“’Max Yasgur. He’s the biggest dairy farmer in the
county.”
Before long, Lang was meeting with the slender,
bespectacled Yasgur and his wife, Miriam.
“You’re the people who lost your site in Wallkill,
aren’t you?” asked the 49-year-old farmer—a native
New Yorker who had once studied law in New York
City. “I think that you young folks were done a grave
injustice over there. Yes, I’ll show you my land—we
might be able to strike a deal for your music fair.”
They agreed on $50,000 (about $345,000 today),
plus another $75,000 in escrow in case of damages.
“Max was our savior,” Lang wrote. “As we shook
hands, I realized for the first time that he had only
three fingers on his right hand. But his grip was likedecorator named Elliot Tiber, whose family owned
a motel called El Monaco in White Lake, a hamlet
within the town of Bethel. Tiber offered the hostelry,
which had seen better days, as a base of operations
and proposed the grounds as a concert site. When the
organizers found it lacking, Tiber hooked them up
with a real estate agent, who drove Lang and others
out through open, rolling farm country.
At one point, on Hurd Road in Bethel, Lang
shouted, “Stop the car!” As he recalled in his mem-
oir, “it was the field of my dreams... I left the car and
walked into this perfect green bowl. There, at its base,
was a rise just waiting for our stage.”
“Who does all this land belong to?” Lang asked
the agent.16 LIFE WOODSTOCK