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Our friend in Lowell, D-Tension, the writer, performing artist, record producer, and all around-er, recently shared this appreciation of Arthur Ramalho, icon of the city’s boxing scene on his Facebook page. With his permission, we are cross-posting the piece here. The image of the famed trainer is by Danielle Levitt,…
Read More »The author of two novels and a collection of short stories, Smokestack Lightning, Stephen O’Connor of Lowell is a past contributor to this blog whose writing in included in History As It Happens: Citizen Bloggers in Lowell, Mass. (2017), a collection of the best of the RichardHowe.com blog in its…
Read More »Remembering those persons who perished on 9/11 today, especially those with local connections. This entry is cross-posted from my blog at paulmarion.com Posting this on 9/11/2019 in memory of John Ogonowski of Dracut, Mass., where I grew up, and the other persons affiliated with the University of Massachusetts-Lowell who perished,…
Read More »Web photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons We write about a lot of things here, many under the umbrellas of politics and history. There’s no escaping the religious element in our present political moment when ethical questions about fair payment for work done, equal treatment of all persons, humane responses to…
Read More »My friend and mentor Charles Nikitopoulos of Lowell, Mass., passed away a few days ago. His obituary is here. I want to share my thoughts about what he meant to me as well as to the community and university of which he was a part for decades. He came to…
Read More »Yesterday at noon 80 people gathered at St. Anne’s Church on Merrimack Street in Lowell to listen to and participate in a public reading of “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” a speech originally delivered by Frederick Douglass on July 5, 1852 to the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery…
Read More »Joan Baez and Bob Dylan singing in Costello Gym, Nov. 2, 1975. Web photo courtesy of UMass Lowell. The media is full of reports about a new movie and music release tied to the legendary Rolling Thunder Revue tour of Bob Dylan and friends in 1975-76, which made an earthquake…
Read More »When I began contributing to this blog many years ago, I often would post links to opinion pieces in national media that I believed were worth sharing locally. I shared a lot of David Brooks’ columns, which may have surprised people. He’s on the NY Times commentary list as a…
Read More »Yesterday at the Lowell Memorial Auditorium, I delivered the following remarks at the Greater Lowell Veterans Council Memorial Day service. For the past several years on Memorial Day and Veterans Day, we’ve made frequent mention of World War I in recognition of the centennial observance of that conflict. That war…
Read More »If You See Something, Say Something It’s Memorial Day weekend. My father, Marcel Marion (1919-1982), born in Lowell, fought the Nazis on the ground in Germany with the US Army in the brutal winter of 1945, the final months of the war in Europe. He knew a fascist when he…
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