by Bob Spitz
• • •
Several members of the town had done a little extracurricular plotting of their own. A week or so after the festival crews began work in the field, Pat Mills was busy in the kitchen feeding her baby when the phone rang.
“Mrs. Mills?”
“Yes, speaking.”
“Listen carefully, Mrs. Mills. You’ve got two days to get those slobs off your land and out of our town before we start throwing rocks through your picture window to give you some encouragement. Understand?”
“Who is this?” she demanded, but the line went dead. She told herself it was someone’s thoughtless practical joke and fought to put it out of her mind. But when she resumed feeding her child, she had to wait for ten minutes for her hand to stop trembling.
She had decided not to tell Howard about the call. Enough pressure was being brought against him by some of the neighbors to renege on his lease with Woodstock Ventures. Several of his close friends had even gone so far as to sever their relationship with him until he “came to his senses.” The call would only serve to worry him more.
The next morning, though, another call disrupted her day, this one jarring her beyond all imagination. It was the same voice.
“They’re still there, Mrs. Mills. Those goddamn hippies are still in your field. You’re not taking us seriously enough. You’d believe us if you woke up in the middle of the night and found your house on fire, wouldn’t you? Your beautiful children, Mrs. Mills, they . . .”
She was not listening anymore. The house, the children—they had actually threatened her with something that inhuman? People whom she most likely knew! This is insane, she thought.
That night, as they were preparing to go to bed, Pat Mills was undemonstrative. Howard sensed something was wrong and asked how she felt.
“I’m okay,” she lied, turning down the bedspread. Mills accepted his wife’s taciturn mood and went about getting washed. When he returned, he found her ready and willing to talk about what was on her mind. “Howard, I’m scared. I feel as if we’re being watched by someone very close to us, and I have no idea who it might be.” She told him about the calls.
“I’ve gotten the same ones at the office,” he admitted. “I didn’t want to frighten you. I don’t think it’s anything we should worry about.”
“My God, Howard, what if they actually do what they say?”
“They’re not going to do anything of the kind. Look, maybe you and the kids should take a vacation until this thing is over. That fellow, Goldstein—the one from the festival group with the black beard—he said they’d be willing to pay all costs if we want to get out of here for the rest of the summer. What do you think?”
“All of us?”
“You know I couldn’t run out and leave my property in the hands of those kids. No, just you and the children.”
“Absolutely not.” She refused to leave her husband while he was receiving threats on his life. “We’ve got to do something about them. Isn’t there someone we can notify, someone who could watch the house?”
Mills remembered reading in the paper that the festival’s security chief was supposed to have checked in a few days before. He called the barn and the woman who answered the phone told him that Wes Pomeroy was staying at a local motel.
“I’ll call him now,” he told his wife.
“It’s the middle of the night, Howard. You can’t wake someone up at this hour.” It was minutes after eleven o’clock.
Mills was already dialing Pomeroy’s number. “I want us to be able to sleep in our own house without worrying that some disaster is going to strike. Leave it to me.”
Mills caught Pomeroy minutes before he was ready to leave for the security meeting. Pomeroy spoke to him for ten minutes and got a fairly good picture of what was going on. He knew what was expected of him in such a time of crisis, accepted the commission without demur, and promised to be at the landowner’s home within half an hour.
Pomeroy was deeply concerned about his meeting with Mills. More succinctly, he was disturbed by his own impotence in dealing with the situation. He felt he should be able to step resolutely into the eye of the storm and alleviate the man’s alarm, yet he was not plugged into the community well enough to assess how seriously the threats should be treated. He could not, however, ignore the possibility that Mills’s life was in danger. He wished he had the chance to discuss the situation with Don Ganoung. He tried tracking down Ganoung before he left the motel, but the community relations man was already on his way to the security meeting and might have stopped off at any one of ten places to kill some time.
