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Billy Joel went to Woodstock, but didn’t end up staying for the whole festival because, well, he didn’t really like it. 
He told Howard Stern in 2014 that he really disliked Country Joe &amp; The Fish. “You start to compromise the music when you use it to deliver propaganda, I think,” said Joel, adding that after hearing their “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die-Rag” he thought, “This song sucks.” 
Joel, then 20 years old, says he did like Santana’s set, but that after seeing them, he thought it was time to go. “I wanted to see Hendrix and the Who,” Joel <a href="https://ew.com/article/2015/07/24/billy-joel-ew-interview/">told Entertainment Weekly</a> in 2015. “But after a day and a half with no real toilet facilities . . . what am I, a bear? I have to go in the woods? . . . I was dirty and itchy and covered with poison ivy and I thought, ‘Just get me out of here! I’ve got to use a bathroom.’ ” 
Joel told Stern, “I think you had to do acid if you stayed there for three days.”

ETJOEL190811

Billy Joel recalls his Woodstock experience

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In the 50 years since the Woodstock Music and Art Fair took over Max Yasgur’s farm near Bethel, New York, its reputation has far surpassed the realities of the three-day event. 
The footage seen in the landmark “Woodstock” documentary has gradually replaced the memories of the 500,000 or so who actually attended the festival. The experiences of those who arrived on Aug. 15 and stayed until the early morning of Aug. 18, 1969, have been condensed into the relatively brisk, mud-free, completely dry four hours it takes to watch the documentary, in which The Who flows into Sha Na Na and then Joe Cocker’s unforgettable “With a Little Help From My Friends,” where Santana and Sly &amp; the Family Stone give way to the transformative set of Jimi Hendrix. 
“Woodstock was a total disaster the first time, but there was some magic that came out of it,” says Michael “Eppy” Epstein, co-founder of My Father’s Place and, currently, My Father’s Place at The Roslyn Hotel. He missed attending the event with his friend Richie Havens because he was, well, in jail in Provincetown, Massachusetts, but he remembers the era well. 
“Great things came out of Woodstock and the Woodstock generation,” he says. “They showed what should happen, what could happen when the young people get together and they deal with the problems that they have and the things that they need. Soon after that, Vietnam was over, Nixon was gone and we started to clean the waterways up.” 
Woodstock spawned plenty of big-picture achievements. But it also changed thousands — maybe millions — of other lives in uncountable ways. To celebrate Woodstock’s 50th anniversary, we turned to Long Islanders to talk about how their experiences at the festival affected them. 

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ANDREW PAUL BINDER 
62, Glen Cove 
Binder was 12 years old and at summer camp when counselors thought that it would be a good idea to take about 75 of the campers to Woodstock for the music. They got more than they bargained for, but the experience inspired Binder to have a creative life. He was an actor who became a regular on the comedy “Just Shoot Me.” He handled production design on numerous music videos, including Janet Jackson’s “That’s the Way Love Goes,” and television shows. And he even served as a stylist on “Good Morning America” and for Martha Stewart. 
BEST WOODSTOCK MOMENT “My senses were on overload. My eyes were seeing a vast humanity of free spirit. My nose was smelling the essence of hashish, marijuana and opium. My touch was feeling the ground and the dirt below me. . . . I spoke very little for the next three days. I saw naked men and women dancing and bathing. I saw sex in the open and took my first hit of pot. Then, I smoked hash. Then, I smoked Thai sticks. I passed on dropping acid. . . . I was in heaven. I fell back on the ground looking up at the stars.” 
WORST WOODSTOCK MOMENT “We were baking in the heat. That was pretty much the worst part — the change from heat to rain and the rain was just so heavy. And that became the mud.” 
50th ANNIVERSARY PLANS Binder plans to go to Bethel Woods Center for the Arts’ Woodstock anniversary events and the original site’s museum. “I want to be back in that same field,” he says. 

