Lowell, MA -- I carry a mill inside of me. Yes, it sounds unlikely, but it’s true. Built in the dark, yearning north woods of my childhood, it stands by swiftly moving gray waters and blocks out the sun. In a real mill, there’s noise, dust, heat, pain, speed, boredom. In a phantom mill, there are only the stories that the broken walls tell.

My relatives haunt my old mill. They keep a silent watch over its crumbling stairwells and turrets. Their dreams still spiral in and out of the broken windows like lost birds. The hame shop, the shoe shop, the woolen mill, the lumber mill where my great-grandparents, my grandparents, and my mother worked. The mills meant survival—bread and beans, clothes and shoes. And, you had to be tough to survive them. Each time you punched the time clock, your dreams flew a little farther away. For many, family and laughter lightened the toil. For some, faith got them through. For others, booze with a chaser of rage did the trick.

These brick fortresses line the rivers of New England towns. Walls lathed thick, sweat and tears soaked deep into the soil beneath. So deeply rooted are the mills, that even when they close down, they stay put. A few morph into condo castles and high-tech havens. Others lie in rubble, nature nibbling away at their guts each year. And some move inside people—passing down through the generations. They hold on—to towns, to people—for decades. “We made you what you were—and are,” they whisper, wind whistling through the gaps in their foundations, “We give and we take away.”

Cooped up in the back of a station wagon, I spent my childhood touring the husks of New England mill towns. To an eight-year-old, the mills looked like skyscrapers. The faces of broken-down clocks on abandoned towers gazed sorrowfully down on me. Sad, winter-torn streets slushed with regret, jobs moved elsewhere, leaving no forwarding address. Mills are an uneasy heart for a town—have you ever met a child who is dying to grow up to work in one? Yet, when they leave, they suck a town dry. Slowly, the town shrinks back and collapses inward. Shops, restaurants, stores, nightclubs become memories. Soon, all that’s left are some unused train tracks, one diner, a gas station, and the churches.

Mill towns are a great way to inspire melancholy in a child. They bring out rage, rebellion, love, loyalty, evil, good—all the biggies. They cause guilt—when your parents spend their lives in there for you—and even a filthy kind of class shame (“Can they see my roots?”) and defiant pride (“Yeah! So what if these are my roots!”). I see all of these things in Jack Kerouac (1922–1969, check out his books if you have not done so). And, I suspect that he carried an old mill inside him, too, whether he was in Morocco or Mexico. The farther away from the mills he was, the closer they felt.

“…blue with mill rags in the alleys, cotton dust balls and smoke pots, litter, I walk along the long sunny concrete rale of the millyards in the booming roar of the windows where my mother’s working, I am horrified by the cotton dresses of the women rushing out of the mills at five—the women work too much! they’re not home any more! They work more than they ever worked!—Dicky and I covered these millyards and agreed millwork was horrible. ‘What I’m going to do instead is sit around the green jungles of Guatemala.’”” Jack Kerouac, Dr. Sax, written in Mexico City, 1952; published in 1959

Eager to Turn Every Known and Fabled Corner

Growing up in Depression-era Lowell, the mill mecca, Jack and his friends played in the shadows cast by the textile industry. And, while Jack wrote his way out of the shadows of Lowell, he never shed them—the mills, his mother, the ghosts of Lowell, or the malt that killed him. A great film, Henry Ferrini’s Lowell Blues, blends Jack’s words with ghostly footage of Jack and images of Lowell old and new—the mills, the mighty river, the children, the shadows moving across the city and across time. The film ends with a powerful quote from Kerouac, “My thought does not have to be improved—because I got it from heaven—where you got yours.”

Most everyone wanted to improve Jack’s thoughts. Even with all those adoring hipsters, equal numbers of squares disdained him. Lowell viewed him as a drunk—some there still do (few greeted the idea for a Kerouac commemorative park on Bridge Street with enthusiasm)—the media saw him as an evil Pied Piper leading the young astray, even the beats sneered at his devotion to his mother. Everybody wanted him to be someone he wasn’t. Who was he? Boozehound? Zen poet? Mama’s boy? Scat writer? Meticulous editor? Lover? Road warrior? Recluse? Raconteur? While he was all of these—and much more—I think the one thing he never stopped being was a mill town boy. So, why not travel back to the place where he fell in love with words, where the castles of industry and the faces flowing through the streets captured his soul?

