Popular Song by Pele deLappe, lithograph, 1935.

Part II

(In last week’s Part I, a 15 year old San Franciscan Pele deLappe found herself in Woodstock in the early 1930s, befriended by Diego and Frida Rivera, Arnold and Lucille Blanch. She studied at The Art Students League in New York, where she first encountered lithography, and came under the influence of the great American scene painter, Reginald Marsh, while becoming immersed in the artist’s life.)

The year after Pele’s second summer in Woodstock, she would send off a poet friend, Edwin Rolfe to the Abe Lincoln Brigade to fight fascist Franco in Spain, recalling, “Rolfe’s poem, ‘City of Anguish,’ about the bombing of Madrid, brought tears to the eyes of Ernest Hemingway.” She danced the jitterbug with her Lefty pals in Harlem’s Renaissance, winning the friendship of Jazz greats Sidney Bechet and Willy the Lion Smith, who performed for and courted her at “The Log Cabin” (as would at least one of them, under cozier circumstances.)

Soon re-united with friends Frida and Diego Rivera, Pele assisted in creating the ill-fated mural at Rockefeller Center, washing brushes and posing for one of the figures, “hanging on every word of Diego and Ben Shahn, one of his assistants.” After Nelson Rockefeller had the mural torn down for the fact it included Lenin, a slightly less outspoken radical entered Pele’s world — “the second” of three great Latin muralists, David Siqueiros.

“Night after night in Child’s Restaurant he hypnotized me and a group of young devotees with his graphic descriptions of revolutionary and collective art work…David once knocked on my door around 3 a.m. to take me to what he considered a marvelous venue for murals, Pennsylvania Station. He magnanimously offered me an alcove of my very own. But the great artist as lover program was proving to be a chimera — I was better off doing my own thing.”

Pele’s apprenticeship — never as explicit in word as in graphic rendering — didn’t reach its crescendo until, at the ripe age of 17, she accompanied the Blanches (both of whom had won Guggenheims) and their painter friends Russell and Doris Lee, to Europe. We’ve seen it before in the story of Andrew Dasburg and we see it again, here. Woodstock painter pairs traveling abroad disintegrating into Italian farce wherein husbands abandon wives for other husband’s wives, great art is swallowed whole (hopefully to inspire personal triumph), horrendous physical calamity is narrowly averted, as, all the while a sort of tipsy naïveté prevails to preserve our “decadents abroad” from a world going to hell in a beerhall and — not least of all — from themselves. Making it all sound simple as arithmetic, Pele would later write:

“It was Arnold’s clever plan to have Lucile and me spend a month each in Germany and Italy while he and Doris Lee went to Spain as lovers. Russell Lee, Doris’ husband, acquiesced in the arrangement by heading for the Soviet Union. The domestic mess would be sorted out when we returned to the States.”

And so it was just “before the deluge” of Nazism sweeping Europe, Lucile and Pele sketch their way through bars and cafes serving Nazi Brownshirts. Pele had a drawing torn from her hands (“I’d shave my head to have preserved!”) and ripped to pieces by a disapproving Nazi model, exclaiming, “This does not happen in Germany!” Spent entire days in Munich’s Medical Museum, where the women drew “tattooed jars in heads, carefully shellacked hermaphrodite genitalia, human brains in formaldehyde. One brain, we were told, was Beethoven’s…” What had clearly become a remarkable friendship accompanied even more remarkable images filling sketchbooks (their whereabouts today, unknown) of “the beautiful, the ugly, the living, and the dead.”

Traveling on-the-cheap by tram and train down the Italian continent, knowing even less about Fascism than they did of Nazism (blessedly little) the odd couple of woman painters marveled almost as much at the food as at the frescoes, as…

It’s not easy to bury a legend. Death crystallizes a charismatic soul. Stories surrounding such a being magnify the force of the individual as memory creates a lens through which mortality is temporarily thwarted if not downright denied.

Last Thursday, November 7, at six thirty in the morning, Woodstock’s one-of-a-kind Peter Walther died on his own terms on the farm at the top of Yerry Hill. He was 69 years old. Beside him his beloved Susan Dresdale, Home School Empress, World Peace Advocate, painter of pine forests, back-to-basics pioneer, farmer, kitchen wizard, lover and friend, who, together with her children, cherished Peter — a tireless worker plain tucker’d out — for many a year. Susan nursed him through this last hot Woodstock summer when he was sometimes strong enough to welcome well-wishers, sometimes not. Come fall, the circle grew smaller, tighter.

The day of Peter’s death a special friend, John Luther, obeyed long-discussed instructions from his mentor. With the assistance of Damien DeLisio (who repaid the favor Peter performed at his own father’s passing) the two used Walther’s personal tools to build the coffin of freshly milled pine. Anthony Lee carved the peace symbol on the lid using one Peter painted at Susan’s farm, as template. A vigil fire was set ablaze at Gabriel Dresdale’s suggestion, its flames fed all night by John and Ben Ranes until Peter’s coffin was placed in the artist’s graveyard. The deceased forbade embalming so the funeral was held a scant two days after his death. Nor had Peter wished to be conveyed in a hearse so Luther’s vintage Dodge truck did the hauling.

Somehow cheerful enough to speak to me by phone, Susan’s grief-inflected laughter helped our conversation along. “Peter always said, ‘I’m a production guy’…and the funeral was his last show — his choreography — down to the last detail. The minister from Christ Lutheran presided, Simon Felice and Simi sang, my son Gabriel played cello. Eight strong young men who admired him carried the casket. All exactly as Peter said it should be…”

Despite the cold, near two hundred gathered on the Artist’s Cemetery hillside.

The eight carried Peter’s coffin from the truck in the parking lot below, all the way up the circular drive to “new territory” on the North Eastern flank. Walther’s white horse, Ghost, stood off to the side, his mane neatly braided, chomping nearby grass. Bruce Milner made the first eloquent remarks and then…the door swung open on memory’s storehold and an uninterrupted two hours of stories commenced. Cold hands and feet be damned — not a soul left ‘til the earth was flung. Some anecdotes were, Susan conceded with a chuckle, “perhaps not fit for children to hear,” yet such reminiscences brought Peter back to life boldly, with the flower-child-spirit of days gone by which one mourner observed “made me fall back in love with Woodstock all over again.” Few if any could identify all that gathered. They came from strange places like Florida and Arizona, out from the hills they came, and from off the grid — men, women and children who’d long waded in the pools of Peter’s aqua-marine blue eyes, had already memorized the almost shocking power of his smile and the carefully measured cadence of his speech. Many had known his well-disguised acts of generosity, others had worked with him, planned and dreamed and partied with him, a good many ladies had been his lovers. All the assembled had been and forever would be his admirers — witnesses to the spirit of ye Olde New Age Peter Walther clung to with the ferocity of a latter-day William Blake. Indeed, a few youths could well be called acolytes to this man who refused — completely and absolutely — “The Power Elite” as manifested in Amerika, the no-longer-beautiful. So self-assured was this “refusnik” that pancreatic cancer itself became a final platform from which Peter Walther proved to the world, not even imminent death would bend him. He’d not seek balm from Big-Pharm, government-begged surgery, or even a hospice-assisted death. Peter had lived in contempt of Uncle Sam and he would die without capitulation to this, his one and only super-animated enemy.

Born in Middle Island, Long Island, NY, in 1944, older brother to two sisters, the Walther kids’ father had been a scientific glass blower who’d once worked on the Manhattan Project. In high school Peter studied girls, mostly, which proved a reciprocal research. Delivered from the draft by a bee-sting blown up like a balloon, Pete was instead inducted into the National Guard. Having serving his time, the 20-year-old attempted his one and only experiment with capitalism, opening a store of some kind which quickly failed. (Knowing Peter, he probably gave away half the merchandise.) Gravitating to New York City this handsome long-hair drew, painted, took photographs and became involved with acting. It was a small role in a Woodstock Playhouse production, in fact, which during the mid-sixties first brought him to the town he’d only briefly ever leave again. Michael Esposito remembers Pete at Sound Outs (the prequel to “The Festival”) in Pan Copeland’s field. Soon after these seminal events the two conspired to build a stage and host a concert on The Green (now “Stone”) where the Garden Cafe steps stand today. Peter lived in an apartment above (and would again years later) organizing further impromptu concerts on the huge porch and even on the rooftop; also with Richard Fusco in the main house at Peter Pan Farm (today the Woodstock Dasy school.) It was now he started working in video, becoming “a production guy,” no doubt inspired by the Woodstock Festival he’d attended with (almost? more than?) a million others whose lives would never be the same.

(Photo by Dion Ogust)

On his eightieth birthday on 27th day of November, Jerry Wapner — longstanding dean of Woodstock lawyers — will retire from the law practice he created not very long after arriving here with his family some 50 years ago. The following interview was preceded by Jerry’s warning, “I’ll try to be as forthcoming as I possible, which isn’t very much …” Despite this caveat the interviewee didn’t once seem to avoid an issue, veil a secret, or pull a punch.

There is one secret Jerry attempted to conceal. Two hours before our phone call I asked Grace Bakst Wapner and Jerry’s wife of 59 years, if she could provide me with at least a partial list of the organizations Jerry has represented on a pro-bono basis. I didn’t want to ask Jerry for such information directly, because I felt he would deem such disclosures self-congratulatory. Twenty minutes later I received an email from Grace informing me that I’d been correct in my assumption: no information would be forthcoming.

TW. Your father, Jerry, was a lawyer. You became a lawyer. Was this a family tradition you were expected to uphold?

JW. I don’t think so. My father’s father carried laundry bundles on his back, and his father rode around Russian working for the czar, of all things buying horses. And my son is not a lawyer, so if there was a tradition it was very shortlived.

TW. But did your father influence the way you practiced law?

JW. Not in the least.

TW. You’re considered something of anomaly — not a run-of-the-mill attorney. But every lawyer’s education is basically the same. When did you become different? And in answering that question perhaps you could provide me with a brief, even cryptic overview of your career before Woodstock?

JW. Well, before I came to Woodstock I was a lawyer in Manhattan in a small firm which a classmate and I formed … and, let’s see, … we took in three partners of the same age, just out of law school, then there were five of us on the 13th floor at 37 Wall Street. We rented on the 13th floor since it was cheaper because people didn’t like the number. And then it dwindled from five to four and then to three. And then that went on for some years and we were very scrapping young lawyers in a very dog-eat-dog world, and I can’t tell you what precipitated it — a variety of things, no doubt.

But one day a year before we came here, almost a year to the day, which would have been some time in May of 1963, I was with one of my partners in the Brooklyn Bridge subway station waiting for the IRT. We’d just come from court — as I recall, a singularly disgusting event — and I turned to him and said, “I’m leaving.” And I think I said, affording myself some prescience, I’m going to leave within a year.

Well, I did leave within a year. I was really disgusted with the city, which was crime-ridden and not a great a place for children. But it was more than that. That was one of the factors. Another was I really came to hate what was I doing.

TW. Which you’d describe as…?

JW. General practice, some criminal law, matrimonial, labor law…I worked on a wide variety of law, not really becoming attached to any of it.

TW. On another note, you’d played jazz piano pretty seriously in college, had you not?

JW. I had.

TW. And had you given piano a try professionally, or was that just too daunting?

JW. It was daunting. I mean I’ve got what I would call something a couple of notches below a minor talent. I’ve got an ear. So I never really learned to read music … really unfortunate. And not all that much technique. But I’ve got a lot of ideas, so if I could play what I think of or feel, I’d guess it would be good and maybe even better, but I can’t play it. And I’ve seen people and heard people who can and so, after a time … I mean I did play up here in the area at hotels and things like that, with small groups. But I just kind of gave it up … It wasn’t satisfying.

TW. Understood. But who is a jazz pianist who plays what you think you might have played, could you have played what you wanted to play?

JW. Wow. Bill Evans, Brubeck. But they’re so high in the stratosphere … There’s no way I could even leap…

TW. So now I first became aware of you through meeting your son Kenny, who would eventually become my best friend, when … were you “renting” Tapooz’s Lodge?

JW. We were renting a house on Tapooz’s property.

TW. And you started a lecture series …

JW. Yes, we had a venture called “Ohayo Mountain Hall,” some name like that … on Yerry Hill Road. We had lined up a whole series of people to come up, mainly from the city, many of who I knew but some Grace knew, too, who were activists, people like Dorothy Day and …

TW. Orson Bean?

JW. That’s right — Orson Bean. He started a Summerhill school. There were a whole bunch of people. We set up a program to present but our downfall was that the constituency that would’ve really attended the hall became alienated. And they became alienated because on the program we had, along with a speaker from the Communist Party, we had a speaker from a local chapter of the John Birch Society. And this obviously offended the left in Woodstock.

Richard C. Wilhelm, prize-winning television technician, foreign war veteran, fireman, local businessman, railroad enthusiast, beloved spouse and devoted Woodstocker of over 50 years, succumbed to a long illness on November 25 after a brief stay at Ferncilffe Nursing Home. He was 90 years old.

