It was my first major holiday weekend, during my term as Mayor of Chelan. We had our hands full.
Most of the visitors were college kids who had circulated (using a FAX Machine) a poster that said “Lake Chelan was The Place To Be” for the upcoming three-day Memorial Day weekend.
We had some time to prepare, so we asked for help from the King County Sheriff's Office and Washington State Patrol. We were able to bring in about 250 additional law enforcement officers, but it wasn’t enough. The kids drank and danced in the streets and made it impossible to get a vehicle through from Safeway to the Bowling Alley.
At least not a police car or ambulance. I drove the quarter mile to the park, but it took me an hour.
The worst thing was the way the kids just camped in people’s yards. Some of them even walked into people's homes uninvited, using bathrooms and eating food out of the refrigerator without asking permission.
Frightened grandmothers and other citizens would call dispatch, but it would take 30 minutes to get vehicles to the "scene of the crime."
By Saturday we knew we needed backup law enforcement on bicycles, because patrol cars would be impossible to navigate through the many other vehicles and people in the streets.
We brought all the extra bicycle cops we could find to assist our efforts at controlling the chaos.
The crowd wasn’t horribly unruly, but just wanted to party and paid no respect to private property or the laws.
We probably arrested 500 or more that first holiday and when the college students tried it again the next major holiday on the 4th of July, we had beefed up our law enforcement support with over 100 bicycle officers from Seattle and the National Guard to help with traffic control. The corner of Johnson and Columbia was just a 4-way flashing stop light back in the day.
By Labor Day the season-long party was over. We had controlled the crowds. An attempt was made by those same partiers the following Memorial Day weekend of 1987, but it was a bust.
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