John Allen Cassady, Beat Museum storyteller and son of Neal Cassady, dies at 75

In the San Francisco Chronicle, Sam Whiting reports that John Allen Cassady, the only son of Beat Generation figure Neal Cassady and his wife, Carolyn, died on October 28 in Springfield, Oregon, at 75. His son, Jamie Cassady, said he died of complications of cirrhosis and an infection. His first name echoed Jack Kerouac, who was born Jean-Louis, and his middle name honored Allen Ginsberg. In 2004 and 2005 he was the main attraction of the Beatmobile, a museum on wheels that took the Beat story to colleges, high schools and community centers across the country. He told stories of his upbringing, and played keyboards and guitar while historian Jerry Cimino read poetry. Jerry Garcia had taught him the guitar. The tour's following led Cimino to move his small museum from Monterey to North Beach, where the Beat Museum opened in 2006. In the 1970s he played lead guitar in the Fabulous FelTones in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and in 2011 he drove the 1949 Hudson used in the film 'On the Road' to the museum. His sister Cathy Cassady hopes to turn his more than 1,000 emails into a book. Photo by BrokenSphere, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.