Further Adventures of the Merry Pranksters - Flashback 1964

Flashback - 1964

Further Adventures with the Merry Pranksters

Ken Kesey and Company are heading north in their day glow painted 1939 Harvester bus, Neil Cassidy at the wheel, Babbs riding shotgun - navigator in the lounge chair propped next to the door, Ken Kesey looking over his shoulder and eyes focused down the highway.

They are headed for New York, where Kesey's new book would be published, and then on to Boston, but Kesey had a few stops in mind, one to Arthur Young's farm outside Philadelphia, and then a pit stop at Sunshine Park nudist colony near the Jersey Shore.

Young isn't expecting them but that's the norm for Kesey and his band of Pranksters, as they take their LSD laced Kool Aide Test on the road and bounce off walls and trip down the highway, which gives new meaning to the word high-way - a double entendre. 

Off the highway they head towards Brandywine, and agree to adopt that as the flavor for their next batch that's already in the works. Finding the mailbox with the name "Young," Cassidy turns sharply up a winding dirt road to a 300 year old Quaker farm house with a large brick barn in the back with a hex sigh above the door.

Only Kesey gets out - giving the others a hand signal to stay put and behave, something they are not inclined to do, but obey the boss.

Kesey is the boss, having his second novel "Sometimes a Great Notion" published and awaiting a movie to be made of his first - "One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest," the movie rights to which he sold to Kirk Douglas for $10,000. The cash deal was sealed at a Hollywood bar and signed off on a bar napkin. With the money Kesey bought the bus and was spending the rest bankrolling this trip.

So with the wave of his hand the Pranksters stayed put as Kesey knocked on the ancient hard wood door.

Mrs. Young opened the door and sheepishly says hello to Kesey, who asks for Mister Young, who appears behind his wife, looking at Kesey over her shoulder.

Kesey introduces himself, saying he was driving east from the West Coast and that John Lilly and Stewart Brand had both suggested he stop by and say hello because "we had a lot in common," or at least some common interests.

At the names of Lilly and Brand, Arthur Young breaks into a big smile and opens the door wider inviting Kesey in.

While the two men shake hands, Mrs. Young smiles and walks into an adjoining room.

"How are they?" Young asks, but ignoring the question Kesey asks if he can move the bus over to the stream he passed on the way in so his friends could have lunch and chill, and with the nod of Young’s head, Kesey pokes his head out the door and with another hand signal Cassidy closes the bus door and swings it around behind the barn.

Settling down by a cold fireplace in a book filled library, Kesey and Young begin a banter back and forth trying to discover what Lilly and Brand thought they had in common, and there was plenty.

Their mutual friend John Lilly was a scientist who was studying the brain of dolphins and the effect of isolation tanks on consciousness, while Stewart Brand ran a California think tank that was collating a catalogue of radical counter culture products and services that would become the Whole Earth Catalogue.

Arthur Young was an eccentric genius, inventor of the Bell Helicopter 47A - the first commercially licensed helicopter, the promoter of the philosophy of process, and was now experimenting with ESP, remote viewing, x-raying the pyramids and other esoteric ideas generally rejected by serious science.

Kesey told Young that he was done writing novels since LSD taught him that literature wasn't where it was at, though he wasn't exactly sure where it was at, or what it was at at all.

Young understood, nodding his head, asking Kesey what his birthday was and where he was born, and while they talked, began to write out Kesey's astrological chart, while Mrs. Young reentered the room with a pitcher of ice tea.

Young explained his son in law experimented with pot, peyote and mushrooms, but he could achieve the same altered consciousness with yoga, and explained that was more interested in remote viewing, and remote medical diagnosis, and while he believed LSD had potential, it was dangerous if not approached in the right way.

Kesey said he planned on visiting Tim Leary at Harvard, who was experimenting with LSD in a more controlled environment than Kesey and the Pranksters, and told Young that he was first turned on to LSD by a Stanford professor who was paid by the CIA to conduct the experiments. And Kesey noted, LSD was still legal, though there were laws against it in the works. 

Kesey said he was interested in testing LSD in an isolation tank while practicing remote viewing, an idea that sparked Young to clap his hands and remark that by combining the three experiments - LSD - isolation tank and remote viewing - a form of time travel was conceivably possible, and then he drifted off thinking about it for a few moments that Kesey didn't interrupt. 

Kesey asked Young about Sunshine Park, the nudist colony where he had heard was a place where some interesting experiments were taking place, including a psychiatrist who practiced scream therapy and a scientist who had built a new type of isolation tank, though Young had also heard such things, he himself had never been there.

During an interesting conversation that lasted several hours, Young confessed he was proud of the fact that his baby - his helicopter was used as a medical evacuation med-vac in Korea, and as it would be later portrayed in MASH, but he was a bit dismayed the latest Bell Helicopter - the one they called the HUEY had been developed into an attack helicopter for use in Vietnam. After staring into space again for a moment, he  just shook his head and shrugged his shoulders, as if he could not determine what use other men applied to his invention.

