a day ago
Louisville had an impact on Hunter S. Thompson's life, especially these 4 spots
Twenty years ago this summer, the ashes of Louisville's most revered writer were fired out of a cannon at his Woody Creek, Colorado, home.
Hunter S. Thompson had shot himself the preceding winter, abruptly ending a career that transformed generations of American writing and continues to influence culture today.
The relationship between Thompson and Louisville — and Louisville and Thompson — is complicated.
His life took him away from Louisville.
His most well-known works have nothing to do with the city where he was born and raised.
There are murals around town (remembering the way pop culture does: cigarette holder, floppy hat) but there isn't really a Hunter S. Thompson International Airport or boulevard (though, in 1996, a December day was declared Hunter S. Thompson Day by mayoral proclamation).
But Louisville had a profound impact on Thompson.
'No matter how well-known Hunter Thompson became, I think it always mattered what the people in Louisville thought, because that was kind of his first audience,' said William McKeen, a Boston University journalism professor and the author of 'Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson.'
Here are some of the Louisville locations that were influential to the writer's life:
Thompson did not write about Louisville often.
But one of the few things he did write about Louisville — the 1970 Scanlan's Magazine article 'The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved' — would change his life and give birth to a form of journalism that still influences writers today.
"The article he did for Scanlan's on the Kentucky Derby, that ends up becoming maybe the most important turning point of his career — because it's the invention of Gonzo journalism," said Peter Richardson, a former San Francisco State University professor and the author of "Savage Journey: Hunter S. Thompson and the Weird Road to Gonzo."
Gonzo journalism inserts the writer directly into the story — often not just as an observer, but as a protagonist. It also lends itself to hyperbole and, especially in Thompson's case, blending fact and fiction.
Simultaneously, Thompson's story had very little and very much to do with the Kentucky Derby.
Thompson starts off the first foray into Gonzo by recounting how he lied to a Texan he met at the bar in Louisville's airport, telling him he's a Playboy photographer. When the giddy Texan asks if he's there to take photos of 'nekkid horses,' Thompson tells him he's in town to cover race riots.
Much of the story focuses on Ralph Steadman, a British illustrator sent by Scanlan's to draw art for Thompson's magazine article, and who was visiting the United States for the first time. Between consistently warning Steadman about the physical danger he was in — of being shot by the hotel clerk for being British, of being killed over offensive caricatures, of the riot that didn't exist — Thompson is hyper-focused on finding the perfect face for Steadman to draw to illustrate the story.
'I saw it, in my head, as the mask of the whiskey gentry — a pretentious mix of booze, failed dreams and a terminal identity crisis; the inevitable result of too much inbreeding in a closed and ignorant culture,' Thompson wrote. '… The face I was trying to find in Churchill Downs that weekend was a symbol, in my own mind, of the whole doomed atavistic culture that makes the Kentucky Derby what it is.'
The morning after the race, with what appears to be a crippling hangover, Thompson catches his reflection in the mirror — 'a puffy, drink-ravaged, disease-ridden caricature' — and realizes it was his face they were searching for all along.
'One of the reasons that piece is so endearing is because it uses a device he had just discovered earlier that year in another article, and that is that whatever he wrote at that point suddenly became an article about trying to write an article — about Hunter Thompson trying to write an article,' said McKeen, the Boston University professor. 'And the device he used a lot was to use a companion. And in the case of the Kentucky Derby piece, it was the perfect companion: Ralph Steadman.'
At the time, Richardson said, Thompson thought the story would be a failure.
He had pitched covering the Derby to an editor in the middle of the night after a friend suggested he write about the Derby because he was a Kentuckian. Steadman was linked with Thompson by chance, because he happened to be in the U.S. and was available.
'It's amazing how close we came to not having Gonzo journalism, at all,' Richardson said.
Thompson was not always gonzo.
In the early 1960s, while writing for other mainstream outlets in the Caribbean and South America, Thompson filed a number of freelance articles for The Courier Journal back in his hometown.
