You’re On the Bus, Or Off the Bus

IN SAN FRANCISCO for another week.  

The Grateful Dead 60th anniversary concert in Golden Gate Park starts tomorrow, and you can already see the swell of tie-dye and hippies on Haight, and a few more sun-damaged mobile home campers on the street.

This 2010 Intenational Harvester school bus conversion was parked on the street near Haight and Ashbury.  The name on the destination plate is a reference to “Furthur,” the 1939 International Harvester school bus purchased by Ken Kesey in 1964 to carry his "Merry Band of Pranksters" cross-country.  The bus was a central character in Tom Wolfe's 1968 book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Trivial Pursuit:  Owsley "Bear" Stanley, the sound man for the dead, and the purveyor of most of the LSD that followed every dead concert in the 1970s, went to my high school in Arlington, Virginia in 1952 and 1953.  His classmate was Shirley Beaty, aka Shirley MacLaine.