October 16, 1965: Mickey Mouse Fight Club

Different city, same scene: Antiwar protesters and counter-protesters, Berkeley, California, November 20, 1965.

Never underestimate the impotency of a heckler–even when he, she, or it represents the majority. Such was unfortunately the case on the date in focus here, when almost 400 protesters turned out for Seattle’s first major local demonstration against the Vietnam War, and were greeted with decidedly feral heckling from both counter-protesters and pro-war bystanders.

The event was organized by the Seattle Committee to End the War in Vietnam (SCEWV) and the University of Washington chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in solidarity with other, larger protest events in several major U.S. cities that same weekend, including a 13,000-strong march in New York City. The Seattle protest began with a march under police escort down Fourth Avenue in downtown Seattle, from the Federal Courthouse at Fifth Avenue and Spring Street to a noon rally at Westlake Park. The heckling began at the courthouse, where the counter-slogans included such reactionary gems as “Keep Washington Green–not Red!,” “For Sale Cheap–Ho Chi Minh Sandals!” and, amusingly representing the UW’s right-wing Greek community, “Sigma Chi says ‘USA–All The Way!’”

When the march arrived at Westlake Park, the counter-protesters, keeping their distance one block away from the rally, attempted to drown out the antiwar voices by singing the Mickey Mouse Club anthem, and the first speaker, UW Political Science professor Paul Brass, was doused with red paint by a certain self-identified “Joe Freedom,” who amusingly turned out to be a disgruntled student of Brass’s.

To protest the Vietnam War at such an early stage, when American public opinion was still squarely (yes, that was a double-entendre) in its favor, was truly daring, especially in light of the news that the march in NYC hours earlier had been violently attacked by spectators, while in Oakland, California, 10,000 marchers were also attacked–some bludgeoned, even–by Hell’s Angels. According to eyewitness and radical Seattle icon Walt Crowley (1947-2007), then an 18-year-old UW freshman braving his first major protest event, all involved were understandably “nervous.” Nevertheless, the crewcutted heckling majority eventually ate their according crow: by mid-1970, in the wake of the Kent State massacre and the war’s increasing lack of direction and loss of American lives, nationwide antiwar protests had grown into massive events, with increasing empathy from the so-called “silent majority.”

One can only wonder what Walt Disney (1901-1966), noted anti-radical, would, by that point in time, have done.

–Jeff Stevens. Sources: Richard Simmons, “Viet Protest Orderly Here; Violence Across Nation,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, October 17, 1965, p. 1; “Hell’s Angels Attack Berkeley Demonstrators,” The Seattle Times, October 17, 1965, p. 1; “Viet-Nam Protesters Heckled In March to Westlake Mall,” Ibid., p. A; Walt Crowley, “Rites of Passage: A Memoir of the Sixties in Seattle” (University of Washington Press, 1995), pp. 45-46.

April 24, 1969: Protesters and Beekeepers

The bees, being both apian and apolitical, stung leftists, rightists, neutrals, and police with equal enthusiasm. --Walt Crowley. Photo credit: Chris Richards, UW Daily archives

The very concept of “counter-protesters” at a protest demonstration is already absurd enough. Imagine the emphatic absurdity, then, of a full-fledged mêlée between left-wing and right-wing student protesters on a college campus–and then throw an onslaught of angry bees into the mix. Sounds like the plot of–pardon the pun–a “B” movie, doesn’t it?

Nevertheless, that’s exactly what happened on the University of Washington campus on the date in focus here. It all began at approximately 12:30 p.m., when roughly 300 members and sympathizers of the UW chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) attempted to shut down the UW’s Loew Hall–then the home of the UW Career Planning and Placement Center–in order to protest ongoing on-campus recruiting by representatives of the military-industrial complex (specifically, on that day, TransWorld Airlines; Aetna Life and Casualty Insurance Co.; and the U.S. Navy).

