Last
Thursday night, Linda and I went to Bookshop Santa Cruz to hear Lee Quarnstrom
read from his memoir When I Was a
Dynamiter, or How a Nice Catholic Boy Became a Merry Prankster, a Pornographer
and a Bridegroom 7 Times.
As one of
our local journalists put it, there probably isn’t anyone else alive who could
have written a book with that subtitle.
My interest
in going was personal. I knew Lee not as a dynamiter, a Merry Prankster, or a
pornographer, but rather as a newspaperman, and a very good one at that. When I
joined the Watsonville
Register-Pajaronian as a cub reporter in 1972, Lee was covering county
government for the paper, which he did through mid-1978. He once said that if
it weren’t for the low wages, he wouldn’t have worked anywhere else.
Eventually,
a better paying offer drew Lee to Hustler
magazine in Los Angeles, where he rose to the position of executive editor
before leaving to finish his career as a reporter with the San Jose Mercury.
Remembering the Pranksters
I could
write an entire blog post (and maybe two or three) about Lee’s exploits as a
newspaper reporter, but those days took up a small part of the memoirs. The
book actually came out at the beginning of the year, and I bought it then and
read (and enjoyed) it in February.
Lee was one
of the people who fell into the orbit of novelist Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) and his
Merry Pranksters in the mid-1960s. Their experimentation with psychedelics and
alternative living was immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s Book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
Their home
base was La Honda, a small community nestled in a redwood-shaded canyon about
30 miles north of Santa Cruz, where the book reading was held. A number of
people from what is now commonly referred to as the hippie scene of the sixties
are still around, particularly in Santa Cruz. It occurred to me that he should
have a large built-in audience for his book reading, if only they could stay up
past their normal bedtimes.
Those Were the Days
I shouldn’t
have worried. When I got to the bookstore 20 minutes before the start of the
reading, every seat was already taken. I was able to talk to Lee for a couple
of minutes, then was able to grab a chair when the bookstore staff started
putting out some extras. It was still standing room only, and I was sitting
behind some of the standees, so I could hear the reading, but not see the
author.
Over a
period of a bit over an hour, Lee read sections from his memoir about why he
was a skinny kid (his mom was clueless about cooking), how the Merry Pranksters
were raided by the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Department, and what happened
when one of the employees of Hustler
went out to buy a live chicken as a wedding present for Publisher Larry Flynt.
Don’t ask.
Being with
Kesey and the Pranksters, Lee was an eyewitness to a distinct moment in
American cultural history. It’s still up in the air how important a moment it
will turn out to be, but in his book, Lee captured quite a bit of it for
posterity. As he read from that book on a rainy late-fall night in Santa Cruz,
all of us in the audience had a rare opportunity to be there with him.
