RichardHowe.com – Voices from Lowell & Beyond

Trump says the U.S. will run Venezuela. What’s next? by Marjorie Arons-Barron

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

For a populist President who campaigned against the foreign entanglements of his predecessors and raged against nation building, it’s stunning that he would launch a military action against Venezuela that the vast majority of Americans oppose, at least without authorization by his reflexively compliant Congress. Trump traditionally says his critics suffer from Trump derangement syndrome. This weekend’s secret assault on Venezuela to kidnap Nicolas Maduro and pledge to “run Venezuela” simply suggest it is Trump who is deranged.

The indictment of Maduro by the District of Attorney of New York, Southern District, makes clear: Nicolas Maduro was a criminal, a narco-trafficker, a partner of drug cartels responsible for thousands of deaths in the United States and elsewhere, a despotic and fraudulently-elected “president” of Venezuela. Now, in a stealthy and powerful military action, the United States has captured him, brought him to the United States, imprisoned him in Brooklyn and arraigned him. That he will stand trial is a good thing.

But, despite the chest-thumping and testosterone-fueled assertions of Donald Trump, Defense (oops, War) Secretary Pete Hegspeth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, all the rest of their outrageous pronouncements and claims don’t stand up to scrutiny.

Take Trump’s announcement that the United States will take over Venezuela until a proper transition can take place. Meanwhile, he declared, U.S. oil companies will take over Venezuelan oil operations “for the benefit of the Venezuelan people.” Sounds like a return to 19th century colonialism to me. According to experts, activating Venezuelan oil reserves, deteriorating for at least two decades, could take years to move into production and market distribution. So, our populist President will risk American lives for the benefit of American oil corporations? And how long will the United States and Trump’s oligarchical inner circle stay in Venezuela, and how much will it cost? Will U.S. military provide a long-term stabilization force, at sea if not on land?

We may find out this week if Trump will respect the War Powers Act if Congress gets a spine and acts on it.  Every President from Truman to Biden has launched a military strike without Congressional authorization. I don’t know of any who immediately announced the intention to run the country we attacked. And, even where they eventually got Congressional buy-in, the long-term efforts – think Iraq and Afghanistan – failed abysmally.

Notably absent from Trump’s press conference was Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence, who would have to defend her 180 from her 2019 Twitter post saying “The United States needs to stay out of Venezuela. Let the Venezuelan people determine their future. We don’t want other countries to choose our leaders, so we have to stop trying to choose theirs.” Not surprisingly, it went viral after Maduro’s capture.

Gabbard isn’t the only one who could be called out for hypocrisy. As recently as October, Trump Chief of Staff Susy Wiles said that an attack on the Venezuelan mainland would require congressional approval. Now she’s a key player in keeping the Trump team in line behind the President’s lunatic moves.

As a practical matter, how exactly will delusional Trump secure that control over another sovereign country? He may have lopped off the head of the regime, but the regime is still in place. Maduro’s cronies, including Vice President Delcy Rodríguez (who has already declared herself interim president), Defense Minister General Vladimir Padrino López (who reportedly has deep ties to Vladimir Putin) and Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello (head of security, meaning Maduro’s enforcer), as well as Maduro loyalists in the Venezuelan military (who also profited from the drug trade) are already under similar indictments and not about to leave quietly.

Trump has already rejected bringing back opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate María Corina Machado and has made no move toward Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, the legitimate winner of the 2024 Venezuelan election. So what’s our authoritarian president’s next grandiose plan if not turning to those who have steadfastly been fighting for democracy and against Nicolas Maduro?

Naively, Trump has also said that those Venezuelans who fled to the United States to escape Maduro’s violence can now return, but early comments from Venezuelans living in Florida indicate that repatriation is impossible until there is a democratic government in Venezuela. Apparently Trump thinks he can do business with Vice President Rodriguez as he is with ISIS terrorist-turned-ally Ahmed al-Sharaa in Syria.

