafe Intermezzo – By Carolyn Street LaFond

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I was coasting down the Fourth Avenue bridge in April 1977, having just recovered from a grueling tonsillectomy and on my way to my Special Ed teaching job at John Rogers Elementary. At the bottom of the incline I noticed a woman working on the large show windows of a shop next to another shop front with an identical set of windows indented from the street. The position of the windows and size of the adjoining space cried out to me, “There’s a great place for an espresso bar!”

From Here to El Salvador – By Beth Hartmann

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At home that night, the war was present in my mind and my dreams, the images and stories haunting me. I wasn’t the only one. We were soon meeting and talking about how to organize in support of the poor of El Salvador and confront the policies of our own government that perpetuated rampant abuses. No one envisioned an antiwar movement like we had with the Vietnamese War. This was a tiny country and U.S. involvement was hidden and more subtle than boots on the ground, though there were boots on the ground in some cases.

Karen Silkwood Memorial Choir – By Don Orr Martin

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“Jingle Coins,” “O Con All the Faithful,” “Clanging Bells.” These were the titles of some of the anti-Christmas carols ten or more of us sang in 1977. The venue was a huge new shopping mall that opened that year in Olympia. We drew in holiday shoppers with our familiar harmonies, and ever so slowly they understood these weren’t quite the same Christmas carols they remembered. New lyrics to “Jingle Bells,” “O Come All Ye Faithful,” “Silver Bells,” and several others were borrowed from the Fallen Angel Choir and Family Circus Theatre in Portland with whom several of us were good friends. We also wrote a few new lyrics ourselves.