Barefoot in Babylon

by Bob Spitz

  “We’ve already made plans to handle shuttle services from New York City to Wallkill for the three days of the show,” they said. “It won’t be difficult adapting what we’ve already planned to meet your needs.”

  All-State had arranged to have several pickup locations and terminals scattered throughout New York City. They had busily been advertising their service through community bulletins and in daily newspapers and were waiting for their tickets to be printed so that they could begin selling seats to the festival. At that point, all they had to do was to coordinate all their activities with a Woodstock representative so that everyone’s customers could be serviced with the least amount of complications.

  As far as shuttling people from parking lots to the site was concerned, All-State estimated that they could handle up to thirty thousand people an hour, depending, of course, on their evaluation of the physical layout. This calculation was based upon an allotment of an hour and a half prior to show time to board their passengers on the bus, travel to the gate, and allow everyone enough time to disembark comfortably before the buses returned to the parking lot. They also agreed to provide transportation for the security personnel between New York City and Wallkill, and between the site and housing areas. Woodstock need only assign a person to coordinate bus dispatching with the firm, and the rest would be worked out to their satisfaction.

  Fabbri was pleased with All-State’s response and notified Pomeroy of his intention to consolidate their efforts. As far as he could determine, it would help with traffic control and might very well appease the town board’s concern.

  Pomeroy had also set up a meeting for his two commanders that same afternoon with representatives from the New York City Police Department in an effort to mobilize the Peace Service Corps. Wes and Fabbri had discussed the arrangements to be gone over with Joe Fink and Ralph Cohen beforehand and had outlined the following objectives: (1) to urge Cohen to bring in an officer of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the bargaining agent for police officers; and (2) to have Fink and Cohen come to Middletown immediately.

  Chief Inspector McManus, who still refused formally to grant police help to the festival, told Pomeroy that if the request for patrolmen to work at Woodstock came to him both from someone within the department and from a member of the PBA, he would give his approval; it was a safeguard designed to absolve McManus of any future blame that might be pointed in his direction.

  Fink assured Fabbri and Ganoung that he would have no problem obtaining proper clearance for the hiring of police personnel from the NYPD. He’d follow McManus’s guidelines by coordinating his own departmental request with that of a colleague from the PBA. Cohen, meanwhile, would begin the preparations for the recruitment and selection of personnel to be transported upstate.

  Fabbri agreed to provide the two officers with application forms for screening the men, a complete listing of what they would be required to bring with them by way of tools (map, flashlights, etc.), and information regarding the form in which salary would be paid and the type of tax deductions taken from their wages. They would handle the rest at the precinct level.

  As far as Fink and Cohen’s instant deployment to Wallkill was concerned, they would have to clear that with their immediate supervisors. That would be more difficult to arrange because they were high-level officers. However, they pledged to give it their best efforts. If all went well, they’d let them know if they could in a few days—when a Woodstock representative got back to them with the requested information.

  It had all gone down smoothly, exactly as planned. The New York police were going to cooperate with a group of hip promoters staging a rock festival. It was unbelievable. Not only would the cops be on hand to insure the peace, but they would be incognito without intending to bust the kids. The promoters were also delighted that they could link their name with the NYPD. New York’s Finest were on their side. How could the Town of Wallkill possibly balk at that? Ganoung and Fabbri were completely satisfied that the recruitment of security personnel was under responsible, professional control.

  5

  The week that followed was a hip publicist’s nightmare, deluged by a cascade of stories reporting developments along the troubled American festival front. If the public’s expectation of rock music events had, indeed, become one of quasi-gladitorial lust, as the hippies claimed, their craving was satiated by bountiful descriptions of wantonness, over-the-counterculture drug dispensaries, and violence. The papers were full of it; the National Affairs sections carried the sordid details, the Community Culture pages analyzed them as social phenomena, the TV-Theatre sections advertised upcoming festivals directly above commercials for “Oh Calcutta!” and “Che!” (“Tasteful Nudity,” the ads proclaimed) and, curiously, all the stories were carried over into Sports. What better combination than dope and doom for a send-off of The Biggest One of Them All in scenic Wallkill? The Concerned Citizens Committee would surely feast on the spoils for weeks to come, the promoters were convinced. It was a dreadful position for anyone to be in. With their backs against the wall, faith became the hippies’ placebo to stave off the ides of imminent defeat.

  The seven-day blowout was kicked off in Atlanta with a weekend Pop Festival that attracted 125,000 long-haired kids onto the red clay infield of the International Raceway. The drawing card—fourteen unbroken hours of music a day—featured many of the same groups slated to play Woodstock in August, as well as newcomers to the star-studded rock galaxy, such as Chicago Transit Authority, Pacific Gas & Electric, and Led Zeppelin. And while the musical jamboree went down without noticeable incident, the New York Times chose to present it as a convention of counterculture merchants and drug dealers. The “underground industrial complex,” it was termed, a culture that supports “an impromptu but efficient commodities exchange in marijuana and LSD, where buyers and sellers let supply and demand establish prices.”

