Not sure how to start this but I guess I just will start with the twins. Kirk Russell was living in New York City when his twin brother Tom was located in Washington state. Early in the 1970s Tom went back to New York to pick up Kirk. He told Kirk to pack his stuff and come with him, which he did.
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.”
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.
Here’s what my life was like in the late 1960s while a student: Trips to the Pacific Ocean, driftwood, logging trucks, colorful flower-bedecked hitchhikers on freeway turn offs (on their way to San Francisco), light shows and strobes at Eagle’s Auditorium in Seattle, The Whole Earth Catalog, Helix (a brilliant “underground” newspaper), marching against the Vietnam War on the freeway and through downtown, buildings blowing up on campus, rallies at the federal courthouse, Radical Women meetings, Claire Fraser holding forth. I had the time of my life.
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.
I had never seen such a beautiful place as the western side of the Cascades. I drove to Olympia, little and peaceful. I found Marilyn living in a small old house with a big chicken coop. I slept in the chicken coop which was also Marilyn’s studio. Now the spot has a Big Lots store on it. The land where the mall is now, across West 9th Street, was acres of Scotch broom.
I arrived to teach at Evergreen in 1973. The spirit at the college then was exhilarating, full of hope and enthusiasm. I was to be part of creating a new way to teach and learn. Testing and grades and categories for study would not guide planning and curriculum. Instead, interdisciplinary studies would focus on themes agreed upon by faculty teams. My work as a drawing teacher was no longer isolated in an art room somewhere but now an integral part of the study of literature and music, science and psychology.
Without consciously knowing it, I had moved two thousand miles away from my family to come out—it was other gay people I was looking for. Once I admitted that to myself, it seemed like Olympia was crawling with lesbians. In my daily flight path of looking for work and trying to meet people, I often circled by Laura’s store downtown, the Rainbow Grocery. I have no idea how she identified, but her store sure seemed to draw a lot of lesbians. They all seemed so much older and wiser, as everyone older than nineteen seems to an eighteen-year-old.