Born and raised in Illinois, Jim Wilson Jr. excelled in academics and athletics but also endured racial abuse. He soon joined the counterculture, traveling to Woodstock and Jamaica before becoming a fixture of Ann Arbor’s Hash Bash and Grateful Dead tours with his Rasta Pasta Pesto. His friend, High Times Editor-in-Chief Steven Hager, hired him as an edible columnist and put him on the November 1987 cover. Ra’s ebullient personality and recipes – such as Springtime Ganja Nachos and Ultimate Hash Brownies – were also featured in the videos “Chef Ra Escapes Babylon” (1989) and “Ganja Gourmet” (2003). Sadly, Jim passed away on December 26, 2006.
See, most of us were living in our own little worlds. Some of the more socially progressive among us certainly had no idea of the primitive beliefs being held by some of our fundamentalist fellow students, just as none of us knew the history of racism in the town, and how all blacks had been herded around the hemp factory