  The next day, the sixteen-year-old tradition of the Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island was “invaded . . . by several hundred young people who broke down a section of the 10-foot wooden fence surrounding Festival Field and engaged in a rock throwing battle with security guards.” Sly and the Family Stone were on stage at the time (not exactly a group capable of producing a settling effect on an angry mob), which led the festival’s producers to place the blame for the depressing circumstances on their allowing rock music to be represented on the program. To rectify their mistake, the remaining rock groups on the Newport festival’s agenda were cancelled.

  Then, two days later, a Smokey Robinson and the Miracles concert in Boston’s South End resulted in scattered incidents of stone throwing and window breaking. According to a witness, the melee began when the audience rushed the stage to hear better after the amplification system had failed. When local police asked the crowd to move back, the Miracles left the stage and six thousand teen-agers rushed into the streets breaking everything in sight.

  Bad timing, the Woodstock staff claimed, was killing their act. The Times Herald Record continued to litter its pages with accounts of local drug busts and overdoses. “Five Fined on Drug Charges” one story began; it was small, but somehow managed to jump out of the page like a neon billboard. “Two Seized in Ulster Drug Raid,” “Nixon Calls for Crackdown on Drug Abuse,” “Fish Urges Marijuana Probe”—they appeared one on top of the other until the most unsuspecting reader got the message. And while the Times Herald Record remained an editorial ally of the Aquarian Exposition, its sense of newsworthiness was kicking the festival all the way to the seamy depths of the Hudson River. The handwriting, if not yet on the wall, was in the works.

  The defenders of the faith were the Wallkill kids themselves. Parents, whose homes had been sanctuaries from the Hippie versus Establishment title bout going on elsewhere in the country, were suddenly beseiged with pleas from their children to defend the festival’s right to remain in their town. “Nothing ever happens here “that we can relate to,” they compl
ained. “The result is going to be that, once we leave Wallkill for college, we’re never going to return. You’ve got to allow us the right to our own events. Please—please don’t let them do this to us. We want the festival to remain here. It’s our only hope.” The editor of the Bush Telegraph, a local high school newspaper, wrote a letter to the editor of the Times Herald Record in which she discounted traffic and security as the main reasons for expelling the festival. “The real reason . . . is that a few reactionary people are afraid of anyone and anything that is different from them and from the way they are accustomed to living,” she said. “The problem of people being so narrowminded that they can’t accept anything new and different is a serious one. These people have to be made to see that the people they term as ‘hippies’ are not dangerous, inhuman, or anything like that. They are people, just like anyone else, who have the right to be judged on their individual worth, and their ideas, rather than be lumped together in a group and classified as ‘dirty hippies.’” As far as prohibiting loud music was concerned, her brazen voice lapsed into plaintive notes of resignation. “There isn’t really that much a teen-ager in this area can get for entertainment without having to go to [New York City].” There was something pathetically sad, yet proud, in her expression, the way an appreciative sister smiles at her hand-me-down wardrobe. “I think we deserve the opportunity to be able to hear these artists without going to all the expense of going to the city. It’s not a lot to ask.”

  Cliff Reynolds, however, took exception to the young woman’s way of thinking. Having made no effort to tour the festival site nor indicated any interest in the preparations, Reynolds announced to the press that he intended to bring a complaint against Woodstock Ventures for operating a place of business in a residentially zoned area. He had apparently done his homework. He found that the barn on Howard Mills’s land, which was being used as the festival’s headquarters, was within 1,600 feet of the road and therefore, according to existing records, a gross violation of the zoning ordinance. Such a violation was punishable by a fine of $50 a day, and Reynolds was quick to note that the promoters were already responsible for $1,500 in penalties should the zoning board of appeals take action on his complaint.

  Reynolds also let it be known that the Concerned Citizens Committee had decided to go on with their suit against the promoters, and that it was likely to come before a State Supreme Court justice as early as Friday, July 11. According to Jules Minker, two informal meetings had already taken place between his group (which, as far as anyone knew, consisted only of Reynolds) and Woodstock Ventures. “But nothing more than promises come from them,” he said. “We have yet to see a single piece of written evidence, although we would adjourn the suit if the defendants produce proof of their commitment to protecting public health and safety.”

  The promoters found Minker’s last bit of sophistry the most exasperating dig of all. They’d never be able to satisfy his or Reynolds’s demands. It all seemed to depend upon their adversary’s mood at the time, a toss of the coin. What were they expected to do—spend an additional ten grand on security only to discover it was not substantial enough to suit Reynolds? Do they purchase 300,000 gallons of water only to find that his gripe about transportation stops them cold? Or consult him on the color of festival T-shirts? Go for the yardage or punt? The whole thing was that ridiculous. The paranoia was unrelenting. Yet, it continued to haunt the Woodstock team with an even greater intensity as the days progressed.

  In the meantime, several “older” members of the festival’s executive staff swung into action. They took an assortment of operational problems to outside interest groups capable of providing them with added vocational muscle, not to mention imagination and influence.

