OBIT: Ken Kesey

Subject: Ken Kesey
From: Barbara
Date: 11 Nov 01 - 01:33 AM

GRANTS PASS, Ore. (AP) - Ken Kesey, who railed against authority in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and orchestrated an LSD-fueled bus ride that helped immortalize the psychedelic 1960s, died Saturday. He was 66.

Kesey died at Sacred Heart Medical Center in Eugene, two weeks after cancer surgery to remove 40 percent of his liver.

After studying writing at Stanford University, Kesey gained fame in 1962 with "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," followed quickly with "Sometimes a Great Notion" in 1964. He went 28 years before publishing his third major novel.

With Neal Cassady, hero of Jack Kerouac's beat generation classic, "On The Road," behind the wheel, and a pitcher of LSD-spiked Kool-Aid in the refrigerator, Kesey led a group of friends known as the Merry Pranksters on a 1964 trip to the New York World's Fair. The journey was documented in Tom Wolfe's 1968 account, "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test."

"There was a lot of the frontiersman in him, an unwillingness to accept conventional answers to a lot of profound questions," said Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Larry McMurtry, who was in a Stanford writing seminar with Kesey. "We argued and debated a lot of things. But I never would not listen to him, even if I thought some of what he said was gobbledygook, because there would always be the perception of genius if you waited him out."

When the Los Angeles Times honored Kesey's lifetime of work with the Robert Kirsh Award in 1991, Charles Bowden wrote that "Anyone trying to get a handle on our times had better read Kesey. And unless we get lucky and things change, they're going to have to read him a century from now too."

"Sometimes a Great Notion," widely considered Kesey's best book, tells the saga of the Stamper clan, rugged independent loggers carving a living out of the Oregon woods under the motto, "Never Give A Inch." It was made into a movie starring Henry Fonda and Paul Newman.

But "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" became much more widely known because of a movie that Kesey hated. It tells the story of R.P. McMurphy, who feigned insanity to get off a prison farm, only to be lobotomized when he threatened the authority of the mental hospital.

The 1974 movie swept the Academy Awards for best picture, best director, best actor and best actress, but Kesey sued the producers because it took the viewpoint away from the character of the schizophrenic Indian, Chief Bromden.

Kesey based the story on experiences working at the Veterans Administration hospital in Menlo Park, Calif., while attending Wallace Stegner's writing seminar at Stanford. Kesey also volunteered for experiments with LSD.

Another member of the Stegner seminar, poet, essayist and novelist Wendell Berry, keeps a picture of Kesey, himself, and friend Ken Babbs on his desk in Port Royal, Ky. The photo was taken during a visit last fall to Oregon.

"He was one of the few people I ever knew who could stand straight up without putting his hands in his pockets or leaning on anything," Berry said. "He was freestanding in that way, if you know what I mean. That told a lot about him.

"He was a man, as far as I could tell, totally without pretense. He never was pretending to be somebody he wasn't. And he never pretended to be the man he was," Berry said.

After "Cuckoo's Nest," Kesey continued to write short autobiographical fiction, magazine articles and children's books, but didn't produce another major novel until "Sailor Song" in 1992, his long-awaited Alaska book, which he described as a story of "love at the end of the world."

"This is a real old-fashioned form," he said of the novel. "But it is sort of the Vatican of the art. Every once in a while you've got to go get a blessing from the pope."

Kesey considered pranks part of his art, and in 1990 took a poke at the Smithsonian Institution by announcing he would drive his old psychedelic bus to Washington, D.C., to give it to the nation. The museum recognized the bus as a new one, with no particular history, and rejected the gift.

In a 1990 interview with The Associated Press, Kesey said it had become harder to write since he became famous.

"Famous isn't good for a writer. You don't observe well when you're being observed," he said.

In 1990, Kesey returned to the University of Oregon - where he had earned a bachelor's degree in journalism - to teach novel writing. With each student assigned a character and writing under the gun, the class produced "Caverns," under the pen name OU Levon, or UO Novel spelled backward.

Among his proudest achievements was seeing "Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear," which he wrote from an Ozark mountains tale told by his grandmother, included on the 1991 Library of Congress list of suggested children's books.

"I'm up there with Dr. Seuss," he crowed.

Fond of performing, Kesey sometimes recited the piece in top hat and tails accompanied by an orchestra, throwing a shawl over his head while assuming the character of his grandmother reciting the nursery rhyme, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."

Born in La Junta, Colo., on Sept. 17, 1935, Kesey moved as a young boy in 1943 from the dry prairie to his grandparents' dairy farm in Oregon's lush Willamette Valley.

