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.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
-
6 charming homes for the whimsicalFeature Featuring a 1924 factory-turned-loft in San Francisco and a home with custom murals in Yucca Valley
-
Big tech's big pivotOpinion How Silicon Valley's corporate titans learned to love Trump
-
Stacy Horn's 6 favorite works that explore the spectrum of evilFeature The author recommends works by Kazuo Ishiguro, Anthony Doerr, and more