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KATHI CAFIERO 
67, Rockville Centre 
Cafiero was staying at her family’s bungalow near Yasgur’s farm when Woodstock was taking place, so she went with some friends and her sister. The experience emboldened her to pursue her love of computers as the only woman in the computer science program at the University of Georgia, which she parlayed into a career at AT&amp;T and then Bell Labs. But it also nurtured her love of nature, which led her to become a certified master gardener, and her spiritual side, leading her to become a yoga instructor. 
BEST WOODSTOCK MOMENT “I really liked waking up to Grace Slick saying, ‘It’s a new dawn, man. Wake up, people!’ And then breaking into her hit. I really loved the camaraderie. We were there to watch a concert and joints were passed. There were these huge joints rolled in Newsday pages. That was a really funny thing. I’d never seen a joint like that.” 
WORST WOODSTOCK MOMENT “Running out of food and water. Everybody was sharing what they had and they did have a food co-op that people would give their extra food to. But there wasn’t really enough. Then the military started dropping food from helicopters, so that worked. . . . Also, I was on line for hours having to call home.” 
50th ANNIVERSARY PLANS “Right now, I’m living in northern Florida, so I guess I’ll be on the phone with my buddies who went to Woodstock.” 

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TODD STRASSER 
69, Roslyn Heights 
Strasser was at New York University when he and his then-girlfriend decided to go to Woodstock to hear some music. He says he didn’t really have a direction at that point, staying in school only to avoid being drafted. But after Woodstock, he decided to drop out and travel in Europe, earning money as a street musician and deciding to become a writer. He started out as a reporter at the Middletown Times Herald Record and then began writing young adult novels. His latest novel, “Summer of ‘69,” is a fictionalized version of his life when he attended Woodstock. 
BEST WOODSTOCK MOMENT “It was just before dawn and The Who was playing. It was kinda dark where the stage was and they were playing ‘Tommy’ and the sun had risen just enough that you could make their shapes out of the dark. It was the last moment that I really can remember until Monday. . . . But if you remember it well, you probably weren’t there.” 
WORST WOODSTOCK MOMENT “I was riding back home on Monday and the rear tire of my motorcycle went flat on Route 17 near Wayne, New Jersey. The guy at the gas station took one look at me and told me to get lost. I went to another garage and they let me fix it myself because I didn’t have the money to pay them. Then a state trooper came and asked to see my license and I told him I didn’t have to show him anything.” 
50th ANNIVERSARY PLANS Strasser plans to attend the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts anniversary celebration. “They will have a writers den up there, a collection of writers connected to the festival,” he says. “I get to spend all three days talking to people and signing books. Then, I get to see the concert!” 

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DYANNE MAUE 
69, East Williston 
Maue was a student at what was then called Harpur College (now Binghamton University) when she went to Woodstock with her older sister. She says the amazing experience helped guide her to become a creative director, first at Stony Brook University, then at Queens College. 
BEST WOODSTOCK MOMENT “It felt like the world’s largest school outing. . . . But what we longed for and wished we could make happen was a kinder and gentler world. We were the peace and the love. Some of us worked for social justice and protested to end the war, but above all, we begged for everyone to just get along.” 
WORST WOODSTOCK MOMENT “The mud. I was worried about the poor farm. I remember thinking, ‘Oh, my God, he has no grass left yet. It’s just mud everywhere.’” 
50th ANNIVERSARY PLANS “I’m not gonna go up there or anything, but my sister Lenore and I have been talking about it a lot. We may do some more reminiscing. It was one of those once-in-a-lifetime events.” 

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VICTOR AMBROSE 
77, Sayville 
When he went to Woodstock, Ambrose was working for the New York City Youth Board in Bushwick, Brooklyn, working with teenagers as he went to law school. After he graduated, he worked with legal services programs. 
BEST WOODSTOCK MOMENT “Santana was terrific and Paul Butterfield Blues Band. . . . It was just an incredible gathering of people and musicians and really one of the fondest memories of my life. But I really haven’t eaten red meat in 50 years and that’s because when I was at Woodstock, a man just emerged from the woods and I’ll never forget it because he had this floppy hat on and a vest and a sign that said, ‘Love your animal friends, don’t eat them.’ He was playing a flute and leading a lamb on a leash and that, that really made us think about whether we needed to eat meat to survive.” 
WORST WOODSTOCK MOMENT “I had sandals on and I stepped on a board and a nail went through the sandal into my foot. There were volunteer doctors and a medical tent and I went there and they gave me a tetanus shot.” 
50th ANNIVERSARY PLANS “There’s a song from Mountain, ‘Theme From an Imaginary Western,’ that I just absolutely love. And Creedence Clearwater Revival was my favorite group, so I will spend some time listening to them.”