“The old people there, old football cronies, cousins, friends, new acquaintances, old newspaper confreres, the teaching fraternity, gossips, characters all, realize I just go there to bask and drink but we really have great rapports and I’m going back there soon because there are more books in that little Christian city than you could have packed in Carthage. A golden Byzantine dome rises from the roofs along the canal; a Gothic copy of Chartres rises from the slum of Moody Street; little children speak French, Greek, Polish and even Portuguese on their way to school. And I have a recurrent dream of simply walking around the deserted twilight streets of Lowell, in the mist, eager to turn every known and fabled corner. A very eerie, recurrent dream, but it always makes me happy when I wake up.” Kerouac, I Simply Plan a Completely Written Lifetime, Chicago Daily News (no author), August 24, 1963, Panorama sec., p. 8 (in Conversations with Jack Kerouac, edited by Kevin J. Hayes 2005, University Press of Mississippi, USA)

Tiptoeing in Jack’s Footsteps

Driving to Lowell, I can tell that I am going to be a piss-poor tourist. For the last 18 years, Lowell has held its annual “Lowell Celebrates Kerouac! Festival.” A major achievement for a town that for many years preferred to ignore Jack, the festival offers all kinds of events—a road race, a jazzed-up egghead Jack Kerouac Conference on Beat Literature at UMass Lowell, poetry readings, music, and lots of Jack-based tours, including a pub-crawl. Today, I don’t want a piece of any of it. I just want the sights of Lowell to wander though me like the city’s canals amble through its streets. I don’t want to stride at Jack’s myth and memory head-on. I want to tiptoe in his footsteps.

It’s a muggy day, and sweat is trickling down my thighs. I already know that I have no patience for museums today. Boy, I always used to be up for a museum. Yet, in the words of a Lowell millworker, “The sunny hours of girlhood have flown away, like a bright dream, too pure to last” (Maiden Meditation by An Old Maid, Lowell Offering, June 1845). Ah, nothing used to please me more than wandering endless halls of culture, head cocked to one side the better to view a painting, surrounded by whispering patrons of the arts. No one whispers with as self-conscious a tone of pathos as a patron of the arts—except maybe a golf announcer.

I regret my momentary museum-phobia. Here I stand on Dutton Street, and a ton of cool joints (New England Quilt Museum, Whistler House Museum of Art, American Textile History Museum, Revolving Museum, National Streetcar Museum) are in walking distance. Am I striding off to see one of these places? No. I’m standing slack-jawed, gazing at the National Historic Park Visitor Center, and former mill, across the street.

The Visitor Center is a clear sign that Lowell has not had the life sucked out of it. Instead, in the 1970s, a time when lots of cities plowed their history under in the name of “revitalization,” two men—educator Patrick J. Mogan and Congressman Paul Tsongas—spearheaded the town’s transformation into a sort of Mill Disneyland. Today, there’s a brown-hatted urban national park ranger on every corner instead of a fat-headed Pluto. Hey, I kid because I love. Mogan and Tsongas made a bold, brilliant move. As a result, much of Lowell is preserved and as Jack would have seen it.

Ladies like Jack’s mother, who spent their lives in the mills, were far less thrilled with the plan to save and salute Lowell’s history. Lots of millworkers didn’t understand why they would create a park to honor an experience that made them miserable. As one local guy that I meet tells me, “My grandmother didn’t get why they would celebrate the mill owners—her life was horrible there…from Poland to hell. I had to tell her, ‘Nana, the museum and the park are to honor you.’”

Before the rehab, the same guy tells me, the Visitor Center was crumbling. A King’s Department Store used to be there after the mill, and someone torched that store. The graceful arches above the courtyard that my eyes are lazily tracing were actually the floor supports for the now-gone first floor of King’s. Even with so much of the past clearly visible in Lowell, there’s much more to know from the locals.

Something close by catches my eye—a newspaper box. “It stank like a ‘corpse’!” screams the headline of the sunrise edition October 7, 2005 Lowell Sun newspaper—where Jack used to work as a sportswriter and where, “…his enthusiasm for sports and his love of words combined in some of the most creative coverage of any local sports event Lowell had witnessed in a long time…” (Kerouac: Visions of Lowell, John J. Dorfner, p. 45). Jack was into sports. He came up with his own, intricate fantasy baseball game, complete with personalities for the players. So, I bet that he would love that he has a bobblehead doll in the Baseball of Fame, and I’m sure he’d dig the minor-league Lowell Spinners team.

