The Seattle Star

Jeff Stevens tells the inspiring tale of one of the most successful acts of civil disobedience in Seattle’s history.

Jeff Stevens tells the story of the night punk rock and DIY culture simultaneously arrived in Seattle.

Jeff Stevens tells the tragicomic tale of how a radical student protest in Vietnam War-era Seattle was hijacked by a swarm of angry bees. No, this is not an urban legend.

Seattle’s University District has long been known as a locus for student-led protests. The first such major protest event in the U District, uncannily enough, was a protest against the U District business community–specifically, against its collective discriminatory stance toward Seattle’s counterculture, and the police harassment which, at the time, was aggressively enforcing such discrimination.

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.

Before there was “the year punk broke,” there was the night when “punks flipped the Bird.” Jeff Stevens tells the humble story of the Bird, Seattle’s first punk club.