John Suiter & Paul Marion Commemorating Kerouac: An Interview (1998

I first met Paul Marion not long after the dedication of the Kerouac Commemorative. I was living in Boston at the time and read his name in the Boston Globe, in their reporting on the years-long movement in Lowell to honor Jack Kerouac with a public monument. I had been reading Kerouac for twenty years at that time, but I had never been to Lowell. I felt like I needed a guide to point me in the right direction. I got Paul’s phone number from “Directory Assistance” and called him cold, to tell him of my interest in photographing “Kerouac places” in Lowell, and to ask his help in finding whatever locales still existed in the city from Kerouac’s time.

Paul was open to meeting with me, and we sat down one afternoon in a Greek restaurant on Market Street. I remember him telling me, “Growing up here and being a poet, Kerouac—as a creative influence—is a piano on your back, almost overwhelming. You can’t write anything about this place without taking him into consideration.” Born in 1954, Paul’s first home was in the Centralville section of Lowell, around the corner from Kerouac’s birthplace. The author was in New York then, but sometimes made nostalgic visits to wander around his old neighborhoods. I used to joke that Kerouac probably walked past Paul in his baby carriage, throwing a shade that predetermined the rest of his life. When we met, Paul had two books of poetry (Strong Place and Middle Distance) and his own small publishing operation—Loom Press, which is still in existence, and thriving, in 2021. He gave me copies of his books, and I went straight to a poem with an obvious Kerouac connection, “Big Sur,” in Middle Distance.

Kerouac-influenced, it was; but not Kerouac-dominated. The poem echoed the title of one of Jack’s books, but it was not about California, it was about the Kerouac Commemorative. Paul clearly had his own voice, even then.

“Kerouac’s back in the news”— it began . . .

his hometown elected his art. There’ll be a fresh green lawn with his breath set in polished red-brown stones that will sing to those come to find him.

I was certainly one of “those come.” From late 1988 until the fall of 1993, I visited Lowell regularly, walking along the walls of the mills with my cameras, praying for good photo-luck at the Grotto, climbing over the rocks under the Moody Street bridge, shooting pool at the Pawtucketville Social Club, even getting to meet Jack’s old high school girlfriend, Mary Carney, still living in the same house on the bank of the Concord River where Kerouac wooed her.

In 1989, on the twentieth anniversary of his passing, I published my first photo-essay of

Kerouac-related pictures in a ten-image spread in Bostonia magazine (“Kerouac’s Lowell,” Bostonia, Oct. 1989). Paul wrote the accompanying text. Two years later, I had an exhibit of thirty photographs, called Rumors of Kerouac, at Lowell’s Whistler House Museum of Art and the Boott Mills Gallery in the Boott Cotton Mills Museum of the National Park Service. Paul introduced me at both openings.

Over the next several years, Kerouac and the Beats boomed as they had not boomed since the late Fifties.

In the summer of 1998, we thought it would be good to record some thoughts on the explosion of interest, and to remember some of the key moments and people in the lead-up to the dedication of the Kerouac Commemorative . . . .

—John Suiter, Chicago, 2021

Above: Original invitation for opening ceremonies. On the following pages: The Jack Kerouac Commemorative in Eastern Canal Park, Lowell, Massachusetts. Photo © 1989 John Suiter All Rights Reserved. The Kerouac Commemorative (granite and steel) was created by Texas-based sculptor Ben Woitena in 1988.

JS Why don’t you talk about the 1970s, after Jack Kerouac died, and where you were . . .

PM I was a sophomore at Dracut High School in the fall of 1969, and I don’t recall hearing that he died even though it was on page one of the Lowell Sun, our daily paper in Dracut, the next town over. I was into baseball and The Beatles. The Abbey Road album was released in September 1969. A year later, Kerouac’s name popped up in a high school history course, an elective on Lowell-Dracut history. I still wasn’t reading Kerouac’s books. When I entered Merrimack College in 1972, I began to think about being a writer. Reading John Updike and Katherine Anne Porter in a short story course made me consider writing prose. And then I found the poems of William Carlos Williams, opening up the poetry lane. I didn’t know I had wandered into the root system of the Beat writers with Williams. At that point I delved into Kerouac, especially interested in his novels set in Lowell. I was fascinated by the way he made world-class art out of a place and people so familiar to me. His presence locally was limited to his grave at Edson Cemetery and better known books like On the Road and The Dharma Bums sold in Prince’s Bookstore in downtown Lowell. The Ann Charters biography of Kerouac would appear in 1973.

