Baltimore at Woodstock

In all the Woodstock coverage, you might have spotted this photo of a VW bus (painted by Baltimore's Bob Hieronimus) at the festival. I asked Hieronimus about it, and here's his response...

No, I'm not in that picture.  Those are my friends, Trudy Morgal and Ricky Peters, sitting on top of the bus.  I'm just the lowly artist who designed and painted the outside.  Trudy and Ricky were Baltimoreans from the local band, Light.  (You can read about them in that excellent Joe Vaccarino book, Baltimore Sounds.)

I still have my unused original ticket to Woodstock. When I heard there might be 50,000 people there, I decided that sounded too crowded for me! Little did I know it would turn out to be almost 10x that amount.  I knew with a crowd that size that I would never get near Jimi Hendrix to share more about our interest in occult symbolism, even though the summer before we had enjoyed numerous personal encounters sharing our sketchbooks and notepads with each other at The Scene nightclub in NYC. I decided at the last minute to stay home and focus instead on the AUM Estoteric Study Center, which was being born at the same time (and is now, today, the Ruscombe Mansion holistic health center, celebrating 25 years in existence!)

Hieronimus also reports that there's a die-cast model of his Woodstock bus in the works. You can check it out here.

[Image: courtesy Bob Hieronimus]