RichardHowe.com – Voices from Lowell & Beyond

Chicago, Again

Ten years ago, my family went to Chicago to look around. We had never been there. The city made a deep impression on us, so we returned last week for another look. If anything, the latest visit topped the first one. If anyone in the Lowell, Mass., area is reading this post and considering going there, I would say, Go for it! From Lowell, it’s easy to fly out of the Manchester, N.H., airport, less than one hour away. The flight is about two hours. Chicago has two airports, O’Hare and Midway. We arrived at Midway and took a taxi to our hotel downtown, about a half hour drive. O’Hare has mass transit service to the city. We stayed in the Michigan Avenue part of the city which offers easy access to most of the main attractions like the Art Institute and its superstar collection of American, European, and World artworks. If you know the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, you know what you’ll see, from American Gothic by Grant Wood to “Sunday in the Park with George” (A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte) by Seurat.

Another spot not to miss is Millennium Park not far from the Art Institute. The centerpiece is a sculpture that may be the most successful work of public art in the country, Cloud Gate by Anish Kapoor, a massive mirror-finished steel sculpture in an organic shape that earned it the nickname “The Bean.” The reflective surface constantly changes and the scene on land and in the sky changes by the minute.

Another day in the late afternoon we joined about 200 people on a cruise on the Chicago River with a guide who described the city’s astounding architecture, a pile up of vast warehouses, high rises, and skyscrapers in various forms. The 90-minute tour was a user-friendly seminar on Chicago history combined with an informative introduction to building design and structural engineering. On the boat we had people from around the US and nations abroad including a lot of runners who were registered for the Chicago Marathon scheduled for the next morning. In front of us were two women wearing blue-and-yellow Boston Marathon windbreakers. The tour boats run constantly, even at night with buildings lit up.

We rounded out our trip with a visit to the Obama Presidential Center on the South Side of the city, about 30 minutes from where we were staying. You can reach it by train (subway), bus, taxi, or private ride. The central building or museum on the campus is called “The Obamalisk” for its unique shape. Inside is the extraordinary story of a man “who went from here to there” on the American civic route. His stops included Hawai’i, Kansas, Indonesia, Harvard University, and New York City before his gig as a community organizer in Chicago, where he met the equally extraordinary Michelle Robinson. Not everyone, I know, but a lot of people find his story inspiring, and moving, to the point that the museum staff places boxes of tissues at strategic locations. I got a little choked up myself reliving the 2008 campaign through video on the second floor. Once the exhibit reaches his presidency, there’s a mock Oval Office where folks can hand their camera to a staff person for a picture of themselves standing at the desk. On floor eight, the space is wide open with windows all around for a panoramic view of the region. Gary, Indiana, on the Lake Michigan shore is right out there in the distance.

The campus includes a branch of the Chicago Public Library and a large building called The Forum with art and cultural exhibits, places to eat, and event spaces. The grounds are landscaped in the Prairie style with local plants as well as formal gardens. More artwork enlivens the grounds including a water feature with two round forms made by Maya Lin, a reference to the Obamas’ relationship.

The photo below if from opening day in June 2026. We were there on a Sunday of a holiday weekend and did not find the place uncomfortably crowded. Tickets are hard to come by, however, because of the large demand. We reserved tickets last May before the official opening. Now, the tickets are released in batches to manage the attendance. Plan on getting tickets some months ahead if you want to go. It’s worth the wait.

Photo by alphabeta135 courtesy of Wikipedia

I mentioned above my initial visit ten years ago. Here’s what I wrote for the Howe blog at that time. 

Epistolary

Epistolary

By Leo Racicot

I suppose my lifelong love of letters and letter-writing began when I discovered The Letters of Emily Dickinson. I was young, maybe 15 or 16. I also at the same time came across the Letters of Vincent van Gogh.  The discovery was revelatory; the idea that the personal correspondence of the lofty artists I admired — what they thought, where they went, who they knew — had been preserved, was exciting, brought them face-to-face as living, breathing human beings, made them accessible to the degree they became like old friends. After all, weren’t they much like the rest of us? They had their dreams, their fears, their hopes, revealing who they were as people. I still pull Emily Dickinson’s letters down from the shelf every Fall, feeling that Autumn, a season she wrote much about, is the perfect season to re-read her.

