In August 2019, Emmy Graham returned to her hometown to attend the 50th anniversary concert of the Woodstock Festival in Bethel, NY. In this episode, she talks to family members and friends regarding their experiences and shares her own impressions of what it was like to grow up in the place that held the famous Woodstock concert of 1969.
"...got teary eyed. So nostalgic and moving! So beautiful and well written and produced!" JL, Sydney, Australia
"This is sooo good! Awesome. So much here. History, fun, sad, personal but universal. The technical aspects of the podcast are great. Really clear and warm audio. Nice transitions. Fascinating that you grew up there. Your sense of loss upon returning really comes through. Resonates." DC, Ashland, OR
"I laughed, I cried, I laughed some more." JPG, Jeffersonville, NY
"All of your creations are top notch and deeply meaningful. Precious gifts." LD, York, ME
www.sacred-truths.com
In August 2019, Emmy Graham returned to her hometown to attend the 50th anniversary concert of the Woodstock Festival in Bethel, NY. In this episode, she talks to family members and friends regarding their experiences and shares her own impressions of what it was like to grow up in the place that held the famous Woodstock concert of 1969.
"...got teary eyed. So nostalgic and moving! So beautiful and well written and produced!" JL, Sydney, Australia
"This is sooo good! Awesome. So much here. History, fun, sad, personal but universal. The technical aspects of the podcast are great. Really clear and warm audio. Nice transitions. Fascinating that you grew up there. Your sense of loss upon returning really comes through. Resonates." DC, Ashland, OR
"I laughed, I cried, I laughed some more." JPG, Jeffersonville, NY
"All of your creations are top notch and deeply meaningful. Precious gifts." LD, York, ME
www.sacred-truths.com
Woodstock: Stories from Local Residents
By Emmy Graham
Voice of Glenn Wooddell: It was overwhelming, ya know! Just to have, like from here to the fence, like beyond that fence, 50,000 kids! We were that close, our stands were that close, and I can remember getting ice cream bars after we broke down and just throwing them, you know, saying, “Get back! Get Back!”
Voice of Matthew Graham: I was 14. I walked here from Jeffersonville, as far as I remember, the first day, with my friend Chris Tonjes. When I crested the hill right there at the four corners and looked out and all I could see as far as the horizon, was people in tents and I was a little scared, truthfully, I was afraid that I’d, ..who was in charge, this could all go wrong,
Voice of Helen Graham: It was 2:00 in the morning and these poor stoned critters would just stare at me and go, and look like this, and sometimes they’d call me “Lady” and sometimes they’d just stand there and stare. And I was behind my ice cream counter and I was getting nervous and I’d go, “Joan Baez is on! Joan Baez is on!”
Woodstock: Personal Reflections from Local Residents. This is Sacred Truths with Emmy Graham.
Cows. Fields. Milk. Manure. Country Roads. Tractors. Rolling Hills. Hay. Farmers. Rubber Boots. This is where it all begins. These are the foundations of my childhood. My father, who, like his father, was raised on a dairy farm in Sullivan County, New York and when I was growing up in the mid 1960s, he bred dairy cows for a living. As a very young child I joined my father on his visits to these farms around the county. I was his faithful companion, and loved making the rounds with him, visiting the farm animals, playing with dogs and cats, exploring haylofts and feed silos while he stopped at each farm to conduct his business.
My mother always said my father knew everybody in the county. He certainly knew every dairy farmer. Many of these farmers he visited daily or weekly and some he had known since their childhood school days together. These were farmers who at Christmas time, left gifts for my father: a bottle of whiskey, a brick of cheese, sitting on a hay bale in the middle aisle of their barn, with a red bow on it, so he wouldn’t miss it when he entered. In those December days, my father would return home at the end of the day, his arms full of gifts, shaking his head and smiling.
I knew many of the secret beauties tucked away in the confusing maze of the backcountry roads of Sullivan County, but even as a very small child, my heart was drawn to the simple beauty of Bethel, New York. Going to Bethel usually meant going to farms like Louie Komenchek’s place on Perry Road who had a fun haymow and a playful collie dog, or visiting Joyner’s Store on 17B and buying penny candy.
