Remembering Kerouac friend, Allan Temko

 

Today we remember architectural critic, writer, and Pulitzer Prize winner Allan Temko, who died on this date -- January 25 -- in 2006. Temko met Jack Kerouac when they were students at Columbia, and he appeared in a number of Kerouac's works as follows: Roland Major in On The Road; Irving Minko in Book of Dreams; Irwin Minko in Desolation Angels; Allen Minko in Visions of Cody; and, Alan Minko in Book of Dreams (expanded edition).

When Kerouac (Sal Paradise) anticipates meeting up with Temko (Major) in Denver, he refers to him in On The Road as "my old college writing buddy" and ended up living with him in Tim Gray's folks' apartment there.

We each had a bedroom, and there was a kitchenette with food in the icebox, and a huge living room where Major sat in his silk dressing gown composing his latest Hemingwayan short story--a choleric, red-faced, pudgy hater of everything, who could turn on the warmest and most charming smile in the world when real life confronted him sweetly in the night. (1976, Penguin Books, p. 40)

Major (Temko) features prominently in the Denver story and then Kerouac runs into him again in San Francisco at Alfred's in North Beach where Major gets kicked out for rowdiness and the two go drinking at the Iron Pot.

For those readers who enjoy making connections, Temko's one-time girlfriend was Jean White, who was Ed White's sister. She appeared as Betty Gray in On The Road. Ed was the person who originally suggested the idea of sketching in words to Kerouac.

Temko won a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1990. Click HERE to read a transcript of him speaking in 1964 at a luncheon in New Mexico as part of a study he was conducting for UC Berkeley on the industrialized urban environment. Some Googling will find a number of articles he wrote.

RIP, Mr. Temko.