| It's been 40 years since the crystallization of the peace and love era, the Aug. 15-18 festival outside of Bethel, N.Y. There was mud and music and 500,000 kids and not a single hair-care product. After Jimi Hendrix wrapped up the show on Monday morning, everybody went home and the whole thing died. Nixon, man. The Hells Angels stabbing somebody to death at Altamont, which was California's version of Woodstock. People suited up and went into corporate America or plastics or something. |
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| Not Big Wayne. |
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| He has a cabin sort of a house in the woods, about three miles outside this little town in western Virginia. ("It's Woodstock in name only," he says. "Lots of Republicans, man, lots of them.") |
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| He's got sheets of plywood for floors, a school bus he bought for $600 in the back yard, and lots of old motorcycles and motors and things, and two talking macaws (Elvis and Kooky) on the back porch, and five tons of marbles he sells sometimes ($2 per pound), and thousands of albums, and half a dozen guitars and amps and an exercise bike and a great picture of John Wayne and a set of steer horns mounted on the wall to hold a cowboy hat and a funky old fedora. The place is on a bluff overlooking the north fork of the Shenandoah River. The sign on the front door reads: "Hippies Use Backdoor. No Exceptions." |
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| There are lots of trees and almost no neighbors, and when it snows he can be shut off from the world for a week or more. |
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| The man says he's never had a bank loan. Never had a credit card. |
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| "I'm a [expletive] hippie, man," he says, twirling up the edges of his thick white beard at the corners of his mouth, with a bone-rattling laugh. "I'm from the '60s." |
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| Now 59, he's still tall but goes a |
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| solid 250 or so now. He's got a tiny little ponytail braided in the back. He's wearing shorts and sandals and a black T-shirt that has something to do with guns and cows. |
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| "Go Ahead," says the bottom line of the T-shirt, "Rake My Hay." He describes his ethnicity, in actuality or in jest, we're not really sure, as "Indian and black and Jewish." Says he hasn't done any "real" drugs since 1984. |
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| He was the Citizen of the Year in Prince William County a few years back, for his work with the poor. |
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| Life is groovy, man, except for when it's not. |
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| There's this bull on a farm across the river that keeps mooing, like, in the middle of the night. There was a divorce a few years ago and a continuing child custody dispute concerning his now 11-year-old son. The charity he founded back in 1989, the Coalition Against Hunger, was put out of its downtown Haymarket offices several years back. Something about escalating rents and the changing downtown area. It led to shouting matches between Big Wayne and then-Mayor John Kapp. |
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| There were accusations "of making pornos with the poor black chicks who were coming by for food." |
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| Any truth to the allegation? |
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| Big belly laugh. "Nah, man, nah. None at all." |
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| It should be noted that Kapp, when reached by phone recently, remembered Rodgers "always in cut-off jeans and sandals" but not the thing about the porno flicks. ("Oh my goodness! I don't remember that at all!") |
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| "Wayne, he's a great guy," says Bill Dykes, a musician and guitar instructor who lives just over the ridge. He's known Rodgers since they met in a prayer meeting 37 years ago. He helped found the coalition and ever since has worked with
Rodgers |
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| on the project, which distributes food to the poor. |
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| The work is part of what Rodgers hews to as the message of the late '60s, the self-described "freak" lifestyle, of peace and love and all that. Lang, the producer, says it wasn't all flower-child ephemera. |
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| "I think a lot of those things we were into then have come to fruition," he says. "The fact that we have a black man in the White House, the green movement, local farming, organic foods, just a healthier way to treat ourselves and our planet. All those things were born in that period." |
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| Rodgers agrees. He grew up in Falls Church. He ran away from home at 15, in 1966. Busted flat in New Orleans at a pot festival the next year. There's a picture of him hanging out in Georgetown, wearing pants you'd get from Sunny's Surplus. |
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| The summer of '69, he hitched as far as Philly, then met some other guys headed to the Woodstock event. He wound up both drunk and high, driving a 24-foot box truck loaded with oranges, peaches and pears to the festival. They got a police escort through the throng, making it within 100 feet of the stage. |
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| He spent the next three days helping out with backstage chores, watched Joan Baez make scrambled eggs in a big skillet. He staggered into that Port-O-San to light up with some friends because the wind was blowing too hard outside. |
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| People recognized him after the film came out, sure. |
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| "It was two years before I could walk down the street without getting frisked." |
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| He figures the spirit of the era "died in 1970," and then things got mean. He also says he got into untoward things himself ("the occult, heroin"), but then he found the Lord (if not a denomination) in 1971. He's been trying to hang on to the peace and love thing ever since. |
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| He lives how he likes. His two main rooms have couches draped with those colorful Mexican blankets a few feet away from a motorcycle on a lift, with the front wheel taken off. There's also a turntable, a remote-control glider, several small amplifiers, a stack of four guitar cases, several chairs pushed up against a sagging bookcase, a big television with a DVD, several small motorcycle models, a ceramic parrot holding a surfboard, a five-gallon water jug half-filled with coins, a steering wheel, a globe, another table with a computer, a yo-yo, a Swiss Army knife, sunglasses and stacks of magazines. |
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| There's also a little clutter. |
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| He used to sell cars, and still sells rebuilt motors and Soviet-era watches and marbles and tuxedos and all sorts of things. He says he's a "social facilitator," which is what they used to call "a hustler." |
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| He's got no complaints. |
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| "Life is good, man. I got a roof. I got food. I've got my son. I love being a dad. I've got coffee in the morning." And: "The Lord says the bottom line is L-O-V-E. That's what it's all about, really. The rest is just man's dogma." |
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| People recognized him after the film came out, sure. |
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| He gives a visiting reporter and photographer a handful of marbles and a "Say No to Hate" button as parting gifts, a little memento of their time in the garden, of how life might have been if Woodstock had taken hold. The photographer doesn't have pockets, and asks if there is something she might put the marbles in. |
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| It turns out Big Wayne has a little baggie. Who'da thunk? |
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| Life. It's pretty groovy, man, except for when it's not. |
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| By Neeley Tucker |
| Washington Post Staff Writer |
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