The Tampa Tribune from Tampa, Florida • 27

STATE 1 TAMPA TRIBUNE-TIMES ll-C Sunday, August 24, 19G9 w'" yrw 4.w ''I'v r- vtrrtj Rock Festival Youths Converted 'Square Mom i' t'o. i Youths Found Music, Kept The Peace (Continued from Page 10-C) traipsed back and forth across the dirt roads and swampy fields, looking for friends, old and new, and for something to keep them busy. And the world of the "Biblical" people, who sought and found a pastoral haven in a gently rolling pasture and adjacent woods. These were fluid worlds, constantly changing with the ebb and flow of humanity. Because of my age and my plain clothing, I had expected to be ignored.

But I was accepted. I was among friends, among warm fellow human beings. It was quite wonderful. And I felt impelled to speak with as many young people as possible. It is true that there were drugs at the festival.

But even before they became evident, people were getting high on people. It was more than just a feeling of camcraderie. It was a religious feeling I am my brother's keeper. It was a scene of children trying to say something to us demonstrating their faith and trust in each other. I felt ashamed when I heard on the radio that some people were gouging the kids, charging a dollar for a quart of milk, 25 cents for a glass of water I r-Ji-i- lv? By SUNNA RASCII Written for The Associated Press WHITE LAKE, N.Y.

If anyone doubts that a revolution is in progress in this country, he should have attended the Woodstock Music and Art Festival. I was there. I found it exciting and beautiful. I was thrilled, moved, and somehow deeply saddened. Maybe that was because everybody there seemed so young and so open and so vulnerable.

Because of my son's interest, I decided to attend the festival at White Lake, seven miles from Monticello. I am 44. I qualify as a square. My husband's a conservative businessman. Anybody who knows me knows that I am a prude of the first order.

The one time I went to a sauna bath, in Sweden where my daughter was an exchange student, I was the only one in a roomtui ot women who wrapped up in towels like a mummy. As a square, driving a station wagon, I joined the incredible web of traffic heading for White Lake, parked on the farm of friends, and walked the last 500 yards with hordes of youngsters. From the hill where I sat, you could see the steady stream of people hiking in and the thousands already peopling the hills in barefeet and boots, in bell bottoms, wildly colored shirts, peace headbands, beards, floppy felt hats, fringed jackets. cerned about her personal appearance and her personal appeal as a heroine. Asked why she felt she had to come herself to raise the $1 million she wants to help the families made homeless by the guerrilla fighting, she said, "Because people here know me as a person.

Because it was an emergency. We couldn't sit down and plan. Somebody said, 'Bernadette, you So I came." giving the truth to what the kids have been protesting all along: Materialism diminishes humanity. But the people at the festival were sharing everything, their food and their drugs. The drugs disturbed me.

I don't smoke anything and I don't have pot smoking friends. I saw two young fellows sitting on some logs, looking absolutely stoned. Their pupils were dilated and their words were a garble. They gave me the creeps. They had a seedy, unsavory look.

But I felt they would have been most unappealing people even without drugs. And I feel that society is responsible for the appeal of drugs to the young. They have been brought up in a pill oriented society. Television displays pills for everything: to perk you up, to relax you, to alleviate stomach distress. Ve have pill oriented our children from the cradle on and then wonder how they could be so foolhardy as to pop pills into their mouths.

We harass them about smoking pot and we consume an ungodly amount of alcohol. You read a lot about braless girls in tight shirts. They were at the festival. The first time I saw one, I turned around and gaped or at least tried not to gape. By the time I was there four hours I gaped if I saw a girl wearing a tight bra, its stitches showing through her shirt.

It began to look funny A young man, a Columbia University student, told me: "You'll see some pretty outrageous things here." "Like what?" "Boys and girls swimming together without clothes on in the pond." I saw them. And the prude of the sauna bath, was not shocked. I am still astonished, that I was not shocked. But these kids didn't seem sexy or salacious. They were not sexy in the prurient ways that movies and books and Madison Avenue try to stimulate sexiness.

They seemed innocent. I heard no four letter words. One young man started to say one. Then he saw me and stopped and said: "Oh, excuse Doing Her Thing Amidst Sea Of Humanity just a part of the estimated 400,000 at White Lake, N.Y. (AP) In all three worlds the use of drugs was profuse and flagrant.

Hawkers called out that they had acid LSD or speed-methadrlne for sale. As nearly as I could learn, the buyers of hard drugs were relatively few, and many of these few freaked out. Some had to be hospitalized. One died. Thousands of youngsters smoked marijuana.

I've never tried pot. But these kids weren't as bad as happy drunks. I heard no vulgar language. Some youngsters mostly boys stripped to wade in two ponds or to stroll in the altogether. I was first shocked and embarrassed by them.

I wondered why the nudity. After three days I found the courage to ask a naked young man strolling past the amphitheater. "Why, that's where it's at, man," he replied. "I'm free this way. I've lost my ego.

I'm me, I'm you. I'm part of everyone and everything." I remain unconvinced about public nudity. But, looking back now, I recall seeing perhaps 50 naked youngsters, and fewer drug freakouts, in a crowd the size of the population of Omaha. Again and again during the long, tiring weekend I asked dozens of youngsters how so many people, of any age, could live together under such conditions without any trouble. Some kids pointed out that people are most often cooperative in time of need.

Some said, they had gone out of their way to behave because "the world was watching." Finally, one boy declared fiercely: "We're just normal American kids. Just because we dress differently and act they smile and say hello. They raise their hands in the sign of peace. They shout 'peace' out the windows of their cars. Maybe they know something that we don't.

Maybe we should begin to listen." Promoters Vow Another Rock Event In 70 NEW YORK UP) Neither mud, nor marijuana nor a million dollar loss can stay the promoters of the great rock festival from doing their thing again next year. Michael Lang, 24, one of the producers of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, said Thursday his corporation hoped to schedule another program next Aug. 21 through 23. Lang said a site for the festival had not been picked out, but he noted that Max Yasgur had again offered his 600-acre Sullivan County farm. The festival at White Lake, N.Y., last weekend drew nearly half a million persons, causing massive traffic jams, shortages of food, water and medical supplies and a $1 million loss to the festival sponsors, Woodstock Ventures.

Bernadette Symbol Of Hope For Ulster Catholics Devlin, 22, explained what keeps her going: "Will power. It's taking a lot out of me, but it's taking a lot out of the people at the barricades. If I collapse, someone will put me to bed and treat me nicely. If they collapse, they're lost." One of five children of a carpenter, the girl who last April beame the youngest member of the British Parliament, speaks in a low voice, without gesturing. She seems uncon Sunna Rasch, new experience me.

That would offend you. But those words are just words and don't mean anything special to us." But I had the feeling also that these kids didn't need' to use the four letter as they are often used, as a substitute for vocabulary. They were articulate. We hear about the generation gap, the communications gap. In the town of Monticello before these young people arrived, all I heard were deprecatory remarks about them, a kind of sneering.

I am 'now astonished to find many people changing their opinions. In the street in. the supermarket in the beauty parlor wherever I have gone these past few days, people have been in awe of the politeness and gentility 2 of these young people. Theyjalk about the nice kids they met. Well, I call that a little bit of communication where there was none before.

Asking me to describe how the exposition changed me is like asking somebody to define a spiritual experience. For that is what it was to to the young people I mean and eventually to those of the community who gave of themselves and their food. We all became the richer. I And I will never be the same. Sentence Suspended or bmging 1 no 1 NEW ORLEANS (UPlV -Three members of the Jefferson Airplane rock and roll group have been given suspended sentences on charges of possessing marijuana.

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