It was billed as three days of peace and music on a 600-acre farm in New York’s Catskill Mountains. Named Woodstock Music & Art Fair, the show started on Friday, Aug. 15, 1969, but actually ended on the fourth day, Monday, Aug. 18.

Richie Havens, who officially kicked off the iconic concert on Friday night, doesn’t even refer to it as Woodstock. Instead, he calls it Bethel, because technically that’s where the event was held, not in Woodstock, N.Y., which is located 43 miles southwest.

Tickets for the full weekend cost $18 and featured 32 of the hottest acts of the era — Janis Joplin, The Who, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Santana and Jimi Hendrix, who famously closed the event.

From all accounts, it was a logistical nightmare. The town wasn’t ready for the nearly half a million people who descended onto Bethel. The traffic was so deadlocked that many decided to abandon their cars and trucks and walk to the event.

But still they came.

And during that rainy weekend of 1969, a group of wet strangers huddled together in a field, giving food to those who needed it and enjoying the music.

Twice people tried to recreate Woodstock — in 1994 and in 1999 — but neither could capture the feeling of the original. The reasons, say Tri-State residents who attended the 1969 event, are simple: spontaneity can never be planned, and history can never truly be recreated.

No need for a ticket

Gary Berg, 61, of Boonsboro, still has an original ticket from Woodstock, which along with an original poster, isprotected behind glass.

He was 21 years old then, a young married father who worked as an electrician and loved his rock ’n’ roll.

Two weeks before Woodstock, Berg attended the Atlantic City Pop Festival in New Jersey. It had been a precursor to the bigger festival with such names as Cass Elliott, Joe Cocker, B.B. King and Janis Joplin.

Berg said he thought at the time that would be it for concerts for the summer.

“I really wasn’t planning on going to Woodstock,” he said.

A friend was selling tickets for the festival in his Baltimore shop. By today’s standards it was cheap — three days for $18 — but it was a lot of money in 1969.

“Most concerts were $2.50 to $3 back then,” Berg said, noting he took home about $70 a week back then.

But Berg paid the ticket price and planned a trip to Woodstock. He can still remember some of the performers — Jefferson Airplane, Crosby, Stills & Nash, The Byrds, Johnny Winter, Janis Joplin.

Berg said he had hitched a ride with a buddy to go to New York.

“He had a Jeep, so it allowed us to get closer and use the back roads,” he said.

They got within two miles and parked, hiking in. By the time he got there, his ticket was useless. The fences had been trampled and there wasn’t anyone to take them. So the ticket he has is still untorn.

By the time they got there Friday night, it was dark and raining and the music was already playing.

“I never got to see the musicians. I could hear them,” Berg recalls. “There was like this orange hue over the stage because of the lights hitting the rain.”

The rain, he said, was something he wasn’t at all prepared for. But what made him miserable, he said, was the temperature — cold at night, hot during the day.

“Talk about hot, you had a whole lot of people in a crowd,” he said.

And he isn’t a fan of large groups of people.

“I didn’t want to be in the middle of the crowd,” he said.

The band he wanted to hear was The Who, whom he had seen a few weeks before at the Merriweather Post Pavilion with Led Zeppelin opening for them. The Who was to officially close out Saturday evening but the concert was behind. Jefferson Airplane performed even later — about the time the sun was coming up on Sunday.

“I remember waiting for The Who, but they didn’t come on until 3 a.m.,” he said. “ (After they played) I was about to lay down to go to sleep when I heard Grace Slick say it was a new dawn. I got up to listen to them.”

He wasn’t able to stay to listen to Jimi Hendrix close out the festival Monday morning. He had to get home to his job.

Berg said he enjoyed his time at the festival, but if he had one thing he didn’t like it would have to be the rain on Saturday.

“The rain just kept coming down,” he said. “You’d get soaked and start to get cold.”

But even in those conditions, Berg said there weren’t any fights or hostilities. Two died, one of what was reported as an overdose, the other by being accidentally ran over by a tractor.

“Under those conditions, there weren’t any problems,” he said, “Everyone was happy.”

That, he said, is what really the four-day festival was about.

“The bigger message was that peace and love mattered,” he said.

He said everyone was friendly, including the local police. “There was no attitude allowed.”

He had brought a sleeping bag with him but it did little to protect him from the rain. He left the sleeping bag there in the field.

Somehow the ticket survived the rain, without getting ripped. It was in a drawer for years before he put it in a baggie. Nearly a month ago his current wife surprised him by protecting it in the glass.

A festival for the ages

Tom Borum of Hagerstown had already been making the musical rounds that summer.

