Woodstock photo mystery solved
A call from a stranger answers reporter Rick Romell’s question: Was it him in the Life magazine picture?
I won’t fight you, Roger. Looks like I’d lose, anyway. The photo’s all yours.
Five decades ago, during one of the rain showers that turned the Woodstock Music & Art Fair into a vast mud pit, several festivalgoers took shelter under a plywood board.
Among them: A short kid in a black cowboy hat, with dark-rimmed glasses and a scraggly bit of beard — me.
Or so I thought for years after a photograph of that bedraggled scene appeared in Life magazine not long after the festival. True, I didn’t specifically recall the incident, but that was nothing unusual at Woodstock.
And, as I wrote recently in an article looking back on my experience at the gathering of hundreds of thousands of music fans for a three-day concert at a farm outside Bethel, N.Y., so many things matched: the glasses, the wispy beard, the kid’s height, his face.
Plus, around that time — for the only time in my life — I owned a cowboy hat, and it was black.
So, it turns out, did Roger Brown. He’s also short, wore dark-rimmed glasses and, in 1969, was sprouting his first beard.
I wrote in my story that I was “pretty sure” it’s me in the photo. Roger, now a 67-year-old art teacher who lives in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, is absolutely sure it’s not.
“I’m not certain of that many things in my life,” he said, “but I know that’s me.”
We spoke by phone after a friend alerted him to my story and he sent me an email labeled “Maybe we look alike …”He was gracious about having his brush with celebrity hijacked by someone whose fuzzy memories pale beside his detailed recollection.
“I liked your story as a story,” he said. “I liked your story of what you went through because a lot of what happened there had nothing to do with the concert at all. … At the same time I thought, ‘No. You’re wrong.’ ”
Roger was 17 when he traveled to Woodstock from Oberlin, Ohio, in a ’62 Ford Falcon station wagon his buddy Steve had “borrowed” from his unsuspecting parents while they were on vacation. A third friend came along, and they picked up another in New Jersey.
Then it was on to Woodstock. With the careful planning that is characteristic of teenagers, they provisioned themselves with boxes of corn flakes and cans of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup.
The music started on Friday, and Roger and Steve listened through the night, and the rain, while their friends bailed and returned to their tent. The two diehards kept dry for a while in their sleeping bags, but by morning the
bags were leaking.
Waiting in yet more rain for Saturday's concert to start, they had a flash of Woodstockian, we're-all-in-thistogether inspiration. A guy nearby was sitting with a large sheet of plywood propped against his back like a lean-to. Roger and Steve suggested that if the three of them lifted the board over their heads they could all stay dry.
“As soon as we did that, all these other people came and started moving underneath it,” Roger said.
The makeshift ramada also attracted the attention of a much older man, much better outfitted, and toting a camera.
“He had like a plastic brown poncho on and big, heavy boots and just started walking around us taking pictures,” Roger said.
He didn't think much more about it, and a little later heard a stage announcement: Roger and Steve, your friends are sick and are going home. That was interesting, since Steve had the car keys. He and Roger were ready to stay for Saturday's concert but, given the circumstances, they too decided it was time to go.
The highlight — lowlight actually — of the return trip came when the Falcon broke down outside a Howard Johnson's on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Already low on cash and with not much more to eat than salt water taffy, Roger hitched in to King of Prussia and had his parents wire money.
In the meantime, one of his friends realized he had a credit card and the car got fixed. They made it home and, about a week later, Roger's friends started telling him he was in Life. He checked it out and there, under the board, he was. Steve's there too, Roger said, but in the background.
Beyond what to me is an almost mirror-like resemblance 50 years ago, Roger and I share somewhat similar perspectives on Woodstock. We both saw only the Friday concert, we both have no memory of most of the acts, and we both felt that it all was a little too much.
“It was overall a good time and it was also overwhelming,” Roger said. “And then you realized you had enough and you had to go.”
About 2,500 years ago, Socrates, according to the late British philosopher and scholar Alfred Edward Taylor, emphasized
the critical need to “know thyself.”
Somewhat more recently, the decidedly-less-scholarly Joni Mitchell, in a song celebrating Woodstock, expressed a similar thought in more-relaxed fashion:
“I don't know who I am, but you know life is for learning.”
That I get.