By Matt Love

"So that what you have in effect is a Charlie Manson-Jerry Rubin-Angela Davis-Jonathan Jackson-Bernadette Dohrn-Huey Newton-Timothy Leary-Rolling Stone-monster heading directly for downtown Portland where the American Legion is planning this year's Victory in Vietnam Parade."

Some radical wrote that in a San Francisco underground newspaper. It was a few months after Kent State and the police riot at Portland State University, and to keep the peace in the Rose City that summer, Oregon Gov. Tom McCall and a group of hippies collaborated to stage the first and only state-sponsored rock festival in American history Aug. 28 to Sept. 3, 1970.

In late August 1970, President Richard Nixon was scheduled to speak at the American Legion national convention in Portland. The Portland-based People's Army Jamboree announced it would hold a concurrent event to protest the Vietnam War. The FBI told McCall he should expect 25,000 Legionnaires and 50,000 anti-war demonstrators to clash in Portland and top the mayhem of the 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago. Fearing that radicals might foment violence against the Legionnaires, a few Portland hippies proposed a free rock festival outside Portland as an alternative. The hippies asked McCall for a place to hold it. He gave them a state park and told local and state law enforcement officials to lay off.

The festival was called Vortex I: A Biodegradable Festival of Life, and for the 100,000 people who attended this event at Milo McIver State Park outside Estacada, it was a short strange Oregon trip indeed. While the festival raged, peace prevailed in Portland, and the only act of violence reported was a broken window at the downtown Meier & Frank (now Macy's) building.

Naturally it happened in Oregon, in an era when the state made national news on a regular basis with a series of unprecedented political measures. We once solved problems in this state.

After interviewing close to 400 people, examining hundreds of photographs, and reading about a thousand pages of primary source documents related to Vortex, I've compiled my list of favorite stories:

McCall, a Republican, was facing a tough a re-election vote later that fall. When he approved the festival, he said, "I've just committed political suicide." He won a second term in a landslide.

The Portland chapter of the American Red Cross, headed by a U.S. Bank vice president named Jack Mills, purchased illegal drugs and hired people to give them away inside McIver park, hoping to keep revelers there.

The doctor supervising Vortex I's medical center, Cameron Bangs, kept a 25,000-word in-the-moment diary of his experiences. It's probably the best in-the-moment observation of the '60s-'70s-era counterculture in American history. According to Dr. Bangs, the Oregon Air National Guard's first emergency helicopter airlift was a young man suffering from an LSD overdose at the festival.

The Oregon Air National Guard was instructed to drop rose petals on potential rioters as a signal to disperse or tear gas would follow.

Oregon State Parks' employees and the festival's hippie administrators worked in perfect concord despite, or because, the latter were under the influence of peyote.

Someone brought a pet cougar on a leash. Someone brought a pet anaconda.

A band played naked on stage.

Nude hippies canoed in the Clackamas River.

Not one permit was issued to hold the event or was any liability insurance taken out.

One of the state's most powerful corporate executive of that era, the Cascade Corp.'s Robert Warren, drove a pickup truck full of licorice out to the park.

At least 20 people reported seeing a naked vendor cruising the park wearing nothing but a string of hot dogs around his neck and a red balloon.

Vortex I's cast of characters, in the flesh and the edges of the story, included Spiro Agnew, Red Skelton, the Rainbow Family, Matt Groening, John Kerry, Donald Rumsfeld, and current New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller, who was then a cub reporter at The Oregonian.

At the festival's end, McCall visited the park, hugged some hippies, then joined them holding hands in a circle. They chanted "oms" for a few minutes and then recited the Lord's Prayer and a few lines from William Blake.

Top that, Woodstock!

Happy 40th birthday, Vortex. There's a lot more to you and your far-out spirit than just a bunch of stoned, naked hippies dancing on a field and fishing for salmon. To me, you represent the quintessential model of solving a problem, through bipartisanship, through risk-taking, and by bucking all conventional political wisdom. Sounds like Oregon's next governor and Legislature should read all about you.

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Matt Love is the author of "The Far Out Story of Vortex I" and, most recently, "Gimme Refuge: The Education of a Caretaker." Reach him at lovematt100@yahoo.com.