It was a poor cousin of 1969’s Woodstock, but nearly 50 years ago, on July 8-9, 1972, Concert 10, or the Mount Pocono Festival, began at Pocono International Raceway in rural Tunkhannock Township, Monroe County (1970 pop. 317). The concert was scheduled from 1-11 p.m., but due to many interruptions by pouring rain and other factors, it actually ended at 8:45 a.m. on July 9.

The weather remained virtually the only thing that a promoter couldn’t control in advance, but with a crowd estimated at between 80,000 and 200,000 - more than 50,000 of them gate-crashers, it was reported - it was still considered one of the most successful one-day concerts of that era. Organizers said they sold 125,000 tickets, but the state police estimated the crowd at nearly 200,000.

While there were several big-name performers, such as Badfinger, the J. Geils Band, Three Dog Night and Edgar Winter, the lineup couldn’t hold a candle to the headliners and star power at the three-day Woodstock festival in Bethel, New York, which featured the likes of Joan Baez, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Janis Joplin and The Who, plus many more top performers of the day.

The Mount Pocono festival was advertised to run for just 10 hours, but just as it did at Woodstock, rain did a number on the schedule, so the festival ended at 8:45 a.m. the next day. By that time, the soaking wet and shivering crowd that had paid $11 a ticket had thinned dramatically.

(Doesn’t it seem that just about every major event held at Pocono International Raceway is impacted by rain? Every important auto race held at the tri-oval seems to come with the caveat “weather permitting.”)

To make it additionally interesting, a power failure Friday night thrust the area into darkness for a while and also contributed to delays in the programming.

Here is how The New York Times described the scene: “A downpour began in midafternoon and turned vast stretches of the ground into a sea of mud. Thousands of youngsters, blankets wrapped around their shoulders, trudged to shelter beneath the grandstands as concert officials wrapped the stage equipment in yards of plastic.”

With concertgoers arriving as early as July 6, state police tried to control the glut of traffic that descended on Interstate 80 and feeder roads, such as two-lane Routes 115, 940, 903 and 715. It became a hopeless situation when far more attendees showed up than were expected. Shades of Woodstock!

When state police began to set up roadblocks on some of the side roads, drivers abandoned their cars, and some walked as far as 8 miles to the festival site. To say that local residents were unhappy with the hordes descending on their properties en route to the festival would be the understatement of the year.

State Police Commissioner Rocco Urella, who was monitoring activities by helicopter, said, “Within a 15-mile area around here, it looks like the world’s biggest garbage dump.”

Tunkhannock Township supervisors, who certainly hadn’t signed up for issues involving a rock concert, were happy with the state police effort, but they begged the office of then-Gov. Milton Shapp for more help. Some local officials wanted the governor to send in National Guard personnel, but they were needed farther north in the Wilkes-Barre area where residents were severely impacted by the massive flooding of Tropical Storm Agnes, which had struck the area just two weeks earlier.

I was a local news editor for The Express (now The Express-Times) in Easton and assigned our summer intern, Debbie Diehl, daughter of the paper’s Publisher Don Diehl, to cover the festival. In retrospect, I should have assigned a veteran reporter to accompany her, because I had not anticipated the enormity of the story and the spillover effect it had on residents, the snarled traffic and other issues which emerged as the festival unfolded.

State police were faced with a 25-mile traffic jam from the I-80 exit in Blakeslee to the Delaware Water Gap. They also had to contend with the snarled traffic along Route 115, a state road now littered with abandoned cars which had to be towed or pushed off the roadway to allow traffic to start moving again.

After the horror tales of Woodstock, I asked myself why any sane person would want to risk a repeat of those conditions, but even though I was not Methuselah at age 33, I obviously did not have the mindset of youngsters who, with Woodstock taking on iconic status by this time, yearned for their own festival experience of love, sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. “I want to be able to tell my grandkids that I did something real crazy like this,’’ a concertgoer from Denville, New Jersey, told our reporter.

A 17-year-old, Dennis Ferment, of Wallington, New Jersey, was the lone fatality. He was killed in an auto accident on I-80 en route to the festival. About 200 were treated at the festival infirmary, staffed by eight physicians, for drug overdoses.

It was a one-and-done event. There was no Mount Pocono Festival II.

By Bruce Frassinelli | tneditor@tnonline.com

The foregoing opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editorial Board or Times News LLC.