DEATH OF THE MERRY PRANKSTER

KEN KESEY, who helped usher in the cultural convulsions of the 1960s,
died Sunday at age 66.

A robust, barrel-chested scholar-athlete who hailed from the rural
woods of the Pacific Northwest, Kesey never looked the part of a
beatnik or a hippie. Yet, as a champion of mind-expanding drugs, he
became a local legend, immortalized in Tom Wolfe's 1968 classic
account of the San Francisco psychedelic music scene, "The Electric
Kool-Aid Acid Test."

Kesey burst onto the literary scene in 1963 with the novel, "One Flew
Over the Cuckoo's Nest," which resonated deeply with a generation
weary of the conformity of the 1950s, ready to question received
wisdom and eager to explore the boundaries of human consciousness.

A charismatic champion of mind-expanding drugs, Kesey jump-started
the cultural revolution when he led a LSD-fueled band of Merry
Pranksters across the country in an old school bus, painted in the
colored swirls that would stamp the psychedelic aesthetic of the
decade.

Kesey's influence still reverberates in the cultural wars that have
polarized the culture for the past three decades. Somewhere, surely,
he is grinning over that legacy.

Dale Gieringer