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Hundreds of people came out on a chilly Saturday morning to exchange their guns for $100 and $200 Amazon.com gift cards in the first guy buyback event held in Seattle in 20 years. People stood in line holding rifles in camouflage cases and shot guns wrapped in blankets among other things. Traffic clogged up city streets near the parking lot where the event took place.

KUOW recently began its seventh decade on the air in Seattle. All this week we’ve been looking back at the history of radio in the Puget Sound Region. Today, Feliks Banel explores how local public radio has evolved over that last 30 years as a result of changes in commercial radio and the rise of national programming.

Runners in a 5K race will wind through the grounds of the Monroe Correctional Complex on Sunday to remember Corrections Officer Jayme Biendl. Tuesday will mark the two years since Biendl was found strangled in the chapel at the prison.

The second statewide public hearing this week on the future of the marijuana industry was held in Seattle. Like the earlier one in the week in Olympia, this one had overflow crowds. The Seattle hearing was filled with people who have grown marijuana for years and want to go legit.

A preliminary report from the Washington State Hospital Association shows that emergency room  visits by frequent users fell by 23 percent between June and October of last year.

KUOW recently began its seventh decade on the air in Seattle.  In the second installment of a three-part series exploring the history of KUOW, Feliks Banel takes us back to the station’s early years before pledge drives and NPR, and then on to the rise of public radio in the 1970s.

In the pre-dawn hours this Friday, hundreds of volunteers will fan out across King County to look for people sleeping in alleys, parks, shopping centers and city busses. The effort  is part of the county’s annual One Night Count, which aims to get an annual head-count of people who are homeless.

It’s been more than 60 years since KUOW first went on the air in Seattle, but local radio history goes back a bit further than that.  In the first installment of a three part series, Feliks Banel has the story of what radio sounded like around here in the years before KUOW.