RichardHowe.com – Voices from Lowell & Beyond

A short novel, long on atmosphere, characters and narrative by Marjorie Arons-Barron

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

Seascraper by Benjamin Wood is a 2025 long-listed Booker novel (really more of a novella) suffused with the gray and misty atmosphere of a British seaside village in the early 1960s, animated by fascinating characters, and enriched by the interiority of the protagonist.  Thomas Flett, barely 20 years, lives with his 36-year-old mother, Lillian, in a shabby house not far from the sea where he earns his living gathering shrimp.  His father died in the Second World War, and he learned shanking for shrimp and other survival skills starting at age 14 from his deceased grandfather, Pop, with whom he and his mother lived after she got pregnant at the age of 15.

Other shrimpers have newfangled motorized rigs to mechanize the job of gathering tasty crustaceans. That’s not how Pop taught Thomas. Every day, Thomas harnesses his overworked horse to a small wagon and goes to water’s edge where he scrapes the sand for a pail of shrimp to sell at market.  Sand pits (sinkpits) threaten his own safety and that of his horse. The work is tedious, far from remunerative, but he knows that following Pop’s rules will enable his mom and him to scrape by.  He longs for something better, but his grandfather had drilled into him that “habit’s all you can rely on.”

It’s almost always foggy, raining or about to rain. Thomas goes home at the end of the day stinking from fish, his own sweat, seaweed, and the filth on his clothes from mucking the horse barn.  His hands are full of cuts, and his toenails are painfully ingrown. He gets back into the same clothes for several days at a time.  Their small house always feels damp.

Thomas dreams of a life beyond, but is stuck, nurtured only by the many books he reads. He has a deep interest in folk music (having secretly sold his grandfather’s watch for an old guitar) and in a young woman in town, but he is too timid to pursue either. His stultified daily routine is interrupted by a newcomer to town, a charismatic, fast-talking American film director who wants to shoot his next project on the isolated beaches so familiar to Thomas. Edgar Acheson is the most interesting person Thomas has ever met. The director’s kinetic exuberance for everything he sees around him, his rejection of conformity, and his exhortation to live life to the fullest make an impact on Thomas. But there is more to learn about Edgar Acheson.

There are plot twists that keep the pages turning.  Author Wood is a powerful writer and skilled craftsman. Seascraper will leave the reader with a gentle smile and the gratification that the few hours reading it have been well spent.

Lowell Politics: October 4, 2026

There was no Lowell City Council meeting this past Tuesday so today I’ll cover some of the things discussed at the council’s September 22, 2026, meeting which I omitted from last week’s newsletter.

I found a couple of procedural discussions among councilors to be both interesting and important. The first involved the time set for a council meeting to end.

The rules of the city council state that meetings must end at 10 p.m. In the past, a proposal to let the meeting go beyond 10 p.m. had been framed as a suspension of the council’s rules. If more than one councilor objects to a motion to suspend the rules, the motion fails. In recent years, at least two councilors have objected, which brought the meeting to an immediate end and rolled all unfinished items to the start of the next meeting.

On Tuesday night, Mayor Gitschier phrased the procedural motion differently. Instead of calling for a “motion to suspend the rules” he asked for a “motion to go beyond 10 p.m.” The roll call found two councilors, John Descoteaux and Mayor Gitschier, voting no. In the past, the meeting would have ended then, but this time, Mayor Gitschier announced the motion had passed and the meeting continued.

Councilor Rita Mercier asked for some clarification, given that for as long as she’s been on the council, just two councilors voting no terminated the meeting, yet on this night the meeting was to continue.

City Solicitor Corey Williams was called upon to explain. He cited Council Rule 5 which specifically states that the meeting shall end at 10 p.m. “unless otherwise voted by majority vote of the city council.” Williams interpreted that to mean that a motion to continue the meeting only needed a majority vote to pass and the prior interpretation, that just two No votes were needed to halt the meeting, was incorrect. All councilors seemed to accept that interpretation. Given the plain language of the rule, it would be hard to argue otherwise. Still, the prior interpretation has been used for decades so this change set aside a long-held precedent.

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Another procedural question arose with an informational communication from the City Manager to city councilors that announced the resignation of two board members, Hunter Berube from the Youth Commission and Sean Callahan from the Zoning Board of Appeals.

