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You're listening to Story Helix, intertwining
stories past, present, and not yet imagined
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in Lane County, Oregon. What's up, earthlings? I'm Leah Velez, and
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I'll be your host. The story
we're about to hear was recorded at Oakshire
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Brewing Company in the Whiteaker neighborhood of
Eugene, Oregon, in early 2022.
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Let's open up
our ear nuggets and give it a listen.
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My name is Margaret Steinbrunn and I
live in the Whietaker. It's a Wednesday
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night. It's about twenty degrees outside.... I've always been a kid at heart.
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I left home when I was fourteen
years old. I was born and
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raised in San Diego. I hitch hiked across the country three or four
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times by the time I was seventeen. I did some things that we don't
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need to talk about on a podcast. And when I was free and legal,
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I met somebody. I came out
of the closet per se and I
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met my first real girlfriend. My
mother had sold our house that she had
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lived in for jeez, since my
brother... She had probably lived there for
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close to thirty years...sold
the house and moved to Oregon. And
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so I was in Southern California and
it just came to a point, through bad
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decisions and growing up in a life
of addiction in my family. I had
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no money, no nothing, and
I was in charge of a family and
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a child and a partner,
and so I called my mother and I
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said, okay, I want to move to Oregon. And I was twenty and
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so I moved to The Dalles.
I lived in The Dalles for quite some
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time. So when I lived there, when I was fourteen,
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I went up for the carnival. That's my
first sales job. I learned how to
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be a barker. I went downtown
and I got a fake ID at fourteen
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years old in San Diego and I
stood in a little booth and I'm like
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hey, hey, come here, come here, you got that girl one last
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night... What? You're not going
to win her one, too? And I
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learned to do that at a young
age. And when I moved here and
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Carnival came through town, and it's not
bad money, and they offered me a job.
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So myself, my partner, and our
small daughter. You know, it's
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like a family, and we traveled
around the northwest and did that for a
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couple of years and ended up landing
in Eugene. I had had a job
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where I worked and I knew some
people here and I landed here and I
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found a job working for someone that
I knew and it was the first real
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gay and lesbian community that I had
ever lived in. You know, I've
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never been afraid of public displays of
affection or any of that, but I
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come from a very devout Catholic family,
and it was bad, and I was going
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to hell, and my mother found out. Oh my God, it was just
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horrific. So I
moved to Eugene, and I found Club Arena,
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Perry's. And I went down there and
that was it. That was the end
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of the story. And about six
months later, my partner moved here, my
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ex, I should say. That's
another story, but I've been here ever
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since, and that was close to
thirty-five years ago. I moved to
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the Whit about fourteen years ago with,
my ex lived here, and I moved here
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and I've never left since I've been
here. It has that same sense of community
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and wellness and just to help [?] your
neighbor. It's accepting and that's something I
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never really had my whole life.
Thanks for listening. You can find us
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wherever you listen to your podcasts.
If you've got your own Lane County Story
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to tell, we'd love to hear
it at StoryHelix.Wordcrafters.Org
