authors

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!”

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. 

Matrix: the Rise and Fall of Olywa’s Feminist-Lesbian Magazine – By Anna Schlecht

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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. 

Violence and Non-Violence: A Tale of Two Tactics – By Anna Schlecht

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Crabshell Alliance was a VERY different kind of political action group for me. Up until 1975, my political experience had involved bouncing around the antiwar movement in Madison, Wisconsin, most of which was DIY, male-dominated, and raucous. But in Crabshell Alliance, I found myself part of a well-organized effort with clear strategies, effective tactics, and women in leadership. Vastly different.

Joe Tougas and the Great Wave Mural – By Anna Schlecht

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This was not a small project. The wall was over 15 feet tall by 15 feet wide. “I sketched out the image to create an outline,” said Joe, “and then I created a color chart showing where the various blues, grays and whites would go.” This made it easier to paint, and easier to get other folks to help him. “I would recruit passersby to come pick up a brush and help me paint,” said Joe. “The entire mural took about a week and a half to finish.”

LLyn’s Tower: An All-Woman Construction Project – 1979 – By Jean Eberhardt

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LLyn De Danaan, Anna Schlecht and I got together for an interview at LLyn’s house, but it quickly morphed into a boisterous reminiscence of the time that Nozama Construction, the newly minted construction collective, came to build an addition on her house to accommodate her growing family. Forty-five years later, this two-and-a-half-story addition, affectionately referred to as a tower by LLyn, still stands.

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.

Smokin’ on the Dock of the Bay – By Joe Tougas

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That day I was walking through a trashed-out industrial part of the old downtown . . . I saw a rusty fire escape going up the side of one of the rough concrete buildings. I climbed the stairs, noticing how one tread was hanging loose, up to the landing where I could sit and have a look around. I immediately saw that this was a bitchin’ spot. You could see a long way in all directions. Across the street there was a row of sheds or warehouses hanging over the water. Much of the corrugated metal siding had been ripped off, and it was obvious that most of those buildings had not been used in a long time.