Beyond the pursuit of Venezuelan oil (perhaps on the false promise of lowering already-lower energy prices in time for our own election), Trump and Rubio hypocritically insist a major goal was ending the flow of fentanyl into the United States. But the main source of fentanyl and its components is China. Will they try to take out President Xi? And, if drugs were so central to this recent operation, how do they square this with Trump’s December 1 pardon of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández in prison in the United States for 45 years for running 400 tons of cocaine into the United States and related gun charges. He, too, was implicated in widespread corruption.

Without evidence other than personal pique, Trump speciously rationalizes the Hernandez pardon by claiming the prosecutors who brought him to trial and won a major conviction didn’t treat the former Honduran president fairly. Yet it is the same team, the Southern District of New York, that is trying the case of Maduro. So, yesterday’s bad guys are magically today’s good guys?

Perhaps the worst aspect of this insanity is the potential global fallout and what this move signals to Russia and China. Despite Donald Trump’s promise to end “forever wars,” he has warned Mexico to “get its act together;” warned Greenland that our taking over there is a matter of national security, ours not Greenland’s; and made threats to move against Columbia and Cuba. It’s reasonable to fear that such warnings will greenlight Putin to finish off Ukraine and move against Estonia and Poland and promise disinterest if China moves against Taiwan and, indeed, all of the South China Sea. Trump is washing his hands of our allies and international agreements that have kept the lid on world war since the 1940’s.

Trump keeps claiming he has aced three or more cognitive tests, even identifying a giraffe. But passing a cognitive test is a low bar, not a ticket to mensa. But a repeat schedule of tests, far from indicating cognitive capability, suggests some insiders may believe his mental health is worth monitoring. However, I’m not reassured. I won’t hold my breath waiting for someone in that inner circle to resort to the 25^th Amendment procedure for declaring a President to be unfit. Nor would I even lay down money on a bet that Congress will find its backbone and assert its Article I powers and responsibilities.

We can only pray that, at a minimum, voters will remember this fall and in 2028 that the party in power would rather underwrite an illegal oil grab for a bunch of oligarchs than ensure access to affordable medical care for financially struggling Americans. And we must cross fingers that Russia and China are somehow delayed in regional aggression that Trump has green-lighted.

Lowell Politics: January 11, 2026

The 2026-27 Lowell City Council took the oath of office at a Monday morning ceremony at the Lowell Memorial Auditorium. The council’s first business was to elect a mayor. The election proceeded alphabetically: the assistant clerk called the roll, and each councilor announced their choice for the position. The first candidate to receive six votes—a majority of the eleven-member council—was elected mayor.

Erik Gitschier won on the second ballot.

Although the event was streamed live on Lowell Telecommunications, the audio did not capture the councilors’ voice votes, leaving viewers in the dark about how each councilor voted. Based on other sources, I believe this is how the voting went.

First Ballot

Dan Rourke received five votes:

• Sokhary Chau
• John Descoteaux
• Rita Mercier
• Dan Rourke
• Kim Scott

Erik Gitschier received three votes:

• Belinda Juran
• Sean McDonough
• Corey Robinson

Vesna Nuon received three votes:

• Erik Gitschier
• Sidney Liang
• Vesna Nuon

With no candidate receiving a majority of the votes, the council immediately proceeded to a second ballot.

Second Ballot

Erik Gitschier received six votes:

• Erik Gitschier
• Belinda Juran
• Sidney Liang
• Sean McDonough
• Vesna Nuon
• Corey Robinson

Dan Rourke received five votes:

• Sokhary Chau
• John Descoteaux
• Rita Mercier
• Dan Rourke
• Kim Scott

Next, the council elected its vice chair using the same process. Vesna Nuon won that election with six votes to five for John Descoteaux. All councilors who voted for Erik Gitschier for mayor voted for Nuon for vice chair, while all who voted for Dan Rourke for mayor voted for Descoteaux.

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The council had its first regular meeting of the term on Tuesday night. Unsurprisingly, the agenda was brief, and the meeting lasted just under 30 minutes. Perhaps the most consequential action taken involved the controversial $40 million loan order that was rejected by the prior council. However, on Tuesday, the order was simply referred to a public hearing on January 20, 2026.