However, City Manager Golden interjected that Mr. Callahan had rescinded his resignation so councilors should disregard it. Councilor Belinda Juran then observed that since Callahan’s September 17, 2026, letter of resignation said it was effective immediately and since the council does not have to formally accept the resignation for it to be effective, she didn’t believe the resignation could be rescinded.

Solicitor Williams was asked his opinion. At first, he said the question turned on whether Callahan had resigned in the middle of a term or whether his term had already ended and he was in a holdover status. When told Callahan was a holdover, Williams said he would have to be reappointed.

Then someone pointed out that if there was a Zoning Board of Appeals meeting before the next council meeting at which Callahan’s reappointment could be formalized, Callahan would not be a member of the board at that meeting. Solicitor Williams then seemed to say that in that scenario, it would depend on whether the City Manager had accepted Callahan’s resignation.

I’ll point out that this answer seemed inconsistent with Williams’ earlier one that the effectiveness of the resignation depended on whether there was time still left on Callahan’s term, but it made no difference because, as Mayor Gitschier pointed out, the city manager’s letter to the council said, “The following members’ resignations are accepted” so no one could argue the resignation had not been accepted.

I’m guessing there is some potentially controversial matter scheduled for the next Board of Appeals meeting which made this interesting but otherwise benign procedural discussion a high-stakes game of political chess behind the scenes. But I have enough to do trying to follow the city council without getting into the board of appeals, so I’ll leave that to others.

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Another procedural matter arose on a proposed vote to “amend council meetings in October, November and December to be held only on the 2nd and 4th Tuesdays of each month.”

This is something Councilor Dan Rourke promoted earlier this year only he wanted to make twice per month meetings the norm council subcommittees meeting on the off Tuesdays. My recollection is that his earlier proposal ended up before the city council’s rules subcommittee which held a hearing on it. The subcommittee ended up opposing the schedule change.

Then this vote appeared on the council agenda. When it was called, Council Sean McDonough objected to the second reading of the motion. Procedurally, that automatically delays the motion to the next meeting. It is a rarely used tactic, but it is an option.

Councilor Rourke expressed his displeasure with the maneuver which prompted Councilor McDonough to ask for a point of personal privilege (which allows him to speak about something not before the council). He explained that this vote is substantially similar to the proposal discussed by the subcommittee; that that discussion generated considerable input from the public; that the public would likely want to give input before this vote was taken, but that since it came at the end of a very long agenda, the public was, as a practical matter, not given the opportunity to be heard.

Rourke explained that the subcommittee did have a hearing but that when the subcommittee reported back to the council, no further action was taken on the proposal. Rourke then said in all his time on the city council, he never recalls a three-member subcommittee deciding the fate of a motion. He said he wanted it brought back, either way. He said he didn’t think it was going to pass but it was an outstanding motion that should be officially voted on.

Councilor McDonough then rescinded his objection to the second reading. After some hesitation, Mayor Gitschier allowed the vote to be taken. Voting for twice weekly meetings were Councilors Dan Rourke, Kim Scott, Sokhary Chau, John Descoteaux, Rita Mercier and Vesna Nuon. Voting to continue meeting each week were Corey Robinson, Mayor Erik Gitschier, Belinda Juran, Sidney Liang and Sean McDonough. That’s six votes in favor, but this vote needed a two-thirds majority to pass. That would be eight votes. Since it only got six, the vote failed.

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My newsletter last week covered the resignation of Councilor Dan Rourke. Now, there will be a special election to fill Rourke’s district council seat.

The current procedure for filling a vacancy that occurs in the office of Lowell City Councilor or School Committee was established by chapter 138 of the Acts of 2024, which became effective on July 25, 2024.

If the vacancy occurs during the first 12 months of the term, the council must call a special election to be held not less than 64 nor more than 120 days after the special election is called. If the vacancy is in a district, the person elected must have lived in the district for at least one year immediately preceding the special election.

If the vacancy occurs on the city council during the second 12 months of the term, then there are some options:

• By a vote of not less than six councilors, the council may call a special election as described above; or
• Appoint an eligible voter to fill the seat. Such an appointment must be made not later than 30 days after the seat became vacant and the eligible voter must meet the residency requirement; or
• Leave the seat vacant for the remainder of the term.

If the vacancy within the second year of the term occurs on the school committee, the same provisions described above apply only it would be the members of the school committee making the decision.

Thus far in this upcoming special election, whenever it occurs, former council, mayor and state representative Rodney Elliott is running as is former vocational school committee member Ray Boutin.