When my friend, Joe went away to college, to UMass Amherst, I stayed in Lowell to attend Lowell State Teachers College. It was the first time in four years we were separated. We began a years-long correspondence, a way for us to keep in touch while apart. When he transferred to UMass/Boston and made his dream of living on Beacon Hill come true, the letters continued. Even though we were only a train ride away and did see each other periodically, the allure of the written letter remained. We exchanged hundreds of letters over the years, many of them gems of penpalship. When life took us to different places; he, to Chicago to accompany his brother, John, who was matriculating at Northwestern, me, to Las Vegas, Cambridge, Cape Cod, the habit of staying in touch by pen and paper happily continued. We both saved every letter, often decorating the backs of the envelopes with decals, photo cutouts, sometimes elaborate displays of our shared interests. What the mailman must have thought!  Who cares? We were forging a bond; snail mail creates a patience, a pause for reflection that a phone call is incapable of, especially in today’s culture where the quick click of an emoji is used to express it all. This is why I’ve loved and continue to love letters, even when the friend I’m writing to lives not very far away.

Some of my pen pals did live a distance away; when I was in my late teens, early twenties, I sponsored a young lady, Hsaih Mi-Chu, in China. What a thrill it was for years sending and receiving airmail, seeing the exotic postage, looking at the hieroglyphics of Hsaih’s Chinese script (along with her handwritten letters, a page translating her words, her life stories, her adventures, would be included) She and her letters brought the world closer…

Hsaih Mi-Chu’s letters are stored in my attic as are dozens and dozens of letters from friends (my high school & college pal, Linda Scanlon, college intimate, Roberta McAnespie, Joe’s, of course, who’d often include with his missive delightful newspaper and magazine clippings he thought I’d enjoy). I’ve also kept the dozens of epistles written by editor Winston Leyland who took editorship beyond the usual boundaries into friendship.

And of course, I can’t omit my letters from writer M.F.K. Fisher. Before our friendship blossomed into an enduring love and visits out to her home, Last House, in Glen Ellen, California, we sent letters back-and-forth. Her letters bristled with personal stories, gossipy anecdotes, recipes, scintillating tales out-of-school. My letters to her tried hard to impress. When we first began corresponding, Mary Frances said she thought my writing style made her think I was a wise, old professor in a small, college town, “so polished is your prose”. (later on, she even crafted a short story about an old professor’s last days, The Reunion, in her collection, Sister Age). Wasn’t she shocked when a young fellow in his early thirties showed up at her door! And, wasn’t I shocked, when, following her death, the literary executors of her estate, notified me that our correspondence would be housed along with others in her collection of papers at Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe! Through the years, whenever I need a lift, I visit Schlesinger, spend an afternoon poring through the words of my beautiful friend, my words to her….The M.F.K. connection lives on, in part, with a 30 year continuation of wonderful letters from Mary Frances’ former staff members, good friends, Pat and Marsha Moran. Pat is a fantastic writer in his own right, Marsha, his live-in editor, who also happens to be his wife. In a way, my heart still lingers in bonny Glen Ellen thanks to the epistolary magic they’ve conjured regularly throughout the years; I just had a long, good letter from Pat yesterday.

Looking back, I see I was blessed to become pen pals with several well-known people (If I like and admire someone’s work, I am compelled to write to let them know).

The gay writer, Edmund White, by the time I wrote him, wasn’t much for letter-writing; the culture had made it easier to communicate by email and social media, especially for one as busy as he was. But I have literally thousands of emails from Ed filled with his brilliance, his quick wit, his naughty asides. I treasure them.

Also, in the famous category is travel writer, Jan Morris whom I met during her lecture/book signing at Cambridge Public Library in 1988 when she made the startling comment, “What a joy it was staring out at the audience, seeing your lovely, androgynous face!” Good grief!  We, too, became years-long pen pals, she, often telling me I “must come to my home and share tea and scones with my wife, Elizabeth and me” It seemed wildly improbable that I could ever make a trip to the enchanted woodlands of Wales where they made their home but it was so nice to be invited, whether ingenuous or not.

It was said that the actress, Katharine Hepburn, didn’t like to sign autographs, answer letters from fans. But I have many from her in reply to my sending her a screenplay I’d written specifically with her in mind, Walking Song. She initially warmed to the script and the part I’d designed for her.  She did express concerns that some of the character’s monologues were too long, that at her age she would have difficulties memorizing them. She asked me to trim them down. Long story short — many edited versions of the manuscript travelled back-and-forth to her Turtle Bay home at 244 East 49th Street. She’d always send them back saying, “Still too long!”  Ever hopeful, I kept cutting and cutting and cutting until the day came when she said, “It’s too short. You’ve whittled this thing down to a nub!”  By the time an in-person visit came to pass, I’m afraid the great actress had “gone away with the fairies”, as the Irish say, and that, as they was that re Walking Song which is gathering dust in the attic.

The English wit and eccentric, Quentin Crisp and I exchanged notes and letters in the 1990s. In one of his to me, he said something that has stayed with me all these years. In response to my moaning that my love life was a disaster, Crisp wrote, “My dear boy. There is no more to be said for loving one person than for loving the whole world.”

