Marjorie Beers King 8/29/1921 — 8/1/2002
My mother, Marjorie Beers King, was born in August 1921. She was the oldest of four girls. They lived on a homestead ranch in Nevada, south of Reno. In grade school she had to get up and milk the family cow before her long walk through the sagebrush to a one-room schoolhouse. Her family moved to Fair Oaks near Sacramento, California when she was in high school. During World War II she joined the Navy. She was one of the first women in the Navy and was stationed in Washington DC.
In 1954 Aldous Huxley published a book titled The Doors of Perception. “The Doors of Perception provoked strong reactions for its evaluation of psychedelic drugs as facilitators of mystical insight with great potential benefits for science, art, and religion.” Marge, and her sister Jean, had both read this book by the early 60s. Around 1962 they attended a conference on the UC Berkeley campus titled ‘Control of The Mind”. Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary were the featured speakers. They both then read Timothy Leary’s book The Psychedelic Experience.
Everyone who knew Marge recognized that she was someone who was well ahead of her time. We are all so thankful that she had the foresight to preserve for future generations these wonderful letters we received from Ram Dass and the other memorabilia from the 60s that I inherited from her.
Marge was a very intelligent woman. For all of the 50s and the 60s she worked as a chemical research librarian in the aerospace industry. Her job was to read scientific articles having to do with rocket fuel and rocket construction materials and then write an abstract of those articles. That way the scientists that were building the rockets, the ones that took us to the Moon, did not have to read the whole article. I believe it was this background in chemistry that caused her and Owsley Stanley, aka Bear, to find common interests and develop a friendship. Her second career, starting in the early seventies, was as a high school teacher. She worked mostly for the Sacramento Public School District. Some of her work was with what were called troubled teenagers. She enjoyed training them to use biofeedback equipment for better emotional regulation.
Jean Mayo Millay 1929 — 2018
Jean Mayo Millay was the youngest of the four Beers girls. She was eight years younger than Marge. After her initial few experiences with LSD she made a movie depicting the visual experiences she had encountered. It has an introduction by Timothy Leary, who gave her permission to title her movie after the book he co authored with Richard Alpert. It featured music by Ravi Shankar. The film won the ‘Film as Art’ award at the 1965 San Francisco International Film Festival. It can be viewed from this link: The Psychedelic Experience Integral Documentary This may have been her first meeting with Ravi Shankar, who was to become an important figure in my life in the late 60’s.
My aunt Jean had a 3 year relationship with Ravi Shankar’s tabla (a type of drum) player, Allah Rakha. Jean introduced Allah Rakha to Mickey Hart, one of the drummers for the Grateful Dead. She knew the Dead somewhat from our friendship with Owsley Stanley, aka Bear. Jean, Marge and I attended the Watts Acid Test in Feb of 1966. I was 12 years old and operated a bright hand cranked strobe light at that event.
Jean earned her PhD in parapsychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco under the direction of Stanislav Grof. For her thesis she did a double blind study evolving brainwave synchronization using biofeedback equipment and telepathy experiments.
Jeans most notable achievement was the publication in 2010 of a book edited by her titled Radiant Minds – Scientists Explore the Dimensions of Consciousness. That book is described on Amazon this way: “Fifty-five scientists have contributed amazing results from their years of research to this anthology of the Parapsychology Research Group (PRG). Their professional disciplines include physics, remote viewing, medicine, psychology, anthropology, shamanism, philosophy, spiritual healing, unidentified aerial phenomena, and some provide suggestions for the future of education. A few of the authors included are: Dean Radin, PhD, Russell Targ, Stanley Krippner, PhD, Charles Tart, PhD, Stanislav Grof, MD, PhD, Sasha Shulgin, PhD, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, Roger Nelson, PhD, and Jean Millay, PhD.”
Jean was an associate of most all of the contributors to that book. Here is a picture of our copy of that book which she autographed to my daughter as follows: “To Sage, who has amazing personal powers, much love, Jean Millay.” This is the link to this book on Amazon
This is a link to a blog posting on this site that gives details of Jean in her later years
Storm Arthur King 11/11/1953
I will be posting blogs on this site that provide additional information about me.
Here are three representative photos of me. One from my teens, one from mid life and one very current.
