'Do You Want To Talk To The Man-In-Charge, Or The Woman Who Knows What's Going On?'
Growing up in the late 1950s and early '60s, Betty Cantor developed an early talent for tinkering. "I used to take things like radios, other little electronic devices if they didn't work, open them up, mess with them, put them back together and they worked," she remembers during a recent phone call. "I could fix watches that wouldn't work for anybody else." Her fascination with how things worked helped her breeze through the available math and science classes at her Martinez, Calif. high school to the point that, she said, "they ran out of things for me to do, so they let me go over to the college to play at the lab."
"Math was fun, I enjoyed it, and science was discovery," she says. "The universe is math, right? Just how it all fits together." She began traveling regularly, sitting in on seminars about chemistry and metallurgy in Berkeley and San Francisco in the '60s — a place where lots of other young people were also investigating, in lots of different ways, how the universe fit together. That's where she met the Grateful Dead, with whom she'd eventually travel thousands of miles over close to 20 years, recording hundreds of hours of tape and becoming one of the many female workers, supporters and associates who shaped the story of America's most weird, colorful, sui generis rock and roll band.
During her junior year, Cantor had written a term paper on the history of psychedelic drugs. LSD, which had first been synthesized about 25 years earlier, had enjoyed a short period of favor in the U.S. as a potentially salubrious psychotherapeutic aid. By the time Cantor was researching it, the pendulum of official opinion was already starting its swing backward; in 1966, California and Nevada became the first states to criminalize possession of the drug, and a federal ban would follow two years later. The budding teen scientist wanted to draw her own conclusions, though, and for reasons that crossed over into the personal.
"I read everything back to 1943 on [psychedelics] basically, and decided maybe there was an answer to why I felt like an alien where I lived," she says. "I decided I was going to see colors and tastes and I wasn't going to go crazy. I had made that decision."
At some point during her senior year, Cantor went to San Francisco and took her first acid trip. "And I ended up at 710 Ashbury Street," she says
