Nearly 10,000 people marched from Capitol Hill's Volunteer Park to Westlake Center on Sunday October 6, in opposition to impending war with Iraq. As with most Seattle protests, there were huge paper mache puppets, protesters on stilts, and giant banners with quirky slogans. But the typical Seattle protest atmosphere--younger people clad in costumes or black bandannas--was notably absent in the crowd.

It was more common to see parents pushing children in strollers, or older professional types in jeans who said they hadn't ever been to a protest before.

"At a lot of protests the diehard activists are there, the 'Seattle 200,' the usual folks," said one longtime protest junkie. "But in Sunday's protest it was all across the board. People I would assume had never participated in protests in their life. Middle class station wagon kids-in-the-stroller types."

Besides the WTO protests in 1999, Sunday's event was the largest local protest in memory; only about 3,000 people protested in 1991 on the eve of the Gulf War. (On Sunday, huge crowds rallied in other cities around the country--over 20,000 in New York, 6,000 in Portland, and 8,000 in San Francisco).

Surprisingly, it was a new and inexperienced group that put Seattle's peace march together, gathering thousands of people downtown for a rally without any arrests or property damage--a rarity for recent large protests in Seattle. The protest organizers--a group formed earlier this year called Not In Our Name, which is part of a nationwide coalition opposed to war in Iraq--admit they didn't know exactly what they were doing. "None of us had experience," explains NION spokesperson Jennifer Kissinger. She says the group started planning the march about a month ago, and enlisted protest veterans in the last few weeks. "We tapped into the people who are already involved," she says.

With that help, Sunday's event went off without a hitch. The crowd was much bigger than event organizers or police anticipated, and there were fewer cops on duty than for most marches--but everything went according to plan, police and organizers said.

West Precinct Captain Mike Sanford was surprised by the large crowd's composition. "At most protests you see 30 to 40 people in masks," Sanford explains. "But at this [rally] there were very few people dressed like that. It was overwhelmingly--for lack of a better term--more normal-looking people, and people with their kids, older people."

Activist Howard Gale, part of another new anti-war group, Sound Nonviolent Opponents of War, credits NION's coordination with other groups and with police as a big reason so many people turned out on Sunday. "People were not going to go [to the rally] if they thought it was going to be confrontational. People simply would have stayed home," Gale says. "That's what the organizers did in an incredible way. They worked really hard to make sure the peacekeeping was organized."

But Kissinger shrugs off the praise, taking the opportunity instead to plug NION's anti-war message. The reason so many people--and such a high number of protest newcomers--joined the march, she says, is thanks to the president's impending war. "We have to credit George Bush. He's making people feel like they're terrorists or unpatriotic if they question our government," she explains. "It's okay to come out, you're not unpatriotic."

amy@thestranger.com