Born in Pittsburgh in 1923, Dick Wilhelm grew up The Great Depression. Working in local steel mills by summer, he enlisted in the army upon graduating from high school and served as an MP during WWII in China, Burma, and India. Stateside again, he attended trade school in Milwaukee on the GI Bill, studying to be an audio technician. Returning to the army Dick cut his teeth as sound technician on Army Training films — credits which soon garnered him a civilian job at CBS. Finding his niche on “Special Event” crews (evolving into 60 Minutes and CBS Sunday Morning) Dick can be spotted in vintage “out-take” footage from such CBS Specials as interviews with Presidents Eisenhower, Johnson, Reagan, and Jimmy & Rosalyn Carter on the campaign trail, as well as Nelson and Happy Rockefeller. He was a four-time Emmy award winner for specials on Hunger In America, The Klu Klux Clan, The Selling of the Pentagon, and The Rockefellers.

Dick bought a weekend home on Baker Road in Wittenberg in the 1960s and soon met another part-timer, Ralph Goneau, at Ulster County’s, then, only gay bar, The Town House [in the building where Cucina sits today.] A year or so later they moved in together, eventually purchasing what was originally Andersen’s Hardware Store. That location — neighboring Woodstock’s Fire Department — found one or both of them donning day-glo vests the instant a siren sounded — with all traffic immediately halted at their command, as fire trucks sped off to their destinations. In those days Dick’s passion for vintage railroading accounted for the majority of the couple’s free time. Journeying north as far as Canada’s topmost border and as far south as Mexico’s Copper Canyon, in all the two enjoyed over 30,000 miles of travel by way of an autonomous railroad car, privately owned and operated by one Richard C. Wilhelm, dedicated member NARCOA (North American Railcar Operator’s Association.)

According to a New York Times article of 7/18/11 “Ten years ago, when some states began moving toward legalizing same-sex marriage, Ralph Goneau called the Woodstock town clerk with a request: If same-sex marriage ever became legal in New York, he and his longtime partner, Richard Wilhelm, wanted to be first in line.” Though they eventually took their vows on the Queen Mary 2, Dick, Ralph, the media-coverage spawned by them since created quite a cottage industry here, consisting of gay and lesbian couples who come to Woodstock for their marriage license and to be married. And it was provident that Wilhelm and Goneau planned so well and moved so quickly, for though their 43 year relationship — crowned by marriage — was a remarkably happy one, their legal union was indeed brief. Today, Ralph is the only survivor of the man he historically wed two short years ago.

Friends will be received 2 p.m.-4 p.m. and again 7 p.m.-9 p.m. Saturday, December 7 at Lasher Funeral Home, Inc., 100 Tinker Street, Woodstock. Formal services will commence at 11 a.m. Sunday, December 8 at the funeral home, followed by burial in Woodstock Artists Cemetery with full military honors. Contrary to earlier press, there will be no reception following the interment. In lieu of flowers, contributions to the Woodstock Fire Companies, c/o P.O. Box 209, Bearsville, N.Y., 12409, would be greatly appreciated.

Bolton Brown, The Bather, 1921, Lithograph on paper, 14 x 17.5 inches, Collection of Morgan Anderson Consulting.

Woodstock as we know it begins with Bolton Brown (1866-1934), a prodigy whose gifts brought him fame, before ego accompanying these ripped them away again. He was an art instructor at 19, arguably the first great mountain climber in America (as well as pioneer of notations and adventure-writing documenting such); a draftsman without peer, masterful painter and extraordinary teacher of painting; a builder, designer and architect, and a father of modern lithography (with more than 60 technical breakthroughs and several books on such to his credit); a lecturer, author, memoirist and “survivor of modernism.” Brown’s accomplishments are particularly astounding for the fact that he remains a marginalized figure today, even if such “shoddy treatment” by history is largely the consequence of a singularly tempestuous and uncompromising nature.

Locally, a fair amount of attention has been paid over the years, of course, to “the discoverer of modern Woodstock” and — if you look for it — fascinating material on and by Brown is not hard to find. We are extremely lucky, however, that the Woodstock Guild’s Derin Tanyol has brought her own mountain-climbing mastery to bear in curating a new synthesis of Brown’s accomplishments, since prior to Bolton Brown: Strength and Solitude (January 17-February 23, with an Opening Reception, 4 p.m.-6 p.m. Saturday, January 18 at the Kleinert/James Arts Center, 34 Tinker Street, Woodstock) a proper appreciation of Brown’s cross-blend of art, writings, and advancements in climbing have been studied in relation to one another only at a cursory level.

Photographer unknown, Bolton Brown drawing The Bowl, 1925. Private collection.

Born in 1866 in Syracuse, into the large family of a Presbyterian minister (with whom BB battled his whole life long), Brown credits his mother as his first art teacher. He received a Master’s degree in painting in 1891, then traveled to California, accepting an invitation to create The Fine Art Department for the newly-established Stanford University — a position he held for ten years, before being fired in a typically heated controversy.

The widow of Stanford’s founder had become outraged that a nude model was being used in co-educational art classes. First Brown was asked to separate male from female students, and then to abolish the use of a nude model altogether. During the ensuing battle Brown wrote contemptuously of, “the foolish idea that the visible body is primarily a sexual excitant,” when he contrarily argued that, “it is simply the home of the soul.” He also defended himself grandly with the claim, “To the best of my knowledge and belief, I am now the best teacher of art in the United States. This is not a boast — but a judgment.”

During the Stanford years (climbing often with his new wife, Lucy) Brown was credited with first ascents of some the highest, most formidable Sierra peaks including those he named Mount Ericsson, Arrow Peak, Mount Gardiner, Mount Stanford, and — in honor of his hero — Mount Ruskin. His solo barefoot ascent of Mount King involved previously unseen lassoes, nooses, harnesses and knots, and has been called, “the finest Sierra Climb of the nineteenth century.”

Immersed in the writings of naturalist philosopher John Ruskin, Bolton Brown’s complex personality seemed to require both that he be heralded as hero (which his writings in the Sierra Club Bulletin certainly accomplished) and yet to simultaneously “disappear” into nature, establishing a nothing-less-than spiritual connection which, in the end, conquered the conqueror. Such dual ambition would inspire many of Brown’s most memorable artistic achievements, and, ironically (due to the immense popularity of climbing), provide him the potential for a contemporary renaissance after the near total eclipse of his reputation in the last century.

The confidence and “cool” of the climber did not leave Brown upon his dismissal from Stanford. He built a beautiful home and, to support his growing family, became a dealer of Japanese prints, buying such right off the docks of San Francisco. It is almost certainly under this pretext he first visited the home of Ralph Whitehead, an immensely wealthy Englishman, who’d studied with Ruskin in Oxford, whose American socialite wife, Jane Byrd McCall, shared his philosophic views (biting the industrialist hand supplying their fortune), and who, together, first attempted in miniature, a Ruskin-based art colony on the California coast. After it floundered, Whitehead came to rely upon two young Americans to help supply him the verve and nerve to try again. Eventually Mr. Brown negotiated three times the salary first offered him and, ever the pioneer, set out to personally explore the Catskill Mountains of his native New York State, since these (he argued to Whitehead and his “poet” companion, Hervey White) better conformed with the requirements for an arts and crafts community as laid down by Ruskin, himself.

In an article (which should be read by every high school student in Ulster County) famously quoted in Alf Evers’ Woodstock, The History of an American Town, Brown, later in life, recalled the formative days of the Byrdcliffe artists colony, when he first arrived “by stage [coach]…in Windham” and hence “scrambled over summits so wild it seemed no man or even animal could ever have been there.” Following only a topographical map of the Catskills he sought an exact altitude recommended by Ruskin. On a particular day in the spring of 1902 Brown explored “a high pocket with steep walls, in its bottom a single farm.” This was Mink Hollow. Finding Cooper Lake at the southern entrance of this cul de sac and with “The day still being young…[he] walked up the back side of Overlook, emerging into a notch at Mead’s Mountain House.”

Now Brown — never shy of a grand-eloquence — recalls, “Exactly here the story of modern Woodstock really begins, for it was just at this moment and from this place that I, like Balboa from his ‘peak in Darien’ first saw my South Sea. South indeed it was and wide and almost as blue as the sea, that extraordinarily beautiful view, amazing in extent, the silver Hudson losing itself in the remote haze.” It was an “old man…Mr. Mead himself” who, after Brown clambered over a stone wall to speak with him and asked, “What is the name of that place down there?” answered, “That is Woodstock Village.” “It looked good to me then…” wrote Brown, and then, with rare understatement, “it has not ceased to do so.”

Whitehead and White were convinced to give up their own explorations near Asheville, North Carolina and, once Whitehead was convinced that Woodstock teamed with no secret community of Jews, he agreed, “Well, all right; let’s have it here.”

Matthew van Rooyen, Jonah Martindale, Jerry Tart and David Fletcher.

In August of this year three high school students from Woodstock will travel to India and Nepal to spearhead a local chapter of the new philanthropic organization Khusi Hona (or “Feel Happy” in Hindi.) At that time, Jonah Martindale, Jeremiah Tart, and David Fletcher, accompanied by parent Sharon Fletcher and KH founder Matthew van Rooyen, will visit two or three of five orphanages in this largely poverty-stricken region. In doing so, they will bring a new breed of “crowd funding” charity to several highly needy corners of the third world. While here at home, with drug and alcohol abuse apparent among Woodstock’s youth (and a nameless malaise, harder to brand, exponentially tainting “first and second worlds” globally) such enlightened actions could not be better aimed nor timed. But just how did Woodstock become the lucky recipient of so selfless yet self-improving an international reach-out? The genesis was this.

Over the years Byrdcliffe-based lawyer Sharon Fletcher has done considerable pro bono work for Global Ministries and Relief (GMR), the founder of which, Dr. Leon van Rooyen, also happens to be the father of Khusi Hona founder, Matthew van Rooyen, both of South Africa. After securing his own finances in entrepreneurial branding and taking obvious inspiration from the philanthropy of his father, a 30 (I was 30 at time of founding 9/15/1981) year old Matthew set out to assist the orphans of his home continent under the rubric of GMR. However, due to chronic political unrest, civil war, and internal struggles inherent to tribalism, this vaulted ambition proved a most difficult “starting place.” Soon advised that I take the model to India where the orphan problem is statistically far worse (31 million orphans in India), Matthew founded Khusi Hona in mid 2012, which has quickly earned him a reputation for charismatic yet extremely efficient leadership in the field. Not surprisingly, Khusi Hona fast came to the attention of Sharon Fletcher, who lost no time in sharing her enthusiasm with David Becker, filmmaker and media arts teacher of the Woodstock Day School who in turn embraced the project and plans to help produce a series of 2-3 minute mini documentaries with the students from the perspective of the orphaned children, students visiting and the staff and directors of the children’s homes. The result was that a core group of Woodstockers — inspired by this young South African’s creative generosity — have placed three of their sons in his care. These young men will travel to the other side of the world to experience and assist children in dire need, exponentially expanding their own consciousness, and encountering an extraordinary career opportunity in the process.

The genius of “crowd-funding” (the most visible and successful example of which remains “Kickstarter”) relies upon specifically solicited funds accomplishing specifically articulated goals (without paying the often exorbident salaries of various “non-profit” specialists.) Case in point: Last year KH collected monies to buy 75 winter thermals for 75 orphans to wear this winter. It has likewise procured funds to purchase (and put in use!) a solar panel which heats water allowing 62 orphans that extremely rare commodity…hot water, in cold Himalayan winters, the daily use of which increases their sense of being loved and truly cared for while decreasing the risk of microbe-based disease.

Asked where Woodstock fits into KH’s fast-unfolding mission, Matthew explains the following: “Woodstock is not the first, but [certainly finds itself] in the forefront of our newly released strategy. We have one official chapter at University of South Florida (USF), we have several more in the works at several other universities including Rutgers and University of Tampa. The Woodstock Day School will be the first such “high school” chapter, as well as the first in New York. We have been organizing and sanctioning field volunteer opportunities in India and Nepal with Khusi Hona since its first year 2012, but Woodstock’s group would be the first volunteer trip sanctioned under Khusi Hona.”

In a cell phone interview held at the end of a recent group brainstorm I asked Jonah Martindale, age 15, what he expected of the trip.

Sculptor John Flannagan, Linda Lilly Sweeney and the Maverick Horse, 1920’s.

Much loved, native Woodstocker Linda Sweeney died of natural causes on February 26 at Kingston Hospital, where she had been in treatment for a week. She was 80 years old.

Linda was the only child of a relatively short-lived marriage between noted painter and lithographer Margaret Lowengrund — whose popular B&W prints appeared often in metropolitan magazines and newspapers in the 30’s & 40’s — and Joseph Lilly, Tax Commissioner for the La Guardia administration, who somewhere or other also found time to win two Pultizer Prizes in journalism on the subject of graft in city government. While residing both in Manhattan and on Yerry Hill Road in Woodstock (Linda preferred to say “Ohayo Mountain” — and quite accurately, too) her parents’ ambitious, if hectic marriage came unglued while Linda was still in Woodstock Elementary School (then located where the CVS stands today) — at which point her young life took on something of a novelistic quality. Mother Margaret — who also ran her own Madsion Avenue gallery — was a society woman, without time or inclination to rear a sensitive child, and so placed Linda in the care of several Woodstock friends, most notably Clark and Gertrude Neher, parents of Barry, Andre and Jane (later Jane Keefe). Linda’s childhood friends soon included Pam Feeley, Nancy Haney, Cornelia Hartmann (later Rosenblum) Judy Small, Jane Keefe, Jean White, and Audrey Webster Prevo.

