RichardHowe.com – Voices from Lowell & Beyond

Last Voyage of the Sholokhov

Last Voyage of the Sholokhov

By Jim Provencher

She was a scow really, a defunct dinosaur
of the sealanes, shipping out of Vladivostock
supplying quick cash flow for the Mother Country
when the West had won and things were slow.
An odd mix, the motley crew and cheap-fare
cruise customers, the classic ship of fools
buying into the lucrative Pacific market.

You might wonder about safety, the creep
of rust, buckling and bubbling a fresh coat
of Potemkin paint, shaling off in eggshell shards.
Lifeboats hang cocooned, forgotten husks
suspended in an old spider’s web, deathboats
jigsawed with cracks and puttied fissures.

The stern was largely a leaky hatch door
for really the Sholokov was a vehicular ferry
designed to monotonously ply the Sea of Okhotst.
The hold then was a vast empty parking garage
now a makeshift museum housing bucolic pastorals
non-Kandinsky samples of the regime’s realist school.
In the middle hung a giant portrait of Stalin.
Hanged, rather, for the gesture suggested
a lynching, an obviously satiric effigy.
We finally got him where he belongs,
the tour guide chortled, curbing a bitter laugh.
Fast-fish passengers in thrall, we nodded assent
to this revisionist version of history and smelled
the liberal smears of gobbed grease easing
the pistoned passage to New Caledonia.

At obligatory Cocktails, the stern grey-bearded Captain
said this sailing was a hard whale-road, always upwind
no matter which way we tacked. So skoal another vodka.
And another, for the corridors were patrolled
by waiters bearing huge trays of rainbow displays
of vodka shot glasses—red, green, yellow, clear, and blue.
Soon you didn’t know which way was up or
mind the endless rocking so, a revolutionary placebo!

We anchored our landlubber trust in Captain Greybeard.
His new stainless-steel heart ticked away through the night
as we floated like moonlight over the waves.
Rough passage and queasy guests hunkered in their bunks.
Buoyed in a vodka haze, the persevering few
arrived on time for dining room meals.
They were greeted with cold soups
and Russian ryes, wholesome homecooking served up
by cheery-eyed, apple-cheeked waitresses
who spoke five languages, including impeccable English
and held advanced degrees in literature and philosophy.
We’re working off school fee debts to the State
ours declared:  But what I don’t understand is why
people like you take make-believe journeys to nowhere?

Robert Frost in Amesbury, Mass. (1897-1898). Who Knew?

Robert Frost in Amesbury, Mass. (1897-1898). Who Knew?

Well, somebody knew about this but I didn’t even though I’ve been in Amesbury for eight years. Plus,  I’ve studied authors of the region since reading Thoreau’s “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers” in the 1970s. How did I miss Robert Frost living a couple of miles away from my current home? It’s no exaggeration to say Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Frost remain the top three figures in American poetry, at least for name recognition—two of them from our state.

A month ago on the Amesbury Facebook chat group someone mentioned that Frost had spent two summers in the community when he was a young man with wife Elinor and their new baby, Elliott. Helped by a biography of the poet by Lawrence Thompson, early letters from Harvard University Press, and the Library of America volume of Frost’s poems with hyper-detailed chronology, as well as various sources on the internet, I pieced together the facts.

The crowning assist came from the Amesbury Public Library, where the reference librarian Jodie Blouin went to the Massachusetts Cultural Resource Information System online for a profile of the clapboard house with garage which remains occupied and looked busy on the day my wife Rosemary and I visited. On the front of the house is a large plaque that reads Summer Home of Robert Frost, 1897-1898. It wasn’t hard to find when we knew where to look. Having driven by hundreds of times since we moved to Amesbury, we had not noticed the white sign.

The Frost family rented the 1775 house at 5 Evans Place just on the other side of the Merrimack River road not far from the notable Lowell Boat Shop. The J. Guest-John Blaisdell House is a two-story structure, now painted red, in the Georgian architectural style. Blaisdell made hats, which was a big industry in Amesbury. The house stands on a rise just where narrow Crum Hill Road veers off the main street. The area was also known as both Salisbury Point and Webster’s Point, built up when this stretch of the Merrimack River was dominated by shipbuilding.

Frost was twenty-three when he and Elinor rented the house. How did they know it was available? And how did they afford the rent? There’s no mention that another family shared the large house during the two summers. Maybe it was common for city people in Lawrence to take a break in the summer to cool off along the river. His family had been living with his mother, Isabelle, in Lawrence. More research needed on this. What did the family do in those two summers? The Thompson biography is not much help. There’s an anecdote about Frost going fishing in the river with a neighbor. Unfortunately, no letters from Amesbury survived, so we don’t have much context for time spent there.