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At the start of each meeting, councilors may ask for a “moment of silence” for someone who has recently passed away. The requesting councilor then reads the decedent’s obituary, the lights of the council chamber are dimmed, and the room goes silent for a short time before the chamber is re-illuminated and the meeting resumes. It is a nice gesture, but I don’t usually mention it in my newsletter.

This week I’ll make an exception because one of the memorials on Tuesday was for Philip Shea, who passed away on December 30, 2025, at age 84. In the 1970s and 1980s, he served on the Lowell City Council, the Massachusetts House of Representatives, the Massachusetts State Senate, and made a vigorous though unsuccessful run for U.S. Congress. In the 1990s, he served as Budget Director for the Massachusetts Secretary of State’s Office, and in recent years continued to serve the city of Lowell as a representative to the Lowell Regional Transit Authority board, the Lowell Stadium Commission, the Community Preservation Committee, and the Lowell Housing Authority board.

In 2016, Shea was inducted into the Lowell High School Alumni Hall of Fame, and in 2021, the city of Lowell named the bridge on Market Street over the Western Canal after him.

Shea was first elected to the Lowell City Council in 1969 in a transformational election that brought newcomers Paul Tsongas, Brendan Fleming, John Mahoney, Leo Farley and Shea to the council. They joined reelected incumbents Richard Howe, Armand LeMay, Samuel Pollard and Ellen Sampson.

Shea was reelected in 1971 and played a central role in the most contentious mayor’s race in the past 50 years. In that fall’s election, three newcomers were elected. They were Robert Kennedy, Gail Dunfey, and Charles Gallagher (who had been the previous city manager). They replaced incumbents Armand LeMay, Samuel Pollard, and John Mahoney, who all lost.

On that 1972-73, council, Kennedy, Dunfey and Gallagher joined reelected incumbents Ellen Sampson, Richard Howe Sr., Paul Tsongas, Leo Farley, Brendan Fleming, and Phil Shea. For Sampson, it was her sixth (nonconsecutive) term; it was Howe’s fourth; and the second term for Fleming, Farley, Shea and Tsongas.

Howe served as mayor in the previous term. James Sullivan was the city manager.

Monday, January 3, 1972, was inauguration day. After taking the oath of office, councilors attempted to elect a mayor. With just nine councilors, the winning candidate needed five votes.

On the first ballot, Shea received votes from himself, Fleming, Gallagher and Sampson (4 votes); Tsongas received votes from himself and Howe (2 votes); Kennedy voted for Sampson and Farley and Dunfey both voted for themselves. Through the next 14 ballots, councilors frequently changed their votes, but no one achieved the necessary five votes. After 15 ballots, councilors voted to recess until the next evening’s regularly scheduled council meeting.

Reconvening on Tuesday evening, January 4, 1972, councilors resumed voting for mayor. On the fourth ballot that evening, outgoing mayor Richard Howe Sr., received votes from himself, Tsongas, Dunfey and Fleming, but he was unable to get the necessary fifth vote on subsequent ballots. No other councilor received more than three votes through the evening. After the 36th ballot of the night, and the 51st since the Monday inauguration, the council again voted to recess until Thursday night.

On Thursday, January 6, 1972, councilors again reshuffled their votes through 54 more ballots without electing a mayor. That changed just before the 55th ballot of the night (and 106th since the inauguration) when Shea announced he was abandoning his own candidacy and would instead vote for Sampson who had received votes from herself, Farley, Gallagher, and Kennedy on the prior ballot. Those votes held on the 106th roll call and, with the addition of Shea, Sampson was elected mayor, her second time holding the position.

That fall, in the 1972 state election, Shea ran for state representative. Back then, the top two finishers in most legislative districts served as state representatives. In that year’s general election for the 31^st Middlesex District, Democrats Cornelius F. Kiernan (13,848) and Shea (13,384) defeated Independent Stanley W. Norkunas Jr. (2,681). There were no Republican candidates. In the Democratic Primary, Kiernan (5,010) and Shea (3,684) had defeated Victor M. Forsley (3,317), Raymond P. Gendron (3,137), and James R. O’Connor (2,554).