Like many a teen-age girl, Linda was horse-crazy, and it’s been recalled that she and her friend Audrey galloped around on their cow ponies, loudly herding unsuspecting cattle usually left to fatten up, unmolested. Her friend Judy Small remembers that Linda and she seriously set about learning to cook in their early teens — because their mothers “didn’t.” From what I could discern of family lore, Jean White and Linda often rode to and from Woodstock Elementary School, boarding their horses at what for many years was known locally, simply, as “The Red Barn” —tucked into the hill below the back of the Woodstock Cemetery at the very end of Elwyn Lane, where, for instance, The James Cox Gallery first resided 25 years back.

Linda boarded at Oakwood School for a year, living by herself in Woodstock at The Twin Gables that summer, before returning to Manhattan and the prestigious Dalton School, where she edited The Year Book, and, graduating from which, was accepted to attend Antioch College.

Of her father even less is known, except his second marriage produced Linda two younger half-brothers, and at twelve she was placed, alone, on the Queen Mary (then used as a troop ship transporting “The US Fighting Man” back from WWII). Two weeks later, Joe Lilly, working for UNESCO in Geneva, retrieved a highly excited daughter from a dock somewhere on the other side of the Atlantic. From that early adventure forward, Linda developed a passion for travel she pursued actively in later years, as a purge against the vicissitudes of a deeply felt nature. All in all, she visited China, Russia, Vietnam, Europe, Alaska and South America.

Her marriage to Kevin Sweeney took place in 1953 at Woodstock’s Roman Catholic Church — today the Community Center — after a courtship of many years. In fact, the two first met at one of the famous Maverick Festival’s Masque’d Balls (a smaller, better-chaperoned version of the bacchanal said by some to have inspired a more famous festival borrowing the town name…). Kevin, who at 19 had hitch-hiked up from his home in Brooklyn, was given a free ticket to the party — his reward for changing a tire. This being the first of Sweeney’s many catch-as-catch-can journeys to visit Linda Lilly in Woodstock, who, upon that first meeting (and though a mere 14 years old) knew “this!” would be the man she’d marry.

Something of an Irish-American gypsy “without clear calling,” soon-to-be-millionaire Kevin, at 23 or thereabouts, was living in sin with his first love, Linda, during her one and only year at Antioch…when the creation of their first child, a daughter, Shannon, hastened a return to Woodstock, and almost as speedy a marriage. Proud, young, newlywed parents resided in New York City (where Shannon was born) while Kevin attended Columbia, with second-daughter Bridget debuting in ‘56. In ‘63 Linda and Kevin returned to the town each them — together and separately — would never leave for long, ever again.

A strong, bright, one-eyed light out went in Woodstock two Fridays ago, when Robbie Collins — who we not call “Robert!” — died at the age of 56, on March 14. His was a routine carpal tunnel procedure but Collins — a long-time cardio risk — took the chance and thus we’ve all been “robbed.” While friendships were of a vast importance, there were three beings absolutely central to Robbie: his rescued Great Pyrenees, Booboo; his sister Linda, and his ex-wife and life-long friend, Pekoe. Two of the three will tell you about him shortly…

The Collins kids were born in Albany — Robbie in ‘57. Their father, James W. Collins, was an Albany policeman and artist with “the gift of the gab” and along with their mother, Eugenia Yattaw Collins, (her middle signifying Native American origin…) removed the brood from urban confinement in ‘63, moving to Woodstock. It wasn’t long before she became known as “the hat lady” of “Jean’s Hats” — an indispensable part of Woodstock. Jean re-married another unforgettable town character named Artie Jackson. Artie eventually taught Robbie the electrician’s art, but first came a charmed childhood…

“Where do I begin to tell you about my dearest, most lovable brother in the whole wide world?” writes Robbie’s sister Linda. “To say we had the run of the town as children is an understatement. From the time we got up in the morning till dusk we were literally free as birds. Whether we played at the Rec Field or swam at Swim-o-links in Bearsville all day or set up lemonade stands at 2 West Hurley Rd — making the “big money” to splurge at day’s end on penny candy at Folk Art. Or in winter sleigh-riding at the Golf Course after shoveling snow in town on snow days…? This is how Robbie became the hard working entrepreneur he was. And how can you spend a hot summer day in Woodstock without seeing the familiar “Tropical Sno’s” cart he owned — now a fixture? Or maybe it was his flowing, curly blonde hair or that wonderful smile and charm that attracted people to his business. Whatever it was, Robbie loved people and people loved him and when he made friends he made them for life!

“He was dealt a tragedy and had his eye shot out from a friend of his pointing a pellet gun at him. I believe he was 16 — a time when young guys are full of ego…Robbie dealt with it the best he could, foregoing the glass eye and eye patch. He said, ‘fuck it if people don’t like the way I look…Oh well!’ He told me many times that Pekoe was the ‘Love of his Life’ — and that she admired the way he looked at life. He wanted to grow old with her, sitting in rocking chairs on a front porch. Their love for each other was amazing and there was nothing either one of them wouldn’t do for each other. What did they have in common? Dogs, dogs and more dogs! Robbie was pretty much never seen without his…and Pekoe promised Robbie she would take care of Boo, if he died. Robbie loved his Mom and always looked out for her…and stood by her side every day during her hospitalizations, even when the rest of us weren’t there for her. Even when he started to decline in health he never wavered and remained strong for my mother, me and his nephew, Brandon! He loved family — and family was, really almost anyone who knew him. Could Robbie make me laugh? He had the ability to improvise and at the spur of a moment, do imitations of people and skits. A couple years ago he did his impersonation of Alfred Hitchcock. I laughed so hard my stomach ached!”

“We were married — I think it was 1986 — in the front yard of the house I lived in on Wittenberg Road (Mitch and Gypsy Vinicor’s place),” says Pekoe Teves. “The ceremony was conducted by Sid Slayton in his classic Native American wedding ceremony. Officially, the marriage lasted six years and we were together for eight. He was zany — that’s a perfect word and when I first met him his friends described him as ‘Mr. Fun.’ His physical strength was due to the electrical work (apparently pulling wires is better than weight lifting!)…he did have impressive arms! People often asked the question about how we could be such close and good friends and the only answer that I can give is that we really loved each other and not being married didn’t seem like a good enough reason to not continue with our friendship. We met in Woodstock, at Deanie’s. He was quite gallant and brought me a dozen roses the day after we met…

“Here’s a story — Robbie had had a Great Pyrenees years ago and was terribly broken hearted when he died at a young age. He swore that he would never get another dog. I was involved in a Great Pyrenees rescue and was called upon to foster a dog in an emergency situation. They needed me to take the dog that day. Unfortunately, I was attending a funeral that day so I asked Robbie if he could pick up the dog and hold on to him for a couple of hours, which he reluctantly agreed to, insisting that ‘I am not going to keep this dog!’ He called me in a panic at the service as he had taken Boo to the Comeau for a walk and he’d bolted. We drove all around trying to find him and were finally called by the police and told that some kind woman had picked Boo up and had him in town.  We went to get him, I fully expecting to take Boo home until another home was found for him. Well, Robbie then told me that he was not giving him up and that Boo ‘was his dog now.’ They just adored each other and I know that despite the work of having a damaged rescue dog, their relationship was one that provided him with considerable happiness and joy. These past 5 years his health has not been good, but he maintained a happy disposition nonetheless. He had a big heart and a very loving and forgiving nature and a gentleness of spirit that was an inspiration to me.”

And to us all…

Robbie Collins was close friends with Alan and Ann Braun through Anne’s (deceased) son Steve Roberts, Sean Zimmerman, John Temme, Mel Ringstrom and Carol Ann Bernius; his nephew Brandon (Linda’s son), John Basil, Chris Basil, Ben Prevo, Tim Schultz, and the recently deceased Rob Carlson — to mention but a few.

Robbie is survived by Pekoe Teves, Eugenia Yattaw Collins (mother), Linda Collins (sister), Susan Collins (sister), James Collins (brother), Brandon Wolfeil (nephew), Bernadette Cody (niece), Elizabeth Cody (niece) and the Late Bernard Cody Jr. (nephew). Also, Great Nieces and Nephew.

Instead of flowers please send donations to Great Pyrenees Rescue www.greatpyreneesrescuesociety.org/ a memorial service is being planned for some time in mid-June.

(Photo by Dion Ogust)

As a local I was long ago acquainted with a) struggling artists, b) cottage industry artists, c) weekend artists, and d) “the ruination of Woodstock” as represented by families attached to businessmen working at Rotron, IBM and eventually imported from New York City.

Recently home for a few days, I hear about a new model of artist in the person of one Lowell Miller, a highly successful investment manager whose company, Miller/Howard, employs almost 50 Hudson Valley residents. While Lowell has lived in town for many years, he’s only recently gone public with what’s been a lifelong pursuit, with fairly instant local attention. We schedule a studio visit by phone, agreeing to meet two hours before the new WAAM exhibition opening for which three of his works were selected by Ian Barry, a guest curator and Director of the Tang Museum at Skidmore College.

Walking through the first room of a large studio, I’m reminded that I’m not a student of modern sculpture — I’m really here out of sheer curiosity. When I inquire, Lowell informs me he didn’t go to art school (though he’s had much feedback from his friend Wade Saunders, a sculptor and sculpture critic for Art in America). And while he’s “absorbed a lot of art” he hasn’t consciously tried to emulate anyone, nor does he consider himself part of any movement or style. “I’m just trying to realize myself,” he says, half way into our hour and a half talk.

“I’ve never encountered a successful businessman who is also a serious artist…” I say by way of a mission statement. Without hesitation Miller counters, “Why favor left brain over right brain? What’s wrong with having both? Some people might have both.”

I blink, conceding the point, and upon hearing that this man is an almost 40-year student of Aikido I am not surprised. The tour continues.

Though cost of materials is clearly not an issue here, Miller’s sculptures are — for the most part — modestly sized and executed in bronze, ceramic, or modest mixed media. A craft-like quality abounds, not in the least self-aggrandizing; the work isn’t cool, slick or academic. These are the creations of someone, who, finding they have something to say, has developed skills sufficient to such expression. In a sense, Lowell Miller seems a three dimensional cartoonist. The work exudes a playfulness, often hinging on a visual pun involving title, but the whimsy isn’t childish, it’s raw, edgy — occasionally, urgently sexual.

“I thought Big Business was prudish,” I posit. “How is it your work is frank if not downright obscene?”

“It’s been a problem, in my mind, at least, but self-censorship is the worst kind of repression…” Miller suggests.

Miller now lets down his guard, telling me a little more about his life than most people would understand and which I am not comfortable in fully revealing. For a man who competes for a living and by way of sport such transparency places a journalist in a curious position. To be specific, while seeking to “dig and reveal,” I am soon provided such an embarrassment of riches that while the writer in me is highly pleased, I also become aware of an instinct to protect my interviewee from his own candor. While in the back of my mind I keep wondering why Miller is giving me far more than I can imagine extracting from him through hard labor.

“You stripped yourself of your armoring.”After studying philosophy and literature at Sarah Lawrence College (in the first graduating class to include males) Miller knew only what he didn’t want to do. Never planning to practice, he bought some time studying law. “I simply wanted the degree and merely passing didn’t require much work. A first love had just ended wretchedly, I was suffering from a highly painful ‘male plumbing’ condition. Physically, psychically, I was in agony — which, we know — is a highly motivational state. I started doing exercises detailed in a book by Wilhelm Reich’s protege, Alexander Lowen, who’d eventually create the field of Bio-energetics. I had a lot of time on my hands so I did a lot of the exercises. And I did them often. For hours and hours. The result being…”

Now it was Miller’s turn to blink. “Exactly. It was like a dam broke. And I went through the demolition process rather quickly. For a few months I sobbed uncontrollably, for another few I yawned, almost constantly. I was living in a cheap place off Great Jones St. (in New York) with a bathtub in the kitchen. Everytime I soaked in the tub a short text popped into my head, and I’d jump out, dripping, to write it down. I sent Rolling Stone magazine a bunch of my texts and they started printing them at $30 a pop. Then Jann Wenner’s austerity regime reduced my fee to $25 which didn’t help my finances any. I thought I should find a way to make a living. But I was busy with all the body changes induce by the armor breakthroughs. Most times when I wasn’t experiencing strange sensations, like a warm ring around my chest glowing and glowing, I found odd postures and contortions to stretch every muscle and joint, stretching out a new container for a new energy.

Temple (photo by Frank Spinelli)

Rooted in Utopia’s past, Frank Spinelli’s astounding photographic record of “Burning Man” celebrates the planet’s newest art-driven community. In doing so this native Woodstocker reminds us that our most extraordinary (if largely forgotten) contribution to world culture is alive and well in an annual “techno heathen” rebirth. Burning Man: Into a 21st Century Utopia is an other-worldly, sexy, seriously playful delight. Spinelli will appear with copies of the book at the Woodstock Library Forum, 5 p.m. Saturday, December 13 at the Library.

