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.