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Fleeing Minnesota and Coming to Olympia- By Pat Holm

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I don’t believe we thought we were being radical by starting a coffeehouse. What was radical was our politics and being hippies from Seattle. We had all lived at and attended the University of Washington . . . and coffeehouses were a big thing in the U District among students and faculty. Olympia was a small conservative town in 1964. Family life dominated. Churches were the main place people had for gathering. Saint Martin’s College was here but it had nothing like a coffeehouse. The four of us created the Null Set coffeehouse, but we couldn’t have done it without the support and backing of the Unitarian Fellowship.

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.

Women in the Trades: A Multi-Generational Tale – By Jean Eberhardt

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Women were recruited via persuasive media campaigns to join the war effort as “Rosie the Riveters” to work in the factories that were emptied by the men who were drafted to fight overseas. My grandmother became a machinist in her late 30s and developed a steady hand for guiding hair-thin bits chucked into the drill press through metals. She fabricated specialized tiny parts for war planes and then later for commercial jets.

Media Monitoring at KAOS – By Susan Davenport

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I was a programmer on KAOS FM, the campus radio station, for most of my undergraduate years at Evergreen 1974 – 1980. I read news stories as the news director, and did public affairs spots . . . On one show I read a brief story about a WPPSS (Whoops!) nuclear power plant being decommissioned, due in part from finding a fault line under the construction site. A week or so later I was called to the office of the college president.