Fortunately, Pomeroy was not unprepared. He had encountered this type of recalcitrant community response before in his career. He knew only too well that there were people who thrived on pumping fear into those whose opinions differed from their own, and that it took only one such person to create a distressing situation. It was a sickness, and he recognized the symptoms immediately. The cure was an automatic response. More than anything else, Mills needed reassurance that his family would be safe, and it was up to Pomeroy to see that he got it.
Mills ran it down for Pomeroy again in his living room. He was visibly shaken and needed to talk. This time, he admitted his panic; he was terrified of anything happening to his wife and children and took the threats at face value. Pomeroy assured Mills that he understood his concern—Wes had a wife and two daughters who were due to arrive in Wallkill in two weeks’ time—and he intended to take measures to prevent anything from happening.
He had devised a plan, one based on the principle that not much crime occurs on a well-lighted street. He instructed Mills to take five minutes and to turn on every available light outside his house. “Right now, Howard. I’ll wait.”
“What good is that going to do? It will just help whoever’s been threatening us to make sure they have the right address when they toss the torch.”
Pomeroy told him that he was going to have the field crews—“big, husky guys”—grab a few sleeping bags and camp out in the yard. “Believe me, Howard, it will discourage anyone from setting a foot on your property. We’ll circle the entire house. Now, I suggest that you go back upstairs and tell your wife that we’ll have sentries posted outside your window all night, and every night until this foolishness stops or we catch who’s been making the calls. Assure her there’s nothing to worry about.” Mills thanked him and did as he was instructed.
A circle of fluorescent light cast an eerie fence around the mansion. Howard Mills pulled back a curtain and peeked out at the spectacle it made. No one could possibly approach within a hundred feet of the house without being spotted. By the time he said good night to the security chief, he was openly relieved.
From his bedroom window, Mills could see the detail of hippies sleeping on the ground in his backyard. He was sure they were out front as well; he didn’t need to check. It was enough for Mills to know that Pomeroy had given his word they’d be protected. He climbed back into bed and slept soundly that night.
It may very well have proved to be his last peaceful night’s sleep. The next morning, the voice on the other end of the line informed him that they were turning the matter over to a professional, someone who would see to it that the situation was put to rest once and for all. Howard Mills, they said, was to be shot and killed.
• • •
The security meeting began an hour late. Wes didn’t arrive at the barn until well after midnight, and he spent some time filling in the executive staff on what had taken place at Howard Mills’s house. He instructed Mel Lawrence to keep in constant touch with Mills and, if necessary, to have “one of the bigger guys” on duty at their house all day. “Mills is on our side,” he said. “Despite everything that’s happened to him and his family, he is deeply concerned about honoring the contract he has with Woodstock Ventures.”
He suggested that it would be a go
od idea for Don Ganoung to put his collar on and make random visits to neighbors and concerned citizens in town. “Keep your ears open, Don. There’s no telling what you might pick up inside someone’s home. We may be able to get to the bottom of who’s making these calls.” Ganoung assured him that he’d begin setting up appointments the next morning.
Mel took over from there. He spent a few minutes recounting what had transpired since they began work, stressing the excellent job done by the University of Miami crews. “They’ve cleared most of the land, and we’re at a point now where we can really throw all of our concentration into setting up the rest of the facilities. The first thing we ought to discuss is fencing. We’ve got to establish a means of securing the grounds whereby everyone who enters the site will come in through the front gate.” He looked at Wes Pomeroy. “You’ve gotta let us know what you want so we can begin ordering supplies. And a lot of that depends on how high you think they ought to be.”
Instead of offering an immediate opinion, Pomeroy suggested they spend some time discussing what a fence meant, both to the crowd and to the promoters. Lawrence stated that they “needed a fence high enough and strong enough to keep people out.”
“No fence can keep people out,” Pomeroy replied. “Not if they really want to get through. Even at maximum security prisons where they use two fences twenty-five feet high and a few yards apart. The only purpose in having a fence at all is to slow people down so that someone else can do something to change their minds.”
