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Last week's column on Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" got some of that old - and new - Beatnik blood pumping in the community. I received e-mails, a letter and comments from people I bumped into here and there.

"Thank you for the article on the 50th anniversary of 'On the Road,'" wrote a woman from Mansfield. "What a fantastic journal. I think his book changed my life way back in the late' 60s. I headed to Denver and lived there for a year and although I wasn't really suited to be a Westerner, I loved the trip and the year I was there.

"I think Kerouac's book has sent me on to further journeys around the world. I never would have had the incentive, creativity, spunk to go without 'On the Road.' Reading your article brought back so many memories."

Wrote an Attleboro man: "I read your Kerouac article with some interest. I guess he changed (or somehow affected) everyone's lives, back then ..."

"I was 17 in 1960, and joined the Navy the day I turned 17," he writes, and goes on in a few pages to recount his ensuing adventures and mis-adventures. "I don't remember anything of the last several weeks of my enlistment," he writes at one point. "I do recall 'waking up' on a street corner in 'Frisco. Bleak, civilian now, 21 years old, bags in hand. I got a room in a flop-house hotel and tried to figure things out ..."

"How I identified with your piece about Jack Kerouac," wrote a woman from Attleboro. "I, too, went 'on the road' after reading it, to San Francisco, in fact - City Lights bookstore, The Hungry I, the whole North Beach scene.

"When I wasn't pounding on the typewriter for The Kingston Trio, The Journeymen (later The Mamas and the Papas) and The 4 Amigos, I tried to write like Kerouac.

"Having been taught never to use the first person, I needed to break a few rules in my writing as well as in my life, and San Francisco in the '60s was just the place to do that."

"I also remember typing on teletype rolls ..."

A younger correspondent from Attleboro e-mailed to tell me the original scroll will be on display June 7-Sept. 16 at the Boott Cotton Mills Museum in Kerouac's hometown, Lowell.

"I've been waiting for this ever since Indianapolis Colts owner James Irsay bought the scroll in 2001 and said he would be putting it on display," he wrote.

He recommended a book, "Kerouac's Crooked Road: Development of a Fiction," adding, "Maybe it will inspire you to get back to work on 'The Poem Shazam.'"

In the locker room at the Y I talked with a pal about how much fun hitchhiking was back then. He asked me about that trip I wrote about last week.

I told him it was 1965 and I got a ride with a friend from Philadelphia to Kansas City, and then with some of his relatives to the campus of St. Mary's of the Plains in Dodge City, where I met a friend as planned. We hitched to Albuquerque to meet a second friend, and there the two of them decided they were turning around and heading home. I hitched solo to San Diego and met a third friend, and after a week there, he and I hitched from California to Pennsylvania in a record 100 hours or so. As I said last week: Ah, the '60s, don't you miss 'em ...

See you next week.

ORESTE P. D'ARCONTE is publisher of The Sun Chronicle. Reach him at 508.236.0394 or at darconte@thesunchronicle.com.