Lungs full of a rich, fried potato and bacon smell, I hunker down outside the yolk-yellow Club Diner (“Booth and table service!”) to take a closer look at the headline. Ah, I see. A local sea-urchin processing business was shut down. “You’ve got thousands of little bodies. It’s almost like one big corpse,” said city Health Director Frank Singleton. At the bottom of the page, there’s a story called, “He put his beer down, saved a life.” An off-duty firefighter used a martial-arts kick to break in a door, rescued a woman, then, as he says, “I went out and finished my beer.” This tells me that two things haven’t changed here—the spirit of entrepreneurship is alive, if a bit stinky, and this is still a town that has a bold heart and appreciates liquor.

Moving quietly through the streets, brushing up against people now and again to take the pulse of the city, I find that lots of other things remain the same. For one, the city is as diverse as it was in Jack’s day. There are scores of newcomer-owned businesses. The city’s heart is still beating strong with fresh waves of immigrants, trying to live their dreams and carve out livings as Jack’s parents did. By many accounts, Lowell is home to the second largest population of Cambodians in the United States—as well as a strong Latino presence. Today, as many languages are spoken in Lowell’s high school as used to be spoken by the mills’ international workforce.

As I roam back and forth along the sidewalks, I kick the scores of spiky-hulled chestnut shells and their splintered, mahogany-skinned meats that are scattered near the grounds of St. Anne’s Church (Espanol Service, Bienvenidos). This church was undoubtedly around in Jack’s Day, and I can picture him and his friends using the chestnuts as weapons. Indeed, amidst the new shops like “Sir Lady Electrolysis” (huh?) and the luxury apartments, you can still see the cityscape of Kerouac’s recurrent dreams, as clear as the green Sun sign on the top of the white brick Lowell Sun Building at the corner of Merrimack and Prescott.

Thanks to Mogan and Tsongas, the grim reaper of urban renewal hasn’t touched that much. The old face of Lowell peeks out from behind the new. The Hosford Building from 1871 now houses Hapkido Taekwondo. And, here’s the Old Terminal Building, circa early 1900s. The building still sports ancient, deco lettering; “Air Conditioned Waiting Room” where Jack might have warmed a bench, is now “One Stop International Market” (African Spanish Middle-Eastern Halal Meat) and “Sarto of Carmine the Tailor.” The old city hall building is still going strong, and the Statue of Victory—an attractive toga/laurel wreath/wheat confection erected in 1867—doesn’t look a day over 22. Hubba hubba!

The Museum Comes to Mohammed

As I continue to wander along, thunderclouds frown overhead and the mugginess grows more intense. I stroll past the massive, sprawling high school from which Jack graduated in 1939. Today, more than a third of the 4,000 students are Cambodian. It’s the only school I’ve ever seen that takes up much of a city block in the heart of downtown, has a canal in its front yard (back yard? I can’t tell), and a quaint trolley clattering by it. Lucy Larcom Park runs alongside the canal and has a bunch of cool markers and historical plaques. Even I, in my museum-shunning mood, can appreciate the spell of the words juxtaposed with the water and trees.

Trudging through hordes of chattering teens, I end up on French Street, and the Boott Cotton Mills where the shoe factory in which Jack’s mother worked towers in front of me. It is huge and very impressive, and there’s some kind of striking, trellised, arbor in front of it. But again, something close by catches my eye. There, across the street from me, is a gorgeous, glittering, glorious Airstream palace on wheels. A little trailer, with a photo of Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, and, I think Peter Orlovsky, is attached to the back of it. It declares itself The Beat Museum on Wheels! The moment has come. The museum has come to Mohammed, and I must penetrate its mysteries. Unfortunately, no one responds to my timid knocks on the door.

Entering the Boott Cotton Mills Museum Store a stone’s throw away, I purchase many items to support the place, and I ask my question with a winning smile, “Do you know when The Beat Museum on Wheels is open?” “The Whichy Whatcher on Whatnotters?” is the response. They are not rude, but they are deeply baffled. They have not noticed the shining museum thing—parked outside their door—nor are they aware of any Kerouac events. They tell me to go to the Mogan Cultural Center, because “They know all of that.” I feel that it must be a good thing in life to “know all of that,” so I head to the Mogan Cultural Center for enlightenment.

Inside the Mogan Cultural Center, a large, plexiglass case with an astonishing array of plastic food products greets me. It is “Lowell Mill Girl Food”—the grub that female mill workers ate at boardinghouses. These girls were mostly from surrounding farm families. In the earliest days of the mills, owners were keen to provide the girls with religious guidance, educational opportunities, and safe places to live. Very swiftly, however, the owners became increasingly ruthless. Working conditions deteriorated. Wages plunged. Eventually, a largely immigrant workforce ran the mills, and no one bothered to provide them with advantages.

