My parents, Al and Ethel, may have been the only married couple at Woodstock who didn’t take drugs. They were covering the festival for the newspaper my father ran, the Middletown NY Times Herald-Record — the only paper in the world to publish daily stories, witnessed from the ground, for which, they were told, they almost won the Pulitzer Prize. In a Huffington Post piece, my mother explains just how that happened:
Al had hired a courier to bring exposed film and hard copy back to the newsroom in Orange County — no laptops in 1969. That motorcycle spent 3 days snaking through the miles of stalled, sometimes gas-less parked vehicles that were jammed ditch to ditch.
She also has fascinating stories of how my friend’s father, Ed Silvers, “the local Professional Engineer hired by the promoters to turn 600 farm acres into a festival venue,” helped avert crisis for the otherwise poorly planned event.
You can also read the remembrance by my oldest brother, Dave, published in the Times Herald-Record here, which has a lot more coverage of the 40th anniversary here.
No relevance to climate change, but an original slant on this slice-of-Americana story.