Carol Seajay

[6] During her last year in school she worked as an abortion counselor, but was fired after being outed as a lesbian, leading her to purchase a motorcycle on which she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1974.

[6][better source needed] Several months later Seajay was taken on a bus ride to A Woman's Place, a worker-owned feminist bookstore in Oakland, California, by its cofounder Forest Milne.

[10] She and Paula Wallace, a colleague at A Woman's Place and her romantic partner at the time, eventually applied for a loan from the San Francisco Feminist Federal Credit Union to start their own bookstore.

[6][11] While attending the First National Women in Print Conference in Nebraska, Seajay received a call from Paula Wallace telling her that the loan had been approved.

On October 31, 1976, Seajay and Wallace opened the bookstore on 532 Valencia Street in the Mission Dolores neighborhood of San Francisco, naming it "Old Wives Tales".

Old Wives Tales bookstore on 1009 Valencia Street in 1983