Effort to gather Woodstock goers' stories before they all die
Curators from the Museum At Bethel Woods are traveling the length and breadth of the country gathering stories and memories from people who attended the iconic 1969 Woodstock festival.
Half a century ago, 450,000 people descended on a small town in upstate New York for three days of 'music, mud, and memories' at a festival that would come to define the 1960s.
Now, as attendees of the iconic 1969 Woodstock festival age and their numbers dwindle, museum curators are bringing them back together to gather their oral histories of the event.
Despite its name, the fabled music festival actually took place in the tiny village of Bethel, 60 miles south west of Woodstock.
An estimated 450,000 teenagers and young adults descended on a swath of land owned by dairy farmer Max Yasgur to attend an 'Aquarian Exposition' promising 'three days of peace, love and music' from August 15 to 17 1969.
With most of the attendees now in their 70s and 80s and many already dead, the festival museum at Bethel Woods is immersed in a five-year project to sift facts from legends and collect firsthand Woodstock memories before they fade away.
The quest to gather memories
Bethel Woods museum curators have traveled the length and breadth of the country from nursing homes to community centers searching for and meeting with Woodstock attendees.So far they have gathered over 500 people's testimonies using techniques similar to WWII historians.
It's important to meet people in person, Neal Hitch, senior curator and director of the Museum At Bethel Woods, said.
'We had to go to people where they are. If you just call someone on the phone, they aren't quite sure what to say when we ask you to tell us about these personal, private memories from a festival when they may have been 18 or 19.'
Their project began in 2020, with $235,000 in grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services - enough money to pay for curators and community connectors to travel the country and record the stories.
The odyssey started in Santa Fe, New Mexico with the hippie collective The Hog Farm which provided volunteers such as Hugh 'Wavy Gravy' Romney and Lisa Law to help feed the Woodstock crowd.
The Hog Farm volunteers provided peaceful security for the festival and set up a free kitchen to prepare food for attendees.
Museum curators then traveled to Florida, joining a 'Flower Power' cruise ship.
They visited Columbus, Ohio, before making a California trip earlier this year that included a San Francisco community center located near the former homes of festival performers Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead.
One of the museum 'community connectors' Rona Elliot, 77, who helped organize the original festival, said: 'You need to capture the history from the mouths of the people who had the direct experience.'
She said Woodstock is 'like a jigsaw puzzle - a panoply of everything that happened in the '60s.'
They are expanding their search this year, heading to Boston in March and New York City in early April, where they estimate half the Woodstock crowd still live.
That will be followed by return trips to New Mexico and Southern California.
The museum will then spend 2025 combing through the oral histories before turning to special projects such as reuniting friends who attended the festival together but now live in different parts of the country.
'It gave me hope:' Festivalgoers' memories from '69
Richard Schoellhorn, now 77, made the trip from his Sebastopol, California, home to San Francisco to discuss his experience at Woodstock with curators.He was initially hired to be a security guard at the ticketing booth when the festival was supposed to occur in Wallkill, New York, before a community backlash prompted a late switch to the Bethel site.
Schoellhorn still reported for work in Bethel, only to discover his services weren't going to be needed because the festival became so overwhelmed that organizers stopped selling tickets.
'I was walking around at Woodstock and Hugh Romney comes up to me and says, "Are you working?"', he said.
'And I go, "No, I just got fired!" He goes, "Well, would you like to volunteer?"'
Schoellhorn ended up working in a tent set up to assist people having bad experiences on hallucinogenic drugs they had taken and ended up getting stoned himself while enjoying his first ever concert.
He said: 'It felt like everyone was in the same freaking boat.
'There wasn´t like one section where people were rich. Nobody was special there, right from the get-go.'
Before attending Woodstock, Schoellhorn said he was a loner intent on pursuing a career in marketing.
After Woodstock, he became so extroverted that he wound up living in a Colorado commune for several years.
Another Woodstock attendee, Akinyele Sadiq, 72, also came to see the curators in San Francisco to excavate his memories of watching the festival from 25 feet away from the stage.
