Oct 16 '40 : for Jack Kerouac, a 1A's first ever Draft registration day was eventful ...

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 .

After registering * in the morning - he was certain to be classed 1A at any subsequent medical - job two for our future Beat that day was to go off in the afternoon to play his second ever football match for Columbia - and to promptly break a leg tibia bone.

Coach Furey didn't take the leg break seriously, told him to 'walk it better' - so Kerouac never went to Columbia university's own hospital , the Presbyterian, to have it checked out properly.

So - and rather ironically - he never got to meet Dr Martin Henry Dawson there that day , busy succouring some of NYC's 4Fs of the 4Fs ( sufferers from the endocarditis complications of childhood Rheumatic Fever) by giving them history's first ever antibiotics.

That broken leg - plus his string of arguments with his head coach Lou Little - doomed Kerouac's football scholarship to Columbia and he soon dropped out.

This 1A exemplar of American manhood went on instead to write novels and poetry , join the Merchant Marine and US Navy , drink lots more, travel, find world fame - and die young at age 47...

* Jack was only 18 in 1940, so it doesn't appear he even could be registered - the lower age limit for draft registration was 21 in 1940.  But Kerouac's biographers insist he did register too - he certainly joined his slightly older classmates in enjoying this big moment on campus - but actually registering ? -- Who knows for sure !