In 1954 Woody Guthrie entered New Jersey's Greystone Hospital. At the time no one knew what was wrong with him, beyond increasingly erratic behavior. (Later he was diagnosed with Huntington's Corea, a disease associated with the wasting of brain cells.) He was in and out of hospitals and institutions for the rest of life; he died in Creedmore State Hospital in Queens, New York in 1967.

The New York Daily News recently ran a story about a photographer, Phil Buehler, who normally specializes in photos of 'modern ruins.' One such ruin he explored was that same Greystone Hospital, now much reduced in scope with several abandoned buildings. In one of those buildings he found photos the hospital staff had taken of Guthrie during his stay there, along with letters from him, medical files and a play he wrote while at the hospital. It all documented a period in Guthrie's life about which very little is known.

Buehler presented the materials he found to the Woody Guthrie Foundation and Archives in Manhattan. He also used them to create a public exhibit and a book called Wardy Forty: Woody Guthrie at Greystone Park, which is due out in 2007.