RichardHowe.com – Voices from Lowell & Beyond

Seen & Heard: Vol. 12

Obituary: Jurgen Habermas, 96, Thinker Who Heralded ‘Public Sphere,’ Is Dead – Last weekend different online sources I follow mourned the death of Jurgen Habermas with great affection and respect. While I was vaguely familiar with the name, I had no idea who he was, so when his obituary showed up in the March 16, 2026, New York Times, I read it with interest. Habermas was born in Germany in 1929 so grew up under the Nazi regime and its aftermath. He earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy and became a professor and author. In the early 1960s, he introduced the idea of the ‘public sphere,’ a place beyond the control of government where the free exchange of ideas could occur. The model he envisioned were the coffee shops of 18th century England and France where people could congregate to discuss politics and reach an understanding of issues that were of common concern. He also warned of the rise of nationalism and any attempt to forget or diminish the Holocaust. He said Germans had a responsibility to keep alive the memories of the suffering of so many by German hands.

Op-Ed: Social Media Is Hazardous by Tim Wu in the March 15, 2026, New York Times. A law professor and one of the foremost thinkers in the country about the role of the internet in our society, Tim Wu argues that social media companies hide behind the shield of free speech when they are instead a threat to public health. He does this in the context in the in-progress lawsuit against Meta (operator of Facebook and Instagram). The plaintiff’s theory in that case is that social media is intentionally designed to create compulsions and over use, regardless of the content provided. Wu suggests that even if this case goes in favor of the social media companies, it’s just a matter of time before someone holds them accountable for all the hard that they have done.

Blog Post: Living Madly: What Time Is It? – In her monthly Living Madly column on richardhowe.com last week, Emilie-Noelle Provost took on Daylight Savings Time, giving the history of where it came from and all the harmful consequences it has for people. I agree with Emilie. When I was younger, my daily habits, including when I woke up and went to bed, were more random. But as I got older, routines became more important. I get up and go to bed at the same time each day and turning the clock back or ahead messes with that. I’m not alone in feeling the disruption. Each morning I take our dog out for a predawn walk through the neighborhood. It’s always peaceful but in the weeks before the time change, we’d encounter other walkers, a good number of cars driving past, and lights on in most of the houses in the neighborhood. Since the clocks “sprung ahead” those things are mostly absent even though we’re out at the same time according to the clock. 

Earlier in life, I had a couple of memorable run ins with the time change. From May through October 1980, I was stationed at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, for army training. For whatever reason, Arizona did not follow Daylight Savings Time. So part of the time I was there, we were three hours ahead of the east coast and the rest of the time we were four hours ahead. 

The second story also comes from my time in the Army only this happened in Germany. One Saturday I took the train to Munich with some friends. We had a great day and evening and were on a late train home when about halfway through the trip the train stopped in the middle of nowhere. It just stayed stationary for exactly and hour and then resumed the trip. Later I learned that was because our trip straddled the time change and, given the Germanic devotion to good order, the train could not arrive at its destination and hour early which it would have had we not stopped. Yet for those of us aboard, it made for a long journey.

The final story was from my time as register of deeds. In 2001, I was on a subcommittee investigating new computer systems for the registries of deeds throughout Massachusetts. It would be a big contract and we had to get it right, so part of the process was to visit registries around the country that were using the systems offered by the top bidders for our project. One destination was the Cook County Registry of Deeds in Chicago. Coincidentally, the night we would be there the Chicago Black Hawks had a home hockey game and one of my colleagues had bought two tickets and invited me to go. I asked him what time. He said the game was on ESPN at 8pm so we should meet in the lobby at 7:30 and walk to the game. We did, but when we arrived at the United Center, the first period had just ended. It turned out that the 8pm start time for ESPN was for the east coast but the came was in Chicago on Central Standard Time so there was an hour time difference with the game starting at 7pm local time. I assume our tickets had the correct start time but I didn’t see mine until we got to the arena. I enjoyed the rest of the game and the opportunity to visit a famous sports venue, but one local practice I didn’t like was that fans were permitted to smoke in the concourse of the arena and many did, so if you went to get a hot dog, you were engulfed in cigarette smoke. I remember going to the old Boston Garden as a kid and sitting high up in a balcony. Back then, smoking was permitted in the seats. By the fourth quarter, I could barely see the court (or breath) because of the cigarette smoke haze that filled the place.

Spaces for Wise Phrases

Spaces for Wise Phrases – (PIP #101)

By Louise Peloquin

L’Etoile – March 1, 1926

__________

     The L’Etoile print shop on 24-26 Prince Street had no modern technology to set up newspaper layout. Innovative ways to “meubler l’espace” (furnish the spaces) had to be found as we saw in PIP #70. (1) Advertising was essential. (2)  Jokes and humorous quips also served the purpose. (3) No space was left vacant. Every line had to “speak.”

