The House Where Jack Lived

Jack Kerouac was an author and a spokesman for the original hippies of the 50's.  They say he was the guy that powered the Beat Generation, whatever that was.  I've heard of Jack Kerouac but trying to get a handle on his fame is slippery.  So, just what did he do?  Well, it is written that he was an iconoclast.  What the hell is that?

According to the dictionary that means (1) someone who destroys religious images or opposes their religious veneration, and/or (2) a person who attacks settled beliefs or institutions.

Big deal.  I did that in college.

He also wrote several books of which one,  On The Road, is considered a classic.  So who was Jack Kerouac and why is still considered a big deal?  Masses of youths have used Kerouac's writings to travel, look at life differently and even to rebel.  In further research I found this snippet:


The thing is, though, that the book was something totally different in its day. The style was different, and the subject was a bit unconventional. While there had been "road novels" before, most notably The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I think On The Road spoke clearly and loudly to American Post-War youth who felt stuck in "square" society. The book inspired a generation of people, and had a substantial role in the creation of sixties counterculture and, by extension, modern counterculture as well.

He also lived his last years in St. Petersburg.  I drove by the place a couple weeks ago and took these pictures.  It seems to be a rather generic Florida ranch house, not at all what one might assume for one of the iconic figures of the 50's New Age writers.

Problems with the Will, and a family not interested enough to clean it up, clear it out and sell.  A Times reporter in 1969 stopped by and this is his last interview.

"He'd been living in obscurity in St. Petersburg for several years with his third wife, Stella, and his mother, who was paralyzed. The man who had written 17 books, includingOn the Road and The Dharma Bums, was clearly fading.

He complained of making just $1,770 the first six months of the year. He complained that he was lonely and didn't get out much. He complained that he was ill."

"I got a g--d--- hernia, you know that? My g--d--- belly-button is popping out. That's why I'm dressed like this," he said. "I got no place to go, anyway."

He was dead from gastric hemorrhaging a few weeks later, at St. Anthony's Hospital, where they tried to save him with 30 units of Type A Positive.

His mother died not long after Jack, and Stella passed in 1990, but the house has been mostly empty of humans since the '70s. To walk inside is to be transported back 40 years. Tchotchkes from the era line the shelves. A '72 Chevy Caprice sits on flats in the two-car garage. AReader's Digest from September 1967 sits on the record cabinet. A 1969 telephone directory for Lowell, Mass., is shelved on Kerouac's desk in the bedroom. A Boone's Farm box is in a closet. An official mayoral proclamation for "Jack Kerouac Day" in Lowell, Mass., hangs on one wall, near a Buddha statue and a crucifix.                             Tampa Bay Times, March 2013

Here are pictures taken of the inside (not mine) by a Tampa Bay Times reporter in March.  It remains pretty much the way he and his wife left it the day he died.  

The kitchen largely unchanged for 44 years.

The house is in disrepair but a group called Friends of Jack Kerouac are attempting to purchase the house and restore it.

Jack's wife, Stella, owned this 1972 Chevy Caprice which is still in the garage.  She died in 1990.

A Lowell Massachusetts proclamation for Jack Kerouac Day is on the wall. 

The desk chair that jack used is still in the house.

  

Kerouac wrote at this desk in the house that has remained unchanged since his death in 1969.

This terribly poor picture was taken with my phone camera.  It is right across the street from Dairy Inn, best ice cream place in the Tampa bay area.  Anyway, it is the Flamingo Bar, which was Jack's favorite hangout.  A large picture of Kerouac hangs on the front to the right.


I doubt that I ever read On The Road.  And I have to say I still really don't get it, but Jack Kerouac is going to remain a somewhat large figure in American Arts.  

So he wrote a stream of consciousness novel about traveling which was, in the literary world,  new and different.  And he presaged the beatniks and hippies?  So he must have been a cool cat, huh?  Sure.

"I'm glad to see you," Kerouac told the Times reporter in '69, "because I'm very lonesome here."

Cool, indeed.