A few more things you may not know about Kesey’s life and times:

- Ken Kesey was born in La Junta, Colorado, and brought up in Eugene, Oregon. His father worked in the creamery business, and his brother still runs Nancy’s Yogurt.

- He was a star football player and a wrestler at the University of Oregon. His son Zane just recently brought the Merry Prankster bus out of retirement to protest the planned closing of the wrestling program at U of O.

Read all about the protest here.

- At a Veteran’s Adminstration hospital in Menlo Park California, Kesey was paid to be an experimental subject of Project MKULTRA, taking psychedelic pharmaceuticals and reporting on their effects. His experiences at the hospital inspired Cuckoo’s Nest. His experiences with LSD inspired the Merry Pranksters bus trip that spawned The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test.

- In the early 60s, Kesey moved to La Honda,California to research and write his second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion. Visitors to his home during that time describe a 24 hour party, with LSD laced punch and crazy Day-Glo art installations in the woods around his property where Kesey would send his houseguests (including, famously, members of the Hell’s Angels) to “expand their minds.” In the midst of this chaos, which he describes as some of the best years of his life, he banged out the first draft for Sometimes a Great Notion, sometimes working 25 to 30 hours straight.

- In 1963 Kesey was called to New York to handle some business relating to the publishing of Sometimes a Great Notion. The resultant cross country trip, in an International Harvester bus painted in Day-Glo colors with a band of friends who called themselves the “pranksters,” was an early harbinger of the “hippie” movement. The Merry Pranksters staged concerts on the top of their tripped-out bus, visited Kerouac (who found them too loud) and Timothy Leary (who found them disrespectful), and created chaos in the various small towns along their circuitous route from California to New York and back again.

Check out a video with a Pranksters retrospective here.

- In 1965, he was arrested for marijuana. He fled to Mexico for a while before finally returning to serve a 5 month sentence. After that, he settled down in Pleasant Hill, Oregon to raise his family and teach a graduate writing seminar for U of O.

- Among Kesey’s later works was a children’s book calls “Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear” and a pulp fiction style novel about an Oregon rodeo.

- Kesey died November 10, 2001 in Eugene, Oregon. He is survived by his son, Zane and daughters Shannon and Sunshine.

Read the Wikipedia entry about Kesey.

Did you know the man? Share your remembrances of Kesey here.

…
buy tickets to Sometimes a Great Notion || read blogs about Sometimes A Great Notion || free community events about Kesey || top of page