“This is a photo of Melissa Cargill that my mother took in May of 1969. Melissa Cargill was Owsley Stanley's partner in manufacturing the very high-quality LSD that fueled the Merry Pranksters and the hippie movement in the mid to late 60s.
There are no other quality photos of her from that time in the public domain.
My mother would want this one to be in the public domain. Feel free to share it as much as you care to. I discovered it among the items I inherited from her, and for the longest time I did not know what I had. I only found out it was Melissa Cargill when I started writing up the stories that I have published in this group of growing up hippie and meeting some of the more famous people of that era as a teen. This photo was on the same page in the same photo album, and from the same camara, as the four close-up photos of the Grateful Dead that my mother took at the May 5, 1969, outdoor Dead concert held at Sierra College in Rocklin, CA.
If you google it, you will find the only other photo of Melissa is a faded one that is mostly all shades of brown. I will post that one in the first comment here so you can compare this one to what was previously available.
This photo is a high-resolution photo of a low-resolution Polaroid photo. I cropped it to show all the margins because the month and year are on one of them. I only touched it up a tiny bit.
I would love to know if anybody in this group has any photos of her or any stories about her that they could share. Owsley Stanly (aka Bear) was a good friend of my mothers for a long time. I don't have any memories of her talking about Melissa, but I'm sure they knew each other some. I do not recall ever meeting her.
I do have a handful of clear memories of my own personal interactions with Bear. Of being in the room when he visited with my mother and a few other times that I got to see him. He always smelled strongly of patchouli. In the late 60s, my sister and I were driving back from Seattle to Los Angeles, where we lived in Santa Monica. Somehow we knew where to drop in to see Bear in San Francisco. He was working on setting up a stage. For the Dead to play. He didn't have much time to chat with us. But he went backstage and came out with a big jar of pills and poured a bunch into both of our hands and said “take these to your mother.” They were small and white and barrel shaped. They were STP pills.”
-Storm King
