RichardHowe.com – Voices from Lowell & Beyond

Nun Too Happy

Nun Too Happy!

By Leo Racicot

The good Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur would be horrified to see or worse try to read my spidery, hieroglyphic scrawl; they labored tirelessly to drum into us students the Palmer Penmanship Method. I sometimes can’t read my own writing a minute after writing it. For years I did my creative projects in longhand on yellow legal pads like I’d heard real writers did. I did this until the final product became indecipherable. Thankfully, I’ve succeeded in transitioning from the pen-to-paper method to the fingers-to-keyboard technique.

The nuns of Saint Patrick’s School in those times worked, and worked valiantly, to teach us many skills they felt would serve us as we journeyed through life. They could be cruel in doing so but that was the way of a Catholic School education in the 1960s. My friend, David McKean, for example, was a southpaw, performed his cursive painlessly with his left hand. This didn’t sit well with the nuns who decided David needed to be retrained in the proper way to write; conformity was their strong suit, the way it must be which seemed to be the tenor of the times, governmental, cultural, societal. They wrapped David’s right hand in tightly wound elastics to keep it intact. I’ll never forget the look on his face as he winced in pain struggling to shapeshift his hand into what the sisters told him was the one and only way to write. The poor kid was prone to nosebleeds through his school years. And no wonder…

Equally harsh, especially on our knees, was the morning habit of classroom prayer. Each day we would as a unit say the rosary along with then-Cardinal of Boston, Richard Cushing, who’d be piped in over the intercom.  Taught to obey the commands of the nuns’ clickers, crude, hand-held wooden contraptions designed to keep kids in line, like trained seals, we’d first stand up next to our desk then kneel down on our hard wooden seats and recite the second half of the Our Father, Hail Mary and Glory Be following Cushing’s recitation of the first half of the prayer. The rosary is a long prayer and Cushing spoke very slowly, his low, bass growl sounding like Boris Karloff seeping through the disembodied wall before us. Glory be is right!  I don’t remember how long we children were on our knees but it was a… long… time…

Equally torturous, if not downright terrifying, was the nuns telling us that if we were bad or crossed a line, we’d be taken to The Spanking Machine, waiting for us behind the doors of the press (the press was the name they gave to the back-of-the-room closets — nuns gave odd names to lots of things. For years, we sat perfect still, hands locked in a praying position, silent as mice, in fear that if we so much as budged, the doors of the press would be flung open and Sister would drag us by the ear to THE SPANKING MACHINE. It never occurred to us that every morning when we hung our coats and belongings in the closet, we saw no such beast. I imagined that until it was called for, this torture device remained invisible until needed to inflict whacks on a naughty child’s backside. Alsoo unforgettable and a lesson in learning to think twice before impulsively letting loose with a curse word was the time Alfred Bellerose let the F bomb fly and was made to eat a bar of soap in front of the whole class. I don’t mean lick it. The sister forced him to take a chunk out of it and chew it. “That’s it, Bellerose. Get all the juices out of there!”, she ordered him. The screwed-up look on Alfred’s face as he did as he was told is still with me.

Medieval disciplinary tactics notwithstanding, I have a lasting gratitude for the nuns. They gave us a lot of good. Many of them were intelligent women, passing on their ample knowledge. In mid-century America, entering the convent was for women if not the only means to receiving a solid education, it also provided an escape from the limited path females in those days were expected to follow, roles as housewives, as secretaries. The religious life provided an accessible avenue to an intellectual life, future professional work they might otherwise be denied.  Love ‘em or not, the sisters guaranteed we students received a solid educational foundation. Sure, the times inflicted some emotional scars at school as indelible as getting the strap from dad, a spanking from mom at home. Those were the times. That was how things were done. I survived the strictness, The Spanking Machine, the molasses tones of Cardinal Cushing, lived to tell the tale, this tale, in fact, told with a tinge of bitterness, sure, but with more than a whole lot of gratitude and praise.

__________________________

Typical 1960s Catholic School classroom

St. Patrick’s School

Richard Cardinal Cushing

Signal clicker

Palmer penmanship method

Survivor T-shirt

Living Madly: Lighter than Air

courtesy of AvocetGeo

Living Madly: Lighter than Air

By Emilie-Noelle Provost

Joy can be hard to come by these days.

In my case at least, the last seven years have often felt like one long street fight. In early 2019, my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. The following year, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, my daughter’s college graduation was cancelled and I was laid off from my job as the managing editor of a regional magazine due to lack of advertising revenue. My mother died in September 2020, followed by three of my close friends dying a month apart in 2022. My husband was laid off from his job in 2024 after the software company he worked for was purchased by a private equity firm. Both of my cats died just eight days apart this past May. And since last February, I’ve been battling a nasty antibiotic-resistant infection that refuses to quit no matter what I, or my doctors, throw at it.

