Sputnik I begat beatniks (YET ANOTHER LEFTY CONSPIRACY THEORY

SAN FRANCISCO -- You could be anything you wanted to be in the Beat movement. This year is the 50th anniversary of the publication of Jack Kerouac's On the Road, in which he wrote how he stayed in San Francisco for a week and had the "beatest" time of his life.

The Beat Museum opened last fall in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco. It honors the Beat creed of tolerance, inclusiveness and having the be-all to follow your dreams. That's how remnants of the Sputnik I satellite landed last month in the museum.

The Russian-made Sputnik I was the first man-made object to orbit the Earth. It was launched on Oct. 4, 1957, and it scared the bejesus out of America. The Russians were experimenting with the atom bomb.

The late Herb Caen was sort of the Mike Royko of San Francisco. On April 2, 1958, he used the Sputnik moniker to coin the phrase "Beatnik" when he wrote a column for the San Francisco Chronicle about a party held for "50 Beatniks." With old-school resignation, Caen wrote, "They're only Beat, y' know, when it comes to work."

And that's why 13 alleged parts of the Sputnik satellite are in the Beat Museum.

Beat Generation relics The pieces sit in a glass case like precious diamonds. The remnants are hand cut and not machine tooled. The U.S. Air Force has identified two of the pieces as parts of a transmitter. They're featured among 200 Beat items like the referee shirt Neal Cassady wore while driving the Further bus for Ken Kesey (featured in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test) and a signed copy of Alan Ginsberg's 1957 poem "Howl."

Jerry Cimino owns the non-for-profit museum with his wife, Estelle. If he can verify the satellite parts he will take the space trash on a cross-country tour in an Airstream trailer to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Sputnik I. Cimino speaks about the Beats at colleges with John Allen Cassady, the son of Kerouac's buddy Neal. They travel around in an Airstream called the Beatmobile. The Beatmobile pulls a storage van with large pictures of Kerouac, Cassady and Bob Dylan.

"The 'Beatnik' term meant the Beat Generation writers -- who were intellectuals -- immediately became Communist sympathizers," Cimino said during a radioactive interview at his museum. At the 1960 Republican National Convention, FBI head J. Edgar Hoover stated the three greatest threats to the American way of life were "Communists, eggheads and beatniks."

The Beat Museum was born in 2004 in an Airstream trailer in Monterey, Calif., as "The Beat Museum on Wheels." Cimino, 52, moved it to Kerouac's beloved North Beach a year ago. The 5,000-square-foot museum is across the street from City Lights Bookstore and Vesuvio Cafe, 255 Columbus Dr. In 1960 Kerouac was supposed to head down to Big Sur to confer with author Henry Miller, who was a fan of Kerouac's The Dharma Bums. The shy Kerouac started drinking at Vesuvio to calm his nerves. He never met Miller.

A work in progress I thought the museum would be a beat-up hole in the wall, but the spacious joint incorporates dozens of glass cases that feature items such as a first edition of Kerouac's Tristessa, a Kerouac bobblehead that was a giveaway at a minor league Lowell Spinners game (his hometown) and a $10.08 check Kerouac wrote to Nunzie's liquor store. The museum also features vintage pulp fiction paperbacks like North Beach Girl by John Trinian. Appropriately, the museum is in a former bookstore. Jack's only daughter Jan gave Cimino her blessing for his 1-800-KEROUAC number before she died of kidney disease in 1996. The gift shop includes drawings made by Carolyn Cassady (widow of Neal) that sell for $100. I cracked up at the life-size 1955 "Beat pad" Cimino created in the rear of the museum. The digs have an Underwood typewriter, a 1955 RCA television set and an RCA turntable (on loan from the California Historical Radio Society). The pad has a working 1928 stove and a beat-up "fainting couch."

Cimino is beginning work on a Day-Glo '60s room and the museum also has a small movie theater where Beat-related films and documentaries are screened.

