Boston Globe: Retracing 'On the Road' 50 years Later...
Chapter 1 - Lowell, Mass
Chapter 2 - Iowa and Nebraska
Chapter 3 - Wyoming, Utah and Nevada
Chapter 4 - California
NY Times: When ‘On the Road’ Was ‘On the Subway’ by Mitch Keller...
SIXTY years ago this week, Jackie Robinson was playing his historic first season with the Dodgers, the Yankees finally lost after 19 straight victories and Perry Como topped the Billboard charts with “Chi-Baba, Chi-Baba (My Bambino Go to Sleep).” Reports had recently come out of Roswell, N.M., that a rancher had found the wreckage of a flying saucer.
That Thursday, July 17, an unknown writer named Jack Kerouac, who loved baseball but preferred Charlie Parker to Perry Como and two-lane blacktops to outer space, left his mother’s apartment in Ozone Park, Queens, and set out on one of the best-known journeys in American literature. Then 25, he was heading west across the country in what became the opening trip in his classic novel of the Beat Generation, “On the Road.”
Kerouac experts like John Sampas, the executor of his estate, and the historian Douglas Brinkley say there is no record of Kerouac’s earliest movements that day. In all probability, though, his journey began at the elevated train station at Liberty Avenue and Rockaway Boulevard in Ozone Park. There, according to Joe Cunningham, a subway historian, he would have boarded a train consisting of six old wooden cars and taken it to Rockaway Avenue in Brooklyn. Then he would have transferred to the A train — which did not, at that time, extend to Ozone Park — and taken it into Manhattan.
By his own account in “On the Road,” Kerouac’s next train was the West Side IRT, which means he would have switched to it at Fulton Street, dropping another nickel into a coin box to activate the ponderous wooden arms of a 1940s-style IRT turnstile. Changing from the IND to the IRT cost an extra nickel in those days. Tokens were not yet in use, and it was still a year before the original nickel fare went up to a dime.
Kerouac’s immediate destination was 242nd Street/Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, his ultimate destination San Francisco. In a letter to a friend three months earlier, he had said, “My subject as a writer is of course America, and simply, I must know everything about it.”
Ten years later, when the book finally came out in September 1957 — its 50th anniversary is one of this year’s big literary events — Kerouac became a national celebrity.
To hip young Americans and others who loved the freedom and exuberance they found in his book and his new, loose, often jazzlike way of writing, Kerouac was a liberating hero. To his detractors, including many established reviewers, his book depicted what they saw as the decadence and perversity of the dope-smoking, hard-partying, rat-race-phobic Beat Generation, whose founding members, in addition to Kerouac, included the poet Allen Ginsberg and the writer William S. Burroughs.
At the time of his trip, Kerouac, who had grown up in Lowell, Mass., and dropped out of Columbia University, was working on his first novel, “The Town and the City,” which would be published in 1950. In “On the Road” the character of his mother was changed to an aunt, Ozone Park became Paterson, N.J., and the author gave himself the name Sal Paradise.
On his way to San Francisco, Kerouac planned to stop in Denver to see friends he had made in New York, most prominent among them Neal Cassady, a former juvenile delinquent who would become a counterculture demigod as the character Dean Moriarty in “On the Road.”
Kerouac had met Cassady late the previous year. The highly intelligent but educationally deprived son of a Denver hobo, Cassady had a turbocharged personality, manic energy, big-screen looks and, as a serial car thief and reform-school alumnus, a practiced eye for the main chance. He would exert an enormous influence on Kerouac’s writing.
The IRT subway car that Kerouac boarded that day in July was probably grimy black from the steel-on-steel dust that built up on subway cars in the years before mechanized washing, and was outfitted with yellowish rattan seats, overhead fans and functioning windows. According to Mr. Cunningham, it had probably been in service since before World War I.
KEROUAC’S train emerged from the underground part of its journey at Dyckman Street in Upper Manhattan, 11 stops from 96th Street, and traveled the remaining six stops on elevated tracks, as it does today. The view out the window was one Kerouac knew well: After graduating from Lowell High School in 1939, Kerouac, who came from a working-class family, had spent a year at the elite Horace Mann School for Boys in Riverdale, the Bronx, before enrolling at Columbia, and had made the long commute there each day from the home of his mother’s stepmother in Brooklyn.
Just before it crossed the Harlem River Ship Canal, the train took Kerouac past Columbia’s football stadium at Baker Field, a sight that almost certainly stirred some emotion in him. Kerouac had been an accomplished scholastic football player and had wanted to play for Columbia, but a broken leg his freshman year basically ruined that dream, a development that Ann Charters, one of Kerouac’s biographers, said “remained always a crushing personal defeat.”
In those days, the end of the subway line at 242nd Street and Broadway, adjacent to Van Cortlandt Park, was a busy trolley hub. Descending the stairs from the elevated station, Kerouac boarded a trolley and took it into Yonkers, then changed to another one and took it, in the words of Sal Paradise, “to the city limits on the east bank of the Hudson River.” Then he started hitchhiking up the Hudson.
What’s wrong with this picture?
Kerouac/Paradise wanted to go west, yet he was traveling due north. This was because Kerouac, in studying his maps, had liked the looks of “one long red line called Route 6” — U.S. Route 6, which runs from Provincetown, Mass., 3,000 miles west to California — and had settled on the idea of taking the road all the way to Denver.
Unfortunately, to pick up Route 6 he had to go up to the Bear Mountain Bridge, some 40 miles north of the city. Worse, once he got there he discovered that little traffic passed through that semi-wilderness, and while waiting futilely for a ride, he got drenched in a thunderstorm.
Enraged at himself, humiliated by his “stupid hearthside idea that it would be wonderful to follow one great red line across America,” Kerouac ended up taking a bus back to New York and then another one all the way to Chicago. In “Chi,” after he had rested up and “dug” the city, he took yet a third bus to the suburbs to escape the urban traffic, and finally began hitchhiking to Denver.
That November, Kerouac was back home in Ozone Park, working again on “The Town and the City” but now possessing lots of material for the book that would make his name. He lived 12 more years after “On the Road” appeared, dying in 1969 at age 47 from internal bleeding caused by years of stupendous drinking. His muse, Cassady, gave up his own tortured ghost in 1968 after being found unconscious beside some railroad tracks in Mexico, just shy of his 42nd birthday.
