Thaddeus Golas: The Curt Bio

Tad grew up in a Polish family in Patterson, New Jersey. He was the only boy and the youngest of five. As a child, he witnessed the horrid sight of the frozen body of his father Valentin, pulled from the Passaic after drowning. His first experiments with hallucinogens was not intentional. At age 14 he recalled the effects of nitrous oxide changing the pain of dental work into spirals of light. He went to school with Allen Ginsberg, who warned him not to read books on Yoga or he might go crazy.

Tad served in Europe during World War II in 1944. He had a psychotic episode at the Battle of Bastogne, where the sight of frozen bodies triggered the horror of his father's death. The army sent him home, no longer fit to serve. In New York, he enrolled in Columbia University, where he ran into Allen Ginsberg again. To pay tuition, Tad worked as a clerk at a New York hotel. He let classmates and their girlfriends check in under false names, often Columbia's President Eisenhaur. At Columbia he'd become clued into the work of Robert Graves and read metaphysics. But even then he felt his ideas were rooted in science, not the spiritual. He more often found himself reading scientific manuals for evidence that he was wrong.

During college, around 1946, Tad married his first wife Lois. They lived in Manhattan on 79th St. It didn't last through the Senior year.

By 1962 he was working as an editor for Ballantine and Fawcett Books. He married Ruth Mansfield. They lived in Greenwich Village as the Beat Generation was fading at the same time becoming a public sensation. At some point during these years, he worked as an editor at Redbook Magazine. Ruth was from the Midwest and Tad took her to Kansas, where he had taken a job as a book salesman for Harper and Row. In '66 Tad was struck by enlightenment in a Manhattan, Kansas restaurant. Shortly after, he and Ruth broke up and he headed for San Francisco.

San Francisco at the time was the center of all late '60s movements. Here Golas found an audience for his theories which were already well established in his head before he ever dropped acid. (It was 1950 when he had written "space is to energy as energy is to mass.") He settled in a small place northwest of Chinatown at 1541 California Street. He had a job, a small veteran's check monthly and occasionally rented the place to a small porn film company to shoot. He'd have to leave the place and spent his hours at the Yellow Submarine. Most of Tad's furniture was picked from the garbage. He lived next door to columnist Herb Gold, and later found out he was a Columbia classmate. Apparently at this time Tad had little or no contact with Ginsberg, who had changed the poetry world with "Howl" here in the '50s.

Tad's theories had become especially popular with those dropping acid, even though he wasn't doing it himself. He got sick of explaining and decided to put them down into a pamphlet. That weekend in 1969, he published it and did acid for the first time. This was a profound experience where everything made sense and gave him spiritual evidence that his theories had merit.

This pamphlet was not LM. He later admitted it was a hodgepodge of raw ideas. It was a couple years later that he was on a hill overlooking the Bay when the idea hit him of writing a tour guide for LSD. LM was written in six weeks. Tad quit acid and working to concentrate on writing. During this time he had little cash and was living on a cheese sandwich a day. The editing was fierce with pages and pages being scratched. It was only after he had finished the introduction that he realized he had said everything he had wanted to say. A little more was added to end it. That was that. He tightly typed it in two columns on 20 pages and started giving away the xeroxes of the work by the hundreds.

Eventually a publishing deal with a local guy named Joe was struck. The publisher turned out to be undependable. This was a real problem since Tad's self-promotion has been wildly successful and orders for the book had started to flow in. Even Alan Watts had become fascinated with the ideas. Golas ended the deal. He hints in the Intro to the current Gibbs Smith edition of LM that Joe was laying some claim to his own part in writing the book. Tad thought the bad press from Joe and the loss of momentum had ended the book. Not so.

Tad had a real stroke of luck one night when Deray Norton knocked on the door. Tad had moved away to San Rafael for a while, but found himself back at the old address on California Steer. It's fortunate he'd just moved back since Deray had no place to look for the author except this old address printed in the book. Deray revealed himself to be the mysterious purchaser of 600 copies of LM. He owned the Plowshare Bookstore in Palo Alto and had set up an enlightenment study center in the back room, calling it The Seed Center. Tad had a new publisher who understood the value of the work and had 20,000 copies printed on a handshake. Deray gave Tad an unheard of 15% royalty. Due to an ordering fluke, B. Dalton had the book set to auto-order itself in the purchasing computer. This sold the book well nationally at a nice clip.

As the '70s declined, so did the use of acid. Tad and his third wife Nancy stood in the cold peddling the book to the San Francisco business crowd at lunch to make their living. But sales of the the book were still trickling in around the country and Tad realized it was being read by others who had no interest in hallucinogens. Sales were still strong enough in 1980 that Bantam entered into an unheard of arrangement of Tad, allowing the Seed Center to continue publishing. Bantam spurred more US sales and released the book in other languages. The German edition had become very popular.

Tad and Nancy split and he headed north to settle in Anchor Bay, California. By the early '80s Tad was 60 and tired. He was reluctant to become a guru so this life of semi-seclusion suited him. Later he moved to Sarasota, Florida and finally across to the Atlantic side of the state shortly before his death. He had once driven to a Columbia class reunion, but stopped at the Hudson River and drove back to Florida.