ETMUSIC190811

LIers share their Woodstock memories

etWOODSTOCK_1969

Woodstock was 50 years ago. What if it was on Instagram?

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Rob Leonard will never forget his moment in the Woodstock spotlight, when he delivered his dramatic solo in “Teen Angel” during his group Sha Na Na’s early-morning set on the festival’s final day. 
It’s captured in the collector’s edition of the “Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace and Music” documentary, so he knows Jimi Hendrix was watching his performance approvingly. And he can see the befuddled reactions of some fans to his emotional vocals delivered in the gold lame suit he was wearing without a shirt underneath. But Leonard — now 70, of Mill Neck, a professor and director of Hofstra University’s forensic linguistics program — says the footage doesn’t show the thing he remembers most about the performance. 
“Imagine staying up all night and then having to get up in front of 150-whatever thousand people at 7 o'clock in the morning and sing,” he says. “Well, we did it. My problem was that it was dawn and the air was very, very still. As I walked up to do my solo, a veritable cloud that you could almost see of weed-and-hash-and-everything-else smoke wafted up — they were smoking these enormous cigar-size spliffs.” 
“I could barely breathe,” he adds, laughing. “So that's my excuse for why I'm not exactly in tune on that song. But, luckily, on the internet, there's a good, in-tune version of my song, from the Fillmore West show with The Byrds and Joe Cocker and everybody. That was a good performance.” 
The fact that Sha Na Na was performing at Woodstock at all was a miracle in itself. Six months earlier, Leonard and some friends were performing in Columbia College’s singing group The Kingsmen when his brother, George, had the idea for them to perform the ‘50s music that they loved. 
“My brother’s older, he was 23, and he says, ‘Boys, I'm going to make you rock and roll stars,’” Leonard recalls. “You can imagine everybody's response, ‘Oh sure, you are.’” 
But George’s plan — the gold lame suits, the Greasers look, the choreography — worked. “We were the first ones and it was a fabulous success,” says Leonard, adding that Woodstock was the group’s third public, professional performance. “And five months later, I was sitting in Steve Paul’s The Scene, the most insider nightclub in New York City and Jimi Hendrix has told me how fabulous we are and he is showing me how to drink tequila shots, you know, with the lime and the salt. And I thought back five months earlier to my brother telling us we were going to be rock stars. And I said, ‘Oh my god, he was right.’” 
Leonard won’t be marking the 50th anniversary of Woodstock in any way special. He is set to be testifying as an expert witness in a criminal trial in Portland, Oregon. 
But Leonard says he does appreciate what Woodstock was able to accomplish. 
“I guess things are defined very much by what they're not, as well as what they are,” he says. “Certainly, Altamont, which happened a few months afterward and during which people were beaten to death, really showed us what Woodstock was. I'm always astonished that after 50 years, I've still never heard of one intentional act of violence at Woodstock. There was no police force. There was certainly no supervision by an organizational team, only a bunch of volunteers.” 
He said Woodstock’s spirit of generosity and peace was on display throughout the festival. “I know a guy, who I met way later, and he went up there with his buddies. Everybody was doing so much drugs and everything and they woke up naked on this incline to their astonishment and he started (to panic) and all the folks around them said, ‘Hey, little brothers, don't freak out. Everything will be OK.’ They actually took the clothing off their own backs and gave them to the guys. And that's just the greatest anecdote of Woodstock for me.” 
Leonard says he’s not sure that can happen again. “Every time they tried to reprise Woodstock, it has not exactly worked,” he says. “Sometimes, there's just a moment in time that everything comes together — karma or whatever it was we were calling it back then. You just can't redo these things.”

etleon190811

Sha Na Na's Rob Leonard, now Hofstra professor, remembers Woodstock

Sha Na Na member from LI remembers Woodstock

Rob Leonard is a forensic linguistics professor at Hofstra University. But he was also a member of the group Sha Na Na. On July 17, Leonard talked about performing at Woodstock, as the 50th anniversary of the landmark concert approaches.


