The Untold Truth Of Jerry Garcia

One of the most iconic Grateful Dead images is the four fingered handprint of Garcia’s right hand. The middle finger is notably shorter than the others, and it’s common knowledge among Deadheads that this is because Garcia lost part of this finger when he was young. Yet, what most fans do not know is exactly how he lost his finger.

According to Blair Jackson in “Garcia: An American Life,” Garcia and his older brother Clifford, known as “Tiff,” were vacationing at their summer home in Lompico, California, and chopping wood together for their fire pit. They had gotten into a rhythm, Tiff swinging the ax while Jerry cleared away the split wood, but at one point they got out of sync and the ax came down on Garcia’s ring finger, nearly severing it just above the second knuckle. His mother quickly wrapped his finger in a towel before they rushed to the hospital, where the top-half of his finger was amputated. Garcia, a four-year-old at the time, did not realize that his finger had been amputated, he just thought it was heavily bandaged. When he took off his bandages weeks later and realized half of his finger was missing, he was shocked.

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