X-Message-Number: 6298 Date: Fri, 31 May 1996 19:45:41 -0700 From: David Brandt-Erichsen <> Subject: NY Times on death of Tim Leary The New York Times wire service carried this item on the death of Timothy Leary '60s Drug Guru Timothy Leary Dies at Age 75 Timothy Leary, Harvard professor turned guru of LSD who ncouraged the '60s generation to "turn on, tune in, drop out," died Friday of cancer. He was 75. Leary, who had turned his final battle into a public event he termed "the most fascinating part of my life," died at his hilltop Beverly Hills home, said Carol Rosin, a friend for 25 years. Fans could follow his deteriorating health through his home page on the World Wide Web, and last month, he said he was exploring 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 with family and friends, Rosin said. Leary's home page announced the death with a simple "Timothy has passed." It also said his last words were "why not" and "yeah." His death was filmed, Rosin said, although she was unsure of plans for the tape. "He had been alert for the last few days -- he'd been traveling with one foot in this world and one foot in the other world,"she said. "Until yesterday, he was moving around in an electric wheelchair, but he was getting weaker." She said his remains would be launched into space in September or October, but plans had yet to be completed. Leary married five times. His first wife committed suicide in 1959. The couple had two children. The son, who felt abandoned by his father's ribald lifestyle, was estranged from Leary. The daughter, accused as an adult of shooting her boyfriend, hanged herself at the Sybil Brand Institute for Women in 1990. Those incidents, Leary said, were the only regrets of his life which seldom failed to polarize two generations -- the parents and flower children of the 1960s. To some of the most gifted members of America's counterculture, he was host, confidant and drug supplier. After he was diagnosed with terminal cancer in January 1995, he focused on dying. "I was really thrilled because I knew that this was the beginning of the most fascinating part of my life," he told The Associated Press. He considered having his head cryonically frozen. He was not afraid of dying, but he was afraid of pain and of being helpless. He turned on right up to the end "for medicinal purposes," his friends said. Born in Springfield, Mass., in 1920 to a teacher-mother and dentist-father, Leary attended West Point, joined the Army, and earned an undergraduate psychology degree at the University of Alabama while in service. After earning a master's degree from Washington State University and a doctorate in psychology from the University of California at Berkeley, he went to work in 1959 at Harvard, where he was a psychology lecturer. There, he met professor Richard Alpert, who later changed his name to Baba Ram Dass, and began a series of controlled experiments with psychedelic drugs. Four years later, Leary was fired. The school, which had been investigating his experiments, said he was fired because he was absent from class without permission. 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." Ingesting mass quantities of LSD and bragging about it did not endear Leary to members of the Establishment, especially the ones with badges. For the next 20 years after leaving Harvard, he had run-ins with the law. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=6298