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.