JS Did anybody that you knew visit the grave?

PM I doubt it, probably a few college students from Lowell State and pilgrims getting off the highway at the Lowell exit. I didn’t go to Edson Cemetery until years later. My wife Rosemary’s mother went to the funeral Mass for Kerouac with her father, who years before had won a contest at the public library with the first prize being a Kerouac novel—he asked the library director: “What’s the second-place prize?”

People paid attention to Kerouac’s passing, and there was regular news about him from Charles and Mary Sampas in the Lowell Sun, both of whom had columns. For example, when Kerouac blew through town in 1962 after Big Sur was published, his long weekend was chronicled by Mary Sampas. There was a consciousness about Kerouac among people his age, but as a teenager in the area there was not much for me to hook onto.

JS So when do you think it started happening in terms of, not so much with people of his generation, but when did the idea of “Let’s honor this guy” gain traction?

PM A couple of things. A benchmark event for me, and it was a big deal in Lowell, was Bob Dylan landing with the Rolling Thunder Revue in November 1975. I was at UMass Lowell (then ULowell), and Dylan showed up out of the blue with Joan Baez, Allen Ginsberg, and a troupe of musicians. Lowell would not have been a stop for the Rolling Thunder Revue if not for Kerouac. Dylan came to pay homage. The well-known photo of Dylan at Jack’s grave ran in Time magazine this month [June 8, 1998] in a souvenir issue honoring the most influential artists of the twentieth century. Dylan is singled out, and one of the three photos is Dylan with Ginsberg at the cemetery.

JS So, Kerouac was dead six years at that point.

PM The event was seized on by the media. There were images of Dylan in Lowell in Rolling

Stone, an article titled “The Pilgrims Have Landed on Kerouac’s Grave.” Mary Sampas had a scoop on the visit. Her husband’s brother, Tony Sampas, brother-in-law of Stella Sampas Kerouac, the author’s widow, had guided Dylan and his crew around Kerouac sites. He was filming for his movie Renaldo and Clara. They went to the Franco-American School and the Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes behind the school, a heavy-duty spiritual site for Franco-Americans that Kerouac wrote about in Doctor Sax. Dylan was photographed in color standing under the large crucifix topping the Grotto. As a young aspiring writer it was powerful to see Dylan connecting with Kerouac.

A few years later the Lowell Museum, which had a history exhibit in one of the old textile factories, before Lowell had a national historical park, hosted a Kerouac night. That was the first public Kerouac event in the city since 1950, when he had signed copies of his debut novel, The Town and the City, in a department store downtown. The museum drew a standing-room audience with dozens of fans left outside, some banging on the windows. The museum director asked the Fire Chief to come down and explain to people why they couldn’t get in—fire safety laws that limited capacity for attendees.

I was inside for the readings from Kerouac’s books, tapes of Kerouac talking, and a display of foreign editions. In 1974, hometown English professor Charles Jarvis had published his biography Visions of Kerouac, and he was the lead person in the museum program. Barry Gifford’s book Kerouac’s Town had come out in 1973, a pocket-sized book with photos of Kerouac places and an interview with Stella Kerouac. There was a building awareness in Lowell topped by a pivotal public event with a couple of hundred people in 1978.

