Rosemary Woodruff Leary
by
Denis Berry and friends

On April 20, a lovely spring day in Santa Cruz County, a memorial service was held for Rosemary Woodruff Leary, a woman who is as responsible as anyone else for pioneering serious and long overdue research into consciousness and psychedelic research The sheer number of those who came to pay their respects when Rosemary died and at the subsequent memorial testified to the fundamental role she played during the decade of psychedelic revolution. Those psychedelic luminaries who have not succumbed to age and infirmity were there: Ram Dass was at her hospital bed: Ralph Metzner, Frank Barron, Peggy Hitchcock, Robert Anton Wilson, Michael and Cindy Horowitz, Chet Helms and many others made their final journey to the pastoral home under the redwoods in Aptos California where Rosemary spent the final years of her life.

Ro, as she was known to her friends, began her psychedelic journey long before her liaison with Dr. Timothy Leary which was to propel her to fame and eventually lead to her twenty four years in exile. In the fifties, as one of the early seekers who prefigured America's emerging counter-culture, she left her middle class home to live among Beats and jazz musicians and experimented with psylicibin mushrooms and peyote.

Those at the memorial who had shared life with the Learys at Milbrook talked about her critical role in creating the set and setting which shaped LSD experimentation in its formative years Because of the pervasive sexism which obscured the intellectual contributions of women in the fifties and early sixties, the extent of Rosemary's intellectual contribution to this research was largely unrecognized in the public eye, but Leary himself was quite explicit about it. As he tells us in FLASHBACKS:

"Rosemary and I shared the work too. I was finishing the work of psychedelic poetry based on the Tao Te Ching. Rosemary edited the manuscript. She joined Michael and Ralph and me in preparing the slide shows and tapes we used in our weekend workshops in various cities around the East Coast. We tried to stimulate LSD experiences with sounds, strobes and slides, as Ralph, Michael and I alternated murmured narration and Yogic instructions while Rosemary whispered philosophic poetry, hour upon hour, recapitulating the evolution of the species taking our astounded participants up the charkas of their bodies ....Rosemary, sophisticated and worldly, joked me out of the trap of YMCA Hinduism, the goal of which was to become a Holy Man, a prospect Rosemary found too amusing for words...(FLASHBACKS,pp.232-3.)

For many, what makes Rosemary Woodruff Leary, the true heroine of the psychedelic movement, even more than her work at Milbrook was her consistent refusal to cooperate with Federal Authorities . Those who were inside the movement know that it was Rosemary's refusal to testify against Leary which landed her in solitary confinement for thirty days after Liddy busted Milbrook in 66. It was Rosemary who orchestrated Timothy's escape from prison in 1970 with the aid of the Weather Underground and laid the plans for their subsequent escape to Algeria. And most critically, it was Rosemary who refused in 1970 an offer of amnesty from the FBI in exchange for cooperating with them by providing names of others who had committed illegal acts in the name of freedom of consciousness.

This refusal was to define the course of her life. In her own words: "After escaping from Algeria, and suffering through yet another arrest and release in Switzerland, I left Leary, searching a country that would allow me to find some peace and sanity. What followed were years of adventure and fear in some very far flung places...I lived underground as a fugitive for twenty four years in Europe and the Americas, long after Leary was captured again and eventually released from the US prison system.

Because of Rosemary Leary, many founding members of the psychedelic movement lived out their lives in freedom rather than jail cells. She paid a high price for the freedom of others: not until 1995 could she say "I have regained my freedom and I am free again to write." For 24 years, she was a woman without a home, who lived with a suitcase perennially packed by the side of her bed, and feared every knock on the door.