Spirit of famed festival turns 50 today

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the start of the iconic counterculture gathering of a half-million people on Max Yasgur’s farm in upstate New York known simply as “Woodstock.”

The Woodstock Music and Art Fair was held Aug. 15 to 18, 1969, on an expansive alfalfa field in Bethel, New York.

As a senior intern spending the summer of 1979 in Gainesville, Florida, I attended an outdoor showing of the movie, “Woodstock,” to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the music festival. It was the first time I had seen it, and at age 22 I was captivated. Besides the terrific music, I better understood the spirit of the occasion.

How we already got to 50 years is a little baffling and disconcerting!

I was a 12-year-old kid growing up in a middle class neighborhood in Fort Dodge in the summer of 1969, playing for the city champion Clinic Pharmacy baseball team coached by a St. Edmond player we all looked up to. (Not a parent. In fact, we played most of our games in the afternoons when many parents were working. Now I wonder if that was by design?)

My older sister, who was already a year out of college, had introduced me to the Beatles and some other popular music of the time, so I had a taste of the “movement” underway among young Americans. But, she was not what I would classify as an activist or protester in her days of becoming a Spanish teacher at Luther College in the 1960s, so at my age I wasn’t fully aware of the social upheaval sweeping the nation.

I just sensed a lot was going on.

And, that year, there certainly was. Richard Nixon was beginning his first term as president. John Lennon married Yoko Ono in March and the beginning of the end of the Beatles was unfolding, announced publicly early in 1970.

Sirhan Sirhan was convicted of the 1968 assassination of U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy. Also a year earlier, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, and I remember even at that age where I was when I heard the news. I was on the front steps of Scott Boomer’s house on 17th Avenue North. I remember adults being very sad, and almost afraid, at what was happening in this country.

(I’ll refrain from drawing parallels to the current environment today. You can draw your own conclusions.)

Kennedy’s brother, Sen. Ted Kennedy, drove a car off a wooden bridge into a pond on July 18, 1969. He escaped, but passenger Mary Jo Kopechne did not survive. At 12, I just knew it looked like he screwed up and people were watching what would happen.

Two days later, the big news of the year took place as Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong took man’s first steps on the moon. I was in a different friend’s house up the street on 16th Avenue North watching that take place, and I remember being amazed that a missile I saw take off on TV a few days earlier was now on that yellow sphere in the sky. It seemed surreal.

Also inspired by that moment was a young Peggy Whitson in rural Ringgold County, which led to her own historical career as a U.S. astronaut that we’ve chronicled on these pages.

The following month included both the Manson family killings in Los Angeles as well as Woodstock. Later, the upstart New York Mets beat the Baltimore Orioles in the 1969 World Series after blowing past the Cubs in the final weeks of the season.

A series of mass demonstrations took place on Oct. 15 across the country calling for an end to the Vietnam War.

It was indeed a tumultuous time.

But, what I vaguely remember about Woodstock, and came to understand in more detail later, was a spirit of union, almost a collective spirit of how to live a better life than the one filled with so much conflict. (Yes there was nudity and illegal drug use. It wasn’t utopia in many people’s minds, I get that.)

As participants jammed together on that hillside to enjoy the music of established icons and emerging stars such as Jimi Hendrix, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Janis Joplin, Carlos Santana, Grateful Dead and Crosby, Stills and Nash, there were very few problems. This was despite the lack of food and sanitary restroom facilities for the crowd that mushroomed without the help of today’s social media. (The number of facilities provided were planned to serve a crowd of 60,000.)

State police releases later showed that from a weekend of hundreds of thousands of people gathered together, including a massive 17-mile traffic jam on a two-lane upstate road, there were only 109 arrests over the three days. All but four were for drugs and there were no reported instances of violence at all. (Good luck trying to recreate that scene today!)

So, 50 years later, maybe we can remember the spirit of those people gathered in a field in a spirit of peace and music.

Those in their 20s then are now in their 70s. I’m hoping we can learn from those who are left from that “half a million strong,” as Joni Mitchell sang in her anthem melody, “Woodstock.”

If someone is showing the Woodstock movie tonight or this weekend, take a look. (There's a good PBS documentary on Woodstock on Netflix.) An attempt to hold a Woodstock 50 concert festival fell through. But, there are still lasting lessons from those free spirits of 1969.

As a collective humanity we can do better. It’s been proven.

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Twitter: @larrypeterson

Email: lpeterson@crestonnews.com