Post by Paul Maher Jr. on Dec 30, 2016 13:41:34 GMT -5
“Boy May Be Victim of Tangled Thoughts”
Jefferson City News & Tribune
(July 1, 1962)
Jack Kerouac as negative influence? Just ask the mother of 15 year-old Bruce Jeffrey.
It was 4 p.m. one afternoon in late March 1962 when Bruce told his mother that he was going to Riverside Park. However, he never returned.
A search commenced by local authorizes, combing the riverbanks and dragging the water, and a raft made from the top of an automobile was reported as missing from its mooring on the Missouri River. Neither the boy or the raft were ever sighted again.
However, his mother, Mrs. Kathryn Jeffrey was stoic in her belief that Bruce wasn’t drowned. She did grimly admit that it was a remote possibility, but she preferred to accept other reasons supporting her conviction that he was still among the living.
Since his disappearance, Mrs. Jeffrey had been collecting bits and pieces of information that gave her the clues she needed to give hope. A newspaper reported, “several factor in the youngster’s life shortly before he dropped out of sight make a convincing argument that Bruce Jeffrey is more likely the victim of his own tangled thoughts than prey of the twisting river currents.”
The paper went on to believe that Bruce was a victim of the beat generation. His departure from home was not because he didn’t love his parents, but because he rejected the “repressions of a society which he had come to view with contempt.” At his class meetings, to which Bruce kept track of the minutes, he wrote, “9:45 a.m, CST, March 28, 1962, AD, room 305, Mrs. Brakke’s classroom, Simonsen Jr. High, Jefferson City, Mo., U.S.A., planet Earth orbiting a nearby star called the sun. All of these are false barriers set up by the semi-civilized, unknowingly to be their own destruction. Human beings, as unintelligent sheep, are led to believe in this fantasy from birth and now that they are in school, they are drilled more and more into self-inflicted misery through conformity. They heard announcements, had a meeting and read minutes, had a test on some insignificant detail of a dead language, and squabbled over the mess for the remainder of their false existence in that barrier of enclosure. A bell dismissed them at 11:00 a.m., CST, etc. and they are doomed to misery until death because of their minds being locked to the nonexistence of themselves – Bugsy Jeffrey, Sec.”
The day before Bruce’s disappearance, he wrote: “The void took the illusionary form of a 9th grade English class in a room 305 at 9:45 am on March 29, 1962 with Mrs. Brakke as teacher.”
His prose, authorities, Mrs. Jeffrey and the press concluded, bore the influence of Zen Buddhism and “particularly the impressions of a young author who has exploited the beat philosophy — Jack Kerouac.”
Bruce was an avid reader, devouring every available Kerouac book at his local library. Among them was his favorite, The Dharma Bums. To his mother, he would tell her that he was going to go meditate under his favorite tree in the park. The local newspaper added to this, surmising that “It is not unlikely that his meditation led to the formation of a plan to hit the open road to join the “rucksack revolution” of Kerouac’s Dharma Bums.”
Bruce left behind some sketches on a sheet of loose leaf note paper(see above illustration) He drew himself having long hair, sideburns and a ducktail in the back. He drew an image of the Buddha, a book with the name of Kerouac and, eerily, an image of a person standing on a raft floating down a winding river.
On the reverse side of the paper, he wrote: “In the ideology of my people there is an absence of any real ideals. If there were ideals, they would have to be conformed to. This, of course, is not nonconformity. The average joker is a conformist by nature. Even the beatniks are conformists because more than 1 of them possess the same beleifs [sic]. Besides, beatniks aren’t usually more than some worthless slob that can’t face reality, so he just goes off and uses the excuse of protesting.”
At some point, Bruce and a friend made a trial run on the river with the car top raft on the Wednesday preceding his disappearance. A few days before, he told his mother, “I am supposed to go out and learn to suffer–to expose myself to heat and cold and hunger.”
On television he watched a documentary about a writer-hermit who lived in recluse off the coast of Florida. Bruce found the location of this island and traced routes to it.
In an autobiography which he wrote in an all-nigh session, he mentioned in a chapter titled Nature and Ambitions” that he planned to get a job around heavy machinery and/or trucks.
He was especially attracted to violence: “I always draw, whenever I can, gory little scenes.” Ominously, the autobiographical account contains details of a raft voyage: “As the gap widened, I felt wet water . . . I thought it was bad enough, but the stream had a lust for my corpse floating upon it.”
The Jefferson City News & Tribune wrote: “It can only be speculated whether Bruce Jeffrey challenged the river on March 30–and lost. Or, scuttled the flimsy craft and hopped a freight train in the tradition of Kerouac’s Dharma Bums.
Mrs. Jeffrey dreamt of receiving letters from her son. “I wish I knew. We wouldn’t make him come home if he didn’t want to. We would just like to know.”
To date, I cannot follow up on if he was ever located, if he is alive, or dead. If anyone can shed light on this out there, drop me a line!