Ken Kesey Takes Final Bus Trip

Laid to rest in a coffin painted in psychedelic swirls of purple, yellow and orange, novelist Ken Kesey took center stage Wednesday for one last time in a theater where he did magic tricks in his youth.

Eulogized as a teacher, trickster, writer and seeker of truth, the author of the novels “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Sometimes a Great Notion” died Saturday at age 66 from complications following surgery to remove a cancerous tumor on his liver.

More than 1,000 people--family, friends and members of the Merry Pranksters, the band of revelers who rode with Kesey on an LSD-fueled cross-country bus trip that helped define the 1960s--bade Kesey farewell.

The memorial service concluded with a recording of the Grateful Dead song, “We Bid You Goodnight.”

Pallbearers loaded the casket onto the latest incarnation of Kesey’s psychedelic bus for a final trip to the Kesey farm in Pleasant Hill, to be buried in the backyard next to his son Jed.

A piper played “Amazing Grace” as the bus drove away.