Journalists, as the old saying goes, write the first draft of history. Lee Quarnstrom not only chronicled history, he lived it.
As a young man in the late 1950s, he wrote about mobsters in Chicago. In the 1960s, he interviewed novelist Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters, who helped create America’s counterculture in the woods near La Honda, and then jumped onto their colorful bus and joined their adventures, becoming friends with Hunter S. Thompson, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady and the Grateful Dead as the Beat Generation gave way to the psychedelic age.
A decade later, Quarnstrom worked as executive editor of Hustler magazine, guiding one of the nation’s most controversial publications while its owner, Larry Flynt, recovered from an assassination attempt.
In the 1980s and ’90s, he wrote a popular weekly newspaper column about Santa Cruz, where he lived for 35 years, for the San Jose Mercury News. He roamed Pacific Avenue and the county courthouse in Hawaiian shirts, grousing in print about bicyclists and homeless activists while poking fun at politicians and documenting the rebuilding of the city after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. He was part of the Mercury News team that won the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of that disaster.
“He was bigger than life,” said former Santa Cruz Mayor Neal Coonerty. “It was always fun running into Lee around town and getting his perspective on things and exchanging news of the day. He was kind of the persona of Santa Cruz at that time. He was a fun guy.”
Quarnstrom died Wednesday at his home in La Habra in Orange County at age 81, having packed an immense amount of adventure into one lifetime.
He worked as a dynamiter on a trail crew in Olympic National Park, a mailman, and bookseller in Greenwich Village. He once kept a cage full of pet monkeys at his house in the Santa Cruz Mountains. He was married seven times, including in 1966 at San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium to his second wife “Space Daisy” in front of 1,500 people. The band Quicksilver Messenger Service played and rock impresario Bill Graham threw the wedding reception.
“Frankly, I’ve been lucky,” Quarnstrom wrote in his 2014 memoir, “When I was a Dynamiter.” “I have been, over and over again, at the right place at the right time. I’ve been offered rare opportunities for adventure, and without truly conceiving of myself as an adventurer, have taken them.”
Lee Quarnstrom was born Nov. 13, 1939, in Longview, Washington, a lumber town. His father, Gordon Quarnstrom, was city editor of the Longview Daily News, and the county coroner. He ran for Congress twice and lost both times.
The family moved to Washington, D.C., then Chicago. Tall, thin, with a curiosity for books and no penchant for athletics, Quarnstrom became the editor-in-chief of the student paper at New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago.
After graduating in 1958, he went to work as a dynamiter on a three-man trail crew at Olympic National Park in Washington, finding solitude in the rugged mountain wilderness as he helped build trails with a buck saw and blasting caps.
He enrolled at the University of Washington, signed up for ROTC, and dropped out of school when he lost his official issue black necktie and didn’t want to pay for another one. Heading back to Chicago, Quarnstrom landed a job with the City News Bureau of Chicago, a hardscrabble news outfit that inspired the Broadway play “The Front Page” and the film “His Girl Friday.” Pounding out stories on a manual typewriter, he covered apartment fires, dead bodies floating in the Chicago River and mafia trials.
After moving to Mexico City, then working for the Associated Press in Seattle, he found his way to the Bay Area, taking a job at the San Mateo County Times in 1964. The following year, after Ken Kesey, who had written “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” moved to the mountains of La Honda and released the novel “Sometimes a Great Notion,” Quarnstrom decided to interview him and review the book.
He drove to the mountains and encountered the charismatic novelist, along with the brightly colored school bus “Furthur” that Kesey and his friends, known as the Merry Pranksters, traveled around the country on adventures. He met Neal Cassady, the hero of Jack Kerouac’s Beat Generation classic “On the Road,” and began riding along as Cassady and Kesey and their friends raced around the backroads of California. Quarnstrom soon quit his job and moved into a $50-a-month cabin near Kesey’s compound.
For the next several years, Quarnstrom became immersed in a blooming counterculture, spending time with the Hells Angels, the Warlocks (who later became the Grateful Dead), Hunter S. Thompson, Ram Dass, Allen Ginsberg, the Jefferson Airplane and others. Merry Pranksters’ parties, fueled by LSD, which was still legal at the time, became known as “acid tests” and were a building block of 1960s culture.
As the 70s dawned, Quarnstrom returned to writing, working for the Watsonville Register-Pajaronian, and then through a friend, landing a job as editor of Hustler magazine in Los Angeles. In 1982, he began work at the Mercury News, where he remained for 19 years until retirement.
“To the naive young journalist I was at the time, Lee was the kind of larger-than-life character I dreamed would populate newsrooms — smart, funny, charismatic, profane,” remembered Bert Robinson, now senior editor at the Bay Area News Group.
“Grasshopper,” Quarnstrom once said to a young colleague. “Apart from police and fire, remember there are only two functions of local government. To put water into the human body and to figure out what to do with it when it comes out.”
He married his widow, Chris, a year after they reunited at their 40th high school reunion in 1998. In 2004 they moved from Santa Cruz to La Habra.
Quarnstrom had a house full of books, antique furniture, bird cages, Corgi dogs, historic maps and photographs. He loved jazz music, particularly Charlie Parker and Sonny Stitt, along with Hawaiian culture, and traveled to the Hawaiian Islands more than two dozen times.
“His background in California history was second to nobody,” remembered his friend, writer Susie Bright. “He could quote Robinson Jeffers poetry at a drop of the hat. He knew every nook and cranny of the state.”
Quarnstrom had a sense of pathos in his writing and personality, telling friends he had never recovered from the death of his son, Eric, 18, who was shot in 1982 in a dispute in San Francisco.
Despite his at times curmudgeonly persona — he regularly clashed with editors and once told a UCSC student who wandered into the Santa Cruz news bureau and said he was majoring in history of consciousness “I hope they teach you how to carry a tray” — Quarnstrom was a romantic at heart, Bright said.
“He was charming and seductive. He was wise and sophisticated,” she said. “Women were drawn to him because he could make you feel admired, but in a way that was respectful.”
After it all, Quarnstrom asked his family to put just one memorial word on his gravestone: Beatnik.
He is survived by wife, Claire Christine Quarnstrom; niece, Anne Quarnstrom, and nephews, Evan and Nik Quarnstrom; several stepsons and stepdaughters, Dr. Andy Osburn, Mark Osburn, Tony Osburn, Jenny Barron and Pat Osburn; and at least seven grandchildren; preceded in death by son, Eric, and brother, Dean Quarnstrom. Plans for a celebration of his life will be announced at a later date.
