On
stage: Dianne Heatherington &
The Merry-Go-Round
with storm clouds forming overhead.
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On Sunday May 24th1970, the
now legendary Niverville Pop Festival took
place south of Winnipeg. What
started as a sunny day of music turned
into a torrential downpour of epic
proportions. Below is my Winnipeg
Free Press article on the festival.
I was there and I remember.
The pastoral rural community of
Niverville, some 30 km south of Winnipeg,
boasts a population of roughly 3500, most
of Mennonite descent. Many of its
residence work in the city, commuting back
and forth transforming the town in recent
years from agricultural hub to bedroom
community. The town’s lone claim to
history is that it was home to the first
grain elevator in Western Canada.
There is, however, another significant
historical milestone not found in the
regional historical accounts, one that
long-time residents may be less likely to
cite. On May 24, 1970, 45 years ago
next week, some 10,000 young people, aka
hippies, descended on a field outside the
town for the Niverville Pop
Festival. What began as a
sun-filled, fun-filled day of music and
hippie ambiance (and all that went with
it) turned into a mud bath of epic
proportions giving rise to a now legendary
experience. For Manitoba’s budding
hippie community it was their very own
Woodstock.
Though the Woodstock movie with its
distinctive split screen imagery had yet
to premiere in Winnipeg (it would open at
the Gaiety Theater, Portage and Colony, on
June 18), the media excitement surrounding
the three-day festival in upstate New York
the previous summer had fired the
imaginations of Winnipeg youth. It
was inevitable that a pop festival would
happen here. But unlike its
inspiration which was initially organized
as a for-profit concert event, the
Niverville Pop Festival had a
philanthropic purpose.
The year before, teenager Lynne Doerksen
fell during a hayride. Her hospital
treatment required the use of an
oxygenator, a medical device capable of
exchanging oxygen and carbon dioxide in
the blood during surgical procedures that
may necessitate the interruption or
cessation of blood flow in the body.
One was flown in from a San Francisco
medical facility. Although Doerksen
ultimately succumbed to her injuries,
students and staff at the Canadian
Mennonite Bible College on Shaftesbury and
Grant established the Lynne Doerksen
Oxygenator Fund in October 1969 in tribute
to her. The goal was to raise
$30,000 to purchase an oxygenator for the
Winnipeg General Hospital.
“We figured we could make some real money
for her by putting on a pop festival,”
states Bill Wallace then of the band
Brother, “so Kurt Winter, Vance Masters
and I organized it with another guy,
Harold Wiebe. He was from Niverville
and got us the land donated for the
festival.” Harold was well-known to
the trio for selling 50 pound bags of
sunflower seeds in the pubs. “We
called him ‘Harold the seed man’.”
“Bill was not in favour of organizing a
festival to make a profit,” stresses
Wiebe. “It should be for
charity. So I told him and Kurt
about the Oxygenator Fund. We
planned it in my parents’ backyard and
initially thought we might do it there
with maybe a few hundred people but once
radio stations started promoting it we
knew we needed a big area.” Wallace
took care of recruiting the performers
while Wiebe and Brian Toews handled the
logistics. Niverville farmer Joe
Chipilski donated his uncultivated field
10 km from town and parking was arranged
on a property across the road. Local
merchant Wm. Dyck & Sons provided a 45
foot long flatbed trailer for the stage.
The organizers didn’t bother seeking
permission from the Niverville community
since the festival was being held a short
distance from town. Nonetheless,
some of the churches in the area took a
dim view of a throng of hippies descending
on their community. Local historian
Steven Neufeld feels that had this
particular constituency been made aware of
the fundraising purpose of the event they
might have had a more welcoming
attitude. “I think that their focus,
especially coming on the heels of
Woodstock six months earlier, was the
apparent presence of sex, drugs and rock
and roll.” Their perception was not
erroneous.
Dozens of local bands including Sugar
& Spice, Justin Tyme, Chopping Block,
Dianne Heatherington & the
Merry-Go-Round, and the Fifth offered
their time. The eclectic roster also
boasted the Chicken Flat Mountain Boys,
Billy Graham’s Jazz Group and folksinger
Jim Donahue. My group, the Pig Iron
Blues Band, was also on the bill.
CFRW deejays Bobby ‘Boom Boom’ Branigan,
Charles P. Rodney Chandler, and Darryl
Provost were lined up to host.
Espousing the hippie ethic of the times,
everybody pitched in for free. “We
got everything for nothing,” remembers
Wallace. “The only expense was $34
to run the power line in. Garnet
Amplifiers supplied the PA.” Tickets
were a bargain at $1 and the show was set
to commence at three PM on Sunday.
Organizers anticipated 5000
attending. By two PM double that
number had taken over the field, spilling
onto adjacent fields and clogging the
roads in and out. Like Woodstock,
many simply abandoned their cars by the
roadside and walked the remainder of the
way. Wiebe and his crew attempted to
collect the $1 from those who simply
wandered in but it was futile. “It
wasn’t that they didn’t want to pay the
$1,” he insists, “it’s just that there
were too many people coming through the
fields.”
“Our whole band, the Weed, minus one
decided to go,” Alex Moskalewski
recalls. “We waited for hours on the
highway then longer down some side roads,
finally parking in the middle of a field
along with a few thousand others.”
Joey Gregorash kicked things off fittingly
with the notorious Fish cheer from
Woodstock (“Give me an F…..”). Brother
made what would be their last public
appearance as guitarist Kurt Winter had
been invited to join the Guess Who the
previous week replacing Randy Bachman
(along with another local guitarist, Greg
Leskiw). Their set featured several
songs later to be recorded by the Guess
Who including Hand Me Down World and
Bus Rider.
