Pittston Dispatch // PD Columnists // Ed Ackerman - Optimist

Sunday August 30, 2009 | 01:00 AM

At the risk of sounding terribly uncool to my college students, not only was I not at Woodstock in the summer of 1969, but I didn’t even know it was happening until it was over.

I was 19 years old then and, by today’s standards, a baby.

I had just completed my sophomore year of college and while my hair was long and I wore bell bottomed jeans, I was pretty much the same good little boy who had received First Holy Communion a dozen years earlier. I still lived at home. I watched the landing on the moon in our living room with my mom and dad and brothers and sisters. Months later, I watched the “Miracle Mets” win the World Series in the same place with the same people.

I had a girlfriend whom I had been dating for two years. We did a lot of kissing and not much else. We thought we were in love and believed we would someday marry. It was about a year and a half before I learned the lesson that love can die.

I didn’t drink or smoke. And I’m talking about cigarettes. Marijuana was something I guessed The Beatles used for creative inspiration. If it had found its way to Wyoming Valley, which I am now certain it had, I was unaware of it.

I went to Wilkes College but my whole world was Pittston.

I didn’t own a car. My girlfriend would get dropped off at my house and we’d walk to the American Theater for a movie and to Grablick’s Ice Cream Parlor afterwards. My dad would give me the keys to the Chevy station wagon to drive her home.

I did all my shopping in downtown Pittston. You could buy almost anything at Corcoran and O’Brien’s men’s store and pay it off two or three dollars at a time.

I worked at the Sunday Dispatch as a sports writer part-time during the school year and full-time during the summer. I wore a tie to work almost every day. It seemed appropriate. All the people who worked there considered me “the kid” and I accepted the role because that’s what I was. At 19 I figured I was still in the process of growing up.

I don’t know if Woodstock caused all of the sociological changes over the past 40 years that make the 19-year-old I just described a “baby” but the three-day rock concert that lent its name to my generation surely indicated where we were headed.

My generation – the teens of the 60s who believed, or at least sang, that “peace will rule the planets and love will guide the stars” – most likely reached our high point in the summer of 1967, the quote, Summer of Love.

But if peace was the goal, and for many of us it was, Woodstock was more of an end to it than a culmination. By 1969, even our beloved Beatles could not live in peace – and that was with each other. What hope was there for mankind?

The music aside – I will always love the music – the Woodstock Generation, to me, has always been divided between believers and non-believers, spiritual beings and materialists, givers and takers, users and the used. The beautiful message from the Woodstock stage “If you have food, share it with your brothers” overshadowed the fact that a lot of people went to Woodstock figuring someone else would take care of them. Many of them still think that.

Another message from Woodstock was free love. Forty years later, many of us have still not realized there is no such thing. Sex can be free – maybe – but love comes with responsibilities.

Then there’s free speech. Woodstock was a protest as much as a rock concert. And in a democracy, protest is a good thing. But for the Woodstock Generation, the protests were often short on ideas and long on hatred. So what? We were exercising our rights. We may have hated the country but we adored the First Amendment. It allowed us to make the f-word the verb of our generation and the middle finger the exclamation point.

Notice the word “we” and “us” in those statements. That’s because I am not excluded from the Woodstock Generation.

The events on Yasgur’s Farm in the summer of 1969 changed me, too. The baby I was in ’69 was long gone by ’70. I may not have bought the whole message, but I bought a lot of it.

One thing for sure, I got cool. And I kept getting cooler. For about four or five years.

I never really fit with the Woodstock Generation. I kept thinking about that 19 year old baby. And I missed him.

A line in the song “Woodstock,” written by Joni Mitchell and sung by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, says “we got to get ourselves back to the garden.” I quickly realized the “garden” for me was who I was in the summer of ’69. Getting myself back was easy.

I’ve been there ever since.