by Dennis Dalman
Fifty-four years ago, on Aug. 15, 16-year-old Mike DeLuca, now a Sartell resident, decided to go camping with a friend for a few days – up near the Housatonic River in western Connecticut.
Well, that’s what he told his parents, anyway.
But the truth is he and friend Guy Lang, also 16, packed a tent in DeLuca’s rust-blue Volkswagen “Beetle” and headed west, from their home town of Ridgefield, Conn. to Bethel, N.Y. They were about to enjoy the biggest music festival in world history – “Woodstock,” billed as “3 Days of Peace & Music.”
Lang loved music, everything from country-western to folk to rock. DeLuca often went over to his house, and the two would sit there in the basement for hours listening to albums on Lang’s small stereo set. One day, Lang told DeLuca he’d heard about some three-day music bash that would take place in New York in mid-August. The lineup of talent, he said, was going to be phenomenal.
Then, after he’d piqued DeLuca’s avid curiosity, he said, “Hey heck, why not go to it? We got the time.”
DeLuca nodded; he agreed.
“Just don’t tell my parents!” Lang cautioned.
“Same here,” DeLuca said. “We’ll tell them we’re going on another one of our camping trips up north for a few days.”
On the farm
Woodstock took place on a 600-acre dairy farm owned by a man named Max Yasgur. As Lang and DeLuca approached that area, the traffic was increasingly dense, bumper to bumper. They had to park the VW and start walking toward the vast concert site. There were people everywhere they looked, to their right, to their left, in front and behind – young hippies wearing jeans, headbands, love beads, peace symbols, fringed leather jackets, paisley-print shirts, granny dresses – a virtual explosion of 1960s’ downhome “hip” styles. The two friends were astonished at the number of people – all of them jive-talking, cool, happy, smiling, lots of long hair everywhere. The gathering crowds got bigger and bigger, a veritable roiling ocean of young people.
Woodstock was organized by four young promoters who expected an audience of perhaps 50,000, max. By the opening day the crowd had grown to an estimated mind-blowing total of 450,000, so many people there was no time to complete a fence around the concert area and so everybody who arrived was let in for free.
The huge outdoor stage had been built at the bottom of a huge sloping hill where concert-goers set up their tents, blankets and other gear.
“Our first reaction was that we thought we made a mistake,” DeLuca recalled in an interview with the Newsleader. “We were overwhelmed by all the people who kept arriving. We finally picked a spot, then another until we found a place to pitch the tent.”
The tent was about a half a mile from the stage on the slope swarming with other people.
Mingling & Music
Then the next morning the music began, with Richie Havens being the first performer. DeLuca said they could hear the music, but during the coming days, they would move closer through the packed-in, vast audience so they could see the performers on stage.
As they mingled and mixed with the tight-packed crowd, Lang and DeLuca shot the breeze with others, exchanged pleasantries, remarks and wisecracks. Everybody was having a heckuva good time. During the days and nights of the concert, the young revelers had a groovy, far-out time: dancing, singing, skinny-dipping in a large pond, joking, smoking and trying to stay dry, warm and un-muddy. That’s because on the second day, during a performance by Joan Baez, it began to rain buckets. The concert grounds soon became slick with slippery mud. But it didn’t stop the fun.
DeLuca, like most of the concert-goers, smoked some happy weed.
“I liked smoking a bit of what was called blonde hash (hashish),” DeLuca said. “It made me mellow.”
Legends perform
During the next three days, there were astonishing performances from solo singers and bands that included Arlo Guthrie; Joe Cocker; Ravi Shankar; Sly & the Family Stone; Joan Baez; Grateful Dead; Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; Country Joe and the Fish; Creedence Clearwater Revival; Jefferson Airplane; Blood, Sweat & Tears; Tim Hardin; Johnny Winter; The Band; The Who; Jimmy Hendrix; Janis Joplin.
“My favorite was Joplin,” DeLuca recalled. “She sang ‘Ball and Chain,’ ‘Summertime,’ ‘Piece o’ My Heart.’ That vocal energy! She was great!”
