Interluding On: Meet Our Unincorporated Kerouac Klub

I planned to return to a few posts recounting Luci, Caroline and my visit with Jack in Austin, but a flurry after last week's Lowell Spinners "interlude" causes me to . . . Please, let me explain:

You haven’t read the report from Barton Springs yet. No one has but me, and furthermore, my version is still just draft.

See, what happened: I was writing about a lovely swim I took in Barton Springs, happy that I was getting ahead of the game in continuing my Austin, Texas, ramble here on Substack, when I closed the laptop for the weekend and headed to a ballgame in Lowell, old stamping grounds. Up there in Massachusetts, last week’s post wrote itself in my head while I attended the Spinners’ shellacking of the Whomevers in the ballpark down by the Merrimack River. I was with my old high school buddies, and memories came flooding ashore. I transcribed some at the keyboard when I got back home. I presented, here, one of my archly called “Summer Interludes” a week ago as “The Return to ‘Spinner Stadium.’ ” I’m not saying you read it or should have or should now, but if you’re interested in this stuff — Lowell, Massachusetts; family mysteries; Jack Kerouac; forensic researching (really! forensic researching does have its fans!) — if interested, then bits of “The Return to ‘Spinner Stadium’ ” might be fun preluding to what’s to follow here, now, and maybe in next week’s post, too. I’m off on another of my shunpikes, which mightn’t surprise at a website called “That Reminds Me of a Story” written by a guy in his seniority if not dotage.

“The Return to ‘Spinner Stadium’ got a usual modest, pleasant, polite response from our usual modest audience, but among a few friends who share my interest in Lowell, it started another round of friendly back-and-forth about the Spinners, about the city, and about our interest in Jack Kerouac’s umbilical connection to the city. A couple members of our Mill City sewing circle know tons about Kerouac’s dedicated but often fraught relationship with his birthplace. One of these folks in particular, whom I’ve only met recently and only through email, is a real scholar who has, just in the past few days, helped me, my sister Gail and brother Kevin learn more about the factual underpinnings of what has long been family lore. He has corrected a few misbeliefs and amended a few others, including one I got kinda wrong in an essay in The Boston Globe (ugh). As the good Time Inc.-trained fact-checker that I once was, I want to correct that soonest, which is now.

Not right now, but in just a moment.

What I want to say right now is: This new guru of mine on matters Keroacian, who joins Paul and Dave as my go-to counselors on the Beat writer’s birth, youth and adolescence in Lowell, will be a guest star in this post. In fact, Kurt will soon hijack this space with an essay he’s written and pictures he’s found, which are all about my mom and the family’s relation to Jack. Kurt’s essay first appeared on Dick’s Lowell-centric website — “Dick” is another member of our cabal) — a site that is popular throughout the Merrimack Valley and beyond. Kurt and Dick have both given me permission to reprint that piece and its photographs: enter them here as forensic evidence.

So, then: I’ve got to — I really must — unload some of this stuff while it is buzzing about in my brain. I’m therefore extending my summer interluding at least a couple more posts before I return to Barton Springs in Austin — which I will do in a couple of weeks, because that excites me, too.

I think, first, I should explain how I fell in with this gang of four variously engaged, variously situated fellows who are bonded by Lowell. The chronology behind my becoming a tenderfoot among eagles will not only explain who they are, but give you a sense of what each brings to our den meetings. And then Kurt will take the podium.

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Dave Perry

This story takes place in early December, 1996. As I wrote a few days ago to Dick Howe (and we’ll intro Dick more fully in just a second, on the other side of Paul): “I’ve recently had nice back-and-forths with Dave about music, which always gets us going. He knows way more about latin jazz than I do — no surprise. Did he or I ever tell you how we met? I had a first book out, Flight of the Reindeer, and he was a cub at the [Lowell] Sun. He dropped by our family house on Berkeley Dr. in Chelmsford before I was doing a gig at a bookstore in Lowell, and wrote a too-nice article about the book for the ‘paper. Afterwards, my dad, who’d eavesdropped, said, ‘What a nice young man that Mr. Perry was.’ ”

Which was true, and remains so minus “young.”

