Kesey sign takes me back in time and up to the top of Mt. Pisgah

Reunited with the Kesey sign after four decades. (Photo by Carl Davaz)

It was just a simple sign on a wooden pole, the kind a protester or picketer might carry. But the sight of it swept me back four decades to another time and place—and to the memory of the remarkable man who carried it.

I saw the sign a couple of weeks ago at a gathering of former Register-Guard reporters and editors who are planning a reunion later this month of what we wistfully call “The RG Golden Era,” when our workplace was one of the most creative, dynamic, cutting-edge, and all-around finest daily newspapers on the West Coast.

The sign, a vertical rectangle of cardboard on a varnished brown pole, was leaning against a lobby window of the former Register-Guard headquarters on Chad Drive, where the reunion will be held. On one side of the sign, in bold black letters, were the words: “The Eugene Register-Guard is a sleazy cheapshot rag…and I’m suing them for $4,000,000!”  The other side read: “…Ditto the Eugene Police Department!” Under those words was a jaunty and unmistakable signature—as jaunty and unmistakable as the great Oregon author himself: “Ken Kesey.”

The sight of the sign, intended as a reunion exhibit, swept me back to a chilly November morning in 1983 when I was a 32-year-old newly promoted assistant news editor just arriving at work at the former Register-Guard building on High Street in downtown Eugene. As I walked from the parking lot to the building’s side entrance, I noticed a commotion in front of the building where a swarm of onlookers, TV news trucks, and news reporters and photographers surrounded a big-shouldered, moon-faced man in a black-and-white striped referee shirt. The sign bobbed up and down in Kesey’s hands as he marched back and forth in front of the building, drawing cheers, hoots and applause from the crowd and honks from passing motorists.

One of the newspaper’s photographers, camera raised and ready, flew out the side door and sprinted toward the front of the building. “What’s going on?” I called after him.

“Kesey,” he said. “Kesey’s going on, and he’s mad as hell at The Register-Guard.”

Let me pause to take you back to a spring day in 1969 in Half Day, Illinois. I was an 18-year-old student at Adlai Stevenson High School and fleeing an English class where I’d just endured a stultifying lecture on Henry James that seemed, if possible, more interminable than that author’s sentences. Outside in the school hallway, a friend handed me a worn, much-read copy of Ken Kesey’s “Sometimes a Great Notion.”

“Read this,” she said. “You’ve never read anything like it.”

It took me less than a week to read the book, and my friend was right. I’d never read anything like the novel that some critics hailed as the “Great American Novel.” It was a wild, fragrant, roiling, and unforgettable cauldron of rivers, mountains, people, places, purposes, and propositions. As soon as I finished the last page, I reread the book from the beginning and then devoured “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” The books bored into my suburban Midwestern brain like a red-hot poker, changing the direction and substance of my life in ways I would not understand until many years later.

After finishing college, I worked at Chicago-area newspapers for several years before my wife and I moved to Oregon. We had several reasons for heading West, and high on the list for me was wanting to see and experience firsthand Kesey’s Oregon—and, if lightning struck, perhaps someday meeting the author himself. When we arrived in Eugene, I got a job cleaning carpets and began working on what would become a plotless 800-page novel that I later wisely chose to bury in a Red Wing boots box at the back of a bedroom closet.

When my wife Candy became pregnant, I put novel writing and carpet cleaning on hold and got a real job (with health insurance) on the copy desk in The Register-Guard’s newsroom. That is how, several years later, I came to be working as an assistant news editor on the day the newspaper ran a front-page story about a pre-trial hearing in which a paid government informant dropped Kesey’s name and those of a couple of other prominent local residents in connection with a drug case.

When I came to work the next day, I finally got my long-hoped-for firsthand glimpse of Ken Kesey. But he wasn’t, as I’d envisioned, sitting in a bar in some backwoods burg or fly fishing on the McKenzie River. He was stomping back and forth in front of the newspaper where I worked, waving a sign that called my employer a “sleazy cheapshot rag” because of a story on a front page that I had helped to produce. And he was filing a lawsuit against the newspaper seeking an oh-my-God $4 million in damages.

For a naive and foolish moment, I actually considered walking to the front of the building, introducing myself to Kesey, and telling him how much I admired his work and how it had brought me to Oregon. Then I came to my senses, remembering that, oh yes, I worked for the newspaper that Kesey was suing for $4 million—and that Kesey was mad as all hell and in no mood to be chatting about his books with a Register-Guard editor.

A Lane County Circuit Court judge eventually tossed out Kesey’s lawsuit, and nothing came of the informant’s name-dropping in the drug case. Seven years later, I was working as a newsroom reporter and assigned to write a story about a monument that the Kesey family had commissioned in memory of their son, Jed, a University of Oregon wrestler who had tragically died along with a teammate in a van accident in 1984. The unique bronze sighting monument, created by local sculptor Pete Helzer, was installed on the grassy summit of Mount Pisgah, just a couple miles and a thousand feet elevation from the Kesey family’s farm in Pleasant Hill.

Kesey met me at sunrise at the top of Pisgah. As the sun slowly rose in the morning chill, we stood next to the waist-high sculpture, whose broad top was rippled in relief with the mountains, valleys, rivers, lakes, and towns surrounding us.

He began to talk, openly and gently, about his late son, and he said he knew Pisgah was the perfect location for the monument when his daughter asked where he thought the family would someday meet up again with Jed after they had all passed. “I had this flash,” he said, “and I knew without a doubt that Jed would know to meet us up here on Mount Pisgah.” He recounted the family’s Easter egg hunts on the mountain and how Jed and his brother Zane trained for wrestling by running up the mountainside to the grassy summit.

When we were done talking and the morning climbers began arriving at the summit, I finally told Kesey how years earlier I’d come to read his books and what they had meant to me. He was gracious enough to listen as if he’d never heard such words before from any of his millions of readers. Then he gave me a big ol’ grin, shook my hand with a wrestler’s grip, pulled the brim of his flat cap low against the morning sun’s glare, and headed down the mountain toward home.

p.s. Are you in a book group, or do you know someone who is? My debut novel, “The Garbage Brothers,” is a great read (5 stars from the Chicago Book Review) and provides plenty of material for a lively, fun discussion. It’s available at Tsunami Books, Black Sun Books, J Michaels Books, Barnes & Noble, Paulina Springs Books (in Sisters), and other bookstores. It’s also available online from Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and signed copies can be purchased on this website.