Frost had various jobs in this period including newspaper reporting and teaching in his mother’s school in Lawrence. After a short stay at Dartmouth College a few years before, while in Amesbury Frost sought to enroll at Harvard University and was accepted—but left after his second year.

With a growing family and pressed to earn a living, Frost moved the family upriver to Methuen, a house with a barn. Backed by his grandfather, Frost tried his hand as a chicken farmer, a poultryman, and had some success. He also wrote articles for farm magazines, all the while still composing poems at the kitchen table at night. His next move was a more serious attempt at working the land when his grandfather bought for his family a small farm in Derry, N.H., the site of today’s Frost Farm run by the State of New Hampshire as a tourist site.

Justifiably, our picture of Frost in the Merrimack Valley is dominated by his time in Lawrence where he grew up and graduated from high school. The bits of information we have about his time in Methuen and Amesbury, as well as in Salem, N.H., just north of Lawrence, make his regional footprint a bit wider and deeper.

There’s another Amesbury link, this one in Frost’s poetry. In his 1936 collection “A Further Range” he has the poem “A Blue Ribbon at Amesbury,” which up to now I assumed was set in Amesbury, N.H., since he had left the Merrimack Valley by that time. There is no Amesbury, N.H., so it is not unreasonable to think the poem is a reflection on a prize hen from his chicken-raising days in Methuen and Derry. Perhaps a local agricultural fair. I’ll have to dig into this subject.

For more on Frost’s life check the Wikipedia page with all the basic facts.

A Classical Education

A Classical Education

By Stephen O’Connor

A woman who I suppose was trying to impress upon me the extent of her minimalism once told me that she could live a perfectly happy life without a television or radio, without coffee and dessert, without wine, and without music. That final bit of self-abnegation struck me as a cross a little too heavy to carry along the stony path of life—an exaggeration, surely. Yes, we could all survive without music, but live a perfectly happy life? Imagine films with no scores, a shower in which no one sings, churches without choirs, silence in the mornings and empty stages in the evenings. The sense of loss would be palpable yet inexpressible by song, wind or string.

I came to be a fan of folk, rock, blues and a bit of jazz by the same path that most of my generation followed. Somewhere along the line, though, my ears were awakened to classical music. I can’t say when exactly, but I know that one formative influence was the late Robert J. Lurtsema and his Morning Pro Musica radio show on WGBH. Robert J. began every program with a few minutes of birdsong. I was reminded of Lurtsema’s intro when I read that the earliest musical instruments were bone flutes on which primitive humans probably tried to imitate the calls of birds around them, nature’s first music. Lurtsema’s birdsong introduction would eventually fade and morph into the rising notes of Handel’s “The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba.” What a grand evolution was there.

My older brother Rory and I sometimes did drywall jobs back in the eighties, a trade we learned from our father. Often, I’d have Morning Pro Musica on the radio as we taped and troweled. Someone asked the name of our company. We didn’t really have a company, but Rory answered, “Classical Drywall.” When Lurtsema, in his sonorous voice, signed off, we’d switch to WBCN and become Rock, or Sheetrock Drywall.

Throughout the years, classical music, particularly in the morning, became as essential to my equilibrium as coffee or reading the morning news. As I write this, Laura Carlo is playing Francesco Cavalli’s “Chiaccone Canzone,” a “Dance Song,” on her WCRB Morning Program. Robert J. Lurtsema will always be my favorite classical music host, but Laura Carlo is a worthy runner-up. Her voice, as well as the music, will reduce your blood pressure and your cortisol levels.

In 1992, I got a job teaching English and ESL at an urban technical high school, what used to be called a “vocational school.” I had read studies that indicated that students did better on math tests after listening to Bach for half an hour, that plants in greenhouses where classical music was played grew faster than in greenhouses where other music or no music was played, and even that cows listening to classical music gave more milk. Based on all of this and my own experience, I began to play classical music softly in my classroom. I told the students, “If at any time during the class, you feel distracted by the music, or you just don’t like it, feel free to go up and turn it off. You don’t need my permission.”

Sometimes, I’d turn the music off myself, particularly if there were clashing cymbals, or if the music was too soporific after lunch. I found that the atmosphere in the class improved in some intangible way. I have a memory of a December day; the students were busy writing something as I streamed George Winston’s LP, December.

“That’s kinda pretty, Mister,” someone said.

“Can’t you picture the snow falling?”

“Yeah.”

You may not believe this, but I’ll swear under oath that a few students asked me what station I had on in class because they wanted to listen to it at home. A Brazilian student once said, “Oh, Mister, listen! That’s a clarinet. I play the clarinet!” I was surprised, but not shocked; he excelled as a student.

Sometimes, students asked if they could listen to their own music on earbuds while they worked. I said no. The reason I gave was that the music I played softly in class had no lyrics, but if they were reading words on a page and there were other words in their ear, they’d be distracted. Beyond that, the music they listened to on their earbuds was what they listened to all the time. Part of education is expanding tastes and experiences. And then there were those studies suggesting a link between classical music and a lot of good things.

