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This year is the 50th anniversary of Jack Kerouac's legendary novel, "On the Road," which changed the lives of many people, myself included.

His freewheeling tale of beatniks roaming the continent in search of truth inspired me. In the mid-60s I even hitchhiked across the country, from Philadelphia to San Diego, and had many Kerouac-ian adventures along the way.

The book was a roadmap for how to deal in a brave new way with a Brave New World in the post-Eisenhower era.

One legend about "On the Road" is that Kerouac wrote it in a three-week frenzy - that Lowell boy was fond of his Benzedrine - in the spring of 1951, typing the story without paragraphs or page breaks onto a 119-foot-long roll of paper.

In truth, the book was revised several times before it was finally published six years later. And now this year the original, unedited version of "On the Road" is going to be published in book form. Some of us can't wait.

Now here's the tie-in: Know where he got that roll of paper? From a friend who worked for a newspaper.

In the early days, the wire services would send their stories from around the world to member newspapers via teletypes, machines that typed the stories as they were fed in over a special telephone line.

An editor would rip the stories off the teletype, choose the ones he wanted, write a headline and send the stories to the backshop to be set in type.

I did that for years when I first started, and the sound of the teletypes clacking out the news of the world was a memorable, romantic sound to a young newspaperman. (In those days, only pretentious boors were "journalists.")

You fed the teletype machines long rolls of paper, orangish pink in my time, to keep them going.

Kerouac wrote "On the Road" on a roll of teletype paper.

When I learned that, it was like taking on the challenge of long-distance hitchhiking, of mad week-long, non-stop trips from the Northeast to Mexico and back, of "real life."

Sure enough, last week, while doing a rare clean-up in the basement I came across a foot-long cardboard cannister with a rusted screw-on cap.

In it was my "Road" effort, typed on that pinkish teletype paper, about 30 feet of fading drivel dated Dec. 22, 1966. The title is "The Poem Shazam," and it has this dedication: "I am lying/in bed/in/dimensions/the visions/of four/fools."

Here's how it starts, unedited, unpunctuated stream-of-consciousness:

"I sat down for 40 incestuous days and cried and left and took notes on the barest dribblings of my mind as they rocked out of the vast clumsy portals of my head I am the illusions spilling illusions on the grand scale and watermark of the pink paper - this is to be the confession of the supreme and icecreamed dream man they all know sits inside our minds and cries for us and gives us our licks ..."

And on and on for 29.9 more feet. I'll do a complete reading the first time I'm asked, if the money, the stars and the aura are right.

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.