This was the mid-1970s. Feminism and a growing number of feminist writers spurred the founding and growth of women-owned and operated presses. These were small businesses started on shoestring budgets by dedicated women willing and eager to get the words of feminist and lesbian philosophers, historians, novelists, poets, and artists into the public sphere. As a bookseller, I wanted to get their books to readers.
My tribute here, however, is not to the church itself but to the several women whom I might never have had the opportunity to meet if not for the church. Carol Fuller, the first woman superior court judge in Thurston County, Jocelyn Dohm, founder of Sherwood Press, and Meta Heller, a former D.C. lobbyist, tax reform and antinuclear activist . . . were among those whom I admired. They were outspoken, farsighted, community-minded, and determined to work for justice. Two I want to especially remember are Gladys Burns and Kay Engel.
One of the interesting practices that was characteristic of the Olywa local culture in the 1970s was the naming of the various houses and households . . . The number of houses with names ballooned over time. Recently, when a request went out for people’s memories of those named households, the response was huge. Here is a list of over a hundred names dredged up from peoples’ memories and documents.
During the contra war—a right-wing terror campaign waged by ex-national guard mercenaries of Nicaragua’s ousted dictator and funded by the U.S.—over a hundred thousand people from the U.S. visited Nicaragua. Many of us traveled and volunteered with purpose. For example, delegations of elected officials mobilized by progressive organizations, ecumenical study tour groups, long-term volunteers with Witness for Peace, caravans carrying material aid with Pastors for Peace, medical teams, coffee and cotton harvest brigades, and journalists.
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!”
The first day I volunteered at the Co-op was the day we laid the linoleum at the downtown store. There were several people there, and it was hard to know where expertise was coming from, if there was any. I did my part, carefully placing tiles where the glue had been spread.
I played violin from fourth grade on. I played briefly with the chamber orchestra at The Evergreen State College when I was a student there. I had a lot of friends in the early ’70s who were in the Evergreen academic program called American Music. Tom Foote was one of the profs. My friend Karen England was taking fiddle lessons from an old-time fiddler in Tenino and she practiced so diligently, more than I ever had. I’d never played anything by ear before but I tried a tune and just wow! It surprised me that it went well.
Andrew and I lived in Hurley, Wisconsin in the deep, dark of the coldest winter—it was like the Arctic Circle. I was from San Diego, the land of barren hills and brown grass. Hurley was a radical shock for me, culturally and geographically. But we saw on CBS First Tuesday about Evergreen. On national television, we saw people having seminars in the woods. We said, “Wow! Olympia must be a neat place—let’s go there.” That’s why we moved here. We knew not a soul, but the feeling that was implied in the network TV show was that kind of “at The Evergreen State College, the president and the janitor danced together.”
We had searched diligently for a place to go. Next we moved to the corner of Fifth Avenue and Jefferson downtown. There’s an empty lot at that corner now [in 1988]. There was a funky, old, two story dilapidated green apartment building on the corner and a woman real estate agent . . . showed us this apartment building. We asked if we could put a store there. She said, “You could do anything here. You could sell babies out the back door.” I never forgot that.
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.