I found the life and work of the Canadian gay liberation figure, Jearld Moldenhauer fascinating, wrote to tell him so. His place in that movement has, I feel, gone unsung. Activist, journalist, horticulturist extraordinaire, founder of one of the first, if not the first, gay bookstore, The Glad Day bookshops, one in Toronto, one, here in Boston. The list of his credits and talents is endless. My letter found him living in Fez, Morocco, in an architectural wonder, Dar Balmira, an ancient guesthouse with a legendary rooftop garden and art gallery. I thrilled to his descriptions of life among the natives there, so different was it from anything I knew. Jearld, a restless nomad, moved to Manila in the Philippines and we fell out-of-touch.

My whole life, I’ve been lucky to find pen pals who like snail mail as much as I do. For over twenty years now, my good friend, Bob Stone (who managed the Shea household for twenty-six years) and I have been exchanging weekly letters, I throw a movie quiz in with each letter because I know how much he likes the movies of The Golden Age of Hollywood, has the answers to practically every question I throw at him. I love seeing his letters in the front hall.

Lowell historian, Richard Howe, too, is so kind to reply to my maybe too-frequent letters. A polymath, Dick’s interests and work are endlessly fascinating to me and bring a contented pleasure to the winter of my days…

____________________

Pat and Marsha Moran with Barley

Winston Leyland, 1990s

Bob Stone working on my movie quiz

Postcard from Quentin Crisp

Katherine Hepburn at home

Jan Morris, Harvard Square, 1988

Garden rooftop at Dar Balmira

Edmund White on his laptop

M.F.K. Fisher’s typewriter

Roberta McAnespie

Linda Scanlon

Joe writing a letter on the train

The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh

Letters of Emily Dickinson

Richard Howe

Living Madly: Crazy Ed

Courtesy of Peter Dyllong

Living Madly: Crazy Ed

Emilie-Noelle Provost

When I was growing up, there was an older man who lived in my neighborhood named Crazy Ed, at least that’s what everyone called him. I never knew his real name.

Crazy Ed lived in a basement apartment in a working-class tenement next to the corner store. Everyone in town knew who he was, mainly because he always wore a women’s skirt, usually plaid but sometimes denim, and high heel shoes, usually red. Every day, he would walk all over town dressed this way—miles and miles—pushing an old shopping cart full of rusty car parts and dented soda cans he’d collected from roadsides and weedy parking lots. At night, Crazy Ed would park his shopping cart outside the door to his apartment with a handmade sign on it: Do Not Touch. As far as I know, no one ever did.

Crazy Ed covered so much ground that you got used to seeing him. He was a fixture in town, so much so that his attire and shopping cart were in many ways just part of the fabric of the place, unremarkable in the way that familiar things tend to be regardless of their normalcy.

Although Crazy Ed wore a skirt and heels (I never saw him dressed any other way), he didn’t identify as female. He had a scraggly white beard and always wore a men’s shirt or sweater. During the colder months, he sometimes wore men’s athletic tube socks, the kind with the stripe at the top, with his high heel shoes.

Sometimes, kids would taunt Crazy Ed, especially young boys. Once, while walking to the corner store from my house, I came across a group of neighborhood boys throwing rocks at him. They were shouting homophobic slurs, and laughing whenever one of the rocks hit him. Unable to run in his heels, Crazy Ed took shelter behind his shopping cart. But the attack was so relentless that Crazy Ed was eventually forced to take his shoes off and hide. He cowered behind a parked car while the boys overturned his shopping cart and tossed his red heels into a nearby trashcan.

At the time, I was nine years old. I felt so sad for Crazy Ed, and I was angry that the boys were given license to treat another human being so brutally, that they felt justified in doing so. Even at the time, I knew none of them would face consequences for it. And none of them ever did.

When I was in high school, I worked in a coffee shop downtown. Crazy Ed was one of our regular customers. Almost every day, he would park his shopping cart outside on the sidewalk, sit down at the counter, and order a black coffee, for which he would pay with a handful of grubby coins. He would often sit there for a half hour or more, keeping an eye on his cart through the window. He almost never talked, at least not any more than was necessary, unless someone spoke to him first.

Usually, other customers would just say hello to Crazy Ed, but if someone asked him a question, especially one about why he was wearing a skirt and heels, he would get angry and defensive, often causing a loud argument.

At the time, I found these exchanges, and Crazy Ed himself, pretty frustrating, especially considering the frequency with which they seemed to take place. The coffee shop was almost always busy, and it was easy to fall behind if something took your attention away from your work. The other employees and I eventually started trying to discourage Crazy Ed from sitting at the counter by putting his coffee in a to-go cup, but it usually didn’t work.

