Jackie Gibson Mercer

'Jackie Gibson' was a "Beat era" artist in the San Francisco Bay Area, once a friend of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, later becoming girlfriend to Jack Kerouac. "He tripped on the fact that we had the same first name," she told me. Kerouac used her for the character Willamine "Billie" Dabney in his novel "Big Sur". In the early 1970s Jackie became a Mercer by marriage, and worked as an artist-supervisor for Motion Picture Services in San Francisco, under Gerald Karski. There in 1973, she hired the out-of-work artist-printer Will Jackson, who went on to become a crew member of the first Greenpeace anti-whaling expedition (1975) and founder of the San Francisco Greenpeace office (1976). Jackie volunteered for Greenpeace work in support of their anti-whaling, anti-sealing, and antinuclear testing causes.