Remembering Woodstock
Legendary concert, turning 40, helped locals stay hippie at heart
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Despite his mother's protests, 17-year-old Brooklyn resident Victor Ozeri traveled to Woodstock in a 'dilapidated school bus' in August 1969. Here, he's in the thick of the concert's now legendary crowd.
And though they haven't always lived like hippies since Woodstock, some North Forkers who attended the concert say they still believe in flower power.
At the age of 17, part-time Aquebogue resident Victor Ozeri was one of the 500,000 music lovers gathered peacefully at a 600-acre dairy farm 43 miles southwest of Woodstock in the summer of 1969.
Pictured here with his adopted Ethiopian son, Lawgaw Getachew, Victor Ozeri is retired but remains active in humanitarian projects across the world, due in large part to the mind-opening Woodstock experience, he said. He recently threw a party for 160 people to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the festival at his part-time home in Aquebogue.
Now 56 and retired from a lucrative career in handbag manufacturing, Mr. Ozeri hosted a Woodstock 40th anniversary party at his spread on the banks of Meeting House Creek a few weeks ago.
A band called Three Sheets to the Wind, made up of Vietnam veterans, played to a crowd of about 160 people, many dressed in tie-dye T-shirts.
Carol Harte, 40 years after Woodstock, is now a Greenport resident and avid boater who says she is still a hippie at heart - and still doesn't see anything wrong with walking around barefoot in the mud.
In April of '69, Mr. Ozeri said he got wind of Woodstock from a hippie camp counselor at a Fresh Air Fund camp in Sussex, N.J., -- the camp he later served for six years as president of the board of directors.
He said his mother refused to let him go, but he and his older cousin, Eddie, went anyway.
This was 21-year-old flower child Carol Harte, chilling out at her pad in Brooklyn in 1969, the same year she crashed the gates at Woodstock.
"It was massive. A half a million adults in a field -- we were blown away by it." Mr. Ozeri said. "All we could hear for a while was helicopters flying the talent in and out."
When the rains came, Mr. Ozeri said he found shelter by becoming a volunteer in a medical tent.
"I decided to help the doctors with the bad acid trips," he said.
But the real appeal of Woodstock, he said, wasn't the drugs. It was the music.
"Music was everywhere," he said. "We didn't have DVDs, no CDs, no video games, no malls, no fast food. We were always looking for the next album from The Doors, Janis, The Beach Boys, Bob Dylan. Every Friday and Saturday, we went to [Greenwich Village] to see three bands for three dollars at the Fillmore East."
Greenport resident Carol Harte, who was 21 when she went to the concert, described Woodstock as "a big love-in."
"It was advertised all over the place," she said. "To see all those celebrities in one place."
Ms. Harte, now retired and selling Avon on the side, was working as a hairdresser and just "hanging out" in 1969, she said. A few years earlier, she had driven from her hometown of Brooklyn to California to buy a Volkswagen van. After she painted it yellow in honor of The Beatles' "Yellow Submarine," she and a girlfriend converted the inside into a camper for Woodstock and headed up that Friday, Aug. 15.
Soon, she said, four lanes of traffic all were going one way -- toward the concert -- and "no one was getting out," she said.
She parked her van on the side of the road to hike the rest of the way. When she and her girlfriend reached the gates of the concert, it was pitch-black.
"It wasn't disorderly," she said. "Just body-to-body. One herd going one way."
That herd crashed the gates, nullifying her tickets, and that's when it began to rain.
The music, she said, didn't start back up until later, and the two women crashed overnight in the mud. Even though Ms. Harte was up for staying, her girlfriend had had enough of the weather. They tromped back to the Volkswagen van and headed back the next morning.
"I really didn't want to go [home]," she said. "There were a lot of people diggin' it at the time."
Even covered in mud?
"Yeah," she said. "No one seemed to mind. And look, now we pay for mud packs."
Ms. Harte said she still hasn't given up on the power of the flower, even in a day when the peace sign has become nothing more than a fashionable emblem.
"Sure, everything has a price these days," she said. "But freedom is in your spirit. Flower power has not gone out the window."
But for some, Woodstock wasn't all peace and love.
Fred McLaughlin, a Brooklyn native who's run McLaughlin Heppner Funeral Home in Riverhead since 1985, said he and a friend went to Woodstock shortly after he got back from Vietnam.
"We planned to go, but we were ill-prepared," he said. "We had a few sandwiches and that was about it."
Mr. McLaughlin said he made it in time to see Richie Havens open the show Friday afternoon.
"Myself and another fellow shared a blanket," he said. "We tried to stay dry, but we had enough of the rain and mud. There was no food, no facilities, no nothing up there."