Hofstra professor, former Sha Na Na member, talks Woodstock

Newsday

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As a half-million flower-children flooded into the 1969 Woodstock Music &amp; Art Fair, turning a potentially profitable rock concert into a blissed-out free-for-all, a pragmatic voice could be heard. It came from Bill Graham, the already-legendary concert promoter who had done plenty to spread the music of the counterculture but also knew how to make a buck. Graham's idea: a simple highway checkpoint would&nbsp;screen out nonpaying customers. 
Then, in words that would haunt him, Graham compared&nbsp;the youth of America to an oncoming swarm of marabunta ants. "If they want to cut 'em off, and stop them from coming, they make a ditch," he said. "They put oil in the ditch, they make a flame." 
It was a hilariously un-hippie thing to say, especially at the hippie-est moment in history, and&nbsp;we know Graham said it because it's in "Woodstock," Michael Wadleigh's invaluable documentary. Released in 1970, "Woodstock" remains the definitive chronicle of a three-day event that would come to embody all the values of the '60s: rock music, social harmony, controlled substances, peace and love. It returns to theaters nationwide on Thursday, Aug. 15 — the date the original concert started — in a three-hour, 44-minute director's cut. This sprawling, shaggy epic captures all the magic and meaning of the event, but it also reveals the glimmers of hard reality within the myth. 
It's worth mentioning that, cultural impact aside, "Woodstock" is a great piece of cinema. (It won the Oscar for best documentary and earned nominations for editing and sound.) Shot by seven cameramen, including Wadleigh, the film was distilled from at least seven hours of film to just over three. (Among the editors were Martin Scorsese and his future collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker, both also credited as assistant directors.) Wadleigh, a hitherto unknown indie filmmaker, thought big: He uses split-screens, triple-panels and mirror-imagery to turn the concert sequences into full-immersion head trips. "Woodstock" is the rare documentary to be released in 70 mm, the widescreen format usually reserved for Hollywood epics. 
Away from the stage, Wadleigh's lens turns journalistic. Local townsfolk weigh in on the hippies — opinions range from "good American citizens" to "trespassers, every one of them" — and it doesn't take much for conversations to turn toward the touchy subject of Vietnam.&nbsp;The hippies weigh in, too, on capitalism (against), free love (for) and the American dream (difficult to define). There's much talk of Woodstock as proof that a bunch of dreamy-eyed kids could build and sustain a peaceful society. Then again, it was local law enforcement and concerned citizens who helped provide food and other supplies; in one scene, a helicopter drops little bundles of dry clothing on the rain-soaked crowd. 
It's the rain that leads to widespread nudity among the crowd, part of what earned "Woodstock" its R rating. Truth be told, the film can feel a little prurient: Just a flash of female breast or buttock is enough to earn a double-take from the cameramen (and they were all men). Eventually, though, you can feel them getting into the hippie spirit. Once the novelty wears off, the bare bodies start to seem — well, just beautiful, man. 
The music, of course, is what truly mesmerizes, beginning with opening act Richie Havens, who sets the tone with a rousing version of his anti-war ballad "Handsome Johnny" (co-written by the actor Louis Gossett&nbsp;Jr.). The bands Canned Heat and Ten Years After transform the blues into sweaty electric rock; Jefferson Airplane plays a woozy set to an early-morning crowd. The Who, always outliers in the hippie scene ("I walked through it all and felt like spitting on the lot of them," guitarist Pete Townsend would say later), come on like a punk band with a cover of Eddie Cochran's "Summertime Blues." 
The film's two best musical moments come from opposite ends of the rock spectrum. One is a newly-formed Crosby, Stills &amp; Nash performing "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" with pure, studio-perfect&nbsp;harmonies; it's a heart-stopper. The other is Jimi Hendrix, the headliner, who played on the festival's final morning to a dwindling crowd. His voice isn't at its finest, but this is where Hendrix delivers his famous guitar-rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner," a stand-alone work of art drenched in politics, history and emotion. It's the payoff moment of the movie, if not the decade. 
As the film closes with images of the empty, muddy, trash-strewn field, it's hard not to think of all the festivals Woodstock begat — from England's Glastonbury Festival to Denmark's Roskilde to America's Lollapalooza and Coachella and Bonnaroo, all of them trying to deliver the same combination of cultural relevance and youthful hedonism. Then there are the official sequels: Woodstock '94 (successful), Woodstock '99 (plagued by reports of violence and sexual assault) and this year's Woodstock 50 (canceled). 
In a sense, that's exactly what makes "Woodstock" so important. You can't relive the event or even re-create it for future generations. But we have Wadleigh's film, and that means we'll always remember it.