I continued to Dick: “After the bookstore event, I, Luci, Gail, Kevin, Mom and Dad went to dinner at a French bistro that was across from the old Union Nat’l where Dad and Mom had met, prewar, as young employees. We had a wonderful meal, but afterwards emerged into quite an ice storm. The roads were so treacherous! Took us a full hour to get back to Chelmsford. After we’d made it, I parked in the bottom of the driveway. I heard all the branches cracking and breaking from the storm as I walked to the house. It was beautiful though; the moon was out now, and it was like this glass palace with all the ice. Frozen. Funny, the things you remember . . .”

Seems funny to me, anyway. Often enough.

I don’[t believe I’ve seen Dave since 1996; in fact, he’s the only member of our Kerouac Klub, excluding adjuncts Gail (my sister), Scott (my brother-in-law) and Kevin (my brother), whom I’ve ever met, except online. But Dave and I have stayed in touch. I know he continued at the Sun and did great work as a veteran writer of features and columns. He then worked for UMass Lowell for a time. Whereas I spend my retirement years goofing around on Substack, Dave, in collaborating with his son Dan, took a braver plunge and opened a record store in old Mill Building No. 5 on Jackson Street. Vinyl Destination became a Mecca for audiophiles and a shining example of a caring local enterprise, sponsoring drives and events to promote cancer awareness.

Dave, who has lived for years with his wife and family on a Chelmsford street that was once part of my and Kevin’s shared Globe paper route, came to know all about Lowell. Of things that particularly interested him were the music scene and the cultural and counter-cultural history of the weird old city. This line on inquiry of course involved Kerouac, bigtime. When Rhino Records assembled a boxed set of Kerouac recordings — Kerouac reading from Desolation Angels, The Subterraneans and other writings; Kerouac reciting his poetry over a musical background featuring hipsters Al Cohn and Zoot Sims, or closet hipster Steve Allen, the talk-shot host sidelining as a fine jazz pianist. I have the box of course. I’m listing to disc two of three, Blue and Haikus, right now. I’m re-reading Dave’s extensive liner notes, written in 1990, which have up high: “He was born Jean Louis Kerouac to Leo Kerouac, a printer, and his wife, Gabrielle, on March 12, 1922. The family lived at 9 Lupine Road in the Centralville district in Lowell, Massachusetts, a tough as nails mill town if ever there was one.

“Kerouac’s French-Canadian heritage and Catholicism would cast a long shadow over his life. Kerouac always honored his heritage, but he also fought to break free of his constraints . . ..”

Paul Marion

I’ve always been a loyalist. Family, friends both new and really old, schools secondary and collegiate, Sox, Pats, Celts, Chelmsford over Billerica on Thanksgiving morning, Lowell over Lawrence for dad’s sake, New Englanders generally, Cardinal Cushing, Kennedys (mostly). Hawthorne, Dickerson, Frost, Higgens, Parker, Lehane, Emerson and way up high: Thoreau. I’m loyal to all of them to a fault, often a fault.

I knew through family stories handed down at the breakfast table in the 1960s that’s Mom’s some-kinda relative (maybe her grandfather?), some doctor named Rochette, had delivered the boy Jack in the Kerouacs' family flat in Centralville years and years ago. I had been loyal to all things even vaguely Lowellish since birth — I’d been born in St. Joe’s, and Mom and Dad were both Lowellians, the Acre and the Highlands. They’d been born a year or two or three just before or after Jack, and Mom at least had maybe been delivered, too, by Dr. Rochette — he was said to be in charge of all of Lowell’s French babies, so we heard.

Instantly and of course, upon hearing of Dr. Rochette’s role in the Kerouac story, I was loyal to Kerouac. I’d never read him; I was maybe nine. The reading started with Maggie Cassidy, when I was maybe 12 and picked up a dime-novel copy of it (actually 50 cents, bought at a drug store in Lowell — maybe Page’s). Mom saw me looking at it — this blonde on the cover about to smooch to death a boy who looked like James Dean in Rebel. Mom said the woman was still somewhere in Lowell, time to time, and I thought: whoa. Mom said Mary Carney was “Maggie Cassidy,” or had been, and Mom would point her out to me when next we passed her. She did this a couple of times in the years ahead. Ms. Carney was not a blonde.

I enjoyed Maggie Cassidy and really enjoyed On the Road. Being a loyalist, I was proud of Jack when I saw The Dharma Bums was on our Modern American Lit syllabus in college. Proud of him, as of Ted having hit .406., or of Cooz and Russ and all the gonfalons at the Garden.

