RichardHowe.com – Voices from Lowell & Beyond

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.

Noon on a Monday a Week into War

Noon on a Monday a Week into War

By Bill O’Connell

The Carolina wren

sings his heart out. Juncos

in the cedar respond.

A pair of returning hawks

circle beneath Air Force

jet trails — C-5 transports

lifting arms to Bahrain, Israel.

On the deck in March sun

I dig Randy Weston’s

African sounds on headphones —

his father Coltrane

gone tribal. Our leaders

play games with our lives

like the gods of old,

oblivious to the suffering

below. Soon I will nap

in my own oblivion, the music

taking me down where

rhythm meets voice

in song. When I wake,

I’ll greet Robin.

We’ll catch the latest news

on NPR. Ponder

the intricacies of war

while we make our dinner, certain

we’re on the right side.

New Poems by Matt W. Miller

Born in Lowell, poet Matt W. Miller has published several award-winning collections of poetry. He lives with his family in southern New Hampshire. The prestigious journal Tupelo Quarterly features new work by Matt in the current issue. Here’s the link to the page (note the small arrows to advance to the next poem). 

Living Madly: What Time Is It?

Courtesy of Alexas Fotos

Living Madly: What Time is It?

By Emilie-Noelle Provost

Contrary to popular belief, Daylight Savings Time was not created by, or to help, farmers. In fact, when Daylight Savings Time was first adopted in the United States, farmers were among its most vocal opponents. After all, the last thing farmers, and their livestock, want is to have their schedules disrupted.

Germany was the first country to adopt Daylight Savings Time on a nationwide basis, in April 1916, as part of an effort to reduce energy consumption during the First World War. The U.S. followed suit, in March 1918, when the Standard Time Act, which also established the country’s time zones, was passed by Congress.

But it wasn’t until 1966, when the Uniform Time Act was passed, that the United States standardized beginning and end dates for Daylight Savings Time. Prior to that, the implementation of DST was left up to the individual states, which made things like traveling by air confusing.

Then, in 2007, with the aim of further reducing energy use, the Energy Policy Act took effect, moving the start of DST to the second Sunday in March from its previous beginning on the first Sunday in April. The law also moved up DST’s end date from the last Sunday in October to the first Sunday in November.

I know there are a lot of people who look forward to the beginning of Daylight Savings Time, and who were happy about the 2007 changes, but I have to say I agree with the farmers.

I’ve always thought of Daylight Savings Time as an overreaching government-imposed construct, one that no citizen had the opportunity to vote for or against. With the exception of forcing the collective population of the United States to lose an hour of sleep, and generally making everyone late for work or school for at least a week or two, in my opinion, Daylight Savings Time accomplishes nothing.

I don’t care how light out it is at 7 p.m. (because it’s not really 7 p.m.). I’d much prefer to get back the hour of sleep of which I was deprived so I wouldn’t be forced to drag my butt around like a zombie until Easter.

According to a 2008 study conducted by the National Bureau of Economic Research, DST only reduces energy consumption by about 0.34 percent. In fact, the study found that DST actually escalates electricity use by about 1 percent during the summer months because of an increased use of air conditioning in the late afternoon and evening. Daylight Savings Time was also found to cause an increase in the use of both heating and electricity in the winter and early spring, due to us all having to be functional an hour earlier, when it’s both darker and colder.

Choose Energy, a nonprofit that provides information to help people save on energy costs, reported, in 2024, that implementing Daylight Savings Time as a way to conserve electricity is now unnecessary thanks to modern LED lighting, which is far more energy efficient than the incandescent bulbs that were used when DST was first adopted.

There’s also evidence that Daylight Savings Time is bad for our health. In February 2020, the scientific journal Current Biology reported that Daylight Savings Time causes an acute 6 percent increase in the risk of fatal traffic accidents due to morning grogginess, a phenomenon that has come to be known as the “DST Effect.”

According to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, the sleep deprivation caused by DST, which results not only from getting up earlier but from difficulty getting to sleep at night due to increased light levels, carries a number of serious health implications. These include an increased risk of stroke and heart attack, elevated cortisol levels, and even suicide.

In spite of all this, in recent years—for some confounding reason—there has been a push to make DST permanent in several states (hello, health and auto insurance companies). The federal Sunshine Protection Act, which would make DST permanent across the U.S., was introduced, in January 2025, by the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. The bill has yet to come to a vote, and I’m really hoping it never does.

For now, at least, I can still look forward to the first Sunday in November (one of the most glorious days of the year), after which I will finally be able to recover my lost hours of sleep.

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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.