Before Rick Dills attended the Woodstock music festival in 1969, he was set to pursue a career in engineering, and was studying at an Ivy League college in New England.

But then Dills and some friends went to Woodstock. What Dills saw and experienced there helped change the course of his life.

“I decided I was going to be a teacher,” says Dills, a retired educator who lives in Hood River, Oregon. “I moved to Oregon in 1972, and started my teaching career in Molalla.” His career also included teaching in Hood River and serving as an administrator in Gresham.

Dills is one of the Woodstock attendees interviewed in the “American Experience” documentary, “Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation.” The documentary, which marks the 50th anniversary of the music festival, airs on PBS on August 6.

“Woodstock changed my perspective on the world,” says Dills, 68.

There were other factors, he says, that helped him decide to pursue a career that he thought could benefit people. But the three-day festival devoted to peace and music, made him start to “see the world somewhat differently,” Dills says. The cooperation and communal kindness that he witnessed at Woodstock made him think about others, and not just his own interests.

“One thing led to another, and before I knew it, I was a retired educator,” says Dills. “I never would have predicted any of that. And Woodstock was a domino, in a chain of dominos, but it was an important domino.”

Dills became one of the voices that viewers hear in “Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation” because he and his wife went back to the festival’s location, to visit New York’s Museum at Bethel Woods. The museum features an exhibit, “Woodstock & the Sixties,” that chronicles the history of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair.

Rick Dills on his trip back to Bethel Woods, in 2012. It was on this visit that Dills wrote down his memories of attending the Woodstock festival. (Photo: Courtesy of Rick Dills)

The visit was “a very moving experience,” Dills recalls. He became one of the attendees who wrote down some of his memories on a computer kept at the museum for that purpose. Later, he received an email from one of the producers working on “Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation,” asking him to share some of those memories in the film.

First, Dills did a phone interview. Then the producer came to Portland, and Dills met with her in a sound studio and talked, he says, for a couple of hours.

There’s no video of Dills being interviewed, but viewers can hear him, and see a collection of photos of him as a young man, taken around the time of the Woodstock festival.

Dills, who grew up in southern Connecticut, was able to travel into New York City to go to concerts as a teenager. When he and his friends heard about Woodstock, with its eye-popping lineup of musical performers, they were drawn by the music.

“I was a big fan of lots of the bands,” says Dills, including the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Sly and the Family Stone, and more.

“So, we got tickets,” Dills recalls, at the whopping rate of “six bucks a day, $18 for a weekend,” and he and four friends got in Dills’ Pontiac Firebird convertible.

“We put the top down on that thing, and we rode off to the concert,” Dills recalls of his then-18-year-old self. The friends soon drove into the gridlock that stopped traffic heading to Woodstock.

Dills parked his car in a field, and he and his friends headed to the concert site and set up camp. The music was great, Dills recalls, especially Joe Cocker, the soulful singer with a distinctively physical performance style, who Dills hadn’t heard before.

“I saw this guy doing this St. Vitus Dance on the stage, and I thought, who is this guy? Does he have a condition? What’s wrong with him? But, seriously,” Dills says, “he was wonderful.”

As he went around exploring, Dills recalls, he realized there was more going on at the festival than musical performances. He went to get water, and found himself not just taking water, but serving water to other attendees.

“And then we went up to get food,” Dills says, “and we ended up volunteering to serve food.”

The experience made Dills realize that “I was helpless there, and other people were taking care of me, and I was taking care of them. And there was something wonderful about that.”

On the lighter side, Dills comments in the documentary about the casual nudity on display at Woodstock.

Rick Dills, left, and two friends who came to visit him, are shown at Crater Lake National Park in this 1971 photo. (Photo: Courtesy of Rick Dills)

“I was a first-year college kid, and I’d had a couple of girlfriends, but I had no idea that there were people who that comfortable just kind of letting it all hang out,” Dills says. “I’m not a gawker by nature, and I didn’t want to stare at people, but I was a kid going, whoa, I don’t believe this is going on.”

Looking back, Dills says, he thinks the message conveyed by the Woodstock festival remains powerful, in that more than 400,000 people came together and showed they could support each other, work together and peacefully co-exist.

While every young person probably thinks their generation is special, Dills says, being at Woodstock made him think about others who were there, about politics, career decisions and much more.

“You felt like you were part of something really significant, and that there was a community and a camaraderie among people,” Dills says. “It made me think that I was part of something bigger than me, and I had some responsibilities to make a contribution to the world.”

“Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation” airs on PBS at 9 p.m. Tuesday, August 6.

-- Kristi Turnquist

kturnquist@oregonian.com 503-221-8227 @Kristiturnquist

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