After 50 years, the riotously painted 1939 Harvester school bus—in which novelist Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters embarked on their famous 1960s psychedelic trip—is returning to San Francisco for refurbishment and public exhibition. This past summer, Kesey’s son and daughter-in-law pulled the rusty icon out of their family barn in Oregon for the first time since 1969, to be part of Forever Grateful, an art show put on by the Haight Street Art Center, celebrating San Francisco’s counterculture, opening on September 5 in Golden Gate Park. The bus, named Furthur, was made famous as the eponymous central character in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, an iconic work of New Journalism. But it also holds meaning for my family, a relic of our complicated legacy of artistic brilliance and mental illness.
I first learned about the bus trip from my uncles, Carl and Alexander “Sandy” Lehmann-Haupt, the younger brothers of my father, Christopher, when I was a kid in the 1970s. My dad was the straight one who joined the army, attended Yale, and eventually became a book critic for the New York Times. His siblings, on the other hand, both took a far-left turn, exploring the outer edges of the psychedelic movement in the Bay Area in the 1960s. Carl, a painter, became friends with Kesey, then a student in Stanford’s creative writing program, and started hanging out with him in Kesey’s group house on Perry Lane in Menlo Park. Around that same time, Kesey had been furtively borrowing LSD from the hospital where he was volunteering in a psychedelic drug–testing program, covertly funded by the CIA, to test how drugs might be used to counter alleged communist mind control. Kesey bought the bus with the proceeds of the theatrical sale of his novel One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. In a series of cross-country road trips in 1964, the Merry Prankster splattered the bus’s yellow exterior with colors; dressed up in carnival masks, headdresses, and cowboy boots; and blared cacophonous sounds, all in the name of an art experiment confronting 1950s American conformity.
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Sandy, the youngest of the three brothers, had been working as a sound engineer in the Manhattan jazz scene. He later joined the bus crew to wire up its sound system. After the trip, Sandy often met up with Wolfe on a bench in Central Park, regaling him with scenes (later recounted in Wolfe’s prose) of the Pranksters’ road adventure and the acid parties at the Avalon ballroom, where Jerry Garcia’s house band, the Warlocks, unleashed frenetic blues rock.
As a teenager, I reveled in reading the scenes written by Wolfe where Sandy, known to his busmates as Dis-mount, threw green smoke bombs off the roof of the bus at Timothy Leary’s Millbrook estate or about the time he climbed up a tree on LSD, convinced he could read his buddy George Walker’s mind. This mythology was so different from the nightly dinners in my parents’ suburban home outside New York City, where, every night, like clockwork, my dad would adjourn to his study to review William F. Buckley Jr.’s or E.L. Doctorow’s latest books for the Grey Lady. But I also knew that Sandy’s wild character caused enormous difficulty and was not as romantic as the rebellious scenes in the book made him out to be.
On a foggy afternoon in August, I headed over to the County Fair Building in Golden Gate Park to visit Furthur. So many secondhand memories flooded my brain as an art producer on the show, Erica Steimetz, greeted me at the building entrance and we walked around the bus together. The neon-painted word “Furthur” just above the front windshield and painted images of peeling castles, faded to muted colors, intermingled with rust, shattered windowpanes, and moss still clinging to the radiator grill from its decades in the barn.
Many San Franciscans are nostalgic for this era, packaged in the Forever Grateful exhibition, when people practiced radical love, rebellious consciousness expansion, and communal living. That zeitgeist is a stark contrast from today’s Bay Area, awash in billionaires, unaffordable housing, AI algorithms, and university-backed psychedelic research focused on promoting mental health. “Often people get too hung up on the drug story,” says Kelly Harris, director of the Haight Street Art Center, when we spoke on the day of my tour. “They miss the profound artistic expansion, experimentation, and human connection. Once again, it can be a catalyst for cultural change.”
I liked her optimism, and yet my family history was a cautionary tale. The day before, Steimetz told me, Cathy Cassady, the daughter of writer and Merry Prankster Neal Cassady (Jack Kerouac’s inspiration for the main character in On the Road), had visited with her son and granddaughter. It was bittersweet, Cathy had said, because the bus really represented her dad’s decline. Neal died of a drug overdose in Mexico when he was 41, four years after his ride on Furthur. In the rear of the bus, Steimetz showed me a single black wire jutting from a faded, paint-splattered socket installed by my uncle, dangling just above the empty space where a speaker once blared. Like Cathy, seeing the bus didn’t carry me back to a moment of radical expression, but instead to one of complicated memories.
In the fall of 1963, Kesey, Carl, and Sandy attended the theatrical opening of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest at the Cort Theatre on West 48th Street in Manhattan. That summer, Sandy’s mind had descended into a crippling depression, and he had checked himself into Bellevue Hospital, where he was diagnosed with a mood disorder. At a party in Greenwich Village following the show, Sandy was inspired by Kesey’s dynamism. He decided not to go back to Bellevue and instead joined the crew on a road trip to California.
My first memory of Sandy was of my dad telling me about his time at Rikers Island sometime in the 1970s because he’d been arrested for assault and battery. Weeks later, a bearded man with haunted eyes appeared at our front door in New York. My parents used words like bipolar disorder and lithium and made up a bed for him in my playroom, where he slept for days. His problems had begun before the drugs—a family history of mental illness and instability—but it turned out the extremely high doses of LSD did not make him better; they exacerbated his psychosis.
Wolfe wrote in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test that Sandy had trouble staying “on the bus.” A famous scene in the book describes a night when Sandy was so high and paranoid on LSD that he climbed to the top of a ravine and screamed about jumping off cliffs. “The Monterey police held him in the jail in Monterey until his brother Chris could get there from New York,” Wolfe wrote. “Chris ran into Kesey at the jail. We’ve got to get him out of here, said Kesey. ‘What do you mean?’ Chris asked. ‘We’ve got to get him back where he belongs, with the Pranksters.’”
My dad had always been against Sandy’s joining the Prankster experiment. “I thought it was a cheap, reductive metaphor that was an easy way out of solving the real problems in America, like poverty and the Cold War,” he once told me. “Carl and I were in a tense philosophical battle, and I thought the decision to turn him over to Kesey was just the opposite of what he needed.”
Sandy eventually moved to a quiet upstate New York town and found stability through Alcoholics Anonymous, modern pharmaceuticals, and a supportive marriage. In 2001, he passed away from a pulmonary embolism at the age of 59. In his New York Times obituary, headlined “Sandy Lehmann-Haupt, 59, One of Ken Kesey’s Busmates,” he was described as having “succeeded in leaving behind the troubled 22-year-old who rode the bus on trips both physical and metaphorical.”
After my uncle died, Wolfe sent my dad a condolence letter in his famous calligraphy. “He made me laugh,” Wolfe wrote. “He made me wonder about things that never occurred to me, such as how depression or paranoia utterly alters one’s attitude towards comedy, which as Sandy pointed out almost always has a vein of cruelty.”
In the end, sobriety is what saved my uncle, though he was still part of the rust, shattered glass, and unpolished truth of this past. “Not everybody always had a great time, right?” Steimetz said when I visited the bus. “It doesn’t take away from things, but we have to acknowledge it and come to terms with that.”
Sandy taught me that no matter how hard things get, you don’t need to conform to the group. You can lift yourself out of difficulty. “He was a true survivor,” my uncle Carl once told me. His wires carried both ecstatic noise and distress, signaling that freedom without structure can become self-abandonment. In the end, he found himself and knew when to get off the bus.•
Rachel Lehmann-Haupt is an award-winning journalist and author who lives in Sausalito, California.