There were some conspicuous missing-in-action performers – the Beatles, Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones. They (and other greats) had had scheduling conflicts or declined the invitation for one reason or another. The Beatles, for example, were in London working hard on recording what would be their last album together, “Abbey Road.”
The last performance, on Aug. 18, was Jimmy Hendrix, who gave his wild psychedelic guitar rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Landmark
Woodstock is considered a landmark event because it was a triumphant culmination of the love-and-peace counterculture hippy movement of the 1960s. And its vast peaceful sea of people was so unlike the divisive discord and violence that punctuated like bold exclamation points the mid-to-late 60s: riots, assassinations, demonstrations, the struggle for voting rights, anti-Vietnam War protests (the doves), pro-war gatherings (the hawks).
During their time at Woodstock, DeLuca said, he and Lang kept nodding at each other, grinning and saying over and over, “This is the coolest thing!”
After the mind-boggling concert experience, the two friends walked back to the Volkswagen. DeLuca was worried about the car not being there.
Lang “reassured” him with a wisecrack: “Don’t worry. It’s a piece of crap anyway.”
The car was still there; DeLuca breathed a sigh of relief.
“Woodstock?!”
Back home from their so-called “Housatonic River camping trip,” DeLuca’s parents asked him how it was. It was great, just great, a lot of fun, he told them.
Two weeks later, those parents wised up, having put together clues gleaned from overheard conversations of their son and his friends.
“Woodstock?!” Outraged, the startled parents grounded their son for a solid month. Lang’s parents also freaked out.
“Being grounded wasn’t too bad, though,” DeLuca recalled, with a mischievous chuckle. “Both my parents worked so I had plenty of time to sneak out of the house.”
Good memories
To this day, 54 years later, DeLuca has vivid memories of Woodstock, as if it were just yesterday.
“I cherish memories of hearing that great music with people from all over, singing along, rocking back and forth and all of them getting along so well. So different from now where just about everybody I meet is arguing about politics.”
There’s some sadness, too, mixed with the good memories. In 2013, Lang, who’d long been an auto mechanic, died at age 59 in Connecticut.
Post Woodstock
Trained in trade school as a printer, Deluca worked in that profession for years in Connecticut and New York. While living in New York City, DeLuca lost his wife, Jean, and 12-year-old son, John, in a car accident when Jean was driving in Brewster, N.Y.
Eventually, he landed a job in the mineral business, helping re-patent old mining claims for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. Later, he moved to Arizona to be closer to his parents who had moved there. His mother was blind. Still later, the parents decided to move to central Minnesota where some relatives lived. So they and son Mike moved to a mobile home in Sartell’s Evergreen Village.
“I took care of them, they took care of me,” he said.
His parents have both passed on, but DeLuca still lives in Evergreen Village. A jack-of-all trades, he has worked a variety of jobs and teaches courses in geology and mineralogy now and then, most recently for the Sourcewell company in Staples. He also works maintenance for the Blue Line Bar & Grill in Sartell.
For many years, DeLuca has been passionately committed as a member of the Sartell Lions Club. He was instrumental in developing so many local projects, including Sartell Lions Community Park and most recently, that park’s all-inclusive playground, currently under construction. DeLuca, who has aged well and mellowed since those spirited days at Woodstock, is the Lions’ membership chairman.
Mike DeLuca sits in the room of his house where he does work in mineralogy, studying rocks.
This famous photo, taken by freelancer Burk Uzzle, graced the cover of the soundtrack album of Woodstock the movie. The standing couple is Bobbi Kelly and her boyfriend Nick Ercoline. They met a few months before Woodstock and married a few months later, living in Pine Bush, N.Y. She became a nurse; he was a carpenter and construction manager. Bobbi died in early 2023 after a long battle with leukemia. The couple has two sons. Also in this photo, sleeping near the couple, is their friend, Jim Corcoran, who’d just returned from a tour of duty in Vietnam.
This poster advertising the Woodstock music festival was slightly off on its dates. The festival ended on March 18, 1969 – not March 17.
