[LISTEN] American Chronicles Episode 7 – Woodstock: Part 2

American Chronicles 7 Part 2, originally airing Aug. 7, 2015 (Listen to Part 1)

WOODSTOCK 1969
© 2015 John C. Merino

PA’S CAR

It was August of 1969. I had just graduated from Niagara Falls High School that June and was two weeks away from leaving for college on the prairies of Kansas.

“Pa” I said, “Can I borrow the new car to go to a concert?”

“The new car? I guess” he said, “but you have to take your little brother with you, your mother and I are going out”…we’ll use the old car….” But be damn careful”.

The car….the new car…. was a four door 1968 Pontiac Catalina. A 400-cubic-inch eight-cylinder engine, which featured a 4.12-inch bore and a 3.75-inch stroke.

It produced 290 horsepower and 428 ft.-lbs. of torque.

It was cream colored, cloth seats with leather trim. AM/FM radio and an 8-track player, simulated wood grain dash and electric door locks.

It was the car of Pa’s dreams.

He had watched the window at Krueger Pontiac in Niagara Falls for a year. It was a salesman’s demo with low mileage and when the 1969 version came out he made them an offer on the demo and we had our first new car since the 1963 Chevy Impala.

He waxed it the first day he had it home……and when I asked to borrow “the car” it had been home for just two weeks.

I called the boys to let them know the trip was on, but we had to bring Marc along. We left that afternoon, Thursday August 14th. My kid brother (Marc) was 15 years old.

Marc and I made the rounds picking up the boys. There was Dangler, Acorn, Pig Pen, Little Mike and Louie Sawicki. For some reason, Louie never had a nickname and was always referred to by his full name. He was always Louie Sawicki. Seven of us in Pa’s “new” Pontiac Catalina.

I had plotted our route on a Shell Oil map from my Uncle Mo’s gas station. He helped me mark the route and then asked if my father knew where I was going. “Of course Uncle Mo” I said………….but Pa had no idea.

Bethel, NY was a six and 1/2 hour drive. We made it in 9 hours, arriving at 2 AM the night before the concert began.

Louie Sawicki was the last driver and got us lost… yet somehow, when we arrived via some back road or other, we were within sight of the stage, parked on a hill with only 50 or so other cars. By the morning, hundreds of cars surrounded us.

Our planning amounted to this. Everyone brought $50.00 for gas and tickets. No sleeping bags, no food, no change of clothes, no water, no beer and no common sense.

We had let our hair grow since 1967. Rarely did anyone wear anything but jeans and a T-shirt. We all played guitar, swore by the Beatles and Bob Dylan and traveled in a pack everywhere we went. If one guy went to the dentist, we all went and waited outside.

When Dangler decided to pick grapes for the summer at vineyards along Lake Ontario with the migrant workers, we all went to work with him. When I, (later that summer), went to work at Airco Steel for a few weeks (to have some spending money at college), the boys would be waiting at the gate when my shift ended and we would head to the Midtown Tavern for 15-cent drafts of Gennie Cream Ale.

If there was one of us somewhere, there were all of us.

That first morning (Friday) we woke to rafts of smoke, breakfast being cooked on Coleman Camping stoves that smarter people brought along, the sound of the Grateful Dead blaring from a car stereo system and the sun beginning to burn off the damp of the hills grasses.

It took only a few minutes to understand that this was different.

We never asked for food, it was gladly offered. Wine with eggs and bacon, pipes passed around, guitars everywhere and Marc, mouth wide open hardly believing what he was seeing. He, after all, was my 15 year old kid brother.

The concert was scheduled to begin at noon. Somewhere along the path from our hill to the stage we were handed plastic jugs of water. “It’s going to be hot man” a young woman said, “you’ll want this” and she danced away to the song in her head.

By 10 AM we had etched out our space. No more than 150 yards from the stage…..dead center so we’d get the best sounds possible.

Noon was coming…..it came and it went. For nearly 4 hours we sat baking in the sun of day one. It was the only time the ground was solid…….no mud and no rain…..and no music either.

At 3:30 Marc said he needed a bathroom. We pointed to the rows of porta-johns 100 yards away, to the left of the stage. As he began to leave he asked, “How will I find you guys?”

“Just walk back to the center of the stage down front and when we see you, we’ll stand up and wave and you can just walk through the crowd to get to us”.

It was estimated, that eventually, some 500,000 people attended the festival. On Friday afternoon, (day 1) there were 100,000 people and they never stopped coming.

I have to admit it was a bit un-nerving. The feeling of complete freedom and anonymity……both at once……in a crowd that size and (having been brought up in an all Italian neighborhood a few doors away from the homestead of Mafia Boss Stefano Magadino) a bit paranoid because I didn’t know the motives of anyone there.

