As Neal Cassady lie dying early on the morning of February 4, 1968 — according to a fictionalized account of Cassady’s passing written by Ken Kesey in an essay titled “The Day Superman Died” — his last words were the number of railroad ties he had counted on his ill-fated venture: “Sixty-four thousand, nine hundred and twenty eight… “
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After a wedding party in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico on February 3, Cassady attempted to walk the rails to the next town.
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In the cold and rain, wearing only jeans and a T-shirt, he fell into unconsciousness near the town of Puerto Villarta and died of exposure early in the morning hours of February 4, just four days shy of his 42nd birthday.
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“Neal was the fastest man alive,” says Wavy Gravy, the Prankster formerly known as Hugh Romney. “He’d do ten things at once and nothing twice.
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“I remember after dancing three hours to the Grateful Dead, he says to me, ‘Boy, are my feet tired. It’s a good thing I’m not a foot.’”
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“A lot of people couldn’t handle him,” noted Garcia. “And a lot of people were scared to death of him. They thought he was totally crazy. And a lot of people would dismiss him because he didn’t cop centerstage. He would have a little sideshow going on over here.
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“You’d ignore it as long as possible, but you’d sort of get sucked in, and pretty soon … wham ! There you are in this world. If you went for it, it was incredible. But he’d never lay it on you. It was one of those things you had to volunteer for.”
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The exact cause of Cassady’s death has, for decades, remained a subject of debate. It’s known that at the wedding reception, he took secobarbital, or Seconal, a powerful barbiturate.
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The physician who performed Cassady’s autopsy in Mexico declared his cause of death as “general congestion in all systems.”
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(That same physician later stated that his report was inaccurate because Cassady was a foreigner and drugs were involved.)
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The generally-accepted cause of Cassady’s passing is exposure, although his wife Carolyn Robinson (photo below lower right) said before her death in 2014 that she believed her husband could have died as a result of renal (or kidney) failure.
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Cassady married his second wife, Robinson, on April 1, 1948; later that year, they moved to a ranch in Monte Sereno, 50 miles southeast of San Francisco, where they raised three children. To support his family, Cassady worked as a brakeman for the Southern Pacific Railroad.
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By 1953, Ginsberg (photo below lower left), Burroughs and Kerouac had all relocated to San Francisco, and Cassady was reunited with his literary pals.
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In 1962, a young Oregon writer named Ken Kesey, who was living in Palo Alto (where he had penned most of his highly-acclaimed first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), captured the attention of Cassady.
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When Neal visited Kesey in Palo Alto later that year, the two struck up the friendship that served as the crucial link between the Beat Generation and the Sixties.
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After purchasing an arsenal of video and recording equipment with Kesey’s royalty money from Cuckoo’s Nest, the Merry Pranksters began to plot a cross-country trip in Furthur to the 1964 World’s Fair in New York.
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They planned to document their trans-America adventure, a party being held in Manhattan for the release of Kesey’s second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, and a meeting with Timothy Leary and his crew of LSD mavericks at Leary’s upstate New York house (the “Hitchcock Estate”) in Millbrook.
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However, before the Pranksters could head east, they had to resolve a minor issue.
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They needed a bus driver.
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That is, until Neal came roaring up the driveway of the La Honda home late one night in a Jeep station wagon.
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“The rear end immediately fell off,” recalls the great Prankster Ken Babbs. “That was our introduction to Neal. He spent three sleepless days and nights talking and working and putting that thing together. We looked at each other and said, ‘This is the man we need on our team.’”
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Kesey, Cassady and a crew of Pranksters began their journey east on June 17, 1964 armed with a stash of AVR equipment and hallucinogens.
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“Driving with him was such an experience,” Hunter once declared. “It was so-o-o frightening because he would depend on his radar, and I didn’t have that radar and couldn’t relax.
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“I’d go down that mountain with him, coming out of La Honda [until] I finally swore that I’d never drive with that madman again. He’d have your hair standing on end.”
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“He was able to go 50 or 60 miles an hour through downtown rush-hour traffic, he was able to see around corners, I don’t know how to better describe it,” remembered Bobby.
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“It was hard not to [be like] Neal when he was around,” continued Hunter. “He was such a master of any social situation that you would learn it yourself, and when he was away it would take weeks before you would stop ‘being Neal.’
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“That was true of all of us. It would create the same impression on other people when you were being Neal as he would create on you when he was being himself. I had incredible experiences with him. He blew my mind hundreds and thousands of times.”
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— Scott
February 4, 2026
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