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| The festival stated on August 15, 1969. About 30,000 people were expected to attend the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival, held in Bethel, N.Y. It was to be three days of peace and music...coming together for a celebration of a communal spirit and to hear some of the popular rock acts of the day. It was that and even more. As close to anyone can count, the final tallies of people attending this event were near 450,000.
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Tickets were to be handled at the ticket booths. Too many people, cars and tents blocked the way to get the 22 out of 24 ticket booths put in place. This was before the event even opened its gate. On Saturday, the gates were open to those thousands arriving without tickets. Hundreds of thousands of people attended, yet Woodstock never collected a single dollar at the gate.
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Noone was prepared for what was to come...not the residents of Bethel, N.Y., not the police, not even the concert organizers. Around midnight on the second day of the festival, in the space of about three hours, five inches of rain fell. The musicians played in the rain...everything and everbody was soaked and in two inches of mud.
Not everything that happened at Woodstock was good. Warding off the rain, a 17 year old from South Jersey, covered himself with his sleeping bag. In the morning a tractor towing a tank trailor used to haul away sewage from the portable toilets slowly ran over him. He died before the helicopter arrived to transport him to the hospital.
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If there were to be problems, the Woodstock promoters decided early on that crowd control was crucial. What was worse..as the music got louder, the crowd got wilder? Or several hundreds of bored fans looking to be entertained? They decided for the music to be endless...the bands would begin to play later and play til dawn. Since there was no possible way to bring the bands in by bus - noone could get throught the mass of people - they were all flown in by helicopter.
The organizers pleaded with the bands to play twice as long...most were willing. The problems don't end here. Thousands of unprepared people outside the actual concert, the massive traffic jams blocking deliveries of food and medical supplies, drug use was widespread and the sanitary conditions were primitive. Not to mention the cost. Way over budget, no money was made. The cost of cleaning up the decimated festival site was $100,000. A huge hole was dug and tons of bottles, clothing, tents,
plastic sheets, and shoes were bulldozed into the ground. A fire was set that burned for days. Yet with all that, when one looks back on the "Psychedelic Sixties," Woodstock is what comes to mind.
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