Jack Kerouac would be 83 today

Today is Jack Kerouac's birthday. He would be 83 years old. Isn't it interesting what dying young does for a someone's legacy?

Kerouac died at the age of 47 in 1969 (when I was 5), so I never had the chance to meet him, but I did meet Ginsberg and Burroughs when they appeared together at a reading in Milwaukee in 1986. I'll always remember them as old men, whereas I remember Kerouac as a maverick, a "hip flask slinging madman," as Robert Buck and Natalie Merchant of 10,000 Maniacs so aptly put it.