'Goin' Down to Yasgur's Farm' ... It's All About Growth

  • By Mike Dewey
  • May 20, 2014
  • 429
                        
SUMMARY: This week, Mike Dewey does his best to get back to the land, to the garden, to the farm and discovers something uniquely human: Life is for learning. “I'm a farmer. I don't know how to speak to 20 people at one time, let alone a crowd like this. But I think you people have proven something to the world … that a half million young people can get together and have three days of fun and music and have nothing but fun and music, and God bless you for it!” Max Yasgur Woodstock, August 1969 Now there was a farmer. It could be argued that Max Yasgur – on whose land the landmark Aquarian Festival was held – is our nation’s most famous farmer. I’ll leave that discussion to those more learned and experienced in the field. My point is that when I heard his voice – hoarse and homey, folksy and friendly – my 15-year-old mind conjured an American ideal: A man of the land who gave Sly and the Family Stone, the Who, Richie Havens, CSN&Y, Arlo and Joan, Janis and Jimi a peaceful place to play, knowing somehow that 500,000 kids would behave. That took a lot of guts and trust and wisdom and faith, all traits that could be attributed to those who work the land. Farming has to be the most tenuous kind of tight-rope ride, one that depends on the vagaries of the land, the spasms of the marketplace and the utter unpredictability of the weather. Until I moved to a little town I consider my hometown, my family lived in suburban Columbus which, even back in the late 50s, wasn’t exactly known for its bucolic expanses of corn and soybeans. It wasn’t urban sprawl yet, but it was well on its way to becoming a concrete sea. So, when we arrived in Ashland in summer of 1964, it was a shock to the system; I mean, instead of metro buses, we saw horse-drawn buggies tied to actual hitching posts. Before that, the closest we’d come to experiencing rural life was the black-and-white portion of “The Wizard of Oz,” and when Dorothy fell into the pig sty, we simply cringed. Then the twister ripped through the landscape and all of a sudden, Munchkins and the Yellow Brick Road: the contrast couldn’t have been more stark. Not even mentioning witches and poppies and Flying Monkeys, which still kind of freak me out. UPON OUR ARRIVAL in town – not at all unlike landing in a house that had been borne aloft and dropped into an alien landscape – I made my first friend and, of course, his family lived on a farm. Wait. That’s poorly phrased. His family worked a farm. Big family, six or seven kids, with more on the way, and that wasn’t at all unusual among Catholics back then. Breeding was considering a blessing. But that didn’t concern my friend and me. Nah, we just hung out at the house my family was renting a block or two from the college and we played catch with baseballs and footballs, we swapped cards, we rode bikes, we talked about the girls in our fourth-grade class. Sometimes, we talked about homework, but since he was smarter than I was, it wasn’t that often. In short, we became friends. And, in the natural course of such relationships, there came a time when he asked if I wanted to sleep over at his house. I knew he lived out in the country, but I had no idea what was involved in accepting his invitation. Three things still stand out from my stay at his family’s farm:  Drinking warm milk that had come from a cow’s udder, perhaps drained that morning before I was out of bed.  Jumping from the second level of the barn, called a hayloft, into a big pile of straw on the floor.  Dealing with no television. That was an educational weekend, for sure, and my friend and I spent a lot of time just walking the place: the fields, the woods, the little creek that ran along the property line. It was all good: the fresh air, the open spaces, the animals – I learned the difference between a mule and a donkey and what made a chicken different from a hen, not to mention the sheer number of kids in the house. They were everywhere and I recognized most of them from school, though the little ones were strangers until I spent some time with them. As I said, my friend was the smartest kid in the class and, looking back, it was pretty much the same story with his siblings. They were all whip-smart students and, actually, excellent athletes, as well. It must have been the fact that TV wasn’t permitted in their home. WHICH BRINGS US to “Green Acres,” which was a popular program of that time, with its City Mouse-Country Mouse ambiance and some of the best writing of the era. Oliver Douglas and his wife, Lisa, leave New York City for the bucolic life in a backwater called Hooterville and hilarity ensued. Farm life was portrayed as a Looking Glass existence, one that was equal parts zany characters – including Arnold the talking pig – and pointed social commentary, albeit clothed in overalls and clodhoppers. Oliver was always going on long-winded speeches about the value of farm life – often accompanied by an off screen fife – and seemed rather stunned when the rural folks he’d considered friends took on almost citified cynicism when his crops always failed. And then there was Eb Dawson, the Douglasses’ listless hired hand who spent most of his working hours downright doing nothing, listening to the latest hits on his transistor radio. The concept was fully realized when characters like the grocer Sam Drucker, the county agent Hank Kimball and, especially Mister Haney – a charlatan and a huckster who was always conning Oliver into buying something worthless – were introduced. Farmers, it turned out, had a whole lot more street smarts than a Wall Street lawyer and the juxtaposition turned the whole show on its ear. So, what have we learned about farming? Well, you’ll have to answer that one. All I’m confessing is that I’ve walked through cotton fields since my wife and I moved to Carolina in the earliest days of the century and that I think that Woodstock is the finest three-album set ever released. Beyond that, I can report that we’re traveling to upstate New York in the fall and that our host, a grade school friend of my wife’s, is planning to take us to Woodstock. True, Max Yasgur’s no longer with us – RIP, famous farmer – but there’s more than a little echo of his spirit inhabiting those fields, where dreams were sown and have bloomed for generations. Mike Dewey can be reached at CarolinamikeD@aol.com or 6211 Cardinal Drive, New Bern, NC 28560. You might also enjoy the stuff on his Facebook page.


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