The scene quickly became confrontational as an organized group of right-wing anti-SDS students, along with a growing crowd of curious onlookers, prevented the SDS contingent from entering the building. The majority of the SDS group serendipitously managed to enter Loew through the back doors. Meanwhile, several spontaneous fisticuffs between angry right-wing students and angry left-wing students–ignited in part by an egg-throwing incident instigated by some among the anti-SDS crowd–quickly escalated into a full-blown radical campus free-for-all.

The absurdity, at this point, was only just beginning.

After SDS had gained effective control of Loew Hall, and at least 2,000 agitated students continued their aimlessly attempted catharses outside, a truck containing eight hives of bees, driven by two beekeepers from Eastern Washington’s Yakima Valley, abruptly stopped in front of the already absurd scene then unfolding in the plaza outside Loew’s main entrance. The abruptness of the stop caused one of the hives to overturn, and its wildly buzzing contents immediately swarmed out of the back of the truck and into the crowd. One of the drivers, clad in protective gear, then–and quite intriguingly–stepped out of the truck’s cab and began haphazardly handling the remaining hives, causing more understandably angry bees to be released, who then began stinging wildly, with noteworthy ideological neutrality.

Walt Crowley (1947-2007), the late radical Seattle historian and, at the time, a 21-year-old UW dropout, would recall the scene for the record many years later with delightfully mirthful pith: “The bees, being both apian and apolitical, stung leftists, rightists, neutrals, and police with equal enthusiasm.”

After several minutes, several of the students outside Loew Hall began pelting the truck with fruit and various other objects, including a brick that went through the truck’s windshield just before the driver took off.

The offending truck

In the sublimely entomological aftermath, no one at the scene was truly hurt–physically, anyway–yet much intrigue remained concerning the allegedly accidental nature of the event in question. The beekeepers involved volunteered their witness to the UW Daily the following week, claiming to have been merely seeking an academically trustworthy entomologist to examine their allegedly ailing freight. At the time, the UW had no entomology department–nor even a degree program in that field–and a mere two entomologists on its faculty.

The buzzing horde ultimately failed to break up the SDS demonstration, although 22 persons were later treated for bee stings at the UW’s Hall Health Center. Longstanding rumors of covert UW administration complicity in the attempted dispollination of radical UW student power by way of strategic serendipity that fateful day remain today unconfirmed.

–Jeff Stevens. Sources: Bruce Olson, “Groups Finalize Loew Plans,” University of Washington Daily, April 24, 1969, p. 1; Lee Rosen, “Placement Center Stays Open: Opposing Groups Clash in 4-Hour Student Confrontation at Loew Hall,” University of Washington Daily, April 25, 1969, p. 1; “Sleepy Bees: Common Denominator,” University of Washington Daily, April 25, 1969, p. 13; “Melees Erupt In Effort to Close Hall,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, April 25, 1969, p. 1; Melvin Goo, “Confusion Marks Shutdown Attempt,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, April 25, 1969, p. B; John Hinterberger, “The Many Signs of a Campus Demonstration at U.W.,” Seattle Times, April 25, 1969, p. 1; Julie Emery, “‘Bee-In Driver Is Sought,” Seattle Times, April 25, 1969, p. 16; Julie Emery and Svein Gilje, “Campus Tone Is Moderation,” Seattle Times, April 25, 1969, p. 16; “Student Fights Regretted by S.D.S.,” Seattle Times, April 25, 1969, p. 16; Richard Gollings, “Beekeepers Claim Accident,” University of Washington Daily, April 29, 1969, p. 1; Walt Crowley, “Rites of Passage: A Memoir of the Sixties in Seattle” (University of Washington Press, 1995, pp. 135-136).

March 23, 1967: The Cocoon Breaks, The Helix Emerges

Helix, Vol. 1, No. 1, March 23, 1967

Seattle has a long history of local alternative newspapers, some better than others, all vital in the collective process of stirring the complex pot of a healthy local media scene. Most, if not all, of the past four decades’ worth of such endeavors owe a great debt to Helix, the groundbreaking chronicler of Seattle’s counterculture whose debut issue was published on the date in focus here.

