The Woodstock Museum in Bethel will rock on despite getting half a peace sign from the U.S. Senate, which this week pulled the plug on a $1 million piece of federal pork for the memorial to hippie heaven.
"Our plans haven't changed,'' said Ellyn Solis, public relations director for the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, which is developing the museum as the newest part of its 2,000-acre performing arts venue. "The museum is scheduled to open in late May or early June.''
The money, attached as an earmark to a Senate health and education bill by New York Sens. Charles Schumer and Hillary Rodham Clinton, drew criticism from Republican Sens. Jon Kyl of Arizona and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who moved Thursday to strip the grant. They won a 52-42 vote, effectively giving the Country Joe and the Fish Cheer - flipping a bird other than the dove that symbolized Woodstock - to the museum and proving that almost four decades after "the gathering of the tribes,'' the iconic music festival still serves as a cultural flashpoint. Bethel Woods has received $15 million in state funding.
GOP presidential contender John McCain mocked Clinton's support of the earmark at a recent debate and almost immediately began airing a television commercial in New Hampshire that contrasts images of Woodstock with his years as a Vietnam War prisoner. Schumer and Clinton defended the grant, saying the museum will create jobs and give a much-needed boost to the Sullivan County economy.
"Woodstock has become a metaphoric representation, a symbol of a specific time in our cultural history, just like Plymouth Rock or the Gettysburg Address," said Syracuse University professor Robert Thompson, who teaches classes on pop culture. "It's thought of as possibly the major event of the counterculture, when the parameters of what we now call the culture wars were being laid out. When you look at it like that, a museum makes perfect sense. The problem with attaching or earmarking funding for something like this to a spending bill that is supposed to help educate poor children is that it's easy to point at it cynically and make fun of it. But that's really oversimplifying things. I think there should be separate bills for cultural funding, so that the issues don't get convoluted like this has."
Billed as "three days of peace and love,'' the August 1969 Woodstock festival drew 500,000 music fans to a natural amphitheater on Max Yasgur's farm and is mostly remembered by those who were there for the rain, mud, drugs and career-defining performances by bands including Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Santana, Jimi Hendrix and Ten Years After.
The Museum at Bethel Woods, as it is officially known, is on top of the hill that runs down to where the festival stage was. The museum "explores the unique experience of the Woodstock Festival, its significance as the culminating event of a decade of radical cultural transformation, the legacies of the Sixties and Woodstock today,'' according to the Bethel Woods Web site. "The Museum will encourage intergenerational dialogue about important ideas and issues relevant to today" and preserve the original concert site.
Thousands of people visit the site each year, where a stone monument is currently the only reminder of the festival.
"I call it the tomb of the unknown hippie,'' said Duke Devlin, who hitchhiked to the festival from a Texas commune in 1969 and never left. Devlin opened a farmers market and for years told visitors about the concert and his experiences, showing them where the stage was, where the helicopters shuttling the performers landed and relating other tidbits.
Two years ago, he was hired by Bethel Woods as the official "site interpreter.'' Now 65, Devlin's long hair is gray, as is his bushy beard, but he still describes himself as a hippie, albeit one with a business card.
"I told people about Woodstock for free for 36 years,'' he said with a laugh. "Now I get paid, but honestly, I'd do it for a Twinkie and a Yoo-hoo. If someone had said in 1969 that there'd be a festival museum, I'd probably have asked them to share what they were smoking. We were on another planet back then. But when you think about it all these years later, we were talking about ending the war, civil rights, women's rights and the real meaning of freedom. It was an important event, and what we did here, calling for peace and love, did change the world at least a little bit.''
Devlin said he supported the use of tax money to help fund the museum "because we're up in the sticks here and it's tough for people to make a living. Tell that senator from Oklahoma that this will attract tourists, create jobs and help people get off welfare."
Liberty resident Glenn Pontier, director of Sullivan Renaissance, a grant program that provides seed money for beautification projects in the county, agreed that the museum is culturally important.
"People will come here, and it will be great,'' he said. "The museum will give visitors an opportunity to explore the cultural issues of the time at the spot where hippies made history, where a window into our country's culture was opened.''
Not everyone is enthralled with the museum.
Jim Wright, a sales manager for M.E. Sharpe Inc. in Armonk, was a 21-year-old Oneonta college student when he and a group of friends piled into a car and headed to the festival.
"We left the car about three miles from the site and caught a ride on a flatbed the rest of the way," he recalled. "It was muddy and wet, but I loved the music, and most of my favorite groups played there. It was something I did then, but it's not a way of life that I embraced."
He scoffed at the idea of a museum, saying, "I'd prefer to have the memories than to see what a bunch of present-day people might try to capture and interpret. The plaque on the rock that's there now is perfect for me.''
Retired White Plains Police Commissioner John Dolce, who bought a dairy farm about two miles from the festival site from the Yasgur family 27 years ago, said neighbors of the area are concerned about the traffic a busy museum might bring.
"I'm not too worried about it,'' he said. "I didn't really pay attention to the Woodstock festival when it was happening - it just wasn't part of my lifestyle. I don't know if it deserves a museum, but I don't have a problem with it. I still have some old milk crates with Yasgur's Farm stamped on them. I'm going to offer them to the museum if they're interested.''
Terri Hall was a 15-year-old at Camp Willoway in Hancock, N.Y., in 1969, and a self-described "naive, goody two-shoes,'' when she rode on a bus to what was supposed to be a music festival and crafts fair in Bethel.
"We had tickets, but no one asked for them,'' said Hall, an Eastchester attorney. "I was a counselor in training, and I got lost on Friday, right after we got there. We had no idea that it would be so big. There were just thousands of people in every direction I looked, for miles and miles."
Hall finally did find her camp group and spent the night in a tent. By the next day, she said, parents had seen the festival on news reports and "lit up the camp switchboard, demanding that we leave. We did go back to the camp that Saturday. It was fun while it lasted.''
"Woodstock didn't change my life, but it did give me a whole new outlook, and it definitely improved my musical taste,'' she said. "If the museum will bring money into the state and help the local economy, I'm all for it. Look what the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame did for Cleveland.''
Reach Richard Liebson at rliebson@lohud.com
