Seattle Jazz Icon Overton Berry Reflects On Long Career

Carol Glenn, a former nurse, remembers when AIDS ravaged Seattle.

“We began to have people literally walking into the clinic and dropping dead,” said Glenn, who worked at Pike Market Clinic at the time. “Or people with these really strange growths on their face or horrible pneumonias, and nobody knew what they were.”

Back then, HIV was a death sentence. AZT, the first drug approved to treat the disease, came on the market in 1987; it would be years before HIV/AIDS treatments truly started saving lives.

“People were dying left and right at that point and their friends or family would come with a box of stuff and say, ‘I don’t want to throw this away; what’ll I do with it?’” Glenn said.

I was 16 and going to school; I lived in Dublin and was infatuated with this older fellow who was a jack-the-lad kind of fella.

We met and had a relationship and it was brief. And I got pregnant.