Woodstock attracted over 400-thousand people for four days of peace, love, and music who watched some of the biggest bands of the time in weather that included pouring rain.
One of the most iconic photos from Woodstock captured a young couple escaping the chill with an embrace under a dirty blanket.
The 20-year-old woman in the picture would now be 70 and Jessie Kerr who lives in Comox says that woman is her.
“We picked up this pretty dirty blanket off the ground because we were cold, it had been wet and this guy came along and took our picture and I remember it,” said Jessie Kerr.
Kerr was in Montreal in the summer of ’69 where she met a man named Jon from Boston who suggested they go to Woodstock.
The photo soon surfaced including on a Woodstock record album, but Jessie didn’t make a big deal about it.
“I thought it was great that nobody knew who it was because of this mystery couple right?” she said.
Her daughter and her friends have always thought it was pretty cool.
“Whenever people hear that maybe it’s my mom, they’re like Oh my God, I’m in love with your mom,” said Rebecca Halls.
However, when Life Magazine did a 20th Anniversary edition in 1989, Kerr was baffled when another couple altogether was identified as the people in the photo.
“And that’s when I saw these other people saying they were us and I thought how can they do that? How can they pretend that they’re us? They’re not us. It was my clothes she was wearing,” said Jessie Kerr.
She says she even made the dress she was wearing in the photo and wrote a letter to Life Magazine pointing out their mistake.
A reply letter she still has says the magazine is confident it had the right people but would keep her in mind for a future article.
Kerr says she lost touch with Jon sometime after the music festival.
Dean Stoltz