After serving four months in jail for a marijuana bust in California, he set down roots in Pleasant Hill in 1965 with his high school sweetheart, Faye, and reared four children. Their rambling red barn house with the big Pennsylvania Dutch star on the side became a landmark of the psychedelic era, attracting strangers in tie-dyed clothing seeking enlightenment.

Furthur rusted away in a boggy pasture while Kesey raised beef cattle.

Kesey's son Jed, killed in a 1984 van wreck on a road trip with the University of Oregon wrestling team, was buried in the back yard. Kesey also wrestled in college.

Kesey was diagnosed with diabetes in 1992.

In a recorded message on Kesey's office phone, Babbs said: "Ken Kesey, a great husband, father, granddad and friend. Done in by a bum liver. As always, he gave it a great fight, but his body pulled its last dirty trick and done him in. If he has one legacy it is for us the living to carry on with courage, compassion, generosity and love."

---

Subject: RE: OBIT: Ken Kesey
From: Amergin
Date: 11 Nov 01 - 01:59 AM

shit...thanks...

Subject: RE: OBIT: Ken Kesey
From: Amos
Date: 11 Nov 01 - 02:48 AM

Amen.

It is for us the living -- another thing they will still be wrassling with a century from now.

Kesey added a major flavor to our times. I, for one, am glad to have had him in the pot-au-feu of our civilization.

A.

Subject: RE: OBIT: Ken Kesey
From: Mudlark
Date: 11 Nov 01 - 04:45 AM

Barbara...Thanks for reproducing the obit...so sorry to hear of his death but appreciated all the info. Chief Brombden is a great fictional character....though I liked Sometimes a Great Notion, I thot it more self-conscious than Cuckoo's Nest....maybe better "literature" but not as spontaneous. I know Kesey was unhappy w/the movie but I will never forget the inmates playing Monopoly and absent mindedly eating the houses and hotels....

Subject: RE: OBIT: Ken Kesey
From: catspaw49
Date: 11 Nov 01 - 08:04 AM

What would the times have been without him? How much poorer our culture? So what if he wasn't the poster boy for moderation and responsibility? The colors of life are better viewed when the contrast is great. Ken Kesey gave us the contrast.

Hopefully the government will honor Ken with a postage stamp......perhaps an Air Mail stamp. You stick it on and the letter flies there by itself.

Goodbye Merry Prankster

Spaw

Subject: RE: OBIT: Ken Kesey
From: harpgirl
Date: 11 Nov 01 - 08:13 AM

...maybe Owsly will make the stamps!!!

Subject: RE: OBIT: Ken Kesey
From: Midchuck
Date: 11 Nov 01 - 09:58 AM

Does this mean drugs are bad for you after all?!

(Nawwww! If the govt. says they're bad for you, they must really be good for you....)

Peter.

Subject: RE: OBIT: Ken Kesey
From: Tweed
Date: 11 Nov 01 - 11:25 AM

Unbelievable, he was another of those guys you just figured would go on forever. I remember the little ads in the Whole Earth Catalog and there was one of him exhorting the great value of corn starch for combatting jock itch. Funny stuff. He sure made a change in people's thinking while he was here.

Subject: RE: OBIT: Ken Kesey
From: Wanderer
Date: 11 Nov 01 - 01:46 PM

That's the way it goes.

It seems we've still got Dr Hunter S Thompson.

Subject: RE: OBIT: Ken Kesey
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 11 Nov 01 - 01:59 PM

Ken Kesey wrote a lot more than just Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion - here is a bibliography of himn.

And last year he had another Magic Bus Trip, this time to England - this link gives stuff about that.

Subject: RE: OBIT: Ken Kesey
From: rangeroger
Date: 11 Nov 01 - 05:31 PM

I got to see the bus last year as I was returning to North Idaho from Strawberry Music Festival.I was northbound on I-5 just above Sacramento, when I saw a psychedelic bus headed south. As I got closer, I saw the logo Further, and as it passed me there was a skeleton in a sombrero playing a guitar on the back porch of the bus.Sure looked like Kesey driving.

Cuckoo's Nest was one of the best books I have ever read. Particularly since I started working at Patton State Hospital in 1963. I really could relate to every thing in the book.

The article on Kesey's passsing surprised me with comment about the Veteran's Hospital.I had always understood that Cuckoo's Nest was written about Eastern State Hospital in Oregon.Supposedly several people lost their jobs after the publication of the book.