However, whenever my father directed the car down Hurd Road, a simple, narrow country road that passed John Gempler’s farm, among others, my senses peaked and I looked out at the surrounding fields with anticipation, as if they had something important to tell me. In particular, what I had felt when we drove down Hurd Road, was a certain sacredness, although I didn’t understand those feelings then. I longed to live in our own rustic farmhouse there, for it felt like home to me. Sometimes my father stopped the car at what we always called ‘the four corners’, the intersection of Hurd Road and West Shore Road and there was nothing I had ever known that compared to the silence and stillness of standing in the middle of that lonely intersection taking in the fields, the distant trees and old stone walls, where we never met another car.
When I tell people that I was at Woodstock in 1969 as a 6-year-old child, they often assume I went with my young hippie parents. But in fact, at that time my parents were in their 40s, somewhat conservative, and were skeptical and concerned about the festival that was coming to the town of Bethel, NY, which was part of their small, rural community. I’d been to Max Yasgur’s farm on 17B, the man who owned and leased the land for the festival, dozens of times as a young child and he of course knew my father well. Most kids my age in my region didn’t attend Woodstock. I probably wouldn’t have gone at all if it hadn’t been for both of my parents.
August 2019 was the 50th anniversary of the Woodstock Festival. The Bethel Woods Performing Arts Center, currently located on the site of the festival, hosted a weekend of events and concerts to commemorate the anniversary. My older brother Matthew and I planned to attend the event. We obtained tickets for the Saturday night concert featuring the Doobie Brothers and Santana. I travelled from my home in Ashland, Oregon, with my 13-year-old daughter, while my brother and his wife Katie and her sister Chris drove from Indiana.
I rented a car and took the entire month of August to explore New York State, my home state, with my daughter. I hadn’t lived in New York since the age of 18, when I left for college, but I’d returned many times over the years to visit family, but since living on the west coast, I hadn’t been back in almost 10 years. My daughter and I visited the Ithaca area and the Adirondacks and we had been visiting a friend in Yonkers the day we finally drove to Sullivan County and got on 17B in Monticello on our way to stay with family near Jeffersonville. We passed several active dairy farms that I had known as a kid and a number of farms I had known that were now collapsed and defunct. Our first stop was Joyner’s Store, where our journey to Woodstock begins, just a short distance from the festival site.
I’d been coming to Joyner’s store with my father since I could walk. However, the last time I had actually stepped foot in Joyner’s store, must have been when I was about 12, roughly 45 years ago. It is now called Bethel Country Store and Café but in 1969, it was owned and operated by Clara and Dick Joyner who lived above it in the upstairs apartment. Dick pumped gas and operated the post office in the back of the store and stocked shelves. Clara stood behind the cash register and the deli counter that was filled with meats and cheeses and ready-made salads. They were probably in their late 50s or early 60s then. The building itself was built in the late 19th century.
My daughter and I pulled into the parking lot of Bethel Country Store and Café. Getting out of the car, I sniffed a strong smell of cow manure coming from the farm across the street, a place I’d been to many times, reminding me immediately of my father. Today the small parking lot around the store was full. The outside of the store looked just the same: same stone steps and porch, same double red door.
Emmy: I have a memory of sitting on that stoop and eating a Table Talk pie with my father. Shall we go in and see what they’ve got?
Daughter: Sure.
Emmy: Oh, the doors are the same! And right there was the cooler for the Yoo Hoos! And right here in the center was all the penny candy. And there was the counter where Clara used to stand behind the counter.
Bell tingles.
Nothing could have prepared me for what I felt. In touching the door, the same door of my childhood, I felt the presence of my father. He lingered in this room. The tingling bell, the same windows with the view of the very same farm brought me back to myself as an eager 7-year-old delighted to pick out my penny candy, secure with my father, his smell a mixture of cigarettes and cow manure, his feet in his farm boots that had stood on this wooden floor so many times. This store, turned café, held the spirit of the Joyners, and it held my father. I burst into tears. I stood in the middle of the floor of the Bethel Country Store and Café and held my daughter and sobbed.
We decided to order scones from the counter and we went out to the porch to eat them. The porch was now tiny to me and I sat on the stoop just where my father and I had eaten our Table Talk pies all those years ago.
