RichardHowe.com – Voices from Lowell & Beyond

March Madness and Maura Healey’s full-court press by Marjorie Arons-Barron

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog.

For Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey, her high spirits and steely dedication are a year-round demeanor. The former co-captain of Harvard University’s women’s basketball team and a starter on a professional team in Austria applies the competitive drive and shrewd strategic sense to everything she does in government.

We saw those qualities when, as Attorney General, she was a leader among state attorneys general in challenging moves by the first Trump administration. Now she is simultaneously moving forward on her own policy agenda (especially on housing and transportation) and planning defensive responses to the hellscape that Trump is painting for the people of this country.

I’ve always liked Maura Healey since the first day I met her over coffee at the late-lamented Peet’s in Newton Centre as she was gearing up for her first run for Attorney General more than a decade ago. Since then, she has only grown in her focus and competency across a full range of issues.

Speaking to a packed crowd Monday at the Charles River Regional Chamber of Commerce, Healey is ever the coach, praising her team and citing recent Massachusetts “firsts” among states: in education, child care, public safety, clean drinking water. She added to the scoreboard how she lowered certain taxes (including estate and capital gains) and increased child care tax credits, invested in primary care and mental health, and has already made strives on improving transportation, upgrading the T, bringing South Coast rail on line and investing a projected $8 billion over the next 10 years.

But Healey made clear that a truly winning strategy must include significant momentum in housing creation. When I was active in Newton Fair Housing in the late sixties, there was already a reported deficit of some 25,000 units. Despite all the initiatives in the last half century, today Massachusetts lacks more than 200,000 units.

At the end of the last legislative session, Healey signed the Massachusetts Housing Act providing $5.2 billion for 65,000 housing units over five years, along with dozens of policy initiatives. Some 119 cities and towns have passed the MBTA communities act, reshaping zoning to ease multi-unit housing, with, she reports, some 4000 new units already coming on line. These are major moves, and, as important as they are, they are not enough. So her team is now doing an inventory of under-utilized state properties for siting opportunities for more housing.

Housing and transit go hand in hand, both keys to recruiting, retaining and growing workforce to strengthen our economy. She has put points on the board and seems adept at moving the ball, but a winning score has yet to be achieved. She artfully dodged a question on expanding tolls to highways not currently paying their fair share. Nor did she mention the difficulties presented by the huge cost for dealing with recent migrants.

All this is against the backdrop of the slash-and-burn predations of the Trump team – cuts in Medicaid (affecting 2 million Bay Staters), NIH initiatives (battering the state’s nation-leading per capita medical research funding), threatening grants for higher education, – all portending serious harm to the state’s major sectors. Healey says her team is developing strategic responses. There are few, if any, surprises, to these and other upcoming crises, she observes, having seen the other team’s game plan,–the radical recommendations in Project 2025. Defense is paramount for the erstwhile point guard, but, she notes, the minute you allow defense to distract you from your overriding objectives, you’re losing.

Tuesday was a promising day for democracy defenders, with Susan Crawford’s 10-point victory in Wisconsin despite Elon Musk’s $25-million investment in her state supreme court opponent and New Jersey Senator Cory Booker’s awesome, record-breaking 25+ hour passionate speech attacking Trump’s ongoing destruction of democratic norms and Constitutional order. It’s also reassuring that state officials are getting things done, working to solve problems on the home court. Still, to paraphrase Aristotle, “a swallow does not a summer make,” despite one fine spring day.

‘Opening Day’ by Terry Downes

OPENING DAY

By Terry Downes

Gazing on emerald to players they shout;
All then are favorites, none that day a lout;
New bunting billows its red, white and blue
Fans for the home team are rooting anew.

Run up the pole the flag to salute
From widest eyed child to oldest galoot;
The anthem when sung with gusto and style
Brings to the faithful a tear and a smile.

Right down the roster the names are called out,
Every man’s intro will trigger a shout;
When after the cheering for one and for all
The umpire steps up to holler “Play ball!”

Catcher to second and then ‘round the horn
Into the dugout the practice ball worn;
Blue suit to pitcher the game ball is passed –
The season in earnest has started at last!

****

Terry Downes is an attorney and retired District Court Clerk/Magistrate who went on to found and direct the MCC Program on Homeland Security, and long served as an adjunct professor at Suffolk Univ. Law School and UMASS-Lowell. He lives in Lowell with his wife Atty. Annie O’Connor.

