ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, June 1, 1996 TAG: 9606030066
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
TYPE: NEWS OBIT
SOURCE: THE BOSTON GLOBE
note: above
THE COUNTERCULTURE guru of the 1960s died in his sleep after a long battle with prostate cancer.
Timothy Leary, the former Harvard professor who became a counterculture hero when he urged the '60s generation to ``Turn on, tune in and drop out,'' died Friday in his hilltop home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 75.
Leary, who turned his battle with terminal prostate cancer into a publicity event, made a career out of violating convention. ``When I found out I was terminally ill,'' he told the Los Angeles Times in August, ``I was thrilled.'' Dying ``is such a taboo topic,'' he explained, and ``I love topics the establishment says are taboo.''
Fans could follow his deteriorating health through his site on the World Wide Web (http://www.leary). Last month, he said he was considering the idea of allowing users of the computer network to watch as he committed suicide.
In the end, though, he died in his sleep surrounded by family and friends, said Carol Rosin, his friend for 25 years. His home page announced his death with a simple ``Timothy has passed.'' It said his last words were ``why not'' and ``yeah.''
Rosin said his remains would be launched into space in September or October, but plans were not complete.
``He was so excited. ... He was literally jumping up and down in his wheelchair when we told him we had made the preparations,'' she said.
Leary was host, confidant and drug supplier to some of the most notorious members of America's counterculture.
The popular British band The Moody Blues even put him in their song ``Legend of a Mind,'' singing, ``Timothy Leary's dead. Oh, no no no ... he's outside looking in.'' After he fell ill, they retooled the lyric, ``Timothy Leary lives,'' and sang it to him over the phone. He said it moved him to tears.
He became famous for promoting the use of hallucinogens during the 1960s when his name became inextricably linked with LSD (he claimed to have taken the drug more than 300 times) and President Richard Nixon called him ``the most dangerous man in America.''
Leary survived prison, flight abroad and prison again in the '70s to become a recurring, if minor, media celebrity of the '80s and '90s when he worked as what he called a ``performing philosopher'' in comedy clubs. He also marketed software, saying that ``psychoactive software will expand consciousness, get you high and even blow your mind. You do it with electronic beeps. Besides all that, it's legal.''
Timothy Francis Leary was born in Springfield, Mass. He briefly attended Holy Cross College in Worcester, Mass., then the U.S. Military Academy, which he quit after 18 months. He earned a bachelor's degree at the University of Alabama in 1942. After serving as a psychologist in an Army hospital during World War II, he earned a master's degree at Washington State University and a doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley.
He was an assistant professor of psychology at Berkeley for five years, then served from 1955 to 1958 as director of psychological research at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital in Oakland, Calif.
He became a lecturer in psychology at Harvard University in 1959. The following year, on a trip to Mexico, he had his first encounter with psychedelic drugs. ``I ate seven of the sacred mushrooms of Mexico and discovered that beauty, revelation, sensuality, the cellular history of the past, God, the Devil - all lie inside my body, outside my mind,'' he said.
When he returned to Harvard, he began conducting experiments with mescaline, psylocybin and LSD in partnership with another Harvard professor, Richard Alpert, who later changed his name to Baba Ram Dass.
When their notoriety spread, they were fired by Harvard and set up shop in a 63-room mansion in Millbrook, N.Y., where they continued their drug experiments. A stream of counterculture luminaries including William Burroughs, Abbie Hoffman, Jack Kerouac and Aldous Huxley dropped by to join in for varying lengths of time.
In addition to hallucinogens, Leary also used marijuana. He was arrested, tried and convicted on marijuana charges in both Texas and California. In 1970, six months into a 10-year sentence on the latter conviction, Leary escaped to Algeria, where he stayed with Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver. He later moved on to Switzerland and then Afghanistan, where he was apprehended by US narcotics agents. After 31/2 years in prison, he was released on parole in 1976.
A member of the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, he appeared in a number of films and television programs. He also ran for governor of California in 1970. A steady stream of public appearances and writings kept him in the public eye and earned him a handsome income.
Even now, fellow academics at Harvard have negative feelings about the man. David McClelland, who was chairman of the psychology department, said Friday that Leary had been ``tremendously promising,'' but then ``the drugs became a kind of reason for being for a long time. And then after that he was mainly interested in making a splash.''
Brendan Maher, another psychologist who knew Leary at Harvard and still teaches there, said he was a lax researcher who put little effort into gathering precise data.
``I began to regard him as a person who was immensely narcissistic, who had little thought about the consequences of his actions on the lives of others,'' Maher said Friday.
After he was diagnosed with terminal cancer in January 1995, he turned his attention to dying in style.
He said he was not afraid of dying - just afraid of pain and of being helpless. He used drugs right up to the end ``for medicinal purposes,'' his friends said.
``No. 1, we're all going to die,'' he said. ``And we're all going to get senile, if we're lucky enough to hang around that long. So there's nothing to be afraid of.
``Some guy at a party came up to me and said `Good luck on your death.' And that's one of the most powerful things that anyone has ever said to me. It implies `Have a good life. Have a good death.'''
Leary married five times. His first wife committed suicide in 1959. The couple had two children. The son, John, who felt abandoned by his father's ribald lifestyle, was estranged from him. The daughter, Susan, accused as an adult of shooting her boyfriend, hanged herself in 1990. Those incidents, Leary said, were the only regrets of his life.
For related stories and web-site links, go to Globe Online at http://www.boston.com, and use the keyword Leary.
LENGTH: Long : 125 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. & 2. Timothy Leary poses for a portrait at his homeby CNBin Beverly Hills, Calif., Nov. 30, 1995. Leary's death was announced
on his home page simply, with the words, "Timothy has passed.''
color AP
3. AP file/1968 Timothy Leary (center) with Abbie Hoffman (left) and
Jerry Rubin at a news conference in 1968, announcing plans to
disrupt the 1968 Democratic convention.