In the summer of 2012, Spinelli was looking for a new project when his nephew serendipitously recommended “Burning Man” as happy hunting ground for remarkable images. In short order Spinelli procured a press pass, outfitted himself with tent and highly specified survival gear, and drove his pick-up truck to one of the most extreme locations in America, The Black Rock Wilderness, of which he writes: “…an inhospitable environment in Northern Nevada that extends due north from the town of Gerlach for one thousand square miles. The annual rainfall in this desert is under eight inches per year. The Playa, an ancient alkaline lake bed, four thousand feet above sea level, is home to nothing except a rare species, the Fairy Shrimp, that can remain dormant for years within the desert’s crust…I have never been in a more inhospitable place in my life, yet many thousands of people live there for a week in August. There are no hotels, electricity, water, or any type of natural shade. In fact, what one can expect is searing daytime heat, cold night air, ferocious wind-driven white-outs that make infinitesimally small bits of alkaline dust airborne…The dust can dry out a person’s skin until it cracks and blisters, while the heat at noon can feel like a hammer hitting you over the head.”

“Burning Man” was born in 1986 on the beach in San Francisco when Jerry James and Larry Harvey constructed a nine foot Moloch made of straw they set aflame on the night of the summer solstice. Some reverentially irreverent chord was struck in this heathen burn causing its annual re-enactment to outgrow the beach, the city, the state — soon to be embraced by the world. Its popularity exploded exponentially, becoming a movement — a libertarian way of looking at life, indeed of taking back a life many Americans have passively allowed to be wrested from them. “Over the years,” Spinelli writes, “the effigy has morphed into a structure more than sixty feet high…I witnessed the burning of the man on a Saturday night, a climax preceded by an elaborate firework display that attracted more than fifty thousand people.” Larry Harvey quickly emerged as a sociologist-shaman chiefly responsible for the effigy and the community of artists and revelers surrounding it. Last year 233 large works — many of them ritually burned — adorned the grounds traversed by attendees in outlandish dress and various states of undress, who returned nightly to approximately a thousand camps intractably interwoven for eight days and nights.

Of the early movement Harvey wrote: “For those of us who marched out into the Black Rock Desert in 1990, there was an underlying irony awaiting us…because there was no context in the desert…we actually became the Establishment…slowly, step-by-step, circumstances drove us to invent a government. Without intending to, we’d stumbled onto the principle of Civic Responsibility.”

Appropriately, Spinelli quotes Harvey extensively, listing and reacting to the ten principles loosely representing “the Burner’s Manifesto.” For instance: “3. Gifting: Burning Man is devoted to acts of gift giving. The value of a gift is unconditional. Gifting does not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value.” Spinelli: “Since there is no money changing hands at Burning Man, there are fewer ways to demonstrate wealth, and therefore little or no class structure.” And elsewhere: “I cannot remember the last time I walked through the world for a week without a wallet or money. It was probably when I was seven years old.” Of course, there is a price tag attached to this generosity de rigor. The cost of a ticket is $400. Keep in mind, however, that between 20 to 26 million dollars are spent yearly on security, medical facilities, and accompanying “insta-city” infrastructure. On top of that budget, three quarters of all “Burners” do volunteer work which — among dozens of duties — insures the fulfillment of the final dictum: “Leave no trace.” Case in point: “In 2013, there were sixty-eight thousand people at Black Rock City and no garbage cans. The community coined a name for ‘matter out of place: ‘MOOP’.”

Performing Arts of Woodstock [PAW] will be 50 next season. At the moment that feels like 49 consecutive miracles in a row. Despite a solid string of very strong shows, lousy logistics dog the company, primarily in the form of a rogue-ish re-model of Town Hall, sure to shrink PAW’s shoe-box of a theater by a half size. On nights court isn’t in session, that is. While Town Supervisor, Jeremy Wilbur vows support (and well he should — his first run for office hinged upon a series of plays he penned and starred in, lampooning the-then highly fragrant issue of a town sewer), these days PAW’s hopes hang on a yet-to-be budgeted Les Walker design for an addition on the existing Community Center.  The proposed building includes plans for a “shared” PAW home, and but for such half-born hopes, the company survives with no “official” town sponsorship. Though PAW president Edie Le Fever, (“Mother Courage” to local theater folk) seldom complains, with several other new theater companies nipping at her heels, PAW has little choice but to soldier on.

Astoundingly, despite these and other challenges, this year’s annual Winterfest fund-raiser, looks and sounds like a million bucks, largely due to the vision of Christa Trinler,  a hugely energetic actor, producer, and board member.

Entitled: Forbidden Fruits, this year’s gala will work well to ward off the cold with heat — human heat, otherwise known as sex, albeit it of a whimsical variety. The intimate black box feel of the venue, Utopia Soundstage in Bearsville, is sure to provide the perfect provocative environment for a highly entertaining evening, including but not limited to: broadly romantic and sensual poetry, innuendo-laced song, and some delightfully bawdy, naughty, and occasionally ridiculous comedy. Additional alcoholic libations promises to lubricate the lascivious proceedings, and a fabulous lite buffet of aphrodisiac-infused foods await sampling as provided by Kathy Miller. (I predict a melange of tamarinds, mangos, persimmons and pomegranites glazed with a ginseng roux.)

We are to expect a lavish stage filled with tapestries, oriental rugs, large pillows and ottomans. And because the Utopia soundstage (thanks to originator Todd Rundgren) has a “full-on” light rack above, as well as splendiferous amplification throughout the event should prove a special occasion for friends of PAW, especially for those of legal age.

Local testaments of tremendous talent will include the beautiful Ann Osmond and almost-as-cute Dennis Yerry who will perform three songs, including the wonderful “Too Close for Comfort” as well “Don’t You Feel My Leg,” (which Maria Muldaur used to “sign” for the deaf, seated at the bar of the old Joyous Lake). Robert Burke Warren, fresh from his success in PAW’s “The Dumb Waiter,” will provide us with a Prince song (back from when the artist was actually known as “Prince”) and a spoken version of Leonard Cohen’s killer: “A Thousand Kisses Deep.” (Uncle Rock fans under 12 will be fined and accompanied home.) The lovely Christa Trinler and the highly talented Ron Morehead will investigate the dark and deep first act of Greg Owen’s “Girls Fart Too.” Ron will then attempt to more seriously redeem himself with a famously obscene ee cummings poem. Another from that poet — the charmingly risque “May I feel” will be enthused and effused by the effervescent Joyce Romano, soon joined by  hilarious Audrey Rapoport (who can be funny and provocative, both — and note: she teaches…) when the two serve up the first act of Dean Lundquist’s “Finger Food.” The evening will close with a highly under-clad ensemble piece from the last act from “O Calcutta” — sorry — make that “Cabaret.” And there’ll be a reading of the marvelous Pablo Neruda poem, “Your Hands”.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if a corporate sponsor…or even just a filthy rich widow — were to adopt PAW for a pet? Well, it hasn’t happened and though the Utopia sound-stage is a perfect stop-gap it won’t come cheap. That’s right — back to the wall — PAW digs deep asking for help…doesn’t seem fair, somehow. So come out to support “the little company that could” with a marvelous night of Forbidden Fruit. Doors open at 7 p.m. for an 8 p.m. show on Saturday, January 26 at the Utopia Soundstage behind WDST in the Bear Complex. Tickets are $35 for adults, $30 for seniors (includes buffet, dessert, beverage and show — cash bar). For reservations call 845-679-7900 or visit www.PerformingArtsofWoodstock.org.

(Photo by Dion Ogust)

Like a hurricane finally blowing out to sea, Kiki Randolph, 87, departed Ferncliffe over the weekend as an ice-storm in her wake closed the New York State Thruway. Leaving stories enough to fuel a best-seller and heart enough to save an impoverished nation, Kiki’s death also punches a hole in the fast-fraying canvas of old Woodstock which none can fill.

Winner of the 2012 Alf Evers award for extraordinary citizenship, this gutsy, outrageous, all-but-unstoppable woman came by such a life-force honestly as the daughter of one utterly unique: her mother, Clemence Randolph. “Clemmie” arrived at 17, unchaperoned, in New York City in 1907.   Photographed in the American Southwest on horseback in 1912 with the prodigiously talented, eccentric, and wealthy painter Robert Chanler — an epic love story was herewith begun which only ended with the “roaring twenties,” themselves, and Chanler’s death at 58 in 1930. Chanler’s Dionysian lifestyle in Greenwich Village expanded upstate with his purchase of collaborator Hunt Dederick’s place in Woodstock. Bob spread his good cheer, genius and wealth all around the community, particularly amongst the artist-anarchist crowd at Hervey White’s “Maverick” colony. Though Clemmie vowed never to marry, many were convinced Chanler sired Kiki and her brother Donny. (Upon Chanler’s death he left the children a shared trust, interest from which supported Clemmie for life.)

Avoiding the scandal guaranteed in America, Clemmie gave birth to a daughter in the outskirts of Paris in 1927. Local women called the baby “Kiki” — meaning “mischievous imp of a chimp.” Earning this definition, few have ever heard the legal name “Kiki” eclipsed.

Clemmie’s wanderings didn’t seem to slow much even after the death of Bob Chanler. In 1932 United Artists offered her a consultant fee on her adaptation of “Rain,” from a Somerset Maugham short story that Clemmie and a mutual friend of Maugham’s had created and which in 1922 became a four year sensation on Broadway.

United Artists’ offer included transportation. Clemmie took the money but had a better idea. Passing her first driver’s test in Kingston, she procured her license and then bought a car and trailer. After a week of practice she loaded both kids and six pets into the caravan and took off for Hollywood.

Clemmie loathed Joan Crawford in the film but the checks didn’t bounce and Kiki at seven or eight won an audition at the Hal Roach Studios, landing a minor part in several “Our Gang” reels. Miss Randolph’s film career was cut short, however, when she developed a tubercular ankle. Clemmie and her brood promptly returned East for “the best medical attention money could buy,” until the State of New York declared a mandatory amputation. In old interviews Kiki claims to have accepted the diagnosis since peg-leg pirates were enjoying quite a vogue in Hollywood. Her mother was less amenable.

Stealing Kiki out of a sanitarium in the dead of night, the family of three hit the highway until reaching Key West — not yet a part of the U.S. No amputation took place.

Kiki, age 10. Portrait by Norbert Herrmann.

They were back in Woodstock again when Norbert Herrmann painted Kiki’s portrait, age ten. Pam Marvin remembers her in the fifth or sixth grade (in the schoolhouse where CVS stands today) running the bases with crutches — and fast. An impression which stuck more firmly with many young men from the original farming community of Woodstock, Pam said, was of Kiki wheeling her cast and crutches around knocking down any who challenged her supremacy as “Queen of the Hill.” Bill West remembers her climbing to the top of the bridge span where Tannery Brook Road attaches to Broadview, and recklessly plummeting an easy 35 feet into waters which, he recalls, couldn’t have been more than three or four feet deep. That was Kiki.

Carl Eric Lindin, Early Spring Woodstock, ca. 1930, oil on canvas

Since assuming the Executive Directorship of the Woodstock Artists Association and Museum in September, Neil Trager has heard a distant drum roll heralding an event others are hardly aware of but, as an old hand at the game, he knows is just around the corner. In only four years it will be a century since five painters representing a cross section of popular, if ‘oft opposing, styles became the founding fathers of a fighting ground first called The Woodstock Artists Association. As the town’s dim memory of that early harvest struggles to regain clarity, Trager has taken a somewhat radical route in stripping away his responsibilities until he is now — first and foremost — the steward of the legacy that is WAAM.

The most conservative of those original founders, John Carlson (who would inherit directorship of The Art Student League’s Summer Program here), upheld the virtues of plein aire oil painting with canvasses which hold up remarkably to this day. A second founder and one-time student of Carlson’s, Frank Swift Chase, would take a small step towards modernism with Impressionistic brushstrokes. Leading the radicals, founder number three Andrew Dasburg, was considered Woodstock’s eloquent firebrand. Upon his returning to town from Paris in 1911 (where he’d met both Cezanne and Matisse) Dasburg preached the revolutionary gospel of Cubism and fourth founder Henry McFee  fell under its spell. Final and eldest founder, Carl Eric Lindin, from Byrdcliffe’s early days, fell stylistically somewhere between such extremes. It was these men who literally sold shares at $50 apiece, creating the company which built the gallery wherein each agreed to disagree. Yet they tolerated one another to begin with…most of the time — partly because each believed the verdict of art history would rule in his favor, and partly to “give free and equal expression to the ‘conservative’ and ‘radical’ elements because [we] believe a strong difference of opinions is a sign of health and an omen of long life for the colony.” This, from the original preamble of bi-laws of the WAA. Needless to say that  same friction exists at what is today known as WAAM, though the struggle is as much between living artists and dead ones as between representational and abstract work.

Just outside the Towbin Wing at the 28 Tinker Street facility, works by these original founders (together with the essential 1926 map by Marg and Rudolf Wetterau establishing exactly which artists lived where) set the tone of rediscovery Trager seeks in WAAM: Creating Spirit Of Place, the show currently on display (it opened February 7) that will remain up until June 8.