Movies

ETMOVIE190811

'Woodstock' returning to theaters for one day: Why the movie still matters

'Woodstock' returning to theaters for one day

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It turns out paying tribute to the 50th anniversary of Woodstock isn’t as easy as it seemed. 
The major Woodstock 50 Festival — &nbsp;originally set for Watkins Glen, New York, with headliners that included Jay-Z, Dead and Company, Miley Cyrus, The Killers and Chance the Rapper — was finally canceled late last month after it could not obtain the proper permits from Watkins Glen, near the original site, or Vernon, near Syracuse. The last-ditch effort to produce a free concert at Merriweather Pavilion in Maryland on anniversary weekend has also been canceled. 
“We are saddened that a series of unforeseen setbacks has made it impossible to put on the festival we imagined with the great lineup we had booked and the social engagement we were anticipating,” Woodstock co-founder and Woodstock 50 organizer Michael Lang said in a statement. 
Lang encouraged people to celebrate the anniversary at Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, which will host a string of concerts at the site where Woodstock originated. 
On Aug. 15, Arlo Guthrie will perform before an outdoor screening of “Woodstock: The Director’s Cut,” the documentary about the festival. Ringo Starr and His All Starr Band will perform on Aug. 16, followed by Santana and the Doobie Brothers on Aug. 17, and John Fogerty with Tedeschi Trucks Band and Grace Potter on Aug. 18. 
Fogerty is also set to play at Radio City Music Hall on Aug. 15, where he plans to celebrate the anniversary by playing songs his band Creedence Clearwater Revival played at the original Woodstock festival, as well as songs from throughout his career. Jorma Kaukonen, who played guitar with Jefferson Airplane at the original Woodstock, will be playing NYCB Theatre at Westbury with his band Hot Tuna on Aug. 17, but he will be more focused on celebrating Hot Tuna’s 50th anniversary more than his performance at Woodstock. 
Michael “Eppy” Epstein says he hasn’t planned any Woodstock celebrations at his My Father’s Place at The Roslyn Hotel for the anniversary because it wouldn’t be a proper tribute to the event. 
“It would be just about making money,” Epstein said. “Nothing about that excites me. I’d rather book some of those acts on their own night when they’re touring so people, young and old, can come see them.” &nbsp;