If anyone else runs, I think there may have to be a special preliminary election to narrow the field down to two candidates for the general election, although I’m not sure about that.

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The Boston Globe is doing an eight-part series on Gateway Cities in Massachusetts. Episode 2, which appeared on Monday, featured Lowell. “From five-and-dime store to modern apartment: How Lowell is building needed housing” (by the Globe’s editorial board) highlighted the recent conversion of the Hildreth Building at 45 Merrimack Street from a vintage office building to market rate apartments.

The rehab of the building started in 2024, the first tenants moved in this May, and the 50 apartments are now 60 percent occupied. The first floor along Merrimack Street has always been retail space – I fondly remember in my youth shopping at Woolworth’s and Kresge’s in the building’s ground floor – and that use has continued with the space now occupied by the Hive, a collection of independent retailers who migrated from Mill No. 5 when that space was sold two years ago.

The Globe article cites the importance of UMass Lowell to the area economy, quoting Chancellor Julie Chen about how the ongoing Lowell Innovation Network Corridor will bring well-paying jobs and affordable housing to encourage UML graduates to remain in the city after school.

The article also points out that Lowell was an early adopter of repurposing commercial and industrial buildings for housing but doing that meant the easiest conversions have already been done while the buildings that remain are the most challenging to convert to housing. Still, from the amount of construction one sees driving through downtown, it seems that developers are taking on those projects.

Given that the high cost of housing in Massachusetts is one of the reasons the state is less attractive to young people who grow up and are educated here but feel priced out by the high cost of housing, it seems that the more new housing that can be built in Lowell and elsewhere, the stronger the economy of the Commonwealth will become.

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In this week’s Seen & Heard column, I wrote about a podcast interview of Ted Leonsis, a Lowell High graduate who owns multiple professional sports teams in Washington DC; reviewed the book, “Panic at the Pump,” a history of the gasoline crises of the 1970s; commented on a Globe article about surveillance cameras in Boston; and cited a New York Times Op-Ed on “how Flock cameras became the enemy.”

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If you’re reading this early on Sunday, you still have time to get to Lowell Cemetery for the 10am tour (Oct 4, 2026) which begins at the Lawrence Street entrance.

Saturday, October 17, 2026, at 10am – “Secrets of Lowell Cemetery” tour which is part of the of the Poe in Lowell Festival. Edgar Allan Poe came to Lowell at least three times to lecture but also to spend time with a female friend who is buried in Lowell Cemetery. Learn their story and the stories of others involved in their orbit. This tour is free and begins at the Knapp Avenue entrance of the cemetery (77 Knapp Avenue).

Time of the End of the Season Part IX

Time of the End of the Season Part IX

By Bob Hodge

Bob Hodge grew up in Lowell and went on to graduate from Lowell High (1973) and University of Lowell (1990). He was (and still is) one the greatest runners to come out of this region. He’s also a writer whose 2020 memoir, Tale of the Times: A Runner’s Story, is available at lala books in downtown Lowell and in Kindle format from Amazon. The following is an excerpt from his novel-in-progress.

Already published:

Time episode 1

Time episode 2

Time episode 3

Time episode 4

Time episode 5

Time episode 6

Time episode 7

Time episode 8

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Side Trip to Galway

I could see that it would be fun and interesting living with these two knuckleheads who were as obsessed as I was with our Athletics aspirations. On the weekend we would be adding another of our persuasion a college drop out said to be taking a sabbatical. Bobby would be sleeping on a cot in the hallway.

He would be running with the Bombers while on his break from college and working at the shoe factory with Donnie and me. Bobby was also a guitar player so I could see us all making some noise when I got back from Galway with my guitar.

I spent the rest of the week getting in a routine which included working 25 hours a week doing odd jobs at the shoe factory and working in the factory store on odd Saturdays.

The first job I was given was hanging insulation way up in the ceiling of the factory, which required climbing a ladder a very uncomfortable distance up over the factory floor where the racks of shoe last and shoes being made in progress and the noise and the spills and the smells.

On Friday I took the train up to Galway and walked to my parent’s house through those same streets I had left behind nearly a year ago. So much had changed in that short time and Galway looked smaller cheaper and meaner as immediately I started to walk and some delinquent peckerheads started harassing me, “hey hippie dippie what’s with the pack, you going camping?”

No—don’t look back, you can never look back.

