Zach Leary on his famous father

Timothy Leary during the recording of John Lennon's "Give Peace a Chance." (Creative Commons photo).

Just a normal American life: "I grew up in what appeared on the outside to be a somewhat normal upper-middle-class household in Beverly Hills, California. Every morning my mom or dad would take me to school, my dad would toss the baseball with me in the backyard and on most nights they would make sure I did my homework."

The "dad" being talked about by Zach Leary is Timothy Leary, and the article, "Having Timothy Leary as a Father Was a Trip," describes what Zach learned about his father after discovering that he was famous.

The article is the excerpt from the forward to a new book, The Timothy Leary Project: Inside the Great Counterculture Experiment by Jennifer Ulrich, a collection of Leary's selected papers and correspondence. The book will be out on April 17.