RIP Peter Stafford; author of Psychedelics Encyclopedia

I went to high school with Peter. He and I graduated from Lincoln High in Seattle in 1957. What will probably amuse people is that Peter and I were both members of a teen age rocket club - not sending rockets into the sky but trying to design them and test them on a test stand. None of them worked and some exploded. We were thinking space travel and rocketry before Sputnik. Peter served as the librarian for the group and caused a large problem when he decided to clean house and through a lot of our papers away.
Several years passed after h.s. before I saw Peter again. He was going to Reed College and had found summer employment as a forest fire lookout in Oregon. He said he had unlimited time to read on the job and he needed to prepare for the Reed Junior Quals. At Reed he moved from Dept to Dept, changing his major, and when it came time to pass Reed's junior qualification exam in whatever dept he had ended up in, he failed it. The proctors said he had "tried to be too brilliant." He did not leave the campus though, because he had been elected by the student body to be both director of the college radio station and editor of the college newspaper. He stayed a year giving the administration a bad time with his editorials and broadcasts. I saw him when he was at the U of Washington and then he vanished for a while.
Then he visited me and stayed a few nights. He had gotten hold of what he claimed was the first batch of LSD from Berkley. I did not know what that was. He carefully explained it to me as he dipped a toothpick into his supply bottle and applied it to vitamin tablets. He said the LSD mini-droplet would sink into the gelatin cover of the pill and should the police see him with them, would not recognize each one was an LSD dose. He offered to give me a bottle of the liquid (a lifetime supply he said) but not having the faintest notion of what that was I declined. It was only after he had gone that I found a book in a library giving some account of the drug and its history of discovery and early trials of its use.
I never saw Peter after that but he moved to the east coast and was the editor or similar of a periodical about drugs. He sent me copies of his newsletter, and his book LSD, the Problem Solving Psychedelic. I was most impressed by his reporting a rafting trip through the Grand Canyon while being completely stoned on drugs.
I was visited by his brother, Michael, who had become an enthusiastic user of LSD. He said he was using it to analyze art and intended to open an art gallery. He left my place with the promise to write when he found Peter. I never got any letter and wonder to this day what happened to him. Peter said he never arrived on the east coast.
In 1971 I took an overseas job and when I returned in 73 an old class mate from h.s. wrote to say that Peter had died. This was, of course, erroneous, but it stopped my trying to find him.
Somehow I connected with his sister Penny, a few years ago and she told me that Peter had died just a short few seasons before that.
I deeply regret I did not make contact with him in our later lives. He was one of those people you do not forget.