Then, as their conversation winded down, Young escorted Kesey through the kitchen and out the back door to the barn where Young picked up a little black box, took out a hand control device and set a model helicopter into motion, raising it off the ground and out the open barn door - buzzing the Pranksters by the bus who were skinny dipping on the rocks in the fast moving stream.

Young said he was also proud of the fact that nobody died in accidents in the 20 year development of his helicopter because he created the working model first and then built the full scale Model 47A at the Bell fighter plane factory in Buffalo, New York.

So in a sense, besides inventing the first working commercial helicopter, he also invented the remote controlled drone aircraft, an invention that pretty much went unnoticed and unrecognized until the emergence of drones on the battlefield, long after Young had died.

With the Pranksters back on the bus, Arthur Young waved goodbye as Cassidy leaned on the bus horn and drove away, down the winding dirt road, past the stream and pulls back onto the highway - Sunshine Park, Mays Landing, New Jersey their next destination.

Mack & Manco Ocean City New Jersey

Billy Goes AWOL to Atlantic City Pop

July 1969 – Fort Dix New Jersey

Billy Muller – aka “Buzzy White,” was wrapping up a shooting round with his M1 on Range Road, out of bullets but still in shooting position, when he was approached by three guys he recognized from the base band. The two white guys from Tennessee and black dude from Louisiana came up to him and one of them says, “We heard youse from Atlantic City.”

“Yea, - I’m the Barrack’s concierge,” Billy laughs, as he gets up from the prone position and dusts off his uniform pants. "What do ya wanna know?" 

“Well where the hell is McKee City?” 

“Why? What’s in McKee City you want?"

“We want to see B.B. King, Booker T, Johnny Winter and Little Richard,” they each say a different name.

“Get out!” Billy said, as he took a poster out of the hand of one of the guys and looks at it closely. “Holy Shit! This is fucking amazing,” he says in barrack talk.

Although he didn’t know their names yet, he knew them from the base band, led by drill sergeant Leroy Brown, who enlisted Billy in the band when he saw his Les Paul guitar in his locker. Billy didn’t volunteer for the Army and didn’t volunteer for the base band, but he played, played for each of the units as they were preparing to leave for deployment overseas, mainly to Vietnam, and then they played for those who came back from Vietnam, as they got off the plane. He knew these guys were from the south by the way they talked, and the only thing they had in common with Billy was their mutual love of music, especially the blues.

Later that day, early in the evening, after a shower and change of uniform back at the barracks, the four soldiers sat down at the bar of the Satellite Lounge in Wrightstown, just outside the base. As little lights fluttered above their heads like twinkling stars, Billy cuts a deal before the band started playing and its too loud to talk.

“What’s so secret about McKee City?” the black guy asks, “we can’t find it on the map.”

“It’s a small town just across the bay from Atlantic City, and down the Pike a bit,” Billy explains, “and it’s home of the Atlantic City Race Track, where they race horses, and where the festival will be at.”

At, is one of the local diction, it isn’t where it is – it’s where it’s AT, as they say in South Jersey.

“I’ll tell you what,” Billy says. “If you borrow Sergeant Brown’s car for the weekend, I’ll drive us down there and bring us back Sunday night.”

“We got three day leaves, and tickets,” says one of the white guys, “and you got nothing.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Billy says, “we won’t need no tickets as we’re going in the back door, and when we get back, I’ll get three days in the brig for going AWOL and then they’ll ship us all to Vietnam, and this will be out last hurrah until we come home again.

They agreed, and when Sgt. Brown handed Billy the keys, he didn’t realized Billy was going AWOL and didn’t have a pass like the other guys, but he knew Billy liked going to Kentucky Avenue in Atlantic City as they had talked about it before, and so he asked Billy to stop by the Club Harlem and say hello to Chris Columbo, which Billy agreed to do.

They all piled into the old Plymouth, chipped in for gas, and Billy drove through the back roads of the Jersey Pine barrens, and stoped at Bond’s Halfway House on Route 70 for a cold one, before proceeding across the two lane blacktop past the Hedger House and Buzby’s General Store in Chatsworth to New Gretna and then down Route 9 to the Black Horse Pike.

Instead of following the lines of cars entering the main gate to the Race Track and Clubhouse, Billy turns down a small road that ran along the Race Track fence until he got to a small open gate that led to the barns and horse corrals and pulled up to a small trailer. He gets out and the other three watch him as he knocks on the trailer door and turns around a smiles as if he is up to something.

A teenage girl in tight jeans opens the door with a smile and gives Billy a hug and a kiss as he talks to her softly.

“Sure,” she says, “park right there, and your friends can sleep in the barn and you just jump that fence and walk across the track to get to the stage.”

Just as Billy imagined it would happen. 

The three soldiers put their sleeping bags and back packs in the barn, where they stake out spaces from themselves among some of the empty horse stalls, and then jump the fences and head for the stage as Billy and the girl retreat into the trailer.

The Atlantic City Pop Festival – Day One has begun.