But, judging from these gruesome plastic models, can we count the food that the earlier, slightly more fortunate, female millworkers ate as an advantage? Perhaps making plastic food look appetizing is a skill mastered only by the Japanese’s artistic renderings of sushi? Relying only on sight, I start cataloging one plate as “pinky wad, brownish lump, grayish sphere, ecru puddle, nasty heap, milky tea” before giving up and referring to the exhibit label. Here’s what the girls ate. Breakfast: Fried codfish, fried hash, fried potato balls, pumpkin mush with cream, toast and butter, apple pie, coffee with milk and brown sugar. Lunch: Pea soup with croutons, New England Boiled Dinner with corned beef, potatoes, carrots, turnips, parsnips, and horseradish sauce, pickles and bread, bread pudding, and coffee with milk and brown sugar. Dinner: Baked beans with pork, homemade rye ‘n injun (brown) bread with cheese, fried potatoes, flat jacks (sp.?) with applesauce, baked Indian pudding with cream, plum cake, tea with milk and brown sugar. Oh, sure. It all sounds okay, but it will always be “pinky wad, brownish lump, grayish sphere, ecru puddle, nasty heap, and milky tea” to me.

A young museum dude with a Beatlesque haircut joins me and agrees that the food looks horrible. Happy at having hooked up with someone who will “know all of that,” I ask him when the Beat Museum on Wheels will be open. “The Whichy Whatcher on Whatnotters?” he asks, brow furrowed. “Well, you know, the Kerouac Festival is happening today and tomorrow, and it must be here for that,” I say. “Who?” he says, and then, dimly recalling as if from a long-ago “heads-up e-mail,” he says, “I think there’s a case with that guy’s stuff here somewhere.”

I thrust some money into the lad’s hands and speed-walk through the exhibits until I get to the Kerouac case. It contains his Underwood typewriter (always classy) and the contents of his road knapsack: Rain poncho, mighty stiff looking argyle socks, a purple handkerchief, Mad Max funky looking sun goggles (but average for the era), dishtowel, scrubbing pad, wine cork, matches, sewing kit containing a small tin of Bayer’s aspirin, a cooking kit including metal nesting pans/bowls, a measuring cup, and 2 mismatched spoons, a fork, and a knife, and a plastic glass, water bottle, and cup.

I imagine his mother buying him the sewing kit and cooking kit to help him create a home away from home. The path that Jack took in life, always cycling back to Lowell, might have been easier if he had broken out of some of his old habits and haunts. He had lots of romances, but no lasting relationships with women other than his mother. From all that I read, Jack struggled to juggle his mother and his friends she didn’t like, his mother and his girlfriends she didn’t like. But, how do you break away from the Sunday roasts of a plucky, good-hearted little woman who—sure, hates all of your girlfriends and helps you get a good drunk on—but buys you a little sewing kit for your road trip and works to support your dreams? If you are her only son, and her first son died, and her husband died, and you are a mill town boy, it is no choice at all. Your loyalty guides you every time. You sever ties with undesirable friends and girlfriends. You keep cycling back home. You are proud of your roots—the hard working, the hard drinking life—and you stay close to them, even if they rise up and strangle you.

With hope in my heart, I exit the Mogan Center and tap at the door of the Beat Museum on Wheels again. No soap. It is as if this one museum has turned against me for shunning the rest of its kind. Okay, then. I head toward Kerouac Park on Bridge Street, walking past the tiny Arthur’s Paradise Diner at 112 Bridge Street (Home of the Delicious Boott Mill Sandwich!). A ranger I meet (there’s one on every street corner) tells me that Jack definitely hung out at this diner. “Sure,” she says, beaming brightly, “You can still find people in the diners and bars who remember Kerouac. They’ll probably say, ‘Oh, that bum?’ Mostly to get a rise out of you…but, most folks in Lowell didn’t recognize the need for the park over there. ‘What? That drunk?’ pretty much captures how lots of them feel.”

I cross the street and head over into the park. It is small but lovely, carved out next to the rushing waters of the Merrimack River and across the street from the Paradise. Willows, vine covered trunks of maples, aspens…shiny marble columns with Kerouac’s writings and glazed marble benches. Two skateboarders are dancing in the park, leaping atop the benches and gliding along their smooth, arced surfaces. One column was intended to have a likeness of Jack carved into it, but the ranger told me, “Stella [Jack’s wife] took one look at the picture they had and said ‘That’s not MY Jack,’ and no likeness was ever added to the column—just his name.” I walk around and look at the quotes for awhile—from Visions of Gerard, On the Road, Lonesome Traveler, Mexico City Blues, Vanity of Duluoz, Doctor Sax, Book of Dreams, Town and The City, Maggie Cassidy—and then I just lie down on a bench.