To help accomplish this goal he resorts to a logical if not altogether common strategy:  inviting those who’ve run WAAM for years to step from the shadows to introduce a few personal favorites from the permanent collection. The result is a quiet riot — and a most welcome one. This is the first time in a while, however, that a new exhibition hasn’t relied heavily upon work borrowed from other institutions, and one unfortunate reality emerging from this investigation of the core collection makes obvious the fact that the Artists Association doesn’t own many works by the town’s best artists. For instance the founders, themselves, are somewhat scantily collected. In the case of a Bellows or a Guston this makes sense because such works are expensive (even if WAAM could hope to have been gifted a bit more generously.) The especially hurtful part is that this incredibly important institution doesn’t own enough of Woodstock’s many “better than good” artists, either. Nevertheless, numerous marvelous surprises released from safekeeping for the first time in a long time, take proud position beside several long-familiar friends.

The most obvious success in the show is the “modern wall” curated by Carl Van Brunt who is WAAM’s Gallery Director, usually responsible for showing the work of Woodstock’s living artists. His selection consists of four sparely arranged geometric, abstract and semi-abstract paintings on a dark gray background. Specifically, Abstract (c.1950) by the too often-over-looked Reginald Wilson, a dazzling Geometric Abstraction (1950) by Rolph Scarlett, another colorful, highly-designed August Evening (c.’80) by Anne Helioff, and commanding the center, a grand Sentinel (1969) by Grace Greenwood (the older, often over-shadowed sister of Marion). Collectively the four works positively pop and sing, the wall comes alive, and a collaborative fifth work is achieved.

Long-time wizard of the darkroom, Ben Caswell, has dipped into WAAM’s photography collection and culled some remarkable images — for instance a classic portrait by an unknown photographer of the extraordinary painter Arnold Wiltz at work.  Also, a photo montage of three images in two mediums (which just so happen to include his own monumental profile) by our ever-adventurous Konrad Cramer. Unfortunately, this image leaves us enviously recalling the vast majority of such pioneer works bequeathed by his daughter Aileen to the George Eastman House in Rochester. Ouch!

Jane as toddler c. 1926.

Long-time Woodstocker Jane Axel died in the comfort of her own home at the end of Elwyn Lane on March 2. She was 90 years old. Born and raised in New York City, the only child of Arthur and Lillian Corn Bender, Jane attended NYU where she earned a Master’s in English Literature and also studied Fine Art. First appearing in Woodstock in the late fifties, Jane regularly attended drawing classes at the Art Student’s League Summer Program as well as eventually studying sculpture with Master Carver Tom Penning. Briefly and most unhappily married to a local photographer, she became good friends with a remarkable Woodstocker named Mutzi Axel, who — along with many friends — encouraged her to divorce.

Mutzi was first known to Woodstock as a cook at the legendary “SS Seahorse” and was sometimes seen squiring about one of two children from an earlier marriage. Small, squat, with a cat-like face handsomely adorned with a distinctive mustache and goatee, he was mostly made of muscle and — often squinting through the haze of a cigarette — exuded a near constant good cheer. Mutzi and Jane fell in love and were married circa ‘61. He created a family residence by re-building a house in Shady badly damaged by fire, where Lucinda Knauss lives today. Mutzi then briefly went into the building trade with the (so far) immortal Bud Sife, today, hail and hearty, living in Fleischmanns. Jane commented to a friend that she’d never been happier in her life. They moved briefly to Library Lane, socializing with John Pike and his wife, as well as writer Ted Sturgeon and family. Jane dubbed the neighborhood “Fish Row.”

Outwardly anyway, they were a peculiar pair: he staying to end of every party, gregariousness personified, always ready to help a friend hoist a particularly heavy beam into place. (Nearly every Woodstock male built his own family house in those days — or so it seemed.) Jane, on the other hand, was with-held, contemplative, uncomfortable in a large gathering, though a droll and pungent wit would occasionally flash from out of nowhere, followed by flowing, knowing laughter.

In the later sixties, Mutzi bought the huge old barn towards the end of Elwyn Lane, converting it into an antique shop locally famous as “The Red Barn” (later The James Cox Gallery and today The Hawthorne House.) He created a living space in the upstairs, including a studio for Jane, and then he built a free-standing house on the hill above the Red Barn. This would be Jane’s last home.

Alan Carey photo of a drawing of Mutzi Axel by Jane Axel.

Artists Pia and Frank Alexander were in a recorder club with Jane, which included painters Georgina Klitgaard and Dorothy Varian. Sometime around the death of Mutzi in ‘85 (his son Leon told me, “They both hated funerals. So Jane hosted a farewell party for Mutzi instead,”) Jane went back to school in Albany, eventually becoming a psychotherapist, in part to assuage her own grief. Eventually she became very involved with the indomitable Holly Beye, whose theater group for seniors, “Holly’s Comets” often produced surprisingly powerful work. As the years passed, Jane once bought Pia a season ticket to the Maverick Concerts. Pia would pick her up every Sunday and fondly remembers, “Jane never missed a Sunday’s performance — not one.” Best friends for many years with today’s 100 year-old Noami Halpern, Jane and Nomi traveled extensively together, including a trip to Israel. Fellow Maverick Concert fanatic, Betty Ballantine, also traveled for a few winters with Jane, and on a summer’s day the two could be seen sipping a five o’clock champagne over a board of Scrabble before a last dip in Betty’s flower-festooned pool. I sat with Jane often on such an August afternoon and one day — after a long silence — I finally summonded the temerity to ask: “What is it, Jane? You seem so blue…”

She looked out over the pool, raised and dropped her cane in frustration and blurted out, “It’s well past 20 years already but —  damn it all if I don’t think of Mutzi…still. And though I feel like quite a fool to admit it…well, I miss him. Every day. I do.”

You’ll forgive the sentimental conceit of our including Jane’s pen and ink drawing of Mutzi dozing, after a long day’s work or a long night’s party. And of our wishing Jane her patiently awaited place beside him for The Big Sleep…there will be a small party marking the occasion to be announced later in the spring.

Jane is survived by her step-son Leon Axel, a radiologist and researcher at Jane’s Alma Mater, NYU, and his sister Susan Axel Bedsaul.

Hervey White outside the Maverick Concert Hall with log buttresses. (postcard photography by Louis E. Jones, copyright 1919. Courtesy of Stuart Kline.)

“Strangers used to marvel — and still do — that such music as the Maverick concerts was to be found in a rude hall in the woods far from any center of population. To those who asked him how this miracle happened, Hervey White has always answered that it was due to the influence of Byrdcliffe. The story that Mr. Whitehead’s attempt to provide trios in an almost inaccessible Oregon forest, makes less surprising the good…music on the Maverick.” — an editorial by the Martin Schütze and the editors of Woodstock Historical Society publication of July 1933, No. 10, pp. 5-6.

A magnificently rehabilitated Maverick Concert Hall remains the vitally beating heart of a colony which, over the last 75 years, disintegrated around it. The hall is also the greatest surviving work of art created by Maverick Founder, Hervey White, a man who wasn’t known to volunteer his creative debts. Concerning his “Cathedral in The Pines,” however, White was always quick to credit his one-time mentor and long-time rival, Ralph Whitehead*, founder of the Byrdcliffe Colony, as his chief inspiration. In a sense this would be like James Madison acknowledging England’s Magna Carta as blueprint to Madison’s Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution; except that White’s conspicuous generosity highlights the influence of Whitehead, a man whose contribution to Woodstock had, by that time, been overshadowed by his own. The extraordinary relationship between these two men, roughly outlined below, will constitute core chapters of The Maverick’s Maverick.

Hervey, who for the first 20 or so years of his life was known as “Will White,” grew up on the plains of Iowa and Kansas in the 1870’s. His father, namesake, and Civil War veteran, William A. White, introduced his boy to the fiddle before he was ten. By the time family had moved into a half-underground structure built of Kansas sod, the precocious lad was making as much as a dollar and a half playing at local square dances. As a 16-year-old prodigy teaching school, White eventually earned an astronomic $30 a month, allowing him to, at 17, attend Kansas University, one of the first co-educational colleges in the country. Among many novelties in his freshman year, Hervey found Haydn and Liszt “most disconcerting to [one] who had heard only dance tunes and hymns.”

Hervey White at Bearcamp, by Arnold Blanch. (Courtesy of the Historical Society of Woodstock)

Since White was interested mainly in literature, philosophy, and Italian Renaissance painting, this brief description of Teutonic genius constituted all he’d write of his “higher” appreciation for music through the next decade. Within this time he’d spend a year on a scientific expedition in Northern Mexico, transfer to and graduate (without distinction) from Harvard, and  tramp the belly of Italy before finding himself, in 1895, the new favorite of Jane Addams in Chicago’s Hull House. There he began work on a novel. It was while sponsoring theatrical events on behalf of Addams (an eventual Nobel Prize winner), White first met Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead, the shy English millionaire whose second wife, Jane Byrd McCall, was the daughter of a one-time mayor of Philadelphia. The Whiteheads were slowly augmenting their Tuscan Villa north of Santa Barbara with a “Sloyd school” cum art colony they called “Arcady,” fore-runner to Byrdcliffe in Woodstock.

Mr. Whitehead and Hervey soon discovered their lives to be more satisfying in each other’s company. To the expat Brit twelve years White’s senior, Hervey was a rough genius in-need-of-a-last-polish, a political proponent of all they mutually admired, and a fearless social explorer. White eventually proved to be the perfect go-between, introducing this most reserved Englishman to America’s charming if occasionally alarming culture.

For Hervey — whose first novel, Differences, achieved excellent reviews if little money — Whitehead became that eccentric uncle who quietly placed him on retainer while squiring him (and several friends) about in a style never known before. Icing the cake, Whitehead insisted the charming artist’s studio “down the hill” at Arcady was White’s to write in. Herewith, Hervey’s life quickly became a children’s story come true, which — less fortunately — was exactly the sort of writing he embarked upon under Whitehead’s tutelage.

Elsewhere, Mrs. Whitehead was happy with the addition of Hervey to their circle, since he seemed to distract her husband from such unacceptable behaviors as, for instance, seducing a neighbor’s daughter. Classical trios, quartets, and solo piano concerts were heard often at the villa. Hervey succumbed to their thrall.

The pairs’ most outrageous musical adventure proved to be an exorbitantly expensive disaster. Under the towering redwoods of Oregon, Whitehead bought considerable acreage and caused to be built a tiny colony comprised of  five cabins, a kitchen, studio and stage. Here, renowned classical musicians (equipped even with a grand piano) were sent overland to practice prior to Whitehead and Hervey’s arrival. A pre-existing trio was to be augmented with piano, however the pianist, a woman both beautiful and divorced, proved an embarrassment to whom the outraged cellist refused to introduce to his wife. The “fallen woman” soon inaugurated an affair with the violinist, fully justifying the cellist’s ire, and rehearsals quickly ground to a halt.

Ralph Whitehead

In the meantime, Whitehead and White arrived with saddle horses for the enjoyment of all, though their much anticipated “concerts in the forest” (foreshadowing White’s “Cathedral in the Pines”) were aborted amid much hilarity.

Becoming more serious about finding the ideal location for an artist’s community, Whitehead hit upon a brilliant strategy when introducing Hervey White to a second assistant, Bolton Brown — a self proclaimed genius, with fair justification. The two men took an instant dislike to one another while correctly intuiting Whitehead had placed each man (and his talents) in obvious competition with the other. It would be Brown and his extraordinary mountaineering skills which would famously result in “the discovery” of the fantastical Hudson River look-out visible from a southern Catskill Mountain, below which nestled a slope ideal for the colony, only a mile or two up from the sleepy little village of Woodstock, New York.

In May of 1902, Hervey and Mr. Whitehead were investigating the Carolinas only to receive the fateful telegram from a village apothecary (where “Clouds” resides today) announcing Brown’s triumph. Shortly thereafter, the three men foregathered on Mead’s Mountain and Whitehead (having concluded Woodstock was free of Jews) agreed, “Well, all right, let’s have it here.” Remarkably enough — and largely due to the industries of Bolton Brown — the small arts college of Byrdcliffe (if more modestly described by Whitehead) opened the following year. Many classical musicians were invited to Byrdcliffe, including Dolmetsch in 1908, builder and player of baroque instruments including clavichord and viola di gamba, cellist Paul Kefer, and the conductor of Boston’s Metropolitan Opera (with soloist guests.) Extraordinary concerts were triumphantly held at last, and though the Whiteheads high-handedness cost them the further participation of Bolton Brown, Hervey White waited in the wings to take his place.

Hervey’s writing had largely been put on hold during this period, with the result that his habitual eloquence was forced to flower solely in a social realm. He was remembered as “best loved of all the colonists,” by Mrs. Bolton Brown (herself, the best regarded of Byrdcliffe’s women), so it’s likely that Hervey’s popularity began to annoy his “betters” as their own standing slowly deteriorated. Privately, White had long admitted to hopes  he and a few friends might “buy out” the Whiteheads, once the novelty of the colony-making had worn off.

It’s likely, then, that frictions building between Byrdcliffe’s founders and its new manager were mutual. The actual rupture between Hervey and the Whiteheads remains a complicated and mysterious matter — insufficiently explained by White — though the result was obvious enough. Hervey partnered up with Fritz Van Der Loo (who Whitehead earlier “sponsored”), hastily married Vivian Bevans (the Byrdcliffe beauty Mr. Whitehead, too, had courted) and with borrowed, earned, and gifted funds purchases a sprawling, low-lying farm across the valley from Byrdcliffe,  soon finding Hervey “the sole resident” owner. Thus, the truly anarchistic community Hervey White long before resolved to call, “The Maverick,” took its early, most tentative steps.

