Some fans who will be watching the Seahawks victory parade today are remembering another time when the city turned out to celebrate a major sports victory.
It was June of 1979 and the Seattle SuperSonics had just won the NBA championship. Seattle was a sleepier place in 1979. Starbucks and Microsoft were not yet household names and Amazon.com didn’t exist. But some fans, including Bryan Gunnersall, believe the Seahawks parade today will be similar to the Sonics parade he watched 35 years ago.
"Imagine your craziest event and I think it will probably be four times as big as that," he said.
At the age of 16, Gunnersall was a sophomore at Seattle Prep. He remembers that school was let out and he and nearly 500 classmates walked to the parade from Capitol Hill.
"It was just nuts. I’ve never seen that many people together in my life and that was just a picture of downtown," he said.
Now, it's Gunnersall's son who is a sophomore at Seattle Prep. Largely because of Gunnersall’s prodding, the school will once again close so that students can attend a downtown victory parade. It's something Gunnersall says his son will never forget.
