Barefoot in Babylon

by Bob Spitz

  Common sense compelled him to mow the grass where it was expected the helicopters would touch down until that patch of ground resembled a masterfully manicured golf course green. Once that was done, however, he was lost. He couldn’t be expected to build a control tower; in fact, he wasn’t certain that air-to-ground radios would direct the slight traffic onto the mark. But something told him there had to be more to a heliport than a plot of mowed grass.

  “Don’t you guys need to be able to see at night?” he asked a pilot who had dropped by to inspect the facilities.

  “Sure. We’ll need to have some frame of reference from the air,” he replied. “But do us a favor and make sure your signal is not a beam shining directly in our eyes.”

  Langhart remembered a truckload of Christmas lights that Jim Mitchell had brought back from one of his supply runs in the New England area. Most were to be used in the woods to light the paths between the performance arena and the campgrounds. Borrowing an immodest portion of the colored bulbs, Langhart drove stakes around the perimeter of the sheared land and strung the Christmas lights on them until it looked like a landing strip in an underdeveloped African nation. Its usefulness would be forcibly limited by the lack of available ground space and by the heliport’s scissors-and-paste composition, but it was imaginatively functional (as observers were quick to admit) and would handily service the sole helicopter budgeted to take off and land there.

  Of course, had Chris Langhart any indication then of the significance his handiwork was to play in the overall success of the festival, he would have surely thrown his hands up in the air and yielded to the engineering acumen of the Civil Aeronautics Board. Little did he suspect, as they ran tests on the lights, that his heliport would provide the only means by which anyone would be able to enter or leave the festival grounds that weekend, and, where, by Saturday morning, a squadron of some fifteen whirlybirds would wait their turn to land.

  • • •

  The security office, kept open eighteen hours a day, operated on a tankful of nervous energy. Logically, the staff’s preparations were supposed to fall neatly into place as the festival approached, but it seemed that exactly the opposite was happening. Hard as they pushed, and as adept as some of them became at heading off defeat, the unsolved problems always seemed more numerous than before, their goal more distant and more futile.

  Chief Pomeroy had unsparingly devoted a great deal of time in Wallkill to organizing a mobile medical unit made up of doctors from nearby Memorial Hospital. The two supervising physicians had consented to rent medical equipment and to purchase enough supplies to treat thirty thousand people, as well as to work out shift assignments for a rotating staff of residents and interns. But when relations with the town collapsed, the doctors followed suit. Fearing reprisals from hospital administrators and patients alike, they asked to be relieved of their command and quietly slunk back to the unassuming refuge of their practices.

  Bill Ward heard about the predicament while in Miami and called Jean to remind her about a doctor he knew of, living in Wappingers Falls in Dutchess County, New York, who specialized in crowd medicine.

  Bill Abruzzi was, in fact, one of the few medical practitioners in the world who had any practical experience caring for the masses without fretting over compensation. He was a humanitarian, Ward noted. And, to make matters considerably more appealing to the hippies, he was a recognized friend of the civil rights movement, a certificate of character that attested to his compassion for the underprivileged and downtrodden.

  While doing graduate work at the Columbia School of Medicine, Abruzzi became interested in “the seemingly disjointed rights of some antisocial segments of the culture—like junkies in dire need of help.” Subsequently, he spent his time between classes “dragging a lot of black kids who were stoned out of the gutter and trying to keep them from being jailed.” Later on, as selective justice resulted in a cry of national outrage, Abruzzi immersed himself in the moral plight of the black man and actively participated in the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march, which, among his colleagues, branded him “a nigger sympathizer.” Undaunted by the professional criticism, he pursued his convictions by caring for James Meredith in Birmingham, Alabama, marching alongside and treating Martin Luther King, Jr., and counseling members of SNCC on self-survival before settling down with his family a few miles from White Lake.

  Abruzzi was immediately receptive to joining the staff of the Woodstock festival. He saw it as a logical extension of his work with minority groups, primarily because the only people he knew in the area “who treated young people in a drugged state did so by calling the police or by bringing them to a mental hospital or by calling their parents.” As Abruzzi saw it, “Kids have their own rights as well, and it’s not necessarily in their best interests to admit them to a medical facility only after they receive parental consent. Of course, that was the law, but the law isn’t always just. You turn a freaked-out kid over to his parents, and it’s often worse than confronting the medical problem.”

