Ken Kesey, Springfield Boy, and the Bus That Left for Everywhere
Near Eugene, Oregon
Ken Kesey grew up in Springfield, the city that abuts Eugene to the east, across the river. His parents had moved there from Colorado when he was ten to run a dairy cooperative. He graduated from Springfield High School and enrolled at the University of Oregon, where he wrestled and played football and started writing. He graduated in nineteen fifty-seven and went to Stanford on a creative writing fellowship.
At Stanford he volunteered for government-sponsored drug experiments at the Veterans Hospital in Menlo Park, California, experiments that exposed him to LSD and mescaline among other compounds. He began working the night shift as a ward attendant in the psychiatric unit and started writing a novel. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was published in nineteen sixty-two. Sometimes a Great Notion, a longer and more technically ambitious novel set in an Oregon logging town, came out in nineteen sixty-four. Both were written before he was thirty.
By nineteen sixty-four, Kesey had returned to Oregon and assembled a group of friends who called themselves the Merry Pranksters. In the summer of that year they painted a school bus in lurid Day-Glo colors, named it Furthur, and drove it from California to New York and back. Tom Wolfe would document the trip in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, published in nineteen sixty-eight.
Kesey spent the rest of his life on a farm in Pleasant Hill, east of Eugene, raising cattle and continuing to write. He died in Eugene in November of two thousand and one. His influence on Eugene is less a matter of specific institutions than of a general permission: the idea that the Willamette Valley was a place where unconventional things were allowed to become the local character rather than be pushed to the margins.
His statue stands in a downtown Eugene square that bears his name. He is depicted reading to his grandchildren.
