Laguna Woods resident Nadine Asner was in high school in August 1969, living with her parents in Brooklyn, New York, when she attended an event that would have a profound impact on her life, even her character.
The Woodstock Music & Art Fair was taking place for three days in upstate New York. The festival, coming as America was deeply rooted in the Vietnam War, became a pivotal event for the 1960s counterculture with its focus on peace, love and music.
Asner liked the music of the era – Jefferson Airplane, Canned Heat, Country Joe McDonald and the Fish, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, all bands that performed at Woodstock.
But she was far from being a hippie like many of the 400,000 who attended the festival.
“I was probably the antithesis of a hippie,” Asner said.
She had led a sheltered life with strict parents, she said, and was very naive. She knew nothing about drugs, had never seen anyone use drugs. She had never seen people dressed in tie dye and floppy hats, and certainly had not seen folks run around naked.
But she did start to question America’s involvement in Vietnam – and she realized at the festival that she was not the only one harboring such thoughts.
“I came back a different person, I do have to say,” Asner said. “I realized that it wasn’t just me who likes this music, not just me beginning to question things, but there were 400,000 other people too.”
Asner recalls that it wasn’t too difficult to get her parents to agree to let her go to Woodstock. She likens her family to the one in the movie “Dirty Dancing,” summering at an upscale resort in the Catskills each year. So she booked rooms for the festival at the same hotel where her family always stayed.
“What could go wrong?” her parents asked, though they insisted she bring proper evening clothes with matching shoes and purse to go out to dinner – all packed in a nice suitcase.
What went wrong, Asner said, was that she and her friends never made it to the hotel because of the washed-out roads. Instead, she used that nice suitcase to sit on at the festival.
What also went wrong was that her parents saw the news of the festival on TV and were horrified that their daughter was caught up in that chaos.
“They freaked out,” she said.
But Asner is grateful that she got to go to Woodstock.
“I realized the world wasn’t as simple as I thought it was,” she said. “There were lots of complexities.”
Instead of “blindly accepting what parents and teachers said,” the experience gave her another perspective: She realized she could question things.
She also realized that a change was coming, “that the music and clothing and thoughts and opinions of the generation before was going to be replaced by our generation.”
Those realizations carried Asner through college and the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned a masters in sociology.
She eventually became a litigation paralegal, but more importantly, she became “an adult who made it my business to understand a different perspective and to come to my own conclusions.”
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Laguna Woods resident Robert Mutchnick was “absolutely” a hippie when he went to Woodstock.
“I had long hair down to my shoulders and a full beard, bushy like Karl Marx’s,” he recalled.
He was 18 and on summer break from college in New York City in 1969 when he and some friends bought three-day passes and drove up to Bethel, New York, car trunks loaded with food and water from his dad’s supermarket and an old Army tent that slept 10.
They arrived two days early to beat traffic and set up camp about 200 feet from the stage.
“We were there for the whole time, for the rain, the mud and everything,” he said.
They also stayed a day and a half after it was over – only because their cars were stuck in the mud and they had to wait for a farmer to come with a tractor to pull them out. (That farmer charged them for his service, Mutchnick noted.)
Like Asner, Mutchnick was a big fan of the music. He had looked forward to seeing Country Joe McDonald, Canned Heat and Joan Baez, and he became a fan of CSNY.
“I was just blown away by their performance,” he said.
And Jimi Hendrix?
“There aren’t many guitarists who were better than him.”
A vivid memory for Mutchnick was an announcement by entertainer and peace activist Wavy Gravy.
“At one point, he said they were going to have breakfast for 400,000 people.”
That spoke to Mutchnick’s core values.
“I care about community, that everyone gets opportunities,” he said. “I’m still a strong supporter of DEI. … I still believe we need to take care of each other.”
Those values helped lead him during his 45-year career as a professor of criminology.
“I was an egghead theorist,” he said. “I was interested in the sociological causes of crime, the perspective that crime was caused by inequality and the environment. The social science perspective on causes of crime.”
The values guide him to this day as he volunteers as a director on the Third Mutual HOA board in Laguna Woods.
“I believe in giving back,” Mutchnick said. “It’s important to do what’s right and best for all residents, which is still a carryover from that ‘60s philosophy.”
More memories
Alan Gorsky, who was working in a defense plant in 1969, drove to the Woodstock festival with his buddy Ron, entering from the Pennsylvania side. There was no traffic, and they were able to park about a mile from the stage.
“On the way up we heard on the radio about the number of people, so we stopped at a 7-Eleven and stocked up on cold soup and beans for the weekend. … My biggest thought was there are a lot of cold, hungry, wet people. But not us! We had food, water and rain gear.”
These days, he says, “When I feel old, I tell young people, ‘Yes, I am old, but I was at Woodstock,’ and suddenly I am a cool old guy!”
David Dearing was teaching high school English in Wattsburg, Pennsylvania.
“I was a big fan of rock music and loved the bands that were to perform at Woodstock ’69. I had purchased many of their albums.
“I jumped at the opportunity to attend. We got to park right on the lake and set up a 12-person tent. We had camping experience, so we had lots of provisions, including a full roast beef and a large ham. Of course we had rain gear!
“Friday the music was good and I got to bed quite late. On Saturday the bands who were to perform were among my favorites. After a nice meal I wandered up to the site by myself. None of my friends or my ex-wife wanted to leave our campsite.
“Was I in for a treat! I had to stay up all night and into the next day (I know I dozed) but heard in approximately this order these bands” Canned Heat, the Grateful Dead, CCR, Janis Joplin, the Who, Sly and the Family Stone and The Jefferson Airplane. I was pleasantly exhausted!”
– Compiled by David Dearing