Woodstock: VW Beetle takes him back to the '60s

When made right, time capsules define an era — keepsakes that  bring back memories of people, places and moments. The summer of 1969 must, then, have a number of time capsules for people to remember it by.

For Ed Ellison, a young man from Hempstead then and a family man in Stony Brook now, that time capsule turns out to be a car.

"I was 18 years old back in 1969," said Ellison, 58. "I had just graduated from high school. And I was driving around in this car, and the reason for it was, being a youngster you have no impact on anybody, really. You're never taken seriously. So a buddy of mine and I decided we would paint this car and put some messages on it. It was kind of a statement of how we felt at the time."

Ellison came up with the idea to paint his 1963 Volks-wagen Beetle, and Tony Fabiano, a close friend and classmate at Uniondale High School, spent most of two months working on it. Naming it the "Elusive Butterfly," they covered their "labor of love" in color and images, writing the messages "Give A Damn" and "Smile On Your Brother," making the car a symbol of their ideas. And when they and Ellison's girlfriend Jean Derenze took it out on the road, they were met with more than a few looks.

"Driving it around, it was a very polarizing car at the time," said Ellison. "Back then, the reaction was either two-fingered or one-fingered. People knew where I stood by driving it, and they either felt strongly about it in a positive way or felt strongly about it in a negative way."

The message they were trying to convey came out of their feelings about the tumult of the late '60s. The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and especially the Vietnam War, wore on the two young men. The car became a reflection on what they wanted to say, which was, said Ellison, "to care about people, and care about what's going on."

"The idea is kids now don't know how lucky they are and how much they have," said Fabiano, 59. "The '60s was a wonderful place for music. But it was not a pretty time if you were different. There was a lot of sadness, a lot of violence. It got really ugly there."

Never able to part with it, Ellison stored the car away in Derenze's mother's garage in Uniondale for 37 years. In the meantime, Ellison would not see Fabiano for decades after Woodstock, and he and Derenze would marry. Now, Ellison works for the Social Security Administration and has three children.

This year, the "Elusive Butterfly" has found new life as the focus of a documentary, "The Vehicle," that Ellison is making, trying to recall the feeling of the era and compare it to today.

"It was pretty bizarre, not seeing it for 40 years," said Fabiano. "It's cool that we kinda took over where we left off. Seeing the car again was strange to me because it was like it wasn't ever out of my sight for that long."

The new project, which reunited Ellison with Fabiano, involves the car's complete restoration and Ellison interviewing people about how they feel about the car, the '60s, and what they feel now.

"I don't know if we'll ever see a time like that again," said Ellison. "I mean, for the good and the bad, but at the same time this passion. I want people to tell me what it does for them. As well as young people who have had no experience with this really. What's their passion? Would they do something like this?"

The car is still being restored, with the hope that it will be ready for a trip to Woodstock this month to commemorate the event and the period. After that, Ellison intends to keep the car going.

Just having it today is symbolic of our youth, and it's keeping it alive," said Jean Ellison, 58. "We have a lot of special memories in that car. It kind of ties our lives together."