Our dear friend and colleague on this project Pat Holm passed away unexpectedly in June 2024. She was 86. A celebration of Pat’s life is being planned for the spring of 2025.
I came to Olympia from Centralia in 1963 because my husband got a job here. I grew up in Minneapolis, attended the University of Minnesota, but got pregnant in my Sophomore year and ran away to Seattle with the father. Later I finished my BA at the University of Washington and took a teaching job in Centralia for a year. I had started my schooling with a major in theatre and continued that love throughout my life. Since the Vietnam War, I have been active in many protest movements against war and trying to save the climate. Over the years I pursued my passion for boats, bicycles, puppet theater, and composting toilets. In 1963 I founded and ran a coffee house called the Null Set, which offered music and a gathering place for people outside the mainstream. I worked to help found the Evergreen Labor Center while getting my Masters in Public Administration. I was writing my autobiography when I came across this group doing a group memoir of Olympia between the years of 1960s and the 1980s.
- Blossom Patches – By Pat HolmAround 1970, Steve Wilcox and a group of friends decided to lobby for the legalization of marijuana. We formed an organization called BLOSSOM: Basic Liberation Of Smokers and Sympathizers Of Marijuana. I was the sympathizer since I didn’t smoke pot and nobody was doing edibles yet, except for the occasional fibrous brownies. We wrote up a list of ideas, goals, and tasks, and we assessed what each of us could contribute to the effort.
- Fleeing Minnesota and Coming to Olympia- By Pat HolmI 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 HolmA 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.
- How a Data Report on Racial Bias in Corrections Affected My Career – By Pat HolmI am proud of that work. It took discipline to stay with it and finish the paper. This paper and the story in the Seattle Sun pretty much destroyed my ability to ever get another job in the DOC research shop, however. I had tried getting the attention of my supervisor and the bosses above him about what I had discovered. But unequal treatment of minorities was not anything they were interested in, that is until I went public. So, in many ways I do not regret that I did what I did.
- Car-Nation – By Pat HolmI was a puppeteer for many years, an art form I used in teaching to engage, entertain, and educate. In the late 1980s I worked at the Department of Ecology as a transportation coordinator to get people to drive less, take the bus more, walk more, and bike more to work. With this in mind I came up with the idea to do a giant puppet show
- Wild Days of Experimentation – By Pat HolmOur music and what we wore were the things most visible to other generations. Lots of creativity was going on in our relationships and our denial of materialism. Times “were a changin’.”
- The Null Set Remembered – By Pat HolmThe Null Set Remembered By Pat Holm