![]() “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. The band Quicksilver Messenger Service played and rock impresario Bill Graham threw the wedding reception. 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. He once kept a cage full of pet monkeys at his house in the Santa Cruz Mountains. He worked as a dynamiter on a trail crew in Olympic National Park, a mailman, and bookseller in Greenwich Village. 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 was kind of the persona of Santa Cruz at that time. “It was always fun running into Lee around town and getting his perspective on things and exchanging news of the day. “He was bigger than life,” said former Santa Cruz Mayor Neal Coonerty. He was part of the Mercury News team that won the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of that disaster. 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. 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. Thompson, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady and the Grateful Dead as the Beat Generation gave way to the psychedelic age.Ī 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 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. Lee Quarnstrom not only chronicled history, he lived it.Īs a young man in the late 1950s, he wrote about mobsters in Chicago. Journalists, as the old saying goes, write the first draft of history.
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