Gidget Goes Berzerk: The Seaside rock-and-roll riots

By Finn J.D. John
December 8, 2024

SEPT. 1, 1962, WAS an unusually sultry day for the north Oregon coast, and the little beachside resort town of Seaside was crammed with high-school and college kids.

They had come from all over the state and beyond for a rowdy, high-spirited end-of-summer Labor Day beach-party weekend that had become almost like a tradition in the postwar years.

Something was a little different this year, though. The crowd was larger than usual, for one thing. Actually, it was a lot larger. The first baby-boomers, born in 1946, were 16 years old in 1962 ... and there were a lot of them on the beach that day, and they were a bit wild.

Something else that was different that year was the attitude of the Seaside cops. They were being noticeably more hard-nosed than they had been in years past. Seaside had elected a new mayor, Maurice Pysher, a 68-year-old former heating engineer who had retired to Seaside from Portland a couple years before.

Pysher didn’t like his new town’s reputation as a place where kids could blow off steam, and he’d seen that they were getting noticeably rowdier year after year. He wanted visitors to Seaside to be quieter, more respectful, and less rambunctious. So he had fired Seaside’s longtime police chief and replaced him with someone who would be more strict and firm about keeping things orderly.

The crowds of college kids and high-school students who flocked to town for Labor Day had always been a little high-spirited, and the town’s cops had learned to strike a balance with them. They’d be there if somebody really needed help, and they’d stop any actual vandalism or other criminal activity; but they wouldn’t accost anyone on the street and hassle them for carrying an open beer, or ticket them for disorderly conduct for getting too loud around a beach bonfire.

But, not any more. Today was the start of Labor Day Weekend, 1962. The crowds were enormous, the beer was flowing freely, and the cops had a new attitude.

It wouldn’t take long for that combination to explode into something close to a worst-case scenario for the town: the first  Seaside beach-party riot.

According to the later recollections of Portland musician Stew Dodge, who at the time was a Portland high school student in town for the party, the riot started on a downtown street near the Times Theater. There, two older boys were squared off for a full-on fistfight. The onlookers around them hastened to clear a circle for them to fight in and watched, the fighters’ friends cheering and shouting encouragement.

“It was like a John Wayne movie,” recalled Dodge, in an interview with writer David Craig quoted in R.J. Marx’s book. “These guys were slugging it out.”

Finally, during a lull in the fighting, one boy asked the other if he’d like to call it a draw. The other took him up on it.

“They shook hands and walked down the street to get a beer,” Dodge said. “And then the cops showed up.”

This was exactly the sort of misbehavior Seaside cops had formerly let slide. A big fistfight was an ugly thing, certainly against the law, and not exactly conducive to an orderly retirement-friendly-resort-town experience; but, it was over, nobody was much hurt, and a stern lecture was probably the best medicine for the moment.

But there was a new sheriff in town, or rather a new mayor; and that mayor wanted order. People must not be allowed to think they could just engage willy-nilly in public fistfights.

So the cops arrested one of the two boys — apparently they figured he was the one who’d started it — and bundled him into the back of the car.

Then they found they had a little problem. The street was packed with young people who were suddenly angry, and were refusing to get out of their way.

Then somebody ran up to the back door of the cop car and grabbed the handle. It wasn’t locked — it opened right up, and the prisoner jumped out and took to his heels.

The cops, sensing the change in the crowd, tried to retreat from the field. But as they were inching past the Catholic church, someone threw a Blitz-Weinhard bottle through the back window of their cruiser.

“And then, that was it,” said Dodge.

What it was, was the first Seaside Labor Day Weekend beach-party riot. It would happen again the next year, and the next, with more and more police coming to the scene, until finally in 1964 the rioters were finally vanquished ... along with Seaside’s reputation, temporarily at least, as a youth-friendly beach town.

AS THE LONG weekend dragged on, things got worse and worse. The bumper crop of drunken youths that was already on the scene grew even larger when local radio DJs breathlessly reported there was a riot going on in Seaside, and kids from nearby coastal towns who’d come to check out the scene got swept up in the action.

Or arrested. The police, outnumbered and more than a little freaked out, responded by basically nabbing random kids and hauling them off to the jail. Billy clubs and hazelwood ax handles got used for crowd control. The kids responded by ripping apart fences and benches to get cudgels to fight back with, and filling beer bottles with sand and lobbing them at the cops like hand grenades.

At one point, someone talked the volunteer fire department into showing up and blasting the rioters with fire hoses; the kids charged, drove the firemen off, seized the hoses, and started blasting the cops with them.

Then someone got the idea of stealing the lifeguard tower off the beach and dragging it into town. There it fell over, breaking a rioter’s leg.

On Sunday, more cops came to town, and waded into the sea of drunken youths clobbering them with ax handles — usually striking the meaty part of the shoulder by the neck, so as to stun them without breaking collarbones or skulls — and drove them back to the beach. The crowd rallied and surged back into town, yelling and cursing and lobbing rocks and bottles. It was lather, rinse, repeat.

On Monday, though, one of the state police guys had the idea of passing a kitty to hire The Fabulous Wailers, a popular Northwest regional band that had been booked to play a show at one of the clubs downtown. The Wailers’ show had been canceled because of the riots, and they were just hanging out in their hotel room trying not to get involved.

The Wailers were happy to help, and so they set up their instruments and amplifiers on the roof of the beachside Pypo Club, an alcohol-free music venue for Seaside youths.

And so the kids who had come to Seaside for a good time, stayed on the beach dancing and singing along to “Louie Louie” instead of running around town looking for cops to punch and throwing beer bottles through plate-glass windows.

