Calling Ken Kesey

A grandchild of the '60s recalls a bedtime story about the bull-goose Prankster that echoes through her family to this day.

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

Nov. 17, 2001 | Although I'm not of the generation that you'd expect to be affected by the death of a '60s icon, Ken Kesey had -- no, still has -- a special relationship to my family. When I was a kid, my dad, Henry, talked about Bob Dylan and Timothy Leary like they'd been our next-door neighbors for years, always forgetting that my younger brother Ethan and I weren't born until the late 1970s. Our favorite bedtime story was always "The Time Dad Called Ken Kesey." He was stoned at the time -- my dad, that is -- and he saw Kesey's name in the "Whole Earth Catalog" and gave him a call. And although Kesey was already a celebrity by then, he was kind enough to give dad a few words of advice.

"Well," Dad laughs when I ask him about it, "it's hard to remember what's stoned and what's not stoned. It's not that I was stoned a lot in those days. Compared to everybody else, I was stoned hardly at all, but anyway there was one section in the 'Catalog' that was a handwritten note by Kesey, and I was totally convinced that it said 'Henry' right in the middle. This was a message specifically to me. I was sure that he had cooked up this very complicated plan of getting it published in the 'Whole Earth Catalog,' knowing that I'd read it, and presto, you know, I would get it. I mean it is a little crazy. I knew Kesey lived in Springfield, Ore., so I got the number and called him up.

"His wife, Faye, answered the phone. And I said, 'Hello, is Ken there? This is Henry.'

"And she said, 'Who?'

"'Henry. Tell him I got his message.'

"So she got off the phone, and Kesey got on.

"And I said, 'Hi, this is Henry. I got your message.'

"'What message?'

"'The one in the "Whole Earth Catalog," remember?'

"And he said, 'Where?'

"And we both got out the 'Catalog,' and looked at the same page, and then I read it to him, and as I was reading it I realized the word that I thought was 'Henry,' was 'learn.' It was handwritten, sort of scratched. You know, it looked like it could have been 'Henry' if you were slightly stoned.

"I said, 'Oops!' and I was kind of embarrassed, and he said, 'Nahh, don't worry about it. The exact same thing happened to me with William Burroughs!'"

My young father then felt himself to be but a pebble in the tide of counterculture history, kin with the hippies and descendant of beatniks, and this kept him going satisfactorily for the next 20 years or so. The story also has a moral of sorts, in which Kesey imparts to my father some famous advice. When telling the story, however, Dad always seemed to forget this. Maybe it was the drugs. But I never forgot, and I always had to prompt him.

"Did he have anything else to say; did he give you any advice or anything?" I'd ask pointedly.

Next page: The Kesey legacy of carefree, Prankster-style life also has a darker edge