I had a ranking system for each farm I went to with my father, according to how interesting they were. High on my scale were farms with loving, playful dogs, friendly cats and kittens, or sheep, goats, or chickens. Max Yasgur’s farm, on 17B, and down the road from Joyner’s store, was my least favorite for he had nothing but cows. In fact, Max Yasgur didn’t own a farm, but had a dairy with over 600 head of cattle. The only redeeming factor of his farm was an office, where my father’s childhood friend, Ann Mages worked, and my father, who was very social, enjoyed popping into her office and chatting, and I would sneak sugar cubes from the coffee display and pop them in my mouth.
With the coming of the Woodstock festival, the number of cars coming in was so great, that 17B eventually came to a standstill, completely blocked with abandoned cars, and many of the back roads were impassible. In the evenings I heard my father talking on the phone to the concerned farmers in Bethel. Because of the traffic congestion, he could not drive to their farms and therefore was not able to breed their cows and they were concerned. I remember him saying, “I can’t get through! All the roads are blocked.” During the 3 days of the festival, and during the proceeding and days following, many of the farmers in Bethel could not get out of their driveways and no one could get in. Cows need to be milked twice a day. Once a day, a milk truck comes and takes the milk from each farm’s milk house. During the festival week, none of the farmers could get their milk out. It went to waste.
My mother, Helen Graham, was 41 years old in 1969. She and her friend, Glenn Wooddell, decided to get involved with the Woodstock festival. I had interviewed her in 1996, 3 years before her death, regarding her experiences at Woodstock. Here is her story from that interview.
HELEN GRAHAM: I can remember sitting on our front porch, looking at the newspaper, that was before the Woodstock Festival, and Glenn Wooddell said, “Are we going to read about this next Sunday in the paper or are we going to get involved?” and I said, “We are going to get involed!”
Glenn Wooddell was a family friend and neighbor who was in his early 20s at the time of the Woodstock festival. He lived down the road from us in an apartment at the Lake Jeff Hotel and he taught music at our high school in Jeffersonville. Glenn still lives in the area and is currently a long-term volunteer for the Bethel Woods Performing Arts Center. Here he talks about his experience during an interview I had with him during my NY visit in August 2019.
GLENN WOODDELL: So now I’m up at the house with your mom, and Helen and I are on the front porch and she was reading the papers and there was a big article about what was coming as far as “A Day in the Garden”, I don’t even know if they named it that. We looked at each other and I said, “Are we just gonna read about this in the Middletown Record or are we going to be a part of history?!”
HG: It’s all Glenn Wooddell’s fault that I ever went to Woodstock, and I was the oldest person in Woodstock, the OLDEST.
GW: So we went over; I don’t know who we talked to, but they put us to work hiring.
HG: So, both of us went over before the festival started and signed up for “Food for Love” which was a concession group and we were there for a couple of days, and I’m not quite sure what we were doing!
GW: Yes, but we hired for them. Yes! I did! We went up about two or three days before the actual weekend, for them, because I can see it from where Bethel Woods is, I can remember where our tables were. Or my table, a big long table, where people would come up with their applications and give them to me and I would talk to them. And it’s right there where the plaza and the walk is now in front of the Museum Building. Kind of.
So, Helen and I went over there and we, I think we talked and sat next to each other maybe even, and so we HIRED for them. These were employees, I think we had 14 or 15 food stations or food booths, and I ran, I managed 3 and Helen probably managed 2 or 3; we were like in a formation because we and we were close enough we could like look at each other and mouth, “Help!”
HG: They gave us sandwiches to eat at one point…
Emmy: Yeah,
HG: and this little character was following me around and he had a horn and a blanket. And every once in a while I’d hear, {imitates a trumpet} “Da doo! Da Doo!” And I’d go “Oh” behind my back and it was this little character following me around. And he was starving and I ate part of my sandwich and I gave him the rest. I think I had 2 sandwiches, something, and he was so glad.
GW: A couple of interesting, ah, recruits that wanted jobs with us. One of them was a little boy who followed Helen around with an old trumpet, did she talk about him? And, ah, he would just play it every now and then very loudly, it didn’t make any sense, he wasn’t playing any tune or anything. He wanted to work and he asked us questions. He was very unusual. (laughs) I don’t know how old he was, maybe, he had to be a teenager, how else would he have gotten there?