After I went away to college, I would still spot Crazy Ed around town sometimes when I was home on breaks, but not very often. A few months, after I graduated, I moved to Boston to attend graduate school. After that, I don’t think I saw him again.

In the years since, I’ve often wondered what drove Crazy Ed to live the way he did. Did he suffer from some sort of mental illness or was he just eccentric? What was his life like before he moved into that basement apartment and took up roaming around town with a shopping cart full of junk? When and why did he start wearing a skirt and heels? Did he have a family? Did he have enough to eat? Why didn’t anyone ever try to help him?

When I think about Crazy Ed these days, it’s almost always with a wistful heart. Although I’m not particularly religious in a conventional Western sense, my memories of him often bring to mind the Parable of the Sheep and Goats in the Gospel of Matthew, which says the way we value and care for the most vulnerable among us—the poor, the hungry, the sick, those who are discriminated against for one reason or another—is, in the end, what reveals our true character.

###

Émilie-Noëlle Provost is the 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.

Seen & Heard: Vol. 41

A weekly report on things I’ve read, heard and seen since last Wednesday. 

Article: From bus driver to professor, he keeps RI workers’ history alive, by Carlos Munoz in Boston Globe, September 27, 2026. This is the story of Scott Molloy, who was hired as a Rhode Island Transit Authority bus driver in 1973, drove for eight years then became the union business agent for three more. During this stretch, he received his Ph.D. in history. He was hired by the University of Rhode Island to teach labor history. Along the way, he accumulated a substantial collection of RI Transit and labor history artifacts. He recently donated some of it to the Smithsonian and most of it to the URI archives. About a dozen years ago, the Globe saw a business opportunity and started aggressively covering Providence, Rhode Island. The plan must have worked since RI coverage is more extensive than ever in the Globe. I went to Providence College from 1976 to 1980, so I have some lingering fondness. Plus, Providence politics can be pretty entertaining which keeps me paying attention.

Article: “Nutritionalists love these fall fruits and vegetables” by Caroline Hopkins Legaspi in New York Times, September 29, 2026. About eight years ago, I got a CSA subscription. That stands for Community Supported Agriculture. You pay a lump sum and then each week you get a crate filled with fresh vegetables, all locally grown. (The provider here is Farmer Dave’s in Dracut). This has expanded my culinary horizons to the point that vegetables are the high point of most meals, although some time I struggle to identify what a particular thing is. As a result, anytime I notice an article on fruits and vegetables, I pay attention. As the article states, “Here are 10 less popular but no less delicious – or nutritious – fall fruits and vegetables nutrition experts say are worth experimenting with this fall:” Brussels sprouts; cranberries; Jerusalem artichokes; Swiss chard, pomegranate seeds; okra; rutabagas; persimmons; winter squash; and pears.  

Book Review: Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City 1886-1990 by Jonathan Mahler (2025). This book spans the final four year term of Mayor Ed Koch who served three consecutive terms, from 1978 until 1989. Besides Koch, the main characters in the book are Al Sharpton, Rudy Giuliani and Donal Trump. A strong supporting cast includes Benjamin Ward, the first Black police commissioner; David Dinkins, who succeeded Koch as mayor and was the first Black person to hold that office; and Larry Kramer, the AIDS activist. The events this group must navigate include the stock market collapse of October 1986; the AIDS epidemic; runaway homelessness; the Central Park Jogger assault; the Preppy Murder; race confrontations at Howard Beach, Bensonhurst, and other places. Runaway homelessness, and much more. Having lived through it, I remember many of these events but not in the context of each other and of what else was going on in the world. That’s one reason why this book is so interesting. 

Obituary: “Sam McDowell, 84, Pitching Ace Who Battled Alcoholism, Dies” by Richard Goldstein, New York Times, October 9, 2026. My interest in baseball was born in the summer and fall of 1967 when I was eight-years-old and the Boston Red Sox won the American League Pennant and nearly won the World Series, losing to the St. Louis Cardinals, 4 games to 3. At least some of the games were televised but the production values were still rudimentary, so I consumed most games on an AM radio. I also learned about the players by purchasing baseball cards. They cost 5 cents per pack which gave you five cards and a brittle stick of bubble gum. I didn’t accumulate an entire set but I had a big stack of cards, sorted by teams, so when the Red Sox faced the Cleveland Indians, for example, those cards were pulled out and studied. One of those cards was of Sam McDowell, a fearsome starting pitcher who teamed with Sonny Siebert to give the Indians a one-two pitching punch on an otherwise lackluster team. McDowell played a few more years, retiring early in the 1975 season. I don’t think I’ve thought of him since but noticed his obituary this week, a memorable name from my childhood.