In that same election, Paul Tsongas was elected Middlesex County Commissioner. Under normal circumstances both Shea and Tsongas would have resigned from the council, and their seats would have been filled by the candidates who finished tenth and eleventh in the 1971 city election. But Shea and Tsongas were both strong supporters of City Manager Jim Sullivan who was just barely hanging on with the support of five of the nine city councilors. Both Shea and Tsongas were comfortable with tenth place finisher Armand LeMay joining the council since he would be a Sullivan supporter. But it was a different story with eleventh place finisher Samuel Pollard, who was a vocal critic of Sullivan. If both LeMay and Pollard joined the council, two Sullivan supporters – Shea and Tsongas – would be replaced by one supporter and one critic which would make five councilors ready to fire the city manager. To avoid that result, Lowell political lore says that Shea and Tsongas agreed to flip a coin with the winner resigning (allowing Sullivan-supporter LeMay to join the council) and the loser of the coin flip remaining on the council until the end of that council term (preventing Sullivan-opponent Pollard from joining the council). Tsongas won the coin flip and resigned from the council while Shea remained on the council, holding both that office and that of state representative for another year.

Redistricting eliminated multiple representative districts prior to the 1974 election. The old 31^st district which had been held by Shea and Cornelius Kiernan was renumbered as the single seat 45th district but Kiernan was appointed to be a judge at the Lowell District Court and Shea was unopposed in both the primary and the general election.

Shea was reelected without opposition in 1976 but by 1978 voters had chosen to reduce the number of state representative seats from 240 to the current 160 and Shea’s district was merged with that of incumbent Robert Kennedy. In a hotly contested Democratic Primary, Shea defeated Kennedy 3,591 votes to 3,407. Shea was unopposed in that year’s general election.

In 1979, the city councilor elected State Senator Joe Tully city manager. In the special election to fill the state senate seat, Shea was unopposed in both the primary and the general election. He was reelected to the state senate with token or no opposition in 1980 and 1982.

In 1984 when incumbent Congressman Jim Shannon ran (unsuccessfully) for U.S. Senate, Shea and his fellow State Senator Chet Atkins of Concord ran for the vacant Congressional seat with Atkins winning with 43,538 votes to Shea’s 38,737.

Shea attempted an electoral comeback in 1992 when he ran for his old state senate seat, however, in the Democratic Primary he finished second to Dan Leahy.

In that same 1992 election, William F. Galvin was elected Secretary of the Commonwealth. When Phil Shea was first elected to the Massachusetts House in 1972, Galvin worked at the State House for the Governor’s Council. The two met and became friendly. In 1975, Galvin was elected to the House in his own right, and the friendship deepened and lasted. Upon his election as Secretary of State in 1992, Galvin asked his old friend Phil Shea, who had a strong background in finance, to be his Budget Director, a position Shea held until his retirement in 2002.

On a personal note, I first met Phil Shea back in January 1970 at the Lowell City Council inauguration. He was one of the newly elected councilors who elected my father, Richard Howe Sr., mayor of Lowell that day. Shea’s name was often in the news, but I would encounter him only occasionally.

That all changed in the summer of 1997. I was in my third year as Middlesex North Register of Deeds. As a result of its fiscal insolvency, Middlesex County had just been abolished as a governmental entity, and the registry of deeds had been transferred to the Secretary of State’s office. Although my office was an elected one, I knew little about the Secretary of State’s office or its personnel. At gatherings with my similarly transferred colleagues from other registries, some spoke with trepidation about the strict fiscal policies of the Secretary’s budget director, which would be a departure from the free-wheeling finances of county government. In my naivete, I asked, “Who is the budget director?” The reply: “Some guy named Phil Shea.”

To paraphrase Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, it was the beginning of a beautiful partnership. The transfer from county to state government went smoothly regarding daily operations, but more importantly, it unlocked meaningful funding for new technology. As the state geared up for Y2K, Shea oversaw those expenditures with a balance of prudence and flexibility. He trusted tech-savvy colleagues to leverage these investments, effectively jump-starting the registry’s entry into the internet age. For instance, Middlesex North became the first registry in Massachusetts—and perhaps the country—to make every document from 1629 to the present freely accessible online. It was also the first to implement full-scale electronic recording, saving immense time and money for the registry and homeowners alike. Without Phil Shea’s support, neither achievement would have been possible.

