[2] She spent the first eight years of her childhood in East Lansing, then the family moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where she attended the Ward-Belmont College Preparatory School for Girls.
At Bennington College, Carolyn took classes with Martha Graham, Erich Fromm, Peter Drucker, Francis Ferguson, and Theodore Roethke, obtaining her bachelor of arts degree in Stanislavsky drama in 1944.
During this period, Carolyn and Neal began their love affair, though at the time he was still married to his first wife, Lu Anne Henderson.
While waiting for the job to open, Carolyn moved north to San Francisco, staying initially with an older married sister before finding temporary work and an apartment of her own.
In a 2008 interview with literary magazine Notes from the Underground, Cassady stated, "As far as I'm concerned, the Beat Generation was something made up by the media and Allen Ginsberg.
His new wife expected life to settle down, but that December, he spent their savings on a new maroon Hudson and made a trip with his friend Al Hinkle and Lu Anne to connect with Kerouac in North Carolina.
[7] At the end of January 1949, Neal dropped Jack and LuAnne off on a San Francisco street corner and was back in Carolyn's life.
In 1953, Jack joined Neal working as a brakeman for the Southern Pacific Railroad, and he lived with them after they moved to San Jose, California.
After receiving compensation from a railroad injury, they bought a home in Monte Sereno, California, which was then part of Los Gatos, a suburb about 50 miles south of San Francisco.
He was accused of drug trafficking and served two years at San Quentin State Prison, leaving Carolyn to take care of their children and fend for herself on welfare.
Without employment or family to anchor him, Neal joined Ken Kesey's band of Merry Pranksters and embarked on an endless series of road trips, dying in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico on February 4, 1968, four days short of his 42nd birthday.
[8] Carolyn was a founding member of the Academy of Parapsychology and Medicine (APM), and during the early 1970s, served for four years as their correspondence secretary.
In that capacity, she met many in the occult and medical world, including Uri Geller, Andrija Puharich, the Findhorn people, and astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who started an institution much like APM after he had seen Earth as a blue jewel.
She also became acquainted with eminent astrologer Dane Rudhyar, and she corresponded with one of the Russian scientists behind the book Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain.
When APM closed, she served as office manager for a company that imported bamboo stakes from China to stock American nurseries.