RichardHowe.com – Voices from Lowell & Beyond

Hannah Duston Memorial, Boscawen NH

Here are some photos of the Hannah Duston Memorial in Boscawen, New Hampshire.

Robert Caverly grave, Lowell Cemetery. He was the person primarily responsible for the Hannah Duston Memorial in New Hampshire.

William Andrews grave, Lowell Cemetery. Andrews carved the New Hampshire Hannah Duston Memorial.

Example of stone carving talent of William Andrews. The grave of Horace Ebert at Lowell Cemetery.

Book Review: ‘The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America’ by David Baron

Mars Mania in America

Enjoyable throughout. Full of fun facts. A Lowell book you will go back to. Who knew the size of Mars Mania? “There’s always a Lowell connection” (Marie Sweeney quote).

For the past two weeks I’ve been reading a new book by science writer David Baron called “The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America.” The title is a mouthful, but the book is an easy read. I’ve been reading it, yes, but not in a straight line, instead skipping around, sneaking peeks ahead, finding new things in each chapter. On top of everything, the book has been a good diversion from the daily media angst that ratchets up each week.

I grew up at the start of the Space Age in America and Russia or at least I thought so. This new book describes an earlier Space Age dominated by widespread interest in the third planet from our sun.

The Epilogue might be my favorite section of the book as the author ties up a bunch of loose strings and brings the story forward to the modern era and present. We are still talking about Mars as a place to go. Elon Musk, anyone? But don’t rush to get to the end or you will miss the hyperactive popular culture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries when all kinds of folks were jumping on the Mars wagon, including author H. G. Wells, entertainment producer Orson Welles, fizzy and fractious newsman William Randolph Hearst, inventor Nikola Tesla, French astronomer Camille Flammarion (not a relative of mine), many others. Lowell’s younger sister, the inventive poet Amy Lowell of Boston, makes an appearance.

Somebody points up and says, “Look,” and millions of eyes turn skyward. Why were so many people primed to look into the night-scape at this time? Robert Frost once wrote about people at the ocean’s edge just standing there and looking out into the vast water. Mesmerized? Same reason? The scale?

And the man in the middle of a lot of this is one of the “Lowell” Lowells from Boston, astronomer Percival Lowell (1855-1916), who would have made the cover of PEOPLE magazine if there had been one. He was a crossover celebrity hit after promoting the idea that there are canals on Mars, some kind of lines on the surface thought to be artificial, maybe an ancient irrigation system rather than natural depressions from melting ice. His book “Mars” (1895) put him out front in this speculation. He wasn’t the first on the Mars life subject. There was some confusion early on about terminology. A previous astronomer, Schiaparelli of Italy, had seen something up there and applied the Italian word “canali” or “channels.” This framing morphed into “canals” with Lowell, suggesting a system built by intelligent beings and not simply geophysical markings, long ruts worn by flowing ice melt or vast cracks in the surface.

One observer wondered if Lowell’s point of view had been influenced by the 6.5 miles of power canals that had been devised by associates of his family in the pioneering textile mill city named Lowell. Our man Percival was as familiar in his day as Carl Sagan later talking about the universe on TV and Bill Nye the Science Guy, another TV scientist, who incidentally holds a UMass Lowell Honorary Degree among other awards.

There’s a lot here, and the author’s entertaining style, plus pictures, keep the reader moving.

Paul Marion (c) 2025

Living Madly: Saudade

Photo courtesy of Polverini Lian

Living Madly: Saudade

By Emilie-Noelle Provost

I’ve always believed that written or spoken words, with their ability to communicate our thoughts, wishes, discoveries, joys, and sorrows — sometimes across time and space — carry with them a bit of magic. On the printed page, whispered into a waiting ear, or shouted from the rooftops, language forms the bedrock upon which society and culture are built.

I’m particularly captivated by words from other languages that cannot be easily translated into English. These often convey ideas and situations we’re all familiar with, but for some reason, when it came to creating English words to describe them, they never quite made the cut.

For example, ya’arburnee, an Arabic word, expresses the hope that you will die before someone you love because you wouldn’t be able to bear living without them. Literally, it means “may you bury me.” The Japanese have boketto, which describes the act of staring blankly into the distance. From Yiddish there is luftmensch, which refers to someone who is not successful in life or business due to his or her unrealistic ideas and goals. The French have voisinages, a word that refers to the relationships among or between neighbors. And in Brazilian Portuguese, there’s cafuné, a word that describes the motion one makes when running their fingers through a lover’s hair. (Leave it to the Brazilians to require a word just for this.)

Perhaps one of my favorite, and I think one of the most beautiful “untranslatable” words, is saudade, a Portuguese term that conveys a longing for a person, place or time you recollect fondly but know you will very likely never be able to experience again. Derived from the Latin solitate, or “solitude,” saudade acknowledges, mourns, even celebrates the discarded bits of ourselves that lie scattered across the landscape of our lives.

Saudade also implies a feeling of gratefulness, the glow we feel in our hearts when we remember how lucky we are to have had particular experiences and people in our lives. Like an empty chair at the family dinner table that reminds us of the person who once filled it, the empty spaces within us take on the silhouettes of those who left them behind.

Saudade is different than nostalgia or reminiscences, which are often about remembering with a sort of affection occurrences and relationships no longer relevant in our lives. Even if it’s rooted in the past, saudade lives in the present.

Portuguese art, literature and traditional fado music, which literally means “fate” or “destiny,” are all heavily informed by the concept of saudade. The Portuguese, along with the people living in Portugal’s former colonies, such as Cape Verde and Brazil, have built an entire culture around their unapologetic, deep and passionate feelings about just about everything, from romantic love to sports teams. They approach life with the notion that all emotions, happy or sad, are worth experiencing because collectively they are what make us human.