While Phil Shea’s individual contributions to Greater Lowell were substantial, he spent a lifetime empowering others to assist the public in countless ways. My example with the registry of deeds is one example. Another was cited by former City Manager Kevin Murphy in his eulogy of his departed friend during Shea’s funeral mass. Kevin said that in 1979, then State Senator Shea hired Kevin to be a member of his state house staff, he joined three other staffers who all went on to have distinguished careers in public service. Those other three were Marty Meehan (now president of University of Massachusetts); Rodney Elliott (current state representative); and Kevin Coughlin (executive director of the Greater Lowell Workforce Board).

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Blog-contributor Steve Edington has a new book: The Gospel According to Jack: Tracking Kerouac in my Life. The book brings together Steve’s “Kerouac life” (he’s a past president of Lowell Celebrates Kerouac) and his life as a retired minister in the Unitarian Universalist Protestant tradition.

Steve will give a book talk this coming Wednesday, January 14, 2026, from 6:30 pm to 8:30 pm at Lowell’s Pollard Memorial Library in the ground floor community room. No registration is required.

Wandering But Not Lost

Wandering But Not Lost

By Rich Grady

I spend a lot of time wandering in the woods behind my house. I did it when I was a free-range kid in elementary school, and now that I’m a free-range septuagenarian, it still gives me a sense of belonging to something bigger than me. It also untethers memories of the past.

I used to cut through the woods going to and from elementary school as a kid, which was against the rules. I was like a swamp fox and had evaded notice for several years, until sixth grade when one of my supercilious classmates who was on the Safety Patrol tattled on me to my teacher who was also the school principal. She kept me after school and lectured me on the demerits of breaking the rules, and told me that I had to walk to and from school on the street and not via the woods. Being a kid who asked a lot of questions, I wanted to know why there was a rule against walking through the woods, since it was a shorter and more direct route to my house. As she ate her afternoon snack of pickled pigs feet and bread sticks, she proceeded to explain between bites that if there was a nuclear explosion, they needed to know where to look for the bodies; and if mine was in the woods, they might not be able to find me. This explanation stuck with me like the pigs feet between her teeth; and yet, I returned to my shortcut on subsequent commutes after clarifying with my Safety Patrol classmate that it was more assured that his tattletale face would be altered by a tatterdemalion such as myself before the principal would be looking for our bodies after a nuclear attack. Besides, as far as I was concerned, it would be easier to find me if there were fewer bodies to sort through.

I don’t remember being afraid of nuclear holocaust, but I do remember looking at pictures in a book about Hiroshima and Nagasaki that my WWII veteran father had bought after the war. He mostly read the newspapers, and didn’t buy many books for himself, so this one stood out on the shelves that he built to hold our encyclopedias. I read about nuclear fission in one of the volumes and recall it being all about making electricity as compared to incinerating a city and its people. The instantaneous and unprecedented destruction of these nuclear blasts – and the threat of more – factored heavily into Japan’s surrender shortly thereafter.

As these old memories melted and more immediate sensations of my walk in the woods on New Year’s Day prevailed, I listened to the crunch of my footfalls on the crusty snow, and felt the sting of the cold air on my face. I was bushwhacking with no particular destination or timetable, and I was acutely aware of my surroundings. Deer tracks had my attention but I left some bandwidth for the sound of creaking branches overhead, poised to leap if necessary to avoid a falling limb. I don’t call them widow-makers anymore, since I am a widower and the consequences of being struck by a falling limb seem different now, as do many things.

The woods are laced with stonewalls and sprinkled with artifacts of past human habitation – a rusted pail here, the bones of a car there. An old stone foundation begs questions of the past in the current moment – who lived there; did they build the house themselves; how many kids did they have; did they abandon the house; why? Will someone far from now ask such questions about me, my children, and my house? My school days are long past, but I still ask a lot of questions. And perhaps more than ever, I know that adults don’t have all the answers.

