Laura May Booker

Laura May Abraham [Booker] Comes to Olympia – By Stephen Charak

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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.”

Laura May Abraham [Booker] and Food Co-ops – By Stephen Charak

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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. 

Laura May Abraham [Booker] and the Rainbow Grocery/Restaurant – By Stephen Charak

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They said, “Hey Laura May, there’s a grocery store for sale across the street.” I said, “What do I want a grocery store for?” Still, [I] went to look at the store. We looked in the windows, and boy was it a dive. It was a cigarette and beer stop. The drunks would stumble between Ben Moore’s and the Angelus Hotel. But still, it was a functional grocery store. Andrew had the background of being raised in [the grocery] business. His mother had a place in Hurley, Wisconsin, close to the shore of Lake Superior since 1940. And I had the experience of being the manager of a Food Co-op. So this vacant grocery store presented a great opportunity . . . I thought this was a really privileged position to be in, maintaining this old corner grocery store in the heart of town.