Back to the Sputnik A replica model of Sputnik I hangs from the ceiling near the museum entrance. The original Sputnik was about the size of a Southern California beach ball. Around Christmas a visitor noticed the satellite. Cimino recalled, "I say, 'Yeah, the Beats became the beatniks and the beatniks became the hippies and it all came from that term Sputnik.' Then the guy says, 'I know someone who has the real thing.' And I go, 'The real what?' And he said 'The real Sputnik.' "

Cimino was told how a man from Southern California had satellite parts and letters from the U.S. Air Force. "I said it was impossible; it burned up on entry," Cimino said.

Bob Morgan had the parts. He lives in Santa Barbara County, where he makes parts for jet skis. The satellite parts are not jet ski parts. Cimino called Morgan and spoke with him for an hour. "We had a great conversation," Cimino said. "I realized he wasn't wearing a tin foil hat."

The two eventually met. Morgan was in town during my late February visit to San Francisco when the museum hosted a press conference about Sputnik I. Cimino said, "We think there's a good possibility this is real. On Dec. 8, 1957, the family dog [Buttons, named after Red Buttons] woke up from a commotion. Bob's father went outside and saw this stuff glowing on the ground." The alleged Sputnik pieces landed on Morgan's grandfather Earl Thomas' property near Encino.

Morgan, 60, said, "We're looking for people who know about this material. There's no doubt verification is difficult, which is why we're asking for help." In mid-February the New York Times reported that the smaller parts of Morgan's booty could have been part of Sputnik's booster rocket.

On Dec. 11, 1957, Morgan's grandfather took a plastic ring to the Air Force public information division in Hollywood, Calif. The ring was intact. Now in pieces, it's part of the museum display.

"When my grandfather got it back from the Air Force there was a 5-inch piece missing," Morgan said. "And the Air Force told my parents point blank the United States had nothing up there in 1957."

On Dec. 8, 1957, KDAY Radio in Redondo Beach offered a $50,000 reward for Sputnik parts. The top-40 radio station had been tracking the satellite over Northern California. DJ Mark Ford was to give away the reward on air. Thomas took his satellite parts to Air Force officials who were at the radio station. The museum now has the original receipt of the Air Force receiving the items, dated Dec. 11, 1957, and signed by USAF Col. Dean E. Hess. And Ford, who has since died, also signed the receipt as a witness.

"My grandfather never got his money," Morgan said. "They returned the parts in a brown box. He moved up to Sacramento, put the parts in a box in a cellar and left them down there for who knows how long. But from 1958 to 1965 my grandfather wrote letters to [California] Gov. Pat Brown, President Kennedy and President Johnson." The museum even has a Feb. 21, 1962, letter from President Kennedy's office. It apologizes for being tied up with other matters. The Cuban Missile Crisis was going down.

Conspiracy theory? "We found out Mark Ford's real name was Marvin Howard," Cimino said. "He was in the Air Force, got out in 1956 and joined the radio business." The museum features a section of the book Los Angeles Radio People, in which Ford said, " ... I was sent to a language school during the Korean War and studied cryptoanalysis. I listened to Russian broadcasts to break the codes for U.S. Intelligence ... " Cimino smiled and said, "The government realizes Sputnik is coming down, they wonder 'How are we going to get this thing?' and it's 'Oh, that guy who used to work for us is the Air Force is now a DJ in California." Unbeatable.

Following his dream Cimino was an American Express and IBM salesperson before going Beat. "The museum started with my personal collection," said Cimino, who was reared in Baltimore but relocated to Northern California in the early 1980s because of the Beats.

"After we opened people started bringing me stuff. The first day someone brought me that," and Cimino pointed to the Lawrence Ferlinghetti LP "Poetry Readings in the Cellar," which would fetch $300 today. And don't miss the museum's copy of Holy Goof, Neal Cassady's biography. The title comes from On the Road, where Kerouac says of Cassady (he inspired the Dean Moriarty character), 'That's what Dean was, 'the Holy Goof.'."

"I did OK during the dot.com era, but I was looking for something that had meaning," he said. "The Beats were the most tolerant people in the world. Their thing was, 'We don't care who you are, what you look like or what you're into, as long as you're not hurting anybody else, come join our party.'