In retrospect, I think it was strange to make schoolkids worry about a nuclear attack, but it was plausible at the time – and maybe even more so, now. Kids today seem to have plenty to worry about, and I’m sure they have a lot of questions. I just don’t know where they are getting their answers, and I suspect that they are not getting out into the woods enough. The days of free-ranging kids seem to be long past. We were tempered by different flames back in the days of my youth. Accepting the possibility of mutually assured destruction had a way of hardening your constitution, like realizing that your parents were going to die someday. This dawned on me when my paternal grandfather died. He had come over from Ireland as a young man and met my grandmother who had also come across by ship. They got married and raised my father and his brothers and sisters in Dorchester during the James Michael Curley years, which spanned the Great Depression.

I wish I could talk to them about those times, but it’s too late now. I was too young to be curious about it when my grandparents were alive and too pre-occupied with my own era when my parents were still alive to ask about theirs. “None of us live forever” is something my father said to me when he was in the hospital and knew his end was in sight. I know that he meant it in a comforting way even though it was a matter-of-fact statement. He was ok with what the future held in store for him; and although he wasn’t an overtly religious man, he believed in God and prayed for us, his four sons, to be good men and to take care of our mother, our families, and each other. That was his gift to us.

As I walk in the woods, I pray for my kids and grandkids, too, and give thanks for my parents and grandparents, and my wife’s parents and grandparents, and all of the family members and memories that they spawned. And I thank God for love and life, and this divine milieu that I get to experience by walking out my back door, wandering but not lost.

Library Chronicles

Library Chronicles

By Leo Racicot

What’s your most prized possession? For me, it’s my library card.

Ever since the afternoon Sister Margaret Paul, our fourth grade teacher. walked our class down to Pollard Memorial Library, down the stairs to the Children’s Room and I discovered my delight in getting my very first library card, I’ve been hooked on libraries. A library card is a passport to worlds, a ticket to all there is to know, all you could ever wish to know.

I even remember the first book I took out. It was Conrad Richter’s Light in the Forest. I was attracted to its cover. I forget the details of the book I read last week but to this day, I remember the plot of Light in the Forest and have retained a fondness for it all these years later. Its story, set against the background of The American Revolutionary War, about a white boy kidnapped by a Native American tribe and raised to be one of them. has stayed with me, its theme about an individual caught between two worlds resonated strongly with me.

I’ve always loved to read and for twenty years whenever I worked with students, it was in the capacity of an English reading tutor/teacher. At both Saint Patrick’s School in the 1970s and Franco American School in the 1980s, I put together and taught Advanced Reading groups. At Saint Patrick’s, I loved our meeting place, a small space in the school basement next to the hall stage. At Franco, our classroom was wedged between the first and second floors, a private oasis of learning. I remember I decorated the walls with photos of authors of every kind, which the children loved and to which they’d contribute photos of their own favorite writers.  But I wasn’t cut out for teaching; for one thing, like my mother, I didn’t have a strict bone in my body. In frustrating attempts at maintaining classroom discipline, I was forever saying, “Sit!  Down!”. Not fun.  I don’t remember having a job I could say I actually loved, in fact, until I began working at O’Leary Library at what was then the University of Lowell, in 1985. libraries, which I’d always spent most of my free time in anyway, utterly seduced me and I was to spend seventeen years of my working life in them. Mornings I literally couldn’t wait to get to work.     When I moved to Cambridge in ’97, to accept a position as a private home caregiver/companion to an autistic man and his elderly mother, I found my part-time work there (weekends, Thursdays through Sundays) challenging but not sufficiently so; needing more to occupy my time, I applied to Cambridge Public Libraries, hoping my work for ULowell Libraries would give me an easy “in”. Not so. The CPL administration took a long time to hire me; they wondered why, after years of working for a university library, I’d want to work for a public library system. Later, I learned they thought I was some rich guy who wanted to go “slumming”, didn’t think I was serious about wanting to work for them. I’d also tried, unsuccessfully, to get a job with Harvard’s many libraries, most of which were a stone’s throw from where I now lived. But I’m not a typist, still type with two fingers and could never get an interview; Harvard won’t look at you unless you can type like lightning. I’d always wanted to see the magnificent Widener Library stacks but they were harder to enter than Pluto’s Gate if you weren’t Harvard-affiliated. I was about to give up on Cambridge Libraries when, after what seemed an eternity, they finally called to say “yes” to my application.      CPL consists of seven libraries, a main library and six branch libraries spread throughout the city. I began my career there as a “floater”; whenever a regular staff person at any of the seven libraries was absent, on sick leave, sabbatical, or on vacation, I’d be sent in to cover their hours. To say my time as a floater for Cambridge Public Libraries was sheer delight is to miss the mark. I took buses and subways to go to work and it was an absolute joy riding to each of the different branch libraries, seeing and exploring the different neighborhoods each was located in. My favorite branch was Boudreau Library, nestled cozily in the Concord/Huron Avenue area. The late Linda Haines was Branch Head at the time. She was smart-as-a-whip, funny, quick, savvy with a heart of gold. Patrons still mention her Children’s Storytime Hour which was so popular, the kids and their mothers packed the small space such that oftentimes, we workers had to climb over them to get to our stations. I liked Linda a lot. It was Fall of the year when I began as a floater and I looked forward to riding the bus down Concord Ave, pretty as a picture with its big, old trees and colorful leaves. Poor Linda died young after a long battle with cancer. She made Boudreau a vibrant part of that community.