Could the following spaces for wise phrases inspire anyone today? 

__________

– Truth is a treasure of richness. We are, so to speak, its treasurers. We amass it only to spread it. (January 8, 1926)

– The cautious man keeps quiet when he has too much to say. (March 1, 1926)

 – Speak little about what you know, not at all about what you ignore. (January 4, 1926)

 – The more one has virtues and talents, the less one is aware of it. (January 8, 1926)

 – Be what you would like others to become. May your existence, not your words, be a declaration. (January 2, 1926)

– The ocean is in the image of great souls; however agitated they appear, the depths are always calm. (March 1, 1926)

– It is necessary to practice justice without expecting any recompense. (January 9, 1926)

– We are more separated by nuances than by declared oppositions. (January 9, 1926)

– Freedom does not imprison, and the shackles forged for it sometimes serve to spread its empire. (March 1, 1926)

– Only God must be immutable. Every other immutability is imperfection. (March 2, 1926) (4)

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• PIP #70:

 https://richardhowe.com/2025/05/20/echoes-and-musings/

 2) PIP #7:

https://richardhowe.com/2023/11/07/your-business-is-ours/#comments

3) PIP # 33:

https://richardhowe.com/2024/05/28/who-wants-to-sell-a-day-in-june/comment-page-1/#comment-100424

4) Translations by Louise Peloquin.

A lifelong journey with college mates by Marjorie Arons-Barron

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

Heart the Lover by Lily King shares some themes with What We Can Know by Ian McEwan, the book I reviewed two days ago. They’re both set against the backdrop of academia. King focuses on four young people in college, their spirit and energy, academic pressures, dating issues, insecurities, crushes, parties, and card games (one of which gives the book its title.) McEwan’s principal characters are the professors, poets and researchers, also with their sexual relationships and neuroses.  Both books have clever repartee and multiple literary discussions. Even if you weren’t an English major, readers can be moved by Lily King’s talent for capturing both the exciting and daunting aspects of their own college years,

King’s narrator is a woman whose name (Jordan) we don’t learn until well into the book. She is romantically entangled with two of her three housemates. We move serially through the ups and downs of the relationships.

Heart the Lover then leaps into the characters in their middle age, where the four have chosen separate paths, but, in different ways, their ties to each other remain quite profound. Life has become more complicated. Their loves are more mature and take different forms, shaped by life’s realities (career, marriage, health, children). Characters become better communicators. They struggle to deal with their problems, not always with the most desirable outcomes.

King develops the novel in a linear way, the form more straightforward than the sophisticated and intriguing time-bending writing of McEwan. Though many of King’s story lines resonate with familiarity, she brings fresh perspective to those life inflection points. The author treats her characters tenderly, just as those characters, despite some rocky interactions in their twenties, come to treat each other 20 years later.  Heart the Lover is well conceived and well delivered. It’s a pleasing book that will hold your attention even if it doesn’t make your current list of top ten.

Lowell Politics: March 22, 2026

Because the regularly scheduled Lowell City Council meeting this week fell on St. Patrick’s Day, the council canceled its meeting, so instead of writing about local politics, today I’ll share an essay I wrote as part of Lowell’s bicentennial observance. However, instead of the founding of the mills and the digging of the canals, I jump forward to the 1940s and write about Lowell in World War II. I’ll have more comments at the end of the piece.

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Lowell in World War II

On Sunday, December 7, 1941, several thousand Lowell residents filed into the Lowell Memorial Auditorium for that afternoon’s Moses Greeley Parker Lecture, featuring a performance by the Trapp Family Singers. The Sound of Music would not exist for another 17 years; on this day, the group performed Austrian folk songs, classical pieces, and traditional Christmas carols. While they sang, the Japanese Navy commenced its devastating attack on the United States 4,000 miles away in Hawaii. In total, 2,403 Americans died in the assault, including Lowell residents Clifton Edwards of the U.S. Navy and Arthur Boyle of the U.S. Army.

If the Lowell Memorial Auditorium was central to the city’s experience at the start of World War II, it also served as the site of its closing chapter. On Sunday, May 18, 1947, hundreds gathered there to dedicate four bronze tablets bearing the names of 436 Lowell residents who lost their lives in military service during the war.

The names on these tablets are organized alphabetically by branch of service. The first of the 320 names from the U.S. Army is George E. Ahearn, the son of Canadian immigrants who grew up in a large family at 121 Crosby Street in Back Central. At age 22, he died in the Vosges Mountains of France on November 13, 1944, while serving with the 68th Antiaircraft Artillery Battalion. The final Army name is George Zouvelos, the son of Greek immigrants who lived at 94 Lilley Avenue in Centralville. He was killed in heavy fighting in Germany during the closing days of the war at age 18 while serving with the 97th Infantry Division.

