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But
when a photographer snapped their picture early on that Sunday
morning as they stood hugging each other while wrapped in a
blanket, they unwittingly became part of pop culture history,
ending up on the Woodstock festival album cover.
Nick and Bobbi are still together and still living near the farm
at Bethel Woods, in New York's Catskills mountains, where the
three-day festival was held in 1969, on Aug. 15-18.
The couple, now 70, say they don't remember the picture being
taken nor much about what was happening around them that day on
a muddy hillside strewn with sleepers huddled in blankets in the
morning air.
"Just getting up in the morning, standing up, giving my
girlfriend a hug," Nick Ercoline recalled. "I don't even
remember the picture being taken honestly."
Bobbi, who was wearing large sunglasses, said she barely
remembered the moment at all. But when she looks at the picture
now, "I feel calmness."
"I feel that it's like the birds waking up in the morning, and
we're just kind of ... sorting it out. We're just waking up,
looking for a nice hot cup of coffee, which there was none," she
told Reuters.
Nick and Bobbi had started dating about three months before the
festival and decided to go on a whim after hearing about it on
the radio while Nick was tending bar in Middletown, New York,
about 35 miles (56 km) from Bethel.
"Water was intermittent, sketchy. Food was sold out Friday
night. The weather was absolutely awful," Bobbi said. "And
450,000 people gathered here and not one incident of violence.
That's pretty amazing. The world needs more Woodstock."
It wasn't until listening to the Woodstock triple album with
friends that they realized they were the couple on the cover.
"We couldn't believe it. We were just shaking our heads. By then
we had been together for almost a year," Nick said.
Nick and Bobbi married in August 1971 and went on to have two
children. Bobbi worked as a school nurse and Nick became a union
carpenter before retiring.
They are now volunteer guides at the Bethel Woods museum, part
of the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts which owns the Woodstock
festival site some 100 miles (160 km) from New York City.
Museum director Wade Lawrence said the photo of the couple,
taken by Burk Uzzle, captured the spirit of the festival.
"It symbolizes that love and togetherness of the festival. ...
We're really lucky that Nick and Bobbi are still around to share
their story with us," Lawrence said.
(Reporting by Daniel Fastenberg; Editing by Jill Serjeant and
Leslie Adler)
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