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Finding the Beach House Where I Still Live After 55 Years – By Pat Holm

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A couple more roofs appeared to the left of these two cabins. I found out later that these four cabins were all built at the same time, about 1929, by a group of four family friends in Centralia. The designs were all very similar. Apparently many men were out of work back then, so the cost of building was very cheap. Inside all of the houses was the same wainscoting wood on the walls. The outsides were all cedar planking. The families came to stay in these cabins in the summer. Recently, a Mr. Noreen had purchased two of them and was renting one out.

Ela Alvy House – By Daniel Farber

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Over the subsequent year our connections flowed and ebbed. Living down the hall for a quarter or two, meals and conversations that went into the night were random and delightful. We stayed in touch with some folks more than others, but a year later when some of us decided to leave the dorms, five agreed to rent a house on Sherman Street, in Olympia’s Westside.

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.

Don’t Cry for Me Miami – 1978 – By Don Orr Martin

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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.