The most famous bus ever to park in San Jose’s Rose Garden neighborhood is now included in a massive show in San Francisco.
Presented by the Haight Street Art Center, Forever Grateful, Golden Gate Park opens Saturday, Sept. 5 at the County Fair Building (Hall of Flowers) in Golden Gate Park. The exhibition is the second and final chapter of Forever Grateful, a collection-based and experience-driven tribute to the enduring legacy of the Grateful Dead.
Author and LSD experimenter Ken Kesey considered his 1939 International Harvester school bus, famously named Furthur, to be his best work. Now, for the first time, the same psychedelic paint-smeared contraption that carried the Merry Pranksters across the US in 1964, has been rescued from a barn on the Kesey family farm in Oregon and towed all the way to San Francisco, where it currently sits, ready for the general public to view. A rendering shows Acid Test posters on the wall.
Immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Furthur is among the most recognizable artifacts in American counterculture history. When the amphetamine-fueled Neal Cassady drove the bus from coast to coast in 1964, filled up with the Pranksters and experimental audio devices, no one knew the free-spirited adventure would usher in the Grateful Dead’s own community and the entire hippie era.
After the Pranksters once again drove the bus across the country to Woodstock in 1969, it was never used again. It sat in a swamp on Kesey’s property for decades.
All of which is more than well documented, but the San Jose component of the Furthur legacy always seems to take a back seat. (See what I did there?) In that sense, it only feels apropos to once again elevate the house at 1313 University Ave. in the Rose Garden neighborhood. The house looks different now than it did in the mid-’60s when Ken Kesey’s lawyer Paul Robertson lived there, but it still stands.
Whenever Kesey wanted to get away from all the madness—or the cops—he brought Furthur down to San Jose and parked it near Robertson’s house in the “hinterland” as many San Franciscans characterized San Jose in those days. If you nose around, you will still find old-timers who remember seeing the bus on University Avenue.
The matrix of local connections is fascinating. You don’t have to be on drugs to dig it.
Robertson’s brother-in-law was Steve “Zonker” Lambrecht, one of the Merry Pranksters who survived the cross-country trip in 1964. The only San Jose State Spartan to inspire a Doonesbury character, Zonker hung out in the chemistry department, which landed him access to equipment necessary to make LSD, which was still legal at the time.
A passionate jazzman, Robertson also played in a band, The Flowers, with Gordon Stevens, whose family started Stevens Music in Willow Glen, where I first took music lessons many years later. In The Flowers, Stevens played electric bass and mandolin while Paul Robertson played sax and flute. Kesey took some of the royalties he made from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and bought gear for The Flowers.
Robertson’s law practice partnered him with another attorney, Dent Hand, who, like Robertson, was also a jazz aficionado. Hand played alongside many notable musicians for decades. At one point, their law practice was located in the 777 North First St. building, then a brand-new complex in the ’60s. Both were Stanford Law graduates and full-blown jazz philanthropists.
And let us not forget the plaque now gracing San Jose City Hall. On December 4, 1965, Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzmann, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan and Phil Lesh played their first official gig as the Grateful Dead at one of Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests in downtown San Jose. According to Lesh’s book, Neal Cassady was dancing in the strobe lights. Kesey and the Merry Pranksters organized the entire mess and people who attended the party remember seeing the bus.
Following the close of the Golden Gate Park exhibition, the original Furthur bus will enter the first phase of a massive restoration led by Kesey’s daughter-in-law Stephanie, who founded the nonprofit Furthur Down the Road Foundation to raise funds for the project.
We should all be forever grateful.
The Forever Grateful exhibition will be at Golden Gate Park from Sept. 5–Oct. 25, 2026. haightstreetart.org/pages/forevergrateful