In 1980 and 1981, members of an art co-op called Art Alive!, a magnet for interesting young people who had signed up for the cultural renaissance in Lowell, produced Kerouac events. We put together a program called “Kerouac Lives!” It was another packed house, a few hundred people. Speakers included Professor Jay McHale from Salem State College, a Lowell guy who in 1973 had hosted at Salem the first academic symposium on Kerouac with Beat writers featured. We had Joy Walsh from Moody Street Irregulars, the Kerouac ‘zine based near Buffalo, New York. George Chigas recited his sprawling opus “Flashes of Kerouac”; we played a tape of Kerouac reading “The Three Stooges” bit from Visions of Cody. Artists hung works that responded to Kerouac. On a pedestal was a bust of Kerouac by Mico Kaufman, an artist in Greater Lowell. The plaster cast was meant to be bronzed. Art co-op president Susan Kapuscinski Gaylord and I drove to Mary Sampas’s house to pick up the bust, which we wrapped in a blanket and placed on the car seat for the ride back to the gallery. It was weird to have Kerouac’s “head” on the back seat. The next year the same group did a marathon reading of Doctor Sax with volunteer readers.

In 1981, I was at the Lowell Historic Preservation Commission (LHPC)—the culturalaffairs programs assistant. An early project of the LHPC was the so-called “Lowell Play.” David Riley of Vermont won the contest with a pageant play called If the Falls Could Speak. There was a play-making aspect to this in that he worked with us as he developed the script. In this play, you arrive at the second half of the twentieth century and there’s Kerouac in the flow of Lowell history, talking under a street lamp at night.

Promotional card for “Kerouac Aloud: A Live Reading of Dr. Sax,” Art Alive! Gallery, Lowell, Mass., Oct. 23, 1981.

JS So that’s interesting. That was the first official recognition, where you had government backing.

PM Yeah, although Art Alive! was housed in a former fabric shop on Merrimack Street, since knocked down, owned by the National Park Service (NPS), which supported the artists. But the play was commissioned by the LHPC, U.S. Department of the Interior, an agency collaborating with the NPS in making a new national park about the Industrial Revolution, immigration to America, and the process of deindustrialization.

JS The Lowell Historic Preservation Commission was really key to the funding for the Kerouac rehabilitation, or the honoring of Jack. In my experience, the Commission was everything you would want in a cultural preservation organization—people like Julie Mofford—generous, knowledgeable of the subject, on mission, but also totally respectful of the recipient’s artistic expression. [Suiter received a cultural grant in November 1991 to create the photographic exhibit Rumors of Kerouac, which was shown at the Whistler House Museum of Art and Boott Mills Gallery of the National Park Service in 1993.]

PM Another thing that happened at the LHPC around that time, early ‘80s, was the awarding of cultural grants to stimulate heritage and arts activities. Grants went to the public library for the first guide to Kerouac places, written by Charlie Gargiulo of Lowell, and to filmmaker John Antonelli, who had grown up in Greater Lowell but was based in California, for script development for a documentary, Kerouac. In 1985, the film premiered in Lowell at Merrimack Repertory Theater, three sold-out showings, on the same night that it opened at the Orson Welles Cinema in Cambridge.

JS I was at the Orson Welles.

PM So that’s another example of the LHPC supporting that public interpretation of Kerouac as a historical figure.

JS What was the Preservation Commission’s take on all this? Did they just think that Kerouac would be good for tourism? Or was there someone on the Commission besides yourself who was a Kerouac aficionado who believed that this native son should be honored?

PM The LHPC’s mission was “To tell the human story of the Industrial Revolution in a nineteenth-century setting by encouraging cultural expression.” This differed from the standard goals of the National Park Service in that there was a particular emphasis on the community telling its own stories in various ways. This reflected the grassroots origin of the “Park” in Lowell. The Kerouac theme was a strand that local and outside people put forward.

At the LHPC, most of the staff members were young, progressive, culturally sophisticated. The first cultural-affairs director, Jim St. Clair, was a writer who admired Hemingway. From 1984 to 1989, I was the cultural-affairs director. I had left Lowell to go to an MFA writing program at the University of California, Irvine, and returned when my former boss left his job. We had two staff members with deep roots in the local FrancoAmerican community, executive director Armand P. Mercier and operations director Ray LaPorte. The LHPC board of directors, the commissioners, were federal, state, and Lowell appointees. The Lowell folks saw Kerouac as a figure of national and international status. The Commission began its work in 1978, and by 1982 Kerouac was in a play that the LHPC funded, and then cultural grants were awarded, and later came the Commemorative. Kerouac is not mentioned in planning documents for the national park, but the federal agencies responded to public interest and made room for him. After Armand Mercier, LHPC executive director Peter Aucella strongly supported Kerouac initiatives.