  Abruzzi’s terms were sensible and pragmatic. He wanted to employ a complete staff of doctors and nurses for around-the-clock duty instead of utilizing a volunteer group as had been planned. “My experience with the civil rights movement indicated that volunteers are great—God love them for giving up their time and energy to help a worthy cause—but it becomes anarchistic,” he told Don Ganoung during a meeting in the security office. “How do you tell someone who leaves his practice to come help out that he’s got to do feet even though he’s a dermatologist? Someone’s got to be able to say, ‘Do it now,’ satisfied that it will be taken care of because they’re in charge. So, we’ll welcome volunteers and we’ll try to integrate them into the medical care program, but I have to have a staff of trained nurses and physicians I know I can depend on, people who, if I have to, I can order around.”

  He calculated that the medical unit would require three separate facilities: one for analysis, one as a recovery room, and one for bad trips. On the basis of their seeing from five hundred to one thousand cases over a three-day period, he settled on a recruitment of two physicians and four nurses for each eight-hour shift—each doctor and nurse receiving $320 and $50 a shift respectively, as well as $17.50 per person for maintenance and traveling expenses. Additionally, a number of doctors from Thornton Memorial Hospital in Middletown had agreed to stop by when they could see their way free of other obligations, and they would require a fee of $20 an hour per man. Taking into account six physicians, thirty-six nurses, eighteen medical assistants (including medical clerks and aids), and a contingency fund of $500 in case he had underestimated staff costs, the total medical personnel budget came to $15,875. Abruzzi wanted the entire amount “up front and in cash,” and cautioned Ganoung to “be prepared to pay for overtime on a pro-rated hourly basis.” The only outstanding item left to be resolved was a stipulation that Woodstock Ventures provide the medical staff with a malpractice insurance policy by 8:00 A.M., Friday, August 15, as, Abruzzi warned, the doctors “will not go on duty before such malpractice insurance contracts have been made available to them.”

  The three facilities that were ultimately decided upon for the exposition’s medical complex consisted of a trailer and two circus tents with eight or ten army cots and a refrigerator for storing and preserving drugs in each tent. Abruzzi had classified medication he wanted on hand by six categories—injectables, orals, eye and ear drops, suppositories, intravenous solutions, and ointments and creams—each of which were broken down further by generic variety. No possible emergency would be left to chance. This detailed list of drugs included painkillers, steroids, digitalis, antibiotics, antihistimines, cough suppressants, antidiarrhetics, muscle relaxants, hormones, penicillin, asthmatics, Vitamins A through Z, insulin, salt tablets, and several gallons of merthiolate tincture as it was anticipated they’d be overrun by cut feet. Abruzzi also asked for common first aid applicators such as Band-Aids, adhesive tape, splint
s, slings, Ace bandages, eye patches, syringes, and sutures. They would need a veritable warehouse of medical supplies on hand in case the roads were blocked and ambulances could not get through. A walkie-talkie system would be installed in ambulances, trailers, and hospital tents so Abruzzi could monitor his staff and patients and insure that all medical units were operating effectively at all times.

  Abruzzi put three area hospitals on alert—Monticello General, Thornton Memorial, and Beacon—with another four in reserve in case they filled up quickly or were understaffed for the weekend. As a precautionary measure, he informed administrators at each of the institutions to be prepared for a crisis situation. “Please save a percentage of your beds for our kids, have beds sheeted and ready that you can set up in the corridors, and see what you can do about having a subsidiary facility with a roof that you can put up outside for transient care.”

  Ganoung was convinced that Bill Abruzzi had the situation under control and that their medical operation was in good hands, so that he could attend to several other matters that commanded his attention.

  Twenty Courier CWT-50 Walkie-Talkie transceivers were purchased by Ganoung, along with one hundred crystal sets and two hundred Alkaline Energizer batteries with which to operate them. The radios and walkie-talkies were inventoried, cases and shoulder straps attached, and finally tested for accuracy. An antenna was installed on the roof of the Lake Street office that would enable them to transmit messages to and from the site and receive calls from mobile surveillance squads patroling the outlying areas.