“You’ve got to look in their eyes”, the men with banlon shirts, pointy black shoes and sansa belt pants would tell me when I was a kid. “That’s how you know what they’re thinking…that’s how you know if you’re among friends”.

I had never seen so many eyes in one place.

Marc trudged back to the center of the stage, in front of the fencing meant to keep the performers safe from the crowd. Dangler saw him first.

“There’s the kid”, he said and we all stood up to wave our arms and shout his name. …and as we did…100,000 people stood as well, shouting and waving their arms.

At that very moment Richie Havens walked out on stage and began to play. The concert was officially underway, 4 hours late and we didn’t see Marc for 3 days.

At the 20^th anniversary of Woodstock, the Niagara Gazette published an article (complete with pictures) interviewing my crew about our experiences. Even then Marc wouldn’t elaborate on what happened, what he saw or what he did, except to say that those 3 days were like nothing else before or since.

The music was incredible. The rain unbelievable, the mud was everywhere, the experience second to none…but I can’t stop to tell you about all that now…this is (after all) a story about Pa’s car.

On Monday morning, as we listened to Hendrix play the Star Spangled Banner, Marc found us and we all walked the concert site for the better part of two hours.

There were tons of garbage, clothes, sleeping bags, bottles, and people mud covered and left behind. The emergency tents were full of bad trips and minor injuries. Everywhere were people asking which way you were going, could they get a ride to the thruway, did you have any spare change.

Because we had arrived the night before it ALL began, we were unable to leave until Monday about 1 PM. The hundred’s of cars surrounding the 1968 Pontiac Catalina were bogged down, everyone helping to push each other’s car down the hill toward the road, wheel wells caked with mud.

Marc was the lightest and smallest. We made him drive while we pushed Pa’s car down the incline from the top of the hill.

Half way down, the car began to slip sideways. It skipped over the mud like we all had…down the mud-slide on Sunday afternoon, turning the rain into a tool and the mud into a playground. It came to a stop 100 feet or so from the bottom of the hill and the paved road below it.

At least a dozen other people joined in to help us right the car and point it back toward the road.

At the bottom of the hill was a VW Bug sitting and waiting it seemed, for the very point of that 1968 Pontiac Catalina. It was covered with painted flowers and Peace Signs adorning the entire bug and Pa’s new Pontiac Catalina was pointed in its direction.

As Marc hit the gas again, the car began to slide down the hill aided by the push of a dozen strangers. As it reached the road (half skidding-half gassed) the inevitable happened. Marc T-Boned the VW Bug…coming to a dead stop, our rear tires still stuck in mud.

Other’s joined us as we picked up the VW and moved it to the side, then finishing the push, Marc pulled out on the road and we all jumped in Pa’s car.

As I began to drive away, Marc shouted “STOP”. “I have to leave a note”. He reached in the glove box, pulled out a scrap of paper and pencil and walked back to the VW.

He stood looking at us for a minute and on what remained of the hood of the VW wrote his note, placing it under the windshield wiper.

Twenty miles or so down the road; Little Mike said “Marc, you learned a lot about Peace and Love this weekend. It was a nice thing….leaving your contact information for that VW owner”.

Marc smiled the same smile he still smiles when you just know he feels he’s just a step ahead of you.

He looked at Little Mike in the back seat and said, “I didn’t leave my contact information. I wrote: “there are 10,000 people watching me write this note thinking I’m leaving my name and number. Well, I’m not….Peace”.

It took me two weeks to get all the mud out from under Pa’s car. He made me wax it every weekend for a month and I was never allowed to drive it again.

The boys, scattered a few weeks later for various colleges and universities across the country…Dangler becoming a chemical worker, Acorn moving to California, Little Mike is a crime photographer still, for the New York City Police department.

Louie Sawicki died from cancer just a few years later and Pig Pen went home becoming a Niagara Falls police officer, retiring early after being shot in the line of duty.

He later went to law school and ran an unsuccessful campaign for Niagara County DA a decade or so ago….with his claim to fame being that he had once busted Chubby Checker at the Rainbow Bridge from Canada, for possession of marijuana. Pig Pen, a cop…busting Chubby Checker. Ironic.

Marc retired from the city of Niagara Falls a couple years ago after 30 years as a water quality engineer.

I have spent most of my professional career in Urban Development; I still play a little music now and then, been the owner of a VW Bug convertible and a restored 1971 VW Bus…

…and I think about that weekend often, proud to have been there when history was made and just as proud that the guys in the banlon shirts, pointy black shoes and sansa-belt pants were wrong.

Sometimes, when you look into a stranger’s eyes…….. You don’t have to worry about what you’ll find.

I’m John Merino and this is American Chronicles.