woodstock and paper stock

There is already hoopla about Woodstock's 40th anniversary on August 15th. As some of you may recollect, Life magazine did a special issue on the festival at the time. (I was there, too, but as a kid, not a journalist.) They had to really hustle to get that issue on the newsstands—in 1969 there were no digital cameras, no computers, no Fed Ex.
And twenty years ago, for the 20th anniversary, I climbed into a car with several people who had covered the event for Life and we drove on up to that pasture in White Lake. The driver was Bill Eppridge, who shows some of his pictures and talks about his recollections of the event in today's Lens column. One of the passengers still works for what is left of Life at its photo site. Another is still with the photographer she fell in love with there. And there was me, the editor of the anniversary piece. We advertised in the newspaper for people who had seen themselves in the original Woodstock issue, tried to verify that they were who they claimed to be, and printed people's memories of the event. By that time we had computers and voice mail, but no Internet or cellphones. There are several similar web hunts going on now, which is a lot easier than doing the thing by newsprint and U.S. mail.
All this is by way of saying that I have started seeing magazine racks in the trash.