I had dinner with my dad at home and got caught up with my mail. Later my old friend Richelieu picked me up in his Thunderbird and we drove around Galway stopping in at some old stomping grounds.

My friends were bemused by my travels and I was equallypuzzled that they had no desire to ever leave Galway or explore other possibilities.

“Willy, you got that running thing going good for you—but it’s different for us.” A few friends and family commented that I now had a “Boston” accent. “I only been in Boston for a week.”

“Well Willy, you just talk different—you ain’t the same.”

Summer was rolling now and in Galway that meant trips to Salisbury or Hampton Beaches. Early Sunday morning we piled into the Thuderbird for a day at the beach. Lee Ann and Sue in their little “Elly Mae” cut off jean shorts and bikini tops.

The minute we got to the beach and got our blankets down and carried the cooler the frisbees the footballs and all with us I headed out for a ten miler in just my shoes and shorts and cheap sunglasses.

When I returned, I did some barefoot strides on the beach and everyone joined in throwing the football around with frequent dives and swims in the surf.

I had a beer and chatted with Sue who was a few years younger than me a senior in high school. She had been dating a guy on the football team but I sensed she was getting bored with him.

“Willy, my boyfriend is kind of jealous of your notoriety as a runner and if he took up running, he would kick your ass—but football is a real sport and running is for sissies.’

I lay back and tried not to stare at Sue and her beautiful boobs. Like looking into the Sun.

After a time, I fell asleep and dreamed I was far away running in the clouds of snowcapped mountains.

Richelieu dropped me at the train station.

“Willy, you know Sue just a girlie only 17 man she don’t know nothing about nothing.” “Oh ya, I get that, but she pretty sweet just the same.”

“Keep in touch with yourself peckerwood.”

After a few weeks getting in a routine Coach told us he could take a few of us with him to the USOC Training Center in Colorado Springs. He chose me to go mainly because most others could not get away from school and work duties.

We would stay for a week and be tested by the science community and attend classes, one taught by our coach. There were fifteen athletes total from 800-meter specialist to marathoners. It was one of the few times that I felt like the governing bodies in our sport were actually doing something positive to affect our sport.

There wasn’t much to do in the Springs and one night as I sat reading, some homework really a book called the “Marathon Footrace” a complete history of the event, Coach walked in and said “Hey Willy, Neil and I are headed over to the bar around the corner if you want to join us.” “What the hell are you reading? Geez, didn’t I explain the marathon to you already?”

The establishment was a dive bar with about a dozen chopper motorcycles parked in front. The coach showed no hesitation just marched right in. It looked like dozens of bars in Galway where I grew up with pool tables and such. The coach immediately struck up a conversation with a biker who he referred to as Miss even though it was pretty obvious Miss was a Mister with long hair.

Neil and I played pool with a couple of women who were with the bikers and Neil started flirting with them so much that I thought for sure we was going to get stomped. The bikers wanted to know what was up with the coach. “Man. That dude is funny. Is he alright in the head?” “Well, he is one of the greatest marathon distance running coaches in the world.” “World class marathon coach, wow. I guess that would explain it.”

The bikers explained that they never knew what the hell was going on at the training center and we were the first athletes to ever venture over to their neck of the woods.

Midnight came and we did not have to go home but we couldn’t stay there. The last Neil and I saw of our coach he was waving to us from the back of a Harley. “Juanita’s taking me for a little joy ride.” For good or ill I will forever have that image in my mind somewhere.

Dream, dream, dream…. of the early day’s ascendant tripping off to London with my newly minted B-Town singlet. The dialectic with Coach Gerry and the ultimate learning experience.

As I make the coffee and breakfast morsel my back aches low and I drag myself around the kitchen and try to get comfortable in my seat with my notes and reading materials. Another day around the Sun.”

I spent a few days back in Galway visiting with my family and friends and packing up what I needed for the apartment in Boston. My brother gave me a ride with my stuff and helped me move it in the apartment. Donnie let me put some stuff in his closet.

I worked at the local shoe factory job for a week and then left for Europe where the plan was to run the mile in London and a five k in Finland four days later.

I travelled to London alone but met up with some other athletes at Heathrow and we were taken to a Hostel at the Crystal Palace where the meet would be held. We had a few days before racing to rest up and get acclimated.

I was approached by one of the meet directors and asked to rabbit the race for the first half mile in 1:55. I just hoped I could pull that off, but also, I wanted to stay in the race and finish respectably.

