NEW YORK, AUGUST 18
There was relief today when a camp-out involving twice the number of forces engaged in the Battle of Gettysberg broke out on the country town of Bethel, New York, and went home.
Over 300,000 hippies, rockers, pot people, and soul people converged over the weekend on 600 acres rented out to them for $50,000 by a dairy farmer who believes "we older people have to do more than we have done if the generation gap is to be closed".
The occasion was something demurely called the Woodstock Music and Art Fair. It was, in fact, a pop festival, which the natives hoped would end all pop festivals. No prophecy was too dire for the residents of the small towns nearby, who feared that Farmer Yasgur was inviting on his neighbours a rural version of the Chicago Democratic Convention riots that appalled the country just one year ago.
There would be, he was told, wholesale pot smoking at best, heroin at worst, an ocean of garbage, universal bad manners, an orgy of love-ins, and probably a wild and bloody encounter with the police.
It was figured by the festival's young sponsors that 90 per cent of the nodding, swaying listeners were indeed "grooving on the sounds" with the help of marijuana. One youth died from an overdose of heroin and another was accidentally killed by a truck.
Two babies were safely delivered, and there were four known miscarriages. About eighty arrests were made without fuss on drug charges, and 400 were treated for "bad trips".
But these casualties still left 296,000 or more in pretty good shape and incurable high spirits. The closest sizeable town is Monticello, and it had only 25 police, whose chief remarked at the end: "Notwithstanding the personality, the dress, and their ideas they were the most courteous, considerate, and well-behaved group of kids I have ever been in contact with."
After a day of heat and flapping wet winds, a storm broke and garbage came slithering down the hills like lava. The sponsors begged the thousands to take shelter. At last, however, the skies were washed clear and a quarter million or so of the undefeated gathered and smoked and cheered and rocked to Janis Joplin, Sly and the Family Stone, Credence Clear Water Revival, Jefferson Airplane, and other bizarre combinations.
By last night the hippies were high on rhetoric as well as pot. "A miracle of unification," cried one. "It was," echoed an eloquent female of the species, "like, well, you know, I mean, great, I mean beautiful, because even though the facilities were, like you know, bad, the kids and all were great."
Alistair Cooke