Note: The following is compiled from various sources around the net. Neal Cassady was the original "Cowboy Neal". More than anyone, he tied together both the beatnik and hippie eras, being associated with Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, and the Grateful Dead. Being that /.'s site admin and perennial poll topic derived his name from Cassady I figured some people might be interested in his story. Besides, he lived a damn interesting life.
Neal Cassady was born on February 8, 1926, in Salt Lake City, Utah. His parents were en route to California where the plan was for his father to open a barbershop there. The barbershop failed, the family moved to Denver, and when Neal was 6, his parents split.
Neal Cassady was raised by an unemployed and alcoholic father in the skid row hotels of Denver's Larimer Street. He grew to become a very skilled car thief with a unique ability to charm strangers. Because of these skills he spent many years in reform schools and juvenile prisons. He was never arrested for anything violent or serious. Neal just did illegal things for the sheer hell of it. If it was fun, damn the laws...he was gonna do it. By the age of 21, by his own count, Neal had stolen five hundred cars to go joyriding with girlfriends and had served fifteen months in reform schools.
In December of 1946, Neal Cassady arrives by bus in New York City with his teenage wife, LuAnne (previously LuAnne Henderson). They are there to visit his Denver friends Ed White and Hal Chase who are attending Columbia University. Since first arriving in New York, White and Chase have become friends with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.
Jack dislikes Neal at first, but they become fast friends soon enough. Neal is envious of Jack's writing skills and Jack is envious of Neal's charms and fast-living lifestyle.
By March 1947, Cassady is back in Denver, but the two friends take to writing letters and Jack decides to go visit Neal in Denver.
Over the next several years Cassady and Kerouac will travel many times spanning the countryside. It is these zany experiences that Kerouac will later incorperate into his great novel, "On The Road". In the novel Jack is named "Sal Paradise" and Neal is "Dean Moriarty". LuAnne becomes "MaryLou".
Kerouac will continue using Cassady as a main character in many other books such as his novel, Visions of Cody. "Cody", of course, is another psuedonym for Neal. Neal will also appear in Dharma Bums, Big Sur, and Desolation Angels.
By March of 1947, Neal (while still married to LuAnne) meets and begins an affair with Carolyn Robinson (Soon to be Carolyn Cassady - "Camille" in On The Road), a graduate student at the University of Denver. Soon Neal will be sharing time between the two women and introducing Carolyn to his old New York pals.
Allen is the first to visit Neal. Neal is still running between Carolyn and LuAnne and now he has Ginsberg to juggle as well, (as Ginsberg has a very big crush on Neal). Neal is in the process of divorcing LuAnne when Carolyn walks in on Neal, LuAnne, and Allen in bed together. This is a hint of the life to come for Carolyn and Neal.
Neal and Carolyn are married on April Fools' Day, 1948, and she bores the first of his children. Jami, Joanne, and John Allen. John Allen, of course, is named after Neal's two best friends....Jack and Allen.
Neal and Carolyn eventually settled down in in Los Gatos, a suburb near San Jose, where he worked as a brakeman on the Southern Pacific railroad. Neal was very proud of his brakeman job and tried numerous times to get Jack to come out and work the rails with him. Jack was never interested and not really a working stiff anyway.
He remained close friends with Ginsberg and Kerouac, although he never profited from their eventual success. Neal felt he was seen by the world as a madcap madman because of the "Dean Moriarty" character. Neal always felt that people had certain expectations of him that he could not live up to. This caused Jack and Neal to drift apart later on in life.
So how did Neal become known as Cowboy Neal? In the 1960's, Cassady began a whole new series of road "trips", this time new Novelist Ken Kesey took Kerouac's place. It was Cowboy Neal behind the wheel when Kesey organized a trip to the New York World's Fair in a psychedelic love machine, a bus named "Further". This trip is chronicled in Tom Wolfe's novel, The Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test. The Acid Tests inspired the growing hippie movement and drug culture in the Haight Asbury district of San Francisco. Organized by the likes of Ken Kesey, The Grateful Dead, Neal Cassady, and the "Merry Pranksters", the Acid Tests were a hedonistic orgy of psychedelic light shows, 3D sound systems, sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Ken Kesey as "Superman" orchestrated the festivities with the ever present rambling dialogue over the PA system, liquid light show, with often the Grateful Dead as the house band; the special LSD spiked orange kool-aid always available for the taking. These Acid Tests catapulted many a would be hippie into the fourth dimension and beyond. Some of these lost souls would never return from the trip...permanently scarred from the experience. Others seemed to gain great insight and had lasting spiritual insights from the psychedelic experience.
The phrase "Cowboy Neal behind the wheel", btw, is immortalized in the Grateful Dead song, The Other One:
While skippin' through the lily fields,
I came across an empty space.
It trembled and exploded; left a bus stop in its place.
The bus came by and I got on; that's when it all began.
There was Cowboy Neal at the wheel of the bus to
never-never land.
After a night of hard partying in Mexico in 1968, Cassady wandered onto a deserted railroad on a bet to count railroad ties to the next town. He fell asleep on the way, wearing only a t-shirt and jeans. It was a cold rainy night, and Cassady was found along the tracks the next morning. He was in a coma, and died in a hospital later that day. Kerouac would die a year later after retiring to alcoholism and depression.