Desmond Wally from New Zealand might be attempting to run a sub 3:50 mile so I had an important part to play in it.

I was very nervous in the lead up to the race. The grand venue with 20,000 spectators and all of the foreign athletes, many of the best in the world. Once the spikes were on and the sweats came off the nervousness was gone.

I was meant to be here destined and I would be myself just unwind that coil spring out there no need for shrewdness or over analyzing I be the rabbit the rabbit be me.

The pistol shot and I was the bullet breaking out to thunderous applause. I both floated and steamrolled down the back straight and into the curve I felt light as a feather and I hit 56 seconds for the first quarter.

The next 300 yards went the same way but, in the home straight I began to lose my easy stride and the weight hit my shoulders and I felt I was falling, the second lap was 59 seconds.

I stayed on the rail as Desmond cruised past and then the majority of the rest of the field my next lap taking 68 secs and then I managed a 63-last lap for a 4:06 finishing dead fucking last.

I suited up and left quickly feeling like I was going to cry and I jogged around the athletic fields in a daze.

Other groups of runners were milling around doing their warm ups and downs when Wally passed by and slapped me on the back, “Thank you mate, you did a good job.”

Well, I made $200. I guess I will take it and maybe I can salvage a good race over in Finland in a few days. Desmond Wally got beat by the local top British miler Colin Davey, an arrogant jerk cocky and in your face.

I went out to the Pub that night with some fellow competitors and I began to put the race in perspective and I realized how fortunate I was to be here and how unlikely it was that I would rabbit and run well. I did not consider myself a miler in any case.

As I sipped my warmish beer and eyeballed the local talent a man sat beside me and chatted me up.

He was the director of a local road race and he asked if I was interested in competing in this race the same night that I was supposed to be in Finland.

“What are they paying you to run over there?” “Nothing, it is going to cost me some money for expenses just getting over there.”

The road race was a five miler and he mentioned that Colin Davey was running and he also said he would pay me $250 to run. “I’m in.”

Coach Gerry would probably be pissed as he went through some trouble to get me the race in Finland but $250 was three weeks’ pay in the shoe shop. I could not afford to turn that down and I wanted a shot at Colin Davey.

I was thinking about how that great American Miler was quoted to say “Road Racing is Rock n’ Roll and Track & Field is Carnegie Hall.”

I managed to get the word back to Coach Gerry and to the meet organizers in Finland neither of whom seemed distressed.

That is when I knew Coach Gerry was someone I could work with, someone who understood me and who understood the sport.

I had been trying out some new racing flats that the local company that I worked for gave me as prototypes.

They were awesome, very light and cushioned perfectly to my liking. I did a two-mile time trial on the track in the new flats two days before the race in 8:50 feeling good.

Colin would be a tough nut to crack, a 800/1500m specialist and UK Record Holder he was also a very solid cross country and road racer though he did not run the roads often.

The race was sponsored by a big department store and had some nice merchandise prizes for the top finishers guaranteeing a good field.

Race day dawned clear and beautiful. I packed all my things the night before as I would need to go directly to the airport immediately after the race, my ride was all arranged.

The crowds at the start/finish area were large and enthusiastic. As I was warming up Colin came up behind me and said, “hey mate, how much “bob” you getting.”

It took me a minute to understand. “Not enough, but after I win my stock will be rising.”

He laughed and sprinted away.

The start was a bit of mayhem but I put my foot on the gas and doubled the clutch and I was away. Colin spent the first few hundred yards waving and slapping hands with people so it was easy for me to get a lead I did not plan to relinquish.

I was 4:20 at the mile and never looked back. I could hear people saying “B-Town?” and “Boston” and “Who is this guy?”

I was tempted to look back but I never liked to do that and also, I could tell I had a sizable lead from the crowd noise behind me which had grown faint.

The crowd in the last half mile had closed in and I barely had room to run through this deafening gauntlet.

I finished in 22:10 breaking the course record by 45 seconds. I jogged straight to my awaiting car where my driver took me to the airport, changing into some jeans and a t shirt on the way. I won a color television which I had them ship to Annie the fire plug in Atlanta.

I felt like a rock star temporarily but once I was on the plane and on my way back to Boston I realized I would be back at the factory gluing shoes the next day.

I did not exactly return home the conquering hero as everyone seemed to know about my dead last in the mile but no one seemed to know about my road race win over Colin Davey.

