I wonder if any of the 'Woody' experts there can confirm a hypothesis
of mine concerning a turning point in his life:

When I moved to New Jersey in the early 1990's, I became friends with William Main Doerflinger, the great collector of sailor and lumberman
songs. He and I would get together at times to reminisce--- we threw a musical gathering in his palatial house in Convent Station, and I took him to Mystic Seaport several times, for the Festival there.

Bill and his wife had both been book editors in New York city, and the two of them actually collaborated to edit both 'Bound for Glory' and 'Seeds of Man.'

To hear Bill tell of it, it was more like 'writing' than editing. Woody was already showing signs of Huntington's, and taken together with his generally scattered nature and drinking, he really didn't have it in him to see a book through.

During that time, also, Woody spent a significant amount of time as a house-guest at the Doerflingers.

Okay, there's the first part.

You will recall that Woody's enforced hospitalization began with a term at Graystone Hospital in Morristown. He had been found by police, it is said, wandering around highway 24 (now called 124, since the built a bypass) incoherent and disturbed. This was, I believe, very shortly after he discharged himself from a hospital in New York.

"What the hell was Woody doing in New Jersey?" you might well ask.

Well, to me it's obvious: Bill Doerflinger's house, on Canfield Road, was just across Rte 24 from 'Convent Station' station. It was (and still is) pretty routine to take the ferry or the train from New York to Hoboken and catch what was then the 'Erie Lackawanna' line out to Morristown and points in between.

It seems to me that the likely explanation is that Woody was headed out to show up on the doorstep of his friends, the Doerflingers. He probably consumed the better part of his bottle on the train, got off at what may or may not have been the right stop, and then got confused and was wandring around the road that divides the train station from the Doerflinger's neighborhood.

And so, he ended up in Graystone, where Bob Dylan came to see him.

These pieces came together after Bill passed away, so I never got a chance to confirm it. I'd never really though of the connection, until they made a big deal of Woody's tenure there when they recently re-dedicated the Graystone site as a park.

It strikes me as a piece of 'trivia' that is nonetheless significant because the Graystone committal represented a 'turning point' in Woody's life--- it was the point where he really no longer controlled his own destiny or made his own decisions.