‘On the Road,’ and Jack Kerouac, still inspire young and old

LOWELL, Mass. – Manya Callahan, manager of the Barnes & Noble Downtown store, sees them all the time, young and old, looking for books by Lowell’s most famous citizen.\n“They’re usually wearing backpacks and they kind of have a sense of adventure about them,” she says. “They walk inside, looking kind of nervous, then go up to me and ask if I have anything by Jack Kerouac.”\nNearly 40 years after his death, and a half century after the release of his most famous novel, “On the Road,” Kerouac remains an author who inspires motion. Students still re-enact his rambling, improvised trips across the country. Baby boomers retrace their own youthful journeys. Tourists seek out Kerouac landmarks, like this mill town the author left as a teenager but to which he always returned.\nSome celebrities are ignored, or shunned, by their hometowns, but Kerouac’s name is easily found in Lowell, with its red brick buildings, winding canals and cobblestone streets. You can start at the Visitors Center where Kerouac walking tours are offered and maps handed out, noting such attractions as his actual birthplace and a favorite bar.\nKerouac has his own park, shaded by weeping willow trees and centered by a circle of granite columns inscribed with excerpts from “On the Road” and other works. A few miles south, at the Edson Cemetery, his marker is ever adorned with stray tributes. Recent leavings include cigarettes, a bandanna, black flip flops and a note, stabbed into the bare ground by a pencil, that reads, “The only people for me are the mad ones. Here’s to you Jack!”\nHelen Bassett, 16 and a resident of Eastbourne, England, was a recent visitor to Lowell. She read “On the Road” last year and was immediately drawn to Kerouac’s musical, conversational prose, so much more accessible, she says, than the classics she’s assigned \nat school.\nWhen Bassett and her father decided to travel to Boston this summer, they arranged a side trip to Lowell, where Helen enjoyed a Kerouac exhibit at the Boott Cotton Mills Museum, went to the Kerouac park and bought four Kerouac books and a poster at Barnes & Noble.\n“I really related to ‘On the Road,’” says Helen, who is urging her friends to read it. “I’ve always wanted to move abroad; I never thought I would stay in the same place.”\nKerouac’s novel takes readers all over the country, from New York City and New Orleans to Chicago and Denver and San Francisco, all stops on the wild and fictionalized adventures of Kerouac and buddy Neal Cassady, renamed Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty.\nKerouac, not known as a friend of the businessman in his own time, has become especially good for Lowell’s economy. With the decline of the mills, tourism and the arts have become important attractions. Lowell City Manager Bernard Lynch says that when he’s trying to bring new jobs into town, Kerouac is a good name to drop.\n“I won’t say that he’s our only selling point, but when we meet with a business or meet with developers looking to build housing, one of our big selling points is the culture of the city, and Kerouac is part of that,” Lynch says.\nAt Lowell’s Barnes & Noble, Kerouac T-shirts can be seen in the window and his books have their own special place, a shelf of titles to the left of the cashier. Manya Callahan says she sometimes plays a wicked joke on those who look for Kerouac under “K” in the fiction section.\n“I tell them that we don’t carry any Kerouac books,” she says with a laugh. “You should see the looks on their faces.”