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Vic Lovell, a Stanford-educated psychologist and a prominent figure in the Peninsula’s counterculture movement, died on June 16. He was 91.
Lovell was active in multiple political advocacy movements. Notably, he helped to found the Midpeninsula Free University, which operated in Menlo Park and Palo Alto, in 1966 in the wake of the Free Speech Movement and amid growing national pushes for broader access to higher education.
Lovell was born in Annapolis, Md., according to his wife, Roxie Rorapaugh Lovell. His father was a naval officer and the family relocated often throughout Lovell’s childhood, until the family settled permanently in San Diego at the onset of World War II.
After high school, Lovell attended Stanford University, eventually earning both master’s and doctorate degrees in psychology. He received another degree in psychology from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1961.
He lived on Perry Lane, Stanford’s infamous “bohemian” neighborhood in West Menlo Park, while working on his master and doctorate degrees. Lovell’s longtime friend Jim Wolpman described those who gathered there as “mostly just a bunch of graduate students who were just looking for some other way.”
Among them was author Ken Kesey, who was a graduate student in Stanford’s creative writing program and eventually dedicated his novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” to Lovell — with his name misspelled as “Vik Lowell.”
“That was like a forever annoyance with Vic because people were always (mis)spelling his name,” said Lovell’s wife, Roxie Rorapaugh Lovell.
Rorapaugh Lovell said she met her husband in 1995 at a mutual friend’s dinner party, and her first impressions were that he was handsome, kind and funny. They married in 2002, when he was 67.
She said one of his defining characteristics was his respectfulness.
“If more people in power would think a little more deeply into things like Vic … did, it would prevent a lot of problems I think,” she said.
Wolpman first met Lovell in 1953, when they were both freshmen attending Stanford University. They became close friends. Wolpman described Lovell as a “dissenter” who was interested in the Beat Generation, and got involved in Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War actions.
Wolpman said Lovell worked part time at the Palo Alto VA Medical Center, and helped Kesey get a job as an orderly at the hospital. That job inspired Kesey’s most famous novel.
As a psychologist, Lovell grew interested in psychodrama, a form of therapy that involves patients reenacting past life experiences to reflect and gain a deeper understanding of themselves. Wolpman said when the Midpeninsula Free University stopped organizing in 1970, one of the surviving classes was Lovell’s psychodrama workshop, for which Lovell rented a separate space.
“Anything he did, he plunged into, and I think that’s an important part of his character,” Wolpman said.
Lovell stayed active and interested in politics, including locally. When they first met, Rorapaugh Lovell said he was working with a group of activists in Palo Alto trying to prevent the historic Varsity Theater from being redeveloped.
They lived in West Menlo Park and over time became more involved in Menlo Park politics. Rorapaugh Lovell recalled organizing against efforts to expand Sand Hill Road in order to preserve an open space known as Ohlone Field, and against efforts to build a golf course and soccer field on Bedwell Bayfront Park, which was then still recovering from being a landfill.
Rorapaugh Lovell said later in life, Lovell picked up poetry, and had written about 200 poems on a wide variety of topics, from science fiction poems to biographical. She said she hopes to get the poems published, with the help of a family member.
She said Lovell was a thoughtful man.
“Some people will take a line that’s against just because it’s against,” Rorapaugh Lovell said. “Vic only took a line against if he thought that was the right thing to do.”