This is the second in a series of nine poems about baseball (nine, like in nine innings of a game, or nine players on the field, etc.) which will appear on the first Friday of each month through the baseball season. Here are the previously posted poems in this series:

March – Spring Training

John Webb of Boston and Dracut (1611-1668): A Colonial Snapshot

Captain John Webb (right, with sword) leading convicted “heretic” Mary Dyer to the gallows on Boston Common in 1660.

John Webb of Boston and Dracut (1611-1668): A Colonial Snapshot

By Paul Marion

In his History of Dracut (1922), Silas Roger Coburn describes John Evered, also known by the surname Webb, as “the first white man to become a resident on the soil of Dracut, but not, as we have reason to believe, as a permanent settler, but as a speculator in the wild lands of the ‘Wildernesse.’ . . . His early home was in Marlborough, Wiltshire, England, and he was in Boston [by August 1635].”

    Much of the information that follows is taken from Coburn’s history and is offered here as a casual and general account of colonial-era dealings with native inhabitants during the decades of British rule long before the first talk among local people of American independence and revolution against the King of England.

     Source credit also to Donat H. Paquet’s Photographic History of Dracut, Massachusetts (1982), Rebecca A. Duda’s writings about Dracut in the Sun newspaper of Lowell, the William & Mary Dyer blog by Mary Barrett Dyer (2015), and the Wikipedia entry on John Evered (downloaded 3/6/2025) —PM

Dracut, Massachusetts, is the only place in America with that name, the origin being an estate in southwest England, Draycot Foliat, dating from 1086 at least, whose name combines two surnames. Found in Marlborough in Chiseldon Parish of Wiltshire County, Draycot Foliat is the ancestral home of Captain John Evered Webb, who, in 1665, acquired a large portion of the land that would be the colonial town from the Pennacook people who had survived there for centuries. The seller who signed a pivotal agreement was “Bess, wife of Nobb How,” a daughter of the legendary Pennacook leader Passaconaway, Child of the Bear.

Native peoples had been decimated by disease carried into their region by European explorers and settlers. From a population of perhaps 10,000, the tribes numbered some twenty-five hundred by 1631, the survivors of smallpox, flu, and diphtheria epidemics. By 1660, after relinquishing land claims and years of negotiating with white colonists to maintain peace, Passaconaway transferred leadership to his son, Wannalancit, and moved deeper into the northern wilderness. He may have lived to be more than one hundred years old, his burial place uncertain.

English reporters of the time had cast Passaconaway as a cross between a wiseman and a wizard, attributing to him tall-tale powers such as causing ice to burn in his hands, shaping green leaves from ashes, moving a rock with his eyes, and swimming underwater the width of the Merrimack River in one breath. In one account, tribesmen report seeing his spirit leave his dying body in a wooden sleigh covered in furs and pulled by a team of flying gray wolves.

John Webb paid the Indians one pound of tobacco and four yards of heavy cloth for a tract of land exceeding 1,000 acres, part of which he had sold illegally the year before to a pair of English settlers for cash and farm products worth four hundred English pounds. The sale encompassed land on the north side of the river, opposite the area called Middlesex Village close to today’s south campus of the University of Massachusetts in Lowell. Webb may have built a log cabin on what is now Old Ferry Road in Lowell, which would have been the first structure of white settlers.

Let’s review. Tobacco and cloth. Was it a swindle or did the Pennacooks think it was preposterous that the white-skinned people believed land could be held as private property? Take the tobacco and cloth now, they may have figured. These folks cannot be serious. They will never last in the forest.

Time check: Note that the Puritans, religious separatists from England, stepped ashore in what would be Plymouth, Massachusetts, in December 1620, after first making landfall at the fingertip of Cape Cod’s bent arm in the ocean: Provincetown now. This group or congregation was led by William Bradford, later a governor of Plymouth Colony. The Puritans, a strain of Protestantism, rejected the Church of England for not ridding itself of every aspect of the Roman Catholic Church, from which it had formally split in 1534 when Pope Clement VII in Rome denied merry old King Henry VIII’s request for an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon so that he could marry Anne Boleyn. Fast forward to the upstarts who insisted on a purer form of Christian worship and their voyage to the New World, seen from the Old World, Europe. Boston dates from 1630 as the hub of a second colony on the coast, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, led by John Winthrop. The first English people in what would be Dracut came from Boston and Cape Ann just north, the Salem-Ipswich area.

