People Who Died - Ted Berrigan

[houseonthecliff]

 

Pat Dugan……..my grandfather……..throat cancer……..1947.

 

Ed Berrigan……..my dad……..heart attack……..1958.

 

Dickie Budlong……..my best friend Brucie’s big brother, when we were

                                                        five to eight……..killed in Korea, 1953.

 

Red O’Sullivan……..hockey star & cross-country runner

                                                who sat at my lunch table

                                                            in High School……car crash…...1954.

 

Jimmy “Wah” Tiernan……..my friend, in High School,

                                       Football & Hockey All-State……car crash….1959.

 

Cisco Houston……..died of cancer……..1961.

 

Freddy Herko, dancer….jumped out of a Greenwich Village window

     in 1963.

 

Anne Kepler….my girl….killed by smoke-poisoning while playing

                                    the flute at the Yonkers Children’s Hospital                         

                                    during a fire set by a 16 year old arsonist….1965.

 

Frank……Frank O’Hara……hit by a car on Fire Island, 1966.

 

Woody Guthrie……dead of Huntington’s Chorea in 1968.

 

Neal……Neal Cassady……died of exposure, sleeping all night

                                            in the rain by the RR tracks of Mexico….1969.

 

Franny Winston……just a girl….totalled her car on the Detroit-Ann Arbor

                                    Freeway, returning from the dentist….Sept. 1969.

 

Jack……Jack Kerouac……died of drink & angry sickness….in 1969.

 

My friends whose deaths have slowed my heart stay with me now.