HG: And we ran into kids who had hitchhiked from Australia for heaven’s sake!
GW: I had a kid, a young person that came from Atlanta, and I had to take down, you know, for his application his home address, and I said, where did you live and he says on Peatchtree Avenue, and I said, “But where exactly do you live on Peachtree?” and he says just anywhere, I move around.
HG: The night of the festival, four of us drove into Woodstock and we parked the car and we were assigned various stations we were working for “Food for Love”. And I was in charge of an ice cream station and I had people working for me who were ex-convicts, these kids were saying, “we just got out of jail!”… and I said, “Oh, how nice.”
They had to get a token, or something, a coupon, something and they had to give money for the coupon and then they would redeem the coupon for an ice cream so we didn’t have to handle any money.
GW: We were concerned that we were going to run out of food and we did. Very Quickly. You had to have food and drinking water! And so we were concerned about that.
HG: (big sigh) Well, it went on and went on and went on and then it started to rain, oh, it was horrible and mud all over. It was 2:00 in the morning and these poor stoned critters would just stare at me and go, and look like this, and sometimes they’d call me “Lady” and sometimes they just stand there and stare. And I was behind my ice cream counter and I was getting nervous and I’d go, “Joan Baez is on! Joan Baez is on!”
GW: I went back to the trailers for “Food for Love”, so I think there were 2 big trailers, several times, and our bosses, they were not in any condition to talk to me about any kind of current problem. So then I think to myself, “Glenn, you’re own your own!” and of course it all fell apart very quickly.
HG: So, finally, I said, “This is ridiculous.” and I pulled the plug, I didn’t care if the ice cream melted or not. Crawled out under the stand and then, the four of us got together and we started to walk home in the rain!
GW: It was overwhelming, ya know! Just to have, like from here to the fence, like beyond that fence, 50,000 kids! We were that close, our stands were that close, and I can remember getting ice cream bars after we broke down and just throwing them, you know, saying, “Get back! Get Back!”
HG: We shared the afghan and we put it over our heads as we were walking because we had to walk all the way to Yasgur’s farm and then we got to Yasgur’s farm it was about 3:30 in the morning and I called Dad to come and get us and he was asleep and I said, “How can you be asleep at a time like this, I could be raped, mugged, killed, and you’re sleeping!”
GW: So Helen and I had to get out of there. So, you know, when we walked, Em, we were on 17B, we finally got there, well everything had stopped and there were just miles of cars and trucks that had stopped and bodies, Bodies! You had to walk over bodies!
EM: Sleeping!
GW: Yes! But your dad had routes around that area, he knew all the back roads, if there was anything to know about back roads. And so, but he took the road down and we ended up out over by Yasgur’s farm. I think he picked us up on 17B, yeah!
HG: So anyway, dad, poor dad, got out of bed, came and got us.
GW: And that’s just almost where the nightmare stopped. I can remember the first night coming back and getting in to Lake Jeff and so glad, that was oh,,, (trails off)
HG: We went back to Jeffersonville, and believe it or not, I opened the door and I kissed the refrigerator and I said, “I will never call Jeffersonville DULL, again!”
The story continues. Bill Orr from the local radio station, WVOS, came over the next morning to interview them. As a result of this, the Lion’s Club delivered blankets to Glenn’s door and asked him to distribute them to the kids at the festival. Glenn returned to the festival, but my mother did not. There are many stories at the Bethel Woods museum of how local people and farmers came together to provide food, blankets, and sometimes a shower for these kids.
The Monday following the festival, I returned with my mother and my other brother, Jeff, to pick up the car that they had to abandon. I have vivid memories of the mud and the debris and the stench. My mother told us to look for souvenirs. We found nothing of value, but in the end my mother took home a wine bottle and turned it into a candle holder.
I also remember returning to the business trailer with my father on another day, which had been set up somewhere near the proximity of the current Bethel Woods museum, to pick up my mother’s paycheck. I have vivid memories of walking on boards that someone had placed on top of the mud to help people navigate to the business trailers. I was gripping my father’s hand and doing my best not to slip off and into the mud.