JS Okay, so from contributing to Antonelli’s film, what further steps did the LHPC take?

PM In December 1985, I recommended that the LHPC establish a permanent outdoor tribute to Jack Kerouac.

JS So this was your proposal.

PM Yes, encouraged by Armand Mercier and backed by commissioners like Clementine Alexis of Lowell and the cultural committee. The idea of a permanent tribute had been discussed in years past by others, but we had a specific proposal.

JS So what prompted you at that point to go from events and performances to creating a monument—putting it in stone?

PM In 1981, U.S. Senator Paul Tsongas of Lowell initiated a public art program and asked businesses and public agencies to put up money for original monumental sculptures in the city. The first was Homage to Women by Mico Kaufman, which was dedicated in the fall of 1984.

JS Oh yes, down at Market Mills Park on Market Street.

PM Right, some people call it the Mill Girls Sculpture, a large bronze with entwined figures reaching upward. Paul pictured a collection of artworks. He said his children enjoyed monuments and outdoor art in Washington, D.C., and felt that Lowell kids should have that where they live. He saw the effort as aspirational, a way to “raise sightlines” for young people who would encounter fine art around the city. Sculpture was a new way to accent the historical interpretation in Lowell—contemporary artworks related to Lowell’s heritage. We had history-themed murals in the past, but not large-scale sculpture.

JS You were presenting the Kerouac project within this framework.

PM There was a logic to the effort. It began as another public art project, not a standalone thing. Initially, we imagined a modest project, possibly plaques with text excerpts that would be incorporated into a small canal-side piece of land that the LHPC owned off Central Street. The idea was to create something of interest for that site, and in January 1986 the full commission approved the concept, saying, Go ahead, pursue this idea. The cultural committee had approved the idea in December ‘85, and a month later the commissioners signed off on it.

JS Were you soliciting designs at this point?

PM The LHPC had approved $50,000 for the federal project. Lowell has a national park and a state park, both with historical activities and sites around the city. As you know, this is not vast open land fenced off like a traditional wilderness park or recreation area. At some point during that year, planner Steve Conant of Lowell Heritage State Park approached me and said, “We’re going to demolish the Curran-Morton warehouse on Bridge Street . . . .”

JS The “great gray warehouse of eternity” . . . .

PM Bingo. They were going to create a new city park, small “p,” off Bridge Street, where it intersects with French Street. Steve asked the LHPC to consider that for the Kerouac project. And Steve, again, was someone of our generation, interested in Lowell’s history, literature, and hip to Kerouac. He thought we should do something in a more visible place, which was good. The logistics had to be figured out.

JS Well, it was not only a more visible place, but was a more Kerouac-related place. What we just said about “the great gray warehouse of eternity” was a line where Kerouac described that place [from Visions of Gerard]—where the character Big Bull Balloon . . . .

PM Right, Jack’s father and W.C. Fields playing cards behind the B. F. Keith theater, adjacent to that warehouse. Leo Kerouac’s print shop had been nearby. The Lowell Sun building is right there, where Kerouac worked as a cub reporter. You know, tremendous connections.

JS Yeah, it was much more his turf.

PM The only reason the other site had been put on the table was that the LHPC controlled it. We didn’t have to ask permission from another property owner. We had to do something to improve the property, to landscape it. Let’s do the Kerouac thing there. But then an opportunity arose. Bridge Street was a much bigger site, and knowing the cost of outdoor sculpture and construction I was afraid $50,000 would not be enough. Other public art projects in Lowell were costing about $100,000. I said to our commissioners, “I’ll recommend the move if you double the budget to $100,000.” They did.

JS But which is still low.