Unlike his later gonzo offerings, his earlier writings did not look particularly out of place on the pages of The Courier Journal.
While in Puerto Rico in 1960 — an experience that would later be immortalized in his novel 'The Rum Diaries' and a Johnny Depp movie of the same name — he wrote a handful of CJ articles about politics and life on the island.
'Hunter S. Thompson works on The Star in San Juan, Puerto Rico. We have run stories by him in the past,' reads a brief bio tagged onto the end of a June 1960 Courier Journal profile Thompson wrote about a young Louisvillian who was, at the time, living in a small village outside of San Juan after graduating from Yale.
(In reality, Thompson had been turned down for a job at The Star. In a letter to The Star's editor weeks later, Thompson claimed he never told The Courier Journal he worked for The Star. Meanwhile, the subject of the story, a good friend of Thompson's from Louisville, later claimed the quotes Thompson used were "totally fabricated.")
In May of that year, Thompson wrote an analysis-heavy story comparing Puerto Rico's gubernatorial candidates for The Courier Journal.
Later, in 1962, Thompson was in South America, largely writing for the Dow Jones-owned National Observer.
However, in June of that year, he wrote a travel story for the CJ titled 'Beer Boat Blues,' where he recounted a trip on a barge carrying beer up Colombia's Magdalene River.
Writing in the first-person, there are hints of Thompson's voice emerging, but it's still not there yet.
'I came up here on a tug. It was a wonderful trip: free ride, free beer, nice tan, plenty of rest — and now, retribution, I am here in Barranca Bermeja, an oil town, hot and stinking in the very middle of nowhere,' he wrote.
Not all of Thompson's pitches to the CJ landed.
In December 1959, Thompson wrote to the paper's editor pitching a story about "Louisville Expatriates in New York," including the Yale grad he later wrote about in Puerto Rico. The pitch never resulted in a story.
Later, Thompson wrote a friend saying he had stopped pitching The Courier Journal after they turned down a story on Big Sur, California.
To McKeen, the Boston University professor, there were two huge influences on a young Thompson's life in Louisville: the library and the expanses of forest near his childhood home known as Cherokee Park.
McKeen spent time speaking to Thompson's friends for his book.
'A lot of them would say 'we'd go out, and we'd raise hell, we'd throw rocks at other kids, and we'd do this, and we'd do that — and then we'd go into the library, and we didn't say a word. We just sat there and read,'' he said.
That love of books stuck with Thompson.
Even as Thompson embarked on his 'career as a juvenile delinquent' as a teenager, McKeen said, he would come home and stay up all night reading.
Thompson's mother was also an LFPL librarian.
Just a couple blocks away from his Ransdell Avenue childhood home in the Highlands, Cherokee Park was a favorite stomping ground for Thompson throughout his adolescence.
According to McKeen's book, Thompson called Cherokee Park 'beautifully wild and uncivilized: no buildings, no taxis, no traffic lights — just a sprawling and lonely woods.'
It was also the site of an incident that would alter the course of his life.
Thompson was no stranger to delinquency — from stealing booze to destroying a mailbox and drunkenly carousing with friends as a teen.
But at 17, he would finally face real consequences.
One night in May 1955, Thompson and two friends came across two couples making out in a car in Cherokee Park. The trio approached the car, and according to Courier Journal reporting at the time, one of the three allegedly had a gun.
They robbed the couples of $8.
It didn't take police long to find the trio.
Thompson's colleague's — including one who was the son of a prominent attorney — got off light.
But Thompson was sentenced to 60 days in jail, after which he was to go into the U.S. Air Force.
As a result of his actions that night, Thompson never graduated from high school and never went to college.
"He was kind of the mascot for a lot of the rich kids. So he palled around with them," McKeen said. "And then he went to jail, he went to the Air Force — and they want to Yale and all these other schools."
Josh Wood is an investigative reporter. We have run stories by him in the past.
He can be reached at jwood@ or on X at @JWoodJourno.
This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Hunter S. Thompson growing up in Louisville sites to know
