Historians are racing against time to preserve the voices of Woodstock as the 1960s pass. Peace, music, and recollections

Bethel: Woodstock took place somewhere else.
The legendary music festival was held in Bethel, New York, a smaller community than Woodstock, sixty miles (96.5 kilometers) away. It is regarded as one of the most important cultural events of the 1960s. It’s a suitable misnomer for an event that has been both legendary and factual, and it has more to do with the memories it conjures up about the mental condition of a society at the end of a disorganized decade than it does with any specific place.

From August 15 to 17, 1969, an estimated 450,000 people flocked to a dairy farmer named Max Yasgur’s property to participate in an “Aquarian Exposition” that promised “three days of peace, love, and music.”. In a time when very few individuals can still recall the 1960s, the majority were teens or young adults who were close to reaching their twilight years.
Because of this ticking clock, the Museum at Bethel Woods, which is situated on the festival grounds, is engrossed in a five-year initiative to separate reality from fiction and gather first-hand accounts of Woodstock experiences before they go. Curators of museums have embarked on a nationwide journey to document and preserve the memories of the people who were present.
As one of the museum’s “community connectors,” music writer Rona Elliot, 77, puts it: “You need to capture the history from the mouths of the people who had the direct experience.” Elliot was there during the festival and worked with organizers like Michael Lang, who entrusted her with his archives before his passing in 2022. She has her own memories of the event.
Elliot describes Woodstock as “a panoply of everything that happened in the ’60s” and compares it to a jigsaw puzzle.
A REQUEST FOR HISTORIES ORAL
Over the years, hundreds of interviews with Woodstock participants have been conducted, especially on significant festival anniversaries. The late historian Studs Terkel, who recorded hundreds of oral histories about life during the Great Depression and World War II, is using techniques similar to those of the Bethel Woods museum, which is going deeper with a project that started in 2020. “There is a difference between someone being interviewed for a paper or a documentary and having an oral history cataloged and preserved in a museum,” says Neal Hitch, senior curator and director of the Museum at Bethel Woods. “We had to meet individuals where they were. When you ask someone to tell us about these intimate, private recollections from a festival when they were maybe 18 or 19, they don’t know precisely what to say if you simply pick them up on the phone.”
The Institute of Museum and Library Services awarded funding totaling more than $235,000 to the museum in order to discover and meet individuals ready to share their recollections about Woodstock. With this money, curators and community organizers like Elliot could tour the nation, gathering and documenting stories.
The trip started in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which is the location of the Hog Farm, which supplied hippie volunteers like Hugh “Wavy Gravy” Romney and Lisa Law to assist in feeding the Woodstock attendees. The curators of the museum have been to Florida, visited Columbus, Ohio, and boarded a “Flower Power” cruise ship. Earlier this year, they took a tour of California, stopping at a community center in San Francisco that is close to the former residences of the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, two festival performers.
Seventy-seven-year-old Richard Schoellhorn traveled to San Francisco from his home in Sebastopol, California, to talk about his experiences at Woodstock. When the event was originally scheduled to take place in Wallkill, New York, he was first employed as a security guard at the ticket desk. However, a late move to the Bethel location was made due to community opposition.
Though Schoellhorn continued to show up for work in Bethel, he soon learned that his skills would not be required as the event became so large that ticket sales had to be discontinued.
“I was walking around at Woodstock when Hugh Romney came up to me and said, ‘Are you working?'” Before taking a seat to have his oral history recorded, Schoellhorn told The Associated Press. I respond, ‘No, I just got fired!'” “Well, would you like to volunteer?” he asks.
Schoellhorn ended up working in a tent that was intended to help people who had used psychedelic substances and were experiencing negative experiences. After enjoying the first concert he had ever been to, he ended up stoning himself.
Schoellhorn said, “It felt like everyone was in the same freaking boat.” “The wealthy weren’t concentrated in one area. There was nobody exceptional there from the beginning.”
Schoellhorn claimed to be a recluse who was determined to pursue a career in marketing before going to Woodstock. He got so outgoing after Woodstock that he ended up living in a commune in Colorado for a number of years before working as a dialysis technician for 35 years.
REMINDERS OF UP-CLOSE VISITS
Akinyele Sadiq, a different Woodstock participant, visited the curators in San Francisco as well in order to relive his experiences of seeing the event from a distance of 25 feet (7.6 meters) from the stage.
The event was scheduled to start on Friday, but Sadiq left on Wednesday aboard a bus headed for Bethel. After the bus broke down, he got a lift and arrived at the festival site by Thursday midday, in time to secure a place close enough to the stage to be seen in pictures shot during the shows.
Sadiq had changed by the time he left Bethel a few days later, traveling in a hearse that a fellow festivalgoer had transformed into a van.
“I had no actual direction in life before Woodstock. Before having his oral history recorded, Sadiq, now 72, told the AP, “I basically didn’t have a lot of friends, but I knew I was looking for peace and justice and wanted to be with creative people who were looking to make the world a better place.” “If you were living in a little town before Woodstock, you may have assumed there were a dozen individuals there who you could get along with. However, you later discovered that there were at least 500,000 of us. It only inspired optimism in me.”
Hitch claims that throughout the process of gathering more than 500 oral histories, curators have learned about several life-altering encounters and are certain they will gather even more over the course of the next year. Community connections made their way to Boston in March and New York City in early April after stopping in Florida last month. Thereafter, there will be visits back to Southern California and New Mexico.
Hitch thinks that around half of the original Woodstock population still resides in New York State, so the museum plans to concentrate on tracking down and speaking with festivalgoers who are dispersed throughout the state.
Before focusing on unique programs like bringing friends who attended the festival together but now reside in various areas of the nation together, the museum plans to spend 2025 going through the oral accounts.
Elliot believes that the oral history project is something she was destined to pursue, “both karmically and cosmically.”.
She said, “I want this to be a teaching tool.” “I don’t want historians telling the story of a spiritual event that just appeared to be a musical event.”