Doug Kari discovered a journal that belonged to a Merry Prankster who went by the name Cool Breeze
FILE: Ken Kesey, on top of the Furthur Bus, holding a flute with some of the Merry Pranksters in 1967 during a rollicking trip to San Francisco from his home in La Honda, Calif. Joe Rosenthal/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty
By Doug Kari Feb 22, 2026 (SFGate.com)
Amid a stack of old books in an antique store in Utah sat an edge-worn journal filled with handwritten spiritual musings and psychedelic drawings. “Whose journal was this?” I wondered.
The answer, as I would learn, linked the journal to legendary 1960s San Francisco counterculture group Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters. The group, which included Grateful Dead associates and author Neal Cassady, is best known for evangelizing LSD on a cross-country road trip in 1964.
I didn’t travel to Utah looking for books — instead I was investigating a homicide case. As a true-crime writer, I wanted to visit places where Ashlee Buzzard, accused of killing her daughter during a road trip through the West, stopped for gas.
This quest brought me to Panguitch, population 1,788, near Bryce Canyon National Park. As I walked down the city’s main street on a chilly winter’s day, the warm glow from the windows of Smokin’ Hot Antiques, an antique store in an old firehouse, lured me inside. Under a pile of hardcover books sat the journal.
I turned the cover to find a note from “Lee Anne” to someone named Rodger: “May this journal bring you many hours of happy reflection.” Rodger had filled the following pages with fountain pen writings and surreal watercolors.
One of his earliest entries: “I will be like a violent beautiful man of the West bearing a great sack of precious jewels.” Other entries suggested he was high when he penned them. “In the evening’s sunset the orange through the oak trees reaches my soft smiled lips,” read the calligraphy script. “In the romantic promenade of the angels of mercy my own body caresses the currents among the All.”
Intrigued, I sought out the antique store’s proprietor, Beverly Howard, who was adorned in turquoise and wearing a denim skirt. She told me the journal came from the estate of a woman who left behind a house crammed with eclectic belongings. “She was kind of a hoarder,” Beverly said. “But the things she had were interesting.”
After buying the journal for $24, I drove another hundred miles to Torrey, Utah. Inside my hotel room, I leafed through the journal and admired the intricate artwork. Tucked into the back of the journal, where the yellowed pages remained blank, was an envelope addressed to Rodger Williams c/o Joan Kohl.
This led me to connect with Kohl by phone. She said that her brother Rodger Thomas Williams, born in the South Bay in 1945, was a childhood friend of Ron McKernan, later known as Pigpen — an original frontman for the Grateful Dead. As a teen, Williams moved to Haight-Ashbury and became part of the burgeoning hippie scene.
Toward the end of our call, Kohl said: “By the way, my brother’s nickname was Cool Breeze. He’s mentioned in the book ‘Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.’”
For a moment I was speechless. When I attended UC Berkeley as an English major, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” author Tom Wolfe’s account of Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters, was required reading for one of my classes. The book opens with a scene where Wolfe and Cool Breeze are riding down one of the city’s steep hills.
“Cool Breeze is a kid with three or four days’ beard sitting next to me on the stamped metal bottom of the open back part of a pickup truck,” wrote Wolfe. “Bouncing along. Dipping and rising and rolling on these rotten springs like a boat.”
Williams was tied up in legal problems during the summer of 1964, when Kesey and the Merry Pranksters embarked on their LSD-fueled trip across the country, in a Day-Glo bus named Furthur. “He got caught smoking a joint,” Kohl recalled. “Back then, even a small amount of marijuana could land you in jail.”
When Wolfe wrote about careening down an SF hill, Williams, aka Cool Breeze, was on probation. “Right now Cool Breeze is so terrified of the law he is sitting up in plain view of thousands of already startled citizens wearing some kind of Seven Dwarfs Black Forest gnome’s hat covered in feathers and fluorescent colors.”
After the hippie era faded, Williams moved to Tahoma, on the west shore of Lake Tahoe. He worked as a handyman, although his passion was art. “He never sold any of his drawings,” Kohl explained. “He said the art was for itself alone.”
Kohl confirmed that the journal was “definitely his writing and sketches.” The breakup of Williams and his first wife, mentioned in the journal as a recent event, places the timeframe as mid-1970s. Kohl said that Williams lived for a while in Utah and maybe that’s how the journal landed there.
Williams, a long-time smoker, died in September 2025 with COPD. In keeping with his background as a Merry Prankster, he believed there was more to human existence than everyday life. “Lift us up to the bright track — vast, unlimited, the domain of one’s thoughts,” wrote Williams in his journal. “They go towards a beauty, a region of the firmament.”
Editor’s note: This article was updated at 10:30 a.m., Feb. 23, to correct Pigpen’s role in the Grateful Dead.
Doug Kari is a true crime author and investigative journalist who covers crimes in the west and divides his time between SoCal and Las Vegas.
More at: https://www.sfgate.com/sf-culture/article/lost-san-francisco-journal-21369669.php
(Contributed by Gwyllm Llwydd)