Popular Song by Pele deLappe, lithograph, 1935.

Part II

(In last week’s Part I, a 15 year old San Franciscan Pele deLappe found herself in Woodstock in the early 1930s, befriended by Diego and Frida Rivera, Arnold and Lucille Blanch. She studied at The Art Students League in New York, where she first encountered lithography, and came under the influence of the great American scene painter, Reginald Marsh, while becoming immersed in the artist’s life.)

The year after Pele’s second summer in Woodstock, she would send off a poet friend, Edwin Rolfe to the Abe Lincoln Brigade to fight fascist Franco in Spain, recalling, “Rolfe’s poem, ‘City of Anguish,’ about the bombing of Madrid, brought tears to the eyes of Ernest Hemingway.” She danced the jitterbug with her Lefty pals in Harlem’s Renaissance, winning the friendship of Jazz greats Sidney Bechet and Willy the Lion Smith, who performed for and courted her at “The Log Cabin” (as would at least one of them, under cozier circumstances.)

Soon re-united with friends Frida and Diego Rivera, Pele assisted in creating the ill-fated mural at Rockefeller Center, washing brushes and posing for one of the figures, “hanging on every word of Diego and Ben Shahn, one of his assistants.” After Nelson Rockefeller had the mural torn down for the fact it included Lenin, a slightly less outspoken radical entered Pele’s world — “the second” of three great Latin muralists, David Siqueiros.

“Night after night in Child’s Restaurant he hypnotized me and a group of young devotees with his graphic descriptions of revolutionary and collective art work…David once knocked on my door around 3 a.m. to take me to what he considered a marvelous venue for murals, Pennsylvania Station. He magnanimously offered me an alcove of my very own. But the great artist as lover program was proving to be a chimera — I was better off doing my own thing.”

Pele’s apprenticeship — never as explicit in word as in graphic rendering — didn’t reach its crescendo until, at the ripe age of 17, she accompanied the Blanches (both of whom had won Guggenheims) and their painter friends Russell and Doris Lee, to Europe. We’ve seen it before in the story of Andrew Dasburg and we see it again, here. Woodstock painter pairs traveling abroad disintegrating into Italian farce wherein husbands abandon wives for other husband’s wives, great art is swallowed whole (hopefully to inspire personal triumph), horrendous physical calamity is narrowly averted, as, all the while a sort of tipsy naïveté prevails to preserve our “decadents abroad” from a world going to hell in a beerhall and — not least of all — from themselves. Making it all sound simple as arithmetic, Pele would later write:

“It was Arnold’s clever plan to have Lucile and me spend a month each in Germany and Italy while he and Doris Lee went to Spain as lovers. Russell Lee, Doris’ husband, acquiesced in the arrangement by heading for the Soviet Union. The domestic mess would be sorted out when we returned to the States.”

And so it was just “before the deluge” of Nazism sweeping Europe, Lucile and Pele sketch their way through bars and cafes serving Nazi Brownshirts. Pele had a drawing torn from her hands (“I’d shave my head to have preserved!”) and ripped to pieces by a disapproving Nazi model, exclaiming, “This does not happen in Germany!” Spent entire days in Munich’s Medical Museum, where the women drew “tattooed jars in heads, carefully shellacked hermaphrodite genitalia, human brains in formaldehyde. One brain, we were told, was Beethoven’s…” What had clearly become a remarkable friendship accompanied even more remarkable images filling sketchbooks (their whereabouts today, unknown) of “the beautiful, the ugly, the living, and the dead.”

Traveling on-the-cheap by tram and train down the Italian continent, knowing even less about Fascism than they did of Nazism (blessedly little) the odd couple of woman painters marveled almost as much at the food as at the frescoes, as…

Robert Chanler screen depicting panther attacking white stag.

In 1990, while first writing for this paper, I began “ghosting about” what was then called the “Woodstock Artists Association.” One afternoon, through a half open door, I overheard a would-be curator informed in no uncertain terms: “We can’t have a Bob Chanler exhibition here! He was stark-raving mad!” It was precisely at this moment, then, that my fascination for this nearly unheard of genius began. Which is why, a quarter of a century later, it’s a privilege to announce that an astonishingly well-researched volume devoted to the masterful achievement of Chanler, a Woodstocker later in his life, has at last found its way into print via The Monacelli Press, in a book entited Robert Winthrop Chanler: Discovering The Fantastic, edited by Gina Wouters and Andrea Gollin.

Margaret Astor Ward, whose mother died in childbirth, was raised by her grandparents on a 420-acre estate upon which the climate-challenged mansion “Rokeby” still stands, less than a mile from what is today Bard College. Margaret’s grandfather was William B. Astor, “the wealthiest man in America,” who inherited Rokeby through his wife’s family. After marrying John Winthrop Chanler, Margaret gave birth to no less than eleven children before, understandably, succumbing to pneumonia in 1875 at 37; her husband met the same fate three years later. By 1883, three of the Chanler children had joined their parents, and the eight surviving “Astor Orphans,” including Robert, (1872-1930) were raised by a cousin, servants, and governesses at Rokeby.

Although the eldest, John Armstrong “Archie” Chanler, was the only sibling known to visit an insane asylum, eccentricity permeated the entire brood, with Robert, born in 1872, actually taking the cake.

Brilliant, rebellious, precocious, and licentious, 17-year-old Bob Chanler was sent off to Rome in 1889 with Archie and his, then, wife; the artistic leanings of this gigantic “little brother,” were already quite pronounced. Upon coming into “his money” four years later, Chanler married Julia Remington Chamberlain, the sister of Archie’s wife. The newlyweds moved to Paris where Chanler continued formal art education and fathered the first of two daughters. However, “disgusted with the sterile instruction of atelier and academy” Chanler and family returned to Italy, the renaissance art of which, a six-foot-four Bob Chanler seems to have devoured whole. Completing his first decorative panel in Paris in 1900, RWC returned to New York, seeking sanctuary in the purchase of a farm in Red Hook he called “Sylvania,” a mile from Rokeby. In Manhattan, that same year, his first gallery show consisted of mural decorations.

Irresistibly popular, Chanler was elected to the New York State Assembly; a political detour which failed to prevent his return to Paris. Here, the atheistic omnivore encountered a Chinese screen which set his highly tuned sensibilities aflame. Spontaneously reimagining Whistler’s original annexation of this Eastern objet d’art, “Chanler’s screens” would become his personal calling among American millionaires for the next 25 years. On that same trip to Paris, Chanler also met his great patron, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, which probably had something to do with his subsequent divorce. Back in the States he became Sheriff of Dutchess County for the next three years, preferring the title “Sheriff Bob” ever after. Chanler now married “the most beautiful woman in the world.” Opera singer Lina Cavalier, however, first demanded a pre-nuptial agreement assuring her a fortune even should the marriage fail. Unstable brother Archie’s telegram was succinct: “Who’s Looney Now?” Tabloids on both sides of the Atlantic made a fortune all their own as Robert Chanler’s second marriage and honeymoon ended simultaneously.

Rebounding from financial as well as emotional disaster, Chanler rented (and soon bought) adjoining brownstones on East 19th Street in Manhattan. These became his notorious “House of Fantasy,” the artful equivalent of a mad professor’s laboratory cum fraternity house. Here all-night parties anticipated the Roaring Twenties while maintaining the decadence of fin-de-siecle Paris. The Gilded Age in hedonistic decline, Chanler managed what today would be termed “mania” with vast quantities of alcohol; his rapacious social life and increasingly eccentric career besting one another in an evermore bizarre bacchanal.

Now monied lightning struck as Chanler enjoyed one of the great publicity coups of the age. Because of his enormous popularity in high society, such movers ‘n shakers soon insisted their own Chanler be represented in a privately sponsored event, today known as “The Armory Show of 1913.” It would become Modernism’s “shot heard ‘round the world,” repercussions of which dethroned Paris, to make New York City the new hub of Art’s whirling roulette wheel. Here, remarkably enough, though a total stranger to museums, this enfant terrible of an insider, this gigantic, brilliant, all but overwhelming force known as Robert Winthrop Chanler, found no less than nine of his astonishing works lining the entrance of The Art Event of the Century. But it didn’t end there.

Recently released papers surrounding the centennial celebration of this mythic event reveal that Chanler’s VIP “access” allowed him to replace and rotate his most-talked-and-written-about screens with more than a dozen others. The result being, that in the single month during which the Armory Show captivated New York — and the world, Chanler was represented by as many as 24 works. In a sense, then, Chanler showed more of his work than any other American or European artist, including Picasso and Cezanne. Not surprisingly, the reputation of “The Grand Bohemian,” as Cosmopolitan called him, went through the roof. But astounding as his screens were and were to become, Chanler’s legend would depend upon the decorative environments he would create in the private homes of somewhat eccentric wealth. (Imagine Hearst’s San Simeon on LSD, and you begin to get the picture…)

Much of Robert Winthrop Chanler: Discovering The Fantastic understandably focuses on the restoration of these long-ignored treasures with increasingly technical chapters. Especially noteworthy is the newly revealed fireplace and chimney of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s Greenwich Village studio; its massive, rigid flames obviously topping the French at their own game. Suffice to say: once you hold this book in your hands, the cheap tricks of a Jeff Koons are instantly exposed as such. While the authentic wonders found between the covers of this book indeed pry the lid off Chanler’s forgotten accomplishment…they reveal what? An American DuChamp? A Jules Verne of art — 40,000 leagues beneath historic recall? Actually, none of these descriptions do RWC justice, for the best of his work is beyond metaphor.

Which is why I highly recommend you acquire this book and, in Chanleresque style, consume it whole — with one caveat. We’ve all heard the cliché that true genius must risk failure at every turn. Well, with Chanler this old chestnut becomes formidable truth. For he does absolutely “lose it” from time to time, particularly in portraiture.

While the academic cool of a many-authored-essay-style art book infrequently satisfies a fan of biography, here such compartmentalization is welcome, perhaps even necessary. Front and center we find: the work, its place in history, and debate surrounding its importance, disappearance, restoration, and — we hope — renaissance. So our primary attention stays with the art, which is proper to any rediscovery process.

However, this approach begs for a full-scale biography, a portion of which is herewith supplied in miniature as regards RWC’s significance to Woodstock.

Immediately following his 1912 divorce from Lina Cavalieri (and just before the Armory Show), “Sheriff Bob” makes a pilgrimage to Indian Country in Arizona. Period photographs show him frolicking with a young actress named Clemence “Clemmie” Randolph, who becomes Chanler’s “primary life companion” thereafter.

First Indian Nobel Prize for Literature Winner R. Tagore, visited Woodstock in the 1920s and pronounced “the entire village was filled with magical vapors…”

Part I

Author’s Note: Paralleling what the term hopes to describe, the exact origins of “woo-woo” remain forever mysterious. Certain etymologists believe it originated with the eerie sound made by a Theramin of science fiction and horror film fame. Also noteworthy: whenever Wonder Woman’s jumbo-sized side-kick, Etta Candy, joined her best friend in battle [circa the 1940’s], she would shout: “Woo-woo!” Admittedly, the hyphenated word carries a disparaging connotation within hard science circles, however, I hope to use it with — for the most part — a forgiving fondness.

Spirituality, like love, is a subjective experience protected by at least one of the Inalienable Rights of Man. So before the recent attempt to dissolve buffers between religion and government, Americans were guaranteed the right to worship (or not) more or less as they saw fit. What was generally frowned upon by the leaders of most faiths, however, was shameless church-hopping. Not irrelevant to which: immediately prior to the fall of Rome, its citizens took to participating in rival belief systems, in order to cover their bets with Eternity. And so it was most likely here, that Western Civilization first awakened to the fickle fundamentals of Woo.

Now because “godless artists” invading the town in 1902, stretched the tolerances of Woodstock (particularly through pagan rites in The Maverick Festivals), our collection of six hamlets soon joined Greenwich Village, Provincetown, Taos, and several Southern Californian locations, in becoming another petri dish of artistic and — eventually — spiritual experimentation.

Then, after a die-off in the thirties and forties, those tolerances were again tested in the late 1960s, when an all-Republican town government passed an ordinance forbidding “Three Days of Peace and Love” otherwise known as The Woodstock Festival (the coat-tails of which we’ve ridden like a magic carpet, nonetheless bedeviling, ever since.) What the town fathers were unable to root-out, however, was a less-locatable insurrection manifest in the Earthly rites of Rock, and an aspiring to “higher consciousness” amidst the celestial dew of Woo. Of course, the two revolutions were joined at the hip by the psychedelic experience, but that’s getting ahead of ourselves. What Part I of this article will now explore, are the roots of Woodstock’s mysticism, long before Robert Zimmerman or John, Paul, George and Ringo were even born.