They then retreated to his father's place in Pennsylvania to do some swimming and boating. But he said he'll never forget the closing set from Joan Baez, when everyone lit matches and candles and he could finally see the crowd.
"There were a lot of people over there," he said.
Though kids today still listen to the music of that era, to Mr. Ozeri, Woodstock, the concert, will never happen again.
"Not in today's world, not in that manner," he said. "There's too much control. Everything has gone corporate. Concerts back then were $3; now they're $300."
But as an active participant in humanitarian projects across the world, Mr. Ozeri said he still defines himself as a hippie -- in large part because of his mind-opening experience at Woodstock, where the sense of humanity and cooperation was as thick as the purple haze.
"To this day, what happened out there is still a part of me," he said.
eschultz@timesreview.com
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Woodstock Revisited : 8/14/2009
The Woodstock Festival did not take place in Woodstock, New York but in the town of Bethel which is sixty-seven miles due west. The second day of that mythic, three-day concert coincided with my eleventh birthday (I am going to be fifty-one on Sunday. Yikes! Where did the time go?). I remember quite clearly my friend Tom Finkle and I riding our bikes up to the bridge on South Street that overlooks Route 17 - a four lane highway which snakes its way into Sullivan County where the great event took place. It looked like a long and narrow parking lot. The New York State Thruway had been shut down. To the best of my knowledge, that had never happened before and has not happened since. To say that it was an exciting time to be alive almost sounds redundant. Less than four weeks earlier, two human beings had walked on the surface of the moon, a technological feat that will probably out shine every other event of the twentieth century in the history books that will be written a thousand years from now. As future decades unwind, it is a certainty that the photographic image of half a million kids, partying and dancing in the mud, will not continue to sustain the cultural significance that it does for us today. The years will pass by, the people who were lucky enough to be there will one day be no more, and the Woodstock Festival will be erased from living memory; a mere footnote to a very crowded century. But what a freaking party, baby! This weekend I'll be listening to my copy of the Woodstock Soundtrack LP - on vinyl, of course. The very thought of listening to it on a compact disc seems somehow sacrilegious. Although I could have done without Sha-Na-Na's version of At The Hop, all in all it's a pretty good collection of tunes. I have always envied my cousin, the noted falconer Tom Cullen, who was a witness to Jimi Hendrix's rendition of the Star Spangled Banner. Can you imagine? Canned Heat's performance of Going Up The Country is one of the great moments in rock history; and for the last forty years, whenever I heard Joan Baez singing Joe Hill, I have had to pause whatever I was doing at the moment and concentrate on it - It is one of the most moving pieces ever recorded on tape. "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution." Emma Goldman 1869-1940 Dance with me, Emma! The last time I looked at my videocassette of Woodstock (which was well over a decade ago) I wondered about the fates of the half-a-million gathered on the fields of Max Yasgur's farm in Sullivan County on that distant weekend. The passage of four decades decrees that a third or more of them have passed on. The average age of the attendees was about twenty-two. Today would find them approaching their mid-sixties; the age many of their grandparents were in 1969! There are many good people of that generation who have kept the spirit of the sixties alive - or have tried to anyway. America is not the same country it was forty years ago. 2009 finds us even more polarized than we were during the age of Richard Nixon. It is no longer merely a "generation gap" that is tearing America apart. The gaps today are almost too numerous to catalog: the political gap; the health insurance gap; the employment gap; the racial gap; the education gap; the class and income gaps. The world is a lot more troubled and sadder than it was in that long ago, magical summer of 1969. Sometimes I feel like a hostage to time. The truth is, for all the technological wonders of the twenty-first century, I just don't like being here. NOTE TO MY FRIENDS: No, I'm not going to kill myself. Chill. Where I come from, Woodstock has a special meaning to people because it happened here - or close enough to count. From where I now sit, Bethel is a mere forty-two miles northwest. According to this morning's local paper, seventy-five media outlets from all over the world will be covering the events commemorating the anniversary this weekend. That's enough of a reason for me to stay the hell away. I'm not as crowd-friendly as I once was. Besides, I would have preferred to attend the real thing forty years ago. That would have been too cool for words! Nostalgia is a permanent human condition. Each generation is nostalgic for the last. It absolutely boggles the mind to think that the year 2049 will find those of us who survive looking back on these hideous times with tender longing. Given our silly human quirks, that will probably be the case. Still, it's hard not to reflect on the hope that was prevalent in the summer of Woodstock. We want to believe that there is a magical future where, as John Lennon once imagined, there are no countries; nothing to kill or die for. Maybe we will one day arrive at that wondrous place. Maybe.... http://www.tomdegan.blogspot.com Tom Degan Goshen, NY
