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.


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