Yes, history acknowledges modern Woodstock began in 1902 with the grand opening of “Byrdcliffe,” the Arts and Crafts colony financed by Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead, a student and friend of John Ruskin and William Morris. Pertinent, however, to a lesser known side of this founder, the papers of Woodstock historian Alf Evers contain a copy of a letter, sent by Whitehead to The American Society for Psychical Research in 1897, reminding us that he was also a member in good standing within that community. The two page letter, which argues against further inquiries into a family of supposed “sensitives,” attempts objectivity while discussing spirits, seances, and supernatural forces in general. Whitehead’s pseudo-scientific tone clearly shows him to have “a foot in either camp,” in so far as he politely debunks his subject, while evidencing a general sympathy towards the endeavor of contact with the dead. During this same period, of course, The Great Houdini, himself, most famously fulfilled this most ambivalent quest.

When Woodstock’s Godfather, Hervey White, first met Whitehead that same year of 1897 in Chicago, the poor, young American writer accompanied the wealthy Englishman’s assessment of several mediums — without memorable results. Yet more important to our inquiry, it was only four years earlier that Chicago’s Columbian Exposition’s “World Parliament of Religions” inspired Swami Vivekananda (an all but unknown follower of Ramakrisha in India) to mysteriously appear at this groundbreaking conference, where he immediately became its cause celebre. (Vivekananda’s lectures attracted the sincere admiration of no less a genius than Nikola Tesla, who “elsewhere” declared himself an aetheist.) This sage would die at the age of 39 in 1902 and yet, as the first such Indian guru to arrive on these shores, his impact was profound. Unlike many such “Swamis” to follow, Vivekananda discouraged worship of his own person and apparently remained immune from temptations fated to compromise the contribution of so many Eastern teachers to come. Of course, such “failings” are common to all religion’s priests. Take, for instance, the tallest tree in our nineteenth century’s Christian forest, Henry Ward Beecher, (called by Lincoln, “the most famous man in America”) who most memorably represents a prominent “sinner” among those assumed to be “sinless,” back before the entire genus of such would-be saints became notorious.

Equally as important to this inquiry as Mr. Whitehead’s spiritual tendencies, his wife, the Philadelphia heiress Jane Byrd McCall Whitehead (whose original middle name adjoined the second syllable of her husband’s “Radcliffe” to create “Byrdcliffe”), was known to sandpaper her fingertips in order to “more authentically feel” the essence of a fern. A friend recalls her snipping a rose at dawn and carefully carrying it more than a mile, to share the extraordinary splendor of a dew drop suspended between two petals. It shouldn’t come as any surprise, then, that “Arcady,” their lesser California art colony and forerunner to Byrdcliffe, was first described by the Whiteheads as an “art convent.”

Mrs. W also testified to the astounding properties of some very strange diets, indeed. Actually, she quite obviously becomes Woodstock’s first Empress of Woo. A famous champion of tomatoe, carrot, and lemon juice, (probably Gayelord Hauser, himself) for instance, experienced enthusiastic sponsorship during his visit to the Whitehead’s Byrdcliffe home, “White Pines” (where, by the way, use of alcohol was greatly discouraged.) Until, that is, The Great Juicer was invited to the village below by Ben Webster (whose Byrdcliffe family home would eventually shelter Bob Dylan and family.) Well, Ben, who was far from a teetotaler, himself, soon introduced this all-vegetable-prognosticator to his own most recent favorite miracle elixir, otherwise known as “The Brandy Alexander.” Now according to an interview conducted by Jean Gaede many decades years ago, the vegetabalist so took to enthusiastically consuming Brandy Alexanders, that every establishment Mr. Webster and he visited was soon found to be “fresh outta’ crème.” Whereupon, The Great Juicer, himself, supremely juiced, was returned, a slovenly mess, to White Pines. The reputation of his miracle drink reduced to dish water, it was probably poor Peter Whitehead—the black-sheep son–who chauffeured this pale shadow of a shaman to the next train.

[Few contemporary Woodstockers are satisfied with any Byrdcliffe biography unless and until the Whiteheads are “outed” as raving anti-Semites, and so — though it has little or no bearing on this article — note that I’ve noted it.]

The only truly rotten apple in the Whitehead family, however, was the spoiled, sadist of an older son, Ralph Jr. — universally worshipped by both his parents — whose drowning with the sinking of the Vestris in 1928, likewise sank his father into a depression from which Ralph Sr. never recovered, and which precipitated his death the following year.

But prior to Byrdcliffe’s appearance on the shoulder of Mead’s Mountain, our hard-drinking little hamlet wasn’t exactly renowned for its piety, either. A plainly pagan attachment to superstition, the stubborn prevalence of ghosts, several well-known witches, and an “other-worldly” influence of Irish quarrymen in the surrounding the hills, all helped clear a carnival ground for the odditorium to come. Nor, as we see with the Whiteheads, did all “these godless artists” swelling the town from 1902 on, necessarily ignore “the spiritual,” although a majority didn’t attend church, it’s true.

Peter Blum

Part II

The meadows of a storied town prove hallowed ground, tho stone-cursed soil
Soon found fair alternative rebound from farmers’ tool-a-blunting toil.
First the paint brush, then dove-decked guitar commandeered by rowdy crew;
‘Til the greatest surprise of all appeared with those seeding these fields with Woo…

Prologue

Part I established that “‘godless artists’ invading Woodstock in 1902, stretched the town’s tolerances.” However, in rejecting “the God of their Fathers,” these newcomers now sought to replace Church with Gallery until, failing to fill this void, they awoke to radicalism. The result being that by the 1920s and 1930s Woodstock brimmed with Communists, Socialists, and Anarchists of every stripe; the entirety united by an atheism best expressed in Labor martyr Joe Hill’s classic line: “You’ll get pie in the sky when you die…It’s a lie.” Soon most of the highly literate Folk scene filtering into town in the 1950’s, embraced such rejection of religion (though Pete Seeger’s No. 1 hit for the Byrds “Turn, Turn, Turn” enlisting Chapter 3 of Ecclesiastes, represented an obvious exception). Until, that is, folk singing crusaders for the Civil Rights movement of the early sixties, discovered the Black Church embedded at the root of this cause and so…at least that religion was exempted from their disdain.

It’s hereabouts we recall: the chief prophets of the revolution to come consisted of two entities empowered far beyond the influence of any previous “youth idol.” 1) The Beatles. And 2) that waif who “put Woodstock on the map” while crashing upstairs from the Cafe Espresso. But Dylan’s signature cynicism ran contrary to The Beatles’ eventual seduction-by-guru, as “seekers” and “de-bunkers” faced off round a billion whirling turntables.

Lastly, I am asked to complete this introduction by defining the term fueling our exploration — an intimidating task — but here goes: Woo-woo is the mud from which grows the lotus whose flowering represents an otherwise inexplicable spiritual yearning differentiating the “mystic” hippie, from those hecklers of convention known as “The Beats,” as well as that fearless revolutionary evolving out of such Beatitude “around” the hippie, which became the “Yippie” (before the “Yuppie” doubled back down on the Machine-Most-Korporate, to formally usher in the Dark Age presently shining so brightly upon us.)

       [Editor’s note: These stories are portraits of an era. We cannot swear to absolute veracity. Much of the following narrative has been adapted from extended stories shared between Peter Blum and Tad Wise. Language couched in the author’s voice, therefore, has made extensive use of these remembrances, without credit, except for grateful acknowledgement here.]

Two months ago, an hour after receiving permission to write this piece, I was halfway up the gang plank of the good ship TranscenDental, when I encountered a lively-eyed, thickly mustachioed fellow, I first mistook for one of The True Light Beavers — that wonderful Woodstock commune of my youth founded by the Marty, Tobe, and Alan Carey.)

“Marty or Tobe?” I inquired, putting out my hand.

“Neither,” replied the replica taking hold. “Peter…Blum.”

Now it took a mere three minutes to reveal the significance of this meeting. For Blum, it turned out, had been the “Guru Reviewer” for several incarnations of various Woodstock newspapers and magazines in the seventies, culminating with his final years here at this paper. In other words, he was exactly the man I most needed to meet. And, as I was soon to discover, like so many other modern Woodstock histories, Peter’s begins with music.

In the summer of ‘69 Blum was a dedicated New Yorker, arriving in Woodstock with a girlfriend eager to visit her friend Jan Zeitz, (who would become Jan Bernhardt.) Jan Z and Cyril Caster, a notable beatnik, were living near the grounds of the original Sound-Outs in Pam Copeland’s field. The Sound-Outs being, many believe, a spore surviving the town’s legendary Maverick Festivals, that germ of joyous anarchy fated to re-explode in “The Woodstock Festival,” some forty years later and sixty miles away.

Gene Dinwiddie and the rest of Paul Butterfield’s blues band were living across the street at Peter Pan Farm [today the Woodstock Day School]. Here our Manhattanites slept in a chicken coop during the day, while attending live performances at night. The exemplary Spider Barbour was then playing with Chrysalis; Ellen McIlwaine fronted the unforgettable Fear Itself, aided by early (and still) Woodstock guitar-wizard, Chris Zaloom.

One night a guy got up on stage in a cowboy hat who Peter recognized as a high school pal from the Bronx: Gary Kupfer. Gary, it turns out, had participated in the nudist commune “Family” atop Ohayo Mountain, and was well-connected with the village below.

“I was walking along Tinker Street,” Blum recalls, “right in front of what’s now the Photography Center and was then the Cafe Espresso. And this has only happened a few times in my life. I mean, maybe I’ve glorified it over the years, but my memory is very distinct of hearing…this voice. It was like a Rudy Vallee, megaphoned voice that said: This Is Where You’re Sposed To Live!…I was like…Really?”

Shortly thereafter, Peter climbed the stairs over our original health food store [today Pegasus] finding at its top The Aurora Gallery, a showcase for the photographs and artwork of a young Elliot Landy. In the foyer-like meditation room stood a very tall, gangly young man with some of shyest and bluest eyes anyone has ever seen. Our confident, fast-talking, Bronx-born Jew of average height, now introduced himself to this towering innocent, as an odd yet powerfully enduring friendship was born.

Les Crook lived up at Father Francis’ church atop Meads’. He’d walk up and down the mountain each day, to and from what, in partnership with Peter, became his job at The Aurora Gallery. Until, due to Elliot Landy’s growing fascination with metaphysical texts, the gallery was transformed into Woodstock’s first occult bookstore.

The owner of the health food store below was a retired stock market whiz named Lowell Blum. Lowell had become a devotee of Swami Muktananda, (and plastered this guru’s picture anywhere glue would stick) while also coveting ownership of the Aurora gallery. So it was that in the space of a few years, Lowell made increasingly larger offers to purchase the Aurora from Elliott who, married and with a couple of children, was spending ever less time in Woodstock. Nevertheless Landy, who Peter specifies, “was and is a very idealistic person,” responded to these offers by throwing the I Ching, until that oracle eventually confirmed the owner “should not sell.” By now, Elliot had re-named the gallery “The Ajna Bookstore.” [“Anja” being “The Third Eye” in Hindu].

Contact with the outside world from the bookstore amounted to the pay phone Les and Peter answered by invoking the victorious Hindu syllable “Jai!” followed with the more business-like “Third Eye.” Then came the day Elliott called from Manhattan to inform his apprentices of his decision to sell them the “Third Eye” for a dollar. And so that’s how our spiritual warriors came to own Woodstock’s first occult bookstore. Furthermore, it wasn’t long before Les Crook had renamed himself “Les Visible.”

For Peter and Les had become true believers. Exactly what they believed might morph and shift, but that they believed was truth, inviolate. Picture them, for instance, doing naked jumping jacks in the meditation room first thing in the morning, while shouting what Blum fondly recalls as: “the Kabbalistic cheerleader chant ‘Yod He Vau He’ — or the “unspeakable/unpronounceable” name of God in Hebrew.”

Peter’s path next embraced the “Woodstock Health Angels” with whom he caravanned to the first Rainbow Gathering in the summer of 1972. When he returned in the fall, The Ajna was gone. Filling the void, an ever-patient Lowell Blum finally opened his own “Mid-Heaven” metaphysical bookstore [“Castaways” today] where Blum, naturally, found his place behind the counter. Though Peter had by now met his future wife, Merrily, his spiritual adventures with Les continued.

Recalls Peter, “Les Visible and I went for Darshan with Sri Chinmoy at Christ’s Lutheran Church, where it felt like he was sweeping the room with eyes closed — those veiled twin green tractor beams pulling people in…I panicked and ran.”

Peter (and more often Les) also attended the teachings of such notables as: 1) Swami Satchidinanda, the “handsomest” of Indian gurus, who opened the Woodstock Festival, identifying music ‘’as the celestial sound that controls the whole universe.” 2) Guru Bawa, The Sufi mystic who was said to have emerged from the jungles of Sri Lanka in the 1940’s and would appear in the dreams of those fated to be healed by him. 3) Dr. Kaushik, who had been an MD in his native India for 23 years, before a desire to “save humanity from itself,” transformed him into a spiritual teacher. 4) Yogi Bhajan, the founder of Kundalini yoga, with whom Peter took a class. 5) Pir Vilayat Khan, son of the founder of the Sufi order “of the West”, and a particular favorite of Blum’s. 6) The Korean Zen Master Seung Sa Nim who, known for his charismatic discourse, was the 78th patriarch of the Jogye [!] Order, and an early pioneer of Zen in America. Peter and Merrily also received 7) Swami Muktananda’s blessing, as depicted in Peter’s April 15, 1976 article in Woodstock Times: “Most Likely You’ll Go Your Way And I’ll Go Mine” which begins: “Baba Muktananda is, for those who have somehow escaped the barrage of publicity, an Indian holy man.”