Probably another of those myths that get passed on by people like me.

rr

Subject: RE: OBIT: Ken Kesey
From: GUEST,Martoon
Date: 11 Nov 01 - 08:02 PM

Another great loss. I was just told that last week we lost another Merry Prankster, Sandy Lehmann-Haupt. Who do we have left to help us through this morass of madness!!!???

Subject: RE: OBIT: Ken Kesey
From: rangeroger
Date: 11 Nov 01 - 08:07 PM

Wavy-Gravy is still alive and pranking.

rr

Subject: RE: OBIT: Ken Kesey
From: Whistle Stop
Date: 13 Nov 01 - 08:56 AM

One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes A Great Notion are two of the best books I have ever read (and re-read, and re-read...). I agree with Kesey about the movie version of Cuckoo's Nest, which seemed to gloss over a lot of the deeper meanings in that book in order to give Nicholson a platform to be Nicholson. Not a bad movie, I suppose, but it really doesn't measure up to the book.

People live, people die -- I'm not grieving over this one, but it's worth remembering what he gave us.

Subject: RE: OBIT: Ken Kesey
From: GUEST,Jones
Date: 13 Nov 01 - 09:34 AM

Read 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest' and recall laughing as hard as I have ever laughed in my life and crying just as hard. The book literally changed my internal landscape. Led me to a broadening of cultural perspective I, otherwise would have never experienced. I'm grateful to Mr. Kesey and deeply saddened by his passing. If at all possible would suggest finding the Rolling Stone article he wrote re John Lennon. I think it was Jan/81. I agree, the movie couldn't hold a candle to the book. Always pictured Ernest Borgnine as McMurphy for some reason.

Subject: RE: OBIT: Ken Kesey
From: Mrrzy
Date: 13 Nov 01 - 11:19 AM

Well, buggerall. Furthur, indeed!

Subject: RE: OBIT: Ken Kesey
From: Mrrzy
Date: 13 Nov 01 - 11:20 AM

Well, buggerall. Furthur, indeed! Come farther up, and farther in!

Subject: RE: OBIT: Ken Kesey
From: Willie-O
Date: 13 Nov 01 - 11:26 AM

This news came to me while in the middle of reading "Demon Box", a collection of Kesey's various shorter writings. Which includes the above-mentioned piece about Lennon, "Now We Know How Many Holes It Takes To Fill The Albert Hall".

I generally dislike the phrase "an American original" but that's Kesey. Thought for himself, and didn't hew to anyone else's line. A naturally conservative, wild and crazy guy, a master craftsman of the written word who only put out three novels, and farmed in Oregon most of the time, when we wasn't busy being a social renegade in day-glo California.

"Sailor Song", his last novel, is a good read, too. (That was the last one, wasn't it?)

He died the day we had my dad's memorial service. Another independent thinker done gone.

Willie-O

Subject: RE: OBIT: Ken Kesey
From: LR Mole
Date: 13 Nov 01 - 11:47 AM

Say it of him as he said it about Lennon:He was something.

Subject: RE: OBIT: Ken Kesey
From: Lonesome EJ
Date: 13 Nov 01 - 11:56 AM

Larger than Life was Kesey. Larger than Death too.

I know you Rider gonna miss me when I'm gone

Subject: RE: OBIT: Ken Kesey
From: GUEST
Date: 13 Nov 01 - 02:10 PM

The ranks are thinning--a generation that is leaving us way to soon--

Subject: RE: OBIT: Ken Kesey
From: Kim C
Date: 13 Nov 01 - 04:15 PM

That Nurse Ratched, she's somthin of a c**t, ain't she, Doc?

I enjoyed the movie. But I liked the book better. It is a whole different story when told from the Chief's perspective.

Subject: RE: OBIT: Ken Kesey
From: voyager
Date: 13 Nov 01 - 04:29 PM

Have a look at the Prankster History Project

http://www.pranksterweb.org/

voyager

Subject: RE: OBIT: Ken Kesey
From: Lonesome EJ
Date: 13 Nov 01 - 04:40 PM

Check this 2 year old thread here about Ken's sojourn to Britain.

Subject: RE: OBIT: Ken Kesey
From: GUEST
Date: 13 Nov 01 - 05:11 PM

These iconoclasts, these unconventional, irreverent individuals, these freakin' weirdos...where would we be without guys like Kesey to hold up a mirror to our self-inflicted mediocrity and lackluster approach to life? Worse off, for lack of models and heroes to show us the infinite possibilities inherent in someone whose enthusiasm for life spills over the prefab, artificial boundaries. A shadow passes over the reflection now....

