Forty years ago this summer, Woodstock was the place to be…or so the media and fading memories of today’s baby boomers would have you believe. Peter Gordon, who spent summers in the Catskills not far from the Bethel, NY site of the Woodstock Music & Arts Festival, remembers it all quite differently.
By Peter M. Gordon
The first thing I remember about that summer was the endless rain. Days and days of it left streams swollen and mud everywhere. The sun barely peeped through the clouds the entire month of August. Then I remember the refugees clogging the roads, hungry, buying food when they could, begging when they couldn’t. The entire county felt like it had been visited by a plague of soggy locusts with tie-dyed shirts and jeans. Abandoned cars blocked the shoulder for miles up and down the highways and back roads, as the pilgrims grimly trudged on.
The media coverage in Sullivan County was akin to that of a major disaster. I remember reports of starving, malnourished bodies rushed to emergency rooms, and wild uncorroborated stories of bulldozers trying to move immense piles of garbage running over teenagers in sleeping bags. Tales of violence rape, and drug abuse abounded. It seemed like hell on earth. That’s how I remember Woodstock.
During the summer of ’69 my family stayed, as we did for several years before and after, at B & K bungalow colony on old Route 17 on the outskirts of Monticello, New York. Sullivan County in the Catskills was still a prime vacation destination for New York residents. It contained resorts from grand hotels like the Concord and Grossingers to low end motels where air conditioning was still considered a novelty. In those days, in our colony, wives either didn’t have a job or worked for the school system so they could take the summer off. Fathers worked in the city, drove up on the weekends to spend time with the family, get drunk on Saturday night, and go back to the city.
Our colony sat on a piece of land facing Old Route 17, a two lane road that was once the main drag through the Catskills resort area. On the other side of the colony was the elevated span of the Quickway, the new route 17 New York State had built just a few years ago. Both those roads ran directly to Bethel, home of Woodstock. We could hike from our colony to the border of Bethel in 15 minutes.
I don’t remember hearing anything about the music festival a few miles down the road earlier in the summer. I was only 12 at the time and much more interested in the fortunes of the Mets, who were playing great baseball for the first time in my life. Even so, when the first hippies started driving by on Route 17, occasionally stopping to buy milk or bread at our colony’s store, I made sure I saw them. Mom and Dad had warned me about these cowards who were afraid to fight for their country like Dad did during World War II. They didn’t look that dangerous to me with their long hair (boys and girls) and colorful outfits. I thought they were cool.
Suddenly one day in August there were thousands of them, all going to Woodstock. Parents kept a close watch on their kids, particularly the older ones, for fear the hippies would seduce them with drugs and free sex. Some of the teenage counselors that stayed there during the summer did get permission to go and set out in a blue station wagon with sleeping bags and a cooler. They came back a few hours later. They gave up. It was just too hard to get close to the music. I thought Woodstock was a big bust – the joke was on all those poor hungry hippies. Imagine my surprise when I learned it defined a generation.
I’ve read a lot of media tributes to Woodstock during this 40th Anniversary Year. I wish I had a dollar for every news anchor that said, “if you remember the sixties you probably weren’t there.” . If you were there, you were probably muddy, cold and hungry for most of it; if you didn’t make it you spent the weekend living in your car.
After Woodstock the hippies went back to their college, jobs, and families and lived their lives. Unfortunately, we did not see the great outpouring of peace and love that Woodstock supposedly promised. The real lesson of Woodstock was that music festivals could attract big crowds. Better organized promoters who planned for large crowds could make a lot of money. Bonaroo, Burning Man, and even the Warp Tour are the real legacies of Woodstock today.
Woodstock was really the end of an era. The gentle smoke of pot was giving way to harder drugs like cocaine and heroin. The bungalow colony era was ending, too. Mothers were getting full time jobs, and couldn’t afford to spend the summer away from work. With two incomes, families could afford more exotic vacations, and pretty soon the Catskill resorts became ghost towns, waiting for the miracle of casino gambling or other schemes to revive them.
Woodstock is probably the best known example of the sixties’ generation penchant for self-absorption. I plan to celebrate 1969 by remembering the Mets triumph and man’s landing on the moon.
Peter M. Gordon is a writer, public speaker, and media consultant.