I read everything else in what’s called the oeuvre, enjoying much, some not as much. I was working in New York and saw this new collection published by Viking Penguin entitled Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings, in which were collected unpublished Kerouac scribblings, essays, job applications, hopes and dreams, all written when he was between ages of 13 and 21. The majority of that time had been spent in Lowell, and the major part of the contents are set in a real or fictive Lowell.

I loved the book, certainly. This is per young Jack, from Atop an Underwood: “At twelve, I printed a novel laboriously into a nickel notebook dealing with the adventures of a runaway orphan down the Merrimack River. At thirteen, I was busy turning out cartoon strips, hand printing racing form sheets, and a club newspaper. It was also at this time that the Lowell Sun published a ‘column’ of mine written in father’s printing office predicting the outcome of the Louis-Braddock fight to the round.” As a former good Time Inc. trained reporter, I looked stuff up: Jack would have been 15 in the summer of ‘37 when Joe Louis KO’ed James Braddock and began the longest reign as champ in heavyweight history. If Jack had predicted the 8th round as he bragged, his account is red-checked.

Atop an Underwood had been compiled and edited by Paul Marion. I learned along the way that Mr. Marion, too, was from Lowell, was a writer himself, was an accomplished poet. This is from his sketch “Merrimack Street,” written in 1983, looking back: “The place is yours for once, or again, you walk down Merrimack, past Jordan’s minimalist window dressing, one black torso filing a yellow sweater, and the CVS, door open, scent of candy and medicine, past Cherry’s, the manikins severe, past Prince’s books, and the shoe store, all those objects behind plate glass creating a museum of the ordinary.” Terrific, I think. Having walked that walk holding Mom’s hand, I’d say: spot-on.

I think it was Dave Perry who filled me in concerning Paul. Paul was not only a writer but a longtime community activist, and was married to another mover-and-shaker in town, Rosemary Noon. (Paul and Rosemary live now in Amesbury; Paul and his books and essays and facts about Loom Press can be found at paulmarion.com). Paul had co-founded the Lowell Folk Festival and culture-centric Lowell Heritage Alliance. He was active in Dick Howe’s program of guided walks through interesting parts of the city. Of course, there are Kerouac-themed tours, and Paul, Dick and Kurt have all been heavily involved in leading those and others.

Marion was clearly deep into Kerouac, and like me had come to know several of the local citizens who had been featured, pseudonymously, in Jack’s five “Lowell novels.” I had been scribbling some things — memories, reminiscences, reflections on my parents’ world — . . . I’d been working on some things. I asked Dave Perry if he had Paul’s email, as I thought my materials needed a vetting, should Paul be willing to scan them. He was very kind, and generous in his reaction. He said he owned miles and miles of Kerouac-related biographical material — books and all else — and hadn’t read anything with the approach I was assuming. When folks are nice to you, you stay in touch, and I’ve stayed in touch with Paul. He said at some point I had to talk with Dick Howe, to whose sites Paul has often contributed himself. Paul said something along the lines of, “Dick knows everything about Lowell. Dick’s the guy.”

I read a few of Paul and Dick’s essays online, and in January I eagerly emailed Dick the first time.

Richard P. Howe Jr.

Dick was the 30-year register of deeds in Lowell and, like his dad before him, became the longest serving city councillor in the city’s history. His dad not only was a councilor forever but was Lowell’s mayor for eight years; they’re posthumously naming bridge after him even as I type.. The Howe family forebears in the 19th century were almost all immigrants from County Cork, so his people certainly knew my dad’s people in the Irish-American social scene, and Mr. Howe Sr. certainly knew my mom and dad from the downtown scene. I, however, never knew Dick until Paul and others — my friend Bruce, who’s on the hospital's board of directors; Jake, a native who’d begun his own law career in the city — told me that “nobody knows the city’s history like Dick Howe.”

Dick retired from the day-to-day a little over a year ago. “My job had been an elected position so I secured a domain name for my campaign site in the early 2000s,” he says. “The site was up and running when blogging became a thing. I converted my site to a blog. Along the way, others like Paul Marion jumped on board as contributors.” [That site’s at richardhowecom, and is an essential stop if you’re traveling this road.] “By the end of 2022, Substack and electronic newsletters seemed like the new thing so I launched a Substack newsletter of my own [richardhowe.substack.com]. I’ve self-published some books, always Lowell-focused.” [That’s at richardhowe.com/books, and a book any Lowell lover needs is his new one, Lowell: A Concise History.]