Helix was conceived in late 1966 during discussions at the Free University of Seattle, an alternative college and countercultural meeting place located in the University District. These discussions were inspired by the recent flowering of underground newspapers in other counterculturally rich cities, such as San Francisco’s Berkeley Barb and Oracle, and New York City’s East Village Other. Helix‘s prime instigators included Paul Dorpat, then a wayward University of Washington grad student, and Paul Sawyer, a Unitarian minister. This circle quickly grew to include future famous novelist Tom Robbins, Seattle Post-Intelligencer cartoonist Ray Collins, and Jon Gallant, co-founder of Seattle’s legendary underground radio station KRAB-FM.

Serendipitously named after Watson and Crick’s famous description of DNA during a particularly productive session of beer-drinking and brainstorming at the Blue Moon Tavern in February 1967, Helix emerged from its fertile countercultural cocoon to immediate success. The debut issue’s cover announced the new paper’s mission in an editorial that began as follows:

You have in your hand the first issue of a fortnightly newspaper. It is dedicated to no cause, no interests, no point of view; it is dedicated to you.

The first 1,500 copies of the 12-page, vividly colored, wildly illustrated tabloid were quickly snapped up off the streets of the U District, and its initial success would eventually become a three-year reign of weekly publication. During that time Helix would sponsor a number of important countercultural events in the Puget Sound region before finally folding in June 1970.

Helix, Vol. 2, No. 6, December 1, 1967

Among such events was the Sky River Rock Festival and Lighter Than Air Fair, a three-day concert series held near Sultan (50 miles north of Seattle) from August 31 to September 2, 1968–a full year before the more famous Woodstock festival–featuring such luminaries as the Grateful Dead, Country Joe and the Fish, and Santana. Helix also played an important role in promoting local political activism, serving as both catalyst and chronicler of many local protest events organized by the antiwar, environmental, and Black liberation movements.

Among other positive effects Helix provided for Seattle’s countercultural community, it provided a decent, if modest, living for a number of the “hippies” who served as the paper’s street vendors. It also launched the media career of Walt Crowley (1947-2007), the much-revered local writer, historian, and rabble-rouser, who joined the paper’s staff, first as an illustrator and later as an editor, in May 1967.

Crowley would later attribute the paper’s demise to the splintering of the American Left, both in Seattle and nationwide, in the wake of the Kent State Massacre–as well as other dark turns the American counterculture had taken by mid-1970. “After Kent State, the left had gone totally wiggy,” Crowley told Seattle Weekly in 1989. “And the drug scene was brutal.” In the wake of Helix, the media needs of Seattle’s counterculture would be served–if only temporarily–by the more overtly political and militant Puget Sound Partisan.

Today, Dorpat has made a name for himself as a celebrated Pacific Northwest photographer-historian, mainly as author of the long-running Seattle Times pictorial feature “Seattle Now & Then.” Crowley would also go on to broader local fame as a KIRO-TV news commentator in the 1980s. Meanwhile, Helix‘s heady brew of radical politics and groundbreaking graphic design has rarely, if ever, been surpassed locally, its closest competition arguably being The Rocket (1979-2000), Seattle’s greatest music-centric monthly to date. An ongoing archive of complete issues of Helix can be viewed online in PDF form at Paul Dorpat’s blog: http://pauldorpat.com/category/helix/

–Jeff Stevens. Sources: Peter Blecha and Charles R. Cross, “When Seattle Went Psychedelic,” The Rocket, May 1987, p. 21; Bart Becker, “The Beats Go On,” Seattle Weekly, November 29, 1989, p. 34; Walt Crowley, “Rites of Passage: A Memoir of the Sixties in Seattle” (University of Washington Press, 1995).

February 17, 1970: SLF vs. SPD

Same as it ever was: police vs. protesters in downtown Seattle, Feb. 17, 1970.
Photo credit: Alan Lande, Helix, Vol. 11, No. 8

The following story could have aptly been titled either “Chicago Echoes in Seattle” or, alternatively, “Rashomon Echoes in Seattle’s News Media.” The former potential title would be due to the story’s instigation by the provocative verdict in the “Chicago Seven” trial–crucially revealed nationwide on the date in focus here–and the latter due to the story’s wildly conflicting accounts given by, respectively, the organizers of the protest event involved and Seattle’s then-two leading daily newspapers.

