Jack Kerouac's "Springtime Mary" was Mary Carney, described in the novel Maggie Cassidy and depicted on the left; mine was a lass name of Mary Korzen from Chicago. She didn't get me into running, my old friend Marty Boren did; but she lent my impecunious and sartorially challenged self her shorts in which I stumbled in my heavy high-topped boots around the Chestnut Hill reservoir on my first run in the summer of '74. 35 years a runner, but going on 41 years a Kerouac aficionado: I read and endlessly re-read On the Road as a first semester college freshman. (And a week ago I found a copy of the original scroll version of OTR which came out in 2007 (1957 + 50) in a used bookstore; completist and fanatic that I am, I of course purchased it.) Running and Kerouac being two constants of my life, I was happily surprised to hear from a local runner that Lowell, Mass. hosts an annual Kerouac 5 kilometer road race. Kerouac was a track and football star in high school, winning scholarships to Boston College and Columbia. Had he chosen BC he would not have met Ginsberg and Burroughs the other two of the Beat triumvirate, and I wouldn't be writing this post.
Appropriately enough, given Kerouac's prodigious boozing which finally did him in at the tender age of 47 in 1969, the race starts from Hookslide Kelly's a Lowell sportsbar. Here is a shot from Kerouac's football days, and a photo of one of the covers of Maggie Cassidy:
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