For Bellingham's baby boomers, echoes of the '60s protest years continue

Forty years ago I was sitting in a political theory class at Western Washington University when the professor held up the latest issue of the Northwest Passage, an alternative newspaper that had started in Bellingham three years earlier.

The cover showed four police officers standing watch in a community garden at 11th Street and Harris Avenue, in the heart of Fairhaven. Or at least where a garden used to be.

Several days earlier, on Nov. 30, 1972, about 20 officers carrying nightsticks and wearing hard helmets with visors cleared the corner of about 40 protesters who were preventing a bulldozer from scraping the garden into the dirt pile of history. An estimated 100 bystanders watched the kerfuffle.