By the way, the Wailers had a new instrumental that they had written, and they played it for the first time at that beach party. They subsequently named it “Doin’ the Seaside,” and it later became one of their signature tracks.

At the end of the day, the Wailers’ intervention had been a big success ... but Mayor Pysher and his supporters were furious. They had wanted those unruly teens taught a lesson, and instead they had been rewarded with a free rock concert.

The move had the potential of becoming a big win-win for the town. But, it was not to be. The destruction and drama had made a lot of Seaside residents angry, especially the owners of the downtown businesses that the rioters had damaged and trashed. They did not want to send the message that they could be shaken down and have free rock concerts extorted from them by a pack of teenage hooligans.

The way they saw it, Labor Day had always been crazy in Seaside — more trouble than it was worth, really, but they’d always sucked it up and endured it because hospitality was their town’s number-one thing, and they didn’t want to send a “stay away” type of message.

Now they felt like their generosity was being taken for granted, like they’d bent over backwards to be good hosts and the guests had responded with humiliation and demands for more. Battle lines were drawn.

BY THE SPRING of 1963, it was clear that something had changed. The big crowds of visitors who usually flocked to Seaside for Spring Break didn’t show up.

The locals figured that was fallout from the riots. Spring Break is a family holiday; what parent would want to take the gang to Ground Zero of the most destructive civil unrest in postwar Oregon history?

And, that was probably the right call. Because when Labor Day rolled around again, the kids packed into the town like they always did — and another round of riots got started.

But the crowds were smaller this time. Smaller, and more intense. The local kids who’d flocked to the scene to watch the riots the year before figured they’d “got the T-shirt” and didn’t need to see it again; the more harmless youths who were happy to go to the beach for a good time but didn’t want to get caught up in a mob opted to go play somewhere else.

That left a much higher concentration of angry young people who were coming to town to “get some action” in urban combat with the cops.

If the police had been different in ’62 — tougher, more hard-nosed, less flexible — it was the crowd that was different in ’63, and the authorities were in for a nasty shock.

Essentially, in ’62 the crowd had come to party, and the riot had taken everyone by surprise. In ’63, though, the crowd had come to riot. It was either baked into their plans for the weekend, or included as a strong possibility. Some of them were nursing grudges from the previous year, and others just wanted to fight. Not all the visitors were bloody-minded, but enough of them were to make for some very sharp action.

There also were a lot of youths in the crowd who had just come to town to see Paul Revere and the Raiders play a concert at the Pypo Club, the alcohol-free youth music venue that the Wailers had played from the roof of the year before, that weekend. Just like with the Wailers the previous year, the concert had been canceled, but the band was still in town, holed up in a hotel room; and the kids on the beach hoped if they made enough of a fuss, they’d get rewarded with another beach concert like last year. When it became clear that that would not happen, many of them got mad and joined the mob.

Reinforced with National Guard troops and State Police troopers, the Seaside police thought they were ready for the renewal of hostilities, and if the riots had been a strict repeat of the previous year they probably would have been fine; but the intensity of the 1963 rioters took them by surprise, and it turned out they had only brought about half as much force as they’d need to tame the beast. The rioters basically won — although they did not get what they wanted: Paul Revere and the Raiders stayed in their rooms and did not play the coveted free beach concert.

And at the end of the weekend, as downtown business owners trudged back to work to clean up after the rioters, there was a sense of weariness. Was this going to be the new normal? A sluggish tourist season followed by three days of brick-throwing, slogan-chanting rock-and-roll riots?

People started pointing fingers. Pysher’s crew blamed outside agitators, younger townsfolk blamed Pysher’s crew of hard-nosed law-and-order types, and nearly everyone blamed the rioters’ parents for sparing the rod and spoiling the child. Even J. Edgar Hoover, the legendary capo dei capi of the FBI, got involved, probing the riots to see if he could detect the sinister hand of a communist plot behind it all.

At that point, it was obvious to nearly everyone what had happened. Seaside’s reputation as a family-friendly resort town had been trashed, and the only demographic group that still seemed to want to come in large numbers was the rioters, and they’d be back in 1964 and probably more belligerent than ever. The town would have to be ready for them, and meet force with force. The mob would have to be vanquished. Then, they could get started rebuilding their battered reputation.

And, well, that’s pretty much exactly what happened. The force of law-enforcement officers that came to Seaside in 1964 was big enough to keep control even when the furniture-burning, beer-guzzling hordes on the beach started chanting “Let’s riot! Let’s riot!”

They made a few attempts, but there were plenty of cops and Guardsmen defending the town, and every time trouble broke out the mobs were consistently driven out of town and back onto the beach.

On Monday it rained, and that was the end of that.

THE NEXT YEAR, 1965, there were a few scattered parties of youths on the beach around bonfires. They were visited by beach-patroling cops or Guardsmen at the first sign of trouble. Lots of citations for minor-in-possession were issued, but nothing resembling a riot happened.

Seaside breathed a sigh of relief, and got busy rebuilding its battered reputation as a family-friendly beachside resort town. And, other than an out-of-control beach party that escalated to a brief “MTV Spring Break”-style rampage in ’99, the town has had no such trouble since.

(Sources: Seaside’s rock ‘n’ roll riots,” a book by R.J. Marx published in 2024 by Cover to Cover; “Seaside Riots of ’62 and ’99,” an un-by-lined article published May 27, 2018, on Oregon Coast Beach Connection (beachconnection.net); “ ‘Hoodlums’ who led Seaside’s wave of riots in the 1960s worried FBI director,” an article by Doug Perry published June 9, 2016, in the Portland Oregonian)

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