PM The $100,000 didn’t cover what we eventually accepted as the design, and park construction funds helped cover a portion of the cost, which went back to Steve’s wise recommendation that we do it as an integrated project within the new park. We were able to capture money for the site preparation, the paving stones, and more.

JS So this is all happening around mid- to late 1986?

PM The process became a three-way partnership between the Preservation Commission which wanted to do a Kerouac artwork, the Heritage State Park which controlled the larger piece of land, and the City, which received a large state grant to demolish the warehouse and make a new green space. Part of the rational for the warehouse demolition and green space was to reveal the old Massachusetts Mills textile factory complex, which would be renovated for apartments. Everything was contracted through the City planning department, overseen by project manager Ed Trudel. In late 1986, we needed the Lowell City Council to accept the $100,000 from the Preservation Commission for the park construction budget.

JS Before we get into that phase of the discussion, I just want to double back for a minute and talk about some of the concurrent things which were happening. I’m thinking particularly of the input of Roger Brunelle and Brian Foye at this point. When did you meet those guys and what were they doing along about this time?

PM We had two sources in separate places generating energy for Kerouac. Brian Foye of Lowell had degrees in history and English from Boston College and UMass Amherst. My understanding is that he had recently seen Allen Ginsberg, a friend of his brother Raymond’s in New York, and Ginsberg had just come back from China. This is 1985. Ginsberg said, “They’re reading Kerouac in China. You guys in Lowell ought to do something to recognize Kerouac.” Brian created the Corporation for the Celebration of Jack Kerouac in Lowell, a

nonprofit organization with a board of directors. Roger was on the board, as well as Mary Sampas, former Lowell City Manager William Taupier—a heavy hitting group, which was a message itself. One of the group’s purposes, aside from raising awareness about Kerouac and promoting literature in Lowell, was establishing a memorial to Kerouac.

JS Yes, I remember that they published a very useful walking guide to Kerouac places in Lowell. [A Guide to Jack Kerouac’s Lowell by Brian Foye with photographs by Jeffrey O’Heir (1988).] I carried that book in my pack for two years while I was making the photographs for Rumors of Kerouac. Brian did a great job. Had you met him before?

PM No, because Brian was away at school, and he’s younger than me. I went to an event that Roger organized in the mid-‘80s through the Franco-American Day Committee, a night of reminiscences and discussion about Kerouac in the parish hall of St. Louis Church, Kerouac’s birth parish. The Franco-American Day Committee was established in the mid1970s to preserve the Franco-American heritage.

JS Roger was another guy who was very generous, very helpful to me when I began hiking around Centralville, which he said is pronounced “Center-ville,” pointing out places, telling stories that no one but a lifelong Franco-American from that neighborhood would have known. I recall him reverently pointing out a particular boulder in Beaver Brook where Centralville kids jumped in the creek when learning to swim. He spoke of it like it was the rock where Moses stood.

PM Right. And I recall that night at St. Louis because Stella Kerouac at the end made moving remarks. So we had the Franco-American Day Committee, Preservation Commission, Art Alive!, Lowell Museum. We premiered the Antonelli film at the Merrimack Repertory Theater. David Riley’s “Lowell Play” was first performed by the professional actors of the Theater, and a couple of years later by Lowell high school students at Lowell High. You are starting to have a lot of organizations that have raised the Kerouac flag.

JS A critical mass was building . . . . Now tell me, when did you first meet Stella Sampas and where does that fit? Or does she come in a little later? We were talking about the City Council vote . . . should we go back to that?

PM I met Mrs. Kerouac to say hello that night at St. Louis parish. I was in touch with her during the development of the Commemorative. What I do remember is that shortly after that City Council vote, I spoke to her about the text that might go on the Commemorative.

JS What was her response?

PM She was very open from the start. Very supportive. I believe she had endorsed the Lowell Museum program years back. She knew this would be a major remembrance of her husband. We reached out to her early to get her permission to use Jack’s writings. From early 1987, I was in regular touch with her until June 1988.