"That's an important message, especially for young people to hear today. Allen Ginsberg was the bravest man in America in the 1950s. He came out of the closet in 1955. Nobody was doing that. He stood up and said, 'I'm here and I'm queer and I want to be part of the solution -- let me put my queer shoulder to the wheel [the closing line from Ginsberg's poem "America"]. I started to use the story of the Beats to promote a message I believe in, which is to follow your own dreams."

The article said -- "Now I always have someplace to stay in San Francisco."

Well, I try to go down there every year for MacWorld Expo, to see all the latest and greatest for the Macintosh. It's always fun.

But, I stay at a place there, in the city, that goes back to the "Hippy Days". I don't know if anyone remember the Green Tortoise Bus that went up and down the West Coast. They've still got the "Green Tortoise" bus and they've got a great Hostel (that's the right spelling...) in the North Beach district, right next to China Town and about three or four blocks from the Transamerica Building.

It's a fun place to stay and I don't have to pay a hundred or two a night in some of those other places... (only about $50 a night for your own room, or $25 for a bunk bed). I always spend all day at MacWorld anyway, so don't need anything fancy. It's a funky and "hippy" type place, too. It probably looks exactly the same as it looked in the 70s and with the Haight/Ashbury kids...

Regards,
Star Traveler

When I was a kid in Tulsa, Oklahoma, my family went out into the backyard looking for Sputnik, because it was reported to be going over at a certain time. And sure enough, there it was, moving across the sky, in the early evening.

The Sputnik display at the Air & Space Museum in Washington shows the orbit of Sputnik ... all of the orbits ... if I recall correctly, all are over the U.S. from the southeast to the northwest in the eastern third of the country.

Wow, Free Republic always has fascinating witnesses or testimonies to history. For me, Homer Hickam in October Skies looking up at Sputnik is one of the most powerful images of the Space Age.

Bender, your memories are right on. Eisenhower's DefSec, formerly from GM, Charles "Engine Charlie" Wilson, wanted the private sector Vanguard rocket to put the first satellite in orbit and absolutely nixed the Army's Redstone. I think the story was covered in a past issue of Invention and Technology Magazine, but any number of other sources have the whole story. I would give anything to have some of your memories.

For what it's worth, this comes from Wikepedia:

[The term Bohemian was used in the nineteenth century to describe the non-traditional lifestyles of marginalized and impoverished artists, writers, musicians, and actors in major European cities. The bohemian lifestyle is often associated with cafés, coffeehouses, drug use (particularly opium, the "dark idol"), alcoholism, and absinthe (the "green fairy"). Bohemians were associated with unorthodox or antiestablishment political or social viewpoints, which were expressed through extramarital sexual relations and voluntary poverty.
The term emerged in France in the 1800s when artists and creators began to concentrate in the lower-rent, lower class gypsy neighbourhoods. The term "Bohemian" reflects a belief, widely held in France at the time, that the Gypsies had come from Bohemia.]

When I got out of the service in 1969 the first place I rented was in Orlando, Florida on Harmon Avenue. Jack Kerouac's mother lived down the street from me. I used to see her out in her yard. I knew who she was because I had read a couple of Kerouac's books when I was in high school. I never introduced myself because I figured people bugged her all the time. She was listed in the phone book. Jack died later that year in St. Petersburg where he lived. He was still in his 40's.

I remember *everyone* (in our extended family, that is) gathering together over at my grandparents' house and at the right time, everyone headed outside. Then there we all were, standing out in the backyard, our heads tilted back and everyone looking to get a glance of it. And then, someone saw it and says, "There it is!" and of course, others were saying, "Where..., where?" I chuckle at it now, because it was sucha big deal back then. Now we've got all this stuff flying over our heads and no one gives a second thought...

Regards,
Star Traveler

You said -- "Wow, Free Republic always has fascinating witnesses or testimonies to history. For me, Homer Hickam in October Skies looking up at Sputnik is one of the most powerful images of the Space Age."

I saw that movie, October Sky (1999), relating to that person. Should put up a few links here for others to read...

http://imdb.com/title/tt0132477/

http://www.homerhickam.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer_Hickam

Regards,
Star Traveler

P.S. -- Of course, I also remember what happened shortly after that Sputnik, too -- bomb shelters (had some relatives building them, too) and the drills in school ("duck and cover"). We did that a lot in school.