When you factor in the unpresented political and social upheaval that has become a more or less ordinary part of our everyday lives, rampant inflation, high unemployment, and the malignant, unhinged cast of characters currently running the federal government, it’s a wonder that anyone gets out of bed in the morning.

Life has a heaviness to it.

But like an unexpected visit from a dear friend, joy still sneaks up on me sometimes. I often find it while I’m hiking: a newly hatched butterfly drying its wings; the burble of a cold, fast-running brook; swirling snowflakes suddenly filling the air on a dark winter day.

And then there’s music. For most of my life, it has been my savior, a signpost on the road to oblivion that convinces me to turn around and start walking in the opposite direction.

When I dropped out of high school at age sixteen, I did not have the courage or the language to express my anger and disillusionment at the brokenness of my family. But I found a refuge in the heavy metal music scene of the late 1980s. It’s screaming guitars, hard-driving percussion, and powerful lyrics gave me a safe place to unload my rage and disappointment. I made friends at concerts—people my age who were just as pissed off as I was, for many of the same reasons. Some of them are still my friends today.

That music helped me clear my head enough to think my situation through. It made me realize that the only person who could save me, the only person truly responsible for my happiness and wellbeing, was me. I went back to school, completed two years of academic work in a single year, and graduated with my class.

These days, my musical tastes tend to be less aggressive. I listen to classical music during the day while I’m working and often in the car. Sometimes, when I turn on the radio, I can actually feel the stress leaking from my bones. I’m able to unclench my jaw, a bothersome tic that’s become so habitual I often don’t realize I’m doing it.

For the last twenty-five or so years, I’ve also been an enormous fan of traditional and roots Celtic and Québécois music. I have a crate of CDs in my living room and dozens of digital albums on my laptop and phone, but one of my favorite things in the world is seeing traditional bands perform live.

This isn’t just because trad musicians tend to be extraordinarily talented, creative, and thoughtful. As a former journalist and student of history, I appreciate the research and time that goes into collecting and rearranging music that, in many cases, is centuries old. The stories these old songs tell are almost always still relevant, tales of love, loss, and, occasionally, unbridled happiness. I love the humanity in these pieces, to be reminded that hardship and heartache have always been part of people’s lives, and that we have always, somehow, found reasons to persevere.

Often, there’s also an element of magic in this music, a sort of alchemy resulting from the combined passions of individual musicians playing together at a single moment in time. More than once, I have sat in a concert hall and felt time stand still as a single holy, transcendent melody—so much lighter than the air that carries it—washes over the room, leaving in its wake a surge of pure joy.

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Émilie-Noëlle Provost is the author of The River Is Everywhere, a National Indie Excellence Award, American Fiction Award, and American Legacy Award finalist, and The Blue Bottle, a middle-grade adventure with sea monsters. Visit her at emilienoelleprovost.com.

Seen & Heard: Vol. 37

A weekly report on things I’ve read, heard and seen since last Wednesday. 

Article: “Dear Client, thieves may be eyeing your home. No worries.” By Ron Lieber for New York Times on August 31, 2026. This longtime Times business columnist returned from vacation to find a letter from the bank that held his mortgage “confirming changes to your address.” Only, he hadn’t made any changes. He hurriedly called the bank and the person he reached (at a distant call center) said the records showed no address change so it he shouldn’t worry about it. He pressed the call center person who said there was an added layer of security he could activate but would have to do it in person at a branch. So he went to a local branch – this is a big national bank – spent 45 minutes with an assistant manager who didn’t know what he was talking about. In other words, the “added layer of security” wasn’t a thing. Afterwards, acting in his professional capacity as a NYT columnist about to do an article on the bank, he got someone who knew what they were doing to call him back. It seems the columnist lives in a condo (called “an apartment” by New Yorkers) and that the unit number messed up the bank’s automated address check system which considered it a new address. However, the bank official and others the reporter spoke to for this article says that changing the mailing address of a property owner on file with a bank is one tactic thieves use to conduct title theft, but that those most at risk are the elderly or recently deceased, so if you know anyone in those categories, you should pay especially close attention to their property and to the local property records to intercept any fraudulent activity early in the process.

Article: “Collecting Old Filmstrips Before They Disappear” by Christian Kriticos, New York Times, September 5, 2026. Filmstrips were a mainstay of my K through 8 education which ended in 1972. Because I’m interested in the history of technology and also in people who try to save information and the tangible media it resides on, I was very interested in this story. Hardly any archives collect filmstrips so some volunteers working independently are doing their best.

