Since I’ve mused in the past about the intellectual history of the counterculture, I wanted to note the passing of Augustus Owsley Stanley III, better known as Owsley Stanley (or “Bear” to his friends). As the San Francisco scene’s most famous manufacturer of LSD, Stanley was responsible, in some sense, for an important aspect of the intellectual history of the Summer of Love. He also served as the Grateful Dead’s sound engineer. He was killed on Sunday when he lost control of his car and hit an embankment in his adoptive home of Queensland, Australia. The New York Times obit is here.
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Ben (& Others): Here’s a NYT article of interest on Stanley’s larger cultural significance (i.e. marketing “The Sixties”). – TL