August 15 • 2019 19
jn

two miles to the entrance.
Before he left Oak Park, he told 
his friends, “I’
ll meet you at the Hog 
Farm,” Keller recalls. “We had no idea 
there would be half a million people.”
The first night it had started pour-
ing and Keller slept under a truck. 
The next day, he started walking 
around and saw a van with Michigan 
license plates. So, he knocked on the 
door and found Dennis Miller and his 
brother, Danny, who were also from 
Oak Park.
“It was 1969, and we knew there 
was this whole counterculture we had 
a chance to be a part of,” says Keller 
of Birmingham. “We were the hippies 
who just wanted to listen to the best 
music and amazing bands of the time 
and get high. 
“We’
re the generation that changed 
the #@%# world,” Keller continues. 
“We ended the war in Vietnam by 
taking to the streets and protesting. 
We were all about peace, love and 
music.
“I think it was a cultural turning 
point in my life and in American his-
tory because it was like-minded peo-

ple coming together at Bethel. 
The experience of people 
communing with each other 
was the most invigorating. We 
broke the barriers. Our gen-
eration definitely changed the 
world. If we could only recre-
ate that now.”

MARK LONDON
London was going to be a 
senior at Carnegie-Mellon 
University when 
he drove from 
Rhode Island 
with two friends 
to Woodstock. 
A past Newport 
Folk Festival 
attendee, London 
went for the music.
The first night, they 
slept in their car due 
to the rain. After that, 
they slept on the 
field. 
By the last day, 
on Sunday, all the 
concession stands 
had run out of 
food. Many walked 
from the site of 
the festival stage to 
another field on Max 
Yasgur’
s farm where 
they were distributing government-do-
nated food.
“This was my first taste of granola,” 
says London, who has lived in Michigan 
with his wife since the mid-1970s. “I’
m 
standing in line and a guy walks up 
behind me. He was naked. 
“The media reports about the wild-
ness were overblown. It was all about 
the music.”

TODD JAY WEINSTEIN
Weinstein was 18 and ready to start at 
the College for Creative Studies when 
he hopped on a plane 
to New York City. From 
the Bronx, with his 
homemade “Heading 
up to Woodstock” sign, 
he hitchhiked 81 miles 
and then walked the 
last two miles.
“Our tickets cost $18. I 
love that 18 is a spiritual 
number in Judaism,
” Weinstein says. 
“But the organizers couldn’
t get the gates 
and fences up quickly enough, so it 
turned into a free concert.

“Woodstock was happening at a 
time in our country that was a peri-
od of great unrest and protest,” says 
Weinstein, a photographer who has 
lived 50 years in New York City. 
“Woodstock was an opportunity for 
people to escape into music and spread 
a message of unity and peace.”
Weinstein was lucky to find the Hog 
Farm, along with its leader, Wavy Gravy. 
They were brought in to help create a 
safe ground for people. At Woodstock, 
they set up a children’
s playground for 
families and set up a free food tent.
“I would see people swimming nude 
in a small lake passing by the legendary 
Ken Kesey Bus called the ‘
Furthur.
’
 It was 
amazing to witness. 
“The last day I started thinking about 
how was I going to get back to Detroit? I 
had no clue,
” he says. 
Out of the 500,000 attendees, 
Weinstein was lucky to run into fel-
low Oak Parkers Mark Keller, Saudia 
Sharkey, Jeff Shine, Susan Rosensweet, 
Jon Levin and Dennis Miller.
“The amazing thing was I got a ride 
right to my front door in Oak Park. The 
experience of Woodstock will be tat-
tooed into my soul. We had no idea how 
important the Woodstock festival was as 
an event in our U.S. history. I guess you 
can never plan such an event. That is the 
magic of it all.
” 

SANDI GERBER REITELMAN
Reitelman was a 14-year-old rebel-
lious teen about to enter 10th grade 
in the neighboring 
borscht belt commu-
nity of Liberty, N.Y., 
which is about 12 miles 
away from Bethel. She 
already had her tick-
ets and the infamous 
Woodstock poster 
hanging in her bed-
room — the one that replaced her 
Beatles and Monkees posters.
“My father essentially knew everyone, 
including Max Yasgur, who was just 
another Jewish farmer in the commu-
nity,” says Reitelman, who now lives in 
Birmingham. “I was dying to go, but my 
parents said it was going to be a ‘
bad 
scene.’
 We had stranded hippie people 
staying at our house.”
The next best thing was flying over 
the site with a family friend who kept 
his plane at the nearby small airport.
“I remember looking out the window, 
still disappointed I hadn’
t been able to 
go, but very excited to be flying there. 

In less than two minutes in the air, I 
could look down at a massive crowd 
with a huge stage in a very large field,” 
says Reitelman, who has been back to 
the site and the Woodstock Museum in 
recent years.
Although Woodstock 50 was can-
celed, she has many friends from high 
school who plan to descend upon Max 
Yasgur’
s farm in Bethel this weekend to 
attend festivities at the Bethel Center 
for the Arts where Ringo Starr, Santana, 
the Doobie Brothers, John Fogerty, 
Tedeschi Trucks Band and Grace Potter 
are slated to perform.

JON “YONI” LEVIN
Levin had just graduated Berkley High 
School in June 1969 when he decided 
to take a pre-college 
road trip for the sum-
mer. Hearing about 
the 10-mile backups to 
Bethel, he parked his ’
67 
Austin America within 
two miles of the site and 
started walking. After 
about 15 minutes, a hay 
wagon pulled by a tractor came along-
side him.
“
A few hippies in the wagon waved 
me aboard,
” says Levin of Oak Park. “I 
have a clear memory of coming around 
one final curve when the entire festival 
site came suddenly into view. My jaw 
dropped. It was as if I were looking at 
an ant colony. There were some hillsides 
covered with colorful creatures.
“Spirits were high — and so were 
the people,
” Levin says. “
A small group 
offered me a dry corner of their blan-
ket to sit on and I shared my O.J. with 
them. This is how I was slowly absorbed 
into this pop-up community of nearly a 
half-million.
“In retrospect, I count being a mere 
audience member — one ant on those 
hills of Woodstock — as a small point 
of pride. 
“It says something that in the year 
prior to Woodstock, I was at the 
Democratic National Convention in 
Chicago; and after Woodstock, I was at 
the largest anti-Vietnam war protest in 
Washington, D.C.,
” Levin says. 
“Some events are so pivotal in a his-
torical perspective that just being in the 
audience, just knowing to have been 
at that longitude and latitude in that 
moment, shows one to have been at the 
leading edge of a generation seeking 
change through being a living 
example.
” ■ 

WOODSTOCK WHISPERER/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Todd Jay 

Weinstein

FROM TODD JAY WEINSTEIN

Jon Levin

VIA LEVIN FACEBOOK

Sandi 

Reitelman

FROM SANDI REITELMAN 

Amid the mud at 

Max Yasgur’
s farm, 

Woodstock’
s first 

day, Bethel, N.Y., 

Aug. 15, 1969

MARK GOFF/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

went for the

Th
slep

s to the entrance.

th
h
fi

h
fo
fr

the
ano
Y

t
th
fi

h
f
f

to t

t
f

f
f

Mark London

COURTESY MARK LONDON

A set of three-

day tickets 

to Woodstock 

owned by Ann 

Abrams

