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By LIZ DOUP; Knight-Ridder Newspapers
Sunday, June 12, 1994 Page: 1E QUICK WORDS: WOODSTOCK REVISITED
He arrived in Bethel, N.Y., by motorcycle, wearing black leather over his
bare chest and a lion’s mane of hair curling over his shoulders.
Name: Michael Lang, former ’60s head-shop owner in Miami. Goal: to find a
field to stage a music festival — the Woodstock Music and Art Fair –for a
few thousand kids.
It was summer ’69. The appropriate look in rural Bethel, 70 miles from
Woodstock, was cropped hair and covered chests. Appropriate outlook,
conservative.
Miriam Yasgur, wife of dairy farmer Max Yasgur, wasn’t sure about letting
Lang in the door, let alone renting him land. But she and her husband did, and
word traveled quickly through town that sane, salt-of-the-earth Max Yasgur was
negotiating with longhairs.
Someone put up a sign near their home: “Don’t Buy Yasgur’s Milk. He Loves
The Hippies.”
“The sign did it,” says Miriam Yasgur, today Max Yasgur’s widow. “When Max
saw that, I knew darned well he was going to let them have their festival. You
didn’t do that to Max.”
Therein is the genesis of Woodstock — the seminal music festival — as
told by Miriam Yasgur at her home in the Pembroke Pines, Fla., condo where she
lives with her second husband, whom she married three years after Max died in
1973.
Today, the only reminder of the past hangs on the wall, a painting of the
red and white dairy barn with YASGUR FARMS neatly printed above its door. All
of her Woodstock memorabilia — including hundreds of notes from festivalgoers
saying “Thanks for letting us use your land” — is stored in boxes at her
son’s home in New York state.
Miriam remains a gracious, but reluctant, chronicler of history. A private
woman who doesn’t want her married name, age or photograph in the paper, she
even wonders about sharing words.
“Oh, it’s all been said, it’s all been printed,” says Miriam, a youthful
grandmother of four, with short, white-blond hair framing her unlined face.
“Really, there’s nothing new to add.”
But as the 25th anniversary of Woodstock approaches, word of Woodstock ’94
— a mega-concert scheduled for Aug. 13-14 near the original site — makes
news. And while the impact of this anniversary concert must wait for the
history books, the original “Three Days of Peace and Music” remains a reminder
of an era: when practicing free speech brought riot police to quiet Chicago’s
streets, Richard Nixon was new to the White House and a fractious nation was
at war with Vietnam.
In one small town over three short days, music magically united a “nation”
of nonconformist youth. Even Max, a world away politically, knew something
special happened here. Coaxed to the stage at the festival’s end, he said:
“I think you have proven something to the world — that a half a million
kids can get together and have three days of fun and music and have nothing
but fun and music. And I God-bless you for it.”
In July, when Miriam and Max first met the producers, they were told:
“Count on 10,000 kids a day for three days.”
The producers were wrong. Though no one knows for certain, the overhyped
happening pulled kids from all over the country. Maybe 300,000. Maybe 400,000.
Before things even got rolling, 10 square miles turned into a gridlocked
parking lot. Cops couldn’t get in; kids couldn’t get out.
As the crowd grew, the Yasgur farm was deemed music arena “and” official
disaster area. Gov. Nelson Rockefeller sent in medical teams, and a field
hospital was set up. Helicopters hauled out festivalgoers needing treatment
for everything from zapped feet to zapped brains. Food ran short. Rain poured.
But it was disaster with a beat: Joan Baez, Joe Cocker, Jefferson Airplane.
Jimi Hendrix set his guitar on fire, The Who kicked their drums apart and
Janis Joplin cry, cry, cried.
Like soldiers in battle, those closest to the action didn’t get the full
picture, and the Yasgurs became unwitting soldiers. Milk production being a
daily business, they patrolled their office, rescheduling routes and talking
to customers — when not fielding scores of calls from irate, anonymous locals
yelling about the hippies.
The couple’s daughter, Lois, a cardiac-care nurse, and her husband came
from New York City to hear the music. Instead, Lois ended up pitching in at
the emergency tent. Miriam never even saw her.
Midway into the festival, Miriam remembers being coaxed into a helicopter
and flying over the crowd for a look. Before Woodstock had started, she’d
wondered how 10,000 kids could fit in the field. Now she was seeing 10,000
kids multiplied by 30, by 40.
“Just a sea of people,” she says. “People everywhere. It was a sight to
behold.”