Flannery O’Connor (no relation, sadly) once wrote an essay called “Total Effect and the Eighth Grade.” She spoke about the necessity of teaching challenging books, books of literary value, to students. If those books were not to the student’s taste, she concluded, that was too bad. “Their tastes should not be consulted. Their tastes are being formed.” It may sound autocratic, but classrooms were never democracies, and I thank God that Mr. Burns made me read Emily Brontë, though I would have preferred to stick with Jack London and Thor Heyerdahl. Similarly, I believe that some students over the years have taken something positive or expansive away from having listened to classical music in my room.

I recall a student who came to my class after school to work on a project. He asked if he could listen to his own music on earphones. I told him that the school day was over and he was a free man. He could listen to whatever he liked. A while later, I walked over and asked, “Can I hear what you’re listening to out of curiosity?” He handed me the earphone, which I held up to my ear. Imagine my shock when I heard the uillean pipes. I could not have been more surprised if he was listening to French Renaissance music or Gregorian chants.

“You’re listening to the Irish pipes? You must be kidding me!”

It was the soundtrack to Titanic, which was a hit movie at the time. Some of those students were already more open-minded than I had given them credit for. Still, it seems to me that music is such a large part of our culture, of all cultures, that we should not hand its curation over to Universal, Sony and Warner and be content that our young people will hear only the music the industry chooses. I once heard a Professor Abercrombie of the Music Department at UMASS, Amherst, ask some students, “How do you not know Ella Fitzgerald? How is that possible? You went to school, I presume, and no one ever mentioned Ella Fitzgerald?”

When they put me in charge of schools, (a development that’s long overdue), there will be a three-year course called, “History, Music and Culture,” and I don’t just mean European history or classical composers though they will certainly be included. Such a course would also include the spiritual songs of enslaved Blacks, “The Battle Cry of Freedom,” “Pat Worked on the Railway,” the Delta Blues, Bluegrass, Folk, Appalachian, Jazz, Latin and ethnic music in general, Rock, and the music the students listen to today and how it reflects their history because music always reflects and sometimes helps to create the historical period. (They might even teach the teacher on that score). And, of course, Professor Abercrombie, they will hear from Ella Fitzgerald. Let’s make it a four-year course.

Lowell First to Protest

Lowell First to Protest – (PIP #66)

By Louise Peloquin

     Journalists all over the globe have gone into overdrive covering the latest economic roller coaster rides.

101 years ago, price wars and currency issues made the news.

L’Etoile – July 15, 1924

A gasoline price war is suggested

——-

     The news that gasoline fell to 16, even 12 cents, in New York State prompts many prominent Lowell citizens to prepare a campaign to reduce the price here as well. – The principal strategy would be refraining from using the car on Sundays.

—-

     Lowell motorists ask themselves why they have to pay 22 cents a gallon for gasoline which sells for 16, and even 12 cents, in Albany, N.Y. Some of the city’s most prominent and most influential people are organizing a movement which should result in a decrease for Lowell and vicinity.

     Mr. Elliot Katz of Lowell heads the committee. Dr. Charles M. Reaghan and Dr. Robert Donahue, who have their offices in the Appleton Bank building, are part of it as well and they intend to muster support from the Chamber of Commerce and from city officials.

     For quite some time now, motorists find gasoline expensive. The news about price decreases in other States substantiates the allegations that the price is too high here.

     The committee is studying means to arrive at the desired goal. It is probable that the campaign to protest against the actual price of gasoline will be launched as soon as next Sunday when motorists in favor of the movement will be asked not to take their automobiles out unless there is an urgent need to do so.

     As we announced yesterday, those heading the movement state that the price of gasoline fell from 22 to 16 cents over the last three weeks and should drop to 12 cents before long. Independent distributors assert that, due to a production surplus, the drop is normal. They add that the price was maintained at a higher level in order to allow for selling off the supply of gazoline purchased before the drop.

     The Lowell committee claims that the decrease is the result of the Northern New York State motorists’ refusal to take their automobiles out on Sundays to protest against the costliness of gasoline.

     In Lowell, large companies have been selling gasoline at 22 cents a gallon for some time. Motorists believe that these prices are too high and that they will succeed in slashing them by protesting effectively.

     Lowell is the first city in Massachusetts to organize a protest movement.

*****

L’Etoile – September 2, 1924

The American Dollar
Is Refused in
Liquor Stores

     Québec, 2. – As the American dollar is currently at a premium on the American market, Québec Liquor Commission managers have received the order not to accept US paper currency. Many American tourists are offended but the order is formal. (1) 

****

1) Translations by Louise Peloquin.