On the surface it does not seem like the Kerouac family of New England bears much congruence with the nexus of families present at the shootout near the OK Corral in downtown Tombstone, Arizona. We were hoping some obvious evidence of morphic resonance would come to light. We had anticipated that an unruly group of Tombstone cowboys would take the field at McLaury Field (itself several clicks out of town and away from the OK Corral.) We didn't think the Tombstoners could get organized enough to win a cosmic baseball game. Not that the Kerouacs are paradigms of self-discipline but we anticipated that the Kerouacs would make short order of the Tombstoners.

Despite having been on opposite sides of the gun barrels during the 30-second shootout on October 26, 1881 the brothers Earp and the brothers McLaury and Clanton demonstrated some first-rate teamwork and talent on the cosmic baseball field. The fact that this historically unruly bunch was managed by the sniveling two-faced collaborator Johnnie Behan suggests that moral fecundity is not related to baseball team management prowess (real or imagined).

There are words of Jack Kerouac written in a letter to his friend Neal Cassady which make you think that Jack idealized the wild west of Earp and associates. He thought that Cassady was in spirit a latter-day wrangler. "I was saying that there were two kinds of western youths, the wranglers and the city boys..." (Kerouac letter to Cassady, January 10, 1951.)

The face-off at the OK Corral in 1881 has also been looked at as a battle between the more urban people of Tombstone and the rural wranglers and cowboys. With the coming of the silver prospecting business, Tombstone and the Arizona Territory began to grow at a phenomenal rate. Over five thousand souls lived in the Tombstone area at the time. Wyatt Earp and kin represented the urban faction. The more rural-based ranchers like the McLaury's had political sympathies with the former confederate fighters and southern farmers and they were politically opposed to the Northern folk. Families like the McLaurys and the Clantons made money by stealing Mexican cattle and selling it to the U.S. Army. Facing off at the OK Corral were the ranchers and the city-folk...the Town and the City. The Town and the City happens to be the name of Kerouac's first novel, published in 1950. Of course, Kerouac's novel has not a thing to do with the events in the Tombstone of 1881.

But this cosmic game attempts to mix the Kerouac family with the Earps and Clantons and McLaurys, at least on the morphological field of cosmic baseball. Here, Tom McLaury is a cosmic hero and not a dead victim of Doc Holliday's bullets. In this game nineteen year-old Billy Clanton and Wyatt Earp work together to win.

In real life Jack Kerouac was something of a power hitter when he played the game. He also invented his own unique fantasy baseball league which he supplemented with detailed records (an apparent obsession with great American writers). But on this day and in this game Kerouac was 0-for-3 and only his father Leo showed any pop off the old bat. His third wife, Stella, did bop a single in the ninth to keep things momentarily alive but nothing came of it. On this 78th anniversary of his birth, Jack Kerouac and his relatives suffered through a drought of offense. Even so, we are delighted to honor Jack Kerouac's disembodied spirit with this cosmic baseball game.