From Friends, Spring Break 1965, and LSD at Esalen

John Dufford lived in a cottage on Homer Lane. After I smoked pot with Norman Linke near the end of Winter quarter 1965, I clung to Norman like an older brother.  As we hung out in various cottages of that little compound, John quietly adopted me as a protege, almost like a son. Norman introduced me to marijuana. John introduced me to LSD.

 John was a skinny young man with glasses and curly hair whose nerdy neurotic presence evoked a non-comedic Woody Allen.  He wore very plain clothing, which kept him comfortably in the background of an otherwise colorful scene.

Here’s what I remember about John, from what he told me. He had just finished his BA at Stanford with the rarely granted option of having no major.  He designed a cross-disciplinary program to write a dissertation  comparing the world’s mystical traditions (probably under the auspices of Frederick Spiegelberg).  He had been a percussionist with the Dallas Symphony, as its youngest member. He and his wife Diana came to Stanford together. (They were divorced but she now lived in another cottage on Homer Lane with her current boyfriend Vic Lovell, who turned Ken Kesey onto LSD. She later married Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog).

When I first met John he was teaching at Pacific High, a free-form school on the model of Summerhill. John brought an intensity and a hint of the mystical and mysterious to everything he did. He had a piano in his cottage on which he played intensely emotional classical music and got visibly shaken by the experience. He plunged into many edgy spiritual and pseudo spiritual practices. He wanted to create a serial publication covering the burgeoning  countercultural human potential movement at a time when there were no such publications yet. 

 John appeared several times when I was working on a transition. I think he saw himself as a cosmic midwife.

Q5 Winter 65, I was Living at Maybell, hanging out at Homer Lane after  smoking grass with Norman. I got to know John well enough that he met me at my parents’ home during Spring Break to take me to lunch with Fritz Perls. John and I had been talking about making a periodical human potential directory together.

At Spring Break 1965 I describe the lunch at a Hungarian restaurant with John and Fritz Perls. During that week I also went with John to Subud but I waited outside the room when he went in.

Q6 Spring 1965. Dropping out in earnest. I don’t think I had a place to live this quarter. I think as the quarter began I was sleeping on John Dufford’s couch in his cottage on Homer Lane.

Q6 Spring 1965. The next place I lived that quarter was with a middle aged single mother and her young daughter who John somehow knew. He drove me to their house  in a lower middle class neighborhood pretty far from campus. While there I had a very short lived job teaching drums at a small music store. I was living there when I went to the Oakland Induction Center to enlist in the Army.

Summer 1965 I was at my parents house for the summer. John was in and out a lot as he was turning on their most courageous (foolhardy?)  neighborhood friends to LSD. 

I stayed at John’s place in Los Gatos for what turned out to be  the transition between Mount Rushmore and Salvation.