These final years Tad was comfortable with the hermitage. He spent his days meditating, inventing and not patenting (a commercial bleeper for the TV), and replying to reader mail the publishers were still passing on to him. He passed away in '97.


Sources: Tad's writings, especially the Intro to the Gibbs Smith edition of LM, and an interview with Columbia classmate Ted Melnechuk, whom we are eternally grateful to.

The shift to the physical plane.

Tad's writings took a quantum leap after LM. What more could he say? From a writer's perspective, LM was as close to perfect control as any writer has ever had over a printed work. It was an exact treatise of his views in 1971.

After success, most writers would have expanded on their ideas and confused readers by publishing loftier flights of spiritual fancy. But the completeness of thought in LM left Tad nowhere to turn his attention to but the physical plane. Or more precisely, the physics plane. Tad was convinced that science would eventually prove his first paragraph of LM: "We are equal beings and the universe is our relations with each other. The universe is made up of one kind of entity: each one is alive and determines the course of his own existence." As a writer, Tad set out not to justify, but to prove what he wrote. Or as he says in the Gibbs Smith edition Introduction to LM, his writing is "based on what I can't demolish."

There's been no doctorial thesis on Tad's theories, but new scientific understanding reveals some interesting parallels. Golas' idea that love is an agreement that starts at the molecular level is backed by the study of mitochondria. The symbiotic agreement with these tiny parasites that infest our bodies is what makes life possible.

Tad was particularly fond of his theory that energy propels matter and space propels energy. It would be interesting to put this theory on a blackboard in a roomful of today's top scientists and see what what fistfights break out.

Bioette: The unlikely hippie.

It was not an 18-year-old, Californian who wrote LM. In 1971 Thaddeus Golas was a 50-year-old, Columbia-educated, ex-Harper and Row book rep and Redbook Magazine editor who stumbled onto the scene from New York. The '67 Quake in San Francisco was not San Andreas' fault, but a crack opening up in the world's collective consciousness. And Tad found the encouragement here for LM to become one hell-of-a midlife crisis.

Despite being well over the untrustable age of 30, LM became a fixture of the Age of Aquarius. But interestingly Tad never became a guru himself. "It never occured to me to exploit the readers of my book with seminars and courses. I did not want to relate to people that way. I truly did write the book so I would not have to talk about it." (from the Gibbs Smith edition Introduction)

Another work?

Another work attributed to Tad is Perspective on LSD. While this is definitely a Tad topic, the writing style doesn't quite match his other work. One of the reason's why LM was such a success is that, despite it's heady nature, it was well written. Tad had many years of experience as a mainstream book and magazine editor when he penned LM. It's possible this article was penned by someone else, but that's for you to decide.

Writings in The Sun.

Many have asked why Golas did no writing beyond LM. Actually he did. He was an avid producer of work, but much if it never saw print. Why? Simple: LM was a fluke in the publishing biz. Golas took back his book from the original publisher and turned production over to Deray Norton at the Seed Center. Eventually Bantam picked up the book in an unheard of arrangement: that the Seed Center could still print it. The Seed Center copies are exquisite quality, while the Bantam copies are cheaply printed. Despite this, Bantam helped propel the book into the international market in many languages. Despite the success, it was still a publishing analomy. Tad's curmugeonly ways and lack of a finished manuscript made him a risk for publishers.

Over the years Tad had essays published in The Sun magazine. Since his work didn't appear in book form, the Sun became an outlet for his ideas. The 5 or 6 articles he wrote are all lengthy essays. Together they comprise as many words as are in LM.

A few are nicely written essays. Others are more disjointed collections of ideas. All are heady reading that you'll probably want to wrestle with at least a few bouts.

You can order back copies or xeroxes (when out of print) for $7 each from the Sun:

Issue 69 '81 On Enlightenment
Issue 82 '82 On Understanding Pain
Issue 85 '82 Pocket Physics
Issue 108 '84 Understanding Pain
Issue 179 '90 The Cosmic Airdrome
Issue 229 '95 Cosmic Airdrome Revisited

The Understand Pain appears to be a repeat, or possibly a misprint by The Sun.

Still in print.

The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment is still in print. Gibbs Smith has done a small, hardback edition. Added to the original book is a 31-page history of the book and photos of Tad. The history was written by Tad a few years before his death in '97, making it his last work in print. In addition to talking about the book, he also spouts his post-LM theories. Many times he set about to finish an autobiography, but apparently never did. In typical fashion, this brief introduction to the original, thin work - is it.

Many of the new theories in the introduction are at odds with the original ideas in LM. As convinced as he was in 1995 that he finally had it right, his closing lines are: "And now that I have delivered to you all my common sense, I have to ask you: Why are these statements less convincing, less inspiring than the text of The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment?"

Welcome.

Why? Somebody's got to keep track of what the man said. These ideas may be worth something to mankind someday.