Webb arrived with family on this side of the Atlantic in August 1635 in the middle of a hurricane that battered their ship carrying one hundred English emigrants. After riding out the storm off the New Hampshire coast, the ship reached Boston. Webb found work on ships and joined a Boston church. He married Mary Faireweather, a widow, and adopted her son—they then had a daughter of their own and moved to Braintree.

He ventured inland to the territory of native tribes (“ye Wildernesse on ye Northerne side of Merrimack River”), and in 1653 helped to establish a settlement, Chelmsford, named for an English town. He learned how to bargain with the native people. A military man and politician, Webb held the rank of ensign in the state militia, rising to captain, and served three years in the legislature, the General Court in Boston.

Notably, Webb was in charge of the execution of Mary Dyer in 1660, a Quaker who had protested her banishment from Boston. She insisted on her right to worship according to her conscience and returned. Like Anne Hutchinson in 1637, the critic of Puritan ministers who was banished but not killed, Dyer challenged the religious establishment. She was hung as a heretic on Boston Common.

In 1664, Webb gained control of seven hundred-and-fifty acres near Pawtucket Falls on the Merrimack, a “military land grant” from the colonial government. This brings him to Drawcutt (Dracut) and the land transactions described above.

Before his property dealings in future-Dracut, Captain Webb, a man in a hurry, had already owned property in Boston including the lot later occupied by the legendary Old Corner Bookstore and Ticknor and Fields publishers—and perhaps fitting for this character took his last breath in Boston in a dramatic or even literary fashion, considering the details provided by Silas Coburn:

“Rev. Samuel Danforth of Roxbury states as follows: ‘17^th 8^th month 1668 Mr John Webb alias Evered was drowned, catching a whale below the Castle. In coiling ye line inadvisedly he did it about his body thinking the whale had been dead, but suddenly She gave a Spring and drew him out of the boat. He being in the midst of the line but could not be recovered while he had any life.’”

Paul Marion © 2025

The Great Book Burn-a-Thon

The Great Book Burn-a-Thon

By David Daniel

“Welcome to Radio KTRD’s third annual Spring Book Burn-a-Thon! Bob Toole here, along with co-host Carly Kindler. We’re broadcasting all day to celebrate a great cultural tradition in our metro area. We know you’re as excited as us, so let’s get to the phones! Who do you have, Carly?”

“Right, Bob. Sugar’s on the line calling from Keegerstown. Go ahead, Sugar, what book are you suggesting for our bonfire?”

“Burn Herzog.”

“Sugar, Bob here. Her zog. That how you say it? Sounds evil. I haven’t read that one.”

“Neither have I.”

“I’m just checking Google here, Bob. Here it is—that one’s by Saul Bellow. Won a National Book Award . . . that’s suspicious right there. Gives a synopsis—umm, yadda, yadda . . . mmm, sounds kind of pointless.”

“So, thumbs up on that one, Sugar. Bring it on down. Let’s take another call, Carly.”

“Mike’s in a car. Go ahead, Mike.”

“Am I on?”

“Go ahead, Mike.”

“Yeah, I just wanna say about that last book, I damn sure ain’t read it either, but you don’t gotta get down into the hog wallow to know garbage. A dirty book by a dirty man is—”

“Or dirty woman. Let’s not be sexist about this.”

“—is all’s you got to know. Here’s one I wanna see toss’d on the fire. ‘Trout Fishing in America.’”

“That’s the title?”

“What it says here. Some guy named . . . Brautigan.”

“Brought a gun?”

“I’m tryna read what it says on the . . . ”

“Careful while you’re driving, Mike. Um, I don’t know that one. Some sort of fishing book, you say?”

“They wanted to make my son read it for school. I took a look—and pee-uu. I like to thrown it right in the trash if it wasn’t a schoolbook and I’da hadda pay.”

“That says a lot about you as a parent and citizen, Mike. You might consider running for school committee.”

“I just now decided, schoolbook or no, I’m bringing it on down for tonight’s fire.”

“Onto the pile it goes. Remember, listeners, you can take the fight right to the school board in your own town. It’s people standing up to smut that brings change. Isn’t that so, Carly?”