Back to the 50th Anniversary. On the day of the Santana concert, my daughter and I met my brother Matthew and his wife and sister-in-law at my cousin’s house, who lives just a few minutes from the festival. Then we all drove in one car taking the familiar back roads to, what we always called the four corners, the intersection of Hurd Road and West Shore Road, where we were directed to park in a field with hundreds of other cars.
Matthew Graham: I was 14. I walked here from Jeffersonville, as far as I remember, the first day, with my friend Chris Tonjes. When I crested the hill right there at the four corners and looked out and all I could see as far as the horizon was people in tents and I was a little scared, truthfully, I was afraid that I’d,..who was in charge, this could all go wrong, there had been such violence in the country for so long. It was a little scary. And like I said I felt like I was being sucked into this caldron of people, funneled into it, but after a little while, the mood was very loving and friendly and festive, and so, it went away pretty quickly.
This is my older brother Matthew who was only 14 years old when he went to the Woodstock Festival. From where we were standing, we could see the dip in the knoll where the original stage once stood next to West Shore Road. I remember it well for it remained for many months, if not years, after the festival. As we walked toward the concert entrance, my brother told me more of his story.
MG: All right, at the four corners here, the first afternoon I was here, or maybe the second, that field to the left of the road was roped off for helicopters, they were bringing in performers. And at one point these great big army helicopters came in, and people all around me, older than I was, started freaking out thinking the army had come to put an end to this. (laughs) It was a very frightening moment, and someone on the stage announced to everybody, “Do not panic, it’s the national guard and they’re bringing in medical supplies and food.” And that was a great relief, but people really thought (chuckles) they were pulling the plug. Enough fun.
My earliest memory of the Woodstock Festival was when people started appearing in Max Yasgur’s hay fields. People were parking their cars along the sides of these back-country roads and some of them were camping. I had never seen people in these fields before. The most astonishing site was when we passed the familiar ponds on Hurd Road and I saw naked people swimming in them. No one ever swam in those ponds, and no one ever swam naked. My father shook his head and called them Hippies. At age 6 I had a vague sense that a Hippie was someone with long hair who swam naked in ponds. With each passing day, the crowds grew larger. I had no idea all these people were here for a concert.
Matthew Graham: Yeah, this commune from the Southwest, called the Hog Farmers, they were a real hippie commune. Um, they were hired to act as security, but not in the normal sense of security, they just, through the forest and through the trees there and up on this little knoll, and they had their camp and they had a little stage and they had a food kitchen and they had like animals and, yeah, they made a lot of food. But they just kept a sense of calm and humor to everything and they were very funny and they also had tents to help people with bad drug trips and things. They had like these jungle gyms they made out of natural stuff-
Emmy: I remember that! Wooden beams!
MG: and it stayed here forever!
Emmy: Yes, that was there forever! I remember that!
The five of us approached the entrance way to Bethel Woods to make our way with thousands of other people, to the concert.
Crowd noise.
Emmy: Thank you, do we get chairs up here?
The venue was surprisingly large, with well-planned walkways, and concession stands. We rented lawn chairs and the 5 of us found a spot in the lawn section. The show was sold out which meant that 20,000 people were seated in the audience. Close to 400,000 people attended the original Woodstock festival. It was hard to fathom how so many people made their way to these quiet fields 50 years ago.
Directly across from the entrance to Bethel Woods is the long straight driveway that once led down to John Gempler’s farm. This was a frequent stop for me and my father. Today, the barn is no longer there. It was in that barn that one Saturday morning as a second grader I saw a dead cow. The following Monday morning I reported my findings to my second-grade teacher, Mary Gempler who was John’s mother. She only chuckled. John and his wife are now long gone from that place and in what used to be John Gempler’s corn field is now a paved parking lot. This made me sad, but the saddest sight of all, for me, was the double yellow line down the center of Hurd road, what was once a patched, quiet country road.
