July 17, 1947 –
Jackie Robinson was playing his historic first season with the Dodgers, the Yankees finally lost after 19 straight victories, Perry Como topped the Billboard charts with “Chi-Baba,Chi-Baba (My Bambino Go to Sleep),” and Jack Kerouac began his On the Road trip on this date. He left his mother’s apartment in Ozone Park, wound up on the West Side IRT local, passed Columbia University, where he had dropped out, and got off the train at the 242nd Street terminal.
At 242nd Street (near Van Cortlandt Park), he boarded a trolley to Yonkers, transferred to another that took him as far as it would go, and then hitchhiked farther up the Hudson. He wanted to take the “long red line called Route 6” that he had seen on a map, and the nearest place to join it was the Bear Mountain Bridge.
When he got there, he discovered that little traffic passed through that semi-wilderness, and while waiting futilely for a ride, he was drenched in a thunderstorm. Humiliated by his “stupid hearthside idea that it would be wonderful to follow one great red line across America,” he ended up taking a bus back to New York City – and then another all the way to Chicago. From there, he caught a third bus to the Chicago suburbs and began hitchhiking to Denver to see friends he had made in New York, including Neal Cassady.
Such is the stuff of great literature: a subway ride that many of you loyal readers have made countless times is transformed into the opening trip of the classic Beat Generation novel On the Road.
The Haus of Dcaligari 