Jim and Frank Will Back Me Up on This .....

As I pointed out in a number of previous posts, September, 1957 was a great time for launches ..... one that I failed to mention was the publication of Jack Kerouac's "On the Road," a defining work of the 'Beat Generation,' one of the great works of American literature ..... and one that has lost none of its edge, none of its power after half-a-century.

Of special significance to me - and to anyone who has walked the banks of the Susquehanna or the Monongahela - is this brief encounter with a man who embodies the spirit of the American frontier - not in Texas and the west, where it was eventually adopted; but in the east, where it was born .....

"I thought all the wilderness of American was in the West till the Ghost of the Susquehanna showed me different. No, there is a wilderness in the East; it's the same wilderness Ben Franklin plodded in the oxcart days when he was postmaster, the same as it was when George Washington was a wildbuck Indian-fighter, when Daniel Boone told stories by Pennsylvania lamps and promised to find the Gap, when Bradford built his road and men whooped her up in log cabins. There were not great Arizona spaces for the little man, just the bushy wilderness of eastern Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, the backroads, the black-tar roads that curve among the mournful rivers like Susquehanna, Monongahela, old Potomac and Monocacy."