Prologue

We begin this final installment searching the roots of Woodstock’s mysticism, by seeking at least “a casual relationship” between Woo and Wee-ality by means of further Time Travel. So…back we to go to 1974 when, at the age of 18, I first encountered Robert Thurman at Amherst College. Here, having been forgiven his vows sufficient to marry and father a family, our “first Westerner ordained as Tibetan Buddhist monk” seemed momentarily critical of monasticism, while remaining formidably versed in the traditions of rigorous debate essential to his training as a Gelugpa monk. So it was within this somewhat ambidextrous context, that Professor Thurman first cast a spell upon me (and I suspect, most of our tiny class,) when he flatly announced: “Buddhism at its purest is not a religion, it is a science; in fact, it is the ultimate science.”

Four years later the entire Amherst faculty was uproariously divided when Robert Thurman received full tenure. Rumor soon ran riot of a shootout between this “student’s favorite,” and a universally revered Chairman of the Philosophy Department. Evidently the conflict began when the latter powerhouse, one William Kennick, publicly ridiculed Buddhist philosophy as “mumbojumbo passed between little old brown men wrapped in dirty blankets.” Yet our candidate for tenure astutely avoided direct confrontation, to instead provide his esteemed colleague with a translation of the famous Gelugpa debate proving “All is Void.”

Now to grossly oversimplify a multifaceted and incredibly complex argument, allow this primitive synopsis: In the final analysis, nothing in any universe demonstrates true, independent existence, because all which seems “to be” is either coming into or passing out of a “window of identity” prior to which and beyond which it vanishes. Yet since nothing which firmly and truly “exists” could ever be said to “not exist,” it obviously follows that no phenomena anywhere can actually be said to “ultimately” exist at all. Or, as stated in the initially terrifying teachings of Prince Siddhartha upon his attaining full enlightenment under the Bodhi tree: “All is Void.”

Meanwhile, back at the academic shootout, William Kennick reappeared, only to abruptly rescind all previously disrespectful remarks while admitting: “This text represents a faultless argument — one I wish I’d never read.” And with that, Robert Thurman and “Pure Buddhism” stormed the gates of Western Philosophy.

The point being: the argument Thurman presented Kennick was anything but Woo Woo; however, the four other schools of Tibetan Buddhism — to one degree or another — are indeed dyed in the wool of Woo (due to their strong family resemblance to the original “Bon Po” religion indigenous to Tibet). These four other schools include the powerful Kagyu or “magic” school, whose preeminent monastery on this continent, just so happens to border the Church on the Mount atop Mead’s Mountain in Woodstock, New York.

Lastly, allow word or two concerning Magic (“pure Woo”) vs. “hard” Science. Part I began with creative Woodstock’s financier, Ralph Whitehead, and his 1897 letter to the American Psychical Society, debunking as lunatics a family of “sensitives” who Whitehead ruled had not, authentically, established contact with the dead. Let’s call such fraudulence, “Woo Woo at its Worst.”

So what is “Woo Woo at its Best?” Four years earlier, Nikola Tesla, having lit the entirety of Chicago’s Columbian Exposition with his revolutionary AC currents, here also demonstrated “related technologies” climaxing in his “bathing” himself with hundreds of thousands of volts of electricity. Dressed more as a Magician than scientist, Tesla’s accomplishment defied contemporary explanation, with layman and “electrician” alike, unable to explain Tesla’s survival without resorting to the notion of “Sorcery.” (This “Magician’s trick” employed by the greatest inventor the Earth has ever known, utilized a discovery inducing huge reservoirs of electricity to travel “over” not “through” his own body.) However, the ultimate irony concerning this unique genius, involves the fact that Tesla actually denied and suppressed his powers of telepathy and precognition, even as he used his “acknowledged abilities” to foster the mantle of Magician.

Now in the Twilight Zone of Woo we are about to reenter — exactly as in the life of Nikola Tesla — the lines between fraud, defiance of “contemporary” explanation, and powers which possibly transcend even the understanding of those employing them — indeed, all these distinctions must soon blur and even disappear.

Part III

By 1969, Kalu Rinpoche, the senior meditation master of the Kagyu lineage, had been meditating in forests, crude huts, and deep caves for several decades. It was at one such location, then, that his lineage head — the sixteenth Karmapa — arrived to announce: “Rinpoche, you must end your meditation and take the correct view of Buddha Dharma to the West.” So this Kalu Rinpoche did. Understand, however, that legend surrounding such prolonged meditators among Buddhists (and other tribes of Woo), was and remains so intractably entrenched that myth and reality concerning the accomplishments of such individuals becomes all but indistinguishable.

It was already 1975 and Peter Blum, though he didn’t yet have any official relationship with Buddhism, had been seeking one for a while. Little could he know, however, the notoriety of the tall, catfaced Tibetan fated to fulfill this desire. “Well, somehow or ‘ruther,” recalls Blum, “word got out, ‘there’s this guy up at Loren Standlee’s place in Byrdcliffe who transfers a legit connect to real deal Buddhism.’ So up we went.”

Further understand that Loren Standlee — an undersung legend in his own right — had, by this time, sat at the feet of most of the living saints of India, including a great many Buddhist lamas in exile from Tibet. Loren was actually among the first Westerners to urge such high lamas to come to America in the first place. [All this and more is shared by Loren’s life companion, Ziska Baum, in her posthumous portrait of Standlee found on the web’s “Flower Raj Blog.”]

Consequently, it was within Standlee’s home on Camelot Road, that a more or less “incognito” Kalu Rinpoche, first appeared in Woodstock. And so it was here that Peter Blum and family sought him out, circa ‘75-76. “I went with my wife and our one and a half year old daughter,” Peter remembers, “and we all stood and took refuge…Actually, my daughter took three quarters of refuge. She went through the all the motions but then — you go up and you have a lock of your hair cut off — and she didn’t want to do that. Rinpoche laughed.”

However, it turns out that Peter’s wife, Merrily, was a “somewhat lapsed Roman Catholic [who] still had a statue of the blessed mother…” The result being that Peter and Merrily, “would take the kids up to Father Francis’ (Church on the Mount) for Christmas.” Here, “Midnight mass abounded with a purity which had nothing to do with being Catholic or Buddhist. Father Francis was this beautiful old gnome from another world.”

By now Les Visible [first encountered in Part II] had introduced Peter to Samadhi Fred, (so named for his importance at the ashram of Neem Karoli Baba, Ram Dass’s guru, also from Part II.) Upon Fred’s ever mysterious arrival, these three Dharmateers would go a’bowling for hours on end at the Woodstock Lanes. During one such marathon Fred announced: “The Tibetans are coming. At first the Karmapa was about to buy this land in Carmel for his [North American Seat of a] monastery. The down payment being gifted by some Chinese businessman. It was all set. Then somebody took him for a drive up here. And suddenly he changed his mind: ‘No, this is where our monastery is supposed to be!’” History’s truer report is actually revealed in Ziska Baum’s Flower Raj Blog: “It was during a visit of the great Kalu Rinpoche to [our] home in the early 70s, that Loren drove Kalu Rinpoche up Mead Mountain Road to the top of the mountain where the old Mountain House was for sale. Rinpoche got out of the car, looked around, came back to the house, called the 16th Karmapa and after a few calls was told to buy the land. That was the start of KTD.”

Sure enough, the Tibetans showed up here in force. Naturally, Peter, as the official “guru reviewer,” went up to cover the event for Woodstock Times, with Andrea Barrist Stern accompanying him as photographer. Two resident lamas had been sent by the Karmapa as official delegates: Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche and a very young Bardo Tulku. Blum wrote his article of welcome prior to being swept up in events unforeseeable. “I formally thanked them,” Peter affirms, “but then, after the official press conference, Samadhi Fred said to me: ‘Would you like to be introduced personally to the abbott?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ So Fred took me out to the middle of the field and said, ‘Rinpoche this is Peter…he wants Darshan.’ As you might guess, I wasn’t exactly prepared for this, but I instinctively dropped to one knee and took his hand — as this photo shows. Suddenly everything in the meadow started to throb, and the colors to push like a Photoshop filter transforming ‘what was’ into ‘what must be.’”

Four days later Andrea Stern, who’d been standing at the edge of the field with her camera and a telephoto lens, said to Peter: “Here, I thought you might want this,” [whereupon she handed him a photograph published for a first time here.] Later that same year, in the fall 1978, Peter and family were packing up to move to Holland; Blum having had but this one dramatic interaction with Khenpo.

Then Peter had a dream. “In the dream I walked into the shrine room up at KTD, which was then in the old Mead’s Hotel [since torn down], and Bardo Tulku — who I didn’t know at all except from a distance — was sitting there. So I did a triple prostration and walked out of the room. He smiled. That was the entire dream. [Except that] I stopped smoking. Like [snaps fingers.] The afternoon of the day after this very vivid dream I realized: ‘Oh, I haven’t had a cigarette all day.’ And I hadn’t even thought of having one. So I’m watching…two days, three days — no cigarette. Now Ned Romano was helping many individuals to stop smoking, each them going through hell and back. Me? I told people: I smoke — it’s not a problem. And then? It was gone.”

Peter’s family continued to prepare for Europe. However after two or three weeks off cigarettes Blum called up KTD monastery and said, “I’d like to have an interview with Bardo Tulku.” A long meeting resulted, the gist of which was: no, Bardo Tulku did not send “Peter’s dream” or any miracle accompanying such “down the mountain.” Except, that is, for the fact that all Tibetan prayers (and, for that matter, all Tibetan Prayer Flags) are said to essentially “seed the atmosphere,” with blessings for all sentient beings.

Having acknowledged this, however, what now occurred to the oft-Woo’d mind of your present chronicler, is this…what Kalu Rinpoche, that “Master of Meditation’s deepest Cave” actually recognized atop Mead’s Mountain, aside from auspicious physical conditions, was a rather surprising spiritual energy emanating from “The Chapel of Ease,” long since renamed “The Church on the Mount” by Father Francis. For what the Rinpoche — as well as his superior, the 16th Karmapa — of course understood, was that American Christianity, per se, would be threatened by, and therefore hostile to, the building of a large Buddhist monastery, especially one constructed right next door to a humble Christian chapel.

However, it is now suggested that Kalu Rinpoche immediately intuited Father Francis to be something of an Adept, himself; a theory strongly bolstered by the following fact: Much to the surprise of all, Archbishop Francis immediately proved most warm and welcoming to his Asian brothers. In fact, according to then acolyte, Michael Esposito: “The translators couldn’t keep up with the jokes, winks, and laughter flying between the Karmapa and Father Francis, who’d most graciously invited the Tibetans for tea in the meadow above.”

Indeed this, our good Father’s spiritual charisma, had earlier been clearly recognized by a mind no less scintillating than Bob Dylan’s [see Part I] — even prior to the existential crisis precipitating our poet laureate’s travels to Israel’s Wailing Wall, and eventual conversion to radical Christianity. This same mysterious “something,” we must suspect, provided the purified wonder Peter Blum earlier noted at Christmas’ Midnight Mass (by the yearly end of which, according to Esposito: “The entire chapel would be humming like a spaceship preparing to leave the Earth.”)

A similar phenomenon had likewise been noted by another local treasure, Sweetbryar, who at 15 in ‘64, had run away from home to Woodstock where she beheld (without drugs): “People climbing ladders in air! up at Father Francis’ place.”

This original spiritual vibration, of course, would’ve initially resonated from the frail, soft spoken, often hilarious priest who Mike Esposito traded fame and fortune to follow where ever the old fellow led.

Here a particular and admittedly peculiar notion reasserts itself. Indeed, it’s the very image, coined by Peter Blum, captivating me moments after I encountered this “lively-eyed and mustachioed” individual several months ago and soon inspired our traveling back upon Woodstock’s modern history to glimpse a mystical, almost mythical quality emanating from it.

It’s that the singular character of Father (and Archbishop) William Henry Francis indeed surfaced early on in this exploration, which eventually involved dozens of teachers (along with perhaps a charlatan or two) from foreign lands. Yet all through this exotic parade, this patient patriarch — continually muttering his quips and prayers — invariably and ever cheerfully appears, over and over again.

Somehow eluding cliché, the archetypal figure emerges of a slightly nervous shepherd, anxiously checking upon his flock at various hours all through the long, long night ahead. Finally the picture comes even clearer, still…as the solitary Archbishop, ornately dressed in mostly black with lamp in hand, carefully makes his way through this shadow blotched patch of forest surrounding his tiny chapel. You see him now? Guided by that lantern held just above his waist in that wrenlike wrist? It being the very lantern from which a constant Etheric light twinkles — a light instantly recognizable to that select few, among whom Francis seems to have passed on this, his otherworldly beacon, the very same one which even today continues to shed its protective glow upon this, our valley bathed in shadow below.

Tad Wise, author of the biographical novel Tesla and coauthor, with Robert Thurman, of Circling The Sacred Mountain, is presently completing The Maverick’s Maverick, a first, full scale biography of Woodstock’s Godfather, Hervey White.