Dick and I have gotten on swell via email and now have longstanding promises to get together in Lowell sometime with Dave and Paul and seal the bond: an actual Kerouac Klub confab (Confab with a “c”; no KKK’s here.) Dick was quick to tell me he was more place-focused than Jack-oriented: “I‘m a recent convert to the world of Kerouac. Over the past dozen years, I’ve definitely become a fan, especially of his Lowell books. I’m mostly on the periphery of the core believers. I find my role is providing Lowell history context for him and his work.”

If Dick is on the periphery of the core believers — and I think he’s closer to the core than he admits — he has friends in the molten center. There’s Paul, of course, and Dave, and earlier this year Dick mentioned to me, “Bob, Have you ever encountered Kurt Phaneuf? He lives in upstate New York and is a retired high school teacher, but he’s a Kerouac scholar. His focus has been the real life Lowell people who appear as characters in Kerouac’s books. Kurt comes to Lowell several times a year and I got to know him pretty well in advance of last year’s Lowell Celebrates Kerouac festival. A while back, he shared a couple of his ‘Kerouac’s Characters’ stories on my blog. Your great-grandfather was the focus of one.” Dick sent me Kurts’s essay, which is the one I’ll reprint in a moment, and it changed much about what Gail, Kevin and I thought we knew about “our great-granddad who by the way delivered the baby Jack Kerouac. ” It changed our consideration of the immigrant Rochette family’s place in the city, right down to the physical place in which he was living on the March day in 1922 when, during a routine appointment to birth yet another Quebecois baby, he brought forth a howling kid who would bring him in turn a smidgen of earthly immortally.

Kurt Phaneuf

Born and raised a quarter-mile from the New York-Québec border, Kurt is a life-long New York resident, a recently retired high school English teacher and adjunct English professor with Master’s degrees in both English and Secondary Education from SUNY Oswego, and has been a student of and writer on all things Kerouac for over 40 years. He is also a longtime participant in Lowell Celebrates Kerouac’s annual fall festival, leading and co- leading a number of festival tours — something Dick Howe has also done since founding the now institutional Lowell Walks program in 2015.

I got in touch with Mr. Phaneuf and I’m going to save more of what I’ve learned about him for our subsequent post. For now, I’ll concentrate on what he quickly taught me about Dr. Rochette.

He has sent me and my sister piles of stuff. An evangelist and and enthusiast — a researcher and writer as meticulous as he is energetic in getting things right and explaining them well — Kurt went back to work himself, and has been feeding us updates this past week. Here’s his latest note: “Bob— I look forward to discussing all of this fascinating history further as you work through posts and republication.”

[This references Kurt’s Rochette essay, based largely upon a Lowell Sun article about Lucille (Parthenais) Sullivan — our mom — and an interview done separately with her by Roger Brunelle at her place of work, the Jeanne D’Arc Credit Union — and the fact that both Kurt and Dick were granting me permission to republish the piece, which first ran on Dick’s own site. Mr. Brunelle’s role in all this will also be explained in the next post.]

”Our exchange prompted me to dig into my Dr. Rochette folder and I found a couple of things I thought you might enjoy. First, I have a copy of the 1922 Parthenais-Rochette marriage certificate. Also, I’m including a September Lowell Sun article describing Parthenais’ “bachelor dinner” at the Club Fleur-de-Lys Social in Dracut (it includes a photo of Herve). . . .

”Finally, I believe I’ve figured out the Mount Vernon/ Street/Merrimack Street residence confusion. Digging through Lowell directories (particularly the years 1916, 1926, 1931 and 1936), I’ve found entries for the Parthenais family [my mom’s family] that places them at 18 Mount Vernon Street starting sometime between 1931 and 1936 [Mom would have been between ages 7 and 12] . . .”

”Adding an additional layer of Kerouac relevancy to all of this, the home on Mount Vernon was just a single block from Jack’s Uncle Joseph & Aunt Leontine’s home at 18 Arlington Street, a home Kerouac has written about in numerous of his hometown works. In fact, the Arlington Street residence figures prominently in the ‘Watermelon Man’ sequence in Doctor Sax, as the entire reason Jack and his Mom were OUT on that night in July 1934 was to walk his Aunt Beatrice home after her visit with Leo and Gabrielle at the Phoebe Avenue residence. After a stop at the Grotto, Jack and Gabrielle recross the bridge on their way home and witness the stricken man who’d inspire the ‘Watermelon Man’ vignette.