By the time blues-rockers Chopping Block
prepared to take the stage around 5:30 PM,
the sun had been replaced by clouds.
What began as a light sprinkle quickly
became a torrent of both rain and
hail. Like Woodstock, the Niverville
Pop Festival quickly turned into a mud
fest as more than 5 cm of rain fell on
the site. “All I can remember,”
stated Mongrels’ guitarist Duncan Wilson,
“was hail a bit bigger than golf balls and
lots of mud.”
Surprisingly, the rain failed to dampen
the communal euphoria. “I remember
everyone really having a lot of fun before
the rain,” recalls Ron Siwicki, “and even
when everyone was sitting in their cars in
the rain they were still partying and
having fun. It was pretty bizarre,
like the spirit of Woodstock transported
to Manitoba.”
Vehicles became mired in acres of thick,
wet, sticky mud. As local promoter
Bruce Rathbone noted, “It took four hours
to get four miles through the mud to the
highway.” A Winnipeg transit bus had
to be towed out of the mud by a farmer’s
tractor. Michael Gillespie
remembers, “I had parked my CKY-marked
Montego station wagon in a field and got
out onto a road only to slide sideways and
tip into a ditch. The car was on its
side. About twenty people lifted the
car out of the ditch back onto the
road. Unbelievable!” Still
others simply abandoned their
vehicles. “Roger Kolt went back two
days later to get his car and someone had
stolen the battery,” says Wallace.
“I wore a brand new pair of very expensive
Italian shoes which I had just purchased
from Holt Renfrew,” Barb Allen
remembers. “My feet were so
mud-covered I could hardly lift
them. The shoes were a write-off.”
Neufeld witnessed the chaos. “As a
nine year old kid I remember driving past
the deluge with my parents and witnessing
first hand cars in the ditch with water up
to their windshields,” he recalls.
“I remember being shaken by what I saw.”
“There was a certain element of the church
population that felt vindicated that the
deluge occurred and washed out the event,”
notes Neufeld. “The police had been
to many of those same homes earlier
warning people about the event and that
for their own safety they should keep
their doors locked and closed.”
Nonetheless, despite a general feeling of
unease for the festival, the community
came together to help out wet, hungry and
stranded youngsters.
Susan Friesen recalls, “We owned a small
hamburger stand with friends of ours
called Snoopy’s in Niverville. After
the rain we started getting people coming
to Snoopy’s. They were all tired,
wet, cold and hungry. We cooked
hamburgers, hotdogs and fries. We
ran out of everything and borrowed
supplies from another restaurant in town
called The Pines. We used up all of
their fast food supplies then called the
local grocery store to get more.
They were nice enough to open for
us. We fed a couple hundred
people. We stayed open later than
usual, until we ran out of food.”
Others manned trucks and tractors to
extricate vehicles trapped in the
mud. “Mr. William Dyck from Wm. Dyck
& Sons took his cube van and went to
the festival to bring people to
Niverville,” Friesen remembers.
Wiebe’s brother commandeering his dad’s
tractor and pulled out cars until two in
the morning.
“I’ll never forget the farmers with their
tractors coming to many, many people’s
rescue and pulling cars out of the muddy
fields,” recalls Richard Denesiuk.
Neufeld relates the story of a local
pastor who had expressed his opposition to
the festival. “This particular
pastor knew what the right thing to do was
in spite of how he felt. He
recognized that people were in trouble as
a result of the storm. He had access
to a large farm truck with a covered box
and went and got as close to the site as
possible, loaded up his truck with people
who were stranded and took them all back
to his tiny home in Niverville.
There he and his wife fed them, helped dry
their clothes or got them a change of
clothing, tended to their needs and
arranged rides for each one back to their
homes in Winnipeg and beyond, without
accepting any remuneration.” It was
a shining moment for the community.
The event made the front page of both
newspapers the following day. It was
even the subject of discussion at the
provincial legislature when NDP MLA Russ
Doern, who claimed to have been at the
festival the day before, announced, “There
was a sizeable crowd of young people there
who first of all participated in the best
manner, they were well behaved, they
thoroughly enjoyed themselves and I think
they made this a great success.” He
went on to laud the charitable goal of the
event and praised townspeople and local
farmers for pitching in when the rain
hit. Premier Ed Schreyer suggested
that perhaps the festival ought to be
called a “Tractor Rock Festival.”
As for me, Pig Iron never got to
play. Instead I spent several hours
pushing my girlfriend’s little blue Ford
through the mud wearing her pink
raincoat. With my longhair and pink
raincoat, three strapping young lads in
the car behind jump out and exclaimed,
“We’ll help you, miss”. They were
rather embarrassed to discover their miss
was a mister but nonetheless pushed the
car until it was able to get a grip in the
mud. I left a pair of shoes stuck in
that field. I arrived home late in
the evening and went straight into a hot
bath.
And what of the money for the
oxygenator? “A few days later I
delivered $8000 to the head of the
Canadian Mennonite Bible College,” states
Wiebe. Three years later some
$20,000 was donated in Lynne Doerksen’s
name to the Winnipeg General Hospital for
the purchase of the machine.
“I barely got to see the bands,” laments
Wiebe. “I was too busy
working. It was a lot of fun
although it would have been better had
Mother Nature held off for 24 hours.”
John Einarson
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Brother
L-R: Kurt Winter, Vance Masters,
Bill Wallace
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