Boudreau wasn’t the smallest of the branches; that honor went to hobbit-sized Collins Branch. I’m a fairly big guy and just making my way around Collins to shelve and such was a challenge. Branch Head, Elaine Cory, kept a tidy ship. The Valente Branch, located in the Wellington-Harrington section of Cambridge, had more of an inner-city vibe. Eleanor Rose, a staffer, had a habit of screaming at patrons, co-workers and her boss one second then in the next second, remorseful, would suddenly throw her arms around us wailing, “Oh, honey, I’m so so so sorry I hollered at you.”  The more sensible Anna Morais, who’d hailed from the Azores, would tell me to “pay no mind to that one; she’s nuttier than two fruitcakes.”

Central Square Library could have been used for a movie if the scene required a high-security prison. Built in the ugly Brutalist style so prevalent in the 1970s (Boston City Hall is an example of the Brutalist style), its exterior had a forbidding look to it, esp. on bad weather days. I met the wonderfully eccentric Shushie Pahigian there and Kevin Lucey who’s still a good friend. Husband-wife team, Tom and Lynn Brown were so funny, so interesting to be around. Lynn made me laugh all the time and made my work burdens light by cheerfully pitching in. I miss them.  Life at CSQ was always an adventure. It had the most eccentric patrons (i.e. some genuine characters). Located in the heart of what was then one of the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods, it wasn’t uncommon to find a patron in the rest rooms who’d overdosed. or an overly ardent couple who’d decided the bathroom was the best place for them to express their ardor. We staffers saw some things!   O’Connell Library was helmed by a woman named Yan Qu. Yan worked hard to make her branch a mainstay of that area. But she had a habit of going out to lunch and coming back three hours later, or not at all, leaving my co-worker, Dale Howard, and myself to run the show. Sink, or swim. Maybe she was training us to deal with any kind of situations that might arise.  I did like working there. I liked all the branches, and especially Main. Had I known my stints there were being noticed by the higher-ups, I wouldn’t have worked so diligently because — in what seemed like no time, they promoted me to a permanent part- and then full-time worker. No more “floating”, which I’d loved and would come to miss. As a floater, I got to meet and know all of the 80 plus staffers who made up the CPL troops, which was nice. Working at Main, I met some wonderful, interesting people, the most memorable of whom was Priscilla Beck aka IM. Librarians, I discovered are not the benign, book nerdish folks I imagined; their personalities and pasts contain intrigue, adventure and misadventure. Take Priscilla; she’d attended Mount Holyoke College then travelled with her cats to Barcelona where she found herself living in the midst of the Franco regime. Later, her travels took her to Oregon and Baltimore where she continued her work in libraries. In 1988, on my way to see/hear writer Jan Morris speak at Cambridge Library, I stopped this lady on the street and asked if she knew where the library was. She said, “Do I?!! I work there!” and bid me follow her. That was the time Jan Morris said to me, “What joy it brought me looking out in the audience, seeing your beautifully androgynous face!”   Not sure I wanted to hear that or if that’s something one stranger should say to another. When I got home, I spent hours in the mirror trying to discern what had caused Jan Morris to make that estimation of me.  Anyway…years later, now co-workers at Main, Priscilla turned to me one moment out-of-the-blue and announced, with glee, “The witch-hazel is in bloom!”. I thought, “What an eccentric way to break the ice. We became instant chums and are chums to this day. Encroaching age prevents us from getting together as often as we used to, to visit museums, attend concerts, dine out. I haven’t seen her dear, dear face since 2019 but we still email each other every day or so and she has been my rock in times of upset, which have been many.  Oh, let me tell you how she came to be nicknamed IM (which stands for Irreverent Mother). Priscilla always dresses conservatively, always neat-as-a-pin, which led one of the co-worker cut-ups to tease her about being an undercover nun. He was pretty irreverent himself and used to refer to her sensible shoes as “nun shoes” and would add, “In the convent, such footwear is known as ‘anti-rape shoes’ and liked to greet Priscilla with, “Well, if it isn’t Reverend Mother!’  One day, I chimed in with, “More like Irreverent Mother!” and the abbreviation, IM, stuck. And you thought library workers were stodgy stick-in-the-muds. More like dodgy rabble rousers from what I’ve observed, and I’m always gobsmacked by the depth and breadth of their knowledge, always astonishing.