To step back for a moment. On the City Council vote, it became important that Brian

Foye had organized the community group because then it wasn’t only the government bureaucrats coming to the table saying, This is a good thing to do. Community members testified that night, the people from the Kerouac corporation and others. City councilors spoke favorably.

JS Who was the person on the City Council who was so vocal against the Commemorative? And what was his particular objection?

PM It was a lifestyle issue. In three official votes approving the creation of the Kerouac Commemorative, two were unanimous and one was 7 to 1. There were three votes by public officials, two at the Preservation Commission—one to support the project to start, and one later to approve the design. And in the middle there was a City Council vote with one dissenter. There was a local consensus by 1986 concerning Kerouac, but because of the nature of public discourse the one opposition voice caused an outsized media response. I told a Wall Street Journal reporter who had come to Lowell that the news angle was the community agreement about Kerouac’s literary achievement, but she said her editor wanted the controversy not a feel-good story about a consensus.

JS Who was this politician, again?

PM City Councilor M. Brendan Fleming, a long-time city councilor, one-time mayor, and a mathematics professor at the University.

JS Did he ever soften his opposition or change his mind at all? What exactly was it that he objected to?

PM He didn’t think Kerouac was a model of exemplary living. He didn’t separate personal behavior from art. He wasn’t against art. Later, he supported an effort to recognize actress Bette Davis, also born in Lowell. When we presented the Kerouac project both to the LHPC and to the City Council we were aware of opposing perceptions of Kerouac, that there were people who remembered him as a disruptive alcoholic from his last pass through town in 1967-68. Some older people had either heard stories or knew people who had been around him. There was gossip about how he had behaved badly in a visit to Lowell High. The police had a file on him that’s been copied and passed around.

JS Yeah, in his last glorious binge.

PM The human Kerouac was uppermost in the minds of a lot of Lowellians. Kerouac had been described in the press as a controversial writer questioning mainstream American values.

JS Sure, “the drop-out who started it all . . . .”

PM We were aware of the possible criticism, even though support for Kerouac had grown since the late ‘70s.

JS Yeah, but I think you’re right when you say that the real story was that there was so little opposition, and that the other votes were unanimous.

PM If you go back and look at the remarks. One councilor missed the meeting because I remember a 7-1 vote, and there are nine councilors. If you look at their remarks, you can see the seven other councilors got it. They knew we were talking about Kerouac as a top American author with books in print in many languages. That council motion passed at the end of 1986, generating enormous media attention. One classic headline in the New York Post, anticipating the vote, had read: “Hip Park May Be a Bust.” For months it was Kerouac, Kerouac, Kerouac in the press. The discussion in Lowell ignited a global debate about Kerouac’s value.

JS I think you’re right about the worldwide discussion. So then you opened the competition for the design.

PM The landscape architects for the park project were Clarissa Rowe and Nina Brown of Boston. Ben Woitena of Texas won the design competition. That wasn’t without controversy. Some of the same folks who had supported the Kerouac project at City Hall objected to the design selection. The Lowell Sun wrote an editorial pushing the LHPC to reconsider Woitena’s design. The commissioners stood by the selection committee’s vote.

JS What were some of the other comments?

PM There was interest in a life-sized statue. And complaints that the process had gone too fast, that it wasn’t wide open enough, and that certain notable artists should have been invited to submit designs, concerns by people who, I’m happy to say now, are in favor of the Commemorative.

JS Back to the issue of a human figure in bronze versus the abstract panels with text cut into them. It was an interesting thing that happened. I remember reading a letter, I think it was to Jim Curtis, a Lowell attorney, in which Kerouac seemed to have a prescient feeling, he wrote: “Someday this town will put up a monument to me . . . and I’ll even pose for it naked if they want!” So he was thinking along the lines of something representational— probably like Rodin’s naked Balzac with the big gut!—but the whole thing is reminiscent of the arguments around the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Some outspoken people, including some veterans, wanted human figures, and of course, it eventually got some on the orders of the Commander-in-Chief Ronald Reagan, who was such a great soldier himself.

PM It is reminiscent of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial by Maya Lin. I remember going there and seeing the names, the text incised in the black stone . . . .

