Remembering Woodstock, Giving birth on an airplane

They say that if you can remember Woodstock, you weren’t there. Now the town of Bethel, N.Y., which hosted the legendary rock festival 39 years ago, is helping people remember. The Museum at Bethel Woods opened this week, offering retrospective displays, screenings of concert footage, interviews with attendees, and other exhibits about the concert, which drew 450,000 young people. Among the museum guides is Duke Devlin, who was drawn to Woodstock in 1969 from Amarillo, Texas, and settled down to work on a nearby dairy farm. “Is it over yet?” he joked.

When John Webber’s grandfather, a scrap dealer in England, gave him an old 5-inch-tall metal cup back in 1945, he assumed it was made of brass and put it in a shoe box under his bed. When he moved last year, he decided to have it appraised by the British Museum. It turned out to be a Persian antiquity from the third or fourth century B.C., beaten out of a single sheet of gold, and decorated with two female faces looking in opposite directions, their foreheads adorned with a snake motif. The piece will be auctioned this week and is expected to fetch nearly $1 million. “Heaven knows where he got this,” said Webber.

Jacel Brown wasn’t really thinking about her pregnancy when she boarded a Korean Air Lines flight from the Philippines to New York City this week; her baby wasn’t due for another two months. But at 37,000 feet over Canada, she went into premature labor. Fortunately, she was accompanied by her husband, Dan, who happens to be a trained emergency medical technician. A Korean surgeon onboard also stepped forward to help. Brown gave birth on the floor of the plane’s kitchen area, and though Jadan Brown weighed only 3 pounds, he is doing fine. “I really didn’t have time to think about what was happening,” said his father.

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