”So, the Stations/Grotto/Franco-American Orphanage, the Joseph & Leontine Kerouac home (and Joseph’s former market on Pawtucket Street), the Archambault Funeral Home, AND the Parthenais-Rochette residence are all separated by less than a tenth of a mile. . . .

”Finally, you’ll find a 2nd PDF attached to this message. It includes an excerpt from my ongoing “Lowell Duluoz Legend Character Index,” a collection of over 200 short biographical profiles I’ve written of ALL the Lowellians Jack refers to in his books. . . .

“Stay well and keep your eye on that muse —Kurt”

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I mean: Yikes!

Right?

Not only was I now confronted with the fun of reading Two Hundred More bio sketches of Lowell folk who were alter-ego’ed in the Kerouac canon — and I do mean fun; I love this stuff — but I now knew that my mild-mannered grandfather Herve (“Papa”) Parthenais whooped it up with his boyos in the buggy jungles of Roaring Twenties Dracut on the eve of his wedding to sweet, calm, unassuming Lydia (“Mama”) Rochette — not only that, but: I now knew Mom had lived her earliest years directly across the street from St. John Baptiste Church, in the the parish hall of which the bank that she would become president of one day, the Jeanne D’Arc Credit Union, had been founded by the city’s Quebecois fathers in 1919 — the same church where Jack Kerouac, a year and a half older than Mom, would be an altar boy; where his funeral mass would be said by his revered Father Spike; where, two or three years from now, the Jack Kerouac Center will open its doors to reveal a brand-spanking-new library, museum, recording studio and concert venue, thanks to the auspices of the Kerouac Estate and, in large part, the bankroll of a benevolent country music megastar from Oklahoma named Zach Bryan, who was born 46 years after On the Road hit the shelves, but who is nonetheless mad about Jack, every bit as Jack-crazy as Kurt, Dave, Paul and I suspect Dick. (Hey Zach: Wanna join our Klub? You can open the next meeting with “Burn, Burn, Burn.” Do you know Natalie Merchant? You two can follow with a duet on “Hey Jack Kerouac”.)

And, oh yeah!: the Mount Vernon Street home where Mom lived for two decades beginning when she was eight was less than a stone’s throw from Jack’s uncle and aunt’s house, where he visited all the time. Mom used to say, yeah, well, he was around . . . “Around!?” They might’ve played together as kids in that courtyard. They might’ve prayed together with the other French-Canadian kids in the spooky Grotto?

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Here’s what I’m going to do now.: I’m going to let Kurt have the final word this week. I’ll follow next time with a deeper introduction to Mr. Phaneuf accompanied by a Q&A between the two of us. The following, then, is Kurt Pheneuf’s essay about Dr. Louis Vitalien Rochette, based upon a Lowell Sun piece on my mom, plus an interview conducted by the late Roger Brunelle.

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“Kerouac’s Characters: L.V. Rochette”

by Kurt Phaneuf

Above: Dr. Louis Vitalien “Victor” Rochette, unknown date

According to his granddaughter Lucille (Parthenais) Sullivan, Dr. Louis Vitalien “Victor” Rochette (1862-1930) delivered an estimated 10,000 babies for Lowell’s Franco-American mothers during his four-decade career. Arguably his most famous delivery was Jack Kerouac, whose birth Rochette oversaw at Leo and Gabrielle’s Lupine Road home in Centralville on March 12, 1922, “at five o’clock in the afternoon of a red-all-over suppertime.” Kerouac describes the circumstances of his birth in this fanciful reimagining from Doctor Sax (1959), wherein Dr. Rochette is renamed “Dr. Simpson”:

“Young Doctor Simpson who later became tragic tall and grayhaired and unloved, snapping his—“I think everything she is going to be alright, Angy,” he said to my mother who’d given birth to her first two, Gerard and Catherine, in a hospital.

“Tank you Doctor Simpson, he’s fat like a tub of butter–mon ti n’ange …” Golden birds hovered over her and me as she hugged me to her breast; angels and cherubs made a dance . . . ”

Above: Return Of A Birth for Jean Louis ‘Keroach’ Signed By L.V. Rochette

A native of Saint-Barthélemy, QC, and the son of St. Lawrence River steamboat captain Norbert Rochette and housewife Louise Malboeuf, Rochette received his early education at Berthier and Joliet Collèges (“collèges” in this case referring to the parish equivalent of middle and high school), completing his medical studies at Victoria University in Montreal in 1887. He married Quebec native Marie Lafontaine in 1888, the couple eventually having fourteen children. Only six survived to adulthood.

