This editorial was printed in the Providence Journal, Aug. 19 1969.

When the first reports began to trickle out of Bethel and the stay-at-homes had their first inkling that the inaccurately named Woodstock festival was something more than a jazzed-up Tanglewood, anticipation gave way to hysterics until the site lacked only presidential designation as a disaster area.

Hip radio stations around the country began a series of desperate appeals, warning everybody who might have been interested to stay where they were, or, if they were on their way, to turn back. Rock fans, by all accounts, were pullulating miserably in the horribly overcrowded patch of farmland that rains had turned into a bog. Editors licked their electronic lips and dispatched correspondents to add to the crush, sat back and waited for catastrophe.

Catastrophe, of course, was not forthcoming; but as cooler heads and objective reporting began to emerge from the swamp, something even better turned up instead. The hippies were back.

Not the homicidal detritus of the Haight's decline, nor the sullen border patrols of the New Mexico communes, but the hippies that everybody (for which read Time magazine, et al.) used to know and love: who pelted the fuzz with love and flowers in Monterey not that long ago, who inspired the whole Art Nouveau renaissance that has generated so many psychedelic dividends, who talked in their outlandish way about religious virtues but spared an audience of indulgent adults any ecclesiastical inconvenience.

For us forgotten Americans, the rotund, obscurely agitated inhabitants of radioland (TV not-withstanding, radioland forever,) for us depressed circulation builders and bedside pundits, it was the return en masse of the prodigal. These kids - these hippies - were nice. It didn't even matter much about the drugs, or the occasional nude pilgrim cavorting across Max Yasgur's fields. What mattered was that this incredible agglomeration of nearly half a million souls was peaceful, cute, above all safe. Why, the festival even closed with a rendition of The Star Spangled Banner.

The apparent resurrection of the "good hippie" may not include his music as well. The earlier experience with rock at Newport - quite possibly a result of the same kind of overcrowding as at Bethel, but in a more volatile urban environment - may unfortunately be the one that will stick.

But there is a moral to be gleaned from the ruined festival fields, a fairly urgent moral at that. Five hundred thousand young people cannot conceivably be written off as hippies, kooks, weirdos, deviates, bums . . . not even of the "nice safe" variety. There just aren't that many. The manifestation of a creative tribalism that so astonished the elders was a function of benevolent happenstance, not of some immutable gravitational force binding together a community of freaks.

In short, gentlemen, those were our children, as different from us and from each other as any collection of people in any audience anywhere. As a mob of human beings, they acquitted themselves rather well. Think about it.