Pat Holm

Our dear friend and colleague on this project Pat Holm passed away unexpectedly in June 2024. She was 86.

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 Holm
  Around 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.
• Finding the Beach House Where I Still Live After 55 Years – By Pat Holm
  HOME Finding the Beach House Where I Still Live After 55 Years By Pat Holm
• How a Data Report on Racial Bias in Corrections Affected My Career – By Pat Holm
  WORK How a Data Report on Racial Bias in Corrections Affected My Career By Pat Holm
• Car-Nation – By Pat Holm
  I 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 Holm
  Our 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’.”
• Fleeing Minnesota and Coming to Olympia- By Pat Holm
  ARRIVALS Fleeing Minnesota and Coming to Olympia – 1950s-1960s By Pat Holm
• The Null Set Remembered – By Pat Holm
  The Null Set Remembered By Pat Holm