Ken Elton Kesey was born in La Junta, Colorado, on 17 September 1935 to dairy farmers Fred A. and Geneva Smith Kesey. As a boy Kesey learned to do farm chores, to appreciate country ays and rural values, and to feed his imagination on comic books and the adventure stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Zane Grey, after whom he would name his own first son. After a stint in the navy during World War II, Fred Kesey moved his family to Springfield, Oregon. There Ken and his younger brother, Joe (known as Chuck), fished in the clear streams and hunted in the lush forests of the Willamette Valley and the Cascade Mountains. At Springfield High School, Kesey boxed, wrestled, played guard on the football team, and was voted "most likely to succeed" by his graduating class. At the University of Oregon in Eugene he was a speech and drama major, an Olympic-class wrestler, an actor, an aspiring playwright, and a popular member of Beta Theta Pi fraternity. In his junior year Kesey married Faye Haxby, his high-school sweetheart. He graduated in 1957 with a bachelor's degree in speech and communications.
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