The first of 84 names on the U.S. Navy tablet is Donald M. Adie, a graduate of Keith Academy and Lowell Textile Institute who lived at 26 Otis Street in Sacred Heart. He died on November 12, 1942, when his ship, the USS Barton, was sunk by the Japanese during the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal. The final name is Peter P. Yianopoulos, the son of Greek immigrants from 161 Mt. Pleasant Street in Centralville. He died on April 2, 1945, when two Japanese kamikaze planes struck his ship, the USS Dickerson, killing 54 aboard during the invasion of Okinawa.

The first of the 25 names on the U.S. Marine Corps tablet is Joseph E. Albert, the son of Canadian immigrants from the Acre. He died on March 1, 1945, at age 33 during the invasion of Iwo Jima, leaving behind a wife and young son. The final Marine is Julian J. Wojas, the son of Polish immigrants from 24 Ray Court in Centralville. After enlisting in 1940, Wojas was taken prisoner in the Philippines in May 1942. He died of disease in a Japanese POW camp on June 21, 1945, at age 28.

Throughout the war, Lowell’s residents fought and died on every continent and ocean. On June 5, 1943, 17-year-old Robert Beek was lost at sea while serving as a Navy gunner on a merchant ship sunk by a U-boat. On July 20, 1943, Frederick Webster died in a midair collision over Corpus Christi, Texas, while training as a Navy pilot. On March 4, 1944, 19-year-old Chester Colbath was killed during the Anzio invasion, and on March 22, Antonio Rapone died at age 26 when his bomber was shot down over Indochina. The casualties continued through the war’s end: John Shaughnessy on Omaha Beach on D-Day; Leo Cote in Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge; Stanley Kijanka, one of the first in Lowell to enlist in the army, during the final push through Germany, Costas Ivos, whose B-17 was shot down over Germany in March 1945, and his two cousins, David Scondras who was mortally wounded in Lorraine, France, and his brother, USMC Lieutenant James Scondras, who perished on Iwo Jima. Most tragically, on August 6, 1945, 19-year-old Normand Brissette died while a POW in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb exploded.

Service was not limited to men. Lowell Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers was instrumental in creating the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), allowing women to serve in the military. Mary Hallaren, a graduate of the Lowell Normal School, became one of the first to enlist, eventually commanding the first WAC unit deployed to Europe. Helen Brooks (then Helen Mangan) also graduated from WAC Officer Candidate School and served as an aide to Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall.

For those who remained in Lowell, life was defined by a steady stream of casualty notices in the Lowell Sun, the rationing of food and gasoline, and the nightly patrols of air raid wardens. However, war contracts also brought full employment, briefly reviving the city’s fading mills.

That economic boom ended with the war as military contracts were abruptly canceled. Yet, thanks to another federal initiative guided by Edith Nourse Rogers, thousands of returning service members gained access to affordable home loans and college tuition through the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944—the GI Bill.

Though World War II ended with the surrender of Japan on August 15, 1945, its legacy endured. Survivors returned to Lowell to raise families, achieve homeownership, and make the city a better place for all who live here. Those who did not return are honored throughout the city by the dozens of street intersections dedicated as memorial squares and by the bronze tablets within the Lowell Memorial Auditorium. These names serve not only as a record of the past but as an inspiration for future residents to meet their own generation’s challenges with the same selfless resolve and dedication to the common good that defined those who gave their lives during World War II.

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I’ve long been interested in the many monuments and memorial street signs (“squares”) located throughout Lowell. An ongoing project has been to identify, locate and contextualize each of them. In the process of doing that, I focused on approximately three dozen memorial squares that were dedicated to the memory of Lowell residents who died while serving in the military during World War II.

I found those individual World War II stories to be fascinating. But I also found them perplexing. Nearly 440 service members from Lowell died in World War II. Why was this small cohort chosen to be publicly remembered? Perhaps more importantly, what of the other 90 percent who have largely been erased from public history except for the appearance of their names on four memorial tablets at the Lowell Memorial Auditorium? Who were they and what are their stories?

To help fill this gap in Lowell’s historical record, I am now researching all 440 and hope to have a book with their stories completed by this Memorial Day. I’ll share more information in the coming weeks.

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A reminder that my newest book, Lowell: A Concise History, is available as a free PDF download here and that a paper copy may be ordered from the print-in-demand publisher Lulu Press at this link. Finally, our own independent bookstore, lala books at 189 Market Street, is carrying physical copies of the book for sale.