Baby boomers won't let go of the Woodstock Festival. Why should we? It's one of the few defining events of the late 1960s that had a clear happy ending.
On Aug. 15 to 17, 1969, hundreds of thousands of people, me among them, gathered in a lovely natural amphitheater in Bethel (not Woodstock), N.Y. We listened to some of the best rock musicians of the era, endured rain and mud and exhaustion and hunger pangs, felt like a giant community and dispersed, all without catastrophe.
A year after the riots at the Democratic convention in Chicago, expectations _____ large gatherings of young people were so low that this was considered a surprise.
"Notwithstanding their personality, their dress and their ideas, they were and they are the most courteous, considerate and well-behaved group of kids I have ever been in contact _____ in my 24 years of police work", said Lou Yank, the chief of police in nearby Monticello.
Yet for all the benign memories, Woodstock also set in motion other, more crass impulses. While its immediate aftermath was amazement and relief, the festival's full legacy had as much to do with excess as with idealism. It was as much an endpoint as a beginning, a holiday of naïveté and dumb luck _____ the realities of capitalism resumed. Woodstock's young, left-of-center crowd – nice kids, including students, artists, workers and politicians, as well as hippies – was quickly recognized as a potential army of consumers that mainstream merchants would not underestimate again. There was more to sell them than rolling papers and LPs.
Adapted from: PARELES, John. The New York Times. 5 Aug. 2009.
According to the text, after the end of Woodstock, the local merchants recognized its participants as
a) future successful politicians.
b) potential clients.
c) promising business leaders.
d) future successful musicians.
e) potential artists.
