As you might have heard, longtime Seattle historian/activist/political operative Walt Crowley passed away Friday at age 59.

I’d known he was going in for a second round of cancer surgery this week, after having already lost his larynx in February. He suffered a massive stroke while recovering from this latest operation. Despite already being in Virginia Mason Medical Center at the time of the stroke, physicians could do nothing for him.

The last time I’d seen him was three or four weeks ago. He’d shown up at the Two Bells with some longtime friends. He conversed with me by writing on an Etch-A-Sketch-like children’s erasable screen he carried on a necklace. I agreed to consider producing a book for his HistoryInk, the print arm of HistoryLink, the massive nonprofit local-history web site he’d cofounded. (I’d already written a couple of small essays for the site.)

I’d also been to some of Crowley’s legendary Christmas Eve house parties. I remember at one of them insistantly telling a woman Crowley’s age that no, people like myself who were too young to be “From The Late Sixties” were people too. Crowley himself, bless him, had no problem with that novel concept.

I’d first met Crowley in the late 1980s, around the same time he was serving as a dueling commentator on KIRO-TV with another former acquaintance of mine, John Carlson. Around this time, Crowley boasted of having personally saved the Bill of Rights in his Belltown apartment, by forming a committee to stop the Washington State Legislature from going along with a Reagan-era right-wing drive for a new Constitutional convention.

A scion of the Crowley Maritime tugboat family (though he didn’t like to mention it), Walt first gained citywide attention as a hippie-era activist, spokesperson, journalist, and cofounder of the underground paper Helix. He remained socially and politically active all his life. He worked in various capacities for various local Democrats, and once lost his own race for a City Council seat. He served on countless boards and committees. He was big in the drives to save the Paramount and Moore theaters, the Eagles Auditorium (now A Contemporary Theater), and the Blue Moon Tavern.

But like all too many of his and subsequent “rebel” generations, his antagonisms against conservatives never quite extended to that quintessential conservative big business, the tobacco business. In recent years his powerful, fun-loving voice became a raspy whisper, before it disappeared altogether.

Crowley will be remembered by many people, online and in print, over the coming days and weeks. Let me simply remember him as one of Seattle’s most important keepers of history, as well as an historic figure himself.

Here are further thoughts by two Crowley friends, Michael Hood and (in the comments) Patrick McRoberts.

And here’s Crowley’s official bio on HistoryLink.