Neal Cassady with cigarette young & vigorous age 29 with salesman surveying North Beach used car lot, he needed new wheels. Bay Area Johnny Appleseed of pot from early 1950’s, he worked as conductor on Southern Pacific Railroad, averted train crash as brakeman years earlier, breaking his ankle, collected insurance, bought his family a ranch-house in Los Gatos down the peninsula, gambled madly & disastrously at horse racetrack, wrote painfully in pencil on his “The First Third” autobiographical manuscript, visited me overnight in rooms on Polk and Montgomery Streets, San Francisco, sometime March 1955.