The Kerouacs

[jo grant <jgrant@BOOKZEN.COM>]

(Second time around. First time I was told this post had been distributed
to the list, BUT it never showed up.)


Not sure if anyone cares, but the following news really has me upset. I
hope there are others who are equally concerned.

According to Jacques Kirouac, head of the Kerouac Family Association, and
"Buddha" (John Paul Pirolli) a Massachusetts poet, John Lash, Jan's
ex-husband--who hadn't visited her during the last five years of her life
including the time she was on kidney dialysis--has made the following plans
for the interment of Jan Kerouac's ashes.

They will be placed in the Kerouac Family Plot (originally 10 "slots") in
Nashua,
New Hampshire, at 9:00 A.M. on Thursday, June 5, 1997, the first anniversary of
her untimely and painful death.  This is the plot where "Papa Leo" Kerouac,
Gabrielle "Memere" Kerouac, and little Gerard Kerouac are buried. Jan
definitely wanted to be
buried there; just as she wanted her father's body to be moved from Lowell to
the Kerouac plot.

So far so good.

However, Lash has chosen to invite only his sister Debra, Jan's
half-brother David Bowers, Jacques Kirouac, and, as guest of honor, John
Sampas, JAN'S WORST ENEMY. Sampas controls most of the Kerouac literary
archives as a result of the forged signature of Jack's mother on a will
leaving everything to the people Jack swore would never get anything of
his.  Handwriting experts are prepared to testify that Memere's signature
is a forgery. Even the "witness" to her signing has admitted he did not see
her sign.

Unfortunately, the case may never get to court in St.Pete, FL because Lash
and Sampas have contested Jan's will and it appears they may succeed in
getting her wishes changed. Lash says Jan made a death bed statement asking
that everything be left with Sampas. A lie if I've ever heard one.

Only days before she died she told me she was entrusting her closest and
most trusted friend, Gerald Nicosia, with the job of making sure her law
suit continued so that her Dad's archives would end up safe, in a major
library, and that John Sampas would be forced to stop selling pieces from
the archives to private collectors. For these two, Lash and Sampas, to hire
lawyers and fight her wishes and change her will is sickening.

Nicosia, the one person who is carrying on Jan's fight to save her dad's
archives has been excluded. Too bad, because he's the one person, living,
who would be able speak knowingly about Jan at her burial.

As if that isn't outrage enough, Lash is burying Jan on top of her
grandmother instead of in one of the remaining plots. Sampas used one of
the plots for a member of the Sampas family a few years ago. But he doesn't
want to "waste" a space for Jack Keroauc's daughter.

Denying Jan her own space in the Kerouac Plot will save money. It's
reportedly cheaper to bury someone in a space that has already been used.
Saving the remaining spaces for Sampases is my guess?

Such shabby treatment for such a fine woman.

So it goes. JK's wishes are dramatically altered by falsifying a will, and
now Jan's wishes are dramatically altered by outrageous lies. The kind of
lies that only money can buy--that only greed can manufacture.

How sad that so few of the Beats and Wannabeats give a shit about this
woman--this writer, this child of one of the original five or fifteen or
whatever Beats. So lost for so many years. So fucked over by the men in her
life. And the endless  fucking, by Lash and Sampas, following her right
into here grave,  that small part of a grave being allocated to her by
someone with not a drop of Kerouac blood.

Didn't her father, in his last letter, written to Paul Blake the day before
he died, have something to say about Kerouac blood? In that letter Jack
stated that he wanted Paul--wanted his "blood"--to share in what he left
when he died. Paul hasn't even been notified of the burial, much less
invited or consulted. But then how could he be contacted. He's eking out a
living as a carpenter, caring for kids, just lost his home, phone taken out
because of of expenses, scatching by in a small trailer while others spend
tens of thousands of dollars making sure he doesn't get what his uncle Jack
Kerouac wanted him to have.

Depression, thy name is

jo grant










                BE ON THE WATCH
for items stolen from the Keroauc Collection
        O'Leary Library, U Mass, Lowell
http://www.bookzen.com/kerouac.theft.html

Academic & Small Press Authors & publishers
                display books free at
           <http://www.bookzen.com>


- --------------1D6712A82C3B--