Welcome to a new series on the Massé Musings Substack platform: EXTRAORDINARY LIVES. Some of these individuals are famous, but most are not. Their lives are extraordinary because of the challenges they have faced, the impact they have had, and the special qualities they possess. This new extended profile is of Ken Babbs, a member of the legendary 1960s Merry Pranksters, featured in Tom Wolfe’s bestselling classic The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I met Babbs via his son O.B., who was a student when I taught in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon in the early 1990s. Ken Babbs remains the most colorful individual I have ever met, and his life story is an American original. Hope you enjoy the first installment of this three-part series.
Author’s Note: This narrative contains both witnessed and recreated scenes, documented dialogue and facts gathered through extensive interviews and secondary research. But there is also material based on informed speculation. Ken Babbs is a real person, but the truth about him is often elusive.
“Intrepid Prankster” (Part One)
“I grew up in a golden damn time.”(Ken Babbs)
Tonight Ken Babbs is hosting a Greenwich Village nightclub birthday tribute to his idol, Neal Cassady, the legendary Beat generation car thief, sexaholic and famed On the Road traveler. Cassady was first immortalized in the late 1950s by his friend and author Jack Kerouac and later chronicled by literary journalist Tom Wolfe, who shared the highways and byways with Cassady, Babbs, wunderkind novelist Ken Kesey and the rest of the psychedelic bus riding revolutionaries known as the Merry Pranksters in the mid-1960s. Now, three decades later, Babbs has traveled from Dexter, Oregon, to the Big Apple to pay homage to Cassady and “show those New Yorkers what a good time is all about.”
He bounds on stage in baggy khakis, Birkenstock sandals over sweat socks and a Hawaiian shirt full of purple and yellow parrots. Babbs stands tall, hands on hips, chin cocked upward like a silent screen star awaiting applause. Smiling like a mischievous man-child he begins:
“Laadeez and Gennillmen, I am Ken Babbs. If you ever read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe, you’ll remember me as “The Intrepid Traveler.” If you don't remember, then shame on all yor sorry asses.” Babbs holds a bottle of Lowenbrau in his right hand as he cradles the microphone in his paw of a left. “Tonight, we celebrate the memory of and pay homage to Neal Cassady—our beloved ‘Holy Goof,’ who was born on this day back in, uh, uh, well, back a while ago. H’yuk, H’yuk, H’yuk.”
For the next two-plus hours, Babbs shows slides of Cassady and the gang from the famous 1964 Merry Prankster bus trip, plays Charlie “Bird” Parker albums and riffs on his own trombone. He tells corny jokes along with excerpts of classic Beat literature.
“My first impression of Dean was of a young Gene Autry—trim, thin-hipped and blue-eyed with a real Oklahoma accent—a sideburned hero of the snowy West,” Babbs reads from On the Road. “You saw that in the way he stood bobbing his head, always looking down, nodding, like a young boxer to instructions, throwing in a thousand ‘yesses’ and ‘That’s right.’ ”
As his performance draws to a close, Babbs flips his black Portland Trail Blazers cap backwards on his large noggin. His eyelids grow heavy, and he is slurring his words. He has downed many beers and smoked a few joints during breaks, but he has entertained this crowd of young and old Bohemians with bursts of manic energy “like a great hearty grizzly bear roaring a cosmic laugh” as Tom Wolfe had characterized him decades earlier.
Bob Miller, a successful Putnam County (N.Y.) attorney and college classmate of Babbs at Miami University (Ohio), has driven to New York City to catch his performance. Whenever Ken is back East, the two longtime pals try to get together and reminisce about their college days playing basketball court and enjoying life on the bucolic Midwestern campus.
“Babbs always loved holding center stage and entertaining people, and he still does,” Miller says, recalling his friend’s shenanigans. “He was the original free spirit.”
But Ken Babbs was also a brilliant student destined for success, according to Miller.
“Always thought, Kenny was gonna be a big-time writer or a professor. He had everything going for him back then.”
•••
It was a haunting short story by senior student Ken Babbs that caught Professor Walter Havinghurst’s attention. The tale was of a man in a drunken rage who uses a baseball bat to club crabs on a Maryland shore. Later, he falls asleep on the beach. In the middle of the night, he is attacked and eaten alive by waves of hungry crabs. Babbs’ writing was influenced by literary hero Edgar Allan Poe, and it had all the ingredients of classic fiction—dramatic tension, a startling climax and compelling resolution. Above all, it told a helluva story.
“Kenneth, you have a bright future,” the distinguished Havinghurst, with his trimmed moustache, bright bow tie and clipped accent, said to the grinning All-American boy from Mentor, Ohio. “You should apply to graduate school in creative writing and pursue your craft.”
The Dream was alive and well, destined for a happy ending. The Dream had started back in post-WWII America when he was a Midwestern kid reading the stories of Jack London and Mark Twain and tales of real-life heroes like Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone. The Dream was that Ken Babbs would grow up and write great stories one day. He bragged to his college pals and anyone else who would listen that he was destined for fame and fortune.
On his way home after basketball practice one evening, he ran into another of his English professors—John Weigel. “You should apply for a Rhodes scholarship, Ken. You really should.”
This was heady stuff for the former engineering student who had come to Miami University on a U.S. Navy R.O.T.C. scholarship. With the encouragement of Dr. Weigel, he mused about going to England and studying at Oxford or Cambridge. But that really wasn’t his style. He decided to take Havinghurst’s advice and applied to the MFA programs at Stanford, Columbia and Iowa—the nation’s top three postgraduate schools in creative writing. He was accepted by all three.
Babbs chose Stanford (“Always wanted to see the West Coast.”), packing up his 1948 Pontiac and heading to California in a “golden damn time” to be alive, an age when so many hopes and dreams seemed invincible and inevitable. He drove Route 66, musing about meeting On the Road characters Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty in some roadside bar. “Imagine us downing some cold ones and swapping stories. H’yuk, H’yuk, H’yuk.” But Ken Babbs was still more of an overgrown small town boy than hitchhiking hipster.
His dad had raised him with sturdy Midwestern values: “Talent alone won’t make it in this world, son. You have to work hard and keep your nose clean.” Ken said he got his sense of humor and love of reading from his mom, Frances, a Scotch-Irish storyteller with a gift of blarney and a wonderfully warm laugh. She would pass the prankster spirit onto her son.
Back in the fall of 1959, the Stanford University creative writing program had major league literary talent. Ken Kesey, Robert Stone and Larry McMurtry were among Babbs’ grad school classmates. Their mentors included accomplished writers Malcolm Cowley and Wallace Stegner. Kesey, the hale and hearty son of an Oregon dairy farming family, would become Babbs’ lifelong blood brother. The two Kens were salt-of-the-earth, stand-up and speak-your-mind kind of guys. They were big-shouldered and booming-voiced with oversized egos. They dug competitive sports, women and, of course, the Beats. Bound by a psychic friendship, they were destined for the long haul—like Kerouac and Cassady, except with happy endings. Or so they thought.
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© 2023 Mark H. Massé
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