Kathy Casamo(1938-1992)

The oldest of four children, beautiful, dark-featured Italian Cathryn Marie Casamo was born in New Jersey on December 22, 1938, to Sicilian union organizer Bill Casamo and his wife, Victoria. She graduated from Westfield High School in Westfield, New Jersey, and went on to major in Drama at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where she counted Richard Benjamin, Paula Prentiss and Karen Black as classmates. However, in summer 1960, she dropped out a few math credits short of a degree and moved to California. She soon had a daughter, Caitlyn. The two lived for a time at Gate 5 in Sausalito, which was a collection of two-room houseboats built on the hulls of old WWII beach-landing barges. There she met actor and comedian Larry Hankin. In 1964, she, her daughter and Hankin moved to an apartment on Grant Avenue in San Francisco. One day outside of her apartment, Casamo met a group of hippies who called themselves the Merry Pranksters. She invited them up to her apartment and quickly became caught up in their circle. She met filmmaker Mike Hagen, who introduced her to head Prankster, author and LSD aficionado Ken Kesey. Hagen was going to document Kesey on a cross-country journey to discover America. On June 17, 1964, Casamo left her daughter with Hankin and traveled across the country with Hagen, Kesey, driver and doomed literary figure Neal Cassady, and several others in Further, Kesey's recently purchased converted school bus, which had bunks and a bathroom, and sported a colorful, psychedelic paint job. LSD, legal at the time, was dispensed in orange juice. Casamo later revealed that she mostly did not enjoy the journey once it began because she had believed she was going to star with Casady in a real movie. Nearly every person on the bus had a nickname, and hers was Stark Naked after the Pranksters stopped the bus in Houston at the home of Kesey's friend from their days at Stanford, author Larry McMurtry. Due to the heat and humidity and influenced by LSD, Casamo had removed her clothes and emerged from the bus nude, embracing McMurtry's toddler son because she missed her daughter so much. She showered inside McMurtry's home, then walked out, took a blanket from the bus, wrapped it around her and wandered off. The next morning, the bus had left without her. One of the Pranksters had called Hankin, Casamo's boyfriend, and told him she had gone missing. Hankin left Caitlyn with friends, flew to Houston, and found out that Casamo had been arrested, had bitten one of the officers, and with no ID, she had been sent temporarily to a mental health facility outside Houston. After intervention from McMurtry's attorney, Casamo was released and flew back to San Francisco with Hankin. Despite this traumatic episode and being left behind, she remained friends with Kesey until her death and was to travel further in Further, the next time to Mexico. Her daughter, now Caitlyn Teter, says that from the 1970's until her death, Casamo lived a fairly quiet life, occasionally involved in child care. She was married and divorced twice and had a son, Holden. Although her daughter says that for decades, her mother was a drug-free vegetarian who loved exercise and health food, Casamo nevertheless was a victim of cancer, dying in the arms of her boyfriend, artist Stephen Ehret, at her Marin County home in Larkspur, California, on the morning of December 12, 1992. According to Casamo's wishes, Caitlyn and Ehret took her ashes out to Limantour Spit Trail in Marin and scattered them to the winds.