Staring up at the trees and clouds, the noises from the whushing Merrimack, vooshing traffic, and swooshing skateboarders all blending together, I mull over a Jack quote, “Stare deep into the world before you as if it were the void: innumerable holy ghost buddhies and savior gods there inside, smiling…rest and be assured: While looking for the light, you may suddenly be devoured by the darkness and find the true light.” Where was Jack’s true light? Feeling pretty moved, I hoist myself up and cross the street again. I’m feeling like a “Delicious Boott Mill Sandwich” might get my feet back on the ground again, but the doors of the diner are closed to me. And, well, everyone else, too.

Trotting quickly back by the Boott Mill complex, I try to outstrip the surly little spat-out drops of rain, then slam on the brakes. The Beat Museum on Wheels is open. And, a real, live, human is there. Jerry Cimino is a very affable sort. He has a nice, drawling voice and a lot of energy. I think that only a little of the energy comes from his cup of coffee that might be spiked with some secret, Jack-like ingredient.

Jerry founded The Beat Museum in Monterey, California (it recently moved to San Francisco). Then, two years ago, he went mobile. He and Neal and Carolyn Cassady’s son, John Allen, travel the country in that Airstream, and they hip students to the Beats. They do a multimedia show—with readings, rappings, video—and I bet it’s a doozy. “They have no idea who the Beats were,” he says. And then, he gives me some of his show spiel and he tells me how he fell in love with the Beats. As a middle school Catholic boy, he read “A Coney Island of the Mind” by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. And, with the rain splatting down on the roof of the trailer, he recites the poem to me. If you have never read it, you should check it out—it is great. He sells a lot of books, buttons, videos—all things Beat—and I stock up on some stuff and chat more, before heading out into the rain.

Everybody Goes Home in October

Back in my car, I pop a CD in that I bought from Jerry, The Best of the Beat Generation. Even before I hit the highway, I’m jamming my foot down on the accelerator hard, without even noticing, and feeling a little bit cooler. Forward, homeward, I speed into an amazing, inspiring trip down a Beat memory lane of spoken word selections set to music, songs, scat, and novelty items. There’s a lesson in “Basic Hip” lingo, “Three Little Pigs” and “Marc Antony’s Funeral Oration” done hipster-style by Jazzbo Collins and Lord Buckley, respectively.

The brick castles of Lowell grow more distant in my rearview mirror. I replay the first selection, “October in the Railroad Earth,” twice. This cut, spoken by Jack with backing piano by Steve Allen, is my favorite. Jack’s voice, with a little French-Canadian here and a little Lowell there, brings his already vivid words to life in a new way. As the images of Lowell resonated with mill town boy Jack, his word pictures, whether heard by ear—twining through your head when spoken aloud—or skipping in front of you on the page continue to resonate. He continues to have a lasting impact, even if his journey ended too soon. Maybe that’s how—while haunted by ghosts, crushed by his inner mill, and devoured by the darkness—Jack did find a true light. At the very least, he gave a true light to us.

Resources
http://www.kerouac.com/

Inching Toward Acceptance—Chath Piersath
Commonwealth, vol. 7, Summer 2002
http://www.responsiveeducation.org/pdf/acceptance.pdf

Lowell Celebrates Kerouac!
http://lckorg.tripod.com

Lowell: The Story of An Industrial City—Handbook 140. Division of Publications, National Park Service. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Interior.

Kerouac: Visions of Lowell, John J. Dorfner, 1993, Raleigh, NC: Cooper Street Publications.

Conversations with Jack Kerouac, edited by Kevin J. Hayes 2005, University Press of Mississippi, USA.

 

1. Jack Kerouac 
   Allen Ginsberg
   Ginsberg Collection, The Richmond Hill Historical Society 
2. Store Going Out of Business, Lowell Massachusetts
   Jack Delano, 1941
   Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection,
   [reproduction number, e.g., LC-USF34-042792-D DLC]
3. Row of workers' houses near the mills in Lowell, Massachusetts.
   Jack Delano, 1941
   Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection,
   [reproduction number, e.g., LC-USF34-042897-D DLC]
4. Borrowed from The Beat Museum on Wheels Web Site
   http://www.kerouac.com/images/imagesnew/Route%2066%20-%2023.jpg
5. Spinners
   Tintype of Two Weavers
   American Textile History Museum, Lowell Massachusetts
6. Textile mill working all night in Lowell, Massachusetts.
   Jack Delano, 1941
   Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection,
   [reproduction number, e.g., LC-USF34-042901-D DLC]