Recalling Woodstock, a generation later. (Originated from Knight-Ridder Newspapers)

Publication: Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service

Publication Date: 08-JUN-94

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COPYRIGHT 1994 Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service

He arrived in Bethel, N.Y., by motorcycle, wearing black leather over his bare chest and a lion's mane of hair curling over his shoulders.



Name: Michael Lang, former '60s head-shop owner in Miami. Goal: to find a field to stage a music festival _ the Woodstock Music and Art Fair _ for a few thousand kids. It was summer '69. The appropriate look in rural Bethel, 70 miles from Woodstock, was cropped hair and covered chests. Appropriate outlook, conservative. Miriam Yasgur, wife of dairy farmer Max Yasgur, wasn't sure about letting Lang in the door, let alone renting him land. But she and her husband did, and word traveled quickly through town that sane, salt-of-the-earth Max Yasgur was negotiating with longhairs. Someone put up a sign near their home: ``Don't Buy Yasgur's Milk. He Loves The Hippies.'' ``The sign did it,'' says Miriam Yasgur, today Max Yasgur's widow. ``When Max saw that, I knew darned well he was going to let them have their festival. You didn't do that to Max.'' Therein is the genesis of Woodstock _ the seminal music festival _ as told by Miriam Yasgur at her home in the Pembroke Pines, Fla., condo where she lives with her second husband, whom she married three years after Max died in 1973. Today, the only reminder of the past hangs on the wall, a painting of the red and white dairy barn with YASGUR FARMS neatly printed above its door. All of her Woodstock memorabilia _ including hundreds of notes from festivalgoers saying ``Thanks for letting us use your...

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