 Who was Ken Keesey? Here's what Ken Babs wrote. Captain Marvell, Captain America, Davey Crockett, Lord Buckley, J.P. Barnum, Paul Revere, John Wayne, Casey Jones, Carl Sandberg, John Henry, Hank Stamper, Herman Melville, Paul Bunyan, Randall Patrick McMurphy, Bullseye Marble Shooting Champ, Baby Coon Capture, Cave Explorer, Flesh Eater, Blood Guzzler, Dead Shot, Rifle to Shoulder, He Ames at a Raccoon in a Tree. The Raccoon says, Is your name Ken Keesey? I thought so. You needn't take no further trouble. And he hikes down the tree for he already considers himself shot. But Keesey pats him on the head and says, I hope I shoot myself first for I've never had such a compliment in my life. Champion wrestler, arguifier, lover, allocutioner, writer, actor, owner of the ugliest dog in the west. Runs faster, dives deeper, stays under longer, and comes out higher than any man on the McKenzie. Out screams a panther, out stares a flash of lightning, totes a Nash rambler on his back, plays rough and tumble with a mountain lion, sleeps under a blanket of snow, walks like an ox, runs like a fox, swims like an eel, yells like a banshee, fights like a devil, spouts like an earthquake, makes love like a mad bull, and swallows a bare hole without choking if someone butters the critter's head and pins back its ears. He's also the author of the best-selling novels One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion. Well, except for that last sentence, that's the Keesey myth. But behind it and inside it was a real man, the wizard with words, Ken Keesey, who created that myth and made the magic that has astounded us all for several decades. What we're going to try to do tonight is to give you a glimpse of that real man who, in many ways, was a giant among us, even if he couldn't really eat a bear with its ears pinned back. He was to start a giant of kindness. And I would guess that almost every one of you who ever met the man has some story to tell of that kindness. People who only knew him from his books would hitchhike across the country to meet him, convinced he had some special truth that could help them with their own lives. And from what I hear, he almost never turned any of them away. Name me another man or woman as famous as Ken Keesey. You can say that of. You would be hard put to find one. In my case, I asked him to come down to San Francisco in 1995 for a benefit that I was putting on for my friend Jan Kerouac, Jack Kerouac's daughter, who was dying of kidney failure. Jan was caught up in a tough fight against her father's estate which had shut her out of the millions of dollars it was generating. And there was a lot of heavy political pressure being exerted on beat celebrities not to take part in that benefit. Some of that pressure was put on Keesey too. I know because he told me. But Ken came down from Oregon anyway and did two shows for Jan. He told me the political pressure meant nothing to him. Jack Kerouac's daughter was sick and he owed a debt to the writing of Jack Kerouac. So how could he not come down and help her out? I owed my own debt to Ken for that and tonight is part of my way of paying him back. The Universalist Minister, Paul Sawyer, a close friend of Ken's, wrote that Ken was a warrior of the spirit. Never a military man. He was a veteran of the larger war in which we are all engaged. How to be ourselves to the full limit of our powers and to share that most fully with all our fellow beings. How to change of our strength and love of life. Ken Keesey touched millions of lives and almost everyone I know acknowledges a positive difference that Ken made in his or her life. His friend Bob Laird told me that even Ken's close friends probably numbered in the thousands. What was his secret? Many have speculated. It was his way with words. His enormous strength and energy. His handsome face, his charisma. I would like to suggest something else. Never trust a prankster, they always said. But the pranksters were nothing if not masters of contradiction. And in fact, in one of Ken's later writings in Demon Box, he extolled trust as the glue that holds human society together. And he insisted on the need to honor human trust. That was the quote I selected to be on tonight's program. Trust does expect to reel in something if it casts far and often and deep enough, Ken wrote. It expects these things because these things have been signified. I submit that Ken Kesey honored the trust of his fellow human beings to a degree that is tremendously rare in our society or any society. And that his ability to honor the trust of others was one of the cornerstones of his true greatness.