After the Santana concert, as people were packing up and exiting the Bethel Woods Performing Arts Center, the 5 of us sat in the dark and listened while the event organizers broadcast a recording of Jimi Hendrix playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” as he had at Woodstock. Thousands of cars were all trying to get out of the parking lot at once. We took our time getting to our car. I was driving so in an effort to avoid the mass migration towards 17B, I turned left onto West Shore Road. These back roads were completely dark with no street lights, only our car lights shown the way. It reminded me of driving around when I was in high school late at night after dropping a friend off at his home. These were the same roads where, as a teenager, my brothers taught me how to drive a stick shift. After all these years, and after living in numerous cities and rural areas throughout the world, while I couldn’t remember exactly which way to turn, these roadways seemed to be etched in my brain. I drove on instinct. At each intersection I had no idea where we were and could see absolutely no landmarks in the darkness, but without hesitation, I knew which way to turn. Right, then left then right again brought us back on to Hurd Road and in the direction of my cousin’s house. Each dip and curve was familiar for as a child I did not learn my way around by knowing street names, but by knowing landmarks: trees, rocks, hills and dips in the road. There’s no doubt about it; these roads always bring me back to my father.
The next day, I continued to talk with my brother, Matthew, about his reflections.
Emmy: How did it all start for you, how did you even hear about the Woodstock Festival, do you remember?
Matthew Graham: I don’t. But it’s interesting, in a time with no Internet, um, everybody knew about it all across the world, really. I think the way of communication then was underground radio stations that would advertise it. And there was hundreds of underground newspapers that advertised it, and I think that and word of mouth, it just spread. How did I hear about it? I think…(chuckles) I don’t know. I think hearing it advertised, because we could get some kind of hippie radio stations up here from New York City. And I think I probably heard about it there.
And then when they decided to move from Walkill, I think they were originally, down here, there was ads, you know all over the place. Everybody knew about it. Like I told you I actually bought two tickets ahead of time, um, I don’t know where I bought them, but I had them and of course, they never collected them when we got there so. And we just wanted to see what was going on and you get kind of sucked into it and it was just fabulous walking around and seeing all these interesting people and sights and stuff.
But if you look at the pictures you realize that even in ‘69, most of those kids look like college kids today. You know, even the really long hair and beards. You didn’t see, you know what I mean, if you look at the photos, that didn’t really kick in until the early ‘70s.
Most of those people didn’t look like your typical hippie YET, you know, but there was some seriously hippies there, like the commune people and stuff, but mainly it was like college kids, I think for the most part.
But I was thinking last night at the concert I was thinking about this a lot and… I,, at 14, I don’t, I don’t think my consciousness was developed yet, but I was certainly very aware of the Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s movement, and the Anti-war movement, of major cultural changes and shifts going on in the country. I was terrified of the war, and of being drafted. Um, but there was an excitement in the air that made me just want to get out and go places more than anything else.
The whole Hippie Peace and Love thing kind of embarrassed me a little bit, you know, that wasn’t that interesting to me. I mean, it was a nice concept but it seemed very naïve. Now how at 14 I could feel that way, I don’t know, but I, I, you know, I feel that way now, looking back, but the sense of adventure and a change appealed to me. So I wouldn’t say going there was life changing, it was life affirming more than any- okay, yeah, this is kind of the direction, you know, this kind of individual bohemian life that I kind of wanted to live was solidified there. I knew from then on, I wasn’t going to, you know, get married and have 3 kids and a house in the suburbs. That wasn’t going to be my life.
Emmy: Yeah, and what’s interesting is that this area is quite conservative, really, and yet – so this amazing musical event happened practically in your back yard, and as you said, you really weren’t that interested in the music itself, is that right, personally?
MG: Well, the music represented the culture. I didn’t know enough about it. I didn’t know who many of the performers were. It was wonderful background noise for the event, you know. (chuckles)
Emmy: (laughs) Right. Did you know at the moment, when you were at Woodstock that this would be such a significant event?
MG: I think so. It was one of those things, that the moment you were in the middle of it, you thought, “Wow, this is big.” And this is, this is..,.. I don’t think anyone knew it was WOODSTOCK as we know it now yet, but I think people were quite aware that something very special was happening.
But again, last night in my crabby, you know, old age, I was thinking in some ways though, it was such a - everybody was so proud of themselves for what happened. It went smoothly, it could have gone terribly wrong. This country was torn apart. Things could have gone badly. I think there’s too much patting on the back sometimes, and in some ways; it was a lot of privileged white middle class kids having a big party and you know, getting away with it. You know, there was that feeling about it, too. When I think back on it now. Like I told you last night, those weren’t the kids that were suffering racial injustice, they weren’t being drafted and killed. They were having a good time and getting away with being, being kids. Mom and Dad weren’t going to slap them. Again, I was thinking this last night.
