http://www.statesmanjournal.com/article/20100708/NEWS/7080343/1001
By Barbara Curtin
July 8, 2010
Long before Ken Kesey penned "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and
"Sometimes a Great Notion," the novels that would make him famous, he
was a kid spinning tales to his rapt cousins on a family farm in Coburg.
"Ken was always a storyteller even when we were kids," his younger
cousin Jim Kesey, now 70, recalled this week. "We would lay out and
look up at the stars on a pile of hay, on a boat, under a grape
arbor, us little kids. Ken was a leader. I wasn't surprised (at his success)."
Now retired and living in the Tillamook County town of Hebo, Jim
shared newspaper clippings and childhood photos of the Kesey clan
with the Pentacle Theatre, which opens its production of "Cuckoo's
Nest" on Friday. But he says he didn't presume to advise Jo Dodge and
Tony Zandol, the director and set designer, how to stage the play.
Jim had gone off to college in Colorado and didn't see much of his
cousin while Ken was writing "Cuckoo's Nest" in Palo Alto., Calif.
But he remembers one visit during which Ken showed him the little
shack behind the house where he did his writing.
"I noticed when we were in there, he had a sprinkler on the roof. He
said that was to get him in the mood of Oregon," Jim said. "He used
it to keep the cottage cool."
As a graduate student at Stanford University, Ken experimented with
LSD to earn some extra money as part of a CIA-financed experiment at
the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital. He also worked in the hospital's
psychiatric ward.
"When he wrote 'Cuckoo's Nest' (published in 1962), he told me it was
pretty easy to write," said Jim. "He got almost all his information
from working in that psychiatric ward. He just set it in Oregon."
Jim, meanwhile, joined the Marine Corps and shipped out for Vietnam.
He read his cousin's 1964 novel, "Sometimes a Great Notion," on a
ship in the China Sea.
Any Kesey could have picked out the family stories in that book, said
Jim. But he appreciated its importance to literature as well: "I
really thought he reached, as far as literature is concerned, way
beyond anything written before. ... I could tell when I read that
book that it was going to be a classic."
Although the two cousins' lives were taking very different paths,
they still got along well. Jim remembered a visit to Ken in
California when a group of Ken's friends, the Merry Pranksters, were
readying a bus for the cross-country trip that Tom Wolfe later
immortalized in "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test."
"I had my Marine Corps haircut with all these hippies, but the word
was out, you didn't give Jimmy any (expletive)," said Jim. "Ken was
proud of what I was doing. Ken was a very patriotic person. He loved
America. He had a flag painted on one of his front teeth."
Jim went on to succeed in two fields: as a landscape contractor and
working with youth in Oregon and California. He retired about three
years ago from his last job, as a youth counselor for Tillamook County.
Ken would never match the success of his first two novels. He lived
his later years in Pleasant Hill, Ore., and occasionally made
appearances at rock festivals. He died following liver surgery in 2001.
"People want to put him in a box as a dopehead or a hippie, but he
was neither of those," said Jim. "He was a good father and loved his
kids. He was a neat person. We've all made mistakes in our lives and
Ken did his share, but by and large he was a good heart a good heart."
--
bcurtin@statesmanjournal.com or (503) 399-6699
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