  Pinkerton guards were hired to handle, pick up, and count all ticket money, two thousand signs for identifying everything from refreshment stands to highway shortcuts were prepared and ordered, a sign production shop was set up on the site, and paper maps were prepared to provide all necessary graphic information concerning the layout of the grounds, color-coordinated to the actual booths and utilities, which were to be passed out at the entrance gate.

  Two other areas that the minister had gotten into pretty good shape were a Clergy Assistance Program, made up of the Sullivan County Ministerial Alliance, the Sullivan County Council of Churches, and a coalition of local rabbis, to foster a program that offered advice to rebellious teen-agers and runaways concerning their domestic problems, and a Legal Assistance Service. This latter program, headed by a youthful, long-haired Wall Street lawyer named David Michaels whom Stanley Goldstein had met during a skirmish in Grand Central Station, was established to benefit young offenders who found themselves in police custody as a result of drug busts. Michaels had prepared a pamphlet to be distributed to ticket holders that included a summary of what to do if they were arrested and the rights of the arrested person, an outline of the state drug law, notes regarding the law on search and seizure, and a warning against violations of the law. Accompanied by a social worker and a team of five juvenile defenders from New York City, Michaels was primed to spend the three-day weekend behind a well-marked booth near the entrance gate where he would answer the kids’ questions and, if the situation called for it, stand up for them in court.

  Ganoung also saw to it that an employment office was opened on the site to hire an army of guides, seventy parking lot guards, three hundred Food For Love vendors, and two hundred attendants whose duty it would be to supervise the garbage clean-up detail at the conclusion of each day’s show. Most of the people whom they hired were green—drifters or Bethel students, who stopped by for a progress report, volunteered their services, and wound up signing the daily payroll register next to an identification number in exchange for twenty dollars in cash.

  By August 7, when Don Ganoung hurriedly left upstate New York in time to greet the Hog Farm and Indian artists arriving at Kennedy Airport, Woodstock Ventures’ employment rolls exceeded a staggering fifteen hundred names. In less than two weeks’ time, their staff had quadrupled. By August 15, he’d find it had doubled again, as the Aquarian Baby Boom stretched the festival’s already lopsided budget further out of proportion.

  4

  “Just walking around the Hog Farm is an incredible trip,” a reporter from the East Village Other observed while strolling through the commune’s plywood homestead located at the north end of the festival campgrounds. “A few thousand of the absolutely most together and peaceful and loving and beautiful heads in the world are gathered in a grand tribal new beginning. This meadow, which drops off to a steep slope . . . had become a gypsy camp of heads. All the petty bullshit things that before kept us apart vanished, and for the first time we were free.”

  This idyllic rendering, a splendid and graphic example of how vapid Hip Journalism had become, was, perhaps, one of the grossest misrepresentations of festival life to appear in print since the Concerned Citizens Committee’s smear campaign hit the Town of Wallkill.

  “Everything was beautiful until those scoundrels arrived,” a production assistant sneered, jerking a thumb in the direction of Movement City, as the newcomers had so named their stomping grounds. “They’re the hogs, man—the greediest, nastiest, most loathsome human miscreants I’ve ever laid eyes on. People can call me a dirty hippie if that’s where their heads are at, but those Hog Farmers are downright disgusting. They smell, man—I mean, they’re downright foul smelling—and they’ve got every communicable disease known to modern science. Since they barreled in here, we’ve been missing wallets and watches and anything else of value they can get their hands on. Believe me, they’ll swipe anything that’s not nailed down. Peace and love, man—to them, it’s one fat excuse for taking what they can get without working.”

  Penny Stallings wore a Mickey Mouse watch strapped to her left wrist that she’d been given as a little girl. A week after the Hog Farm made the scene, it, too, was gone. “One of their guys marched up to me and demanded that I give it to him,” she recalled, shaking her head in disbelief. “And, fool that I was, I did. I actually took it off and handed it over to that ignoramus, quite pleased that I could contribute to their welfare. They had me totally brainwashed into believing that I was supposed to give away all of my earthly possessions to them. We all wish they’d never have shown up.”