Still, she saw it as a local event until family members from New York City
started calling. On the TV news they’d seen a most surprising sight. Yasgur’s
dairy farm, rocking out.
Through it all, Miriam remembers focusing not on crowds and chaos, but on
her husband and his health.
Max, a community leader who helped the Boy Scouts and 4-H, had a good heart
but not a strong one. At 39, he had his first heart attack. By Woodstock,
50-year-old Max had had another or two.
A muscular man of six feet, he disliked admitting physical frailty. Miriam
was more realistic. She kept oxygen tanks in their car and bedroom. More
stress, he didn’t need.
She remembers angrily calling the head of Woodstock security to tell him
the obvious: Way too many people are here. Festival trouble meant trouble for
Max — he’d said yes to promoters when everyone else said no.
The first site to go due to a skittish landowner was near Woodstock, a
summer colony for rock stars, including Bob Dylan. The producers then rented
land in nearby Wallkill, selling thousands of tickets before the town banned
gatherings of 5,000 or more, to kill the festival a month before its Aug.
15-17 date.
Then someone told producers about the Yasgur farmland.
In “Young Men With Unlimited Capital,” a history of the festival, producer
John Roberts wrote: “An old-fashioned sort of fellow, (Max) believed that you
should not hate people just because they are different. … He believed in the
American Constitution and the right of peaceable assembly. He believed that
Wallkill had done us wrong. He also believed in money.”
(Roberts wrote that the agreement called for $50,000 to rent the land and
another $75,000 in escrow for damage. Miriam, who sold the 40-acre tract in
1981 for a reported $65,000, says she doesn’t remember exact numbers but
believes all the figures, including the publicized sales price, are too high.
Today, the only change to the open field is the addition of a concrete marker,
placed by the couple who bought the land, which reads: This is the Original
Site of the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair.)
Miriam doesn’t recall that she and Max slept much during those three days.
Just washed up and went back to work. On the final festival day, Mel Lawrence,
part of the Woodstock organizing team, thought Max should address the crowd.
That’s when Max gave his impromptu speech, captured forever on the
“Woodstock” album and film. In “Woodstock: The Oral History,” there’s also a
picture of Max on stage — giving the peace sign to the crowd.
Even after the music ended, emotions played on, at crescendo level for
months. The Yasgurs were viewed as either scourge or celebrity. Especially
Max.
When one Bethel merchant continued to complain about the crowds and the
trash, Miriam closed their post-office boxes there and put up a mailbox on the
road by their home.
Weeks later, an ailing Max stopped his car on a Bethel road to pop
nitroglycerin and breathe from his oxygen supply. He heard a car driving by
and thought someone would stop to help.
The car’s driver, a neighbor angered by Woodstock, saw Max and kept
driving. Miriam avoided the man and his wife from that day on.
“Woodstock made me realize that these young people were better than a lot
of grownups I’ve known,” she says. “At the time I hadn’t learned to accept
people who looked different. Our generation was, well, we were rigid. But I
hope I’m past that now. You judge people by their actions, not their
appearance.”
After the festival, people called from around the country citing names
similar to Yasgur and wondering if they were related. Sometimes they were.
Thank-you letters decorated with peace symbols poured in. On occasion,
troubled kids gravitated to the Yasgur home, looking for advice from Max,
suddenly elevated to guru status.
Max tried to find common ground, Miriam says, especially about childhood’s
tough times. He had been only 17 when his own father died.
“If Max thought he could help,” Miriam says, “he’d help.”
A year after Woodstock, the Bethel community gave an appreciation dinner
for Max to balance the negative buzz that lingered. Then, Miriam says, “we got
on with our lives.”
But less than four years after Woodstock, Max died of a heart attack at 53
in Key Colony in the Florida Keys, where the couple kept a home.
In 1976, Miriam married a friend, her accountant. But tragedy trailed her
newfound happiness: In 1977 her daughter was killed in a car wreck on her 33rd
birthday.
In ’83, Miriam and her husband bought a winter home in Pembroke Pines, then
moved here year-round about five years ago.
So much has marked the 25 years between now and then that Woodstock is more
footnote in Miriam’s life than main event.
Chances are, she’ll visit the Bethel area about the time of the Woodstock
anniversary. She returns every summer to visit friends and pay her respects at
the graves of Max, her parents and her daughter.
“You know,” she says, “Woodstock doesn’t occur to me.”
Except when anniversaries roll around and people won’t let her forget the
Yasgurs’ place in history.
“I suppose without Max and that sign,” she says, “Woodstock never would
have happened.”