Obituary: Gloria Steinem (1934-2026) by Katharine Q. Seelye, New York Times, September 4, 2026. It’s funny but I don’t recall reading anything by Gloria Steinem or seeing her interviewed, yet I had tremendous respect for her. Perhaps that’s because I’ve recognized that the US has long treated women as second class citizens. It was much worse long ago but that disparate treatment continues today and in some ways is worsening since young women growing up in America today in some ways have fewer rights than their grandmothers had at the same age. I knew that Steinem fought for the cause of women for her entire long life and respect her for that which is why I made note of her passing. 

Book Review: “Two lives, one Russia” by Nicholas Danilov (1988). The name “Nicholas Danilov” came up a few weeks ago and I immediately recalled that in the 1980s while working as an American journalist in Moscow he was arrested for espionage and held for several weeks until he was exchanged for a Soviet spy who’d been arrested by the Americans. I wanted to refresh my memory so ordered his memoir via interlibrary loan. One reason Danilov wanted to work in Russia was because of his deep family routes there. His grandfather had been a senior general in the Russian Army before World War I, survived the war and the Soviet takeover and got himself and his family out of Russia. But the grandfather of the general’s wife had also been a Russian army officer named Fyodor Frolov. However, when Frolov was just a lieutenant in 1825, he got caught up in an attempt by a cohort of army officers to assassinate the Czar and initiate a democratic revolution in Russia. The coup was discovered, the leaders executed, and the followers exiled to Siberia. After ten years of incarceration, Frolov married and had a family. While working in Moscow, Danilov spent many hours searching for Frolov’s story. When Danilov was arrested and imprisoned, he constantly compared his experience with that of his ancestor. Although it was incredibly stressful, Danilov was held for just over two weeks and then was released and flew back to the US. This book intersperses Frolov’s story with the author’s own. I found it hard to put down. 

YouTube Channel: Moodi Foodi Berlin. Each video on this channel takes an in depth view of a street food vendor in Berlin, Germany. It popped into my YouTube feed recently, I watched for a few minutes and was hooked. Why did the algorithm show me this? I do watch a lot of cooking videos including some from Germany. That’s because I lived in that country for 3 years in the early 1980s, have returned on visits a few times, and always enjoyed the food and tried to duplicate it for home cooking. I haven’t seen any food trucks in the series. Instead, the vendors typically use small trailers that they tow with their small cars. The episode starts with the vendor pulling into a plaza, unhooking the trailer and getting ready for customers. It highlights vendors who mostly cook from scratch, right in the trailer. The food looks great but I expect speed of service is not a big consideration.

L’Etoile – A Star on Prince Street, Chapter 5

Two years ago, Louise Peloquin began sharing excerpts from L’Etoile, a French-language newspaper published in Lowell from 1886 to 1957. At my urging, she has agreed to compile some of her previous posts with added contextual information into a book manuscript to be called, L’Etoile: A Star on Prince Street. Starting this week, Louise will present draft chapters from the book in serial form here on the blog. Today, we have another installment.

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L’Etoile – A Star on Prince Street

Chapter 5 – Star Sustenance

By Louise Peloquin

     In Chapter 3, we quoted an excerpt from a 1994 interview of Biron’s youngest child Marthe who worked at L’Etoile from her adolescence until the newspaper’s closing in 1957. She explained how revenue acquired from printing services guaranteed what she called her father’s “independence of thought.” Biron advertised L’Etoile but he needed ads from others.

Marthe talks about advertising.

     “French newspaper circulation was never huge. In order to support the newspapers, it was necessary to solicit advertisements at 35 cents an inch, often going door to door in the quest…

With the newspapers, politicians and professionals seized the opportunity to rally votes and drum up business among the Franco-American readership. The budget from their ads was minimal.

Moreover, the newspaper exempted parishes from the cost of printing weekly bulletins by including them gratuitously in its columns. However, their promoting the paper was not allowed….

The newspaper team members persevered… They functioned like centipedes, from linotype to press, from typing to correcting proofs, in the search for advertisers.

As a constantly renewed miracle, the paper managed to appear…with its message of life, its message of hope.”

Popping up here and there among L’Etoile columns, inserts listed a variety of items offered by L’Etoile Publishing Company.

Here are two examples.

« Avez-Vous Besoin de

Cartes d’Affaires

Petites Circulaires

Grandes Circulaires

Livrets de Reçus

Etiquettes de toutes sortes

Factures de toutes sortes

Entêtes de Lettres

Lettres d’Invitation

Envelopes de toutes sortes

Livrets de vente avec Duplicata

Bons de Pain

Bons de Repas

Menus, Etc., Etc.

L’Etoile Pub. Co.”