“Then how do we keep people out?” Michael asked. “It’ll be impossible.”
They discussed the dilemma for another hour and arrived at the conclusion that they would symbolically destroy the fences. They’d have a fence bordering the site, but it would be constructed so as not to keep anyone from scaling it if they really wanted to. In fact, Pomeroy told them he didn’t care what it was made out of. “We’ll sell them on this idea: ‘We’d appreciate it if you did not go beyond this fence. Please go to the gate and pay for a ticket.’” To accomplish that, they’d have people stationed every hundred feet or so around the grounds whose duty it would be to talk to the crowd. If someone desired to crash the gate, the staff person was to say: “We wish you wouldn’t do that. Everyone else has bought a ticket. You shouldn’t ruin it for the rest of the crowd.” But if they insisted and went over the fence, the sentry was not to go after them.
“I don’t like it,” Lawrence said. “It means we’re going to forfeit a lot of income from lost gate receipts.” No one seemed to pay much attention to his objection. They were more concerned with putting the show on and making sure that no incidents occurred except those they could easily control.
The meeting lasted well into the morning. Each man contributed ideas as to how trouble could be avoided, with Lawrence consistently the most conservative of those in attendance. He was voted down on almost every point of added security and tighter control. After another hour or so, he gave up and adopted their theory. He could see there was realistically no way around it. The festival would most probably lose money, but it would be peaceful. He just needed some time to reconcile himself to the decision.
Before they disbanded, an elaborate security program had evolved based on the theory of nonconfrontation. Wes was in favor of busing people onto the site as a measure against potential gate-crashers. Everyone coming to the festival would be met in assigned parking lots by a staff member and escorted onto buses going to the site. The guides would talk to the people without tickets and explain where they could purchase them. If the kids had no tickets or money, they would be told various ways they could earn admission.
It would be possible for those who came empty-handed to be allowed into the grounds for free if they promised beforehand to help clean up after each day’s show. It was to be an honor system. No names would be taken, only words of good faith. After the show, they would meet at a prearranged place and begin to rake the area. If that failed to meet with their approval, the festival worker would issue them a staff armband and ask them to help load new arrivals onto the buses; once they did that, they would travel to the site with the full bus and explain where the people were to go, eat, and camp. That way, they could assure everyone that there was plenty of food, could point out that a playground for children existed, and could provide anyone who wished with a map of the area.
They decided to call the security force the Peace Service Corps. It had a soft sound to it, yet it suggested regimentation. They had to be well organized, Lawrence insisted. Everyone pledged his best to see they were able to collect as much money from the festival goers as possible.
Wes said that he’d always have a couple thousand tickets to the festival on his person. If anyone tried getting past members of the Peace Service Corps stationed at the gates, Wes would be alerted by walkie-talkie and would negotiate with the gate-crasher until he finally gave in and handed him a free ticket. For those who simply had to force their way inside, the executive staff decided to make some kind of arrangement with Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters to act as its representatives in aiding the obsessed. The Pranksters would arrive early and camp right up against the fence so no one would see the hole they had dug underneath. The Pranksters would then let those determined to enter illegally crawl under the fence as if they were helping them pull off a scam. Indirectly, they had arrived at a system of institutionalized gate-crashing that would avoid ripping out the fences.
It was a brilliant plan, everyone agreed. No one would ever be compelled to fight his way into the festival, and each person would think he got in on his own initiative.
“What are we going to tell Roberts and Rosenman when they want to know how we intend to keep people out?” someone asked.
“We don’t tell them anything,” Michael said. “No need to upset ’em. They’ll make out all right, and we’ll all come out smelling like first-class heroes. The most important thing is to protect the show. Everything else’ll fall neatly into place.”
• • •
Goldstein requisitioned the services of one of the members of the Miami art crew, a tall, strapping man named Ron Liis, to accompany him on an expedition for some 750,000 gallons of water for the festival.
