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Description :
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Without a doubt, the most famous of the so-called hippie buses was Furthur, a multicolored craft that transported Ken Kesey and his group of friends known as the Merry Pranksters on a number of hallucinogenically fueled adventures in the 1960s. In 1964, Kesey, flush with money and fame thanks to the success of his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, purchased an aged 1939 International school bus with the intent of driving across the country to announce and celebrate the publication of his next book, Sometimes a Great Notion. Kesey enlisted the Merry Pranksters and prepared for the journey. The yellow color of the bus just wouldn’t do, so Kesey and the Pranksters applied liberal amounts of swirling polychromatic paint and christened the old bus Furthur, a testament to their continual destination. After stocking the refrigerator with a bottle of orange juice generously laced with an experimental drug LSD-25, they set off on their own version of the quintessential American road trip.
Kesey and the Pranksters continued to use the bus on a number of adventures, painting it different colors as their mood warranted. Eventually the bus was retired to a pasture on Kesey’s farm near Eugene, Oregon, where it reposes today. From time to time, efforts have been made to restore the bus, including a Pranksteresque one by Kesey himself where he created an entirely new bus, using a smaller late ’40s-era bus as his canvas. The “new” bus was used for a 1990 re-creation of the Pranksters famous journey. Kesey announced he was going to donate it to the Smithsonian despite the museum’s protestations that they only wanted the original bus. After Kesey and the new bus made a number of appearances, the bus was given a coat of dowdy church blue, emblazoned with the words “Mt. Pisgah School for the Dumb,” and driven off into the sunset. Images of Furthur (now with the correct spelling, Further) courtesy Zane Kesey, www.key-z.com.
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