  The American Airlines charter carrying the Hog Farm and their children taxied up to the arrivals gate at Kennedy Airport a few minutes past 5:00 P.M. on August 7, but, as Wes Pomeroy noted, “They were so high, they could have flown in without the plane.” A cluster of reporters and television commentators appeared awestruck as they watched “the parade of sideshow freaks” shuffle down the ramp to the waiting room clad in “whatever mommy and daddy would find offensive.” Men in dresses and top hats, in tattered pajamas, women wrapped in swatches of the American flag, carrying naked babies, and a pet black and white hog named Pigasus—all trailing behind their mentor, Hugh Romney, a toothless Gabby Hayes lookalike, dressed in a white nightgown and a Donald Duck aviator’s cap.

  “Hey, it’s the God Squad,” Romney said, waving cheerfully at the members of the press who swarmed around them, poised for a statement.

  A man from the New York Daily News elbowed his way to the front of the crush. “I understand your group is here for security at the Woodstock festival,” he began.

  “Security, hey?” Romney rolled his eyes and flashed an audacious grin. “It’s just you and me and there’s all those other guys about ten feet away. Do you feel threatened? Of course not! I’m sure you’re secure.”

  Members of Romney’s party burst into laughter as reporters smiled nervously at one another. No one wanted to be the Hog Farm’s next Establishment victim until a New York Post music critic finally spoke up. “What do you plan to use for weapons?”

  “Oh yeah—like weapons, I almost forgot about them. Why, seltzer bottles. Seltzer bottles and cream pies,” Romney said, flashing on the silly plan he and Goldstein had concocted five months before at their first meeting. “And we’ll move in with that if anyone gets out of hand. They can face off like gladiators if they want.” He grimace
d, pantomiming the net and trident fighters of ancient Rome. “We just want to keep things together.”

  Sensing the carnival the press conference had become, everyone from the media began feeding Romney straight lines hoping he could turn them into quotable inanities. That became a signal for Ganoung and two other festival executives to herd their guests onto waiting buses parked outside for the trip upstate.

  The plane ride had, indeed, been a “trip.” The Hog Farm “did a couple tabs of great acid each” and the Indian artists, not particularly thrilled with their traveling companions, “got riproaringly drunk on airline samplers.” According to a horrified airline official, the flight was a nightmare. Tepee poles cluttered the aisles, making it virtually impossible for the flight attendants to get through to the rear cabin. The tribe sang and screamed obscenities until “one of the stewardesses locked herself in a lavatory and refused to come out until they landed in New York.”

  Arranging the trip had not proved all that much easier to deal with. In addition to the difficulty of booking the charter—at an expense to the promoters which the New York Post put at around sixteen thousand dollars (although there is evidence it was considerably less)—a Hog Farm representative had called Penny before leaving New Mexico and insisted that they be served only vegetarian meals with a side of goat’s milk while on board. That was not quite as time-consuming, she thought, as it would have been to fill the artists’ order for authentic American Indian cuisine, a request that the airlines dismissed out of hand.

  That night, the newest arrivals were reunited with the rest of their “family” who had come to New York weeks before as part of the labor crew. Paul Foster, a Merry Prankster who had joined the Farm’s touring company, had constructed a geodesic dome from leftover scraps of polyethylene and branches in the campgrounds, and had set up a communal kitchen where the Hog Farm prepared individual assignments and ate their meals. “Houses” were built out of rolled plastic, and blankets were passed out among them for “roofs.” In the morning, after family yoga exercises (which Wes Pomeroy attended as an avid participant) and a hearty breakfast served on picnic benches in front of the dome, a core-group of Hog Farm leaders examined the grounds, picked crew leaders, and lined up the rest of their members behind them in order of talents and capabilities: the kitchen crew, the cop crew, the trail crew, and the art crew. Romney was designated to coordinate the activities of each in the pages of The White Lake Daily Weirdness, a mimeographed newsletter he edited each night before they assembled for the family campfire.