Olywa Days of Change 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.
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.
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.
They left me alone with the bagel machine. They neglected to explain how to control the speed or shut it down. For a while I had no trouble keeping up, but soon I was like Lucy in the chocolate factory.
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.
“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.
VIGNETTES – I was right downtown on the busiest street, and this logger dude was walking toward me on the sidewalk. I knew he was a logger dude by the length of his Carhartt work pants . . .
Anita Bryant was an also-ran Miss America contestant in 1959 (Miss Oklahoma) and a christian pop singer who became a spokesperson for the lucrative Florida citrus industry. She popularized their slogans. “A day without orange juice is like a day without sunshine.”
Anita was also a rabid homophobe and a lightning rod in the thunderhead of anti-LGBT politics of the late 1970s. Anita Bryant was a piece of work.
In 1975, one of the social spots for young adults and students was, oddly, the local Crisis Clinic. Many Evergreen and Saint Martin’s students who were looking for ways to connect in the Olympia community volunteered there. Word of mouth got around that they offered exceptional training in communication skills, crisis intervention, suicide prevention, and de-escalation of acute mental health episodes, along with expansive knowledge about local agencies, resources, contact numbers, and their eligibility criteria. This was a treasure trove for students in sociology and psychology studies and those interested in internships or social-issue policy work.
Representatives from each household would meet weekly at a member’s house. We had product lists from the wholesale suppliers with whom we had previous ties and we would order items in bulk, purchasing only an amount we could completely divide up, keeping no inventory. We would bid on portions of wheels of cheese from Peterson’s in Seattle, crates of milk from Flett Dairy, sacks of oats and rice from Cooperating Community Grains, boxes of fruits and vegetables from Nisqually Valley Produce. These meetings were a little like the New York Stock Exchange: initial orders were compiled, then bids were taken to increase or decrease a family’s order until we reached a case lot.