In the conveniently short version, a large group of anti-Establishment protesters would display the worst tendencies of the American Left of their time by recklessly vandalizing a crucial section of downtown Seattle, clashing along the way with cops and, eventually, prosecutors.

The necessarily longer version would more accurately resemble Akira Kurosawa’s classic cinematic tale, in which a similarly contentious event is re-told by three of its key participants in three wildly conflicting versions, leaving the ideal of an “objective” account hopelessly washed away like a fragile sand sculpture after a violent rainstorm–much like the storm that crucially frames Rashomon‘s finale.

All involved in the story would likely agree, at least, that the “Chicago Seven” trial was at the heart of the clash that shook Seattle that day. In mid-February 1970, the trial of the seven infamous defendants charged with “interstate conspiracy to incite a riot” during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago was obviously winding down towards a highly anticipated verdict. The “Seven” in question, cueing the nation’s anti-Establishment masses, had then called for their many disparate supporters to organize local demonstrations nationwide on “The Day After” the impending verdict.

Enter the Seattle Liberation Front. The SLF was a brazenly “radical” organization formed one mere month prior to the impending “Day After,” inspired by a provocative public appearance in Seattle on January 17 by Chicago defendant Jerry Rubin. (See the RSR entry “January 17, 1970: Jerry Rubin Brings the Chicago Noise to Seattle” for details.) The SLF wasted no time in planning a “TDA” demonstration to be held at Seattle’s U.S. Federal Courthouse downtown at Fifth Avenue and Spring Street–never mind the inconvenient mystery of the Chicago verdict’s exact date.

Seeking to effectively promote Seattle’s “TDA,” one member of the SLF, Charles “Chip” Marshall, approached the office of Helix–then Seattle’s leading counterculture newspaper–with a copy of a manifesto calling for a “Stop the Courts Day” at 2 p.m. in front of the courthouse on the still-unknown day of the verdict, seeking its publication in the paper. As Helix editor Walt Crowley (1947-2007) would recall in his 1995 book Rites of Passage: A Memoir of the Sixties in Seattle, “While Marshall’s [manifesto] never explicitly called for a violent action, it all but invited it, and this made us very nervous.”

Crowley’s anxiety, along with that of his kindred Helixistas, would soon prove well founded. On the Sunday prior to “TDA,” Julius Hoffman, the judge in the Chicago trial–already reviled by then by much of America’s radical youth–sentenced all of the Chicago Seven, along with their attorneys, for contempt of court.

This, mind you, before the Chicago jury had yet reached a proper verdict.

For the Seven’s nationwide supporters, this served as both a deadline cue and an inflammatory catalyst for the impending “Day After.” Despite pacifist pleas for genuinely cool reason–such as, in Seattle, the earlier, written pledge of SLF co-founder Michael Lerner “that we have no intention of introducing violence into [Seattle's] demonstration”–Hoffman’s pre-emptive legal strike had apparently infused the nation’s antiwar movement with a profoundly frustrated rage that no pacifist leadership could possibly contain.

Thus, even before “The Day After,” the stars, it seems, were already crossed; the dice already cast.

When 2 p.m. on “TDA” arrived in Seattle, some roughly 2,000 agitated youth–most ranging in age from “juvenile” to twenty-something–had assembled downtown in front of the federal courthouse. While some there may have represented the best kind of “radical”–i.e., wielding a deeply-rooted understanding of the injustice of the Chicago verdict–all too many were, by many accounts, all too young, and simply thus looking for gleefully reckless trouble. Seattle’s then-acting police chief Frank Moore would later sum up the grim situation for Seattle’s news media thusly:

“The demonstrators came prepared for war … They were armed with pipes, clubs, chains, paint and tear gas … and they used them all.”

Thus, what could have been a relatively peaceful demonstration against injustice in the American court system became instead an anti-everything free-for-all, with protesters tossing paint bombs, breaking windows, and violently scuffling with police, from the courthouse to the Federal Building at First Avenue and University Street, and several storefronts in between.

