Supersonics Victory Parade 1979

On this day in 1979, the Western Conference Champion Seattle Supersonics lead the biggest parade in the history of Seattle after beating the Eastern Conference Champion Washington Bullets to take the World Championship Series title.

The morning of June 4, 1979, a Monday, started gloomily, with thick clouds and drizzle, but the overcast began to clear about 9:30 a.m., a couple of hours before the start of what The Seattle Post Intelligencer predicted would be “the biggest parade the city has seen since the end of World War II.” The newspaper wasn’t wrong.

By 11 a.m., a throng of 300,000, that figure estimated by Seattle police, lined the 16-block parade route from the Kingdome to the plaza between the Olympic Hotel and the Rainier Bank Building. The biggest swarm, about 100,000, according to Seattle Police spokesman Lee Libby, congregated at Fifth Avenue and University Street, where pennant, T-shirt and pretzel vendors worked the crowd… read more >