April 24, 1969: Protesters and Beekeepers

Do not adjust your allegedly anarchist newspaper; April Fool's Day is over (if you want it); the following, as publicly available microfilms will likely corroborate, did in fact happen on the date in focus here, right here in Seattle. Believe it, sisters and brothers!

On that date so politically as well as comically pregnant, roughly 300 members of the University of Washington chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) attempted, at least, to commandeer the UW's Loew Hall (crucially proximate to the UW student union building) in order to protest ongoing on-campus recruiting by representatives of the military-industrial complex. The scene quickly became confrontational as an organized group of right-wing anti-anti-war students, along with a growing crowd of the curious and/or spectacle-hungry, prevented the SDS contingent from entering the building. The majority of the SDS group serendipitously managed to enter Loew through the back doors. Meanwhile--and crucially for this RSR installment's especially amusing drama--several spontaneous fisticuffs between angry right-wing students and angry left-wing students quickly escalated into a full-blown radical campus melee. Hold your applause, please--the deliciously weirdest was yet to come.

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, abruptly stopped in front of the already absurd scene then unfolding in the plaza outside Loew. The abruptness of the stop caused one of the hives to overturn, and its wildly buzzing contents immediately swarmed out of the trunk 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, and, indeed, truly sweet radical-historical serendipity.

In the sublimely entomological aftermath, none were truly hurt--physically, anyway--yet much intrigue remained concerning the alleged accidenticality 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, and a mere two entomologists on its faculty. 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 unconfirmed at press time. Oh well!

Today's lesson: Anger, whether ideological, entomological, and/or otherwise, while never, ever good, is often, albeit inadvertently, amusing. Class dismissed! Sources: UW Daily archives; Ruckus archives.