Borum, who said he was 18 during Woodstock, attended the Laurel Pop Festival in Laurel, Md., in July, and the Atlantic City Pop Festival in New Jersey, which was the first week of August.

It was during the New Jersey festival that he heard about Woodstock and decided to go.

“But we didn’t buy any tickets,” he said.

Borum was working the third shift at Mack Trucks, from midnight to 8 a.m. So after his shift Friday morning, he and six others, one of whom was his brother Bill, piled into a friend’s Ford Falcon and started on the eight-hour drive.

By the time they got closer to the festival, Borum said the driver thought it was too crowded and wanted to go home.

“So me and two guys got out and four went back to Hagerstown,” he said.

Borum, his brother and a friend walked into the festival. When they reached the top of the hill, it was about a half of hour before the start of the festival. As they found out, they didn’t need any tickets after all.

“I looked at the two guys and said, ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m sitting in front,’” he said.

He said he was about 50 feet from the main stage when he ran into a sister of a friend from Washington, D.C. She led them to a space she already had down front.

“I sat there for 13 hours and didn’t leave or even move,” Borum said.

It was about 3 a.m. before he even thought to getting up and making his way back to the portable toilets.

On the second day, Borum said he decided to stretch his legs and walk around.

“I really wanted to see what was going on,” he said.

The sleeping bag he had brought with him was in the Falcon, along with his buddies. All he had were the soaking-wet clothes on his back.

By Sunday afternoon his clothing, along with the sleeping bag, started to dry. But things were a mess.

“We were in a farmer field,” he said. “The smell got pretty rank.”

He got food by asking those who had brought something, Borum said.

His weekend was over by Sunday evening because he had to go back to work. But they were stuck in New York, so Borum said they crafted a sign to say “Washington, D.C.” He said he, his brother and their friend only stood five minutes before someone stopped to give them a ride. The three got a ride to Georgetown, Md., where they called a friend in Reston, Va. (who just happened to be the brother of the girl he met at the festival). The next morning they hitchhiked back to Hagerstown.

Borum is part of the area band Rudy & The Bluefish. He said growing up in the 1960s inspired the musician he is today. He said from his spot in front of the Woodstock stage, he was able to study performances of some of the greats.

“I listened to everything and watched everything,” he said.

In 1994, Borum attended Woodstock II, which he said was similar because it rained and had good bands. It was better organized and had food. But it couldn’t replace the 1969 Woodstock.

Finding the spirit

Rob Shaw, 58, of Martinsburg, W.Va., hadn’t planned on attending Woodstock, but there he was in the middle of the crowds in 1969.

Shaw, then 18, had planned on attending a conference related to his Baha’i faith in nearby Connecticut the same weekend Woodstock was to start.

He hitchhiked from the Baltimore area to New York. He arrived on Monday, Aug. 11, days before the concert was to begin.

“There were about 200 people there and the weather was beautiful,” he said.

But by Thursday, the masses started to arrive and a crowd had gathered into the field.

“Friday morning we woke up because it started to rain on us,” Shaw said.

Rain did little from keeping people away and by Friday, the official day of the event, Shaw estimates there were hundreds of thousands of people.

“We were stunned,” Shaw recalled. “I realized that I wasn’t going to make it to my conference.”

Shaw said he didn’t have a ticket, and when he tried to find out where the tickets were being sold, the fences were already down.

In days before text messaging, cell phones or the Internet, the group at Woodstock had to go by word-of-mouth to find out what was going on outside of the festival.

“We’d hear that the traffic was backed up for 17 miles,” Shaw said as an example.

He said what was amazing was that even though there were so many people watching the stage, there were still aisle-like spaces.

“I was just able to walk down to the front,” he said.

He was able to see Richie Havens, the first performer, and Sweetwater, the first band to play at Woodstock, up close. He remembers seeing Arlo Guthrie take the stage and watching a pregnant Joan Baez perform. After the first day, he lost his great seat.

“But it didn’t matter. You could hear music wherever you were,” he said.

What’s not seen on the famous documentary, Shaw said, is that there was a smaller stage off in the woods where lesser known acts performed.

Shaw said he was wet and sunburned, but still had fun. The only food he had carried in with him was a child-size box of Lucky Charms. When he ran out, people were willing to share with him.

Eventually, the National Guard flew overhead, dropping K-ratios of peanut butter and crackers for the festivalgoers.

If he could do it again, Shaw said, “No. 1, I would take something to eat.”

No. 2, “I’d at least take an umbrella.”

And No. 3? “A camera,” he said.