seattle

 I have been thinking a lot about Seattle. I was interviewed yesterday by a woman who is part of the Northwest Lesbian and Gay History Project. She was at Shan's memorial and asked if people wanted to be interviewed about their time in Seattle. I sent her my email and we set up a time. 

In preparation for the interview, I looked at the CC Grains online group and there was this picture, among others. I'm guessing that this is sometime around 1980 or so, since I started working at Grains in the fall of 1979. This doesn't look like winter. No one has enough outwear on and it's not raining. So maybe it's early spring or the fall. 

I was looking at the FB group to try to figure out how many women were in the collective. The woman who interviewed me said that she'd talked to someone who was at Grains, whose name I didn't quite remember. I wanted to have some sort of list of who worked there and doing it from memory was sketchy.  On the group page was a post from Margaret Bartley who was interviewed by someone else for some other project, maybe about left groups in Seattle or maybe about the Seattle Workers' Brigade specifically. In the interview Margaret says something about the collective being 18 women, but I think that was it at its peak. My memory has it at a lower number, maybe around 12 or so, but maybe that's the size it was when I joined. 

The interview reminded me a lot about the Seattle that I knew, the Seattle of the late 70s and 80s. It would be hard to make people in their fifties or younger understand how poor a city Seattle was then, how sort of marginal. Boeing had a crash sometime around 1976 and Boeing was the main employer then, before software became the city's money maker. Someone I knew bought a house for $10K. A similar size house would go for close to a million now, probably. Broadway had a couple of bars and a lot of little necessary businesses like cleaners, laundry, a pharmacy. There was the Hadassah, which was the Jewish used clothes store. There was a Fred Meyer, but it was much much smaller than the one currently there and didn't sell food. There was a movie theater, places to get breakfast, nothing fancy. For all that Seattle is a sort of foodie place now, there weren't many fancy restaurants at all. The co-ops were small and local.

I keep trying to tie this up with some grand summary insight, but all I have been doing these last few days is remembering. Remembering what it felt like to walk around in that rainy city. What it felt like to bicycle the 14 miles to work and back on Saturdays, the long haul up Denny Hill. What it was like to have my own small apartment. How I felt standing on Madison, looking around to see the Olympics, the Cascades, and Mount Rainier on one very very clear day.