“Right, Bob. The school committee, the local library. That’s a good place to start. And if you get resistance—some of those library ladies can be pretty pesky—tell them they work for you. You pay their salaries. And it’s your right to free speech. Haul books right off the shelves if you have to to make your point.”

“Well—haha—I don’t know if that’s where I’d start, Carly, but at least make some noise.”

“Which is what the group sponsoring tonight’s bonfire is doing, Bob. They’re called ‘Moms for Others’ Sake’ and they’re not shy about sticking their noses in and looking out for all of us.”

“So, folks, if you’re just joining me and my co-host Carly Kindler, our goal’s to have a heap of books by nine p.m. That’s when we’ll light up. If you’re in the area, come on by! It’s family friendly fun. Meanwhile, listeners, you can phone or text us with requests.”

“When you think about it, Bob, books are more of a threat than guns.”

“Well you do hear that. Make the argument, Carly.”

“A criminal breaks in your house, are you going to stop them with a book?”

“Probably not. Unless it’s a big fat book. Haha. Or a boring one.”

“Meanwhile we’ve got texts and tweets here. I’ll just read some of the titles that’ve been  . . . uh, anything by J. K. Rowling. Tenderness by Robert Cormier. To Kill a Mockingbird. The Grapes of Wrath. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian by Alexi, is that how you say it? The Handmaid’s Tale. Any books by D.H. Lawrence. Any by Toni Morrison. Don’t know if that’s a man or a woman. Woman? Bob says woman. Okay. And this last one—Charlotte’s Web.”

“Hmm—I’m curious about that one, Carly. A children’s book, isn’t it?”

“Well, it is, but according to what it says here on the Moms for Others’ Sake ban list it’s heavy on death and it gets very sad—so maybe not appropriate for youngsters.”

“Okay, well. Food for thought.”

“Just to remind listeners, Bob, we’re broadcasting all day, and if we can get actual copies of some of these books tonight, so much the better. We’re gathering everything right out in the K-TRD studio parking lot where we’ll have the bonfire.”

“Someone was asking earlier, won’t burning filth just pollute the air? All I can say is it shouldn’t. A good righteous fire that burns really hot . . . haha. By the way, if listeners have got audiobooks or CDs, or even record albums—”

“Dating yourself, Bob. Just got another text message—The Catcher in the Rye.”

“That the one about the drunk ballplayer? LOL. I know the book. Read it in high school . . . I actually kind of liked it.”

“You’ve got a stronger stomach than I do, Bob. Anyway, it’s all fair game, folks. Bring them on by. We’ll see they get their due. Remember, we want this year’s event to be the biggest yet. And to that end, for anyone bringing along three or more books for the blaze we’ll be offering exciting prizes.”

“The phones are lighting up. Callers waiting to get on. We have city councilman Stappo on line one. A good day to you, sir.”

“Great to be on. I just want to pump this event for our community. What it gets down to, it gets down to who’s making our decisions for us. At the next council meeting I’ll be introducing a proposal to freeze funding for the city library.”

“Really? Wow. That’s uh . . . that’s thinking out-of-the-box, Councilman.”

“It’d save money, for starters. As it stands, we’re all paying for a library that not all of us use. If we make it a private business, well, there’s control over inventory. And, shoot, maybe it’d turn a profit.”

“Well, you’re always with the ideas, sir. Will you be there tonight?”

“Wouldn’t miss it. I’ll bring the marshmallows.”

“That’s councilman Gus Stappo, folks. And I want to give another plug for Mom’s for Others’ Sake—MOFOS—who are making sure that bad books don’t end up in the hands of good people. Carly’s signaling we’ve time for one more call.”

“Last one for this segment, Bob. Let’s go to Winnisburg. Howdy, caller . . . you’re on K-TRD!”

~*~

National Library Week is April 6-12

“In 2023, the American Library Association reported that the number of titles targeted at public libraries had increased more than 90 percent from a year prior, and 17 states – including Florida, Texas, and Connecticut – had seen more than 100 censorship attempts. A more recent report from the free expression-focused nonprofit PEN America notes that more than 4,000 unique titles have been banned across the country. The organization says that we’re in a moment of education censorship “unseen since the 1950s-era Red Scare.”

— From Boston Globe 3/11/25

At present, legislators in Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, and Texas are debating legal penalties against teachers and school librarians for discussing unapproved books.

Rhode Island is introducing a bill that would combat efforts to ban and censor books and punish teachers.