Subject: RE: OBIT: Ken Kesey
From: katlaughing
Date: 13 Nov 01 - 05:18 PM

Sad to hear this, dammit. Aren't we supposed to be the immortal generation?

Subject: RE: OBIT: Ken Kesey
From: GUEST,Old Brown's Daughter
Date: 13 Nov 01 - 09:38 PM

Kesey sent me a postcard once. I still have it, stuck in my Bible where I put it the day I received it. Not so much because I worshipped the guy--though I only hope that one day people will say my writing is half as good as his. I was heading off to a weekend retreat that day, and was just packing my Bible when I got the postcard, so that's where it got stuck. But somehow I think that's an appropriate place for that memory. We put important things in our Bibles; for centuries families have handed down family Bibles, in which are written every child's name, and whole family trees can be traced.

When I was fifteen I was writing a paper on Kesey's 1964 trip across the country in that bus, and I got it into my head that the very best resource for that paper would be the man himself. So I looked him up in the phone book at the library, and there he was. So I sent him a letter asking if I could interview him. It was many months later when I got his postcard in reply--I had of course long since turned in the paper. But the fact that he replied, and replied personally, to a fifteen year old kid who just wanted a good grade on a paper she cared about (because I cared about the topic--had read Cuckoo's Nest, and well...)--well, I just think that was so cool.

I saw him read from Sailor Song at the Seattle Book Fest the year it came out. It was just a little while after Jerry Garcia had died, and he talked about how all the hippies and Deadheads (is that redundant?) were coming to him, asking what they should do now that Jerry was gone and they couldn't follow the Dead all over anymore. Ken's response was essentially, "Go home." Go back to your communities, and make them communities again. And carry on--with courage, generosity, and love. Babbs could have taken those words straight from Kesey's mouth.

Such a loss to the world. Not enough people understood what we had in that man. :) Monica

Subject: RE: OBIT: Ken Kesey
From: Coyote Breath
Date: 13 Nov 01 - 10:15 PM

oh. God, it makes me feel sad and tired. Well that isn't worth feeling is it? So I'll think a bit, yeah Wavy Gravy is still around. But everything changes. Mike's Pool Hall is long gone and I don't remember seeing Shakes in City Lights last time I was in 'Frisco and Jerry Garcia (good banjo player, by the way) is dead and Brautigan killed himself. Well stuff don't last. Who is next to wake us, shake us make us laugh and think and...

Subject: RE: OBIT: Ken Kesey
From: JudyR
Date: 14 Nov 01 - 01:59 AM

He was a nice man, not an a-hole. Leary was a bit of an exhibitionist and kind of phoney, to boot -- Kesey was who he was. The guy who said "totally without pretense" was right. But you can't always say that about the followers. Maybe it's just me. I spent a few weeks in all their company once after a friend took me up to at Ken Babbs' spread in Soquel, California, in the mountains above Santa Cruz. I also visited Kesey's place in La Honda after the SF acid test and Trips Festival. I got to know Babbs, the Pranksters, Kesey, Kesey and his beauteous wife (she reminded me June Carter Cash), were angels. Just downhome nice people. Sorry, but you couldn't say that about many of those Pranksters. They were always "pranking" somebody, which I didn't think was funny. They were rude, obnoxious, mean and insulting (this is not all of them -- not Ron Bivert, who was called Hassler, or Mike Hagen, a video operator. A few others were OK). But (if he reads this, guess I'll eat it), Babbs was a military man, who didn't appear to be raising his little kids very well. I remember him sitting on their bed socializing with the lights on and yelling at them for crying that they couldn't go to sleep that way. He left his nice country wife Anita to live in the same house with his snotty mistress, "Gretchen Fetchin'" (who, like Mountain Girl, never spoke to you if you were new and a stranger). He might have been Kesey's pal, but -- I could tell you stories.

Sometimes I've wondered why Kesey had to squander his writing career and hang out communally like this, but that's not recognizing who he was, and how much he meant to all of you. So that tells me something, this thread.

Subject: RE: OBIT: Ken Kesey
From: Lonesome EJ
Date: 14 Nov 01 - 12:52 PM

-- I could tell you stories....JudyR

Please do, Judy! Did you know Cassidy? Anything about Kesey and the Dead would be interesting to me and many others here!

LEJ

Subject: RE: OBIT: Ken Kesey
From: Art Thieme
Date: 14 Nov 01 - 09:35 PM

Lonesome EJ,

Check out the old thread about the LITTLE RED SONG BOOK for some pretty fascinating dialogue about Cassady and that good era.

Art Thieme