JS Yeah, and the reflective surface of the stone . . . .

PM For the Commemorative, the winning design would have to include the text passages we had specified. I had a run-in with an art consultant in Boston who said we’d never get big-name artists to buy into the design competition because of the requirements.

JS You were specifying that it had to include Kerouac’s words, cut into stone . . . .

PM Not cut into stone. And we didn’t rule out figurative work. One artist proposed a Stations of the Cross-type sequence with episodes from Kerouac’s life. The challenge for artists was to display the text. We had proposals for steel and bronze artworks. To the art consultant, I said, “That’s our vision, the words must be there.” That’s what I presented to the commissioners. I had been to Salinas, California, to see the John Steinbeck Library with the Steinbeck bronze figure out front. Another general on a horse, in a way. I was convinced that a word-based piece was the way to go. A portrait in language. When he saw the finished artwork in Lowell, poet Michael McClure said it was “subversive” to have that kind of writing in stone.

JS And how do you think it’s played out?

PM Most people have come around to the position that this is a good solution. With all the words and Ben Woitena’s mandala design for the granite panels, steel-and-stone benches, and paved plaza, the site is aesthetically coherent. Woitena greatly increased the number of words. We had emphasized the “Lowell books” because we were a historical agency. We wanted the Commemorative to reflect the Lowell side of Kerouac, which had been neglected. It was always On the Road, The Dharma Bums, Big Sur, and you didn’t hear much about Maggie Cassidy and Doctor Sax. The passages from the Lowell books are social history of the twentieth century. Woitena’s text selections enhance the experience, however, adding dreams, scriptures, blues choruses, writing that’s metaphysical and spiritual.

JS It was a wise move to put the emphasis on his words versus how he looked, because if there had been a statue people would come by and look at it and say, Oh, so that’s Jack Kerouac, but it wouldn’t tell you much about him.

PM The Commemorative is an antidote to the cult of personality that damaged Kerouac. Fame was not a good thing for him. With this approach, we say to people, Look at the words, and then make up your mind. One problem in Lowell in past years had been too many people too quickly judging Jack Kerouac and having not read a word of his. Media people would drop into Lowell, stop at a barber shop, and ask the first person, “Did you ever hear of Jack Kerouac?” and the person might say, “No,” or they’d run into somebody on the sidewalk who’d say, “Oh yeah, he was a drunk.” But reporters usually failed to ask, “Have you read a book by Kerouac?”

JS I often heard that when I walked around his old neighborhoods with my camera and tripod, back in the early ‘90s, even after the Commemorative. “Why do you want to make a big deal out of that drunk?”

The Jack Kerouac Commemorative by Ben Woitena (1988), Lowell, Mass. Cover illustration, Bell Atlantic Yellow Pages, Lowell Area with White Pages, Nov. 1997 – Oct. 1998.

JS How do you judge the success of the Commemorative? What criteria do you use to tell if it’s been a successful installation?

PM One question is, Has it taken its place in the life of the community? The answer is yes. It’s been integrated into the annual Kerouac festival. It appears in promotional materials about the city.

JS Didn’t you tell me that it’s even been used for the cover of the Lowell area phone book?

PM [Reaching for the phone book] Yeah, right here—the 1997-98 phone book has the Kerouac Commemorative on the cover.

JS I know Lowell High School kids go to the Commemorative. I asked one player on the football team if he knew who Jack was. He said, “Kerouac? Oh yeah, that poet guy.”

PM There’s an elective course in the high school English department called “Lowell Writers” which covers Kerouac. Brian Foye takes his classes there when he teaches Kerouac at Middlesex Community College. It’s not unusual to see somebody reading the passages.

JS I’ve bumped into people from England there, from Sweden . . . .

PM The Commemorative is showing up in books. It’s in the new Fred McDarrah photo book, the last picture in his Beat retrospective. Sean O’Connell is complimentary in his Imagining Boston literary overview of the area. It’s in regional guidebooks. That people are going there is encouraging. I see people filming and making photos. Every day someone goes there.

Lowell, Massachusetts June 29, 1998