One major point of contention between the protesters’ accounts of the mêlée and those of The Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer concerned the massive use of tear gas, which was plentiful enough for clouds to be seen rising over downtown from Interstate 5. While the Seattle Police Department officially denied using tear gas, and the Times and the P-I both dutifully reported the SPD’s allegation that it was the protesters who had brought the tear gas with them, eyewitness accounts published in Helix two days later declared the opposite: the police had used the tear gas, and one sole demonstrator at one point lobbed a gas bomb into the courthouse–after it had been thrown outside by police inside the building.

Helix on the march: Seattle's counterculture newpaper covers the TDA fiasco, Feb. 19, 1970

In addition, despite initial statements from the SPD and the Mayor’s Office commending the officers on the scene for their “restraint,” the degree of police violence was allegedly drastic enough that the P-I, at least, joined Helix in reporting several instances of police recklessly attacking protesters and innocent bystanders alike.

When the smoke finally cleared, up to eighty-nine people had been arrested, scores were injured, and an estimated $75,000 worth of property damage had been done downtown. Among the other results of Seattle’s “TDA” fiasco, our city would soon claim its own anti-Establishment “Seven,” as that same number of people would soon be named as protest organizers responsible for the riot. The “Seattle Seven” would then be tracked down, arrested, and put on trial later that year in an odd local microcosm of the Chicago trial. And, unfortunately, the whole affair would give the reputation of Seattle’s antiwar movement a black eye that would not soon heal.

–Jeff Stevens. Sources: “Stop the Courts,” “bertold brecht” (a.k.a. Charles “Chip” Marshall), Helix, Feb. 12, 1970; “U.S. Courthouse Attacked; 80 Arrested, Score Injured,” Larry McCarten, Don Carter and Craig Smith, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Feb. 18, 1970, p. 1; “Gas Lingers, Charges Filed,” The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Feb. 18, 1970, p. 3; “Rioters’ Damage Put At $30,000; 75 Arrested,” Don Hannula, The Seattle Times, Feb. 18, 1970, p. 1; “Uhlman Praises Police Conduct, Warns ‘Hooligans’,” The Seattle Times, Feb. 18, 1970, p. 1; “14 Juveniles Are Arrested,” The Seattle Times, Feb. 18, 1970; “Window Glass Is Major Casualty,” The Seattle Times, Feb. 18, 1970; “Hospitals Too Close For Gas–Moore,” Lou Corsaletti, The Seattle Times, Feb. 18, 1970, p. A 4; “Militants Vow More Protests,” The Seattle Times, Feb. 18, 1970, p. A 4; “Demonstrators Were Prepared For Battle,” Don Hannula, The Seattle Times, Feb. 18, 1970, p. A 5; “Police Praised–Witness Tells of Officer’s Restraint,” The Seattle Times, Feb. 18, 1970, p. B 1; “Who Is The Real Conspiracy? This Is!,” Helix, Feb. 19, 1970, p. 2; “Outside Leaders Hinted Behind Seattle Violence,” Larry McCarten, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Feb. 19, 1970, p. 1; “Mayor Warns Future Confrontation ‘Hooligans’,” The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Feb. 19, 1970, p. 4; “Stiffer Laws, Stronger Protest Reaction Urged,” The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Feb. 19, 1970, p. 4; “UW Students Reflect Confusion, Anger at Protest Violence Here,” Frank Herbert, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Feb. 19, 1970, p. 5; “49 Adults, 13 Juveniles Charged in Protest,” The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Feb. 19, 1970, p. 5; “Tuesday’s Trouble: Public Defender Asks Probe Of Reported Police Excesses,” Don Hannula, The Seattle Times, Feb. 19, 1970, p. A 8; “Out-Of-Towners May Have Led Demonstration, Says Uhlman,” The Seattle Times, Feb. 18, 1970, p. A 8; “Youths March To Clean It Up,” Larry McCarten, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Feb. 20, 1970, p. B; Walt Crowley, “Rites of Passage: A Memoir of the Sixties in Seattle” (University of Washington Press, 1995), pp. 168-169.