People Who Died

By Ted Berrigan 1934–1983 Ted Berrigan

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.

Source: Selected Poems (Penguin Books, 1994)

Biography

Ted Berrigan—Edmund Joseph Michael Berrigan Jr.—was born in Providence, Rhode Island, the oldest of three children of Margaret Dugan and Edmund Berrigan, the chief engineer at Ward's Baking Company. On both sides the family was Irish Catholic. Berrigan attended local schools and entered Providence College, a local Catholic school, but left after a year and enlisted in the army.

Berrigan was sent to Korea in 1954 but never saw . . .

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