Now what was I talking about again? Oh yeah. Grim writes at Huffington Post.com:

Depending on who you ask, or their state of inebriation, there are as many varieties of answers as strains of medical bud in California. It’s the number of active chemicals in marijuana. It’s teatime in Holland. It has something to do with Hitler’s birthday. It’s those numbers in that Bob Dylan song multiplied.

The origin of the term 420, celebrated around the world by pot smokers every April 20th, has long been obscured by the clouded memories of the folks who made it a phenomenon.

I always thought it referred to sneaking out to the parking lot or behind the building at 4:20 to light up and make the last 40 minutes of work fly by. It turns out the term has a musical pedigree – sort of.

The Huffington Post chased the term back to its roots and was able to find it in a lost patch of cannabis in a Point Reyes, California forest. Just as interesting as its origin, it turns out, is how it spread.

It starts with the Dead.

Makes perfect sense when you think about it.

It was Christmas week in Oakland, 1990. Steven Bloom was wandering through The Lot – that timeless gathering of hippies that springs up in the parking lot before every Grateful Dead concert – when a Deadhead handed him a yellow flyer.

“We are going to meet at 4:20 on 4/20 for 420-ing in Marin county at the Bolinas Ridge sunset spot on Mt. Tamalpais,” reads the message, which Bloom dug up and forwarded to the Huffington Post. Bloom, then a reporter for High Times magazine and now the publisher of CelebStoner.com and co-author of Pot Culture, had never heard of “420-ing” before.

The flyer came complete with a 420 back story: “420 started somewhere in San Rafael, California in the late ’70s. It started as the police code for Marijuana Smoking in Progress. After local heads heard of the police call, they started using the expression 420 when referring to herb – Let’s Go 420, dude!”

Although Bloom documented the term in a 1991 issue of High Times, he actually only had part of the story right. Grim did some additional digging and found the true origin was sometime before that.

It had nothing to do with police code – the San Rafael part was dead on. Indeed, a group of five San Rafael High School friends known as the Waldos – by virtue of their chosen hang-out spot, a wall outside the school – coined the term in 1971.

Grim and the folks at Huffington Post spoke with the Waldos, who asked that pseudonyms be used when quoting them to avoid any legal entanglements, and viewed evidence, including an old 420 flag and letters containing references to the term, postmarked in the early ’70s, that proves their claim.

So what’s the real story of the origin? It’s kind of like a stoner version of “The Goonies.”

It goes like this: One day in the Fall of 1971 – harvest time – the Waldos got word of a Coast Guard service member who could no longer tend his plot of marijuana plants near the Point Reyes Peninsula Coast Guard station. A treasure map in hand, the Waldos decided to pluck some of this free bud.

The Waldos were all athletes and agreed to meet at the statue of Louis Pasteur outside the school at 4:20, after practice, to begin the hunt.

“We would remind each other in the hallways we were supposed to meet up at 4:20. It originally started out 4:20-Louis and we eventually dropped the Louis,” Waldo Steve tells the Huffington Post.

The first forays out were unsuccessful, but the group kept looking for the hidden crop. “We’d meet at 4:20 and get in my old ’66 Chevy Impala and, of course, we’d smoke instantly and smoke all the way out to Pt. Reyes and smoke the entire time we were out there. We did it week after week,” says Steve. “We never actually found the patch.”

Gee, wonder why? I guess it never occurred to them it might be easier to find what they were looking for if they weren’t fried. Oh well, at least they had a good time. And they came up with a code word for getting high that was soon adopted by their friends.

So how did the term spread from a group of high school stoners to cannabis fans around the world? That’s where the Dead comes in.

As fortune would have it, the collapse of San Francisco’s hippie utopia in the late ’60s set the stage. As speed freaks, thugs and con artists took over The Haight, the Grateful Dead picked up and moved to the Marin County hills – just blocks from the San Rafael High School.

And the rest is history. The father of one of the Waldos managed the Dead’s real estate. Another member of the group had a brother who managed a Dead sideband and hung out with Phil Lesh. The Waldos also had open access to the Dead at parties and rehearsals.

The term spread throughout the Deadhead community as the band toured in the ’70s and ’80s. It only went above ground when High Times stumbled upon it and decided to bring it to the masses, even purchasing the domain name 420.com in the early ’90s.

Even though most of the Waldos don’t partake anymore, they are kind of proud to be the ones who created the term beloved by stoners everywhere.

As Waldo Dave puts it, “I’m sure on my headstone it’ll say: ‘One of the 420 guys.’”

In honor of 420 and the Waldos, here’s Seth McFarlane’s musical tribute to the benefits of pot from last night’s “Family Guy” which was called – you guessed it – “Episode 420.”