Chapter 19: The Sporting Culture The final chapter is about a personal experience with the author Jack Kerouac, an incident related to Kerouac and two end-of-the-year signature pieces I developed over the years. In 1961 when Jack Kerouac's novel, "On The Road" was on the best seller list, I found out he was living on Long Island, in Northport, with his mother. I knew he had a sports background, that he had played high school football in Lowell, Mass. and had won a scholarship to Columbia, so I got in touch with him. He told me about a card baseball game he had conceived and we made a date for me to go out to Northport to play the game. His mother lived in a unprepossessing Cape Cod house on a quiet street in Northport. You couldn't imagine a more unlikely setting for the man associated in many minds at that time as the king of the beatniks. Keouac actually was a more conservative and traditionally-minded guy than most people would have imagined. We sat down in his living room, with his mother clucking in on occasion to scold him about being neat. We played while sipping and finishing off a large bottle of Petri wine. The game consisted of cardboards on which Kerouac fashioned the various actions of a baseball game-single, double, strikeout, double play, stolen base, caught stealing and the like. The fascination for me was the imaginative world of colorful characters Kerouac had created, and he mouthed a sort of play-by-play, sketching in their backgrounds as we played. He had wonderous players. There were:
I was taken with the name of Burlingame Japes, who Kerouac said "was 40 years old, a little left-hander who in his younger days was the league-base-stealing champ. I put him in for Joe Boston who broke his leg sliding and who wasn't helping the team anyway." Kerouac explained that the name Burlingame came from a town just south of San Francisco. I managed the Pittsburgh Browns, who beat Kerouac's Chicage Blues, 9-3. I was not accustomed to an afternoon of sipping wine, let alone the cheap stuff, and I was a bit woozy when I left the shaggy author late in the afternoon. But, as I wrote at the time, "It was a good game." That column led to some conversations recorded in the first column.
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No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money. |