Actually, at least as far as Kerouac and Cassady are concerned, that museum should be in San Jose, 65 miles to the south. The Beats are connected to SF mostly because of Ginsburg and to a lesser extent because of Ferlinghetti.

A friend of mine who's a local Beat aficionado pointed me to the neighborhood near San Jose Hospital where Neal Cassady's old house is. Kerouac and at least one other notable Beat also lived and wrote there. Kerouac did most of his research on Buddhism at the nearby Carnegie Library.

.
Squeal
I saw the best minds of my generation
Destroyed—Marvin
Who spat out poems; Potrzebie
Who coagulated a new bop literature in fifteen novels; Alvin
Who in his as yet unwritten autobiography
Gave Brooklyn an original lex loci.
They came from all over, from the pool room,
The bargain basement, the rod,
From Whitman, from Parkersburg, from Rimbaud
New Mexico, but mostly
They came from colleges, ejected
For drawing obscene diagrams of the Future.
They came here to L.A.,
Flexing their members, growing hair,
Planning immense unlimited poems,
More novels, more poems, more autobiographies.
It’s love I’m talking about, you dirty bastards!
Love in the bushes, love in the freight car!
I saw them fornicating and being fornicated,
Saying to Hell with you!
America.
America is full of Babbitts.
America is run by money.
What is it Walt said? Go West!
But the important thing is the return ticket.
The road to publicity runs by Monterey.
I saw the best minds of my generation
Reading their poems to Vassar girls,
Being interviewed by Mademoiselle.
Having their publicity handled by professionals.
When can I go into an editorial office
And have my stuff published because I’m weird?
I could go on writing like this forever . . .
— Louis Simpson.

Re: Sputnik I, whatever ... I can say with a fair degree of confidence I'm the only member of FR who actually saw Sputnik I in orbit October 1957.

Sorry, but there are at least two of us...

I was in Columbia, Tennessee, that October visiting my cousin Wick when his dad called us outside to watch that little dot of light fly through the night sky...

Gadzooks, it was strange! I remember the hair on the back of my neck rising... I also saw another strange dot of light in the night sky a few years ago while fishing, but that is another story...

Okay, now... I believe I am the only Freeper to have seen with my own two eyes two atomic explosions in 1958 at the Nevada Proving Grounds. My late Father was a Project Manager on building facilities for Hush-Hush government projects and as his son, I got to see a lot...

Go to http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/Hardtack2.html for info on those series of atomic tests. I admit I do not now recall which of the ones I saw, but I will never forget that initial flash of atomic light!

I found this shot...

that matches the memory in my mind...

Re: Eisenhower's DefSec, formerly from GM, Charles "Engine Charlie" Wilson, wanted the private sector Vanguard rocket to put the first satellite in orbit and absolutely nixed the Army's Redstone...

Vanguard was a project of the NRL (Naval Research Laboratory), which was regarded more as a scientific than a military organization... However, Vanguard was a US Navy rocket project!

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanguard_rocket & http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Vanguard

BTW...

Anchors...

Aweigh!

"...It was launched on Oct. 4, 1957, and it scared the bejesus out of America. The Russians were experimenting with the atom bomb..."

Whoa! They had the bomb about eight years before that.

Bohemians and Beatniks...I refuse to think of them as always Leftists. To me a beatnik was addicted to jazz, progressive jazz, and other hip music and poetry. A bohemian was addicted to any one of the arts; painting, music, writing, et al. They were the starving artists who had to suffer and disavow materialism.

In those dark nights near Columbia, Tennessee did you ever see the Bell Witch or the ghost at Spring Hill?

Re: "...It was launched on Oct. 4, 1957, and it scared the bejesus out of America. The Russians were experimenting with the atom bomb..." Whoa! They had the bomb about eight years before that.

Whoa... I did not say "...It was launched on Oct. 4, 1957, and it scared the bejesus out of America. The Russians were experimenting with the atom bomb..." That was Dave Hoeksyra, Staff Reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times/ that said it!

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