I settled into a routine with my roomies and teammates and was given another job temporarily in the shoe factory hanging insulation in the ceiling. This work was almost as back breaking and dangerous as gluing the shoes.

At some point Coach Gerry talked to the company owner and they managed to find me a desk job in the offices working with Donnie.

When that happened, I took to running three times a day, usually five miles before work, then eight miles at lunch and then ten miles at night.

I did not have any big races planned until the fall as the team would be gearing up for the National Cross-Country Championships. I did run some all-comers track meets and road races almost every weekend.

I talked with Alby Thomas, my teammate who held the American Record in the marathon, about working in his running store which he had just opened. I ended up just working there on Saturdays and when I told friends and family I worked in a store dedicated to runners they were skeptical and thought that it was just a front for some illicit business.

Eventually though this running thing became legit and overnight it seemed everyone became a runner and the Boston Marathon went from a few hundred runners to ten thousand.

And I was right in the middle of it all.

Coach Gerry thought I should go back to college. “Listen Willy, I love this running game more than anyone and it cost me a lot but I don’t regret any of it that is true.”

“Coach, most of us don’t want to admit that all we really want to do is run, it’s like we’re ashamed of it or something, but not me. I am going to do this thing while I can and find out what I got and college can wait.

College running does nothing for me. Those in the NCAA, corrupt, hypocritical bastards are even worse than the AAU.”

Coach laughed and I felt that he knew I sincerely meant what I was saying and that as someone just about to turn twenty-one I already knew the realities of this athletics game and I was all in as long as it lasted.

Alby preached professional running and more opportunities for “amateurs” to make a living and nearly every run with him turned into a diatribe against the AAU. In one interview he was asked what could be done with the powers that be if they didn’t provide better conditions for athletes.

Alby said, “We’ll have to snip, snip, cut their balls off.”

Alby took a lot of heat for his comments in this interview in which he also revealed his disdain for the muscle sports pro sports like football and baseball that they were a fraud and that athletics had superior athletes.

I loved it but he really toned it down after this interview because the media were about to crush him if he kept it up. There were some who were sympathetic but when you began threatening to cut off body parts, well, you lose some support maybe.

Yes, folks, running has its share of drama too.

In August I was planning to run a newly minted race in Falmouth on Cape Cod that was created by our bartender friend Francis who was also a runner ex-Marine and all around the most enthusiastic proponent of running on the entire planet.

He certainly did more for our sport than the stinking AAU ever did.

The B-Town Bombers helped support the first few years as the race became established and then just took off.

This year there will be eight hundred runners, holy cow!

After that it was on to a glorious fall and another shot at a cross country USA Champion Title.

This was about the time that I was hitting the peak of my enthusiasm, my wonderous awe of just being alive unaware of the waves about to break all around my head.

I received some media acknowledgement for my recent exploits, especially my triumph in the road race in London, including a photo of me in the B-Town singlet and local shoe company shoes, getting into the waiting car that would take me to the airport only minutes after my victory.

I am surrounded by spectators cheering and laughing and it is a shot of adrenaline every time I look at this photo.

I was reading many books about athletic heroes back through history and currently reading a little gem by seven-time Boston Marathon Champion Clarence DeMar who also made two Olympic teams winning a bronze medal in 1924 in Paris.

I had this idealism, I believed in the Olympic Oath and I would swear on the statue of Zeus, king of the gods of Mt Olympus. At the same time amateurism will never work, never could work and so many athletes’ careers have been destroyed because of this nonsensical edict.

I wanted to win the Boston Marathon and run in the Olympic Games, and a lot of smaller steps along the way to those goals are what motivated me to continue with almost maniacal devotion.

What I am trying to say is that I was conflicted but I determined that there is no way to reach any type of fulfillment until and unless you work at something until you are defeated and/or satisfied.

Only you will know whether it was a worthy cause.

