Bobbi Kelly, who was featured in the long-lasting photo used as the quilt of the Woodstock album, died over the weekend, in accordance with her husband.
“It’s with beyond great sadness that I tell my FB family and friends, that after 54 years of life together, of the death of my beautiful wife, Bobbi, last night surrounded by her family,” Nick Ercoline posted on Facebook Saturday. “She lived her life well, and left this world in a a lot better place. In the event you knew her, you liked her. She lived by her saying, ‘Be kind’.”
“She didn’t deserve this past 12 months’s nightmare, but she isn’t affected by the physical pain anymore and that brings some comfort to us,” he wrote.
Nick Ercoline and Bobbi Kelly were 20-year-old sweethearts when photographer Burke Uzzle snapped a shot of the couple holding one another wrapped up in a blanket on the three-day festival.
Behind a pair of thick yellow sunglasses, Bobbi gazes towards the camera.
The photo became the quilt of 1970’s “Woodstock: Music from the Original Soundtrack and More” — a triple vinyl LP in May 1970 to accompany a concert film of the festival.
The couple met in 1969 while Nick was bartending at Dino’s Bar and Grill in Middletown, NY, Bobbi and Nick told The Post in 2019.
They began dating in May — just months ahead of Woodstock, which took place from Aug. 15 to 18.
After making a last-minute decision to go to the festival, they packed up their 1965 Chevrolet Impala station wagon, which they eventually abandoned about 4 or five miles from the concert site.
As they walked the remainder of the best way, Bobbi found the blanket.
“As we were walking in, I picked up the blanket because I believed we would have liked something to sit down on,” said Bobbi. “It was just discarded, so I scarfed it up and that’s where the pink blanket got here from.”
They staked out a spot on the highest of a hill, where the Uzzle photographed the couple.
From the hillside the sound was incredible, they said.
Bobbi and Nick got engaged on Christmas Eve 1970 and married on Aug. 27, 1971 — just days after the second anniversary of Woodstock — at St. Paul’s Catholic Church in Bullville, NY.
They went on to boost a family with two sons: Matthew, born in 1979, and Luke, arriving in 1981.
They later learned that they were on the album cover while listening to it with a friend.
It wasn’t until the twentieth anniversary of Woodstock, in 1989, that Nick and Bobbi were publicly identified because the couple in the long-lasting photo that they now proudly display of their kitchen.
Bobbi told The Post they need their photo to encourage a message of peace, love and hope in generations to come back.
“I just hope that when folks take a look at that picture they usually consider what a chaotic, troubled world we now have right away, [they will feel] that there’s at all times hope,” she said. “All the time. Irrespective of how bad it appears to be, you gotta have hope.”
Bobbi had been in hospice and made her husband promise her three things before she died, Nick said: “1. No more hospitals 2. House is where she is going to stay 3. When her time comes for her passing, that I might hold her close.”
“I used to be in a position to accomplish these 3 guarantees as my sweet Bobbi passed from this world while I held her close with our sons next to us,” Nick wrote in a heartbreaking follow-up post.
