LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Victor Wong: Big Sur
built 632 days ago
While attending Humboldt State, Wong began living in nearby Eureka. He remained based in this small town on the northern coast of California until 1978. Surrounded by awe-inspiring redwood forests and boasting many outstanding examples of ornate late nineteenth-century architecture, Eureka by the mid-twentieth century had attracted a vibrant and idiosyncratic community of artists, who were treated with tolerance by the largely working-class population.
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Wong and his first wife became a dramatic team, staging productions in the auditorium of her father’s church and other locations in the city. She directed. Victor acted and designed and built sets. They had just parted ways when Kerouac showed up during the Big Sur period. It was an exciting and turbulent period in San Francisco. The Wongs rubbed elbows and shared friendships with communists and socialists who used the same auditorium of Thurman’s church for organizational meetings.
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Wong died of heart failure at the age of 74 on September 12, 2001. Upset at the September 11, 2001 attacks, and concerned about the fate of his two sons who lived in New York City at the time, Victor, who had already survived multiple strokes, deprived himself of needed sleep while riveted to the TV set for nearly two days. Last words before he died "The world will never be the same."
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Kerouac chronicled the encounter between Wong and himself in Big Sur, the final novel by the Beat icon. It was a wild spree involving a troupe of drunken bohemians. The setting was City Lights bookstore owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s cabin in the mountainous woods south of Monterey. Those who showed up included poets such as Lew Welch, Michael McClure, Neal Cassady (the inspiration for Kerouac’s novel On the Road) and Ferlinghetti himself.
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