UMass Magazine Online

Fall 2003

Departments

Extended Family

Features

Experiencing Jeff Corwin

Drawing on the past

Clean-up at the old Davis Mine

Extended Family

Proud parents to the People's Market

Christopher O'Carroll ’97




	“No retail experience, no business experience,” plenty of pluck: Ellen Gavin and Gail Sullivan. (photo by Ben Barnhart)

AMERICAN TROOPS WERE STILL KILLING and dying in Vietnam. Roe v. Wade was a brand new Supreme Court decision. The Watergate scandal filled the headlines, but Richard Nixon’s resignation lay a year in the future. It was 1973, the year that two UMass sophomores did their bit to change the world by opening a health food snack shop in the Student Union.

“We were 19, we were children!” exclaims Ellen Gavin ’76.

“No retail experience, no business experience, no nothing,” adds Gail Sullivan, the other founding mother of the People’s Market, as they called their pioneering student-run business. “It started with a lot of pluck and energy, not a lot of knowledge.”

Three decades, six presidents and quite a few wars later, the People’s Market is more than a thriving concern, it’s a venerable UMass tradition. Gavin and Sullivan came back to campus this year to mark the 30th birthday of their unlikely success and to celebrate with the plucky, energetic, knowledgeable students who run the business today.

Gavin grew up in Lawrence, granddaughter of a mill worker. She credits UMass with opening her eyes to her family’s labor history heritage. “My grandmother worked in the mills at the age of 12,” she says, “but it took me going to UMass to learn about the Bread and Roses strike.”

She and Sullivan became friends during their freshman year when both of them joined the takeover of an ROTC building. In addition to their anti-war activism, they shared an interest in women’s issues, and they both wanted to get involved in student government. Sullivan left UMass in her junior year to work for the American Indian Movement, and eventually completed her undergraduate work at Goddard, but Gavin stayed to earn a degree in legal studies and win election as co-president of the student body.

After graduation, Gavin moved to San Diego, where she became one of the nation’s first female firefighters. When she wrote a play about that experience, she discovered yet another career path. Today, she is executive and artistic director of the Brava theater company in San Francisco, which produces politically charged plays by and about women. Meanwhile, back on the East Coast, Sullivan heads the Boston architecture firm Gail Sullivan Associates, which specializes in designing buildings for schools, child care facilities, community centers and non-profit organizations.

From the vantage point of their subsequent successes, both woman treasure the lessons in leadership and entrepreneurial thinking they learned 30 years ago when the People’s

Market was young. As Gavin puts it, “The People's Market was the absolutely first time I had taken control of my environment.”

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