etevents190811

John Fogerty, Arlo Guthrie performing at Woodstock site

Fogerty, Guthrie performing at Woodstock site

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Are there any connections between Long Island and the Woodstock Festival? Yes, there are: 
* Artie Kornfeld, one of the key members of Woodstock Ventures, the group that promoted the festival,&nbsp;graduated from Levittown Division High School (where he played&nbsp;varsity baseball). 
*&nbsp; Co-promoter,&nbsp;venture capitalist Joel Rosenman is a Cold Spring Harbor native. 
* Rosenman &nbsp;met John Roberts on the golf course at Sunken Meadow State Park and quickly became friends and business partners. Roberts, the heir to the Polident fortune (yes, the dentures), helped finance the festival. 
* Kornfeld and Brooklyn-born co-promoter Michael&nbsp;&nbsp;Lang were both inducted into the Long Island Music Hall of Fame last year, along with “Brand New Key” singer Melanie, a Queens native, who performed at the festival. 
* Leslie West, who was raised in Lawrence and whose band Mountain regularly played The Action House in Island Park, is also a Long Island Music Hall of Fame inductee, in part for Mountain’s memorable Woodstock set.

etLIWOOD190811

What was LI's connection to Woodstock?

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Bob Gruen is one of rock music’s greatest photographers. Some of the Long Island Music Hall of Famer’s work, including his iconic photo of John Lennon in a “New York City” T-shirt, is the subject of a current exhibit at the Morris Museum in New Jersey and some of his photos of Green Day are collected in a new book out later this month. 
So you’d think the Great Neck&nbsp;native has some amazing photos of his time at Woodstock. Right? Well, no. 
“I didn’t want to get the camera to get rained on or messed up,” Gruen says, laughing. “So aside from the few pictures on my website, I have some headshots of my friends inside our tent with a green canvas background and no Woodstock in the picture. I don’t think we really appreciated what a big event it was. You don’t really see the historic ramifications of something while you experience it. . . . At the time, it was just everybody being in a good mood. Maybe you and your four or five friends are wearing bell-bottoms, maybe starting to smoke pot, maybe starting to listen to interesting music. But you didn’t know how many other people were out there. Going to Woodstock and seeing half a million people, you realize you’re not alone. You realize that these new ideas, these new energies, they are much more widespread than just you and your friends.” 
While Gruen, 74, was deeply influenced by the peace and love exhibited at Woodstock, the event did not have anything to do with his eventual line of work. 
“I didn’t go as a photographer,” he says. “I went as a fan, with my wife and friends. We went to have a good time. . . . At that time, I didn’t want to be anything. Today, people plan so much. They have careers and want to be this and want to be that. My idea was to ‘tune in, turn on and drop out.’ ” 
Gruen got his start as a working photographer because he was living with friends in the band Glitterhouse and had taken photos of them. When the band got a record deal, the record company used his photos. 
‘It wasn’t really a career choice,” he says. “It was just my hobby. . . . But after the record company used my pictures, they hired me to do another band and I met people who hired me to other bands. And pretty soon, much to my chagrin, I was actually working.” 
Gruen says his relationship with Green Day came about in much the same way. 
“When I first met them, they were the most interesting band I’d seen in a long time,” he says. “What they’re saying is very powerful and that’s always mattered to me. I like music with a message and I felt that Green Day had an important message. They also have a fantastic sense of humor. And it turns out that they liked me, so we started spending more time together and I started seeing them every time they came around New York. So after 25 years, it was time to make a book out of it.” 
Gruen says he is much more interested in new work than trying to look back at the past. He doesn’t plan to do anything special for the Woodstock anniversary. 
“We had a great time, but you can’t reproduce it,” he says. “It was a moment in people’s lives. I don’t think you can package that. We went to the second one in ‘94 and it was debauchery. Times had changed and more importantly people had changed. It was just a matter of people getting drunk and seeing what could they get for themselves, whereas Woodstock was much more about sharing.”

