When 10,000 or more youth converged on a farmer’s field in southeast Kansas in 1970, they came to enjoy live rock music and protest the ongoing war in Vietnam.
The three-day event near Pittsburg, Kansas, may have been the only successful grassroots rockfest in the Midwest that year as similar events in larger Midwestern cities were cancelled. But the blatant use of illicit drugs at the festival spawned a political backlash against Kansas state and local officials accused of tolerating drug use. The issue would play an important role in upcoming elections. Rare film footage of the Pittsburg Peace Festival is now available on Kansas Memory.
Inspired by the Woodstock Music and Art Fair held in Woodstock, New York, the previous year, locals Kenny Ossana and Fulton Wilhelm organized the festival, which had many names including the Ken-Ton Festival, the Peace at Pittsburg Festival, Cornstalk, the Arma-Pitt Festival, and the Happening. Initially, the organizers sought permission to hold the festival at various locations without success. They solved this problem by literally settling on a 160-acre field located three miles west of the Kansas-Missouri state line southeast of Pittsburg in Cherokee County. The owner, farmer Florn Meyers, gave tacit permission against the wishes of his neighbors by refusing to ask the youth to leave. The event took place over Labor Day weekend, September 4-7.
Organizers expected as many as twenty-five bands to participate, including Impulse Federation (Kansas City), Rock Sanctuary (Fort Scott), Man Alive (Pittsburg), the Chessmen (Kansas City), Grit (Kansas City), Kansas (Topeka), and Caurosel [sic] (unknown), Morning Star (unknown), and Fatty Lumplin (unknown). A surprise appearance by Jerry Hahn and the Brotherhood, Columbia recording artists from San Francisco, marked the highpoint of the festival. The event ended abruptly early Monday morning when a car ran over two sleeping teenagers, leaving one eighteen-year-old girl in critical condition with extensive head injuries. Authorities later arrested two sixteen-year-old boys.
The Pittsburg Headlight-Sun reported, “Marijuana dealers abound everywhere. Shouts of ‘Black Hash over here,’ ‘Get your organic mescaline in the grey van, only $1.50 a hit (tablet),’ are common.” Vern Miller, Sedgwick County sheriff and Democratic candidate for state attorney general, emerged as the most vocal critic. Miller berated state and local authorities for not enforcing the law saying, “Such an attitude gives dope suppliers and pushers free rein to deal and distribute dope.” He said the festival should have been “saturated with undercover agents and enough law enforcement personnel… to arrest law violators.” Under attack, then state attorney general and Republican candidate for governor, Kent Frizzell cited several arrests made as part of KBI investigations. The event helped bolster Miller’s campaign for attorney general, which he won, and undermined Frizzell’s law-and-order campaign for governor, which he lost to Democratic incumbent Robert Docking.
Kansas State College at Pittsburg professor Robert Blunk Jr. filmed the event. Blunk’s film includes psychedelic imagery and camera work, and focuses primarily on the crowd. For more information on the festival see the numerous articles published in the Pittsburg Headlight-Sun from September 3 to September 11, 1970. See also Randall Thies, “Hippie Archaeology: In Search of the Kansas Woodstock," Journal of the Iowa Archaeological Society 50:69-77 (2003).