Carol Seajay arrived in San Francisco from school in Michigan in December of 1973. The first connection she made with the women's and lesbian culture that she was seeking here was through a flyer in a women's bathroom in the Main Library. It advertised a Women's Coffeehouse and bookstore, at a place called the Full Moon.
Seajay already had an affinity for books by and for lesbians. She had attended the University of Michigan in Kalamazoo, and there she read early lesbian classics. But none had a happy ending. Early lesbian novels available in the late sixties inevitably ended in double suicides or dramatic conversions. A friend gave her a grant of $50 a month to write a lesbian novel with a happy ending.
In 1973 she worked for a while as a cocktail waitress, saved her money, and bought a two-cylinder Honda motorcycle for $400. She left Michigan and drove the Honda to California. When Seajay was first in San Francisco, there was already a very developed, very intense, lesbian scene.
Seajay decided that she wanted to be an electrician. She signed up with a women's trade group to be trained once she passed the union admission tests, but the waiting list for training was 2 1/2 years, due to the bad economy at the time. So, while waiting she went to a local free school operating at the time and took classes like, Lesbianism, Socialism and Feminism and Criticism and Self-criticism. This deepened her love of reading as well as her lesbian identity.
Full Moon Cafe and Bookstore, the bookstore on the flyer in the Main Library women's bathroom, was on 18th Street. The collective, which Seajay quickly joined, spent all spring getting the store together. The side room of the cafe held books (it was about the size of a Murphy bed), and that was the bookstore. Unfortunately they never got licenses for any of the cabarets or gatherings held at Full Moon. In 1977 they were closed because they didn't have a cabaret license. Upstairs neighbors complained and the Full Moon collective lost their lease.
Seajay got a job with the state where she coded questionnaires as an assistant statistician, and read her homework for free school at lunchtime. After saving up some money, she went to India for four months. When she got back, she moved in next door to a woman from her socialism class named Gretchen Milne (now Forest), who was one of the women who started A Woman's Place, a feminist bookstore in Oakland.
It was the mid-seventies, the recession, and Seajay's new neighbor, Gretchen Milne, was living on unemployment and working on A Woman's Place bookstore. Seajay went down to check it out, there were two whole shelves of lesbian books. She started volunteering, riding the bus to Oakland once or twice a week to sit on the floor and read every last book.
At the time, Seajay recalled, lots of lesbian ideas were actually coming out in poetry. People were starting to do anthologies, self-published, staple-bound. Poetry became very important to San Francisco's lesbian community. The Women's Press Collective was started and Judy Grahn and Wendy Cadden were making all the books themselves. There was even a women's distribution company for women's newspapers!
Paula Wallace was a worker at A Woman's Place with Seajay at this time and she and Seajay were also lovers. They decided to start a San Francisco women's bookstore together. So they applied for a loan from the very friendly San Francisco Feminist Federal Credit Union. The initial idea for Feminist Bookstore News came out, and the first issue was published on October 14, 1976.
Seajay got notice that she could finally get into an electrician's class. Moreover their loan from the credit union was approved. Elated, Seajay instantly decided to pursue the decidedly more risky venture of starting a feminist bookstore. So with $6,000 from the credit union, and a $2,000 loan from Paula's parents, they started Old Wives Tales.
They opened Old Wives Tales on Halloween, 1976, paying themselves $200 a month. Around this time Seajay and her housemates took on a foster daughter through a program for gay and lesbian teens who had run away to San Francisco. The first person they hired was a friend of Seajay's foster daughter, who worked part time and stayed for ten years.
There was a great deal of internal pressure on participants as everyone tried to work in an egalitarian and cooperative way - not a familiar mode for anyone raised in a capitalist society. And this was in addition to the external pressure of trying to run a small business (bills, expenses etc.) After two years, in 1978, Seajay and Wallace broke up.
Old Wives Tales became a collective instead of a partnership. The time was a struggle, but the community really supported the store, and tourists and travelers came from all over to shop at and see Old Wives Tales. Most people easily felt comfortable upon entering, because the vision behind the project was a women-owned store where the whole community was welcome.
Around 1982, lots of internal hassles surfaced. Seajay had invited another lover to join the collective after Wallace left, and the break up that came a few years later was rather difficult - the collective also tried mediation. Then, like a lot of feminist organizations in the 1980s, there came discouraging problems around racism. The Old Wives Tales collective dealt with embezzlement, alcoholism, and went through more mediation as a group.
Exhausted with all she had put into Old Wives Tales over the years, Seajay was literally watching the store fall apart. By 1994 it needed to be fully rebuilt organizationally. Seajay decided to resign, but the collective wouldn't accept her resignation. She advised the collective and passed on her formidable bookstore-running skills. Gradually the collective transitioned into an official non-profit and Seajay resigned. She didn't really recoup any part of her investment from Old Wives Tales when she left.
People without experience were running the store once Seajay left, and it was in and out of financial trouble. When A Different Light came to town from New York, it squeezed Old Wives Tales even more. In 1995, riddled with strife and debt, Old Wives Tales closed its doors. Seajay's attention was already turned full time to the Feminist Bookstore News and Network.
