Ed. note: A long time ago, in a local media landscape far, far away, ETS! co-editor Jeff Stevens was part of the crew who brewed up Ruckus, the University of Washington's progressive (and currently dormant) student newspaper. As a regular Ruckus feature, for several years Jeff produced "This Month in UW Activist History," a collection of stories from the UW's rowdy rabble-rousing past. In the spirit of carrying forward the legacy of Ruckus, ETS! hereby launches a new column dedicated to shining a linguistic light on tasty historical tidbits from Greater Seattle's own radical past, to serve as a complement to our long-running "Reclaim Our History" feature. Enjoy!

September 9, 1967: "Hippie Hill" Prevails

As the 1960s' counterculture first began to fully bloom in Seattle, some local reactionaries decided our local flower children needed weeding out. Some sought to do so directly, staging "hippie-bashings" in the University District and elsewhere, while others worked more politically--among them a local letter writer who sought to pressure the University of Washington to rid its campus of its growing counterculture population.

The reactionary in question was one Charles E. Divoky, a 43-year-old North Seattle resident then employed by a U District insurance firm. On Sept. 6 Divoky wrote to UW President Charles Odegaard to express his disgust at how the UW campus had recently become, in Divoky's words, a "retreat and haven for hippie malcontents." He specifically referred to "Hippie Hill," the stretch of lawn on the campus' western edge, between 15th Avenue Northeast and Denny Hall, near University Way (a.k.a. "The Ave"), which was then becoming a West Coast counterculture magnet rivaled only by San Francisco's fabled Haight-Ashbury district.

Indeed, at the time, Hippie Hill was generally considered Ground Zero for Seattle's fast-growing counterculture scene, benefiting in part from Odegaard's outstandingly tolerant attitude toward the hippie element on and near his jurisdiction's campus, as well as his ongoing refusal to allow Seattle Police onto UW property (mainly due to the UW's status as state property).

Divorky, in fittingly dramatic reactionary fashion, accused the regular denizens of Hippie Hill of "using public property as a marketplace for drug sales and sexual orgies." As a solution to the scandals of his imagination, Divorky suggested "a few night sticks appropriately used by campus or city police" might "make the right impression."

To which Odegaard, in a letter sent not only to Divorky but also to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the mayor, the governor and the UW Board of Regents, publicly replied, "It is unthinkable to close the campus to someone who chooses not to conform to modes of dress and personal behavior common to a particular period in our society.... To lump any group together for treatment with 'night sticks' smacks of a type of society which the people of this country have labored arduously to eliminate, rather than to instigate."

The understandably student-popular Odegaard's attitude was rare back then among local authority figures; the Seattle Police, for their part, would later be discovered to have been covertly part and parcel of the aforementioned local hippie-bashing. Today, the erstwhile Hippie Hill is merely a nondescript stretch of lawn facing the popular U District hangout Cafe Allegro (est. 1975) across 15th. The Ave, of course, remains as wild and wooly as ever.

Sources: Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer archives; Walt Crowley, "Rites of Passage" (University of Washington Press, 1995).