In the Middle of It

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=X2oWAoUq-7g&ra=m

Remembering Cupples Square

Remembering Cupples Square

By Leo Racicot

In spite of my lifelong devotion to The Acre and Saint Patrick’s Parish, I was actually born on Pine Street in The Highlands, baptized at Saint Margaret s Church on Stevens Street. Aunt Marie and Nana lived most of their lives in The Highlands in close proximity to Cupples Square so, in my younger years I spent a lot of time in that square. I liked and still like the name Cupples Square; it sounded European to my young ears, a place out of one of the Sherlock Holmes stories I liked so much. As a kid, I divined its quiet charm, its pretty string of enticing shops. My first encounters with the square were when my father would bring me to his barber for my monthly haircut. Crewcuts were the style of the day. This was the 1950s — lots of dads and their sons looking like Johnny Unitas, Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford. I liked Dick the Barber. He had a pencil-thin mustache like his idol, Errol Flynn. His shop smelled like hair tonics, some fruity, some pungent, some bracing. Papa would never let Dick flatten my hair with Brylcreem. “When you’re older …”

Barbershops in the 1950s weren’t just for getting your hair cut. Men would linger for hours, chatting, trading stories, debating current events. I always looked forward to going there, being with Papa, being one of “the guys”.

I always liked walking past Teddy’s Variety; it tickled me that our mother, as a young teenage girl, worked the soda fountain there. She told us what she liked best about the job was the free ice cream sodas. Oh, and the cute boys who’d come in after school to flirt.

Next door to Teddy’s was Yum Yum Bakery. Nana would take me in on my visits and treat me to a buttercup. A thick slice of checkerboard cake (equal parts vanilla and chocolate fashioned to look like a checkers game board) was a favorite. I went ape for the chocolate squares, messy, luscious fun. Not more than a couple of steps away was Huntley Hardware. Huntley’s had a warm, silvery welcoming feel to it and offered personalized service to its community, some of them customers of long-standing. I don’t remember Nana ever buying or needing anything at Huntley’s (though I do have a clear memory of her buying bobby pins to put up her white, flowing hair.). She liked chatting with Mr. Huntley (Was his name Bob?); the two had known each other for years in the neighborhood. She also let me tag along to visit Mr. Pryor, (known to one and all affectionately as Pryor) at First National Market. Pryor was a long-time manager at this longtime Highlands grocery store, an affable friendly face always eager to help with a grocery order or point the latest bargains out to customers. This is the store Marie and Nana liked to get their green stamps from. Green Stamps was a wide-scale national loyalty program. The way it worked is this: based on how much you’d spent on your weekly groceries, the store would award you, the customer, a certain amount of stamps. Diane and I found it great fun when getting back home to Marie’s to have her make a kitchen project of pasting the stamps into little booklets. When our tongues got tired of licking the things, Marie would put a small glass bowl of warm water on the kitchen table to replace our tired lips and tongues. Booklets of stamps could then be redeemed at local redemption centers in exchange for prizes, big and small. I remember the excitement when Marie took us to Nashua to trade our books of stamps for a brand-new radio. That was on a Saturday and on Sunday, the radio brought the news that Country Western singer, Patsy Cline, had been killed in a tragic plane crash. After that, the green stamps lost their luster for me…

Across the street from First National was Page’s Drug Store. Page’s sat at the sharp, V-shaped intersection of Pine and Westford Streets, a black, almost baroque structure whose appealingly decorated windows filled with women’s make-up, men’s colognes, powdery, colorful, puffy do-dads, vanity mirrors and an astonishing assortment of what used to be known as sundries redeemed the dark facade.

Cupples Square was also home to Terminal Fruit Co, owned and operated by Greek immigrants, George and Angie Malapanis. Terminal Fruit grew out of a fruit-peddling enterprise George and Angie began when they first came to America. Their boys, Costas (Dino) and Jimmy, both around my own age, were often in the store. This popular staple of Highland residents’ fruit and market needs was a beloved Cupples Square institution. The Malapanises later moved their business to Appleton Street under the name Palmer News Palmer News had a magazine collection to rival that of Harvard Square’s International Bookstore. Both stocked local and world periodicals, my idea of heaven. Palmer News became a weekly stop for me in the ’80s where Costas and Jimmy would give customers the shirts off their backs if needed. Good people, like their parents.

The places, the people I knew there are many years gone. Today, Cupples Square is the home base for generations of those Vietnamese boat people and refugees who migrated to Lowell following the failure of the war in Vietnam in the early 1970s. Southeast Asian-owned grocery stores, herb shops, beauty salons, restaurants now populate the still-busy square. It is a different Lowell from the Lowell I came of age in, a different but no less vibrant Lowell, offering culinary, cultural, captivating adventures.

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Checkerboard square cake

George Malapanis with sons Jimmy and Costas

Getting my hair cut at Dick the Barbers

Huntley Hardware

Marie, Diane and me preparing Green Stamps

Nana and me

Our mother the “soda jerk”