Kesey’s mother reflects on author’s life, career

Published 4:00 am Tuesday, November 8, 2011

SPRINGFIELD — It seems impossible that so much time could have passed, but Ken Kesey died 10 years ago this Thursday.

His mother, Geneva Jolley, shakes her head — she can’t believe it either — and tells you from across her dining room table that she still dreams of him, though the dreams pop like bubbles and she can’t remember them.

“I keep thinking he’ll come back from wherever he’s been with lots of good stories and presents,” says Kesey’s 45-year-old daughter, Sunshine Kesey, who helps take care of her grandmother in Geneva’s home off Hayden Bridge Road in Springfield.

Geneva Jolley, who remarried after her first husband died in 1969, turned 95 two weeks ago. She relies on a full-time helper, gets around with a walker and is, she says, “80 percent blind.”

“But I’m a tough old broad,” she says. “I don’t cry easily.”

The context is how difficult it was to lose her son, who died in 2001 at age 66 after complications from surgery to remove a tumor from his liver.

“I cried then,” she says. “A lot. It’s still your child, no matter how old he is.”

Geneva gave birth to Ken in La Junta, Colo. The family came west after World War II when Geneva’s husband, Fred, got a job here at a creamery.

“Ken was always attentive, always rebellious,” she says.

He went to the old elementary school at what’s now the Springfield School District office on Mill Street, then Springfield Junior High. In 1953, he graduated from Springfield High School.

He attended the University of Oregon. Wrestled. And eloped with a girl he’d been in love with since junior high, Norma “Faye” Haxby.

“He didn’t get off track until he went off to Stanford for graduate school,” Geneva says.

Drugs. A faked suicide. A run from the law. Other indiscretions.

But, amid it, literary brilliance. After working night shifts at the Menlo Park Veterans’ Hospital, he wrote “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” in 1962, now a standard on most best-novel lists.

Two years later, “Sometimes a Great Notion” was published.

“When the books came out, they were not red-letter days for me,” Geneva says. “They should have been. But I didn’t appreciate all that he had put into those books. I didn’t appreciate how famous they were going to become.”

She wonders if it was a mother’s protective instincts. “Maybe I didn’t want him to be a big turnip in a little turnip patch,” she says. “He always liked a crowd.”

But Keseys were simple folk. And fame isn’t simple — even if she did come to accept him finding it.

She loves the downtown statue of Ken reading to the kids. “It’s beautiful.” Didn’t mind, decades ago, when an occasional fan would show up on the front porch.

But she regrets not embracing his success. “I never gave him credit for all he accomplished,” she says, “and he knew I didn’t.”