Our action at Yard Bird’s was inspired by a project of the American Friends Service Committee. The aim was to educate people about the nature of the Vietnam War. We publicly solicited donations to help rebuild a sweater factory destroyed by US bombings in northern Vietnam (Democratic Republic of Vietnam).
I was traveling with a delegation of U.S. teachers and union activists. The trip included people from Seattle, Los Angeles, and other U.S. cities. Beth Harris of Olympia was one of the organizers. We were responding to a request from ANDES, the Salvadoran teachers union, to attend their union convention. ANDES had not been able to hold a convention for years because of the violent repression, so they invited teachers and activists from all over the world to attend as witnesses and participants.
We are all longtime Olympia folks and three of many who learned and organized at the Labor Center with Dan Leahy. We did not differentiate between our work at The Evergreen State College Labor Education Center and our working-class roots. We each tell about our involvement with the Labor Center and how it affected our lives. Dan Leahy passed away in 2022.
Using a PA system, we announced that we would be showing a slideshow to reveal the actual military purpose of the air force in Southeast Asia, noting that we were not attacking the individual band members, but rather bringing attention to bear on the actual role of the air force itself, especially in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
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.
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.
At home that night, the war was present in my mind and my dreams, the images and stories haunting me. I wasn’t the only one. We were soon meeting and talking about how to organize in support of the poor of El Salvador and confront the policies of our own government that perpetuated rampant abuses. No one envisioned an antiwar movement like we had with the Vietnamese War. This was a tiny country and U.S. involvement was hidden and more subtle than boots on the ground, though there were boots on the ground in some cases.
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.
In 1975, one of the social spots for young adults and students was, oddly, the local Crisis Clinic. Many Evergreen and Saint Martin’s students who were looking for ways to connect in the Olympia community volunteered there. Word of mouth got around that they offered exceptional training in communication skills, crisis intervention, suicide prevention, and de-escalation of acute mental health episodes, along with expansive knowledge about local agencies, resources, contact numbers, and their eligibility criteria. This was a treasure trove for students in sociology and psychology studies and those interested in internships or social-issue policy work.
Glen Anderson was a lifelong activist, never wavering in his dedication to promoting peace on all fronts. He remained a steady proponent of nonviolence in local activism. We are fortunate to have called him our friend and fellow activist. May his memory be an inspiration to continue to stand up for social justice.