EXTRA...

Jack Kerouac left Cape 0n trek 60 years ago; Owner died, Cape mutt gets new leash on life; Barnstable museum honors rescues at sea

On the (wrong) road with Jack Kerouac
Trek began 60 years ago hitchhiking from Ptown to Ely Nevada


Long road, long write
Legend has it that Kerouac wrote On The Road in 1951, in three Benzedrine-fuelled weeks, with no margins or paragraphs, on a single scroll of paper 121.39 feet long. Certainly, such a scroll exists. It was bought in 2001 by Jim Irsay, owner of the Indianapolis Colts, for $2.4 million. It's comprised of pieces of tracing paper taped together and was typed from the notebooks in which Kerouac had written segments of the book as they happenedAs he set out, albeit unwittingly, to change the literary landscape, Jack Kerouac started off by going the wrong way.

Sixty years ago this month – July 17, 1947, to be exact – Kerouac, then 25, left his mother's house in the Ozone Park district of Queens, New York, on the first of four treks around the United States and into Mexico that would lead to the publication 10 years later of his autobiographical novel On The Road.

September will mark the book's half century. It remains a steady seller. Biographies and critical studies of the father of the Beat Generation appear regularly. Kerouac, who was already developing a drinking problem when he hit the highways, died in 1969, aged 47.

As he tells it in On The Road, he'd been "poring over maps" and thought he'd hitchhike to the West Coast along "one long red line called Route 6 that led from the tip of Cape Cod clear to Ely, Nevada, and there dipped down to Los Angeles... To get to 6, I had to go up to Bear Mountain."

Kerouac took the 7th Ave. subway to the end of the line at 242nd St. and then a trolley to Yonkers. "Five scattered rides" took him to Bear Mountain, where it began to rain "in torrents... I began crying and swearing and socking myself on the head for being such a damn fool... I looked like a maniac, of course, with my hair all wet, my shoes sopping. My shoes, damn fool that I am, were Mexican huaraches, plant-like sieves not fit for the rainly night of America and the raw road night."  Read the rest of this Toronoto Star story here.  
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Owner died, Cape mutt gets new leash on life
“That woman saved Adison's life by finding him"

WAREHAM — Adison, a lhasa apso-mix dog believed to be around 9-years old, was in rough shape (see before & after photos on right).  After he was discovered last month in a home on Cape Cod after his elderly owner died, he had six inches of matted hair on the top of his head, said Lauren Biagiotti, volunteer shelter manager of A Helping Paw Humane Society.

“You couldn't even tell he had eyes until we pried the fur away. His feet were bloody raw and soaked in urine and feces,” she said.  He'd been taken by the town's animal control officer to a shelter where he would have been euthanized because of his condition, but he was rescued just in time by a relative of his former owner, who brought it to A Helping Paw.

“That woman saved Adison's life by finding him. She called us and asked if we could take him and of course we said yes. He needs a really good home, likes cats and dogs, but not small children. He's been through a lot of trauma, but loves attention and loves to ride in the car. It takes time for him to warm up to people, but be patient and give him love and a backyard to run in and he'll be your best friend!”  Read the rest of this Enterprise story here. 
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Barnstable museum honors rescues at sea

BARNSTABLE -- Ralph Jones stands before a tailor's form draped in the crisp blues of a Coast Guardsman's dress uniform, complete with cowl collar and square-knotted tie. "I had a uniform just like this," Jones recalls, "the flat hat and everything. I used to fold the pants and put them under my mattress to keep them flat."

Jones served in the North Atlantic from 1946 to 1952. Now he volunteers in the red brick landmark building on Cobbs Hill in Barnstable village (on right)... Now it's home to the Coast Guard Heritage Museum, which focuses on the Life-Saving Service and the Coast Guard on Cape Cod...

The exhibits range from Cape Cod to the world theater. Photographs show the 11 lightships that warned vessels off the shoals of Cape Cod from 1910 until 1968-69. A replica of the Race Point Lifeboat Station on the Outer Cape serves as a reminder of the US Life-Saving Service, a forerunner of the Coast Guard...  Read the rest of this Globe report here.