Today, libraries aren’t what they once were; gone are the card catalogs, the microfilm and microfiche machines. Library work involves knowing computers inside-and-out.I know more than one librarian who’s sighed, “I’m little more than a human Google. I, myself, continue to spend a great deal of my life in them, reveling in their offerings, and am especially fond of the Interlibrary Loan services. I.L.L. Departments have procured rare texts, long out-of-print films and other items for me. I always get a kick out of it when these treasures come to Lowell from places as far-and-wide as Argentina and Japan. No matter where a rarity is, you can be sure an Interlibrary Loan Librarian will find it for you. Friends and relatives tease me that libraries are my home away from home. I’ve yet to find one I didn’t like, no matter how big or how small. In Norton, where I lived for a time, the Norton Public Library was so tiny, there wasn’t much room for more than a couple of patrons and staff at a time. Its chief was the eccentric Mitch Perlow, Mitch always wore black head-to-toe every day of the year leading townsfolk to nickname the library, “Basic Black and Perlow”. While in the area, I also did some archive work at the beautiful Wheaton College Library. Which memory makes me think of the time I was at a luncheon gathering at M.F.K. Fisher’s. Conversation turned to what each of us did for a living. When it came my turn, I said, “I work in a library.”  One guest, the Anglo-Irish journalist, Elgy Gillespie, gasped, “So — you’re an ah-sha-vist!”. I had no idea what she’d said, Mary Frances, noting my confusion, said to me, “She thinks you’re an archivist, dear.”  I blurted out, “Oh, God no!. I just check out and shelve books” (which wasn’t exactly true either) but we all had a good laugh.

I think of libraries, any library, as a Sanctum Sanctorum of Civility and Decorum. I honestly don’t know how I would have gotten through Life without them. Then again, I run into people who tell me they’ve never set foot in one in their life, ever. The poor fools…

Libraries mesmerize me. Whenever I travel, my first point of order is to find the local library. I love capering in them, discovering what the special treasures of each are. For. no library is like another. Each bestows upon the visitor its own particular magic. My favorite library of all time remains Dracut’s Moses Greeley Parker Library. I spent countless hours there feeding my research and reading needs. The staff is among the best I’ve encountered and the spirit of the place always cheers me the second I walk in the door.

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Pollard Memorial Library card of the author

Author at Wheaton College Library, 1992

Boudreau Library, Cambridge

Cambridge Public Library

Collins Branch Library in Cambridge

Elgy Gillispie

“I always wanted to be on a Read poster.” (Author)

The Light in the Forest book cover

MBTA Huron Avenue bus

Moses Greeley Parker Library in Dracut

O’Leary Library at UMass Lowell