
My most memorable big crowd gathered in a muddy field called Woodstock, with signs promising “Peace and Love.” That was 55 years ago today. I went “back to the garden,” for an anniversary concert 25 years later. It was still muddy. Rained most of the day, but more than a quarter of a million people partied on. Paramedics were busy fixing broken ankles and arms. 750 people were taken to the hospital. Some concert goers set out islands of straw to keep from sliding away. Others folded up tents and beat feet for home. A few looked to the skies for a face wash. And stuck it out. Re-staging Woodstock was a lot like trying to recapture the moments of a senior prom. Like music, it can’t be touched. Only felt.
- An Image to Show They LivedMost everywhere you go out west, you find that a photographer has been there before. People didn’t always care where they’d end up, but they wanted the folks back home to see they had arrived. Glenn Altman has been taking their portraits most of his 81 years, offering his neighbors something special — a beautiful image to remind the world they had lived.
- D.C. SamaritanThere is a side of Washington, DC, we seldom see on Nightly News. It is far removed from the ruffles and flourishes of the Nation’s Capitol. Here, survival is no global affair. Calvin Woodland’s business is begging. For decades, he hustled these streets, raising money to help the drug addicts and dead end kids who lived in his neighborhood. Home was the grimy public housing projects southeast of the Capitol. Calvin Woodland represents something in short supply around here. A hero.
- The President Who Never Owned a HomeMy grandfather Paul Bailey was a rock ribbed, small town Republican. Former President Harry Truman, a Democrat, was his friend. Grandpa Bailey once argued a case before Mr. Truman, when Truman was a Jackson County, Missouri, Commissioner. “You must have won,” I grinned, “if you became friends?” “No,” he said, “I lost. But I learned something about Mr. Truman that made me admire the man. He opened a hat shop in Kansas City after he came home from the front lines of World War One. The business failed. His partner declared bankruptcy. Truman did not. He moved in with his mother-in-law, so he could pay back every penny.” The only asset Mr. Truman had when he died was that house. His wife had inherited the home from her mother and father and other than their years in the White House, they lived their entire lives there. As president he called home collect. Never billed the taxpayer. “Mrs. Truman wanted Harry to buy a car,” Grandpa recalled. “He said, ‘We can’t afford one, but when we get out of this Great White Jail (the White House,) we’ll get one.” After president Eisenhower was inaugurated, Harry and Bess bought one. There was no Secret Service following them. President Truman retired from office in 1952. His income was a U.S. Army pension. $112.56 a month. Congress, noting that he was paying for his stamps and personally licking them, granted him an ‘allowance’ and, later, a retroactive pension of $25,000 per year. When offered corporate positions at large salaries, Mr. Truman declined, stating, “You don’t want me. You want the office of the President, and that doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to the American people and it’s not for sale.” One day on the way to Grandpa’s house, he stopped to show me the retired president mowing his mother-in-law’s lawn. “Hi, Harry,” he waved. Mr. Truman shaded his eyes and smiled when he recognized his friend. “Hi, Paul.” Grandpa grinned and then said, “Okay, Bobby. Let’s get out of here before this Democrat stuff sticks to the tires…”
- Better Baby InstituteThe Better Baby Institute of Philadelphia looks like a college campus. Ivy on the walls. Faculty in the halls. Walk by an open door, you hear violins and Japanese. It’s a college all right, but the average student is less than six years old. Glenn Doman, the director says, “Tiny children are starved for information. They have a rage to learn. And they understand superbly.”
- Found ArtThink of what you drive by every day and don’t see. Douglas Geiss notices more than most. He and his cousins live in a five acre forest filled with wonder. They found a mermaid riding a yellow submarine. And a fish made out of pick axes. Created by their grandfather, Nate Nichols, a farmer who also planted art. Nate would weld together whatever he saw in worn out tools. None of them made him much money, so every day for 25 years, he hid them in his woods. “Everybody else looks up in the clouds and says, ‘Oh, that cloud looks like a dragon,’ Nate’s son Josh said. “My dad looked down at the ground and said, ‘That wrench looks like a monkey.’” Nate Nicholls’ sculptures so filled his heart, he felt compelled to give them life. The farmer was working on a metal frog last summer when his heart failed and he died at 52. Last fall his children buried him beneath flowers he’d made from water faucet handles.













