The Most Important Thing About Woodstock . . . That You Don’t Remember
I wasn’t there — I hadn’t turned seven yet — but I still have a file folder in my head of sights and sounds and memories from Yasger’s Farm, fifty years ago: the rain and the mud and Hendrix’s reinterpretation of the Star Spangled Banner; skinny naked people dancing, joyous and spastic; “The brown acid is bad. Don’t take the brown acid!”
Maybe you remember some of the same things — whether you were at Woodstock or not.
You probably don’t remember Clark Stahl, a 23-year-old US Army Warrant Officer on temporary duty at West Point, some fifty miles downriver from Woodstock — a helicopter pilot, then recently returned home from Vietnam where he’d flown medevac missions.
Stahl bombed the festival from the air — with thousands of sandwiches.
The people of Sullivan County — a few of whom profited from the festival, most of whom were inconvenienced to varying degrees — also donated food, most of which was airlifted in.
The 400,000-strong Woodstock Nation needed that help: not a lot of people had packed food for a several-day adventure; vendors — set up to serve an anticipated crowd of 50,000 — quickly ran out of what they had to sell; a hot dog stand deemed guilty of price-gouging was burned down.