Concerning the previous post, Wikipedia describes Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest thus.
Set in an Oregon psychiatric hospital, the narrative serves as a study of institutional processes and the human mind, including a critique of psychiatry and a tribute to individualistic principles.
As it happens, my life intersected briefly with Ken Kesey’s quasi-fictional world. Let me tell you a true story.
Fifty plus years ago I was a doctoral student at the University of Oregon. I was unmarried and good friends with a married student - Tom - in the same program. Tom’s wife Mary (not their real names) was a young tradwife and they lived in ramshackle married student housing, a relic of the GI Bill days.
Transplants from sunny CA, Tom and I studied together, consumed pizza and beer together, and cursed OR’s gloomy skies. Mary developed psychiatric problems and was treated locally, to little avail.
Mary needed more treatment. Tom having little money, the state psychiatric hospital libeled by Kesey was not only the obvious, but probably the only choice for her treatment. My VW beetle being more reliable than his junker, we piled Mary and Tom in and I drove them north to Salem where she was admitted.
That much-maligned hospital actually helped Mary and she eventually came home to Tom. We both graduated and stayed in touch but lived in different parts of the country.
With the same degree our careers took different paths, he went to industry, I to academia. He earned more money, I had more stability.
As you might surmise, her problems recurred off and on for another couple of decades, through a couple of successful pregnancies. They eventually divorced when their sons were adults.
The late 1960s were a strange time. I drove a psychotic Mary north to Ken Kesey’s hospital and another friend and fellow grad student drove a heavily pregnant Mama Cass Elliot south to LA. And more than once I took cases of embargoed Coors beer north to Oregon where the sixpacks were prized trophies.
By the way, the answer to your unspoken question is “No,” I did nothing stronger than vodka, and not much of that. But I sure knew lots of losers who did the illegal stuff, even in the Business grad school.
