Love & ‘music’
CT woman recalls getting married at Powder Ridge Rock Festival
It was late July 1970 in Middlefield, and a palpable feeling of anxiety was in the air as thousands of music fans descended onto the Powder Ridge ski resort for what was supposed to be three days of music. Fleetwood Mac, Janis Joplin and Joe Cocker were among some of the names scheduled to appear at the festival, but an injunction by the town against the owners and the promoter of the festival halted the Powder Ridge Rock Festival in its tracks.
Not knowing this, 18-year-old Boni Douglas (now Potter), who was six months pregnant at the time, was en route to the event. She had missed Woodstock a year prior and was determined to get to the Powder Ridge Rock Festival. It wasn’t easy.
“The police had blocked off the main entrance. In order to get in, we had to find a way to go around them, so there was a side road, and everyone decided that it was going up in the right direction. So we started climbing up the mountain,” Potter, now 70 and living in Ansonia, said. “We were climbing by the sound of the machinery, which we thought was the festival. It turned out to be a sprayer from the orchard.”
Potter was just one of the tens of thousands of music-loving individuals who traveled to the ski resort for the festival, which was going to take place from July 31 to Aug. 2. But opposition to music festivals began to grip the nation following the deadly Altamont Speedway Free Festival, coupled with the reputation of these festivals — including 1969’s Woodstock — for bringing nudity and drugs to local communities. The Powder Ridge Festival was served an injunction just days before it was set to be held.
Potter said by the time she set up camp, which consisted of plastic tarps hoisted up by a series of poles atop the mountain, she still “didn’t know if anybody was coming on.” Ultimately, Potter and her group got word about the festival not taking place as intended, but there was a Melanie performance on the mountain — the sound system was hooked up to a Mister Softee ice cream truck.
After trekking up and down the mountain for the Melanie performance, the pregnant Potter was exhausted.
“I’m about six months pregnant or so. It wasn’t like climbing a normal mountain where there is dirt, trees, paths and stuff like that. We were climbing up a crushed granite mountain,” Potter said. “And the guys would grab me and like haul me up.”
Even getting water on the mountain proved to be an arduous task.
“Because everyone knew that I was pregnant, and because there was no water at the mountain, people would walk ... down into town to where people had hoses and stuff,” Potter said. “I had this line of people coming up to me all day long. Everyone would bring me a Dixie cup of water.”
“There’s not much in the cup [though] when it gets to your destination,” Potter laughed.
Getting married at a festival
Word had moved fast among the campers that Potter and her fiance, Peter, were going to get married at the festival on Aug. 1.
“The next morning, everybody came up to our campsite and we got married,” Potter said. “I don’t really even know how Peter and I decided to work out that we were going to get married there.”
Potter didn’t even have a wedding dress to wear. Luckily, some friends of hers had a solution.
“They went off and somehow they found a sheet and made a dress for me,” Potter said. “I had this tie-dye sheet for a wedding dress.”
Despite the high attendance of her wedding on the mountain, Potter said she has only ever seen two photos from that day. Potter added that there were a couple of photographers at her campsite taking photos of the ceremony who promised to mail them to her, but she is still waiting to this day. There are a couple floating around the internet with no photographer credited.
While people were having fun and getting high, as she recalls, around her, Potter said she kept a low profile, sitting around and playing cards or backgammon. She described the mood of the festival as happy with little fighting or disagreements to note.
“I can’t imagine what Woodstock
was like with the music because ours was so fun and we had no music,” Potter said. “We had a couple of radios if that counts.”
In total, Potter was at the mountain for no more than a weekend, but the memories she made there will last a lifetime.
After the festival
Exactly three months after the Potters got married on the mountain, their daughter Zoey was born.
The family moved around throughout the Connecticut Valley until Boni and Peter eventually divorced. The two remained on good terms up until his death. On Feb. 18, 1988, Peter, along with his fiance and a friend, were flying to Florida when their private plane went missing over the ocean. The couple was never found; they left behind a one-year-old daughter at the time.
At the age of 70, the Ansonia resident reminisces on all the memories she has made and notes that music festivals and people today “are so different.”
“It’s just a group of people who don’t necessarily know each other who are all there doing the same thing and just getting along and helping each other out,” Potter said, describing the essence of a music festival.