"Hunter S. Thompson's widow returns antlers he stole from Hemingway in 1964"

CBC Radio:  Thompson had long felt a deep connection to Hemingway, and he would end up becoming a large influence in his written work. It was in 1964 that Thompson decided to drive out to Ketchum, Idaho, to visit the house where Hemingway had lived and died. Hemingway committed suicide there in 1961.

Thompson was also there to write a story for the National Observer about Hemingway's legacy in Idaho. And when Thompson got to the home, it was empty. As he was leaving, he noticed a massive pair of elk antlers hanging above the doorway — and stole them.

"[Hunter] made such a long journey to go and visit, and he just couldn't help himself. And he was much younger then, and not as wise." Thompson's widow, Anita Thompson, tells As It Happens guest host Laura Lynch.

"When he would talk about it, he was embarrassed. Because Hunter is not a thief — he's just so caught up in the moment. We planned to take a road trip several times in 2003 and just quietly return them, but we never did," she says.

Unfortunately, the Gonzo journalist would never get around to making that trip to Idaho. On Feb. 20, 2005, Thompson — like Hemingway before him — shot himself.

Hippies Punching Upwards

[Posted as a retort to Glenn Reynolds' disparaging post on hippies, posted here]

Hunter S. Thompson writing about hippies in 1968, well before he got really weird:

The British historian Arnold Toynbee, at the age of 78, toured San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district and wrote his impressions for the London Observer. 'The leaders of the Establishment,' he said, 'will be making the mistake of their lives if they discount and ignore the revolt of the hippies and many of the hippies' non hippie contemporaries on the grounds that these are either disgraceful wastrels or traitors, or else just silly kids who are sowing their wild oats.'

Toynbee never really endorsed the hippies; he explained his affinity in the longer focus of history. If the human race is to survive, he said, the ethical, moral, and social habits of the world must change: The emphasis must switch from nationalism to mankind. And Toynbee saw in the hippies a hopeful resurgence of the basic humanitarian values that were beginning to seem to him and other long-range thinkers like a tragically lost cause in the war-poisoned atmosphere of the 1960's. He was not quite sure what the hippies really stood for, but since they were against the same things he was against (war, violence, and dehumanized profiteering), he was naturally on their side, and vice versa.

--Hunter S. Thompson, The Hippies (1968)

More of Thompson's thoughts on the optimal timing of being a hippy from the same essay are here.