What made me feel kind of sad last night was how all those noble if naïve ideas and ideals that were developing in 1969: Justice and social justice and economic equality and sexual equality that were so important, and I’m thinking 50 years later, you know, it’s almost like we stepped up one step and stepped back 2 steps. There’s something kind of sad, I felt last night, that all those great, again if naïve things, never really came to pass. I mean, they did to a certain extent, but it’s amazing how fast the culture can turn around again. And that kind of made me feel a little sad, like, you know, 50 years, what’s been accomplished?
Emmy: Do you have any sense of how somebody from Dad’s generation, like Dad, how did he feel about all this, do you have any sense of that?
MG: Oh, yeah, a bunch of hippie draft dodgers, um, lazy bums, (chuckles) you know. People of his generation, I mean, you know, the generation was split, there was certainly a real divide between generations, and anger and hatred and, um, fighting. I think he was just disgusted by the younger generation, and the younger generation was disgusted with his generation, like you know, this failed, and we have to change the world and people really thought I think, that they could change the world.
Emmy: And so he just, uh, was not very supportive of this whole festival?
MG: Not at all, not at all! I remember him telling me that if I was drafted, and I, because I had made plans to go to Canada, and we had huge fights. I remember him telling me I’d be.. he would disown me, (chuckles) and I thought I was going to lose the fortune, oh no!, It was like really kind of funny, like, what does that mean? But he was very adamant that you know, if your country asked you to do something, no matter what, you did it.
Emmy: He changed his mind, later!
MG: That’s where I was going! It’s kind of interesting that probably by 1970 he was turning against the war. You know, he started to see it for what a waste of lives and money it was, and I think the thing that really changed him which is kind of funny was when Nixon bombed Hanoi on Christmas Eve and I think it was Christmas Eve, 1970 and Dad thought, that’s wrong, (chuckles) you don’t bomb people on Christmas Eve not realizing the Vietnamese weren’t even Christians, but, that, that right there, made him feel like it was immoral, finally.
I think that, that, and a lot of people older than I was at the time, realized this too, it seemed like a gathering of tribes in a way, and it seemed like, gosh there are an awful lot of people that kind of look and feel and act the same way, that we’re not isolated groups of weirdos, and there was this whole generation and that generation could have some power and could make some changes possibly. But on the other hand, you have to realize, it wasn’t a serious thing, I mean, you know, this was just a party. And I remember, I don’t know, I guess people needed a break, people wanted a party, people wanted a non-political event, which was fine, but the seriousness of the politics at the time, I think, should have overshadowed any big party sense, not that you shouldn’t have a party, but it was serious times for many people.
Emmy: Thank you, Matthew.
MG: You’re welcome, Emmy.
After the Woodstock Festival of 1969, life quickly returned to normal for the residents. The crowds dispersed, children went back to school in September, and life for the farmers and residents went on as usual. The Joyners retired soon after and sold their store to a young couple, and two years later Max Yasgur sold his farm and moved to Florida. A plaque commemorating the event was erected at the festival site, otherwise the fields remained empty for many years. Eventually, a local resident named Allen Gary purchased the land and created the current Bethel Woods Museum and Performing Arts Center on Hurd Road.
What was it like to grow up in the Catskill Mountains of New York State, this place that held the Woodstock Festival? Well, my brother’s poem sums it up pretty well. Here is my brother Matthew Graham, reading his poem “Catskill Lullaby”.
“Catskill Lullaby”
For Jordan Smith
Something was always for sale –-
Firewood, snowmobiles, shotguns--
In those old mountains
Still savage in their slow decline.
There was always snow, jumper cables,
And old, cold cars filled with exhaust
And cigarette smoke.
The nights were long dreams
Punctuated by the cries
Of the Erie Lackawanna
Pounding through frozen crossings.
Jack-lighted deer hung gutted
From the hand-hewn crossbeams
Of collapsing barns near the forgotten history
Of stone walls and the foundations of farmhouses.
In spring, the mountain runoff rushed
Through the washes and gullies,
Past clumps of rusted rhododendron
On its way to the Atlantic
Where, in my sleepless heart,
I ached to be.