October 16th 1940 : Dies Mirabilis
As a husky football player from a poor family , John "Jack" Kerouac was not earning his usual drinking money that day by being part of the team of Columbia U football players hauling about tins of graphite or uranium for Leo Szilard and Enrico Fermi's forerunner to the Manhattan Project .
Yes this gridiron hero drank.
Lord he drank , drank mostly to drown out memories of the painful prolonged death of his saintly slightly older brother Gerald, from Rheumatic Fever in 1926 when Jack was only four.
Rheumatic Fever - and not the rather more famous polio - was far-and-away the leading killer of school age children, but it tended to kill the poor mostly .
(And because New York book editors are themselves rarely poor, we don't hear much about this Sword of Damocles that hung over America's families for almost a hundred years.)
So with no tins of uranium to muck about, our future Poster Boy of the Beat Generation was instead enthusiastically obeying his legal requirement to be part of the historic registration process for America's first ever peacetime draft .