  On July 7, Wes Pomeroy and Don Ganoung drove north to the state capitol in Albany to meet with Harrison F. Dunbrook, the director of traffic operations for the New York State Department of Transportation. By 10:00 A.M., eight men, all of whom bore titles the length of a grocery list, were settled into the fourth-floor conference room in the main office of the state campus. The purpose of the meeting, in addition to presenting the Department of Transportation with a formal statement of purpose, was for Ganoung and Pomeroy to urge vigorously state support of the Aquarian Exposition in the form of highway alterations throughout the festival weekend.

  Ganoung gave the state brass a list of eight points they sought to carry home. It had been Pomeroy’s ardent hope to persuade the Department of Transportation to provide them with emergency openings off the Quickway at the Scotchtown Road overpass and at the intersection with Route 302, which cut across Circleville and snaked onto the back end of the Mills property. Both could be easily tapped, and while neither road was in any kind of shape to accommodate the number of cars Pomeroy was contemplating, they’d serve to lessen the strain at Exit 120. At this point, Exit 120 was the only major artery leading directly onto Route 211, across from the Burger King, and on toward the site. If that remained the case, cars would be bunched up for miles trying to get in and out. They desperately needed more access; Pomeroy thought two more exits would do the trick.

  To Pomeroy’s chagrin, the request was denied straightaway. Besanceney, the state director of engineering and safety, pointed out that, should their highway division approve additional exits, the traffic turning into them would slow the normal movement of high-speed vehicles on the Quickway, thereby crippling travel upstate and beyond. That was out of the question. He did agree, however, to send an investigating committee to Exit 120 in order to determine what could be done about the construction work that was presently going on there. The factfinding expedition would also discuss with the contractor the possibility of opening Industrial Road and Egbert Drive, two narrow roads that traversed Mills Heights, onto Route 211 during the exposition. That, for the moment, was all they could offer. It wasn’t much, but it was an improvement.

  A request for posting festival signs on the Quickway was met with somewhat more enthusiasm, although not enough to produce the permits necessary for the security staff to begin work. The state officials agreed to entertain such a motion, but only after certain requirements were met. First, the promoters had to submit to them a sampling of the legends to go on the signs; secondly, the locations where they were going to be displayed had to be thoroughly mapped out and registered with the State Highway Commission; and, finally, facsimiles of color and how they were to be lettered had to be offered for approval.

  But there was more about which they had to agree before they could relax. Once granted a permit, Woodstock Ventures had to adhere to age-old statutes that forbid signs to be fixed on the shoulder of the road. Pomeroy shrugged, defeated by the complexity of it all. That more or less restricted them to fastening wide directional markers to staff vehicles or to signs already positioned in exit lanes. It was a lesson in legislative futility. Their only recourse, one which Ganoung and Pomeroy considered both practical and attractive, was to contact the State Thruway Authority and work out a system whereby directions to the parking lots and site could be handed out at toll booths where the Thruway intersected with the Quickway.

  One of Ganoung’s primary interests in addressing the Department of Transportation had to do with acquiring additional parking lot space in the Wallkill-Middletown vicinity from which he could conduct his shuttling operation. Several parcels of land had already been examined for rental. While scouting prospective property, Wes had come across a four-mile stretch of nearly finished highway to the north of Middletown that was part of the Interstate Highway 84 project connecting the New England states. It was called the Road To Nowhere by the local residents because of its abrupt halt a few miles out of town. As far as Pomeroy knew, it wasn’t scheduled for completion before the end of the year, and he wanted permission to lease it from the state as a parking facility for four thousand cars. Woodstock Ventures, he warranted, would assure them that the piece of road would be properly protected and insured, and that all refuse would
be removed before they left the area.

  The representatives from the state agency took everything in stride. The red tape involved was agonizing. All of Pomeroy and Ganoung’s requests for special privileges would necessitate further examination by one aide or another before any decision could be made. Pending everyone’s satisfaction, the festival security officers would be referred to specialized deputies further on down the legislative ladder for final approval on each matter. And to make matters worse, no one could give them an estimate of how long that might take. It could be a matter of days; it might even take weeks!

  John Fabbri had better luck. While Pomeroy and Ganoung were struggling through the ineffectual traffic meeting in Albany, he was huddled with four representatives from Tri-Co to iron out the specifics of their communications job at the festival. Arnold Puff had discussed the organization’s chance to work at the site with the rest of his membership and had come away with an eager vote in favor of supporting the outing. Now, all that remained was for them to work out a strategy with Fabbri that would enable them to estimate the amount of equipment and manpower they’d have to supply.

  It was decided that the members would be divided into three groups to man the Communications Command Center, the Mobile Security Patrol and the Parking Lots Control Communications. Tri-Co was to provide their own four-base station transmitters with a total of six frequencies, one each for Headquarters Command, the Inner Command, the Outer Command, Transportation and Parking Command, outside law enforcement agencies (which included the New York State Police and the Wallkill Fire Department), and a frequency left in reserve for any emergencies that might crop up along the way. They would also attempt to lease an additional channel from nearby Newburgh for the purpose of coordinating the transportation of performers between hotels and the backstage area.