Woodstock Was Amazing

For a 12 year old boy from Appalachia

This story took place when I was 12, on a farm just two miles away from my home in Appalachia. It changed me forever.

My Italian grandfather sold plants every spring along the main road. He grew a lot of them himself but also bought certain ones from a greenhouse about 50 miles away. My father would drive him there, and so in 1971, we three found ourselves rumbling along in a 1956 International Harvester pickup truck—complete with a homemade, hillbilly-style wooden cap on the back.

As we drove, we saw them up ahead—hippies! Van’s, VW beetles in all manner of transportation had shut the traffic ahead down to a crawl, hundreds walking on foot.

They were on their way to some “rock concert,” and my father, never one to mince words, muttered, “Damn hippies.”

As we drove through the crowd, I saw lots of long hair and pretty girls, I’m thinking this is awesome. My father wasn’t impressed, in fact being a hard-working guy who barely got by didn’t have time for traffic jams, and this could have well been the first ever. No such thing as a traffic jam in the hinterlands of Appalachia. My grandfather Luigi seems cautiously fascinated, looking out the window at these people wearing tie-dyed tee shirts and vests. He said, “Pirates.”

My grandfather, who was in his eighties and still spoke with a thick Italian accent, frowned and then asked, “What is hippy?”

“Dopers,” my dad replied.

Grandpa squinted, his head swiveling around to see all the young people, “What is dope?”

Meanwhile, 12-year-old me was in the middle of the bench seat, thinking, Hmm… good question.

When you grow up in the sticks, this kind of moment of generational parenting counts as being a life-forming moment, if you are young and into self-parenting.

The festival turned out to be shut down, but that didn’t stop the crowd. The J. Harold Arnold farm sat empty, but a group of 800 to 1,000 people had set up camp on another farm a few miles away.

It started with just a few hitchhikers. Mrs. William King had given them permission to stay overnight, but before she knew it, her property had turned into an impromptu Woodstock. Campfires dotted the hillside, tents popped up, and people were crashing overnight in campers, vans, and just about anywhere they could find a spot.

And they weren’t leaving anytime soon—at least, not unless the cops made them.

I later talked to my neighbor a young hippie himself, probably around 20, I asked how he felt about the festival’s cancellation.

“A real bummer, man,” he sighed, genuinely perplexed as to why people weren’t more welcoming to the idea of a rock fest in rural Appalachia Pennsylvania.

He wasn’t too torn up about it, he was a hippie, one of the few local hippies who had been reading Rolling Stone magazine for 10 years prior and kept every paper copy.

“The music wasn’t the main thing,” he said. “I like people, and I like getting out like this—meeting out-of-towners is cool man.”