Ah, festivals. Remember what they were like?
I know at this point it’s almost hard to remember what a festival is, but one day they will be back and there will be fantastic stories from main stages to tents in fields.
One of the best parts of festivals is the people you meet. Friendships can be forged with strangers; sometimes something more.
One couple in the States who met at Woodstock more than 50 years ago are living proof of this.
Over half a century on from meeting for the first time, they have recreated their first photo they were in together.
Judy and Jerry Griffin were pictured together 48 hours after meeting. They are still together, all this time later.
A couple at Woodstock (48 hours after they met) and the same couple 50 years later. pic.twitter.com/EvzpeLawzC
— History Videos (@historyandfacts) February 21, 2021
They met before Woodstock in 1969 when Judy and her friend were hitch hiking to the festival after her car broke down.
Jerry came to the rescue and gave them a lift in his VW Beetle. Judy told PEOPLE in 2019: “I was just thinking, ‘Damn, now we can’t go’, and we were dying to. Then Jerry and his friends pulled up. I stuck my head in and I saw that there was a woman in the car.”
“I’d never hitchhiked before, but I figured, ‘Well, since there was a woman, it was fairly safe, and I probably should just get in the car’.”
Jerry, told People about their chance meeting: “I thought, ‘Okay, this is definitely unusual. We just picked up this really cute girl. And I’m going to Woodstock and I’ve got a tent and she doesn’t’.”
Judy added: “By the time we got out of the car and set up camp, we were into each other, and we basically were together from that point on.”
The couple who have two sons and five grandchildren recreated the Woodstock photo back in 2019. The other day both photos were shared online side by side and have gone viral with more than 480,000 likes on Twitter and 47,000 retweets.