Arriving in Lowell on October 3, 1893, Rochette signed his “Declaration of Intention” in 1912, finalizing his petition for naturalization as an American citizen in 1916. He certainly didn’t wait for citizenship to render an impact on his adopted home — Rochette opened a successful private practice at 730 Merrimack Street in the heart of “Little Canada” in 1893, directly across the street from the recently-constructed St. Jean Baptiste Catholic Church. Though Dr. Rochette was best known for delivering babies, he dealt with an eclectic, challenging cross-section of medical emergencies during his years of practice. A representative sampling of those cases can be found in the pages of The Lowell Sun during the early decades of the century.

Above: Cross Section of Dr. Rochette’s Cases from The Lowell Sun

But what of Kerouac’s curious characterization of Rochette as “tragic tall and grayhaired and unloved” in the above passage from Doctor Sax? The disquieting answer to this question rests in events that unfolded in early March 1905. During a difficult childbirth, Rochette’s 36-year old wife Marie lost twin daughters on consecutive days; the first child dying on the morning of Sunday, March 19 while the second perished early on Monday the 20th. Adding to the family’s litany of trauma, Marie herself succumbed on Tuesday, March 21, under what The Lowell Sun describes as “distressingly sad circumstances.” One can only imagine how Dr. Rochette — a man who’d safely delivered countless children into the world — was able to cope with such a deep, relentless impaction of loss. Marie and the children were returned to her native Quebec and are interred in the parish Cimetière de St-Barthélemy, nearly six hours from Lowell.

Despite his grief, Rochette had children to raise and patients to assist. For the next quarter-century, he remained the go-to obstetrician for the French-Canadian community. Illness forced his retirement in 1929, the same year of his brother Stephen’s death. Trained as a pharmacist, Stephen/Stephane Rochette (1868-1929) was another preeminent Franco-American citizen of the Mill City; he became one of the pioneers of auto sales in the Merrimack Valley, running Lowell Motor Mart for decades. Upon their deaths, both Louis and Stephen Rochette were laid to rest in St. Joseph Cemetery, Chelmsford.

Above: Louis V. Rochette’s Grave at St. Joseph Cemetery, Chelmsford

In a moment of poetic symmetry Jack would likely have relished, the home of L.V. Rochette–the man who brought Jack Kerouac into the world–was located directly across the street from the house of worship where Jack was guided into the afterlife by Fr. Armand “Spike” Morissette. The Rochette home was razed in the 1990s though the vacant lot on which it once stood provides splendid views of the future Jack Kerouac Center at the former St. Jean Baptiste Church.

Above: Jack Kerouac’s Funeral, October 24, 1969 (with Dr. Rochette’s former home at 730-732 Merrimack in the background behind the VW microbus)

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PS: Okay, I’m back here at “That Reminds Me of a Story.” I’ve got to add this: Unless I miss my guess, the bearded mourner with the eyeglasses in the center of the photo just above is Allen Ginsberg, with whom I visited once at his Lower East Side walkup, who I once saw during a reading at my college, and who I later saw perform in the Lowell gym during the second-ever gig of Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue.

And a PPS: Under the old magazine-writing maxim that it’s often good to have your kicker hearken to your lede, let’s go back to the Spinner. In the interim of writing this new post, I have learned that on this coming Saturday, August 1, there will be a Jack Kerouac Night ceremony before the Spinners game. Tim Bawmann, COO of the Spinners, confirms in an email: “Jack bobblehead this upcoming Saturday night. Features his sports career. Free to early arriving fans. Very limited.” I can tell you: You want to be there soonest, because a Jack bobblehead if a thing worth having. I have two, each from an earlier Jack Nights staged by the former, Sox-affiliated Spinner franchise. The first one, from “On the Road Night,” caused fans to start lining up more than seven hours before the first pitch of the Spinners August 21, 2003 game. That edition became the first bobblehead of a literary figure to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame’s hallowed bobblehead collection in Cooperstown, New York. Here, below, is that one and a subsequent premium given out before “The Town and the City Night,” plus one of my old Spinners souvenir balls. Pretty cool, yes?