“Do You Need

Business cards

Small circulars

Large circulars

Receipt booklets

Labels of all kinds

Invoices of all kinds

Letter head

Invitation Letters

Envelopes of all kinds

Sales booklets with Duplicates

Bread Vouchers

Meal Vouchers

Menus, Etc. Etc.

L’Etoile Publishing Company »

« Augmentez vos Affaires en Annonçant.

Les Marchands de Lowell devraient retenir une espace dans

L’Etoile

Afin de faire connaître au public acheteur ce qu’ils ont à vendre.

Augmentez Votre Commerce et Encouragez votre Journal Local en Insérant une Annonce.

Notre Département d’Impressions est prêt à exécuter toutes sortes de travaux, depuis les cartes de visite jusqu’aux placards.

Ouvrage de Luxe une Spécialité. »

« Increase Your Business Affairs by Publicizing.

The Merchants of Lowell should retain a space in

L’Etoile

In order to make known to the purchasing public what they have to sell.

Increase Your Business and Encourage your Local Newspaper by Inserting

an Advertisement. Our Printing Department is ready to execute all sorts of work, from calling cards to signs.

Luxury Work a Specialty.”

      Canvassing for ads, publishing ads and encouraging “the establishments” appearing in L’Etoile, all made for a virtuous circle. The French term “entraide,” meaning mutual aid, comes to mind.

Here is an example of an ophthalmologist’s recurrent ad.

« Vous n’allez pas à l’aveugle en visitant Joseph-F. Montminy

492 Merrimack. Tel. 6211”

“You do not go there blindly by visiting Joseph- F. Montminy

492 Merrimack. Tel. 6211”

Once the ads procured, L’Etoile followed through by encouraging readers to patronize the businesses in question.

« Lecteurs!

Réservez vos achats pour les maisons qui publient leurs annonces dans L’Etoile vous serez mieux servis et vous rendrez service à votre journal en le mentionnant. »

“Readers!

Reserve your purchases for the establishments which publish their advertisements in L’Etoile. You will be better served and you will be of service to your newspaper by mentioning it.”

L’Etoile’s mission was serving Lowell’s French-Canadian community. Therefore, presenting businesses which could cater to its needs and wishes was a priority. The paper wanted to offer readers information to facilitate daily life.

Biron was known to examine each advertising order and to ask himself whether or not the establishment, whilst legitimately aiming at enlarging its market, had its clientele’s best interest in mind. Concern for L’Etoile’s industrious, hard-working readers was ever present and Biron believed that they were well aware that ads appearing in the paper were worthy of their consideration.

French-Canadians enjoyed preparing meals and were innovative in making the most of the contents of their pantries. Nothing was wasted. The skimpiest of ingredients could turn into meals worthy of modern Michelin Guide chefs. A measure of this and a pinch of that, whatever was at hand became the culinary enhancement which turned a couple of carrots and potatoes, a measure of flour, an egg, a spoonful of suet into a gourmet tourte.

Here is what Union Market had to offer Lowellians.

“Union Market, Tel. 4810 – 4811 – 4812

173-175-177 Middlesex. Foot of South St.

Spécial pour vendredi et samedi. Les prix sont plus bas que jamais. La qualité est la meilleure.

Gigots et Filets…..12c.

Quartiers de Devant…..10c.

Côtelettes de Veau…..13c.

Côtelettes…..12 ½ c

Steak de Veau…..20c.

Boules de Porc…..13c

Oreilles de Cochon…..8c

Museau de Coch0n…..10c

Tête de Cochon…..10c

Volaille Fraîche Tuée…..20c

Oie Fraîche Tuée…..25c

Canards Frais Tués…..20c »

„Union Market, Tel. 4810 – 4811 – 4812

173-175-177 Middlesex. Foot of South St.

Special for Friday and Saturday. The prices are lower than ever. The quality is the best.

Legs of lamb and Filets…..12c

Front Quarters…..10c

Veal Cutlets…..13c

Cutlets…..12 1/2c

Veal Steaks…..20c

Pork Meatballs…..13c

Pig’s Ears…..8c

Pig’s Snout…..10c

Pig’s Head…..10c

Freshly Killed Poultry…..20c

Freshly Killed Goose…..25c

Freshly Killed Ducks…..20c”

Union Market probably carried pork belly and pig’s feet as well. A “ragoût de pattes de cochon et ses boulettes,” a hearty French-Canadian stew made with pig’s feet and pork meatballs simmered in a rich brown sauce, was a favorite dish appreciated by many in Little Canada.

Editing ads and presenting L’Etoile Publishing Company services were tasks as seriously  undertaken as writing feature articles. Every printed piece was lovingly composed and crafted, all for the benefit of the readers.

(All translations from French to English are by Louise Peloquin.)