ETGRUEN190811

Rock photographer, LI Music Hall of Famer Bob Gruen recalls Woodstock

Famed LI rock photog recalls Woodstock, sans photos

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Walter Cronkite was seething on the night of Aug,&nbsp;18, 1969.&nbsp;&nbsp; 
A vast music festival had just ended in upstate New York, and&nbsp; he seemed to be unaware that everyone was calling it "Woodstock." No matter: He would just dismissively refer to it as "a rock music festival in White Lake, New York" on the "CBS Evening News." 
This White Lake festival had been attended by hundreds of thousands of young people, no doubt many of them "hippies." The most trusted man in America didn't like hippies. They offended him, recalling in a 1997 CBS special, "During that period I made the declarative statement, 'I don't care for their hair; I don't care for their looks; I don't care for their clothes; I don't care for their behavior. I don't care for anything about them.'" 
Cronkite masked well his repugnance on the air, his rivals less so. The festival is over, said NBC News anchor Chet Huntley, then added — glowering through thick horn-rimmed glasses — "but the aftertaste lingers on."&nbsp; Over at ABC, the commentator Howard K. Smith arrived at one hysterical conclusion: "Woodstock is a picture of all our future!" This post-apocalyptic vision of an overcrowded America "means then [that] over-population, so long predicted, has stolen upon us, and it gets worse week by week." 
For Cronkite, the "White Lake" mosh pit was personal, as he related on that 1997 broadcast,&nbsp;entitled "Cronkite Remembers."&nbsp;Days before, his teen daughter, Kathy, had called from college "and she said, 'We've been invited to a concert and I need $ 5 to go.' Mother [his wife, Betsy Cronkite] and I just jumped to a conclusion that this was probably with the New York Philharmonic or some such concert of the type." 
Sure she could have five dollars. That Friday evening, after the broadcast, the Cronkites were driving up to their country house and turned on their radio to learn that a concert was underway, and attendees were "in the mud and naked," as Betsy later recalled. 
"And we thought," said Cronkite, "'Isn't that a terrible thing? Oh, that's just awful, for those kids to — awful — Woodstock, concert..." 
He then paused, and wondered to Betsy: "'Could that be where Kathy is?'"&nbsp; 
It was.&nbsp; 
Cronkite wanted a commentary on Woodstock for that Monday's edition of "Evening News" and perhaps secretly hoped that CBS'&nbsp;distinguished essayist Eric Sevareid would turn out a screed that would finish off the hirsute rabble with a few well-tuned phrases and a sharp rhetorical thrust or two. Sevareid was not available, so instead, the call went out to John Laurence.&nbsp; 
By August 1969, Laurence was back stateside after two reporting tours in Vietnam, where he had covered the battles of Dak To, Hue, Khe Sahn, the siege of Con Thien and the Tet Offensive. Cronkite, understandably, had high regard for his young reporter who told him about the futility of the war and who helped inform Cronkite's Feb. 28, 1968, special broadcast declaring the U.S. "mired in a stalemate."&nbsp; 
Laurence's Woodstock commentary may or may not have surprised Cronkite. It hardly reflected his own views. Laurence looked over the vast crowds and saw peace and a common humanity. Nothing about this concert offended him, and — quite the contrary — gave him hope for the future, and that "people of all ages are capable of compassion."&nbsp; 
After a long and distinguished career, Laurence, 79, is now living in England. In an email, he explained that by the time he and his crew got to Woodstock on Friday morning, "It was already getting muddy. The four of us spent the night in the car trying to sleep. It rained much of the time.&nbsp; What I really wanted to do was smoke a joint, sit down somewhere in the audience and listen to the music, but that was impossible with the straight-laced camera crew." 
He and the crew flew back to the city Saturday "in a small, bubble-top helicopter [and] In order to save time to get us back to West 57th Street to make the 6:30 p.m..news broadcast, the pilot flew underneath the George Washington Bridge. His words to us as we approached the bridge were, 'OK, you didn't see this, right?'" 
"To witness the level of kindness and consideration shown by just about everybody at the Festival (except my disgruntled older camera crew) was a revelation. Hundreds of thousands of good-natured American young people came together to listen to music and behave like peace and love were more than words on a poster.&nbsp; 
"Never mind the negative coverage of the bad acid, the accidents, nudity, food shortages and the rain and mud. Woodstock was truly about harmony — on and off the stage." 
Laurence called it "one of the most memorable assignments of the 12 years I worked at CBS News."

ETTEL190811

Walter Cronkite, other network anchors were not thrilled by Woodstock

Cronkite, other anchors weren't thrilled by Woodstock

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Woodstock, 50 years later

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