Lee Quarnstrom

Lee Quarnstrom is a retired American journalist, former executive editor of Larry Flynt’s Hustler Magazine, and a former Beatnik. He was a core member of the Merry Band of Pranksters, a group loosely led by novelist Ken Kesey.

Lee Quarnstrom grew up in Longview, Washington and the Chicago suburb of Wilmette, Illinois where he attended New Trier High School. Lee Quarnstorm's journalism career began with the City News Bureau of Chicago, which soon gave way to his cross-country adventures. As a post-Beat Generation, pre-Hippie beatnik, Quarnstrom lived in San Francisco, Greenwich Village, Seattle, Mexico City, and Ken Kesey’s remote home in the Santa Cruz Mountains above the Bay Area. At a cabin in La Honda, California, where Lee Quarnstrom lived, frequent visitors included the Hells Angels and The Warlocks, precursors to the Grateful Dead. The notorious parties held at La Honda involved fluorescent paints, black lights, and LSD. This was the start of what came to be known as The Acid Tests, which Lee Quarnstrom helped organize. The events from La Honda are described in Tom Wolfe's book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs. Quarnstrom's marriage to Space Daisy at Bill Graham's Fillmore Auditorium is documented in the book The Summer of Love: Haight-Ashbury At Its Highest.

In 1965, police invaded the La Honda home, arresting 14 people on marijuana charges, including Lee Quarnstrom, Ken Kesey, and Neal Cassady. Other friends and associates of Lee Quarnstrom included spiritual leader Ram Dass, The Realist founder Paul Krassner, counterculture activist Wavy Gravy, and Jerry Garcia's former wife, Carolyn Garcia (then known as Mountain Girl).

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