Water—purified water, the hardest to find—seemed to be emerging as the festival’s common currency. It was the base ingredient for most of the recipes they were preparing in the Hog Farm’s free kitchen, it was required for boiling cooking utensils and rinsing stoves. New York State, like most other regions of the country, required running water in all commercial kitchens before its agency granted the restaurateur a proprietary license. The flushing of toilets entailed enormous quantities of it, as did the washing of hands, brushing of teeth, taking of medication, and cleansing of cuts and bruises—all priorities on the board of health’s list of prerequisites. And, of course, there was drinking. How in the world were they going to predict and accommodate the number of gallons necessary for consumption? There was no precedent on which to base an estimation. And with time closing in, their inimitable monetary system was on the verge of collapse.
It would have been so simple for them and solved many of their problems had they been given permission to drill for wells on Mills’s land. Chris Langhart was friendly with several instructors at New York University who were familiar with the intricacies of pumping mechanisms and could erect small, homemade water wells to their specifications within a few weeks’ time. He had made a few informal inquiries and could most likely have them on the site with a few days’ notice. But Schlosser had perfunctorily waived their request for on-site natural resources, and there did not seem to be any way around the red tape. That solution was sadly but swiftly abandoned as being hopeless.
Goldstein and Liis determined that the only alternative open to them was to buy water elsewhere and have it trucked in, a procedure that proved, on paper, to be both complicated and costly. Because of the precarious nature of such an enterprise and the
susceptibility of their delicate load in transit, stringent codes were enforced to supervise the moving of water from one place to another. Additionally, New York City was battling one of the most severe droughts in its history. Mayor John Lindsay had declared a state of emergency, going so far as to issue a proclamation that prohibited the placement of water on restaurant tables unless it was specifically requested. Their water department was drawing off the surplus of every neighboring county at an incredible rate. As envied and hated a place as New York City already was, it was doubtful its needs would be shunned to accommodate a gathering of hippies in Wallkill. Still and all, it was the only method left at their disposal and they had to investigate the outside chance that they could find a donor.
The two men spent the first week calling all conceivable sources. With a phone in one hand and a crinkled tristate map in the other, they tried every municipality in an expanding circle.
Most of their calls were met with unqualified refusals or solicitous, profit-driven schemes that indirectly made the sale impossible. Others merely quoted them outrageous prices; a particular city to the east of Middletown set its price at ten cents per gallon of raw water, nearly five times the going rate.
Trucks, too, seemed to present them with an insurmountable problem. If, indeed, they were able to arrange for the rental of voluminous trucks from dairy farmers, they had to contend with health department-approved cleansing procedures that adhered to converting the vehicles from milk to water carriers. This necessitated the installation of stainless steel linings and proper purifying elements within the metal stomachs. All of that was inordinately expensive. Even if they eventually got the trucks and agreed to make the conversion, they still couldn’t fill them. Catch-22.
They finally stopped looking.
Goldstein spent a number of conscience-searching days pondering the dilemma and arrived at a seemingly hopeless conclusion. Astonishingly enough, that verdict was to drop the whole matter, to just ignore it. They’d act as though they had either made a deal with another source of water or would go through the motions of looking, being “on the verge of a deal” whenever the water inspector came snooping, but it would be put aside until the last possible moment. However irresponsible Goldstein’s plan seemed, it was not entirely without merit, nor had he arrived at it without being absolutely convinced of its practicality. He had reexamined a section of the local zoning ordinances and discovered that once a concern was licensed by the Town of Wallkill to open its doors, water was not a legal requirement for operating a business. The responsibility was completely undefined. Therefore, they didn’t have to submit a plan of that nature to the town board for inspection. And once they were a duly recognized part of the community, they could not be refused water, fire protection, or police services. They were taxpayers like anybody else and were covered by existing rights under the law.