Since my daughter moved into her own condo, I’ve come to know saudade well. Madelaine’s absence from our house has often been difficult, as her absence is often a presence all its own. I sometimes find myself thinking about the days before she started kindergarten, when I was a stay-at-home mom. Back then, we were together all the time, sometimes 24 hours a day for weeks on end when my husband was traveling for work. We ate all our meals together. I helped her get dressed every morning. We shopped together and went for walks around the neighborhood. In the wintertime, we snuggled on the couch under a blanket while we watched her favorite show, “Arthur,” on TV. Some days I longed to get away, to have another adult to talk to. There were times when I lost my patience and did things I now regret.

I grieve the loss of the baby that Madelaine was, and the loss of myself as a young mother. But these memories also bring with them a powerful and bittersweet happiness. I’m grateful I was able to spend so much time with her when she was young, and I believe the time we spent together helped her become the intelligent, thoughtful, successful young woman she is today. The sadness my memories bring helps me better appreciate the time she and I spend together now. Because I know someday I’ll look back at these moments with longing, too.

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Emilie-Noelle Provost (she/her) – 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.

Radios & Jukeboxes

Radios and Jukeboxes

By Leo Racicot

When I was a kid, The Golden Age of Radio was coming to its end. Still, we had two radios at home and listened regularly; our mother, aunt and grandmother had come of age during The Great Depression when radio was at its peak as pretty much the only form of entertainment and information available, other than live theater which was financially out-of-their-reach. In the kitchen, on top of the fridge, was a yellow portable number, with handle. Ma always had it playing, especially as wake-up on school mornings. Next to it — Albert the Drinking Duck (a popular toy of the day, a battery-operated plastic bird made to bob up and down into the bowl of water placed at his feet. Sometimes, the radio song that was playing was in sync with his bobbing. I got a kick out of that. In a corner of the living room, stood a large cabinet  radio. It seemed to me this was always there in the corner. I adorned the top with an Infant of Prague statuette. The window displaying the needle indicator, the pointer that  displayed the station frequency, was an eerie alien spaceship orange and I liked looking at it, fiddling with the dial, trying to find a cool song. The cabinet below opened up to a record player which my mother sometimes let me listen to if I was good. She’d put the record on for me and we’d sit there for hours listening, a mostly Sunday activity.

Whenever she took us on excursions, our Aunt Marie would put the radio on. She loved the singers of The Great American Song Book: Doris Day, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin. Her favorite was Al Martino. She’d sing along and coax Diane and me to join in. Diane never would but I was too afraid not to. This was when I came to love that era of singers myself and later in Life, I was lucky to see Peggy Lee, Rosemary Clooney and Tony Bennett in person. I have three friends for whom the radio is still daily listening. One never would buy a television set and relies to this day on radio for her entertainment. I find something old-fashioned and charming about this. In Lowell, we had two radio stations: WLLH was located on the topmost floor of the old Giant Store at the corner of Dutton and Broadway. WCAP (“The Voice of the Valley”) had its offices down on Central Street. As far as I know, it’s still broadcasting. Our next-door neighbor’s nephew, Henry Achin, had a program on ‘CAP for years. The Achins were big in Lowell (real estate and law). Henry was blind and he and his seeing-eye dog were a familiar sight making their way to-and-from his job. I remember the focus of Henry’s program was Franco-American history and when I went as an undergraduate to Assumption College, Worcester, and was so nervous to be away from home for the first time, finding Henry there as a student was a comfort. I didn’t stay long at Assumption; not only did my scholarship not cover extracurricular expenses but when I was standing in the cafeteria line, the man in front of me gave a sudden shudder and dropped dead right in front of me. I thought, “What the heck kind of a place is this?!!” and hightailed it home as fast as I could. I haven’t seen Henry in ages and ages and thought I read his obituary in The Sun a few years ago but I can’t find information to confirm that on Google. WCAP is still alive and well, with offices on Central Street next to Brew’d Awakenings.

Some of my favorite radio personalities, though not local, were Jess Cain, the “morning drive guy”, Murray the K (known as “The Fifth Beatle”) and Wolfman Jack. Whenever I’m sitting in the barber’s chair, I like looking at a photo my barber has on the wall of him with Wolfman.

A form of entertainment I don’t see anymore is the jukebox. Back in time, every restaurant had either a large one or there were smaller ones found in each dining booth, affixed to the wall right next to the customer. A metal lever allowed the customer to browse through “pages” of song selections to see which ones he/she would like to play. The cost was a dime for one song or a quarter for three “plays”. These jukeboxes were my favorite and our mother always let Diane and me pick a selection or two. The fun of it was waiting for the songs you picked to play when it was their turn in the queue. One special jukebox memory — before George’s Pizza on the corner of Broadway and School Streets closed up shop and moved further down on Broadway, across from Anton’s Cleaners, that location housed “Pete’s, a breakfast diner-type place. One morning, Diane and I were there for breakfast with our mother. I remember the place was redolent with the aroma of French Toast and Petula Clark’s big hit Downtown was blasting on the jukebox. The whole restaurant was vibrating with the sound of Clark’s song. A beatnik couple got up and did a swing dance right in the middle of the floor. To this day, whenever I smell French toast, it gets me singing Downtown and thinking of “Pete’s”.

My friend, Elena, told me yesterday some places (clubs/bars) do still have jukeboxes but that now they’re digital, the way casino slot machines are digital and — “That’s taken all the fun out of them”. She sighed.

Albert the Drinking Duck

Assumption College

Beatnik Couple Dancing

Large restaurant jukebox

Living room radio console with Infant of Prague statue

Marray the K – the Fifth Beatle

Small customer booth jukebox

WCAP logo

WLLH logo